The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief

  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.

  In my hotel in Abidjan, the capital, there was a United Nations man who was doing work on epidemics. Epidemics were strange things, he said. In the beginning they swept everything before them; later, for no discernible reason, the virus or disease moderated. This had happened with syphilis. It was as though the virus feared that if it killed everybody it would destroy itself, since it would have no one to infect. Something like this seemed to have happened with Houphouët’s crocodiles. They were no longer feared; people lived more easily with the idea of the thing, which as a result appeared to lose its power.

  In any event the ritual could hardly survive its founder. It was built around his need. And it was as though with his death much of Houphouët’s grandeur had disappeared into thin air. The airport still carried his name; so did the big orange-coloured stadium on the edge of the lagoon in Abidjan, and the stadium was also hung with a very big photograph of the man. But something like bad magic was about to befall that stadium. Some weeks after I left the Ivory Coast there was a calamity during the football match against Malawi. A wall fell (too many people perhaps); the police for some reason fired tear gas at the panicking crowd; and in the mêlée sixty-nine people died. It would not be easy for Houphouët’s name to recover. Already, even before that tragedy, people were ready to speak less reverentially about the king and were ready at the same time to dismiss as Togolese the rituals that had once been used to perpetuate the rule of the crocodile master. (Houphouët’s wife came from Togo.)

  2

  IN 1982, when the crocodiles and the meat-eating turtles were the draw in Yamoussoukro, the cathedral existed only in outline, with the dome (intended to be higher than the dome of St. Peter’s) only a few curving lines in metal. There was nothing more to see. Now the cathedral was what visitors were taken to Yamoussoukro to see. It was, indeed, a creation, beautiful and unexpected and staggering. It echoed St. Peter’s in its dome and its tall outside columns. In some accounts it had cost 300 million dollars; in some it had cost 400 million; and there were vain local people who said, boastfully, but without truth, that it had bankrupted the country.

  The steps to the plinth were of white marble from Italy, and the floor was a Roman design in coloured marble. Below the famous dome the strong tropical glare was softened by very tall French stained-glass windows in blue and purple that ran from the floor to the dome. At the far end was a copy of Bernini’s baldaquin in St. Peter’s (which had itself been partly made from bronze impiously stripped from the ancient Roman Pantheon, a full fifteen hundred years after Hadrian’s reconstruction of the burnt-out original). A notice asked pilgrims and visitors to be silent: we were in a house of God.

  It was quite desolate outside. The columns of the porch framed extensive flat gardens: shrubs trimmed low to fill a European-style design. Various comparisons came to mind. It could have been a pastiche somewhere in the United States. For its costliness—and thoroughness—it could have been Houphouët’s Taj Mahal.

  The architect had left out a device whereby cleaners or their brooms could have got up to the coffered ceiling between the high columns of the porch. Cleaners couldn’t get up, but tropical spiders could: they had begun to create noticeable brown webs up there. Elsewhere, between one column of the porch and the outer skin of the dome a fair-sized piece of stucco had fallen off, revealing the metal armature. Much complicated scaffolding would be needed before that could be put right; perhaps it never would be. It was possible that this was how it would be nibbled away, this piece of vainglory of the forest king. A woman guide said that on Sundays up to nine hundred people came for the services. This might have been so; but until the government moved the capital the hundred and fifty miles from Abidjan to Yamoussoukro (as was projected) there could be no rooted community in the forest town. Even then there would be much to do. Hidden from the cathedral and its gardens were moraines of uncollected garbage that lay in all the streets of the town: Africa reclaiming its own.

  3

  AS MUCH as on his magic Houphouët’s rule had depended on the support of the French. In 1982 there was a French army base amid the coconut trees near the airport; and in many places in the Ivory Coast there were French people helping to keep Houphouët’s show on the road. The French were welcomed as investors and they were glad to come since they could repatriate ninety per cent of their profits. They ran the restaurants and they ran them well, giving the Ivory Coast its reputation for fine French food. There was an official word for these French guests who helped to create the illusion that this African state, unlike its neighbours, was on the move. The word was co-opérants; it can best be translated as “helpers.”

  Even if one knew nothing about the political situation one could be worried about this French presence. It seemed that a crisis was being prepared, and after Houphouët’s death the crisis came: a very involved business, as crises in small places tend to be, not easy for an outsider to disentangle. There was a many-sided civil war: people of the country against black immigrants from the neighbouring poorer countries, a tribal war with the French on one side, with the French then retaliating against hostile Africans, and finally Africans against the French, so that yet another aspect of Houphouët’s legacy vanished. The day came in 2004 when gangs of black men roamed the streets of Abidjan looking for white people to kill.

