The Impressionist (56 page)

Finally the road runs out, ending abruptly where a work gang of fifty or so men are breaking up the earth and pounding out a flat surface with hammers and rollers. Near by is a camp of army-issue canvas tents.

‘Fotse,’ explains Yusef. ‘Government bring them to make the road.’

‘Those men are Fotse?’ asks Morgan, aghast. ‘Where are their Fo necklaces? Where are their combs?’ The labourers are dressed just like any Hausa peasants, with no Fotse status marks at all. Their foreman confirms that they have been brought down from Fotseland to do compulsory labour. The ethnographers question them for a while, though they seem reluctant to answer even basic questions about their names or their clan affiliations. The foreman, a Yoruba from the coast, is amazed anyone would want to go up to Fotseland. ‘Show your guns,’ he advises. ‘They have respect for that.’ The Professor tells him not to be ridiculous, that the Fotse are a very peaceful people, and they will welcome him with great joy because he is a chief in their land. The foreman seems unimpressed, and wants to know if they have any gin, as dash for letting them speak to the men.

The party moves slowly towards the hills, the earth under their feet baked hard, its surface patterned by fine cracks. From his rolling saddle, Jonathan squints through the heat haze at a world which shimmers as if perpetually on the verge of evaporation. Gradually the ground rises, and breaks up into a litter of boulders. They pass through the neck of a valley, following the dried-up course of a river. Sheer cliffs push up on either side, gnarled bushes clinging to the rock faces like ticks on the hide of a cow. The going becomes hard, and they have to scramble up steep slopes, the camels complaining and tugging at their halters. Finally they see their first Fotse homestead, a little knot of conical huts approached by a path dotted with coils of dried human excrement. Built under the shadow of a huge rock, it is surrounded by a patchwork of fields, marked by boundaries of river pebbles. Here and there, signs and charms are tied to stakes: animal skulls wrapped in dried grass to ward off pests; strings of beads and spider-egg sacs marking a plot’s position in a Fo negotiation. The anthropologists are thrilled, and then disappointed. The farm is completely deserted.

So is the next farm they come to, and the next. The Professor, who was expecting the customary party of women singing lilting traditional songs of welcome, can think of no explanation for it. That evening they camp deep into Fotseland, without having seen a single live Fotse. They order Yusef to post a double guard. As the sun sets, Jonathan looks back down towards the plains, and wonders when he will see them again.

The next morning they come to the end of their journey. Under the great escarpment which the Fotse call the Lizard’s Back is the compound of the Daou, the paramount chief. Around it terraced fields step down to a dry river bed of flat round stones. Behind it the cliff face is honeycombed with the caves where the Fotse lay their dead. Like the other farms, the mud walls of the chief’s compound are deserted, and the goat pens empty. The silence in the valley is beginning to beat on the white men’s eardrums, when Gregg spots movement up near the escarpment. He hands the binoculars to Chapel.

‘They’re hiding in the caves,’ he says.

‘Good God,’ breathes the Professor. ‘Why would they do that?

They give orders to make camp, while the Professor, Gittens and Gregg climb up to the escarpment, guarded by a dozen of Yusef’s men. Jonathan watches them slowly picking their way towards the caves, and later on watches them pick their way back. The Professor looks distinctly unwell.

‘Will you credit it,’ he fumes, ‘they actually asked me to go away. Me! They have no greater champion. My work has made them world-famous.’

‘That’s probably overstating the case a little, Professor,’ smirks Gittens.

‘And I’m sick of your sarcasm!’ snaps Chapel.

‘Go?’ asks Morgan carefully.

‘They seem,’ says Gittens, ‘to have a rather jaded view of white men. They think we’re going to take more of them for government work.’

‘But they were supposed to be
pristine,’
complains Morgan, rounding on the Professor like a man who has been given a dud tip on the stock market. He digs into a pack and brings out a battered book. ‘May I quote, from your own description,
“the Fotse are a docile, joyous people, almost untouched by the ills of modernity, their pastoral
–”’

‘Yes, yes,’ says the Professor. ‘Look, how am I supposed to help it if the administration wants to muck around with them? You know how keen they are on getting the natives working. I try to explain, but they haven’t a thought for science! All you can ever get them to talk about is their blasted tax base.’

