The King of Kahel

by Monénembo, Tierno; Elliott, Nicholas

  “Me? Really? Why, that’s fantastic!”

  “Would you really accept?”

  “And how! I can’t live without the bush anymore.”

  “You’ll build my palaces, my roads, and my monuments.”

  “It’s agreed, your majesty.”

  “Be careful—I’m very demanding!”

  “I’ll follow your every instruction, your majesty. But let me return the warning, old man. I have one condition—and it’s a significant one.”

  “What is it?”

  “That you come by to pick up a letter for my family before you sail out. To let them know I’ll be there for Christmas, so I can tell them the good news—the most beautiful of their sons has just been promoted to grand vizier of Africa! Anyhow, you’ll agree this is no place to spend Christmas.”

  When he was released from the lazaretto, one of his agents was waiting for him in an old mule-drawn delivery tricycle—there wouldn’t be any ships for a long while. He killed time by taking walks and going fishing and took his meals with a couple of German biologists who claimed to have found a seashell unclassifiable according to Linné’s theory. When the Pointe-Noire–Bordeaux steamship was finally announced, he stopped by to pick up Souvignet’s mail as promised. But the woman guarding the entrance to the lazaretto gave him a strange look:

  “Who? Monsieur Souvignet? You’re looking for Monsieur Jean-Marie Souvignet?…I’m sorry, my dear sir, but that’s him over there.”

  She pointed to the other side of the alley, where a small group of black men was carrying a coarse cashew coffin.

  A tear rolled down his cheek as the grave diggers dropped the first shovelfuls of earth into the grave. He hummed the “Marseillaise” and threw a branch of acacia blossom onto the coffin. Then his voice rose up of its own volition, shaky and unrecognizable:

  “Goodbye, my future General Faidherbe!”

  He returned to the official and handed her the gold watch Souvignet had lost to him on the ship:

  “You’ll be sending his belongings back to his family?”

  “Those are the regulations, sir.”

  “Well, please put this with them!”

  “But—”

  “Do as I ask, madam, please,” he implored, a sob catching in his throat.

  “Very well, sir, very well,” she said, rolling her eyes in stupefaction as she watched him walk away.

  The boat was called Le Congo and was the kind of magnificent Compagnie des Messageries ocean liner regularly produced by Marseille’s La Couronne shipyards.

  He watched Africa getting smaller in the wake of the ship and addressed the laptots and trees fading into the distance in a mystical tone: “Oh no, my poor Africa, you are no more than a stranger now!”

  He landed in Bordeaux on October 11, 1880. He had left France exactly ten months and nineteen days earlier.

  { PART TWO }

  THE TELEGRAPH HAD WORKED; his coachman was waiting for him when he got off the train. But was he stepping down from a train or from the bottomless hole of nothingness? Marseille sparkled in the brilliance of a magnificent Indian summer. Yet he felt nothing, neither the touch of the sun nor the flesh of the city, for which he had pined for long months.

  His body felt insubstantial, his gait unstable. Had Africa held on to him and only released his ghost?

  He shielded his eyes from the fiery sunlight. He met his coachman’s greeting by swaying unsteadily, grasping the coach’s door just in time to regain his balance while his vision cleared. He marveled at the car’s varnished black flanks and glittering wheels with coral-encrusted spokes.

  He settled into the car, grumbling, “Go via the old port, Marcel.”

  He leaned against the open window. Blurry outlines of buildings and spectral silhouettes of trees and passersby flickered past his tired eyes. The car sped along the avenue d’Athènes and the Canebière. When they reached the quai des Belges, he signaled for Marcel to slow down. Refreshed by the sea air, he raised his head to see the teeming piers and the picturesque tangle of masts. Only then did he finally take in the presence of the city.

  Marseille unfolded like a fresco—the same fanlike assortment of hills and creeks, country houses, and little gardens that had so often haunted his thoughts when he was in the bush. It pleased him to see its covered markets, arsenals, oil mills, and soap factories again; greedily he breathed in the odor of lavender, the sea, sulfur, and burning fat. He closed his eyes and rocked with the movement of the horses and the music of his surroundings—quai de Rive-Neuve, bassin de Carénage, promenade de la Corniche, avenue du Prado, avenue de la Pointe-Rouge, avenue de la Madrague-de-Montredon.

