“Cloué is right, Monsieur Olivier, the French belong in the clearings of the Sudan. You’re the people of the Enlightenment, after all. Why don’t you leave these forests to us miserable English?”
He based his argument on the fact that the English had long preceded the French in that part of the world: “Watt and Winterbottom in 1794 and Campbell in 1817, years before your Mollien. If one applies the rule of the first occupant, Fouta Djallon is ours.”
Olivier de Sanderval answered that Fouta Djallon belonged to no one, particularly not the English—the almamis hadn’t signed any agreements with Campbell or Major Laing.
“The Fulas are even slyer than you are—they always pretend to sign and then they never do. Except with me. And do you know why they signed with me, Mr. Gladstone? Because I am neither a state, nor an army, nor a bank. I am a friend.”
“Hmm, a friend? What would you say to giving us all your treaties in exchange for the title of Lord and—this.” He opened his bag, which was stuffed with banknotes.
Olivier de Sanderval’s face contracted into an angry grimace. He stormed across the room and grabbed his rifle:
“Get out of here, Mr. Gladstone, or I will commit a crime against England!”
“One moment, please,” Gladstone said, picking up his glass as if to prove British composure was no myth.
He finished his drink in one swallow, calmly closed his bag, took his coat and walking stick, and politely saluted before getting into his hackney. Olivier de Sanderval chased him to the exit, spat in disdain, and furiously slammed the gate shut.
He spent the next weeks writing his travel narrative and giving interviews and conferences all over France. Newspapers in the most remote provinces sent journalists to meet him. Some even came from Belgium and Germany. The halls of geographical societies were crowded with young men in gaudy vests and frock coats with wide lapels and society ladies in tulle dresses, mantillas, and wide-brimmed hats who had come to listen to him. In Bordeaux, Montélimar, Dijon, and Angoulême, he received a hero’s welcome; strangers threw their arms around him and offered him flowers while crowds chanted “Bravo!” People vied to be photographed with him. In Toulouse, a group of young romantics received him with cries of “French Fouta Djallon! French Fouta Djallon!” At the end of his conference, a young boy handed him a small chest:
“What’s this, young man?” he asked.
“Why, it’s for your railroad of course!”
He was so moved he had difficulty hiding his tears.
“Ah, if only they were all like you in the ministries of Paris, my boy,” he cried as he lifted the child in his arms, “France would be saved!” But his visits to Paris continued to prove utterly fruitless and his constant barrage of increasingly agitated letters remained unanswered.
In late April, he recognized Gambetta’s handwriting in the imposing pile of mail he received from his admirers every day and let out a cry of joy. The letter read: “I’ve finally convinced the government to send a mission to Timbo. You see that I haven’t forgotten about you!…My dear Aimé Olivier, please be assured of my most faithful and sincere friendship. Signed: Gambetta.” In a postscript, he added: “Incredibly, your nebulous Fouta Djallon tale is starting to take hold here.”
He ran to kiss his wife and children and uncorked a bottle of champagne. Then he returned to the library and wrote a feverish response. He devoted several sentences to the usual expressions of gratitude, and closed on an enthusiastic note: “This is the best news that you could have given me. I am ready to leave for Timbo immediately and to hold talks—officially this time—with my Fula friends. I leave it to the government to appoint the team that will follow me and to set the date for the expedition. However, in my opinion, it would be better for us to go before the beginning of the rainy season. As of June, the plains are flooded and the roads impassable in Fouta Djallon.”
After so much hesitation, it seemed as though luck was finally turning his way. The same week he received a letter from the court of Portugal announcing that in appreciation for his treaties and the information he had provided about the Cassini and the Foreyah, King Louis I was bestowing on him the title of Viscount de Sanderval and that he would soon be invited to Lisbon to receive his trading license and decoration.
Suddenly the gods were smiling upon no one but him!