‘If they want us to go,’ says Jonathan, ‘shouldn’t we go?’

Everyone stares at him as if he is mad.

‘Stop taking pops at each other,’ says Marchant, ‘and look up there.’

From openings all along the ridge the Fotse are emerging, hundreds of people leading their goats out of the caves, as if, like their ancestors, they are being born out of the rock of the escarpment.

The white men look at the Daou. They see a haggard Fotse sitting on a carved wooden stool. The fine scars on his face are lost in wrinkles. The weight of the multicoloured Fo necklaces looped across his chest appears to drag him down. Behind him his wives kneel in order of precedence, surreptitiously pinching each other, or coaxing termites to run into their neighbour’s hair.

The Daou looks back at the white men and sees trouble. Around him his people are whispering, making wagers about the newcomers. Someone has to maintain tradition. Certain things must be done, even if they are distasteful. He signals to the griot, who steps forward and starts to sing the royal ancestry, enumerating his dead father’s status and possessions, the number of his children and his most profitable transactions. Then come those of his father’s father, and his father’s father’s father, and so on back into the obscurity of the past. After every few generations, refreshments are served.

Just as Fo necklaces become tangled up in one another, chains of debt and obligation that lose themselves in irresolvable complexity, such are the worries of a Fotse ruler. While the Daou listens to his genealogy, the shadow of the great escarpment gradually lengthens. It crawls over him, and over his people. By the time the griot sings the name of the first ancestor, only the white men and their servants remain in light. His voice shakes a little as he tells the visitors it is their turn. The young one is pushed forward and starts to chant in their language.

Jonathan sings (flat, to the tune of ‘Land of Hope and Glory’)
Son of Je-re-my Cha-pel, very wi-ise and strong.
The Professor has prepared the lyrics on a neatly typed sheet of paper. There are several verses, tracing the story of the Chapels back to misty seventeenth-century obscurity on a Wiltshire smallholding. As the Professor beams with pride, the others look at their feet. When Jonathan’s song comes to an end, the assembled Fotse whisper uneasily to each other.

‘It was a bit short,’ whispers Gittens. ‘They probably think we’re rather nouveau.’

Though he lets them know he thinks their genealogy despicably brief, the Daou is finally satisfied that they have not come to take more labourers, and grants them leave to camp near the river. They pass some days organizing their living arrangements and paying off the surplus porters. Unfortunately most of the men want to be among those who leave. They do not like the Fotse, who are heathens and eat forbidden food.

One morning Yusef the headman announces that he wants to go with them. This provokes an immense argument, which takes place outside Jonathan’s tent, waking him from a troubled dream in which the dark mass of the escarpment tottered precariously over his bed. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks, pulling open the tent flap and rubbing his eyes. He never gets an answer, because Marchant emerges from his own tent brandishing a pistol.

Yusef starts, thinking he is about to be shot. Other porters rush up with knives and pangas, and during the confusion Marchant discharges the gun into the air. By noon, very few men can be persuaded to stay; they say the others fear pollution, but they do not. They are not superstitious men. They are brave men. They are also poor men, and want more money. The Professor has no choice but to give it to them.

For some hours, snatches of a happy hand-clapping song can be heard far down in the valley. The sound of
Yusef’s
departing column of porters makes everyone uneasy, and no one will speak to Marchant, who takes a spade and slopes off to dig a first-stab latrine.

For a long time the Fotse avoid the white men completely. There are no curious onlookers around the camp, no passers-by. Their unfriendliness increases the tension among the party, and though the Professor maintains it is unnecessary, Gregg and Marchant decide to post a guard.

One night Jonathan sits up late in front of his tent. He is watching Gregg stalk round the perimeter with a rifle in the crook of his arm, when he notices a group of flickering lights against the silhouette of the escarpment. Gradually they are joined by others, until there are dozens of them, and the cliff face glows like a termite mound. The lights remain there for hours, and for hours he sits and watches, his blank notebook lying untouched on his knee.

