The Writer and the World (41 page)

The audience for the piano recital was white. The pianist that the Goethe Institute was offering to French-speaking Africa was an Alsatian with a French name. He had done the French African circuit before for the Institute, and had a local reputation. He was a tall, thin, half-smiling man in chunky black shoes, and with strong, big, white hands. When applause came, he bowed, picked his way down two shaky, detachable steps from the platform, walked briskly to the end of the hall as though he was leaving us forever, but then he waited in the shadows, walked back to the platform, up the shaky steps, and bowed again. At the end he walked back twice and played two encores.

Arlette said in French, “I had a bet with Terry that there would be only ten black faces here. I was wrong. There are only three.” Africans didn’t like cultural music, Arlette said. They liked only African nightclub music. Even in Paris that was what African students looked for. But still, Arlette said, shaking her head to the rhythm of her French speech, and acknowledging her own restlessness during the recital, the pianist had chosen some difficult pieces,
des morceaux difficiles.

The pianist and the German cultural counsellor stood at the door to say goodbye. The pianist was neat and silent, black-suited. The counsellor was artistically casual, with big round glasses and a full round head of long red hair. He was pleased with the success of his evening. It was expensive, he said to Terry, putting on music of that quality. The Goethe Institute in Abidjan could do this kind of thing only once a year. The pianist should have been going on to Accra in Ghana, but—and the counsellor gave a diplomatic shrug, as though we all knew about events in Ghana, and it wasn’t for him to comment.

We went afterwards, Arlette and I, to Terry’s house. It was a bachelor’s house. The sitting room was large and formal; many of Terry’s cultural evenings took place there. There were mementoes of the East, where Terry had served, and there were African masks and objects. Terry offered wine, and went to the kitchen to make scrambled eggs.

Arlette told me about the French. She loved the culture of France, she said. But she detested the manners,
les moeurs.
She meant that the French were socially rigid and petty, extraordinarily fussy about having the correct glasses, the correct cutlery, the right wines. For the
petits français
—and especially in a place like Abidjan—these things were like moral issues. And there was the French obsession with food. It was part of the French myth, but Arlette didn’t admire it. How could you admire people who, when you got back from a foreign country, could only think of asking:
“Mange-t-on bien là?”(“Is
the food good there?”)

Arlette said that in the Ivory Coast the French West Indians,
les antillais
, behaved like French people. They looked down on the Africans and—because they thought of themselves as civilized and French—they expected the Africans to look up to them.
“Mais ils sont déçus.”
The West Indians made an error; Africans looked up to nobody; and life was as a result full of stress for some West Indians in the Ivory Coast.

So, in spite of what she had said about Africans and night-club music, Arlette separated herself both from French people and from a certain kind of French West Indian. And it was also clear that, in spite of her failed African marriage and her present solitude, there was in her some deep feeling for the Africa that followed its own ways.

At our supper of eggs and brown bread and wine, the talk turned to Amadou Hampaté Bâ, the sage who was the president’s spiritual counsellor.

Arlette said, with glittering eyes, “He’s a great man. One of the great men of Africa.”

Terry had a spare copy of Hampaté Bâ’s booklet,
Jésus Vu par un Musulman
, “Christ Seen by a Muslim.” The book had been presented nineteen months before by the sage to Flora Lewis of the
New York Times
and inscribed to her in a shaky hand.

It was in this copy that, later that night, I read of the arithmological calculations which, applied to invocations and other religious formulae, proved the essential oneness of Islam and Christianity.

Hampaté Bâ described himself as “a man of dialogue,” and the last
chapter of his little book was about the president of the Ivory Coast. He said that he and the president often had long spiritual discussions when the president’s state duties permitted. He had asked the president one day for some story, some legend acquired perhaps from an African elder, that might serve as a parable of brotherly love. And the president had told Hampaté Bâ this story.

“There was a captive at the royal court of Yamoussoukro who looked after the education of the children. He liked me a great deal, and he gave me a lot of advice, advice necessary to someone like myself, who was being trained to be a chief. But I should say, before going any further, that among the Baoulé people ‘captivity’ was more a word than a fact. The fact that a man was a slave didn’t take away from him his value as a human being.”

