The King of Kahel

by Monénembo, Tierno; Elliott, Nicholas

  “Lieutenant Levasseur? You mean the Frenchman we arrested in Labé? Not at all, Yémé, not at all! It’s just some poor fool, a bandit for whom we’d been looking for a long time and who has just been unmasked. If it had been a Frenchman, we would have asked your opinion. You’re the King of Kahel now!”

  The marabout and the executioner stood in the middle of the square surrounded by a teeming crowd.

  “Well, my good Saïdou, I must say that reassures me. Isn’t the almami coming?”

  “He’ll be here soon. I came ahead to welcome him.”

  Saïdou led him to the makeshift stand the guards were putting up. Once they had finished, the almami appeared with his court, lavishly greeted the white man, and exchanged a few words with Saïdou before taking his seat. He signaled for the guilty man to be brought forward; he was wearing nothing but a loincloth, his head covered in a hood, and chains extending from his feet to his neck. The marabout cupped his hands around his mouth so that the sentence would be heard far and wide:

  “You, Mangoné Niang, you robbed the trading posts in Rufisque, pillaged a caravan in Buba, and stole cattle in Mâci, then came to hide in Yali under a false name. But your accomplice, Doura Sow, arrested in Boké, denounced you. For all of these reasons and others unknown to us, you are sentenced to decapitation. Now I will read the Fatiha and the executioner will proceed.”

  He read the Koran and took off the victim’s hood.

  “No!”

  Olivier de Sanderval’s cry stopped the executioner’s sword in midair. He leaped forward and tore it out of his hands.

  “This man is my friend! As the King of Kahel, I request that the almami amnesty him.”

  It was the man who had given him ham and wine in his plantation. He was not actually called Yéro Baldé, but Mangoné Niang, and was not even from Fouta. Born in Rufisque, he was a Wolof.

  “But he robbed the trading posts in Rufisque!” Saïdou exclaimed, stunned.

  “That doesn’t matter. He is still my friend.”

  “Do you really want to amnesty him?” asked the almami’s griot.

  “I insist, almami!”

  A tremor of excitement shot through the stands. Some were surprised, others annoyed, all needed to consult with their neighbors. Then the griot spoke again:

  “No Fouta lord wants this bandit on his territory!”

  “Let him come to Kahel! He will be my first subject.”

  HE STOPPED IN KAHEL on the way to the coast to evaluate his property: twelve miles long, barely three miles wide. He started a new notebook to inventory his goods. All in all there was one high grassland plateau, five valleys, ten hills, two natural springs, one waterfall, three streams, and three backwaters. His domain contained five villages and ten hamlets, populated by two thousand free men and five hundred captives. Fifteen donkeys, one hundred dogs, three thousand oxen, as many goats and sheep, about a hundred henhouses, and five horses. He breathed in the smell of the grass and crumbled some soil between his fingers. It was real Fula soil: no good for planting cereals and tubers, but perfect for grazing cattle and growing vegetables. He could tell just by its odor that coffee, vineyards, sisal, and potatoes would also thrive here. Up here, he felt as if he were in Auvergne; both the landscape and the climate reminded him of the region. Water flowed in abundance.

  A few canalizations would suffice to carry water to the arid peaks. Elsewhere, the grasses remained high year-round. A mere drop of water and the fonio and corn would sprout; flowers, mushrooms, and fruit would be there for the picking. His gaze was immediately drawn to the colorful slopes in the north—he would breed horses there. Then he turned to the wooded plains in the south, where he would found a preserve for elephants and lions, antelopes, and baboons to coexist as innocently as in primeval times.

  Three villages drew his attention: Fello-Dembi would be his capital, Diongassi his economic center, and Bourouwal-Dâra his rail junction.

  He chose the site of his palace on top of the hill in Fello-Dembi and, sitting by the backwater that ran below, carefully sketched a plan—it would be a magnificent Fula hut, but with several rooms like a European house, and layered roofing made of the best straw, reaching to the ground and decorated with rattan rings and bamboo arcs. This would be a temporary dwelling, of course. Later, he would commission the best architects to design something. Something elegant and majestic—in other words, something Latin. A palace, a real palace, like the palazzo del Principe in Genoa, or the palazzo Garbello in Florence. He had always been fascinated by Italy—“Every great man is born Italian!” he declaimed in his memoirs.

