The Writer and the World (42 page)

He sounded quite a figure. And, as often happens when, as a traveller, I am given the names of important local people, I was shy of getting in touch. But I mentioned his name to various people, and I found out fairly soon that Mr. Niangoran-Bouah was academically controversial, that if he was a world expert on Drummologie it was because he had started the subject and had in fact invented the word. Drummologie was apparently as controversial a university course as the one on African philosophy. Some people doubted whether either Drummologie or African philosophy existed.

Arlette, who worked at the university, knew both Niangoran-Bouah and his secretary. The secretary was a fellow
antillaise
, a French West Indian. This lady telephoned me one morning. She had a pecking, fluting voice, and her French—unlike Arlette’s—was not easy for me to follow, especially on the telephone. Her name was Andrée, and I understood her to say that her
patron
, Mr. Niangoran-Bouah, was still lecturing in the United States, but that I should come to the university to get Mr. Niangoran-Bouah’s Drummologie book, fresh copies of which had arrived at the office that morning.

The campus was big. Some workmen sitting on the ground below a tree—the crab-grassed ground scuffed down to the roots of the young tree—pointed out the unexpectedly modest, and rather weathered, brick building which was the Institute of Ethnosociology. And it was quite exciting to see, inside, in a corridor hung with name-boards, the little board with the name
BOUAH;
to enter the little office, and to see the big
posters for the course on Drummologie, and another poster with photographs of Ashanti gold-weights.

Andrée, the West Indian secretary, Arlette’s friend, was a brown woman of more than forty. She was welcoming, but she wasn’t like Arlette. She didn’t have the vivacity, the size or the softness. Andrée was thinnish, with glasses over strained, big eyes. Her frizzy hair was pulled back tight and done in a bun. She wore a bright blue cardigan and a heavy plaid skirt: the office was air-conditioned. Her style of dress—respectable French, respectable West Indian—proclaimed her as not African. So did the knitting in her bag. She might have knitted the blue cardigan herself. She said—and she clearly had nothing to do in the office that morning—that she liked to keep her hands busy.

Her French was harder for me now than it had been on the telephone. Face to face, she talked faster, in a higher voice, making little rills of sound. I missed half of what she said, and my own poor French, with nothing in the other person’s speech to lean on, became worse.

Her desk, with the knitting, was next to the window. She pointed to the big desk of the absent
patron
, next to the corridor wall, and the broad plastic-backed swivel chair behind the desk, and she made me feel the great vacancy in the little room.

But she had
the patron’s
books. She undid a brown paper parcel and gave me a copy of a large-format paperback,
Introduction à la Drummologie.
On the cover there was a photograph of Mr. Niangoran-Bouah seated at an open-air drumming and singing ceremony of some sort (with microphones). He was a big man, chieftain-like, draped in African cotton, and he was listening with half-closed eyes to the drums. He acquired a reality for me. He became more than his name and his oddly named subject; his desk became more personal. The little bronze pieces on his desk were indeed things of beauty, as were the gold-weights in the poster on the wall.

A recurring design in those weights—an ideogram or a unit of measure—was the swastika, or something close to it. I asked Andrée whether the weights might have had an Indian origin. I didn’t make myself clear. She said only that the weights were very, very old. And that was what the poster said: these objects were old, African, proof of African civilization. To offer proof of African civilization: that, I began to feel, was the cause of the man whose secretary Andrée was.

Andrée, her morning’s work done, put her knitting in her bag and locked up the office. She said she would walk with me to where I could get a taxi. As we walked among the students she said, à propos of nothing, that I should take a Nivaquine tablet every day. It was the best protection against malaria. This was something I had thought about doing but not done. She said she would come with me in the taxi to a pharmacy she knew. We went to the pharmacy at the edge of the campus; and it was to Andrée rather than to me that the European or Lebanese pharmacist gave instructions about the Nivaquine.

It was now nearly noon, lunch time. I had taken Andrée far from her office. But she didn’t mind. She wanted the company; and I was Arlette’s friend. She said she knew a restaurant in the centre.