It was from this slave or captive that the president, as a boy, got a story he never forgot. This was the story. Once upon a time there was a peasant. One year he had a good harvest and he took his crop to market. He sold well, and afterwards he wandered about the market. On a merchant’s stall there was a beautiful knife. The peasant fell in love with it and bought it. The peasant cherished his knife. He made a sheath for it, and encrusted the sheath with pearls and shells. One day, when he was pruning a tree, he cut his finger with the knife. In his pain he threw the knife to the ground and cursed it. But then he picked the knife up, wiped off the blood, and put the knife back in the sheath that hung at his side. That was all the story. Why didn’t the peasant throw away the ungrateful and wicked knife? It was because of love. The peasant loved his knife. That was the moral.

This was the story the captive at the royal court of Yamoussoukro told the boy who was to be chief. This was the story the president passed on to Hampaté Bâ, the sage, and Hampaté Bâ printed in his book.

Slavery, “captivity”—so it was an African institution. And, like poison, like sorcery, it continued. But what was the point of the abrupt little story? How could love for a knife translate into brotherly love? The story was in fact a parable—from an old president, an old chief—about power and reconciliation. Power was the prerogative of the chief; but the good chief, who followed the old ways, also sought reconciliation. Wicked men had been cast aside; but they had once been good and useful and loved; the chief would remember that, and he would forgive.

The benevolent ruler, the ruler seeking the sympathy of the ruled:
presented in this way, as an African ideal, the chief became attractive, affecting. I began to enter a little into the African world Arlette saw.

T
ERRY’S
assistant was going to arrange my trip to Yamoussoukro. Arlette was going to put me in touch with an Ivorian at the Institute of Ethno-sociology at the university who had inaugurated a controversial course in “Drummologie,” the science of talking drums. And I had been asking around for a guide to Kilometre 17, where the Evil Spirit had recently been at work, causing a schoolteacher’s house to blaze mysteriously from time to time.

These projects began to mature and come together. My days became full and varied. After the random impressions and semi-official meetings and courtesies of the first days, I began to discover themes and people. I began to live my little novel.

Philip—the English expatriate who, with his Guyanese wife, had taken me on the expatriate Sunday excursion to the beach at Grand-Bassam—left a note at my hotel one day. He had found a young Ivorian who would be willing to take me to Kilometre 17 and generally introduce me to African magic. The young man had done some guiding of this sort before, helping a colleague of Philip’s with Muslim
marabout
magicians. He was now unemployed—jobs were getting hard to find in the Ivory Coast, even for an Ivorian.

The next morning we all three—Philip leaving his office to act as go-between—met in a grubby little café in the centre of Abidjan.

The young man was well-made, strong, slender and firm at the waist. He had a finely modelled African face, every feature definite, and his skin was very black, a uniform colour, without blotch or tone. He was carefully dressed; his shirt was ironed and clean. I saw him only in this physical way. I couldn’t tell whether in his intense eyes there was intelligence, vapidity, a wish to please, or a latent viciousness. His name was Djédjé. He was of the Bété tribe, the second tribe in the Ivory Coast after the Baoulé, to which the president belonged.

Much of our time was spent talking about money, assessing all the expenses that might come up during a visit to the house at Kilometre 17. There would be the taxi—Djédjé was going to arrange that: he knew
somebody who would be cheaper than a hotel taxi. There would have to be something for the village chief; something for tips; and there would be Djédjé’s fee—he was talking of going to the village beforehand to prepare people.

Djédjé’s manner, as he leaned over the coffee cups on the plastic-topped table, was conspiratorial. But it was hard to get him to give a precise figure for anything, even his own fee. An absentness, a troubled lethargy, seemed to come over him when an item was being costed. Philip pressed him gently, never allowing a silence to last too long. It was necessary to fix a limit now, Philip said to me in English. Otherwise, when the time came to pay, Djédjé might grow “wild” and ask for any amount. It seemed to be settled at the end that the overall price would be between twenty and thirty thousand local francs, thirty-five and fifty pounds. Djédjé was going to telephone me the next day with the final figure, after he had talked with the chief and the taxi-driver.

