I said to the driver, “Go back to Abidjan. Go back to the hotel.”
He had enjoyed the drama of taking his car between the houses. Now, stylishly, making a lot of dust, he turned in somebody’s yard, and we twisted back through the village to the waste ground and the asphalt road. We bumped down into the road.
Just at that moment Djédjé shouted, “Stop!”
The driver stamped on the brake. Djédjé bent forward once, twice. He said, “I have a bad conscience about this.” He began to rock backward and forward in his seat. He said again, “I have a bad conscience about this.”
The driver looked from Djédjé to me. The village and the féticheur, or Abidjan and the hotel?
I said, “The hotel.”
We dropped our passenger—glad to get out of the car now—and went on to the highway. We drove for a mile or so: the bush, the black highway, the hot afternoon glow.
Djédjé said with passion, “Everything the féticheur does will be at my expense. At my expense.”
Nothing was said to the driver. But he pulled in at the side of the highway.
Djédjé said, “You are making me feel bad. You are making me feel bad.” His eyes went red; sweat broke out on his forehead. He was rocking himself again. I thought he was going to have a fit.
He said, “You see how I am sweating. You believe I was deceiving you. You make me feel bad. Everything I did, I did for you. I asked you for the money only to protect you. If the féticheur had seen a European pull out all those notes he would have asked for a lot of money. That was why I asked you for the ten thousand francs in thousand-franc notes.”
The taxi-driver, always cool, said to Djédjé, “None of this alters my fare, you understand. He will have to settle my bill.”
I said, “The hotel.”
We drove back in silence, until Djédjé said, “Tomorrow. Come to town tomorrow. I will take you to a féticheur in town. He wouldn’t do anything for you especially. He will be giving a display. You will see it free.”
And that was what he said again when he followed me into the hotel lobby.
I felt foolish, drained, sad. I felt Africa as a great melancholy—that expensive highway, with its straight lines and curves; that village, with its antique, forest squalor and its, féticheur; Djédjé’s belief, his exaggerated emotions, his changes of personality.
Without civilization, Djédjé had said the day before, everybody would be a sorcerer.
8
TO BE BLACK was not to be African or to find community with Africans. Many West Indian women who had married Africans had discovered that. So Janet told me. West Indian women, whatever their background, were house-proud; they found Africans dirty. And then there was the problem with the African families. Janet had heard versions of the story Arlette had told: the African family choosing an African wife for the man and sending this wife to the house, with the threat of a curse if she was rejected.
It was easier for a white woman to marry an African, Janet thought. The white woman would know she was marrying exotically; that would be part of the attraction. The West Indian woman, with her own racial ideas, would be looking in Africa for a double security.
Janet herself was black. She had grown up in England, where her Guyanese family had settled. She was blessed with great beauty (tall, slender, long-necked), and she had the security of her beauty. She had no anxieties about “belonging.” Happily removed from the political nastiness of independent Guyana, she spoke of herself as someone “from England.” She had come out to the Ivory Coast with her English husband Philip. Philip had spent most of his working life in Africa, and it was one of his sayings that in their mixed marriage Janet was the English partner; he was the African.
At dinner in a rough but well-known beach restaurant (Philip and Janet were great restaurant-goers), and later over coffee in their flat in the centre of Abidjan (the black lacquer furniture in the big sitting room from London, from Habitat), Philip told me how he had come out to Africa.
Just after he had left school, in Scotland, he “discovered” the motorcar. Motorcars became his obsession; he wanted to be a racing driver. Soon enough it came to him that he wasn’t making any money from driving. So he enrolled as a trainee teacher in a programme run by a British government department concerned with overseas development. The trainees were sent out to East Africa, and East Africa was attractive to Philip, not only because of the sun and the easy life, but also because it was the territory of the great motor rally, the East African Safari.
There were forty trainees in Philip’s year. They could be divided into four groups. There were those, about ten or twelve, who wanted to go out to Africa to convert the Africans to Christianity. There were a few, from very rich families, who were moved by the idea of charity. There were those who went to Africa to get away from personal distress, emotional entanglements. The fourth, and largest, group went out for the sun and the easy life. Philip belonged to this group. And it was people from this group who lasted; most of the others cracked within the first year and gave up Africa.
But the Uganda that Philip went out to soon became another place. Idi Amin, the former army sergeant, took over. Philip was having lunch one day in a little English-run restaurant in Kampala when Amin came in, just like that, without ceremony. This caused a stir; and Amin added to the excitement by paying the lunch bills of everybody who was then in the restaurant. Philip said, “So I can say Amin bought me lunch.” On another occasion Amin appeared, again without warning, at a rugby match in which a representative Uganda team was playing. He stood in the back of his Land-Rover and watched, shouting, “Come on, Uganda!” Later he bought beer for all the players. This was how he was in the early days, the army man, grand of gesture, immensely popular with the expatriates, and quite different from the tribal politicians he had displaced. Then he had become more tribal than any, and he had drenched Uganda in blood.
I had spent some months in Uganda in 1966, at the time of an earlier coup. Philip, answering an inquiry of mine, said, “Many of the young people you knew would have been killed.”
