The King of Kahel

by Monénembo, Tierno; Elliott, Nicholas

  “And what of the railroad?”

  “Ah yes, your railroad. I don’t think it is a bad thing, but I must ask the nobles.”

  “When?”

  “When God wants it to be done. Diango, fab’i diango, tomorrow, the day after tomorrow. Wait until we renew the kings’ mandates, I will ask them then.”

  On his way out of the arbor, a young man sporting a goatee and a thick amber necklace stopped him:

  “I am Pâthé, the almami’s nephew. Your train is a good thing. I am sure it will give Fouta strength. I will come to see you. We have a lot to talk about.”

  A rugged young man with smallpox scars on his face interrupted Pâthé and held out his hand:

  “And I am Bôcar-Biro, the almami’s other nephew and his warlord.”

  Pâthé, Bôcar-Biro, Aguibou, Alpha Yaya! He could not suspect the tragic twist of fate that would soon link him to these four Fouta princes.

  He offered the almami a horse from the Camargue, saddles, bridles, holsters by Walker, weapons, amber, coral, pearls, and a mountain of beautiful fabric. News of this outpouring of luxury goods was soon all over the palace. He had to put all his Gallic cunning to work to avoid handing over his shoes, clock, and tent.

  Two days passed before—miracle of miracles—the guards disappeared from in front of the gate. In half an hour he had discovered all of Timbo. Once back in his hut, he noted: “So this is the Versailles of Fouta! Our chickens live better than this!”

  He locked himself in his hut for the next few days, intending to work on The Absolute and his travel journals. But cockroaches, flies, and a constant crowd of curious visitors—the greatest nuisance of all—made it impossible. Some locals touched his skin. Others leaned in to sniff at him. They checked to see how soft his hair was and counted the number of buttons on his frock coat. They lost themselves in conjecture about his skin color and his way of life. Did he ever eat? Was he sensitive to fire? Did he drink water or melted metal? They tracked him when he went hunting, followed him when he took a stroll, and spied on him when he wandered off the path to relieve himself. There was nowhere to move freely, never any privacy! The most brazen ventured onto the veranda, then right to the edge of his bed. He fended them off with the clanging of his alarm clock, but they came right back. He tried using reflections from his mirror, the smell of camphor, and finally the threat of his rifle, but it was no use. The circus lasted for days until finally it dawned on him: those scoundrels Mâly and Mâ-Yacine! His Senegalese servants were inviting people to gawk at him in return for poultry, corn, and milk. In a rage, he grabbed his rifle and found the louts in Mâly’s hut, sitting surrounded by their booty.

  “I’ve come to claim my share,” he yelled. “From now on, it will be fifty-fifty. After all, I’m the one in the zoo!”

  But when he returned to his room, he found little Fatou waiting for him in his bed, as naked as the day she was born.

  “No way, my little Fatou,” he said, forcing her to get dressed, “this bed is too small for the two of us. Go do that with someone else. Go on, go on!”

  He shoved her back into the courtyard and gave her a ball of amber to get her to stop crying. Her mother emerged from the undergrowth around the lougan and came straight at him:

  “Marry her! Don’t you see how beautiful she is? Hurry, marry her! Do as I say, you heartless white man! Go on, do as I say!”

  Mâly and Mâ-Yacine finally proved he hadn’t hired them in vain: they charged out of their huts to fend off the two hens and save their master from their hysterical clucking.

  As promised, Pâthé came to see him. He was the image of the Fula prince as they imagined him in the best salons of Paris and Marseille. Tall and thin, with fine dark features, he spoke softly and moved slowly. Something chivalrous and mysterious blazed in his eyes. He wore a beautiful white bazin boubou with blue embroidery over the pocket and one of those arabesque-covered conical bonnets the Fulas call a poûto. And of course his elegant goatee and that necklace from which he never parted. He held out a book and made no attempt to conceal his pride:

  “A Turk from Istanbul wrote down the entire history of my family.”