As we passed the blocks of flats and came out into the main corniche road, Andrée pointed vaguely and said, “My mother lives there. She reads cards.”

I pretended not to hear.

“My mother’s a widow,” Andrée said. “She reads cards. You should understand. You are a Hindu.”

“Hindus read horoscopes.”

She said, and her speech, clear and precise for the first time, sounded like something from a language lesson:
“Ma … mère … lit … les … cartes.”
(“My mother reads cards.”)

I said, allowing the taxi to take us further away from where Andrée’s mother read cards, “It’s a good gift. A good profession.”

Andrée said sharply, “My mother’s a trained nurse.”

I wondered how Andrée and her mother, both from the island of Guadeloupe in the far-off West Indies, had found themselves in the Ivory Coast. I said, “Do you live with your mother?” Her voice went high and fluting. She said no. That was how Africans lived, all together. French people, and she meant people like herself, lived independently. I asked how she had come to the Ivory Coast. She said she had met an Ivorian in Paris, and they had married. The marriage had broken up when they came to live in the Ivory Coast.

The restaurant she directed the taxi to in the centre of the town was a big, barn-like building. The doors were open and there were painted menu-boards outside. “It’s clean,” Andrée said, and when we went in—there was as yet no crowd—she said again, “Isn’t it clean?” And it was all
right, and there was even a Lebanese in a tie eating fast at one of the tables, head down, jacket on the back of his chair, like a man with a business appointment to keep. But the smell of braised meat and other foods was so high, the air so smoked and oily, even with the doors open, I didn’t want to stay. Andrée was disappointed.

We took a taxi to a hotel. It was the only place I knew. It was in a more humid part of town, in a commercial street lined with round-leaved tropical almond trees. There were Lebanese cloth shops, shoe-shine boys, and ragged Africans, most likely foreigners, sitting or lounging on the broken pavement in a smell of sweat. One African, white-capped and in a Muslim gown, was doing his midday prayer, kneeling and bending forward in a private stupor.

The hotel, one of a chain, was of the second rank, a considered blend of flash and shoddiness. But it excited Andrée. She said, “Expensive,” and her manner improved to match her idea of the place. She gave the taxi-driver a tip on her own account, a fifty-franc piece. And as soon as we were seated in the dining room—next to the glass wall, with a view of the highway below, the black creek, the ships at the far side—she became exacting and French with the uniformed Ivorian waiter, asking precise questions about the menu, taking her time.

The waiter didn’t like it. He was used to dealing with European couples, businessmen (there were a few Japanese), solitaries, people grateful for small mercies in unlikely places. Andrée ignored the waiter’s exaggerated frowns. She chose; she gave her order. I asked for an omelette. Andrée was abashed. She said what she had chosen was too expensive, and she insisted—the waiter standing by—on changing. She settled for the
jambon
with
frites.

She was now in a jumpy state, and as soon as the waiter went away she began to talk very fast. She said that life was hard for her. She was trapped in the Ivory Coast, and had no means of returning home—and she meant France, Guadeloupe in the West Indies, left behind many years before, now too far away in every sense. She earned ninety thousand francs a month at the university, £150; and she had been lucky, six years before, to get the job. Before that, she had taught at an infants’ school. “Not nice,” she said.

Her marriage to the Ivorian she had met in Paris ended four years after she had come to the Ivory Coast. Her husband’s family had broken
the marriage up, she said.
Françaises
, Frenchwomen like herself, who married Ivorians should stay in France, she said. In the Ivory Coast the Ivorian families broke the marriages up.

The boy brought the food. He looked pleased with himself. He was carrying six dishes on both arms, as though demonstrating French restaurant style to Andrée, who had been so French with him. She didn’t return his smile. She was looking hard and doubtfully at what he was doing. And then—as though doomed by Andrée’s stare to fulfil
petit français
ideas about African clumsiness—he dropped one of the six plates. It wasn’t one of ours. When, defeated and downcast, he came back to clean up the mess on the carpet, Andrée was eating the
jambon
and
frites
daintily. She left one piece of
jambon
on one side of her plate while she dealt with the other, and it seemed as though she wasn’t going to touch the piece of
jambon
she had put to one side. But at the end it had all gone—
-frites, jambon
, jelly.

