The Writer and the World: Essays

  It was a great creation, the golf course, perfection in a way. It represented prodigious labour. Yet it was only a view: one look took it all in. And soon it wasn’t enough. Splendour on this scale, in this setting, and after a 150-mile drive, only created an appetite for more: the visitor began to enter the ambition and fantasy of the creator. There was a main street, very wide; there was a market; there were workers’ settlements. Something like a real town was attaching itself to the presidential creation. But the visitor, always quickly taking for granted what had been created, continued to be distracted by the gaps, the scarred earth, the dusty vacancies. And, if you didn’t want to play golf, there was nothing to do.

  There were the president’s crocodiles. They were to be fed at five. The presidential palace was some distance away, down one of the great avenues. Gil Sherman’s car was necessary. In the levelled land, in the glare and emptiness of the afternoon, the scale of everything seemed magnified. The palace wall went on and on. Beside it was a lake. In the middle, an iron-railed causeway lined with young coconut trees led to a palace gate, guarded by soldiers of the presidential guard in maroon-coloured tunics. The cars of visitors—mainly white—were parked on the causeway.

  In the lake on either side were the crocodiles. We saw the first just as we left the car: barely noticeable in the muddy water, a mere protuberance of eyes, until its thorny back became clear. We exclaimed. An African, possibly an official (from his lounging, casual stance), said, “Il est petit.” A small one. Then we saw eyes and thorny backs everywhere on the surface of the water—the thorns like the thorns on the bark of the baobab tree.

  On one side of the causeway there was a stone-paved embankment sloping down to the water. On this embankment were a number of crocodiles, small ones, absolutely still, eyes bright and apparently unseeing, jaws open, the lower jaw of each crocodile showing only as a great hollow, oddly simple in shape, oddly clean and dry-looking, yellow-pink and pale. Flies moved in and out of those open jaws. On the other side of the causeway there was no paved embankment, only a sandy bank, marked by the tails of crocodiles. White feathers, as of a chicken, were scattered about in the sand. There were crocodiles on the bank. They were like the colour of the sand and from a distance were not noticeable.

  The feeder was already in attendance. He had come in a grey Land-Rover; it was parked on the causeway. He was clearly a special man. He was very tall, very thin. He wore a skull-cap and a flowered gown. He had an official with him, a man of more ordinary size in a grey, short-sleeved safari suit. In one hand the feeder had a thin, long knife; in his other hand he had a tin or bucket with pieces of meat. Heart or lungs, Gil Sherman told me: pale pink, with bits of animal “piping.”

  The feeder made a rattling sound on the iron rails. Then he threw the meat. The crocodiles on the paved embankment were awkward, slow. They had to tilt their long snouts against the flat paving stones—showing the pale-yellow underside of their bodies—to pick up the meat. They couldn’t get the meat that had fallen on their own backs or into the crevices between the paving stones. They didn’t seem always to know where the meat had fallen.

  While the feeder threw the meat, the grey-suited official with him clucked and called softly to the crocodiles, speaking to them as to children. “Avalez, avalez.” (“Swallow, swallow.”)

  Later, on the other side of the causeway, there was another ritual. The older, bigger crocodiles were there, yellow, with twisted snouts, heavy bellies, and teeth which, when closed together, suggested a long, jagged, irregularly stitched wound.

  The tall feeder was now holding a black chicken by the wings. He swung the chicken slowly up and down. The squawks of alarm from the chicken died down. The chicken lost control of its neck, which hung limp. Two old crocodiles, as though used to the ritual, waited close together on the sand. More meat was thrown and gobbled up, except where it had fallen on the backs of the crocodiles. Turtles, appearing in the water, swam ashore for their meat. One young crocodile, having got his meat, swam away fast to a little sand-bank on the lake to eat or ingest his meat without disturbance. Then the chicken was thrown at the two old crocodiles. The open jaws snapped shut. The crowd gasped. But the feeder hadn’t thrown straight; and the crocodiles hadn’t moved. The stunned chicken fluttered its wings; it partly recovered from its stupor; it ran along to the end of the sandy bank, near the causeway.