  There was, as it happened, a survivor of that day staying in the hotel. She was not white; she was of mixed descent, with an African mother and a French father; and she had a black husband. She had gone on that bad day in 2004 to fetch her children from school. A black crowd surrounded her car and pulled her out. Some instinct of self-preservation made her say she was Moroccan, and not half French. She looked Moroccan; perhaps she had been told that before, and now she said it to the crowd, and it saved her. Morocco, perhaps because of its good airline, popular with Africans, has a fair reputation in this part of Africa.

  When she told the story she tapped a finger of her right hand on her pale left hand. She said, “They were looking for white skin.”

  She had lived all her life in the Ivory Coast. So the experience had undermined her in many ways. It had given her such severe “palpitations” that her black husband, a diplomat, had taken her out of the country for some years. She was now back in the Ivory Coast, but the country still made her uneasy. She still feared the sight of a crowd of black men.

  But black crowds couldn’t now be avoided. One Sunday there was to be an African football championship match in Abidjan, in the great orange stadium, named for Houphouët, which lay between the hotel and the lagoon. The Ivory Coast was going to play Zambia. Entrance was free. The match was going to start at four in the afternoon, but from five on Sunday morning people had begun to gather. The stadium had various entrances, far and near. Soon the crowd at each entrance made an unmoving mass; perhaps they didn’t move because the stadium wasn’t open. They looked picturesque, something for a painter of crowds, an African Canaletto: a stippling of black faces, jeans, and tee shirts orange
, white or red.

  At some time in mid-morning a few people appeared on some of the uncovered seats of the stadium, to the left, which I could see from my hotel window. Those people were going to wait for six hours for the match. The seats would have been hot enough already, and the great heat of the day was to come. I expected the waiting crowd now to move slowly into the stadium, but it didn’t happen like that. It wasn’t possible from my hotel room to understand all the movements of the crowd. From time to time, as the start of the match drew near, the riot police charged sections of the crowd; it was like a game. The charged crowd ran away in various directions. The stippling effect broke up, and what had looked picturesque became frightening. And then, quite quickly, the crowd reformed.

  The “Moroccan” lady had seen the crowds. Later she said, “I hate football.”

  The Ivory Coast lost to Zambia that Sunday. The local people couldn’t be generous to the winners, after the hours of waiting, the heat, and the occasional trouble with the police. It was easy to understand their frustration. Football released great passions here. Houphouët’s stadium was orange-coloured. Orange was the colour of the national side. Six weeks later, when Ivory Coast was playing Malawi, and winning, a wall in the stadium fell down and sixty-nine people died.

  4

  ABIDJAN HAD grown so much I had trouble thinking back to the town I had known in 1982. I had stayed then in the Forum Hotel. No one seemed to know about it now. I remembered an open field across the road where fat baobab trees grew. I remembered the lagoon, like the sea, outside one of the hotel’s public rooms; in the heat of the afternoon the algae-covered water rocked and it was then like an undulating green carpet. I remembered a general feeling of openness. There was nothing like that now; all those memories seemed to have been swallowed up by time itself. Two days before I left, a taxi-driver, showing me the sights, took me to the Golf Hotel. It was set, stylishly, a little way from the busy road and the lagoon was at its back. It would have been the old Forum, re-made in the image of over-peopled Africa, with a new kind of staff and a new kind of clientele.

  Houphouët, promoting his town of Yamoussoukro, had built an autoroute to it from Abidjan. A hundred and fifty miles, mainly bush: at the time it had seemed part of the vainglory and general wastefulness of Yamoussoukro. But the autoroute was now in use, beaten up in parts, a short stretch replaced by a red dirt road (tree branches on the asphalt announcing the diversion), and it was now the main thoroughfare for heavy trucks from the north and the countries to the north, bringing supplies to Abidjan.

  Between Abidjan and Yamoussoukro the land is ravaged. For a hundred and fifty miles the tropical woodland or forest has been cut down and replaced by patches of petty planting: banana, knotty cassava (introduced to Africa by the Portuguese): the subsistence food of people who are not yet a peasantry. They make scratchings in the bush; these scratchings may develop into a village of grass and mud and mats (for the roof), and that village might turn into something more durable, of concrete and tin.

  The pressure on the land is great; the migrants never stop coming down from the poor and arid north. From the days of Houphouët and the French there is a myth of the blessedness of the lush Ivory Coast where no one need starve. Needs are small; there isn’t the time or space to think of grandeur. But, in spite of the myth, it is possible that in that ravaged, once forested land they will one day be hungry. For people to aim at grandeur they must have a picture of grandeur in their minds. Houphouët didn’t provide this. His rhetorical buildings were part of the private magic that served him alone.

  The land has suffered much. The Ivory Coast—land of ivory beside Ghana’s land of gold—is now without the elephants that by their death provided the ivory of their tusks. There are two cruel elephant monuments in Abidjan—one of a female elephant with her calf (elephants are food in this part of Africa), and a tall awkward obelisk composed (wickedly) of elephant tusks alone. Many small hands got rid of the mighty elephants, and many little scratchings have surely destroyed the great forest.

