The Viceroy of Ouidah (9 page)

Francisco Manoel slung his hammock and lay under a muslin net listening to a symphony of frogs and mosquitoes. And he congratulated himself: for the first time in forty-seven days, he rocked to his own rhythm, not that of the ship.

 

 

 

 

AT SEVEN IN the morning the Yovogan's messenger came with an order for the Brazilian to present himself at once.

Taparica shook his head.

‘King him need gun,' he said. ‘Yovogan him come you.'

The Kingdom, it so happened, was passing through one of its periodic bouts of turmoil. The people had had enough of the King's blasphemous ways. He had failed to ‘water', with blood, the graves of his ancestors. He was a coward and a drunk. Food was scarce, the army was out of ammunition while, from the east, the Alafin of Oyo was threatening to invade.

The messenger shouted abuse and went away, only to return with word of an official visit.

Puffs of musket smoke preceded the Yovogan, a frail octogenarian who rode to the Fort in a costume of pink satin, propped up by the grooms, sitting sidesaddle on a starved grey nag. A man led the beast by a grass halter. Another twirled a blue umbrella. A noisy entourage followed.

It was raining. Boys splashed alongside carrying the old man's cigar case, his stool, and the card table and decanters. Once inside the gate he signalled his wish to dismount, and the groom lifted him from the saddle, sat him down and removed his black tam-o'-shanter.

The Yovogan clicked his fingers in salutation, then proposed his own King's health in palm-wine and the Queen of Portugal's in Holland's Gin. He did not drink himself but poured the contents of both glasses down the gaping mouth of an acolyte.

The interview began in broken Portuguese. The Yovogan's face turned grey as he registered his disapproval at the lack of presents.

What about the barquentine full of silk? What about the coach and horses? Or the trumpets? Or the silver hunting-gun?

‘There are no presents,' said Francisco Manoel.

‘Not even the greyhounds?'

‘Not even greyhounds.'

Nor would there be any presents, until the King released the prisoners, repaired the Fort and resumed the sale of slaves.

Everyone was confused, then angry. A man shouted, ‘Death to Whites!' and an Amazon whirled her cutlass round her forefinger and brought it close to the Brazilian's face.

But when the Yovogan raised his hand, the crowd melted away muttering.

 

 

 

 

THAT SAME AFTERNOON, a hubbub of shouts and whiplashes awoke Francisco Manoel from his siesta. Peering over the north bastion, he saw a crowd of naked men piling up bundles of reeds, planks, baskets of oyster shells and buckets of swish: the Yovogan had sent a corvée of captives to make good the damage.

In the weeks that followed Lieutenant da Silva worked in heat that would have driven most whites to their hammocks or their graves. Even on quivering afternoons, when the sun sucked out the colour of earth and leaves, he would strip to the waist, bark orders and shoulder the heaviest loads himself.

The blacks were amazed to see a white man work.

They thatched the roofs, whitewashed the walls and mucked out the cistern. Again the cannon gleamed with blacking and palm-oil. Again ships offshore saw the ‘five shields' of the Braganzas floating from the flagpole, signalling that the Fort of St John the Baptist had slaves for sale.

The first batch were criminals convicted of stealing the King's palm-nuts and condemned to be fed on them till they burst: none seemed the least unhappy to be leaving Dahomey.

More slavers came — the
Mithridate,
the
Rinoceronte
, the
Fraternidade
and the
Bom Jesus
— each carrying crates of muskets, rum, tobacco, silks and calico. The Alafin of Oyo did not invade. The King went to war against some defenceless millet planters in the Mahi Mountains and, within two years, Francisco Manoel had sent no less than forty-five slave cargoes to Bahia.

Joaquim Coutinho had the sense to offer him a place in the syndicate.