  The tall feeder in the flowered gown didn’t allow the chicken to get away. He jumped over the rail to the bank and—his long thin knife his only means of defence—walked unhurriedly past the crocodiles to where the chicken was. The chicken didn’t run. The feeder seized it, climbed back over the rail to the road. And again the ritual swinging of the bird by the wings was accompanied by clucking calls to the two waiting crocodiles from the grey-suited official. Again the bird was thrown. Again the jaws snapped; again the bird escaped. But now the clucking calls had brought from the water on to the sand a crocodile even bigger and older than the other two. His snout was battered at the tip. His teeth looked stained and old and worn. The chicken’s limp neck was placed on the iron rail; the feeder began to bring down his knife. I didn’t look.

  A shout from the crowd told me that the chicken had been thrown. And when I turned I saw the bird turned to a feathery debris in the seemingly grinning maw of one crocodile, not the oldest, round unseeing eyes apparently alight with pleasure, black feathers sticking out on either side of the jaw. A moment’s ingestion, and all was gone, except for a mash in the lower jaw. The ceremony was over. The feeder, skull-capped, prettily gowned, took his tin and walked back, unsmiling, to the Land-Rover.

  A public ceremony of kingship outside the big blank wall of the presidential palace. Behind that wall there were trees, and somewhere among those trees was the president’s ancestral village with the old palaver tree. That site, which felt sacred now, the scene perhaps of more private rituals, was not open to the public. Ibrahim Keita, the golfer, the president’s protégé, the man said to be charged by the president with the development of Yamoussoukro, Ibrahim had seen the village behind the palace wall. But Ibrahim’s West Indian wife hadn’t.

  Ibrahim was to have guided me around Yamoussoukro. But he hadn’t been able to do that. He had, however, done a gracious and unexpected thing: he had deputed his elder brother to show Gil Sherman and me around. The brother came in the morning to the Hotel President. The brother was a doctor, smaller than Ibrahim, softer, grey-haired, with glasses, and with the confident manner of some black West Indian professional men of established family.

  The Keita family was from the neighbouring state of Guinea; in the Ivory Coast they were refugees of a sort. And the doctor’s story that morning, in the marble lobby of the Hotel President, was of his escape from Guinea in 1964. A quiet hint from someone, a false message to an official, an early-morning drive across the border: Dr. Keita still marvelled at his escape, was still shocked by the terrors of Guinea, where in 1964 people like himself, professional men, educated men, men of the cheferie, were being picked up and killed “like cattle,” locked in cells and left to die, without food or water: the famous “black diet” of Guinea.

  Just across the border, in a climate like this, among people like those one saw, there was that kind of African kingship. It gave an added wonder to Yamoussoukro, to the chieftaincy or kingship symbolized by the crocodiles. And driving around with Dr. Keita that morning, I found it hard not to be moved by the ambition of the president, his wish to build and create to the highest standards he knew.

  In his magnificence there was religion. Just as in some societies the peasant reserves his very best for his god, so here this striving after material splendour served the divinity that protected the kingship. Yamoussoukro was like the Pyramids or Angkor Wat. But these monuments, looking to the rulers’ afterlife, had no purpose beyond themselves. Yamoussoukro was to be a living metropolis. It was to be the ruler’s ennobling benefaction to his people, people of the West African forest, and—like the crocodile ritual—it was
proof both of his right to rule and the justness of his rule.

  Far down a wide, empty avenue we came upon a university or a centre of higher education. It had a freestanding, purely decorative arcade all around, as high as the building itself. The arcade was faced with brown mosaic. Great walkways linked the four quarters of the main building. There was an Olympic-standard swimming pool (showing, already, some signs of neglect). There were dormitories for students, houses for faculty staff. And just a little way down the avenue was another, complementary educational complex.

  How many students attended the university? Someone said six hundred; somebody else said sixty.

  The metropolis of Yamoussoukro awaited full use. But it had been created by foreigners. It was something that had been imported and paid for; and modern buildings like the university were not simply physical monuments that would last; they were like pieces of machinery, liable to decay. The new world existed in the minds of others. The skills could be learned, but faith in the new world was fragile. When the president went, and the foreigners went away (as some people wanted them to), would the faith survive? Or would Africans be claimed by another idea of reality?