The following night the lights appear again, swirling about near the mouths of the caves where the Fotse take their dead. Deep and regular, the sound of drums floats down towards the camp. One by one, the white men hear the drumming and come out to find out what is going on. Peering up at the lights, Professor Chapel appears stricken. ‘They never used to do that,’ he says. ‘It was taboo to go near the caves after dark.’

‘Is there actually anything they did before that they still do now?’ sneers Marchant. The Professor can barely contain his anger. ‘You, sir,’ he splutters, ‘are an impertinent little man.’ Marchant makes an obscene gesture (one Jonathan has seen many times, but which is obviously new to Chapel) and from that moment the expedition splits irrevocably in two, Gregg and Marchant moving their tents to one side of the hearth, and the Professor, Gittens and Morgan moving theirs to the other – or rather, the porters moving all the tents, running back and forth trying to fulfil the conflicting demands of the two groups.

After the initial exchange of insults, the feud is conducted in the traditional British manner. The warring parties simply cease to recognize each other’s existence, politely avoiding eye contact, conversation and simultaneous occupancy of the thunderbox, fireside or mess table. An icy silence descends, broken only by the curt issue and receipt of orders. Since nothing is actually said, Jonathan mistakenly assumes the argument is over. Though he is puzzled by the rearrangement of sleeping quarters, he does not move his own tent. Thus he unwittingly makes everybody suspicious. Gittens in particular looks at him very strangely the next day. The following evening when he drags two folding chairs towards the hearth, the Professor refuses to sit with him, pretending he wants to take a walk.

That night Jonathan cannot sleep. Again the lights are clustered up by the caves, and the uneasy throb of the drums is oscillating the airless heat of his tent. Some time after midnight he decides to go and investigate. It is not so much that he wants to see what the Fotse are up to, but that he is afraid of what will happen if he does not. It is like being on watch on the boat. If he does not put a finite, determinate shape to his fears, he could go mad. Reluctantly, he pulls on some clothes and walks in the direction of the escarpment.

As he passes the latrine, a figure stands upright, fumbling with its shorts.

‘I say! I say! Where do you think you’re off to?’

It is Gittens, who will not be got rid of, firmly believing that he has uncovered some kind of plot. ‘You’re mad,’ he blusters, when Jonathan tells him where he is going, but his suspicion is stronger than his fear. ‘I’ll come with you,’ he decides. ‘I suppose it’s all right. I’ve got a gun.’ He pats at his belt, swears, and goes to retrieve it from the latrine.

They climb up towards the sound of the drums, picking their way over the terraces by the moonlight. The rhythm tugs at them, speeding up their pace. It is impossible to tell how many drummers there are; when the music reaches one of its periodic crescendos, it sounds as if hundreds are playing. As they get closer, Jonathan and Gittens begin to tread carefully, in silent mutual acknowledgement that they are transgressing. To Gittens, despite his scientific training, the sound of native drums still has
Boy’s Journal
associations of the cooking pot, and he looks mournfully down at his legs, wishing them a little less plump and white beneath their baggy shorts. Jonathan’s unease has a different source. He is afraid of stepping into the firelight and feeling Fotse eyes upon him. He is afraid of what they might see.

At the base of the cliff, in front of the caves of the dead, a crowd of several hundred Fotse men and women are sitting in a ragged circle, marked out by flaming torches. To one side are the drummers, a mere six of them, beating out clattering sewing-machine rhythms over the regular whoop-whoop of an enormous double-headed drum. Wallowing on its side, each cowhide face as tall as a seated man, this drum seems to be the central focus of the gathering. In the cleared space before it a group of women are dancing, their bare arms and legs glistening with sweat. Charms and bangles strike together on their wrists, the sound reminding Jonathan, with a sudden pang, of Star. The women form up in ranks facing the drummers, and then approach the bass drum in pairs, flapping their arms and kicking up the dust. Jonathan and Gittens, who are hunched behind a rock, are more or less immediately spotted by people near by. Gradually, in a wave of unease, news of their presence is passed around the crowd, but the dance still goes on, and slowly the two of them gain in confidence and inch out of their hiding place to stand, head and shoulders taller than the Fotse men, like two white flagpoles at the back of the crowd.