The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  And—though the link wasn’t made at the lunch—just as it was hard for an elder or deputy to stop being what he was, so it was hard for the president to stop being president, though he was now very old, eighty or more—no one really knew his age. An added reason for the president’s holding on was the great enterprise of Yamoussoukro. The work there was far from completed, would not be completed in the president’s lifetime. And that was why, democrat and anti-tribalist though he was, the president would have to choose as his successor someone from his own dominant Baoulé tribe. That was the only way he had of ensuring, or trying to ensure, that the work on Yamoussoukro would go on after his death.

  So, as I heard about it, Yamoussoukro grew: from being an agricultural village in the interior, provided now with roads and services; to a place with very wide, brilliantly lit avenues that led nowhere; to a monumental city meant to make an African ruler immortal. And even as I understood the pharaonic scale of the project, I feared for it. I thought of the monuments of ancient Egypt where the cartouches of one pharaoh could be defaced by his successors; where the carved and polished stones of the monument of one sacred pharaoh could be broken up and used unceremoniously, as building blocks alone, in the monument of another. And this African dream of Yamoussoukro was being created by people of another civilization: French and Israelis and others, whose skills might easily vanish from the continent.

  So the first impressions of modern African success began to be qualified. Success became an expression of the nonideological personality of the ruler, the man of an established ruling family; this rested on an African idea of authority. And at the bottom of it all was magic.

  This last idea, of magic, didn’t come to me by any secret means. I came upon it openly, in the newspapers.

  There was one daily newspaper in the Ivory Coast; at least, only one came my way. It was called Fraternité Matin. Every day on its front page, in the top left-hand corner, it carried a “thought” of the president’s. The thoughts were mainly about development and the economy; and so were the big front-page stories. There were sports pages. But they didn’t make the paper any less austere. There was no gossip, almost nothing from the police. Fraternité Matin suggested a nation at work and at school—even night school. But then, at the end of my first week, there was something like a real news story. It was spread over two inside pages of the weekend issue and was clearly about a well-known local sensation.

  Seventeen kilometres out of Abidjan, in a village on the great auto-route to Yamoussoukro, there was a schoolteacher’s house which from time to time blazed with mysterious fires. A reader had written to the paper that weekend with the suggestion that there was probably some escape of natural gas in the neighbourhood. But this letter, headed “A Scientific Solution,” was placed at the bottom of the right-hand page. The main story, the reportage, was that the mystery of the fires at Kilometre 17 had been solved.

  It had been solved by a preacher of the Celestial Christian sect. Even before they had been called in on the case—and while the teacher was spending a fortune on fetish-makers and Muslim magicians—the Celestial Christians had “discovered” through some divine communication that the Evil Spirit was at the bottom of the business. In investigations of this kind, according to the Celestial Christians, there were two levels that had to be considered, the mystical and the human. At the mystical level there was the Evil Spirit. At the human level, there was the person who had been possessed by the Evil Spirit and turned into a fire-raiser.

  The Celestial Christians, with their special gifts, had found out who this person was. And the Evil Spirit, discovered in this way, was immediately at a disadvantage. The Spirit had gone to the Celestial Christians and pleaded with them to be left in peace, to get on with its wicked work in the Ivory Coast in secret. It had offered bribes. The Celestial Christians refused. However, they engaged the Evil Spirit in dialogue. They asked the Evil Spirit why it wanted to start fires in the schoolteacher’s house. The Spirit didn’t answer directly. It only said, “in a mystical way,” that it was the owner of the house. This was apparently a frightening reply, and the Celestial Christians didn’t wait to hear any more. They at once ordered the Evil Spirit not only to leave the house but also to get out of the Ivory Coast altogether. And the Spirit meekly went.

  Now a protective cross was planted outside the schoolteacher’s front door, and peace had returned to the tormented man. The Celestial Christians, making the most of their success, regretted only that the schoolteacher had spent so much money on fetishes and Muslim marabout magic. They, the Christians, had done what they had done only with their faith in Jesus Christ and a few candles.

