The Writer and the World: Essays

by V. S. Naipaul

  “There was a captive at the royal court of Yamoussoukro who looked after the education of the children. He liked me a great deal, and he gave me a lot of advice, advice necessary to someone like myself, who was being trained to be a chief. But I should say, before going any further, that among the Baoulé people ‘captivity’ was more a word than a fact. The fact that a man was a slave didn’t take away from him his value as a human being.”

  It was from this slave or captive that the president, as a boy, got a story he never forgot. This was the story. Once upon a time there was a peasant. One year he had a good harvest and he took his crop to market. He sold well, and afterwards he wandered about the market. On a merchant’s stall there was a beautiful knife. The peasant fell in love with it and bought it. The peasant cherished his knife. He made a sheath for it, and encrusted the sheath with pearls and shells. One day, when he was pruning a tree, he cut his finger with the knife. In his pain he threw the knife to the ground and cursed it. But then he picked the knife up, wiped off the blood, and put the knife back in the sheath that hung at his side. That was all the story. Why didn’t the peasant throw away the ungrateful and wicked knife? It was because of love. The peasant loved his knife. That was the moral.

  This was the story the captive at the royal court of Yamoussoukro told the boy who was to be chief. This was the story the president passed on to Hampaté Bâ, the sage, and Hampaté Bâ printed in his book.

  Slavery, “captivity”—so it was an African institution. And, like poison, like sorcery, it continued. But what was the point of the abrupt little story? How could love for a knife translate into brotherly love? The story was in fact a parable—from an old president, an old chief—about power and reconciliation. Power was the prerogative of the chief; but the good chief, who followed the old ways, also sought reconciliation. Wicked men had been cast aside; but they had once been good and useful and loved; the chief would remember that, and he would forgive.

  The benevolent ruler, the ruler seeking the sympathy of the ruled: presented in this way, as an African ideal, the chief became attractive, affecting. I began to enter a little into the African world Arlette saw.

  3

  TERRY’S assistant was going to arrange my trip to Yamoussoukro. Arlette was going to put me in touch with an Ivorian at the Institute of Ethno-sociology at the university who had inaugurated a controversial course in “Drummologie,” the science of talking drums. And I had been asking around for a guide to Kilometre 17, where the Evil Spirit had recently been at work, causing a schoolteacher’s house to blaze mysteriously from time to time.

  These projects began to mature and come together. My days became full and varied. After the random impressions and semi-official meetings and courtesies of the first days, I began to discover themes and people. I began to live my little novel.

  Philip—the English expatriate who, with his Guyanese wife, had taken me on the expatriate Sunday excursion to the beach at Grand-Bassam—left a note at my hotel one day. He had found a young Ivorian who would be willing to take me to Kilometre 17 and generally introduce me to African magic. The young man had done some guiding of this sort before, helping a colleague of Philip’s with Muslim marabout magicians. He was now unemployed—jobs were getting hard to find in the Ivory Coast, even for an Ivorian.

  The next morning we all three—Philip leaving his office to act as go-between—met in a grubby little café in the centre of Abidjan.

  The young man was well-made, strong, slender and firm at the waist. He had a finely modelled African face, every feature definite, and his skin was very black, a uniform colour, without blotch or tone. He was carefully dressed; his shirt was ironed and clean. I saw him only in this physical way. I couldn’t tell whether in his intense eyes there was intelligence, vapidity, a wish to please, or a latent viciousness. His name was Djédjé. He was of the Bété tribe, the second tribe in the Ivory Coast after the Baoulé, to which the president belonged.

  Much of our time was spent talking about money, assessing all the expenses that might come up during a visit to the house at Kilometre 17. There would be the taxi—Djédjé was going to arrange that: he knew somebody who would be cheaper than a hotel taxi. There would have to be something for the village chief; something for tips; and there would be Djédjé’s fee—he was talking of going to the village beforehand to prepare people.