  He spoke at length about Islam and Fouta. The white man listened to him politely, then steered the conversation to the only subject he cared about: Fouta, but not the Fouta of the ancestors. He was interested in Fouta right now. From the moment he had arrived in Buba, it was clear to him that he was traveling through a complex, contradictory land. It was like a baobab forest, with solid foundations, but frail branches and trunks. Too many provinces, too many jurisdictions. Too many dynasties, too many princes. It was an enlightened system, a flexible edifice, but far too exposed to the ill winds of jealousy and ambition. He interrupted the prince before he could finish his tirade about the Church’s errors and the Christians’ hypocrisy:

  “How old is the almami?”

  “There are two things we never count here: the number of cows and the number of years we’ve lived. It brings bad luck.”

  “One thing is certain: he is no longer a young man.”

  He looked deep into the young prince’s eyes, watching for his reaction, and added:

  “And he will soon have to be replaced.”

  “Fouta has thought of everything, white man. As soon as he is buried, he will be replaced according to the rules.”

  “Is the name of his successor known?”

  “He is standing before you, inquisitive stranger.”

  “Ah, the crown prince! You told me you were the first counselor when we met in the palace the other day.”

  “That is the Fula’s weakness, my friend. We are obsessively modest. If I had told you I was crown prince, everyone would have laughed in my face—yet it is true. I am the crown prince of Fouta.”

  “So, I have the future almami of Fouta under my roof,” he said as he handed him a piece of chocolate.

  “Do I look the part?” chuckled the prince.

  “You all look the part here. One begins to wonder where you hide your commoners! Tell me, good prince, what will you do about my railroad when you accede to the throne?”

  “I will support it. All the young people want it. It is the old ones who don’t.”

  “The old ones will never want it. And here, without the old ones…If I understood correctly, that Bôcar-Biro is your brother?”

  “Yes, the same father.”

  “Hmm, that’s never a good thing, brothers by the same father, especially among the Fula people.”

  “That is not our case. We get along well.”

  “I didn’t say a word, good prince, I didn’t say a word!”

  That night, tired of listening to the song of the frogs, he started a new page of The Absolute: “We cannot define the void as Relative or Absolute because we are far from knowing all of the Relative, everything potentially contained within the Absolute, and all that will still be born into existence in the future…”

  ONE DAY AS HE WAS RETURNING from the spring he visited to while away the time, he was brought to a halt by a fascinating sight. Behind a hedge of gladiolas and mampata medlar trees, a young woman hummed a tune and ground fonio, oblivious to his presence. He was still hypnotized when he described her in his journal that night: “This dark princess is magnificent: bewitching eyes so vast you could drown in them, a perfect bosom as plain as day, apt to fuel Phidias’s dreams and send Anacreon and the poets of his school into raptures of ecstasy. What ankles, what wrists!” He would have given all of Apollo’s treasures to make this delightful spectacle last forever. But after a mere ten minutes disaster struck—a rotten mango fell right next to where he was standing. The beautiful creature turned and saw him, leaped to her feet and ran off, crying that she had seen the devil. He bounded over the hedge and chased after her: “Daro! Daro, yandi! Stop, please stop, I swear I don’t mean you any harm!” He used every Fula word he could think of, but the young woman only ran faster. They tore through lougans and weaved between huts. Dogs barked, chickens and goats
panicked as they streaked by. The mad chase lasted several minutes, until the young woman pushed open the door of a fringed fence. Olivier only had time to see a group of women covered in soap bubbles scrubbing each other’s backs before the door slammed shut behind her. The guards arrived within a few seconds, wielding swords and sticks:

  “That’s white people for you—no sense of modesty, no manners! They should be banned from Fouta, wallahi, they should be! What do you want from this woman, huh? Answer us, you bad seed.”

  Yes, what was he doing? He didn’t even know himself. He nervously twisted the kerchief the young woman had lost in the chase.

  “If there is a hell, it must be just like this,” he muttered, convinced that this time he would not escape the executioner, or at the very least the jail guard.

  Then he heard someone say:

  “Can’t you fools see he just wanted to return her kerchief?”