  The car shot across the traverse de Carthage, pulled into the park, drove past the stables and the Clary farmhouse, and stopped in front of the château. He had decided to settle in the château built against the embankment after his father-in-law’s death, dedicating the farmhouse to his library and laboratory. He left the car and plunged back into family life with the same agitated relief he had felt when malaria sent him plunging into his bed in Timbo.

  Rose, his dear little Rose, was as delicate and perfumed as when he had left her. She covered him in kisses for several days, racked by tears, before entrusting him to the doctors and the cooks. But she waited until the children recognized their father and were able to get close to him without quivering to ask the question that had been on her lips since the moment of his departure:

  “So tell me, Aimé, did those Negroes give you a part in their Mephistopheles?”

  “It happens that they did, my love. In fact, that’s why I’m still alive.”

  Within a month, he had stopped trembling and vomiting and his body no longer seemed adrift inside his clothes. The bush animal he had become slowly settled into family life and adjusted to the sounds of the city. But Fouta Djallon was still in his blood. As soon as he was strong enough to hold a pencil, he pulled his notebooks out of the trunks and returned to his writing. His tone was mocking and prophetic: “Europe will certainly make the trip and civilization will follow. In three years, the king of Timbo will eat cherries from Montmorency like the Romans used to eat figs from Carthage.” Then he remembered the Herculean task before him in achieving that goal. After the perils of the bush, another struggle lay ahead: facing the jungle of the Paris bureaucracy and selling it on his discovery.

  Naturally, he dropped in to greet his old friend Jules Charles-Roux before going up to Paris.

  Both chemists and sons of chemists, they had been born in the same year. The Charles-Roux family was to soap in Marseille what the Oliviers were to sulfuric acid in Lyon. Devoted to Darwin and fascinated with colonial adventures, both men believed more deeply in the glory of science and the unlimited resources of progress than in God. They were the twin sons of a feverish, all-conquering, and inventive era, which had no time to waste, particularly on self-doubt.

  Jules hadn’t yet succumbed to the fashionable temptations of travel and exploration, but was a close friend of Gallieni and an ardent supporter of French settlement in Tunisia, Dahomey, and Madagascar. Despite their markedly different personalities, both men believed that from now on France’s genius would be exercised from Africa, and that from there, it would radiate beyond the Indus and the Mediterranean, along every meridian, on each pole, and to every corner of the planet. And so they fell into each other’s arms with unconcealed emotion.

  “It’s no small thing to shake a hand that has come straight out of Fouta Djallon! Were you on this morning’s boat or last night’s?”

  “Um…not exactly,” Olivier de Sanderval mumbled. “I preferred sparing you the sight of what I looked like straight off the ship. I put myself in quarantine out of, um, decency, let’s say. The whole city would have fled if I had shown myself to her right away.”

  After a long outpouring of heartfelt emotion and the occasional sigh, they took their seats in the living room. The butler’s slender figure appeared beside them; the guest opted for a Dutch gin and the master of t
he house for a cassis. Olivier de Sanderval savored the delicious liqueur and closed his eyes, sighing:

  “Can this be possible? Me, in France, in a real home, eating real food, drinking out of real glasses, conversing with real human beings!”

  Jules made no answer. This was a sign of deference, but also of a burning desire merely to listen. A single word from him would have shattered the moment’s solemnity, the narrative’s authenticity, and the hero’s depth. Silence settled over them like a hymn and stretched suitably long, interrupted only by the chirping of birds in the park and a few notes of music escaping from a piano in some distant home.

  Olivier de Sanderval finally gave in:

  “Only, where do I start?”