Djédjé said he was a believer. He meant he believed in the spirits and in the power of magicians; and he said he had agreed to be my guide because he wanted me to be a believer too.

I asked whether there would be any trouble because I was a foreigner. He said no; then he said yes. I was a Hindu, wasn’t I? Hindus had a great reputation as magicians, and a
féticheur
might see me as a rival and try to hide things from me. It would be easier for a European, easier for someone like Philip, though Philip and I were the same colour.

This last was an extraordinary thing to say; it was far from being true. But it was true for Djédjé. He still had the tribal eye: people who were not Africans were simply people of another colour.

I asked him to write out his full name for me, and he wrote his family name first, his French Christian name last. When I remarked on the French name, he frowned and made a small, brushing-away gesture with his writing hand. It wasn’t important, he said; it was a name he used only in documents.

He telephoned in a message to the hotel desk the next day.
“Le rendezvous du km
17
est OK.”
And when he came to the hotel he told me that the taxi-driver had fixed the fare at eighteen thousand francs. I also understood him to say—but his language here was vague, difficult—that a further two thousand would be needed as tips. The taxi-driver was the brother of the village chief, he said. And the chief would need a bottle of whisky: alcohol had “a special value” for Africans.

He seemed to have kept the price within the limit we had agreed, and I took him to the bar to seal our bargain.

In the dark, “intimate” hotel bar—rosewood, metal-framed furniture, and buttoned black PVC upholstery—he was as much at ease, or as indifferent to his surroundings, as he had been in the café in the town. Sipping his beer, with the leisure and pauses with which he had drunk coffee in the café, he became conspiratorial again, leaning forward, talking softly, holding me with his intense eyes.

The development of the country had taken a wrong turn, he said. It had begun from the top. What did he mean by that? Not answering my question, but going on to his own concerns, he said that the university was “saturated”; and there was only one university; and there were stringent rules for entry. And now there was a lot of unemployment. People came to Abidjan and picked up Western ways and for them that was a misfortune. This was another idea. But why was it a misfortune? He lowered his voice, bent closer to me, and said—as though he expected me to understand the full import of what he was saying—that he himself had forgotten how to dance, to do the dances of his tribe, his
ethnie.
In his village he had danced, but in Abidjan he couldn’t do the dances.

I asked about his family. He said he had nine sisters and eight brothers. His father was
a planteur
, one of the peasant farmers who had created the wealth of the Ivory Coast, and he had two or three wives. All the children were now in Abidjan. Djédjé himself lived in the house of an uncle, his father’s brother. The uncle, a mechanic, had two wives and thirteen children.

I would have liked to hear more of Djédjé’s family life, but he wanted to talk about magic. There were Ivorians in Abidjan, he said, who dressed in the modern way and spoke correct French with a French accent. They had lost touch with their
ethnies
, and they said they no longer believed in the African gods. But these people didn’t want to go back to the villages because they were afraid of the sorcerers. In their hearts these French Africans believed.

I didn’t feel I was understanding all that Djédjé said, and it wasn’t a matter of language alone. Perhaps, forgetting his innocence, and misled by his opening statement that the country had taken a wrong turn, I had been looking in his conversation for something that wasn’t there: an attitude, a thought-out position. Perhaps—uneducated, unemployed, a villager in Abidjan—he was genuinely confused by the development of the
country “from the top.” Equally, he might only have been trying to get me more interested in the magic to which he had been appointed my guide.

O
NE OF THE NAMES
I had been given before coming out to the Ivory Coast was that of Georges Niangoran-Bouah. The note on him said: “Anthropologist. Contactable at the Institut d’Ethnosociologie at the university. He’s around fifty-five, world specialist on ‘Drummologie,’ form of communication of tribal drums. Knows African art well, has a fantastic collection of Ashanti weights.”