The King of Kahel

by Monénembo, Tierno; Elliott, Nicholas

  “The white man asks that you keep his child until he returns from inside the territory.”

  “And where is the white man going?”

  “To Fouta Djallon.”

  Crash! Anger tore the ruler right out of his seat. He threatened to seize their goods, shatter their limbs, then throw them in the snake hut. Mâly knew he had blundered, but took a long time to realize exactly what he had done. No matter how hard he listened, the poor interpreter could barely understand the rumbling salvos of anger now shaking the entire palace:

  “Fouta Djallon, oh no! Never, no, no, Fouta Djallon, no! Fouta Djallon, bad, bad! Fulas, bastards!”

  With the words pouring out like a torrent of lava, the interpreter struggled to keep up:

  “…Fulas, children of treachery whose spear is bent! During the night, they sleep but their left hand does not slumber. Though they possess beauty, they are forbidden fine character…Bastard Fulas!…Bastard Fulas, bastards! You, do you know the Fula? Huh, you don’t know?…So take an enigma, sew it into the skin of a cat, give it to a boa, then give the boa to a crocodile. Now bury the crocodile under the ashes on a foggy night, and you’ll have yourself a Fula!”

  The monarch couldn’t stop himself. Finally, Mâly understood: constant attacks from the Fulas had chased the king’s ancestors off their territory on solid ground and into the islands. “And this monster thinks we’re spies for his enemies in Fouta! We’re in a mess, white man, a fine mess, wallahi!”

  The palaver stretched on for several days and nights. Eventually they had to surrender half their eau-de-vie to save their lives and a magnifying mirror to avoid being detained on the island. But even once he’d returned to a better disposition, the monarch wouldn’t budge regarding his royal gift—the white man had to take the child with him, it would be an insult to do otherwise. After two more nights of arguing and drinking, he finally relented in exchange for a pair of pajamas and the white man’s promise that he wouldn’t go to Fouta Djallon, but would merely explore the coast before returning to claim his gift.

  Upon his unhoped-for return to Bolama, Olivier de Sanderval opened his journal and wrote:

  “My devoted clerks in Gorée may not agree, but I was right to foray into the Bissagos. I’ve got my sea legs now. Nothing can scare me now, not even the Fulas of Fouta Djallon!”

  The following week he carried out a strange ceremony in the middle of his garden. He threw the letters he had carried from France into a bonfire and raised his arms to the heavens to speak to Africa again: “To you, these ashes brought from France! May I never leave you mine!”

  On January 13, he set off to travel three days up the Cassini in a pirogue. He found Lawrence surrounded by his ministers, discussing the kingdom’s affairs. Lawrence’s palace really looked the part. It was a wood house—granted, already lopsided—but if you could see beyond the chaos and mold, its ramps and balustrades were reminiscent of the venerable homes of Bahia and Louisiana. In Marseille, it would have been a simple shack, he thought, but in these parts, where the only architecture to be found outside of thatched huts was in the fanciful shapes of the plants, this old-fashioned edifice had to be admired.

  Lawrence introduced him to his subjects and spoke to him without an interpreter. Aside from Nalu, Susu, and Fula, he spoke perfect English and had a decent grasp of French and Portuguese. He had received the English consul’s message and had very good news—the almami* authorized him to set foot on his territory, and at first glance did not seem hostile to his project for a railroad.

  Miracle of miracles! In just a few seconds, he had become the guest of Fouta Djallon: Fouta, the very area reputed to be totally closed to strangers and so forbidding! The guest of the almami himself—so long as he didn’t steal, kill, or profane Islam, as per the customary expression. Aguibou, the prince of Labé, would come to meet him in Buba, the border town, to give him his passport. A miracle, oh yes, simply a miracle! He was expecting flat-out refusal, or at the very least a drawn-out procedure. He had thought it would take weeks or months to eventually be told no. He had even devised an alternate plan for sneaking in over the southern mountains, at the risk of being decapitated. Thank you, Lawrence; thank you, Nalus! And yes, thank you to the English, for the first and last time!

  “It’s the almami you’ll have to thank. My dear Aimé, not everyone has the privilege of being the Fulas’ guest!”

  “That’s certainly true…I’m eager to leave!”

  “First I must find you some interpreters.”

  “I already have one.”

  “You’ll never have too many interpreters to deal with the Fulas.”

  He would not answer. To say no would be an offense (yet another, in these parts where the sovereigns were impulsive and the penalty was often death). To say yes would be to take on an additional risk as he prepared to enter mysterious and inaccessible Fouta Djallon, already said to be teeming with marauders and spies.

  HE TOOK LEAVE of his friend Lawrence, after having buried him in gifts and obtained numerous treaties, to continue exploring the coast and searching out upstream rapids and its countless rios. He filled his journals with sketches and notes about the nature of the soil and the variety of insects and monkeys. He studied the local languages, preparing lexicons of Nalu and Fula. He ventured deep into the mangrove swamps to wonder at the shape of their trees, sample the unknown tastes of their hundreds of fruits, and negotiate with the tribes to open his trading posts and win the right to travel through with his caravans.

  He mapped the whole area, providing the first credible outline of the coast and the course of the rivers. After exploring the Kouchala, Cabacera, Koubak, Comedia, and Compony, he pushed far up the twists and turns of the rio Nunez and saw the horrifying Vikaria post used for executions. The condemned were tied to the post after having their limbs broken and left to wait for high tide or hungry crocodiles.

  As planned, he reached Boké and immediately presented himself at the French fort.

  “What do you mean you’re going to Fouta Djallon?” Captain Dehous, the local commander, reproached him. “You must understand that we will not be of any assistance to you if anything should happen while you were there. You don’t just go off to Fouta Djallon the way you’d take a little trip to Auvergne. One of our compatriots disappeared up that way nearly a year ago and hasn’t been heard of since.”

  “You mean they ate him alive?”

  “What else could have happened?”

  “What was his name?”

  “Montet or Moutet—I can’t remember anymore. A madman who had gotten it into his head to teach viticulture to the Fula people. Teaching wine-growing to Mohammedan Negroes! I thought he was the worst case I could possibly encounter. And now I find you!”

  Nonetheless, the captain had a room prepared for him and offered him a copious dinner. But their meal was interrupted by violent cries. They rushed outside to find the guards beating a man in chains.

  “This happens every couple of weeks,” the captain explained. “These savages swallow their filth to go into some kind of trance, then they come to steal from our storerooms claiming they are acting under the influence of the spirits. Albert, throw this monkey into the oubliette. Tomorrow I’ll take him to the village chief.”

  “What will the chief do?” asked Olivier de Sanderval.

  “He’ll probably condemn him to the Vikaria post. The savages’ laws are even more cruel than those of the pirates and the inquisitors.”

  “I saw that horrible thing on the way here. What can I do to save this poor man?”

  “Nothing. We don’t make it a habit to meddle in their customs.”

  “I’ll go see the chief tomorrow. Maybe with a little amber…”

  “Listen, Monsieur Olivier, our lives as white men are complicated enough as it is. I’m warning you: if you cause us any trouble, I will have you shot on the spot.”

  But the next day, there was no need to go implore the chief’s mercy. When they opened the basement where the
prisoner was confined, only his bones remained. The bag-bag ants had eaten him alive.

  Only in Africa could you witness something so horrific. He was despondent all day, unable to swallow anything other than his own saliva. Then he remembered his childhood reading. It was from this small port, sheltered from the pirates and the winds and then known as Kakandy, that René Caillié had embarked on his expedition to Timbuktu. He built a small memorial to him and had the fort’s detachment sound the bugle and raise the flag.

  René Caillié loomed large among the myths that fueled his childhood dreams. Now that maturity had set in, he wondered whether Caillié wasn’t even greater than Ulysses and Attila. To him, the name still resonated with the same biblical intensity as those of the great patriarchs and Timbuktu. Why, it was as magical a name as Java or Samarqand. He stood on the threshold of the land of the impenetrable Fulas, wading through mangrove swamps, beset with problems, and feeling the first effects of malaria for no other reason. He was doing it all so that one day their names would appear side by side on the glorious family tree that began with Robinson Crusoe and constantly grew through the extravaganza of modern times. Caillié the father, and he the son! All this was sheer utopia, of course, for reality, always crueler, had created them as unlike one another as clay and emeralds.

  René Caillié had come into this world poor in a small village in the Deux-Sèvres. His father, a baker, was sent to the Rochefort labor camp for having stolen some trifle and died there in 1808, some twenty-five years before Jean Valjean. Young Aimé Victor Olivier was a pure product of Lyon—meaning rich, meaning born with a refined palate, meaning inventive, meaning cold and secretly eccentric.

  The Oliviers were born without fear of the future and grew up in sprawling, quiet homes surrounded by high walls and hidden among lush plants. The city’s industrial development owed a great deal to the family’s genius.* Both on the Olivier and the Perret side, little Aimé was descended from a long line of engineers. His father was considered a scientist. His uncle Théodore was one of the founders of the Central School of Arts and Manufacturing in Paris, where Aimé would be a brilliant student. The world owed industrial sulfuric acid to his maternal grandfather. And Aimé owed everything to chemistry, beginning with his birth! One fine day, Claude-Marius Perret, father of Lyon’s chemical industries, hired a young engineer who was such a perfect fit that he gave him his daughter’s hand in marriage. The couple had six children, of which Olivier de Sanderval was the second.

  “That boy worries me,” his congenitally anxious mother would say to his self-assured, optimistic father. “It seems like he isn’t from here. He always seems to be looking at something other than what’s around him.” No, he was like any other child, just a little melancholy. Like everyone else, he obeyed his father and loved his mother—with an ardent yet modest love, beyond suspicion but undoubtedly ardent. Of the entire brood, he was by far the most attached to her. Yet he was not one of those effeminate, fussy children whose laces had to be tied for them and who had to be forced to eat their steak and mashies. Early on, he proved to be intelligent, energetic, and unusually resourceful. This gentle dreamer loved sports and dangerous games.

  At four, he was already barging in to adults’ conversations with such carefully considered statements that no one thought of rebuffing him. At seven, he had eclipsed his older brother and imposed his cool authority over his younger siblings. He was strange for a tough guy—hard on the outside, but soft inside, like a sea urchin. This athletic boy with a fragile heart and stomach was full of tenderness and sensitivity. His knees went weak at the slightest thing: his mother’s voice, a young girl’s smile, a stanza by Villon, or a rhyme by Sully-Prudhomme. And though his eyes always appeared to be dry, his heart never stopped crying. He was a dreamer, a dreamer in action, permanently dissatisfied. Reality was never enough for him. He always wanted things to be bigger, stronger, more beautiful.

  He had a way of irritating people, but also of charming them. No matter the circumstance, there was something majestic, superior, even Roman about him.

  Women were attracted to his virile figure, his straight nose, and his gray eyes bathed in a soft white light. Even his adversaries were impressed by his piercing gaze, high forehead—his hairline slightly receding to the left and swept in a long strand to the right—and his carefully sculpted black beard. When he walked down the street, everyone turned to look at him—yes, there’s no doubt about it, he had the look of his era. Passersby imagined he was another Jules Verne or Victor Hugo.

  “I come from a family where banality is unacceptable.” He would say no more about his people, but perhaps that was already too much for the Lyon bourgeoisie, which was Latin and Catholic, but as discreet and humble as the great Lutheran families of Northern Europe. Neither the Oliviers nor the Perrets came into the world with bold arrogance, proclaiming their high birth, but with the nerve-racking obligation to rival their fathers’ accomplishments. Yet these fanatics of hard work and discipline always let delightful follies gaily flirt with their reliance on science and passion for industry. Take Claude-Marius Perret. In winter, the venerable old man appeared on Place Bellecour in a dog sled; in summer, in a cabriolet pulled by horses frenzied with alcohol. The prefect was forced to draft a decree to put a stop to this travesty. But after his wife’s death, the old fox found another way to break with tradition and the law: he had her clandestinely embalmed and kept her by his side until it was his turn to die. Not to mention the uncle who spent fifty years of his life restoring the catacombs of Rome merely to use them as the basis for a sumptuous lithograph graciously offered to the Vatican.