  Djédjé’s manner, as he leaned over the coffee cups on the plastic-topped table, was conspiratorial. But it was hard to get him to give a precise figure for anything, even his own fee. An absentness, a troubled lethargy, seemed to come over him when an item was being costed. Philip pressed him gently, never allowing a silence to last too long. It was necessary to fix a limit now, Philip said to me in English. Otherwise, when the time came to pay, Djédjé might grow “wild” and ask for any amount. It seemed to be settled at the end that the overall price would be between twenty and thirty thousand local francs, thirty-five and fifty pounds. Djédjé was going to telephone me the next day with the final figure, after he had talked with the chief and the taxi-driver.

  Djédjé said he was a believer. He meant he believed in the spirits and in the power of magicians; and he said he had agreed to be my guide because he wanted me to be a believer too.

  I asked whether there would be any trouble because I was a foreigner. He said no; then he said yes. I was a Hindu, wasn’t I? Hindus had a great reputation as magicians, and a féticheur might see me as a rival and try to hide things from me. It would be easier for a European, easier for someone like Philip, though Philip and I were the same colour.

  This last was an extraordinary thing to say; it was far from being true. But it was true for Djédjé. He still had the tribal eye: people who were not Africans were simply people of another colour.

  I asked him to write out his full name for me, and he wrote his family name first, his French Christian name last. When I remarked on the French name, he frowned and made a small, brushing-away gesture with his writing hand. It wasn’t important, he said; it was a name he used only in documents.

  He telephoned in a message to the hotel desk the next day. “Le rendezvous du km 17 est OK.” And when he came to the hotel he told me that the taxi-driver had fixed the fare at eighteen thousand francs. I also understood him to say—but his language here was vague, difficult—that a further two thousand would be needed as tips. The taxi-driver was the brother of the village chief, he said. And the chief would need a bottle of whisky: alcohol had “a special value” for Africans.

  He seemed to have kept the price within the limit we had agreed, and I took him to the bar to seal our bargain.

  In the dark, “intimate” hotel bar—rosewood, metal-framed furniture, and buttoned black PVC upholstery—he was as much at ease, or as indifferent to his surroundings, as he had been in the café in the town. Sipping his beer, with the leisure and pauses with which he had drunk coffee in the café, he became conspiratorial again, leaning forward, talking softly, holding me with his intense eyes.

  The development of the country had taken a wrong turn, he said. It had begun from the top. What did he mean by that? Not answering my question, but going on to his own concerns, he said that the university was “saturated”; and there was only one university; and there were stringent rules for entry. And now there was a lot of unemployment. People came to Abidjan and picked up Western ways and for them that was a misfortune. This was another idea. But why was it a misfortune? He lowered his voice, bent closer to me, and said—as though he expected me to understand the full import of what he was saying—that he himself had forgotten how to dance, to do the dances of his tribe, his ethnie. In his village he had danced, but in Abidjan he couldn’t do the dances.

  I asked about his family. He said he had nine sisters and eight brothers. His father was a planteur, one of the peasant farmers who had created the wealth of the Ivory Coast, and he had two or three wives. All the children were now in Abidjan. Djédjé himself lived in the house of an uncle, his fathe
r’s brother. The uncle, a mechanic, had two wives and thirteen children.

  I would have liked to hear more of Djédjé’s family life, but he wanted to talk about magic. There were Ivorians in Abidjan, he said, who dressed in the modern way and spoke correct French with a French accent. They had lost touch with their ethnies, and they said they no longer believed in the African gods. But these people didn’t want to go back to the villages because they were afraid of the sorcerers. In their hearts these French Africans believed.

  I didn’t feel I was understanding all that Djédjé said, and it wasn’t a matter of language alone. Perhaps, forgetting his innocence, and misled by his opening statement that the country had taken a wrong turn, I had been looking in his conversation for something that wasn’t there: an attitude, a thought-out position. Perhaps—uneducated, unemployed, a villager in Abidjan—he was genuinely confused by the development of the country “from the top.” Equally, he might only have been trying to get me more interested in the magic to which he had been appointed my guide.

