The Writer and the World (46 page)

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.

T
HE 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.

It was a great creation, the golf course, perfection in a way. It represented prodigious labour. Yet it was only a view: one look took it all in. And soon it wasn’t enough. Splendour on this scale, in this setting, and after a 150-mile drive, only created an appetite for more: the visitor began to enter the ambition and fantasy of the creator. There was a main street, very wide; there was a market; there were workers’ settlements. Something like a real town was attaching itself to the presidential creation. But the visitor, always quickly taking for granted what had been created, continued to be distracted by the gaps, the scarred earth, the dusty vacancies. And, if you didn’t want to play golf, there was nothing to do.

There were the president’s crocodiles. They were to be fed at five. The presidential palace was some distance away, down one of the great avenues. Gil Sherman’s car was necessary. In the levelled land, in the glare and emptiness of the afternoon, the scale of everything seemed magnified. The palace wall went on and on. Beside it was a lake. In the middle, an iron-railed causeway lined with young coconut trees led to a palace gate, guarded by soldiers of the presidential guard in maroon-coloured tunics. The cars of visitors—mainly white—were parked on the causeway.

In the lake on either side were the crocodiles. We saw the first just as we left the car: barely noticeable in the muddy water, a mere protuberance of eyes, until its thorny back became clear. We exclaimed. An African, possibly an official (from his lounging, casual stance), said,
“Il est petit.”
A small one. Then we saw eyes and thorny backs everywhere on the surface of the water—the thorns like the thorns on the bark of the baobab tree.

On one side of the causeway there was a stone-paved embankment sloping down to the water. On this embankment were a number of crocodiles, small ones, absolutely still, eyes bright and apparently unseeing, jaws open, the lower jaw of each crocodile showing only as a great hollow, oddly simple in shape, oddly clean and dry-looking, yellow-pink and pale. Flies moved in and out of those open jaws. On the other side of the causeway there was no paved embankment, only a sandy bank, marked by the tails of crocodiles. White feathers, as of a chicken, were scattered about in the sand. There were crocodiles on the bank. They were like the colour of the sand and from a distance were not noticeable.

The feeder was already in attendance. He had come in a grey Land-Rover; it was parked on the causeway. He was clearly a special man. He was very tall, very thin. He wore a skull-cap and a flowered gown. He had an official with him, a man of more ordinary size in a grey, short-sleeved safari suit. In one hand the feeder had a thin, long knife; in his other hand he had a tin or bucket with pieces of meat. Heart or lungs, Gil Sherman told me: pale pink, with bits of animal “piping.”

The feeder made a rattling sound on the iron rails. Then he threw the meat. The crocodiles on the paved embankment were awkward, slow. They had to tilt their long snouts against the flat paving stones—showing the pale-yellow underside of their bodies—to pick up the meat. They couldn’t get the meat that had fallen on their own backs or into the crevices between the paving stones. They didn’t seem always to know where the meat had fallen.

While the feeder threw the meat, the grey-suited official with him clucked and called softly to the crocodiles, speaking to them as to children. “
Avalez, avalez.”
(“Swallow, swallow.”)

Later, on the other side of the causeway, there was another ritual. The older, bigger crocodiles were there, yellow, with twisted snouts, heavy bellies, and teeth which, when closed together, suggested a long, jagged, irregularly stitched wound.

The tall feeder was now holding a black chicken by the wings. He swung the chicken slowly up and down. The squawks of alarm from the chicken died down. The chicken lost control of its neck, which hung limp. Two old crocodiles, as though used to the ritual, waited close together on the sand. More meat was thrown and gobbled up, except where it had fallen on the backs of the crocodiles. Turtles, appearing in the water, swam ashore for their meat. One young crocodile, having got his meat, swam away fast to a little sand-bank on the lake to eat or ingest his meat without disturbance. Then the chicken was thrown at the two old crocodiles. The open jaws snapped shut. The crowd gasped. But the feeder hadn’t thrown straight; and the crocodiles hadn’t moved. The stunned chicken fluttered its wings; it partly recovered from its stupor; it ran along to the end of the sandy bank, near the causeway.

The tall feeder in the flowered gown didn’t allow the chicken to get away. He jumped over the rail to the bank and—his long thin knife his only means of defence—walked unhurriedly past the crocodiles to where the chicken was. The chicken didn’t run. The feeder seized it,
climbed back over the rail to the road. And again the ritual swinging of the bird by the wings was accompanied by clucking calls to the two waiting crocodiles from the grey-suited official. Again the bird was thrown. Again the jaws snapped; again the bird escaped. But now the clucking calls had brought from the water on to the sand a crocodile even bigger and older than the other two. His snout was battered at the tip. His teeth looked stained and old and worn. The chicken’s limp neck was placed on the iron rail; the feeder began to bring down his knife. I didn’t look.

A shout from the crowd told me that the chicken had been thrown. And when I turned I saw the bird turned to a feathery debris in the seemingly grinning maw of one crocodile, not the oldest, round unseeing eyes apparently alight with pleasure, black feathers sticking out on either side of the jaw. A moment’s ingestion, and all was gone, except for a mash in the lower jaw. The ceremony was over. The feeder, skull-capped, prettily gowned, took his tin and walked back, unsmiling, to the Land-Rover.

A public ceremony of kingship outside the big blank wall of the presidential palace. Behind that wall there were trees, and somewhere among those trees was the president’s ancestral village with the old palaver tree. That site, which felt sacred now, the scene perhaps of more private rituals, was not open to the public. Ibrahim Keita, the golfer, the president’s protégé, the man said to be charged by the president with the development of Yamoussoukro, Ibrahim had seen the village behind the palace wall. But Ibrahim’s West Indian wife hadn’t.

Ibrahim was to have guided me around Yamoussoukro. But he hadn’t been able to do that. He had, however, done a gracious and unexpected thing: he had deputed his elder brother to show Gil Sherman and me around. The brother came in the morning to the Hotel President. The brother was a doctor, smaller than Ibrahim, softer, grey-haired, with glasses, and with the confident manner of some black West Indian professional men of established family.