The Masque of Africa (21 page)

His voice, and his undeniable presence, had filled the room, and now that he was out of it the room felt quiet and incomplete, although the former minister was trying to talk about language.

The house was well run. No word had been said but, to bridge the gap left by Rawlings and his wife, a well dressed waiter appeared with coffee and fruit juice. I went to the lavatory. I saw the family dogs in two big paved cages at the back of the yard. One cage had small dogs. The other cage had big dogs, a Dalmatian and various hounds, all fine and well exercised and happy. While I watched I saw them fed by a servant who entered the cages with their food. I could have looked at the feeding scene for a long time.

I went back to the sitting room. After a few minutes Rawlings reappeared. He sat down energetically in his chair and, as though to get started again, called me chief. He gave me a flick on the knee and said, “As a pilot I flew around the country, and I used to notice a green patch near every village. I never thought about it, but when I came into government I realised it was the compound of the village school. It was very clean. They were dirty in their homes, but clean in their schools. I go to a factory. It looks so clean. I beg them, I tell them, ‘Take this cleanliness to your homes. Why do you leave it here when you go home?’ What can I do to revive this sense of responsibility?”

He leaned back, took a long breath, and said, “Chief, let me give you one last example. In my last term in office the chaps in my castle”—some of the old castles and forts on the Atlantic coast had been turned into government offices—“the chaps in my castle had proved troublesome in headquarters. I was very anxious. I thought: ‘What can I do to lower the temperature?’ The culture of logic given us by the outside power was in the negative. The English word ‘sorry’ would not have done. It was not good enough. I said, ‘Use the traditional way.’ Down here when people want to apologise sincerely they wake you very early in the morning. I made my chaps go early in the morning, and it worked.”

Someone in France had asked him whether it wasn’t the uniform that kept him in power. He had said it wasn’t the uniform; it was the quality of integrity.

He was talking about the rights of the people when Mrs. Rawlings came in and in a nice clear voice said, “Lunch.”

We looked at her, but Rawlings went on talking about the difference between power and moral authority. Mrs. Rawlings said with some firmness that we should move, and we did, moving first into a corridor, and then into the splendid dining room where the table could seat fourteen. It was laid with fine bone china. The food was Chinese and Ghanaian: yams and meat and goat stew, with some fish. It was an absolute feast. There were no place settings. Mrs. Rawlings made me sit next to her. Everybody else had to fend for himself. John
Mitchell, the Trinidad consul, silent all the while, came at last into his own. He couldn’t conceal his pleasure at seeing the meat stew and the steaming yams. But Rawlings outdid him in pleasure and zest.

We talked about names. Mrs. Rawlings said she had been given an Ashanti name by her father—she was, in fact, an Ashanti princess—and that had caused a certain amount of trouble when, in the fifth class, she had to be confirmed as a Christian. She was asked by her Sunday school teacher about her Christian name. She had no idea what the teacher meant. The teacher persevered: was she Esther, Veronica, Mary, Ruth? She said she had only the name she had. The teacher said she was to stay out of the class until she could show her baptism certificate; she could not be confirmed otherwise.

She telephoned her father. He was enraged. The very next day he came from Kumasi and took her to the headmaster of Achimota. He had the baptism certificate but refused to show it. He said his daughter was baptised with an African name and was going to be confirmed with that name. The headmaster agreed.

Someone at the table asked how Rawlings and his wife had met.

She said they had been childhood sweethearts. Rawlings, full of food at this stage, and now reaching for a dish of Chinese noodles, said, “Nonsense. It took me nine years just to hold your hand. She was an Ashanti princess. While I was from the ghetto.” He looked up. “A nobody.”

“Well,” she said, “you did come to wash our car.”

He laughed, and the moment passed.

H
OUPHOUËT
B
OIGNY
had been the enduring president of the Ivory Coast, loved by the French, adored by his people: a man so enduring he could be called a king.