  As with his house in Bolama, which now belonged to Alpha Yaya, he would have Carrara marble shipped in for the facade and the staircases. He would build the roof and the walls with local materials. The country seemed to abound with slate and granite, and possibly graphite and precious stones.

  It was here, in his future capital of Fello-Dembi, that he finished his famous map of Fouta Djallon and the southern river coast and sketched his railroad line. Next he settled Mangoné Niang in and ordered him to recruit three thousand able-bodied young men to contribute to his new army and clear the brush to build his plantations and trading posts.

  He traveled the length and breadth of his kingdom on horseback and met most of his subjects. He hosted sumptuous feasts attended by the best griots and the most beautiful women. Game was served in bountiful portions and milk and honey flowed like water. Fonio and rice sat steaming in huge brass cauldrons. “The kingdom of Kahel has only just been founded,” they gossiped in the markets and fairs, “but of all the kingdoms in Fouta, it is the one where you can most enjoy licking your fingers while listening to the finest flutists.”

  Soon he had cleared sites for the palace and the train station, erected the trading posts’ walls, and sowed the nurseries. His coat of arms hung at the entrance to the villages and three thousand soldiers were at his command. He could safely leave Kahel in the robust, steady hands of his second-in-command, the bandit Mangoné Niang.

  On his way back to the coast, he briefly stopped in Timbi-Touni to say goodbye to his friend Tierno and show him the plans for his streets, factories, and palaces. Warm embraces were followed by a long festive meal.

  “Thank you, Tierno, my friend, thank you!” Olivier de Sanderval exclaimed. “Though I find your lamb fonio absolutely delicious and your griots’ praise in the finest taste, still I’m not happy.”

  “Why?”

  “I have the feeling you’re hiding something from me.”

  “I admit the news isn’t good. Gallieni has sent his troops.”

  “What a fool!”

  “A column led by a certain Captain Audéoud. Without the almami’s authorization. What does France want?”

  “Ask Saint-Louis! You know me, you know what I want: Fouta’s friendship—don’t you believe me?”

  “It isn’t easy to trust a white man!”

  “I am a friend, Tierno!”

  “The worst is that I have no right to doubt it. For the time being, you haven’t invaded anything. But what about Gallieni?”

  “How did the almami react?”

  “He banned anyone from selling supplies to Plat and Fras, and if the column doesn’t leave Fouta, Levasseur will be executed.”

  “And what about me?”

  “We consider you a Fula. Regarding this, our mouth has permanently been bound by our word.”

  “If this was an invasion, Gallieni would have waited for Plat and Fras to be in Senegal.”

  Tierno did not answer. In the Fula way, that meant he didn’t agree. Over the three days of Olivier de Sanderval’s stay, he avoided the delicate and increasingly burning question of the relations between Fouta and France. It was not appropriate to offend a friend, especially when that friend was under your roof.

  The Frenchman and the Fula merely watched each other carefully, exchanging a few polite remarks and artificial smiles. They knew each other well by now—they were friends or, even better, assoc
iates. But beneath the masks of affection and camaraderie, each man could make out the calculations in the other’s mind and the muted worry that gnawed at his belly. They knew that both among the Fulas and the French, suspicion would always prevail over the most solid pacts in a case such as this and that the fruit of friendship would always hide a pit—the toxic pit of betrayal.

  One man had given his father’s land to the other, who had promised him money, machines, riches, and progress. The white man claimed he was championing his country, contributing to France’s glory, but at the same time he saw himself as king of Africa. On the one hand, the call of duty; on the other, the instinctive call to power. Tierno portrayed himself as the faithful servant of Fouta and Islam, but was not deaf to the sirens of wealth and ambition. Yes, he was a good Fula and a good Muslim, but he secretly desired only one thing: to rival or even surpass the provinces of Labé and Timbo. He and the Frenchman needed each other and mistrusted each other. They were partners—not always honest partners, but they were tied to the same rope dangling over the precipice. For they both knew this much: times were not good. The almami was old and now, suddenly, Gallieni’s column was on the horizon. The sky was heavy with ill omens. Evil winds were sweeping in from every side. Heavy clouds obstructed the horizon—and men’s designs. What would become of their pledges and promises in the heart of the storm?