This was the Africa Philip had worked in. Events had carried him along. He had moved from contract to contract, country to country. He spoke calmly about Uganda; he had trained himself to that calm. He was still trying to arrive at a larger attitude. And now, I felt, he was touched by Janet’s own detachment from Africa.
African countries, whatever their political horrors, genuinely valued education, Philip said. That gave meaning to whatever he had done. In England, he said, education had ceased to be valued. Once, when he was in London between contracts, he had taught at a comprehensive school. He had been shocked by the illiteracy and indifference of the students; one boy, dazzled by his contract with a football club, left the school absolutely without any training. Still, Philip liked England. It remained a good place, if not to work in, then to work from. He and Janet were negotiating to buy a house in London: he had photographs to show.
He had become an expatriate, a man out of his country, a man moving between two continents: one place always made bearable by the prospect of departure for the other.
About Djédjé—to whom he had introduced me—Philip wasn’t surprised. He had from the beginning feared that Djédjé would grow “wild.” And it was Philip’s job at that moment—in the inter-state African organization for which he worked—to deal with high African officials who were going “wild,” but on an astronomical scale, and were coming hotfoot to Abidjan to ask for millions. There was a way of dealing with this wildness without causing offence, Philip said. You asked questions, and more questions; you became technical. The official finally couldn’t answer, and calmed down.
The flat where we were was high up in a high block. Tropical Ivory Coast rain had found a gap between the concrete and the metal frame of the sitting-room window and discoloured the wall. That nagged Janet. She said, “There is no maintenance.” And I thought I saw in the discoloured wall the origin of something Philip had said w
hen he had first driven me round the splendours of Abidjan. He had said, “Africa seeps through.” I didn’t know him then. I had seen him as a man with an African cause, and I had thought the comment was one of approval: Africa humanizing and softening the brutalism of industrial civilization. But he meant only what Janet said: there was no maintenance.
There was another side to that. In Africa, Philip said, distress came to those who cared more about Africa than Africans did, or cared differently. In the Ivory Coast, was there really virtue in maintaining what had been given? Was there a finality about the model?
He had come to Africa for the sun and the good life. Now Africa had become the starting point for speculation. He had become more thoughtful than he might have done if he had stayed in England; he had become more knowledgeable and more tolerant. And simply by being in Africa, he—like other expatriates I met—now took a special conscientiousness to his job. He had become a good man.
Yet men, especially in Africa, had to know why they did things. And—as I had felt after my talk with Busby—in Africa this issue could still only be left in the air.
9
IN THE MORNING I was telephoned from the hotel lobby by a man called Ebony. He said he had heard from Busby that a writer was in Abidjan, and he had come to meet this writer. He, Ebony, was himself a poet.
I went down to see him. He was a cheerful young man of regal appearance, with the face of a Benin bronze, and he was regally attired, with a brightly patterned skull-cap and a rich African tunic. He said the skull-cap and tunic were from Volta. His family employed labourers from Volta and he had always, even as a child, liked their clothes.
He had been a journalist, he said, but he had given it up, because in the Ivory Coast journalism was like smoking: it could damage your health. He liked the joke; he made it twice. But he was vague about the journalism he had done. He said he was now a government servant, in the department of the environment. He had written a paper on things that might be done environmentally in the Ivory Coast. But after twelve months he had heard nothing about his paper. So now he just went to the office and from time to time he wrote poetry.
He said, “I have a theory about African administrations. But it is difficult and will take too long to tell you.”
He had come to see me—and the hotel was a good way out of the town—because he was sociable; because he wanted to practise his English; and because, as a poet and intellectual, he wanted to try out his ideas.
I offered coffee. He offered me a cola nut, the African token of friendship. I nibbled at my grubby, purple-skinned nut: bitter. He chewed his zestfully, giving little dry spits of chewed husk to his left and right, and then at the end of his chew taking out the remainder of the husk with his fingers and placing it on the ash-tray.
He asked why I had come to the Ivory Coast. I said because it was successful and French.
He said, “Charlemagne wasn’t my ancestor.”
I felt it had been said before, and not only by Ebony. He ran on to another idea. “The French run countries like pigsties. They believe that the sole purpose of men is to eat, to go to the toilet and to sleep.” So the French colonialists created bourgeois people. Bourgeois? “The bourgeois want peace, order. The bourgeois can fit into any political system, once they have peace. On the other hand, the British colonialists created entrepreneurs.” Entrepreneurs? “Entrepreneurs want to change things.” Entrepreneurs were revolutionaries.
Antithesis, balance: the beauty rather than the validity of a thought: I thought I could detect his French training. I began to examine his ideas of the bourgeois and the entrepreneur, but he didn’t encourage me. He said, playfully, it was only an idea.
Starting on another cola nut—he had a handful in his tunic pocket—he said, “Africans live at peace with nature. Europeans want to conquer or dominate nature.”
That was familiar to me. I had heard similar words from young Muslim fundamentalists in Malaysia: ecological, Western romance bouncing back like a corroborating radio signal from remote, inactive worlds. But that again was an idea Ebony didn’t want to stay with.