Richmond had heard a marvellous story from his aunt about the way Houphouët had prepared himself for his life of power. Houphouët, in this story, had had a consultation with a great shaman or witchdoctor. Following the advice of this remarkable man, Houphouët had had himself cut into little pieces, and these pieces had been boiled together with some magical herbs in a cooking pot. In that cooking pot at a critical moment the Houphouët pieces had come together and turned into a powerful snake that had to be wrestled to the ground by a trusted helper. The snake had then turned into Houphouët again. The story had a reliable witness: the trusted and powerful helper who had wrestled the snake to the ground. She was Richmond’s aunt, and had been Nkrumah’s cook, no less: Nkrumah the first president of independent Ghana, and one of the great men of modern Africa.

What Richmond had told me would have been told—in various versions—to tens of thousands in the country. It was not disrespectful, as might have been thought; it was by such supernatural or magical tales that the ruler’s myth was kept alive among his people.

It was a tale for believers. I was not a believer. I fell at the first hurdle. In this fairytale the cutting up of the great man was too easy. He was like a worm, soft and uniform in texture; he could be sliced. No bones or muscle or delicate organs met the knife; there was no blinding spurt of blood. Richmond (who had a Danish ancestor) didn’t look for that kind of detail. What was important for Richmond was that the witchdoctor’s prescription had worked. Everywhere in Africa there was change, often bloody change. But Houphouët had ruled for life. Towards the end he had been challenged, but he had seen his challengers off. He had remained father of his people, a grand old man,
le vieux
.

He died at the age of eighty-eight. This was his official age; he was believed by many to be much older. His great age was further proof of his fetish-given power. He was said to have died on an important political anniversary. But no one in the country at large knew for sure. The private life of the ruler, the king, was always a mystery.

The royal compound was in the middle of the town of Yamoussoukro. This town was built around the site of Houphouët’s natal village. A chief’s village, but it would originally (before the French) have been close to bush. The compound was now surrounded by a high ochre-coloured wall nine miles long and was closed to ordinary visitors. From the outside you could see something like a young wood behind the wall. Heaven knows what secret rituals, what sacrifices, served by heaven knows what secret priesthoods, contrived to keep the king and his kingdom safe, at a time when nothing in Africa seemed solid.

Far away from the royal compound, at two different points in the new town which he had built, were mighty emblems of the imported faiths: a beautiful white mosque in the North African style, a style that had had to cross the Sahara to this far-off place in the wet forests of tropical Africa; and a cathedral that in its design paid homage to St. Peter’s. It was said to be higher than St. Peter’s (in spite of the pope’s request that its dome might be shortened by a metre or two). This was more than cross-cultural town-building. Mosque and cathedral, growing
out of no communities, might have seemed like a game in the desert, the whim of a rich ruler looking for foreign approval. But they were seriously meant. Religion mattered to Houphouët; it was what kept him afloat; he would have felt, almost, that he ruled because he was religious. It pleased him, in his expensive new town, to honour these two world faiths, even while yielding to the profounder African stirrings which might have been played out in private rituals, meant for the king alone, in the royal compound, beyond the moat with its sacred crocodiles, fed at great expense every day.

Richmond had said that Houphouët’s magic had worked for him. And so it had. Power had stayed with him to the end. But even a king was only a man, and when his time had come Houphouët had died from prostate cancer.

Twenty-seven years before, when I had first gone to the Ivory Coast, I had been told by someone at the local university that when a great ruler died, his servants or slaves had to take care to run, because they might be buried with their master. The academic who told me this seemed to think it funny. He was an African who was proud of African traditions, but in his African way he thought domestic slaves were also funny. Telling me about the dangers to slaves at the time of the master’s death, he had clapped his big palms together and then used them to make a swift rubbing gesture, a gesture of comedy, to indicate the slave’s need for flight.