  4

  ONE OF THE NAMES I had been given before coming out to the Ivory Coast was that of Georges Niangoran-Bouah. The note on him said: “Anthropologist. Contactable at the Institut d’Ethnosociologie at the university. He’s around fifty-five, world specialist on ‘Drummologie,’ form of communication of tribal drums. Knows African art well, has a fantastic collection of Ashanti weights.”

  He sounded quite a figure. And, as often happens when, as a traveller, I am given the names of important local people, I was shy of getting in touch. But I mentioned his name to various people, and I found out fairly soon that Mr. Niangoran-Bouah was academically controversial, that if he was a world expert on Drummologie it was because he had started the subject and had in fact invented the word. Drummologie was apparently as controversial a university course as the one on African philosophy. Some people doubted whether either Drummologie or African philosophy existed.

  Arlette, who worked at the university, knew both Niangoran-Bouah and his secretary. The secretary was a fellow antillaise, a French West Indian. This lady telephoned me one morning. She had a pecking, fluting voice, and her French—unlike Arlette’s—was not easy for me to follow, especially on the telephone. Her name was Andrée, and I understood her to say that her patron, Mr. Niangoran-Bouah, was still lecturing in the United States, but that I should come to the university to get Mr. Niangoran-Bouah’s Drummologie book, fresh copies of which had arrived at the office that morning.

  The campus was big. Some workmen sitting on the ground below a tree—the crab-grassed ground scuffed down to the roots of the young tree—pointed out the unexpectedly modest, and rather weathered, brick building which was the Institute of Ethnosociology. And it was quite exciting to see, inside, in a corridor hung with name-boards, the little board with the name BOUAH; to enter the little office, and to see the big posters for the course on Drummologie, and another poster with photographs of Ashanti gold-weights.

  Andrée, the West Indian secretary, Arlette’s friend, was a brown woman of more than forty. She was welcoming, but she wasn’t like Arlette. She didn’t have the vivacity, the size or the softness. Andrée was thinnish, with glasses over strained, big eyes. Her frizzy hair was pulled back tight and done in a bun. She wore a bright blue cardigan and a heavy plaid skirt: the office was air-conditioned. Her style of dress—respectable French, respectable West Indian—proclaimed her as not African. So did the knitting in her bag. She might have knitted the blue cardigan herself. She said—and she clearly had nothing to do in the office that morning—that she liked to keep her hands busy.

  Her French was harder for me now than it had been on the telephone. Face to face, she talked faster, in a higher voice, making little rills of sound. I missed half of what she said, and my own poor French, with nothing in the other person’s speech to lean on, became worse.

  Her desk, with the knitting, was next to the window. She pointed to the big desk of the absent patron, next to the corridor wall, and the broad plastic-backed swivel chair behind the desk, and she made me feel the great vacancy in the little room.

  But she had the patron’s books. She undid a brown paper parcel and gave me a copy of a large-format paperback, Introduction à la Drummologie. On the cover there was a photograph of Mr. Niangoran-Bouah seated at an open-air drumming and singing ceremony of some sort (with microphones). He was a big man, chieftain-like, draped in African cotton, and he was listening with half-closed eyes to the drums. He acquired a reality for me. He became more than his name and his oddly named subject; his desk became more personal. The little bronze pieces on his desk were indeed things of beauty, as were the gold-weights in the poster on the wall.

  A recurring design in those weights—an ideogram or a unit of measure—was the swastika, or something close to it. I asked Andrée whether the weights might have had an Indian origin. I didn’t make myself clear. She said only that the weights were very, very old. And that was what the poster said: these objects were old, African, proof of African civilization. To offer proof of African civilization: that, I began to feel, was the cause of the man whose secretary Andrée was.