  So the story of Kilometre 17 had had a happy ending. It was a moral story; and like so much else in Fraternité Matin, it seemed to have an element of benign instruction and reassurance. The Evil Spirit had been defeated by a stronger force. More than the peace of mind of a village schoolteacher had been secured: the Ivory Coast itself had been cleansed.

  The report in Fraternité Matin didn’t say who the possessed person was. This might have been due to legal caution or more probably to some taboo about the Evil Spirit. The reporter only dropped hints: the possessed person was in and out of the house, was well known to the schoolteacher’s family, did many things for the schoolteacher. The Sunday magazine, Ivoire Dimanche, in a two-page photographic feature on the case, showed photographs of the teacher and his two wives. Was the possessed person one of the wives? Both women looked equally enervated, as enervated as the teacher himself, though they were thin and he was plump. The presence of sorcery and the Evil Spirit seemed to have given them all a glimpse of hell. Sorcery was no joke; and the cover story of Ivoire Dimanche was, in fact, about the war of true religion and good magic against sorcery and bad magic.

  The visitor saw the highways and skyscrapers of Abidjan, and he thought of development and African success. But Abidjan was in Africa, and in the minds of the people the world was to be made safe in another way as well. The reassuring message in the government-controlled press was that there was light at either end of the African tunnel.

  2

  I TRAVEL to discover other states of mind. And if for this intellectual adventure I go to places where people live restricted lives, it is because my curiosity is still dictated in part by my colonial Trinidad background. I go to places which, however alien, connect in some way with what I already know. When my curiosity has been satisfied, when there are no more surprises, the intellectual adventure is over and I become anxious to leave.

  It is a writer’s curiosity rather than an ethnographer’s or journalist’s. So while, when I travel, I can move only according to what I find, I also live, as it were, in a novel of my own making, moving from not knowing to knowing, with person interweaving with person and incident opening out into incident. The intellectual adventure is also a human one: I can move only according to my sympathy. I don’t force anything; there is no spokesman I have to see, no one I absolutely must interview. The kind of understanding I am looking for comes best through people I get to like. And in the Ivory Coast I moved in the main among expatriates, white and black. I saw the country through them and through their varied experience.

  One of these expatriates was Terry Shroeder, the public affairs officer of the American embassy. He was in his late forties, and a bachelor, a slender, handsome man with the kind of melancholy that attracts and resists women. He was going to retire early from the foreign service. The Ivory Coast was his last posting but one, and he was at the very end of his time there. It was Terry who had given me the phrase about “a little bit of coffee and a little bit of cocoa.” He admired the economic achievements of the Ivory Coast. But he also had a feeling for its African side.

  It was Terry who at our first meeting told me that there was in the Ivory Coast a famous and very old African sage who was the president’s spiritual counsellor. The sage was open to other consultation as well, and Terry would have liked me to see him. But the sage was u
nfortunately “hospitalized,” and remained so during my time in the Ivory Coast. The name of the sage was Amadou Hampaté Bâ. He had been in his time an ambassador, and a member of an important Unesco body; but his fame in the Ivory Coast was spiritual, and rested on his mastery of arithmology and other esoteric studies. Terry knew him well enough to visit him in hospital, and he always referred to him as Mr. Hampaté Bâ (“Hampaté not far off in sound from “Humpty”). Hampaté Bâ was a Muslim from Mali, to the north; but he had a large place in his heart for African religion. “Islam is my father, but Africa is my mother”—this, according to Terry, was one of Hampaté Bâ’s well-known sayings. Another saying was: “Whenever an old man dies in Africa, a library has burned down.”

  At our first meeting Terry also told me about someone who was doing research among the village witch-doctors or medicine men. Some of these men did possess knowledge of a sort. They could deal in an African way with African neuroses; they also knew about herbs and poisons. They were secretive about the poisons. Their knowledge of poisons made them feared and was one of the sources of their power.