Less than a week later, a sailor knocked at his door to bring news of Bonnard, who had safely returned to Gorée from Timbo. Almami Ahmadou, who in the meantime had replaced Sory according to laws of alternation too Fula to be comprehended, confirmed all the treaties Fouta had signed with him and reiterated the Fula people’s unshakable friendship. Bonnard hadn’t had much trouble convincing the almami—that numskull Goldsburry had done most of his work for him. With his military sense of discernment, Goldsburry had foolishly ordered his entire troop to march in front of the palace in honor of the almami. The suspicious and susceptible Fula people had seen this courtesy as a threat, a sign that the Englishman had come with hostile intentions and that what Olivier de Sanderval had told the almami was true: “The English are aggressors. They only have one thing in mind: to decapitate the almami and enslave Fouta. While I, Olivier de Sanderval, only want your friendship.”
“Which means,” the sailor concluded, magisterially giving the finger to those faraway English troops, “that they booted the Englishman the moment his military parade came to a close, Monsieur Olivier, and that the road to Timbo is still wide open to you!”
The news had the same effect on him as those nice little Burgundy wines one savors over an alfresco lunch to the sound of an accordion. He took up boating again and began hosting balls and banquets. He dedicated his endless sleepless nights to revising The Absolute and his mornings to organizing his travel narrative. He spent the afternoons near Cassis, tracking hares through the scrub and climbing in the rocky Mediterranean inlets. On weekends he took his family on picnics by Lake Berre or in the Château-Combert forest. He relaxed under the pines in the garden, reading Le Petit Marseillais, filling his notebooks, and planning his next expedition to Timbo down to every ration.
Yet spring flashed by and summer (the rainy season over there, with its constant downpours and fiery lightning) was looking him in the face, and still there was no news from the Ministry of the Navy. In mid-May, he expressed his concern to Charles-Roux, who said: “Write them! Maybe they forgot!”
“But to whom, my dear Jules? Cloué or Gambetta?”
“To Cloué, of course! Gambetta already did what he could!”
He did so and, to his great surprise, quickly received an answer: the mission in question had embarked for Fouta Djallon at the beginning of May. The author of the letter, an obscure civil servant with the Bureau for Native Affairs, plunged the knife even deeper by naming the man leading the mission—Doctor Bayol, saddled with a former Folies Bergère comedian turned draftsman-photographer turned Navy officer by the name of Noirot. They were bearing a letter from President Jules Grévy, inviting the almami of Timbo to make an official visit to Paris. Olivier’s heart nearly leaped out of his throat. He ordered his butler to pack his bags immediately and the coachman to find out what time the next train left for Paris. Frightened by his rage, his wife ran to get Charles-Roux. Knowing Olivier’s explosive temper, he dissuaded him from going to Paris:
“That would only make things worse. For now, just calm down. First and foremost, calm down!”
“This is the syndicate’s doing, those mobsters poisoning our ministries!”
“Calm down. Let’s wait for the end of the mission.”
“The bastards! They want to take my Fouta Djallon. Well, they won’t get it! You won’t let me go to Paris? Then I’ll go to Timbo, to put the crooks out of commission!”
But fate had something else in store for him: this time Olivier did not make it to Paris or Timbo. Indeed, another message arrived bidding him to come to Lisbon immediately to be ennobled.
By the time he returned from Portugal, the land of the
Fulas had become Europe’s favorite subject of discussion and the Clary farmhouse was like a train station at rush hour. He received in rapid succession an emissary from Leopold II; a Swedish geographer; a Swiss traveler who, after a recent expedition to the Sahara, wanted to continue his African adventure by following in Mungo Park’s footsteps; and a half-mad Alsatian who claimed to be an explorer and had come to suggest they travel up the Congo River together in a pirogue—from Fouta Djallon to the heart of Abyssinia. Then came a more serious caller, an Austrian journalist who had come all the way from Vienna to ask for a detailed description of Olivier’s adventures. He could no longer keep count of the gentlemen from scholarly societies, the admiring ladies, the merely curious and the Sunday serial writers who came to him seeking inspiration in tales of his exploits. Despite his staff’s vigilance, he was bombarded with visits night and day. At his wit’s end, he discreetly gathered up his family and went to spend the summer at the family home in Avignon. There, between an escapade in the woods and a dive into the Rhône, he found the calm he needed to finish From the Atlantic to the Niger, a digest of his travel notes.