  Andrée, her morning’s work done, put her knitting in her bag and locked up the office. She said she would walk with me to where I could get a taxi. As we walked among the students she said, à propos of nothing, that I should take a Nivaquine tablet every day. It was the best protection against malaria. This was something I had thought about doing but not done. She said she would come with me in the taxi to a pharmacy she knew. We went to the pharmacy at the edge of the campus; and it was to Andrée rather than to me that the European or Lebanese pharmacist gave instructions about the Nivaquine.

  It was now nearly noon, lunch time. I had taken Andrée far from her office. But she didn’t mind. She wanted the company; and I was Arlette’s friend. She said she knew a restaurant in the centre.

  As we passed the blocks of flats and came out into the main corniche road, Andrée pointed vaguely and said, “My mother lives there. She reads cards.”

  I pretended not to hear.

  “My mother’s a widow,” Andrée said. “She reads cards. You should understand. You are a Hindu.”

  “Hindus read horoscopes.”

  She said, and her speech, clear and precise for the first time, sounded like something from a language lesson: “Ma … mère … lit … les … cartes.” (“My mother reads cards.”)

  I said, allowing the taxi to take us further away from where Andrée’s mother read cards, “It’s a good gift. A good profession.”

  Andrée said sharply, “My mother’s a trained nurse.”

  I wondered how Andrée and her mother, both from the island of Guadeloupe in the far-off West Indies, had found themselves in the Ivory Coast. I said, “Do you live with your mother?” Her voice went high and fluting. She said no. That was how Africans lived, all together. French people, and she meant people like herself, lived independently. I asked how she had come to the Ivory Coast. She said she had met an Ivorian in Paris, and they had married. The marriage had broken up when they came to live in the Ivory Coast.

  The restaurant she directed the taxi to in the centre of the town was a big, barn-like building. The doors were open and there were painted menu-boards outside. “It’s clean,” Andrée said, and when we went in—there was as yet no crowd—she said again, “Isn’t it clean?” And it was all right, and there was even a Lebanese in a tie eating fast at one of the tables, head down, jacket on the back of his chair, like a man with a business appointment to keep. But the smell of braised meat and other foods was so high, the air so smoked and oily, even with the doors open, I didn’t want to stay. Andrée was disappointed.

  We took a taxi to a hotel. It was the only place I knew. It was in a more humid part of town, in a commercial street lined with round-leaved tropical almond trees. There were Lebanese cloth shops, shoe-shine boys, and ragged Africans, most likely foreigners, sitting or lounging on the broken pavement in a sme
ll of sweat. One African, white-capped and in a Muslim gown, was doing his midday prayer, kneeling and bending forward in a private stupor.

  The hotel, one of a chain, was of the second rank, a considered blend of flash and shoddiness. But it excited Andrée. She said, “Expensive,” and her manner improved to match her idea of the place. She gave the taxi-driver a tip on her own account, a fifty-franc piece. And as soon as we were seated in the dining room—next to the glass wall, with a view of the highway below, the black creek, the ships at the far side—she became exacting and French with the uniformed Ivorian waiter, asking precise questions about the menu, taking her time.

  The waiter didn’t like it. He was used to dealing with European couples, businessmen (there were a few Japanese), solitaries, people grateful for small mercies in unlikely places. Andrée ignored the waiter’s exaggerated frowns. She chose; she gave her order. I asked for an omelette. Andrée was abashed. She said what she had chosen was too expensive, and she insisted—the waiter standing by—on changing. She settled for the jambon with frites.

  She was now in a jumpy state, and as soon as the waiter went away she began to talk very fast. She said that life was hard for her. She was trapped in the Ivory Coast, and had no means of returning home—and she meant France, Guadeloupe in the West Indies, left behind many years before, now too far away in every sense. She earned ninety thousand francs a month at the university, £150; and she had been lucky, six years before, to get the job. Before that, she had taught at an infants’ school. “Not nice,” she said.

  Her marriage to the Ivorian she had met in Paris ended four years after she had come to the Ivory Coast. Her husband’s family had broken the marriage up, she said. Françaises, Frenchwomen like herself, who married Ivorians should stay in France, she said. In the Ivory Coast the Ivorian families broke the marriages up.