I heard this time, what I had not heard before, that there were servants of such extreme loyalty they would have wanted to die with their master. They would have thought of that death as a final service. But no one knew what had happened here at Houphouët’s death. The ochre walls and the palace behind, with the wood or forest, kept their secret. From a foreign (but well-placed) source I heard that “hundreds” had been killed at Houphouët’s funeral—not necessarily slaves or servants, but people picked up outside, wanderers or vagrants who would not be missed.

There were still crocodiles in the moat or lake outside the palace wall. Houphouët had introduced those crocodiles, and in 1982 they
were still sufficiently new for their feeding at dusk to be one of the sights of the town. A tall man with a red cap and a long white priestly gown came out of the palace gate and made his way between the rail outside the wall and the moat. He brought chopped-up meat in a plastic bucket, a number of trussed white chickens, and he carried a long thin knife. He ran the dark limber blade between the metal uprights of the rail at the edge of the water. It made a scraping, clacking sound. This was the signal to the crocodiles that it was feeding time, and they swam towards the two or three big rocks, like places for basking, that were just next to the rail and the white-gowned feeder.

The meat in the bucket was thrown to them; some of it went to the meat-eating turtles that could be seen swimming below the surface of the water. It was the turn then of the chickens. The spectators on the causeway between the public road and the palace, or at the water’s edge between the rail and the palace wall, gave little gasps of horror. The crocodiles with their apparently smiling eyes snapped their jaws. It wasn’t always a neat kill. The crocodile’s jaws were too rigidly hinged; they couldn’t swivel or turn; and the chickens appeared to escape. But not for long. A few more snaps of the jaws, a small adjustment of the body, and the chicken that had appeared to get away could be seen as a mash of white feathers in the maw of the crocodile.

In 1982 I had seen this ritual at sunset, the proper time. Now, twenty-seven years later, I went in the middle of the day; I couldn’t wait for sunset. I remembered a planting of young coconut trees on both sides of the causeway across the lake. Coconut trees grow fast. I had expected those I had seen to be tall and beginning to be spindly. But they were not tall; perhaps the trees I had seen had been replaced; or perhaps the fetid water of the lake or moat had stunted their growth.

Perhaps the same fetid water had done away with the meat-eating turtles. I had seen them clearly in 1982, coming for their meat, swimming below the surface of the light-brown water, showing their underside, strong and silent and agile, more disturbing in a way than the crocodiles. Now in the dark water they were not to be seen. Perhaps
it was this bad water that was going to do away with this ritual of Houphouët’s kingship, slowly killing or choking the crocodiles that survived. (Though I was told later that crocodiles, rising to the surface to breathe, could survive fetid water.) There was a baby crocodile, pale, two or three feet long, away from the others, resting out of the water on a concrete pier of the causeway.

In ancient Egypt the crocodile was a sacred animal; most people here looked upon it as food. In Indian mythology the earth rests on a turtle’s back. Some instinct, or the wisdom of some shaman, had led the old king to do honour to these creatures of ancient awe. But few people now, in 2009, were looking for the crocodiles in the water, though they were easy to see. Few people were present. Some young men and a strange young begging woman, possibly disturbed, passed by. The woman had a wild look in her eyes; she was more interested in the visitor than in the crocodiles. The young men were more interested in the silver helicopter which appeared over the town and seemed to be making for the presidential palace behind the ochre walls.

The guard on the causeway (he was there to keep unauthorised people away) said that the president was arriving that day, and of course he meant the new president that had come to the Ivory Coast after all the troubles that had befallen the country since the death of Houphouët.

The Romans decreed godhood for quite a few of their early emperors. But the Romans, when they made Augustus a god, also had the good sense to create a school of priests to serve the new cult. These priests of Augustus would have been people of good social standing; that, rather than piety or priestly knowledge, would have been the most important requirement. The cult wouldn’t have survived the turbulence of the next two centuries; and it would have disappeared with Christianity. I doubt whether the fact of its demise, the pointlessness of its once proud school of priests, would have been recorded.

It was possible now in the Ivory Coast to wonder how much longer a cult set up—over so many years and at such expense—by Houphouët would survive, and what form its forgetting would take.