 

 

 

 

DA SILVA TOOK to the Trade as if he had known no other occupation. Having always thought of himself as a footloose wanderer, he now became a patriot and man of property. No word of congratulation came from his superiors in Bahia. Yet he believed it was his heaven-sent vocation to fuel with black muscle the mines and plantations of his country, and he believed they would reward him.

He persisted in this illusion with the obstinacy of the convert. Often on sleepless nights he would lie and listen to the groan and clank of the barracoon, only to remember the sweet singing in the chapel at Tapuitapera and roll over with his conscience clean.

He lived in the Governor's suite of rooms; he restored the chapel and imported a Portuguese padre to say Mass before the start of each voyage.

As major-domo of the Fort, Taparica dressed in a green frock-coat, sailor pants of white canvas and a black felt bicorn with a cockade of parrot plumes. Whenever they passed through the town, he would stride ahead of the hammockeers, clanging an iron bell and shouting,
‘Ago!
Ago!' to clear the path.

He slept on a mat outside his master's room. He cooked and tasted his food, controlled his drinking habits and emptied his slop-pail. He found girls for his bed, aphrodisiacs if the weather was exceptionally sticky, and warned him not to make lasting attachments.

Francisco Manoel would use the same girl for a night or two, then send her home with a present for her family.

His profits — and reputation for straight dealing — exasperated the veterans of the Trade. One year, a Captain Pedro Vicente begged him for a shipload of slaves without money or goods to pay. He swore to return but squandered the proceeds in Bahia and did not come back. Some time later, on hearing that the same man was in Lagos with an unseaworthy ship and a mutinous crew, Da Silva sent his cutter with a message: ‘Come over to Ouidah and I will refit you. Nobody cheats me twice.'

Nor was he less straightforward in his dealings with the King.

The two men never met: a taboo forbade Dahomean monarchs setting eyes on the sea. But if the King wanted twelve gilt chairs, they were sent. If he wanted twenty plumed hats, these were found. And he even got his greyhounds, which came specially from England — though, on their way up to Abomey, the dog was bitten by a rabid bitch.

Every month or so an invitation came for Francisco Manoel to visit the capital. He would read each letter through and politely decline: on the first one, the King's Portuguese scribe had written a warning in the margin:

‘I, Antonio Maciel, have been sixteen years a prisoner of this cruel king without seeing another of my countrymen ...'

 

 

 

 

THE KING WENT to war in January and the chain-gangs started reaching Ouidah towards the end of March.

The captives were numb with fright and exhaustion. They had seen their homes burned and their chiefs slaughtered. Iron collars chafed their necks. Their backs were striped purple with welts; and when they saw the white man's ships, they knew they were going to be eaten.

The Dahomeans' mindless cruelty offended Da Silva's sense of economy. Time and again, he complained to the Yovogan that the guards were ruining valuable property, but the old man sighed and said, ‘It is their custom.'

On arriving at the Fort, the slaves were housed in a long shed, roofed with dried grasses and fenced in with a palisade of sharpened stakes. Each was manacled to an iron chain that ran in bights down the length of the structure. The thatch came lower than a man's waist and, when the buyers peered in out of the sunlight, all they could see were eyes in the darkness.

Every morning, after the Angelus, they were fed from a cauldron of millet gruel and driven to the lagoon where they washed and danced for exercise.

Taparica cured the sick and calmed their fears: in a dozen dialects he would burble of their country-to-be where everyone danced and cigars grew on trees. He taught his master to distinguish the various tribes by their cicatrices. He could tell any man's age by the state of his gums; and if in doubt, would lick his checks to test the resilience of his stubble.

The loading was done in the cool of the evening, when the sea was down — the same scene repeated year after year: the ship, the waves, the black canoes, the black men shorn of their breechclouts, and the slave-brands heating in driftwood fires.

Francisco Manoel preferred to do the branding himself, taking care to dip the red-hot iron in palm-oil to stop it sticking to the flesh.