  And with the relief of a suspect who has lost all resolve, he told Jules everything, everything he had so long and so painfully kept to himself, never daring to reveal it to Rose: the beggars of Gorée, the king of Bubaque, the British consul, the chasms, the snakes, the panthers, the scorpions, the chimpanzees, the comas, the stomach cramps, the death threats, and the poisonings; the country’s staggering beauty, the mysterious world of the Fulas—so sly, so twisted, so noble, so valorous, and, in the long run, so fascinating that one would pay them just for their faults.

  “As I told you, my dear Jules, I had intended to travel all the way to the Sudan. But those Fula kings had other plans. They forbade me from going on and showed their gratitude for my visit by holding me captive a good two months.”

  “Two months a prisoner of the Negroes and…”

  “Don’t worry, my dear Jules, these Negroes don’t eat white men. It’s much worse—they eat their souls!”

  For a moment, Jules Charles-Roux was lost in a daydream, then jovially raised his glass:

  “To our great explorer! René Caillié had Timbuktu, Dupuis had Tonkin, and now you have Fouta Djallon!”

  “I couldn’t live with myself if I were only an explorer. The age of exploration is over, my poor Jules! The age of colonization is upon us!”

  “Now that you’ve seen these Negroes up close, do you think it’s possible to extract them from the jungle to which genetics has confined them?”

  “I recognize that it is a primitive race, far closer to the monkey than we are, but it is also a young race. The heart is just emerging, the mind will come later. Evolution, my dear Jules, evolution!”

  “Would you agree to hold a conference here to expand on this and allow us to dream of the marvels of Fouta Djallon?”

  “I would be happy to, my friend! It would be an opportunity for me to thank the Geography Society for its invaluable support.”

  “Will you be in the city for some time?”

  “I’m preparing a trip to Paris to inform the gentlemen of the Ministry of the Navy. I haven’t finished with the saurians yet—after the crocodiles of Africa, the caimans of the ministries!”

  “What will you ask them?”

  “To support my treaties with the Fulas!”

  “For you or for France?”

  “In my mind, it’s the same thing. In Timbo, I am France.”

  “I see. I’ll write you a letter of recommendation to the new president of the Geography Society. His name is…Ferdinand de Lesseps. Do you know Vice Admiral Cloué?”

  “When he was alive, the Marquis de Chasseloup-Laubat told me a lot about him.”

  “Go see him on my behalf. He’s the new Minister of the Navy.”

  Olivier de Sanderval finished his Dutch gin, stood, and asked for his coat.

  IN PARIS, HE TOOK QUARTERS at the Terminus Saint-Lazare and started with the most enjoyable of his chores: a long dinner at the Grand Véfour with the father of the Suez Canal, then still at the height of his glory. The Paris elite was in the habit of gathering in this sumptuous eighteenth-century setting nestled under the arcades of the Palais-Royal. Grévy or Gambetta could frequently be seen in the crowd. If you listened carefully, you could hear Edmond de Goncourt or Alexandre Dumas, fils holding forth about their latest work. The chicken marengo fricassee melted in your mouth, and the chicken salad was even better than the gourmets in the foyer of the Comédie-Française and the boxes of the Opéra would have you believe. Ferdinand de Lesseps proved to be jovial and witty—an utterly charming dinner companion. Commonly known as the Great Frenchman, he was a rather small old man, dressed entirely in black, with graying but thick sideburns. Though he was seventy-five years old, he spoke directly and with tremendous energy. He was still a staunch believer in his Panama Canal. Certainly, the project appeared to be a lot more costly than he had originally intended. But this hardly discouraged him; on the contrary, it proved that it would be more interesting than the Suez Canal. He would eventually find the money, there was no doubt about that, even if for the time being the shareholders were dragging their feet. He had just launched a major bond subscription and it was getting off to a good start.

  “It worked in Suez, it will work in Panama. But in fact, my young friend, we’re not here to talk about Panama, but that new country you have succeeded in putting within France’s reach. Fu…remind me of its name?”

  “Fouta Djallon.”

  “That’s what I thought: Futita Djallon. It’s a land of plenty, I’m told?”

  “Unfortunately, it isn’t for you—there’s no place to dig a canal.”