  This talk of poison made me think of the Caribbean islands on the other side of the ocean. In the old days, on the slave plantations there, constantly replenished with “new Negroes” (as they were called) from places like the Ivory Coast, poison had been one of the special terrors of slaves and slave-owners. Some poisoner was always about; in the slave underground or underworld, the hidden Africa of the plantations, someone could usually be found with a stock of poison; and a vengeful slave could do terrible things. In Trinidad in 1794 a hundred Negroes were poisoned on the Coblenz estate in Port of Spain, and the estate had to be abandoned. In 1801, when the estate was bought by the emigré Baron de Montalembert, a poisoner went to work again, and in the first month of his proprietorship the baron lost 120 of the 140 “seasoned” Negroes he had put in.

  As much as poison, the plantation owners in the Caribbean feared African magic. Slavery depended on obedience, on the acceptance by the slave of the logic of his position. A persuasive magician, awakening African instincts, could give his fellows a sense of the unreality of the workaday world, and could incite normally docile and even loyal slaves to rebellion. Magicians, once they were identified, were treated with great severity. In Trinidad and Martinique they could be burned alive.

  Magic and poison—in the old documents of the islands, they had seemed like the weapons of despair; and they probably had been. Here in the Ivory Coast they were part of a world that was still whole. The African culture that was officially promoted, and could at times seem to be only a source of tourist motifs, was an expression of African religion. Even in the masks in the souvenir shops, even in the dances beside the swimming pool of the Forum Golf Hotel, there was a feeling of awe, a radiation of accepted magical practices. Men here knew another reality; they lived easily in a world of spirit and spirits.

  And it was Terry Shroeder who introduced me to Arlette. Arlette was a black woman from Martinique. Her French, beautifully enunciated, revived all my schoolboy love of the language. She was in her late thirties or early forties, a big woman, full of friendship, generous with her time and knowledge; she was to make me understand many things about the country. She had married an Ivorian, whom she had met in Paris, and she had lived for twenty years in the Ivory Coast. She was divorced now; her former husband had gone to Gabon, the newest French African land of oil and money. Arlette worked in an arts department of the university in Abidjan. She lived by herself; she had many friends in the foreign community; I felt she feared solitude. She was an expatriate—expatriates in the Ivory Coast were black as well as white.

  Martinique, France, French-speaking Africa: the chain was obvious, and at one time—when I was at school in cramped Trinidad, learning French from black men who had a high idea of a welcoming, liberating French culture—Arlette’s life journey would have seemed to me romantic. But when I had thought of going to the Ivory Coast, I hadn’t thought of French West Indians making the roundabout journey back. So, in addition to the connections I could make for myself, other connections were offered to me. And the Ivory Coast became different from the country I had imagined.

  We met Arlette at a piano recital sponsored by the Goethe Institute, the cultural wing of the West German embassy. Terry was going partly to give support to a fellow diplomat: these cultural evenings arranged by foreign embassies could be poorly attended. The Ivorians—rich, successful, served by foreign labour—were blasé about foreigners in general; it wasn’t easy to entice them, Terry said. At his own cultural evenings Terry offered dinner beforehand, and hoped that people would stay on. It didn’t always work. Foreign culture was too foreign. The biggest American event in the Ivory Coast had been the recent visit of the U.S.S. Portland, when the Americans, using marvellous landing craft, had staged a demonstration assault on an island off the coast.

  Terry said, with melancholy pride, “That impressed the Ivorian military.”

  Arlette lived in a government flat, in a compound full of blocks of government flats. We couldn’t find her when we went to pick her up. We went on to the Goethe Institute. She was there, waiting in the garden, a big, dark-brown woman in a shiny white dress, looking a little forlorn in the lamplight and tree shadows. She was chewing; she was always nervously chewing, or sucking on a sweet, or eating something. They had cut off the water to her flat, she said. She had objected to the bill, refused to pay; and they had cut the water off. Now she was using the bathrooms of various friends. (She fought that water battle for some days; but then she paid the bill.)