  They pretended to put those worries aside by hunting panthers and partridges. Tierno taught the white man archery and insisted he participate in a few equestrian processionals, although he was not fond of horseback riding. In return, Olivier taught him the rudiments of mountain climbing and introduced him to chess.

  On the day they parted, the king of Timbi-Touni accompanied his guest to the Kakrima River followed by his riders:

  “Look at these ponds, these valleys, these blossoming hills,” he said, proudly displaying his land. “We have a beautiful country, don’t we? You see that forest over there, beyond that rock? That’s a spring. A spring only one person knows about.”

  “That’s nothing,” the white man answered, more French than ever. “On my land, there is a spring nobody knows about!”

  After once again narrowly escaping decapitation in Kountou for having accidentally trampled a local god, a miserable statue erected at the entrance to the village, he ended up in Ya-Fraya, dead tired and run down by dysentery, and was taken in by a Frenchman named Gaillard. Gaillard had settled in this forgotten backwater many years earlier to sell salt, fabric, and candles. He also cultivated some land, bred cattle, and traded copper for ivory and gold with passing caravans. He was married to a native, a beautiful Susu woman who had given him seven children, including two tall young girls in bare feet and flounce dresses.

  A long week in bed before he could stand on his own two feet again! Madame Gaillard concocted a delicious duck with rice and wild spinach puree to help him regain his strength. Gaillard proved generous and pleasant, despite the violent coughing fits that choked him. He introduced Olivier to his children and spoke proudly of his two daughters who could read and write and even play the piano. But when dinnertime came, Olivier de Sanderval called the rest of the family to table and was stunned to hear his host respond:

  “What? Negresses at my table? You can’t be serious, Monsieur Olivier de Sanderval!”

  “Poor Negroes!” he wrote straightaway. “The white man feels obliged to hate Africa even when he doesn’t want to.”

  “I’ve been hungry for six months!” he warned as he picked up his fork. He devoured the duck with rice and made short work of a piece of reblochon and an île flottante. The magic of wine, the aroma of coffee, Gaillard’s bonhomie, Mozart’s fugues rising from the depths of the jungle…he closed his eyes, chased the sound of frogs and wild dogs out of his ears, and felt as if he were comfortably seated in his château in Montredon. It was the first time he had been happy in months.

  Another five days in the jungle and, finally, the coast!

  Conakry was still barely more than a settlement, only a fragment of the size of Boké or Buba, of Bolama or Timbo. A mouth-shaped sliver of clearing in the dense face of the jungle.

  You couldn’t take a step without feeling the sinister brush of a bat’s wing against your face. Tree sap and snail slime dripped onto your head, caterpillars slipped under your shirt. Chameleons spit in your eyes, vipers and hissy snakes wound around your ankles. The paths and courtyards stank of hyena feces and vulture droppings. Layers of jellyfish and otters, dead fish, and skittering crabs obscured the sand on the beaches. There were as many jackals and warthogs as flies. “Going hunting” meant sitting in your living room and aiming at gazelles and panthers through the blinds.

  It was a virgin land that, for the moment, belonged to no one—in other words, to no white man. The Belgians coveted it, the Germans claimed it. From their base on the Loos Islands, the British insisted it was theirs. And the Portuguese, who had been established from Senegal to Zanzibar since the fifteenth century, felt at home everywhere. The French, who had built a telegraphic center and a small military outpost, intermittently occupied by soldiers from Boké, didn’t yet dare believe they were at home here. Their dispatch boats and whalers occasionally cruised between the islands and the mangrove to discourage anyone from attacking their positions.

  The Germans called the place Boulbinet, the English Tombo, and the French Conakry. The English said it was an island, the French said it was not, and everyone was right six hours out of twelve: at high tide, Tombo was indeed an island, but at low tide it was no more than an outgrowth of the Kaloum Peninsula—they were separated by a mere 650 feet of pebbles.