  In another direction—east of Abidjan, to Bingerville—the idea of landscape has been undone or certainly hidden by line upon line of inelegant small houses. I remembered the road to Bingerville as a road through country, almost wilderness. Now it belongs to the developers; and the wretchedness of Abidjan encroaches.

  Bingerville is named for Binger, a French governor of the Ivory Coast. And there is so little of history and architecture here in this former French colony that Binger’s house, said to be a great house, is promoted as one of the sights. It is far from being a great house. There are a score of grander public and private buildings in a small place like Trinidad, on the other side of the Atlantic; and Binger’s house is now, more appropriately, an orphanage: Africa drowning in the fecundity of its people.

  In Ghana, just next door, with the same kind of people and climate and vegetation, the British (as they did elsewhere in the empire) created a botanical garden, which still more or less stands, with a few local intrusions. Next to Binger’s house there is said to be a botanical garden. On the outer wall, freshly distempered, an enormous sign, newly done over in fancifully shaded letters at least two feet high, says that there is a garden. All that is missing is the garden.

  After two short lines of ancient and very fat bamboo clumps, dead and grey in the centre, then yellow, then streaky green—clearly from the original garden, and they still cast a pleasant shade, bamboo’s great virtue in the tropics—after this there is nothing, only bush and a few mildewed concrete buildings. But the guides still want to show you the gardens and the plants.

  When they give up they tell you that destruction came to the botanical gardens of Bingerville during the troubles, the many little wars that undid the country when Houphouët left it. So the developer’s landscape that disfigures what might have been beautiful hills between Abidjan and Bingerville, and these tragic gardens might also be said to be part of the legacy of Houphouët, who allowed the French to keep the country going, while practising magic for himself, wasting the substance of his country, building religiously, like a Pharoah—Shelley’s Ozymandias again.

  The land is full of cruelty which is hard for the visitor to bear. From the desert countries to the north long-horned cattle are sent for slaughter here in big ramshackle trucks, cargoes of misery, that bump along the patched and at times defective autoroute to Abidjan, to the extensive abattoir area near the docks. And there in trampled and vile black earth these noble creatures, still with dignity, await their destiny in the smell of death, with sometimes a calf, all alone, without a mother, finding comfort of a sort in sleep, a little brown circle on the dirty ground, together with the beautiful goats and sheep assembled for killing. The ground around the abattoir goes on and on. When sights like this meet the eyes of simple people every day there can be no idea of humanity, no idea of grandeur.

  5

  IT WAS part of the wisdom of the country that nature here was bountiful and unfailing; it was what brought the immigrants. Part of the bounty of nature were the bats. For half an hour or so every day in the late afternoon the bats came, flying low, just outside the windows of taller buildings. They speckled the sky. One million bats would have made a memorable show, but prodigal nature provided four or five millions, at least. The bats flew in a circle over the city. They had no fixed destination. They roosted on trees, hanging upside down within the pale-pink protection of their wings, which they folded around themselves with an almost human gesture. The trees from which they hung were damaged at the top, half stripped.

  Africans eat everything that nature provides (except when a particular animal is the totem of a tribe or clan). The local people liked eating these bats. The main trouble was in getting them down. Some people used slingshots, and then there was the trouble of cooking the creatures. The bats were tough (all that flying) and had to be cooked for hours before they became acceptable.

  It might have been thought that with all that flying some hundreds of bats w
ould have dropped dead every evening and fallen from the sky to a grateful people. But no one had seen such a thing, a bat dead on the ground. And I was told by someone (perhaps not an expert) that when bats had to die they did not show themselves, but hid away, being in this like cats, who could leave their houses and go away to die.

  This, however, was a luxury few of the cats of the Ivory Coast could enjoy. No cats wandered the streets here. Cats were eaten; they were part of the bounty of nature, and they could be reared to be killed. “Like chickens,” the youngish man said, and the comparison amused him.

  It was only on the last morning of my stay, on my way to the airport, that I found out what was the best way in the Ivory Coast of killing a cat or kitten. You put them in a sack of some sort, and then you dropped the sack in a pot of boiling water.

  The thought of this everyday kitchen cruelty made everything else in the Ivory Coast seem unimportant.

  Then, a few days later, when I was in Gabon, I learned more about the bats of Abidjan. They were fruit bats; they were also known as flying foxes. And they were not as innocent as they sounded. They, or their fleas, were carriers of the contagious Ebola virus. The victims bled helplessly till they died. No one knew for sure how the virus jumped from bat to man; but a good guess was that the virus was transmitted by the eating of the bat. So the darkening of the Abidjan sky at dusk was not only part of the visual drama of West Africa: it was like a plague waiting to fall on the men below.