She talked again about her life in the Ivory Coast. She didn’t take taxis often, she said; they were too expensive. So altogether I was giving her a treat, and I decided to make it as good a treat as the restaurant allowed.

I asked whether she would like cheese. Camembert, gruyère, she asked? I said yes. She said she loved camembert. Didn’t she like
chèvre?
Yes, but camembert was the delicacy; and it was something else that was expensive.

She called the boy over, and in her firm way—showing him no compassion after his accident, ignoring and thereby killing the half-surliness with which he tried to fight back—she asked whether they had a variety of cheeses, a choice,
a plateau.
The boy said yes. He began to explain. She cut him short; she ordered him to bring the cheese board. He was recognizing her authority now; and when he brought the board she became very demure, as if rewarding his deference. She took just two little pieces of camembert, though for her
plateau
she could have had four times the quantity.

She said the camembert was good. It wasn’t, really. I pressed her to have some dessert. She yielded; she called the boy and asked him to bring the tray with the desserts. She hadn’t been abroad, she said, going neatly, without hurry, at the pallid slice of apple tart she had chosen. She hadn’t even been to the neighbouring countries, Ghana, Liberia, Guinea. She didn’t have the money to travel.

When the bill came she made a delicate attempt at paying, taking out
her purse and opening it as though it contained a secret. I made her put the purse away. And then—French graces, West Indian mulatto graces, coming to her after the hotel parody of a French bourgeois lunch—she said she would like to visit me one day in my own country.

We took a taxi back. Andrée said she wanted to get off at the church. But the church, on this occasion at least, was only a marker. Andrée’s widowed mother, who read cards, lived near the church, and lived alone, as a Frenchwoman should.

Such solitude, in this bright African light, so like the light of Caribbean afternoons. But how far away home must have seemed to Andrée, who, after Guadeloupe and Paris, now had only the Ivory Coast!

The highway curved on beside the lagoon, through a semi-diplomatic development zone, to the Forum Golf Hotel, opposite the half-developed golf course, where a few old, thick-trunked baobabs had been allowed to remain, reminders of tropical forest. In the garden of the hotel, around the swimming pool, with its artificial rocks, its hollow, plastic elephants, and its water chute, children played and the topless, breast-less women sunbathed. African guards in brown uniforms sat at various security points. The white sand of what looked like a beach had been artificially mounded up: the sand rested on a concrete base, which showed two or three feet high at the water’s edge. It was against this concrete that the tainted lagoon rocked. On this tainted water there grew a small, green, cabbage-like plant, with a root like a thin beard; and these water plants came together in sheltered places, in the lee of boats, or against sections of the concrete wall, to form little rocking carpets of living green.

I found, in
Introduction à la Drummologie
, that Andrée was given a special mention by Mr. Niangoran-Bouah: she was the conscientious
col-laboratrice
of a difficult and obstinate
patron.
That made him sound attractive. And reading beyond the acknowledgements, I discovered that Mr. Niangoran-Bouah had indeed made up the word “drummologie.” Other words had been thought of—
tamtamologie, tamtalogie, tambourinologie, tambourologie, tambologie, attangbanologie.
But these words had been rejected because they seemed to stress the art of drum-beating rather than the study of the “talking drum” as a record of tribal history and tradition. The talking drum mimicked, and preserved, the actual words of old chants: these chants were documents of the African past. As much as the Ashanti weights, with their elements of art and mathematics, true knowledge of the talking drum gave to Africa the old civilization
which Europeans and colonialists said didn’t exist. This was Mr. Niangoran-Bouah’s cause. This was the cause Andrée, from Guadeloupe and France, served.

I
TOLD
A
RLETTE
, when we next met, that I had had great trouble with Andrée’s French. Arlette said she had worried about that. Andrée’s speech was difficult. Andrée was a little nervous,
un peu nerveuse.
But she was marvellous with her hands. She knitted and made tapestries. Her mother was a very good
voyante.
She read cards and always said interesting things.