  He turned to recognize Diaïla, the young prince from the other night, sitting astride his horse. He was saved!

  The incident was soon forgotten, but alas, so was he. For several days, he received no news from the outside world. Pâthé did not make good on his promise to visit again and Bôcar-Biro was nowhere to be found. But these were mere trifles. Disease took advantage of this dark time of solitude, melancholy, and anxiety to strike again. This time it was serious. Nothing like his occasional bouts of malaria or the chronic stomach pain he had first experienced at seven in the austere boarding school in Oullins, where the Dominicans had filled him with Latin, pea puree, and elevated principles. Ordinarily, illness was an insignificant bother, hardly making a dent in his solid constitution. Not this time. He remained unconscious so long that his men began planning to dig him a hole. But where? And following what rite, good God? Apart from an English adventurer who had come to be converted a hundred years ago, no white man had ever died in Timbo.

  He alternated between a comatose state and bouts of vomiting. Soon his arteries were visible beneath his skin as clearly as his bones. His hair began to fall out and his skin turned yellow. His mind was muddled; he thought he already stank of death. Tired of stuffing himself with quinine, Vichy lozenges, camphor water, and morphine, he called for young prince Diaïla and told him his last wishes: “I told my men that if I die they are to burn my body and carry my ashes to Saint-Louis. I beg you, don’t let your rigid Muslim principles put a stop to that.” He went on in a delirious frenzy: “And don’t forget, no one is to touch my belongings! I leave you five centimes, my soap, and a magnifying glass.”

  They say that a man on the threshold of death revisits his life’s main events as if they were unfolding in a film. Sure enough, as soon as he closed his eyes, his past was crystal clear before him.

  Here he was at Oullins in Father Lacordaire’s Latin class. There was Father Bourgeat holding forth on Plato, and Father Mermet writing out his physics formulas. This image was replaced by the sight of the blacksmith Michaux, with whom he had built the first velocipede factory in 1863, later burned to the ground by the Communards in a fit of revolutionary fervor. Next he saw the medal he received for saving that sailboat in the bay of Marseille. Here he was at thirty, bearded, married, and already mayor of Marennes, where he would be the first in France to provide postmen with bicycles. After Marennes, Marseille, where he spent years in the lab trying to dissociate matter and invent a flying machine. Then there was that memorable lunch at the peak of the Verryère. People around the Vieux-Port still talk about it some hundred and fifty years later—three hundred illustrious guests carried to the peak in sedans and on donkeys specially brought from the Pyrenees; Manufacture de Sèvres place settings with engravings of the guests’ names, commissioned for the occasion; a philharmonic orchestra; and the poet Jean Aicard reciting his poems.

  But what they say is wrong: a dying man’s visions go far beyond his own experience, ranging over his entire genealogy. Forgotten figures who had vanished with the short pants of his youth took advantage of his feverish state to come back to life and taunt him. That decrepit old man in a Tyrolean hat was obviously a Simonet, probably the great-uncle, the legendary high priest of muslin. To his right, that general with the cocked hat was undoubtedly his grandfather who had served as an intendant to Napoleon on the Italian campaign. The one on the left was his other grandfather, the formidable Claude-Marius Perret.

  The people of Timbo couldn’t make anything of the disjointed pieces of the saga he mumbled in the throes of delirium. Anyhow, the Fulas considered anything relating to whites bizarre, artificial, and inexplicable. The life of the white people was delirium, which needed no shivers and fevers to distort and poison common sense.

  “But my God, this white man here is no longer like any other white man; this white man here is one of ours now, wallahi, and this white man is going to die!”

  Soon his condition was so desperate that the almami organized a prayer vigil at the mosque to ask Allah to cure him. The enigmatic Pâthé came to his hut with a kettle full of magic philters made by steeping plant resins with nassi, pieces of paper inscribed with verses of the Koran.

  “Drink this,” Pâthé told him.