  Yet work always came first. Fun only followed when you had earned your rest. The rules set by these hotheaded progenitors were as inflexible as their laboratory formulas: “One isn’t born to have a good time but to do what one has to do.” One day when he was about nine, Aimé ran away from his sinister boarding school in Oullins to escape the ferule and a god-awful chickpea puree. He stole onto one of the family barges transporting acids and ores up and down the Rhône to join his parents, then living in Avignon. But as he was about to cross the threshold into the family home, he encountered his father: “You know very well you shouldn’t be here at this hour, Aimé.” His father spoke without making a move or raising his voice. The boy immediately got back on the boat, not daring to go up the stairs to kiss his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in nearly a year.

  Our future king of Africa happened to be a perfect illustration of the Bantu proverb: “One is more the son of one’s era than of one’s father.” He was the spitting image of the nineteenth century. Ordem et progresso! Beginning with his education and temperament, everything had prepared him to live for the passions of his time—ideas, science, and the great expeditions. He had been molded with the mind of a pioneer in a century of pioneers. From an early age, he thought of his life as a steep slope leading to daring exploits. Every hero had his legend; his own dogged quest for grandeur and fulfillment would have a book. It would be titled The Absolute and encompass the sum total of his thinking, the point where all the parallels came together: idea and life, reality and the void, being and the good Lord. Embarked upon when he was twelve years old, this Metaphysics of modern times was now in its twentieth version.

  René Caillié had left travel journals; he would leave both an expedition journal and a system of thought, a lyrical work and an encyclopedia.

  There was another thing that distinguished him from his illustrious model: Caillié had worked himself to the bone all the way to Guadeloupe to pay for his trip to Timbuktu. His greeting committee was made up of mosquitoes and bad luck. For his part, Aimé had recently inherited most of the trading posts from Rufisque to Bolama and Ziguinchor from his stepfather, the shipping magnate Pastré. Yet it was understood that none of his agents would accompany him to Fouta Djallon. He had to go alone with his Negroes, without maid or manservant, or his expedition would not be a veritable exploit.

  Though he scoured the vill
ages and flooded the markets with his smooth-talking recruiters, he had tremendous difficulty finding porters. The coastal people didn’t like venturing into Fouta Djallon. “You don’t come back alive from Timbo,” they answered him with a shudder, “and if you do come back alive, you don’t come back free.”

  It took him three days of palaver and a mountain of gifts to put together a column to accompany him.

  Ten valleys, three plains, five hills, six rivers…Then, one fine morning, Mâly turned into Moses setting foot in the Promised Land. He pointed to wooded highlands lost in the fog:

  “You see over there? Beyond the termites’ nests? That is Fouta Djallon! Finally, the land of rushing water and fruit, pure milk and wise men! The land that quenches your thirst! Don’t be surprised, toubab, that’s the griots talking.”

  But even with his binoculars, the distance was still too great, visibility too poor. He could only catch sight of the glint of a rock face and had to feverishly imagine the rest: the bôwé, the touldé*, stunningly bejeweled shepherdesses guarding oxen with the softest down and the many other images filling Mollien’s, Caillié’s, Hecquart’s, and Lambert’s narratives.

  He led his column forward whistling a happy tune. But events in Buba soon put an end to his euphoria. The very night of his arrival, the rebel lord Alpha Gaoussou attacked the city and carried away sixty of his porters.

  Aguibou, who was meant to give him his passport, had been held up by business a few days’ journey away. His wife, Princess Taïbou, received him instead. Olivier’s memoirs describe her as follows: “Balls of amber as fat as eggs hang from her tightly braided hair. Five-franc coins cover her bosom, their chiming setting off her childish pride. Her arms are loaded down with silver bracelets as thick as my thumb, and she wears rings of braided silver twine around her ankles.”