  The audience for the piano recital was white. The pianist that the Goethe Institute was offering to French-speaking Africa was an Alsatian with a French name. He had done the French African circuit before for the Institute, and had a local reputation. He was a tall, thin, half-smiling man in chunky black shoes, and with strong, big, white hands. When applause came, he bowed, picked his way down two shaky, detachable steps from the platform, walked briskly to the end of the hall as though he was leaving us forever, but then he waited in the shadows, walked back to the platform, up the shaky steps, and bowed again. At the end he walked back twice and played two encores.

  Arlette said in French, “I had a bet with Terry that there would be only ten black faces here. I was wrong. There are only three.” Africans didn’t like cultural music, Arlette said. They liked only African nightclub music. Even in Paris that was what African students looked for. But still, Arlette said, shaking her head to the rhythm of her French speech, and acknowledging her own restlessness during the recital, the pianist had chosen some difficult pieces, des morceaux difficiles.

  The pianist and the German cultural counsellor stood at the door to say goodbye. The pianist was neat and silent, black-suited. The counsellor was artistically casual, with big round glasses and a full round head of long red hair. He was pleased with the success of his evening. It was expensive, he said to Terry, putting on music of that quality. The Goethe Institute in Abidjan could do this kind of thing only once a year. The pianist should have been going on to Accra in Ghana, but—and the counsellor gave a diplomatic shrug, as though we all knew about events in Ghana, and it wasn’t for him to comment.

  We went afterwards, Arlette and I, to Terry’s house. It was a bachelor’s house. The sitting room was large and formal; many of Terry’s cultural evenings took place there. There were mementoes of the East, where Terry had served, and there were African masks and objects. Terry offered wine, and went to the kitchen to make scrambled eggs.

  Arlette told me about the French. She loved the culture of France, she said. But she detested the manners, les moeurs. She meant that the French were socially rigid and petty, extraordinarily fussy about having the correct glasses, the correct cutlery, the right wines. For the petits français—and especially in a place like Abidjan—these things were like moral issues. And there was the French obsession with food. It was part of the French myth, but Arlette didn’t admire it. How c
ould you admire people who, when you got back from a foreign country, could only think of asking: “Mange-t-on bien là?”(“Is the food good there?”)

  Arlette said that in the Ivory Coast the French West Indians, les antillais, behaved like French people. They looked down on the Africans and—because they thought of themselves as civilized and French—they expected the Africans to look up to them. “Mais ils sont déçus.” The West Indians made an error; Africans looked up to nobody; and life was as a result full of stress for some West Indians in the Ivory Coast.

  So, in spite of what she had said about Africans and night-club music, Arlette separated herself both from French people and from a certain kind of French West Indian. And it was also clear that, in spite of her failed African marriage and her present solitude, there was in her some deep feeling for the Africa that followed its own ways.

  At our supper of eggs and brown bread and wine, the talk turned to Amadou Hampaté Bâ, the sage who was the president’s spiritual counsellor.

  Arlette said, with glittering eyes, “He’s a great man. One of the great men of Africa.”

  Terry had a spare copy of Hampaté Bâ’s booklet, Jésus Vu par un Musulman, “Christ Seen by a Muslim.” The book had been presented nineteen months before by the sage to Flora Lewis of the New York Times and inscribed to her in a shaky hand.

  It was in this copy that, later that night, I read of the arithmological calculations which, applied to invocations and other religious formulae, proved the essential oneness of Islam and Christianity.

  Hampaté Bâ described himself as “a man of dialogue,” and the last chapter of his little book was about the president of the Ivory Coast. He said that he and the president often had long spiritual discussions when the president’s state duties permitted. He had asked the president one day for some story, some legend acquired perhaps from an African elder, that might serve as a parable of brotherly love. And the president had told Hampaté Bâ this story.