The chains were struck off at the water's edge, so that, in the event of capsize, one man would not drag the others down. Only occasionally, in a final bid for freedom, would one fling himself to the breakers; if, later, his shark-torn carcass was washed ashore, Taparica would bury it in the dunes, sighing,
‘Ignorantes!'

 

 

 

 

FIVE YEARS WENT by, of heat and mist and rain. The British stopped recognizing Ouidah as a slave port; and when a frigate of the West Africa Squadron boarded the brig
Borboleta
, becalmed off Ouidah with five hundred slaves aboard, Da Silva watched the fight through his telescope and said, ‘At least something has happened.'

Often the Brazilian captains had to wait weeks before the coast was clear but their host spared no expense to entertain them. His dining room was lit with a set of silver candelabra; behind each chair stood a serving-girl, naked to the waist, with a white napkin folded over her arm. Sometimes a drunk would shout out, ‘What are those women?' and Da Silva would glare down on the table and say, ‘Our future murderers.'

The sight of white men disintegrating in the tropics disgusted him. How he hated their hollow laughter! And as their warted contours dissolved behind clouds of cigar smoke, he would make an excuse to slip away and be alone.

On Thursdays he put on his regimentals and went to dine with the Yovogan in an open courtyard frescoed with ochre chameleons.

The old man was so old he could remember the piles of skulls put up to celebrate the Dahomean conquest of Ouidah in 1741 — and, to amuse his guest, would croak a refrain about using the dead king's head as a mortar:

He liked his white friend so much that he took him to his bed-chamber to show off his blunderbuss and the nine rosaries of human molars, the souvenirs of his bloodthirsty youth. But he was equally fond of his European presents — the porcelain teapot of the Brandenburgers or the cruet-stand presented by the Royal Africa Company — since they reminded him of the days when ships of every nation crowded the roadstead.

The Yovogan trembled at the mention of the King's name. But one day, he unwrapped a framed engraving of the guillotine in the Place de la Concorde, the parting gift of Citizen-Governor Deniau before he left for France.

The idea of chopping off a king's head in public struck the old man with the force of a revelation. Deniau had explained that a tyrant forfeits the right to live, and, though he never understood the logic of that argument, it was an awesome precedent.

 

 

 

 

AND DA SILVA was always dreaming of Bahia. Whenever a ship sailed, he would watch the yardarms vanish into the night, then light a pipe on the verandah and sink into a reverie of the future: he would have a Big House, a view of the sea, grandchildren and the sound of water tinkling through a garden. But then the mirage would fade. The sound of drumbeats pressed against his temples and he had a presentiment that he would never get out of Africa.

He confided his fears to no one. To convince himself they were unreal, he would sit, red-eyed into the night, writing letters to Joaquim Coutinho, tearing up sheet after sheet in an effort to express himself:

 

These people must be the biggest thieves in the world. I would live on any other continent but this one. I would live in the lands of ice and snow, anywhere to be away from their gibberish . . .

Or:

 

I cannot begin to describe this cretinous existence of mine. Nor how lonely it is to be without family or friends. Perhaps next year I shall come back and marry ...

 

He pleaded for news, any scrap of news, to keep his memories of Brazil from fading: but Joaquim's replies were invariably cold and commercial:

But why, his partner wrote back, had they not made him Governor of the Fort? How he longed for one word that they were aware of his existence! ‘My conduct, I can assure you, is irreproachable.'

The officers had not forgotten him. But since they were profiting, privately, from his activities, public recognition was out of the question.

At an official level, the Fort at Ouidah had ceased to exist.

 

 

 

 

GRADUALLY AFRICA SWAMPED him and drew him under. Perhaps out of loneliness, perhaps in despair of fighting the climate, he slipped into the habits of the natives.

He wore long pantaloons instead of the breeches that gave him prickly heat in the groin. He wore amulets against the Evil Eye. Taparica taught him to shuffle his feet at the phallus of Papa Legba and, together, they went to the diviners.