  In the slave plantations of the Caribbean Africans existed in two worlds. There was the world of the day; that was the white world. There was the world of the night; that was the African world, of spirits and magic and the true gods. And in that world ragged men, humiliated by day, were transformed—in their own eyes, and the eyes of their fellows—into kings, sorcerers, herbalists, men in touch with the true forces of the earth and possessed of complete power. A king of the night, a slave by day, might be required at night never to exert himself; he would be taken about by his fellows in a litter. (That particular fact, about a slave king, came out at an inquiry into a slave “revolt” in Trinidad in 1805.) To the outsider, to the slave-owner, the African night world might appear a mimic world, a child’s world, a carnival. But to the African—however much, in daylight, he appeared himself to mock it—it was the true world: it turned white men to phantoms and plantation life to an illusion.

  Something of this twin reality existed at Yamoussoukro. The metropolis, the ruler’s benefaction to his people, belonged to the world of the day, the world of doing and development. The crocodile ritual—speaking of a power issuing to the president from the earth itself—was part of the night, ceaselessly undoing the reality of the day. One idea worked against the other. So, in spite of the expense, the labour, the ambition, there was a contradiction in the modern pharaonic dream.

  The crocodiles—I hadn’t heard about them until I had got to the Ivory Coast. And now that I had seen them I kept on hearing about them. Everything I heard added to the religious mystery. I heard about one of the palace watchmen who had been killed on the sandy bank beside the causeway. A crocodile had laid its eggs in the sand. The watchman didn’t know. He walked past the spot. The crocodile rushed at him and seized him and dragged him into the water. There was another story about a man, a villager, who had fallen over the iron rail into the lake and had been mangled by a crocodile, as the black chicken had been mangled. Was that an accident? Or had the man been pushed, a forced sacrifice? That was one view. The other was that the man was a voluntary sacrifice, that he had been persuaded (perhaps by some threat) to do what he had done in order to save his village from some evil.

  So the crocodiles—seen in daylight, by a crowd with cameras—became more than a tourist sight. They became touched with the magic and power they were intended to have, though the setting was so staged: the broad avenue lined with lamp standards, the artificial lake (no doubt dug with modern excavators), the iron rails, the presidential guard with guns. The long-gowned feeder and the grey-suited official with him, when I called them back to mind, were especially unsettling. The official had smiled and clucked at the crocodiles, as though he knew them well, as though they were on his side.

  And the symbolism remained elusive, worrying. Did the feeding ritual hold a remnant of ancient Egyptian earth-worship, coming down and across to black Africa through the Sudan? In a famous papyrus scroll from ancient Egypt, a woman in a plain white smock, hair undone, is shown bowed down before the crocodile, both on the horizontal line representing the earth, the horizontal line resting on the chevrons that in Egyptian art depict water. Or was the symbolism simpler? A crocodile was the strongest creature in water; it was universally feared; it lived long; it slept with its eyes open. And what was the significance of the hen? Was it an enemy? Or did it stand for reincarnation, as some people said: new life daily given to the crocodile, emblem of the ruler’s power? Perhaps the concepts were not really translatable.

  Outside the town, we came upon another kind of order, another kind of power: the president’s agricultural estates. They went on for miles and miles: the disorder of dark tropical forest replaced by levelled, sun-struck fields, where mangoes, avocadoes and pineapples grew in rows. How had the president come by all this land? Had he converted unused, unclaimed forest into private land? Or did he as chief own all the land of his tribe? No one that morning seemed to understand my question; and the answer was no longer important. Two years before, the president had given his estates to the state. Like Yamoussoukro itself, it was a benefaction, a model for the future, and part of the ruler’s religious sacrifice.