The printer Ducroq immediately offered to publish it. Olivier was correcting the proofs one morning when Charles-Roux burst into the library to shove an issue of L’Illustration under his nose. The newspaper devoted two pages to the return of the Bayol and Noirot mission. The French government’s two envoys had disembarked from the Congo, the prestigious Messageries Maritimes ship sailing the Pointe-Noire–Bordeaux route via Dakar, on January 4. Every thrill-seeker and journalist in town had rushed to the harbor. For the two navy officers had not returned alone, but with a significant detachment of Fulas, led by the famous Saïdou, the almami’s secretary.
The newspaper recounted the Fulas’ colorful stay in the capital of Aquitaine over five front-page columns. After a banquet at the local Geography Society, they had been invited to visit the cathedral, then treated to a concert of military music and an evening of ballet. “At the theater,” the newspaper added maliciously, “the prima ballerina sparked a glint in the eyes of Saïdou, the head of our Negro delegation. It was delightful to watch these savages, freshly plucked from the bush, with their shapeless boubous and strange hats, gawking at the beauties of our city—by which I mean our monuments and our leading ladies. The spectacle would have been even more picturesque had their sovereign been willing to make the trip over, but among these people the monarch only leaves his capital to go to war or to Mecca. That’s the way of the Negro!” the article concluded.
This time Charles-Roux could do nothing to stop him. Olivier de Sanderval packed his suitcases immediately and took a train to Paris. But Auguste Gougeard, the new minister of the Navy, refused to see him, and Bayol and Noirot were nowhere to be found. He had to cool his heels for a few weeks, cloistered in a room at the Terminus Saint-Lazare, and satisfy himself with hearing about the Fulas’ boisterous nights in Paris society from press reports and incredulous concierges. The delegation was successively received by Jules Grévy; Gambetta, now President of the Council; Gougeard; and even General Faidherbe, who, after having distinguished himself in Senegal, now held the honorary position of Grand Chancellor of the Legion of Honor. They were put up at the Hotel du Louvre, honored in the courtyard of the Invalides, and taken to see Hamlet at the Opéra. The newspapers were full of juicy anecdotes about their exotic appearance and amusing misadventures in the streets of Paris. The Fulas would clean out the luxury boutiques and when presented with the bill, would say:
“Send that to Tierno Balêdio.* We’re his guests, we don’t have to pay for anything.”
When Olivier finally managed to catch Bayol in his office, the doctor ignored his greeting and handed him a piece of paper. It was the treaty he had brought back from Timbo, with one version in French and another in Fula. Olivier managed to overcome his anger long enough to read it:
“Fouta Djallon, which has long been connected to France by ties of friendship, knowing that the French people are not seeking to expand their possessions in Africa but rather to develop friendly relations in order to favor commercial exchanges, and that the French never interfere in the affairs of their allies and that they absolutely respect the laws, mores, customs, and religions of others…” This was followed by a series of trade agreements and treaties ratifying the friendship between the two countries. Fouta Djallon agreed to reroute some of its caravans from the Gambia and Sierra Leone to the French outpost in Boké.
Bayol watched him read with the glimmering eye of a man who has just stabbed his mortal enemy:
“You see? Fouta Djallon has become a French protectorate, Aimé Olivier. Your treaties no longer have any value!”
“You call this a protectorate treaty?”
“What else could it be than a treaty? Look at the signatures: that of the almami and that of the French state, represented by me.”
“You think these are agreements? With their convoluted language, these Fulas aren’t doing anything more than offering you their friendship. You’ve obtained less than what I already have. You’re lucky I’m not the one responsible for ranks in the Navy, Bayol.”
“Be careful, Olivier!”
“As for my treaties, my Fula friends recently reiterated that they stand intact.”
“That was before I arrived.”
“Your trip doesn’t change anything.”
“You no longer mean anything in Timbo. If you go back there, you’ll probably be assassinated.”
“We’ll see about that, Bayol, because I’m preparing to go back, and this time it will be to settle there.”
“Goodbye, Aimé Olivier.”
“Call me Viscount de Sanderval!”
He slammed the door behind him and rushed to the Hotel du Louvre. Saïdou and his suite had come to the end of their formal meetings. Now it was his turn to visit, gauge their states of mind, and gather their confidences. He took them to see the Figaro’s printing press and to visit boutiques and workshops, including a currier, a saddler, and a manufacturer of soft furnishings. He invited them to the circus and to the Folies-Dramatiques, dined with them at the Grand Véfour and the Vignes de Bourgogne. They all welcomed him with open arms. Saïdou was happy to be reunited with him and passed along the almami’s friendly greetings: “I learned the king of Portugal gave you a title. That confirms your noble origins. I will report this as soon as I return to Timbo. You deserve our friendship; you no longer have to worry.” The man called Alpha Médina showed him the journal he had been keeping in Fula about his stay in Paris, which, he said, “people over there in Fouta will rediscover long after I’m dead.” He parted with them knowing not only that his treaties remained valid but that Fouta was eagerly awaiting his return to welcome and celebrate him.
From the Atlantic to the Niger was released in 1883 to triumphant reviews. He was in the good graces of the most prestigious salons and newspapers. He inspired caricaturists and novelists. One overexcited young serial writer was even reported to have written: “Exhausted by this long journey, the explorer put up his hammock to rest in the shade of the giant pineapples.”
He spent the year responding to solicitations—a banquet offered by a scholarly society here, a conference in a salon or a university there. His essays on the beauties of Africa and the virtues of colonization did not prevent him from keeping a close eye on his affairs in Fouta Djallon. After his envoys Gaboriaud and Ansaldi, he sent another mission to Timbo to confirm his treaties and attempt an expedition into the Sudan. In order not to offend the Fulas, he chose an entirely black mission, led by a former Senegalese infantryman named Ahmadou Boubou. The expedition left from Buba, crossed Fouta, received confirmation that the treaties were valid, and made contact with the Mandingo chiefs of Upper Niger and the Toucouleur kings of Dinguiraye.
His relations with the Ministry of the Navy remained frigid, but at the Berlin Conference in 1885, France was forced to recognize him as negotiorum gestor and claim his treaties for herself in order to thwart the Englis
h.
That same year, he sent Cardonnet, the captain of the Jean-Baptiste, on a mission to reconnoiter the estuary of the rio Compony and had his agents Pelage and Bonnard set up trading posts in Nalu country, in Bassia and Kandiafara—in other words, deep into the interior.
The bureaucracy in Paris remained resolutely hostile toward him. But he found consolation in his wife, his children, his friend Charles-Roux, and in news he received from Fouta. In 1885, Alpha Yaya sent word that he was granting him a concession in Kâdé. He immediately ordered a trading post built there.
His very first possession in Fula country.
IN DECEMBER 1887, weary of the administration’s pettiness and the industrious bustle of Marseille, Olivier de Sanderval embarked on his second trip to Fouta Djallon. He needed to put his treaties into effect before that contemptible Navy “syndicate” torpedoed them, or the shifty Fula lords changed their minds. Things had become more complicated since his previous visit. He would now have to do battle on two fronts, the most perilous of which was no longer in the courtyards of the palace in Timbo, however thick with crooks and conspirators, but in the alcoves of the Ministry of the Navy. Shame on those Paris pencil pushers, a plague on that insolent Bayol, who was becoming a serious obstacle; he would have to be neutralized—and soon. He did not need one of the countless Timbo proverbs—“Slaughter the monster before its claws grow”—to realize that.
He hastened to Gorée to board the Jean-Baptiste and immediately set sail for Bolama, where he took time to think through his return engagement in Fouta.
His first trip had allowed him to set foot in this paradoxical, fascinating country populated with the valiant and the deceitful, hypocrites and petty nobility. This time, his ambitions were different: he wanted to penetrate the workings of power. The moment had come to shed the costumes of the tourist and explorer and plunge body and soul into the murky world of the Fulas, to deal with the nuances and subtleties of this unfathomable, sublime, and fearsome people. This time, he was coming to take part in the perilous whir of the court. He was coming to shape Fouta’s destiny!
The King of Kahel Page 14