Ebony said, “I saw white men for the first time when I was fourteen or fifteen, when I went to school. That was the first time I discovered the idea of racial superiority. African children are trained not to look elders in the eye. It is disrespectful. At school the French teachers took this to be a sign of African hypocrisy.”
What was the point of this story?
Ebony said, “So I thought my French teachers inferior.”
I felt this racial story, with its triumphant twist, had previously had a sympathetic foreign listener. And it turned out that there was a Scandinavian woman journalist who had made a great hit with Ebony. She was now in Spain and Ebony earnestly asked me—two or three times—to look her up and pass on his regards.
Ebony said, “When my father sent me to the school, do you know what he said? He said, ‘Remember. I am not sending you to the school to be a white man or a Frenchman. I am sending you to enter the new world, that’s all.’”
I felt that in his own eyes Ebony had done that. He had made the crossing more easily than Djédjé. Ebony said he had no money, no car. The salary he got from the government was less than the rent he paid. He had come to the hotel on his bicycle. But I thought he was relaxed, a whole man. He knew where he was, how he had got there, and he liked the novelty of what he saw. There was no true anxiety behind his scattered ideas. At any rate he was less anxious than a romantic or concerned outsider might have wished him to be. Ideas about Africa, words, poetry, meeting foreigners—all this was part of his relishing of life, part of his French-inspired role as intellectual, part of the new world he had happily entered.
He went away on his bicycle, and I took a taxi later to a beach restaurant at the end of the city, beyond the industrial and port area. The lunch there, and the French style of the place, was usually worth the fare and the journey in the mid-day heat through the traffic and the crowds. But today it wasn’t so.
It was more than a matter of an off-day. The waiters, impeccable the day before, were casual, vacant. There were long delays, mistakes; some of the portions were absurdly small; the bill, when it came, was wrong. Someone was missing, perhaps the French or European manager. And with him more than good service had gone: the whole restaurant-idea had vanished. An elaborate organization had collapsed. The waiters—Ivorian: these jobs were lucrative—seemed to have forgotten, from one day to the next, why they were doing what they did. And their faces seemed to have altered as well. They were not waiters now, in spite of their flowered tunics. Their faces and manners radiated various degrees of tribal authority. I saw them as men of weight in the village: witchdoctors, herbalists, men who perhaps put on masks and did the sacred dances. The true life was there, in the mysteries of the village. The restaurant, with its false, arbitrary ritual, was the charade: I half began to see it so.
Ebony had been told by his father: “I am not sending you to the school to become a white man. I am sending you to enter the new world.”
The new world existed in the minds of other men. Remove those men; and their ideas—which after all had no finality—would disappear. Skills could be taught. What was fragile—to men whose complete, real life lay in another realm of the spirit—was faith in the new world.
It was in this unsettled mood that at last, on the public holiday that marked the independence of the Ivory Coast, I went with Gil Sherman to the president’s ancestral village of Yamoussoukro.
10
THE AUTO-ROUTE went through a soft green land, and then through forests where grew the irreplaceable hardwoods that had given the economy a start. (Mighty trunks, just two or three or four at a time, chained on to heavy lorries on the road: mighty log piles on the timber docks—with a bustling dockers’ settlement—in an oily black creek in Abidjan: the logs then chained again, and swung one or two at a time into the holds or on to the stripped decks of vessels with foreign, far-off names.) The country was
organized; it was a country at work; and the money had spread down. Money had come to the people of bush and forest, and their villages were now built in concrete. In one small town where we stopped for a while there was even a parody of a modern hotel.
After 150 miles—regularly marked off in kilometres—we came to Yamoussoukro. The road rose. At the top, quite suddenly, it was like an airport runway in a cleared wilderness. Lamp standards lined the broad avenue on either side. In the distance was the twelve-tiered tower of the Hotel President, lifting above itself, to one side, two octagonal slabs of concrete (with the tower restaurant between the slabs), like a giant sandwich with the corners cut away. Towards that we drove: landscaped grounds, gardens, a white marble entrance, a lobby in red and chocolate marble, mirrors set in the chamfered angles of the marble pillars. The upholstered chairs were in virulent blue and green, not restful.
The room I was given was opulent. The bathroom fittings staggered. It was very cold: the air-conditioning was fierce. I turned the system off, but the room never lost its chill while I was there. The great window, of very thick glass, was sealed. It gave a view of the enormous swimming pool, around which, on a wide paved area, lounge chairs were set in a large circle.
Beyond that, and beyond the buildings of the older Hotel President (Yamoussoukro had never ceased to grow), was parkland: parkland created out of the African bush. It was the famous golf course, landscaped, with planting: a foreign eye had drawn out the picturesque possibilities of what to an African would have been only bush. The mist in the distance looked—to me—like the heat mist on the banks of the Congo river. But Yamoussoukro was cooler than the coast, and this was the mist of the harmattan, the cool, sand-charged wind that blew all the way down from the Sahara at this season.
The Writer and the World: Essays Page 35