  Doubly religious was the great mosque of Yamoussoukro. It was at once a gesture to the Muslims among the population, and the ruler’s offering to another aspect of divinity. The mosque was square-towered, not fine in its detail, and I was told it was in the North African style, North Africa being the source of what was Islamic in this part of Africa. North Africa, France: the African ruler, aiming at material splendour, had to look outside black Africa. It was part of the pathos of Yamoussoukro. The mosque, off a wide, unfilled avenue, was in a big, bare yard, open to sun and the harmattan. Like many other buildings in Yamoussoukro, it appeared—perhaps wrongly—to await full use. It felt like a shell; it was possible, in the barrenness of its unwelcoming yard, to see it as a ruin. But it was big, and it was one of the sights.

  We had a late lunch at the golf club. Ibrahim Keita and an Ivorian banker were our hosts. Ibrahim, after his day on the course, was fatigued and said little. The architecture was in the luxurious and playful international style. The menu was French, too ambitious for its own good; the waiters were uniformed. Yamoussoukro might have been only a playground, a tourist spot. But we who were there were living out the president’s ambitions for his ancestral village. We were, whether we liked it or not, in his religious embrace. In another part of the metropolis, in an hour or so, the crocodiles were to be fed again.

  There were many cars on the road back to Abidjan: people returning to the other world from villages that were as sacred to them as Yamoussoukro was to the president. It was the end of the public holiday, the twenty-second anniversary of independence, celebrated by white, green and saffron flags everywhere, and coloured portraits of the very small, benign man who had ruled for all that time.

  11

  IN ABIDJAN I met a middle-aged European who had worked all his life in Africa and had lived for many years in the Ivory Coast. He worked in the interior. His job was rough, unintellectual. He had little social life; and unlike the other expatriates I had met, he spoke about Africa without any obliqueness. He said, “All that you see here in Abidjan is make-believe. If the Europeans were to go away it would all vanish.”

  Africans, he said, were still ruled by magic. In the interior, when a chief or an important local man died, the man’s servants and his wives were buried with him. If the servants had run away at the time of the death, then heads were bought. That explained the regular disappearance of children, as reported in the necrology page of the newspaper. On that page there was a coded way of referring to certain kinds of death. A death by poisoning was said to have occurred “after a short illness,” après une courte maladie. A child reported as having disappeared was presumed to have been sacrificed. In the interior, for these fu
neral or other sacrifices, a head could currently be bought for ten thousand francs, less than £20. Not long before, in the area where this European worked, an important local man died. Heads were needed—the man was very important; and the panic was so general that for three weeks no worker turned up for the night shift at the factory the European managed. At certain ceremonies of welcome a chief or an important man had to have his feet washed in blood. Usually it was the blood of a chicken or an animal. But to do a chief the highest honour, his feet should be washed in human blood, the blood of a sacrificed person, a child. And the child could be eaten afterwards.

  I believed what this man said. He liked living in Africa; he had worked nowhere else; he could work nowhere else. His directness came from his acceptance of African ways. He was not concerned to score points off Africa. But his acceptance went with a correct distancing of himself from the continent and its people. And for him that perhaps was the charm of the expatriate life: the heightened sense of the self that Africa gave.

  It was of that kind of expatriate that I heard not long afterwards from a young American lawyer. He worked for an international law firm and was posted in the Ivory Coast. Business sometimes took him to Zaire, the former Belgian Congo. The Zaire boom of 1971 and 1972 was long past, the lawyer said; but there were now more expatriates than ever in the country—Indians, Greeks, Lebanese. They were people hooked on the way of life. They liked living on the edge of Africa, as it were, at the extremity of their own civilizations. They knew how to manage in the country; they liked that too, that idea of knowing how to manage. Some did well; some ended badly; most just carried on.

  Recently the lawyer had been to Zaire to make an inventory of the effects of an elderly American who had died. The American had gone to the old Belgian Congo in the 1930s, and he had stayed there through everything, colonial rule, the Second World War, Congolese independence, the civil wars. He had spent his last years in a one-bedroomed flat in Kinshasa. He was worth about a million dollars, but the personal possessions he had left behind were few: two suits, four pairs of trousers, a couple of pairs of shoes. He had done nothing big or adventurous. His business dealings had been simple, small, mainly in property. He had never used the money he had made. It lay idle in banks, in stocks. He had stayed in the Congo because he had been hooked on the life.