  This “island” on which the city was just stirring consisted of three trading posts and two tiny hamlets inhabited by two hostile tribes of warriors: Boulbinet, on the ocean side, where the fierce Temenes lived, and Tombo, on the peninsula side, where the intrepid Bagas were gathered. In Boulbinet, the German Colin’s trading post; in Tombo, the English trading post! On the other end of the island, a stone’s throw from the peninsula, was the domain of a strange Frenchman, a Robinson Crusoe type who sold animal skins and wax to passing ships. He was a plump pink man by the name of Maillart who, in this lost corner of the world, had turned his entire existence into a distant and inaccessible atoll.

  His house stood surrounded by a thick fence covered in thorns and barbed wire, without any opening or gate. It could be reached only via an ingenious rotating staircase he had devised: if a visitor seemed trustworthy, he pivoted the staircase and invited him to come in; if not, he brandished his rifle and fired until the visitor disappeared.

  In all, he owned five rifles, each of which bore a woman’s name: Carmen for the Negroes, Esmeralda for the Germans, Agrippine for the English, and Marie-Antoinette for the wild animals.

  “And what about his one, huh, Monsieur Maillart?” the curious would ask.

  “That? Why, that one’s for me, for the day I won’t have the strength to climb to the top of the ladder anymore. Better to die like a dog than fall ill here.”

  “And what’s he called, Monsieur Maillart?”

  “I don’t quite know. Dominique on rainy days and Monique the rest of the year.”

  Apart from him, there were a total of six whites living in Conakry: Colin; his daughter and his son-in-law, Jacob; the head of the telegraph; and the two buffoons at the English trading post, who never said hello to anyone. On the one side, seven whites shaking with fear, eaten away by Pernod, and yellowed by malaria; on the other, about three hundred Negroes worn out by humidity and vermin and drunk most of the day. This was the human presence alongside the flora and the fauna on this stretch of the coast. A Noah’s ark awaiting the second coming, or the last vestiges of a world already sucked into the abyss?

  This was the state of Conakry when Olivier de Sanderval first set foot there in June 1888.

  He was so ragged and skinny that the whites ran at the sight of him and the blacks pointed at him and laughed. When he saw him walk into his office,
the disgusted telegrapher recoiled:

  “Hey now—what do you want of me, sir?”

  “To send news of myself to France. I suppose that’s what everybody who comes to you wants,” shuddered the miserable wretch.

  “Then show me your money!”

  “I just have a little amber and coral.”

  “What I need is proper currency. Fine gold louis, sir, if you know what I mean.”

  “And you can’t give me credit?”

  “Oh no, sir.”

  “For what reason?”

  “You look so strange to me!”

  “Is there another white man in this jungle?”

  “Go see the German Colin. Take a right on your way out, you’ll see the roof of his trading post in the middle of the tall trees.”

  “A German named Colin?”

  “He is of Norman stock. His father was in Napoleon’s army. After the rout in Russia, he chose to settle in Hamburg to put the humiliation behind him. There he wedded a Teuton, yes sir, and this Colin was the result. But as far as I’m concerned, Colin or no Colin, a Kraut is a dirty Kraut!”

  Moving slowly, his breathing labored and his entire frame folded over, he walked toward the tall trees, using his hands to hold up his pants, now too big for his emaciated body.

  “Where have you come from, sir?” Colin asked, cradling his rifle.

  “From Fouta Djallon.”

  “I only know one traveler who has told us of those mountains, a Monsieur de Sanderval.”

  “I am Olivier de Sanderval!”

  The man opened a drawer and pulled out an old issue of Le Figaro:

  “Olivier de Sanderval is dead, sir! See for yourself!”

  He recognized an old photograph taken at a banquet when he was still mayor of Marennes. It took him ten solid minutes to read through the page-long article, which offered a detailed description of his heroic death at the hands of a horde of Fula riders.

  “And yet I promise you I am very much alive,” he said through chattering teeth. “Here, feel my pulse if you don’t believe me.”