  He swallowed it right away, convinced this concoction glowing with sludge and stinking of public lavatories would kill him before the second sip. He closed his eyes and waited to die, thinking this was the best thing that could happen to him. But after three days of a deep sleep, he woke without any headache or dizziness and immediately ordered a dish of mafé rice. He ate heartily and belched as loud as a real Fula expressing his satisfaction after a good meal. He was able to take the few steps to the outdoors without any assistance. Once in the middle of the courtyard, he asked for a folding chair and stretched out under the hot sun to begin his long, pleasant convalescence. When Pâthé learned of his recovery, he came to crow about his part in it:

  “You see that our marabouts are the best! You should convert, my friend. Wallahi, you are too good a man to remain a vile Christian.”

  “I admit it, my Fula friend, you saved my life. How can I thank you?”

  “Aha! Give me munitions!”

  “Munitions?”

  “Otherwise I will turn to my Turkish friends.”

  He understood that he would have to act quickly if he wanted Fula.

  The next day, the elusive Bôcar-Biro appeared with some game, a bowl of honey, and a basket of pineapple.

  “You promised to come to see me, but you never did,” the white man complained.

  “I was at war!”

  “Which unhappy nation has Fouta declared war on?”

  The young prince explained that he had had to lead his troops to the depths of Sierra Leone. He was not battling that country, but trying once again to crush the Hubus, a sect of Muslim Fulas and fanatical warriors who had been attempting to subvert the rule of the almamis since the reign of his father, the much regretted and very great almami Oumarou.

  “This war is wearing us down,” he added. “It would be different if I had enough rifles.”

  “Rifles?” the white man murmured as he smoothed his beard.

  “Could you get us some rifles?”

  “That is conceivable.”

  “Tell me, white man, are you serious? You know we could become friends!”

  Bursting with enthusiasm, he stood to take his leave, but the white man held on to a corner of his boubou and cleared his throat:

  “But listen—I have one condition. You must back me with the almami.”

  “Done! Now, here is mine: you won’t talk about the rifles.”

  “To the almami?”

  “No, to my brother.”

  Once Bôcar-Biro left, Fatou could finally approach him to offer oranges and start her spurned-lover routine again:

  “Marry me or I’ll throw myself in the well!”

  She continued nearly all morning. Then suddenly she lifted her head, as if struck by inspiration, rushed into the hut, and slipped into the white man’s bed.

  Her instincts we
re good—it soon started to rain. Mâly put the folding chair away and helped Olivier to shelter. But the young girl wouldn’t leave. The Senegalese soldiers had to be called in to remove her.

  “If that’s how it is, Yémé, I’ll walk you all the way to hell, as the Fulas say. I’ll denounce you to the almami. You’re a spy, you’ve come to kill him, and you will steal his ancestors’ Fouta!”

  Olivier paid little attention to her childlike babble, particularly since Bôcar-Biro returned with good news that night:

  “The provincial kings are coming in ten days—you’re going to get your railroad!”

  Yet the next day he returned from the butterfly hunt to find his home in upheaval. Guards were thrashing about in the courtyard. Captives trailed out of his hut in a long line carrying his baggage on their heads. Mâly and Mâ-Yacine could do nothing to stop them. He found Saïdou and the palace retinue waiting for him under the orange tree. He grabbed Saïdou by the collar:

  “What’s going on here? Are you standing by and letting this happen or are you the one robbing me?”

  “Calm down,” Saïdou advised in a gruff voice. “I can promise you this is no time to make matters worse.”

  He went to cock his rifle, but was stopped by the guards pulling out their swords. He had no choice but to follow the line of prisoners, cursing all the way. As he strode ahead attempting to contain his anger, Mâly and Mâ-Yacine rushed after him, breathlessly trying to explain:

  “It’s Fatou! That brainless little fool did what she threatened!”

  “But worse yet, they believed her madness!” Mâly whined. “They’re threatening to decapitate you and make slaves of us!”

  Soon they reached the weavers’ quarter at the other end of the city and stopped before some decrepit straw huts surrounded by a tall rattan fence covered in vines. A thorny patch of undergrowth separated them from the nearest concessions and a narrow path lined by wayfaring trees and wild roses led back to the main track. The white man looked around despondently and said: