The Writer and the World (45 page)

“Yes, yes,” Djédjé said, not believing a word. “Some Europeans, some Africans too, can pay up to one hundred thousand francs for a fetish.”

The taxi-driver said, “Listen. About my fare—”

I said, “That’s settled.”

And Djédjé with an open palm made a silencing gesture at the driver.

Bingerville appeared, a scatter of ochre-coloured concrete buildings on low hills: like Grand-Bassam, another early French settlement in the Ivory Coast: degraded colonial architecture, concrete and corrugated iron, at the limit of empire.

Djédjé had said he had made arrangements with the
féticheur.
It turned out now that he didn’t know where the
féticheur
lived.

We turned off into a dirt road. It soon became a track. We asked directions of a plump young man who was wearing an orange-coloured tee shirt printed
Bingerville.
He was all good nature. He was perfectly ready to direct strangers to the local
féticheur.

We got back on to the highway. And Djédjé, to cover up his mistake, told of a particularly powerful fetish that had been prepared by the
féticheur
for a deputy of the national assembly at the last elections. The fetish converted votes given for the deputy’s opponent into votes for the deputy. The deputy won by a big margin, and the deputy’s opponent went mad wondering what had happened to all the votes that had been promised him.

We got lost for the second time. And again, this time stopping near a group of schoolchildren in uniform, we had to ask—or Djédjé had to ask, calling out of the window—where the house of the
féticheur
was. And again no one seemed put out or surprised by our inquiry. One
man—stopped as he was walking busily by—not only told us where the house was, but also offered (as though he hadn’t really been going anywhere) to be our guide. He got into the seat beside the driver and at once became very cheerful, relishing the idea of even a short ride.

The turning we wanted was unmarked. It was a track across waste ground, and it led past a ragged screen of trees and bushes to a village: abrupt life in what, from the road, had looked only like bush. There seemed to be no road at all in the village. We drove straight at houses, and the car turned between houses. Dusty yards opened into dusty, littered yards, one man’s backyard somebody else’s front yard: cooking fires, wood piles, cooking utensils on black, trampled earth, children, men and women in a variety of costumes: the relaxed afternoon life of the village.

We were just a minute or two from the splendid highway, with its logic of straight lines and easy curves. But already we were in an older and more tangled world, a version of a forest settlement. We continued to drive between houses. It continued to seem that we wouldn’t be able to get round the corners, that we would have to stop. But we didn’t stop.

Djédjé, getting more tense as we drove deeper into the village, said suddenly, “You changed money? Give me some thousand-franc notes. It would be better, the thousand-franc notes.”

My money was in a side pocket of my trousers. I was sitting, and couldn’t pull out the notes one by one. I pulled out what the bank at the hotel had given me: a set of ten new thousand-franc notes.

Djédjé said, “That’s ten thousand, isn’t it? Give me ten thousand.”

But he had told me that five thousand would be enough for the
féticheur
, for one
expérience.

I was uneasy at getting deeper in the village, which seemed to go on and on. And I was so uncertain now of Djédjé and the taxi-driver, who had changed their minds about every agreement, that I decided to give up the journey.

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.

T
O 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 when 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.

I
N 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.”