  “Oh, yes, Charles-Roux told me about your idea to build a railroad. I plan to give a paper about it at the next session of the Academy of Sciences. The railroad is the canal of the new age.”

  “The artery that will help us reinvigorate Africa’s slumbering body.”

  “You talk like Dumas—he is our permanent secretary, you see. You should drop in on him. Dumas is like everyone else: he pretends to detest honors, but nothing pleases him more than when others make a show of how important he is. Go see him, thank him for everything he’s already done for you—even if he hasn’t done anything yet. That will certainly give him the impetus to start doing something; for instance, to schedule my paper as soon as possible. You should also see Ganthiot; he’s the permanent secretary of the Paris Society of Commercial Geography. You’ve just accomplished a colossal task, young man, now you have to have it recognized. We’re in Paris, you know—whether it’s an unknown planet or a new disease, it doesn’t exist here until high society has approved.”

  “I can assure you I have no interest in fame.”

  “That’s what I told myself when I broke ground in Suez. But when everyone started calling me the Great Frenchman, I found it rather pleasant. And what about the Negroes?”

  “Animals, for the time being. Progress will surely come to them.”

  “Ah, you reassure me about the magic of progress! In a few years, the Negroes—how long for the monkeys?”

  Since no proper dinner in Parisian social circles could come to a close without a few digressions on politics and opera, they briefly discussed F. Poise’s L’Amour médecin, which had recently opened at the Théâtre de l’Opéra-Comique, as well as two leading figures who shared a first name: Jules Ferry and Jules Guesde.

  Then the man from Suez stood to put on his top hat and cloak.

  “Promise me you’ll go see Dumas!…And then Ganthiot too!”

  Olivier de Sanderval accompanied him to his carriage. He remained frozen with respect until the living legend of France faded in the distance. Then he turned and climbed into his own carriage.

  The Proceedings of the sessions of the Académie française published long extracts from Lesseps’s paper. Fashionable salons and cafés were instantly enthralled with this intrepid explorer from Lyon, already well-known for having invented the sprung-hub wheel and for his exploits on the front at Sedan, and who, in his splendid isolation, now undertook to present France with a new colony redolent of pastures and honey, whose exotic name already tickled schoolchildren and cabaret songwriters. Le Petit Marseillais, Le Figaro, Le Journal des débats, La Revue des deux mondes, Le Bulletin de la Société de Géographie and La Dépêche coloniale devoted entire p
ages to his journey. His renown soon extended beyond the borders of France: the Geographical Society of London discussed his exploits, and the German press heaped praise upon him. In an age when explorers enjoyed the same celebrity astronauts do today, it was thrilling to see his name appear beside those of Stanley, Major Laing, Mungo Park, and René Caillié.

  He was rather pleased with himself. In just a few weeks, he had managed to seduce the scholars, the financiers, and the academicians. But now he had to face Paris’s most cruel beasts: the politicians.

  Thanks to the reputation he now enjoyed from the humblest abodes to the most luxurious salons, he was ready to present himself at the Ministry of the Navy. But Admiral Cloué did not seem as impressed with him as did the newspapers. He let him wait a few days before opening the doors to his office:

  “Dear old Charles-Roux tells me you’re bringing us a brand-new country.”

  Olivier de Sanderval expounded on his journey, describing the beauty of the landscapes, Fouta Djallon’s touristic and agricultural potential, the Fula aristocracy, and his tiresome detention in Timbo.

  “What did you request from these Fulas?”

  “Authorization to build a railroad and to trade.”

  “You’re sure you didn’t want something else? Like clearing some land and proclaiming yourself king?”

  “I see the gossips have done their damage all the way into the corridors of the Republic. My only ambition is to serve France.”

  “Ah, France! Nowadays, any cobbler boasts he is contributing to her glory. You left without us—without orders, without even asking our advice.”

  “You know as well as I do that you would have tried to dissuade me.”

  “Tell me, what exactly do you expect from us?”

  “That you support my treaties. That you send an official delegation to Timbo—I’m ready to head it.”

  “Perhaps you’re expecting France to set you up as king of Timbo.”