The Masque Of Africa Part 7

Richmond said, "I went to the office of the traditional chief and saw the homage the people were giving him by bowing. I only offered my hand because I am not from his clan and I am educated. But indigenous people will bow low to him. The land of the ancestors is held by the chiefs as custodians. You have to give gifts of schnapps to tell them that you recognise their authority. If we buy the land the paramount chief will give the money to the clan chiefs and they will distribute to the families that make up the clan."

I said, "The other day you told me your brother said it was a curse to be born in Africa."

"It is a pa.s.sionate statement. Being born in Africa is like being born in ignorance. We are indolent. Yesterday I encountered a very embarra.s.sing situation. The chief I went to see lives in a finished building, but it faces a public toilet. The chief saw nothing wrong. I did not want to offend him by telling him that he was living by the cesspit. If I had sat there two more hours I would have gone to hospital, but he was comfortable. That is why I say the white man, bad as he was, brought enlightenment. We have a proverb that the man who has gone nowhere thinks his mother's soup is the best."

7.

I HAD TOLD HAD TOLD Pa-boh that I wanted to see his Gaa high priest. Later I had thought that I didn't really need to, but it was too late to withdraw. And then Pa-boh said he was coming to see me on Sunday at midday to take me to see the high priest. He couldn't do it earlier on Sunday because in the morning he would be conducting a service at his church. Pa-boh that I wanted to see his Gaa high priest. Later I had thought that I didn't really need to, but it was too late to withdraw. And then Pa-boh said he was coming to see me on Sunday at midday to take me to see the high priest. He couldn't do it earlier on Sunday because in the morning he would be conducting a service at his church.

He came as he said. I was in the hotel dining room. His appearance there was startling. He wore a white gown with wide strips of purple. (White, as he had told me, was what the high priests of his traditional religion wore. The purple, which he didn't tell me about, was more complicated. It went back to cla.s.sical days in the Mediterranean, when purple, an expensive colour, indicated high rank for both Romans and Carthaginians, and then was taken over by the church. It had a history, Pa-boh's purple.) He had a silver necklace which was engraved with something about Jesus.

He was aware of the impression he was making in the busy hotel dining room. He had a little smile on his lips, like a star who wished to play down his fame. I asked him who designed his white gown. He was pleased to be asked. He said the gown had been designed by an elder of his church. So, as I suspected, it had been designed-especially the broad purple band on the left of his heart.

He didn't want to eat anything, although he had been preaching for much of the morning; and I thought (since the traditional side of his religion was so full of taboos and portents) it might have been a religious prohibition against eating before a certain time of day.

What I couldn't tell Pa-boh was that I had developed nerves about making this trip with him. My friend, Patrick Edwards, the Trinidad amba.s.sador in Uganda, had told me that I should be careful of religious people in this part of the world. Patrick, the amba.s.sador, had told me that it wasn't only the poor who had to be careful. He had a story from Nigeria. A professional person had been abducted and couldn't be found. The family of the abducted man had gone to no less a person than the Oni of Ife, and after some time they had heard from the Oni that the abducted person, now dead, was "lying" in a shrine somewhere.

This gave another idea of what a shrine was. It was one of those words I thought I knew and had not, as it were, researched. I remember, in the early days of preparing for this book, asking a university lecturer in Uganda to come with me to a shrine. She had given a little cry of horror and said no. Other memories had come to me: a shrine was, someone else had told me, a place where body parts might be found scattered about.

It was because of this anxiety I had asked Richmond to come with me to Pa-boh's base. I needed his company and his local knowledge. Richmond knew the language of the Gaa, and had some idea of the religion.

In the beginning this precaution had seemed excessive, especially when I thought of Pa-boh's face. He was driving ahead of us in a yellowish old Mercedes to show the way. His ecclesiastical dress showed; his face, when I caught sight of it, seemed set in a smile, above the spin of his wheels. I was trying to memorise the journey, in case we had to come back on our own. Our drive, when we left the hotel and were on the highway, was in the full sunlight of midday. No worry there; and no worry a little later when we were pa.s.sing the cheerful red roofs of a new development where Nigerians, richer than Ghanaians, had been buying property, to secure their wealth, in a country less hectic than their own, and with more munic.i.p.al regulation.

But then we turned off the highway, entered a gated area, left it, and turned and turned again. The roads became narrow and crowded and began to twist. Ghanaians are people of munic.i.p.al order; but now this order began to break down. The shops were little more than boxes, every owner painting his box in a strong flat colour. Memorising the route became impossible; I gave up.

The people on the streets made me think of something Pa-boh had said at our first meeting. I had asked whether Accra, the name of the capital, had a meaning. (For black people in Trinidad a word that sounded like it meant a kind of food.) Pa-boh said, "The real word is nkrah nkrah, or soldier ants. The Ashanti said they were going to push us into the sea, but they could never conquer us. They attacked us on 7 May 1826, but we just kept coming and coming. So the Ashanti called us nkrah nkrah, soldier ants."

The people here did indeed create something of that impression. They were Gaa, Richmond said, Pa-boh's people. You couldn't do much with them. Whatever you did for them, they went back to their old ways. He said, "They are comfortable." It was one of Richmond's words: it meant that the people we were seeing needed little, and it was foolish to give them more. The chief on the Cape Coast Richmond had talked to a few days before-the man who had built his house in front of a cesspit and had no idea what he had done-this man, as Richmond had said, was comfortable.

At a big, right-angled turn in the road or lane, in front of a whitewashed wall that was extraordinary in its pretensions after what we had been seeing, Pa-boh's Mercedes stopped. It stopped in the shade of a tree and next to three or four big water b.u.t.ts in black plastic. The water was for sale, in small quant.i.ties; the buyers would have been local people, comfortable (to use Richmond's word) with this arrangement. We parked next to Pa-boh's Mercedes, and Pa-boh, in his designer Christian costume, and with the little smile on his lips, told us we had come to the "palace" of the high priest of the Gaa cult.

He wished us to be impressed, and the palace and the wall did make an impression of size and style. But as soon as you began to look at the detail you saw that it was tawdry, in keeping with the area, and, though unfinished, already somewhat run down.

We followed Pa-boh through the iron gateway into the bare palace yard. From here I could see more clearly that there was an area of vegetation, a strip of trees, a narrow piece of woodland at the side of the yard, beyond the palace wall. This would have been where the shrine was; and though the green would have been welcome a little while before in the mess and crowd of the neighbourhood, now, thinking of it as a place that might be used for special rites, I saw it as menacing.

A side gate in the wall led to the grove. Women were not allowed to enter here.

The front door of the white palace was ajar. Various people were waiting for us inside. And since this was a palace, and in palaces in this part of the world there were usually big colour photographs of the ruler and his visitors, there were painted portraits here, such as sign-painters might have done, of three generations of the Gaa high priest. They were strong, heavy-featured men, bearded, in white gowns, and they all held the little brooms that marked them as religious cleansers. They were all barefooted; this was another sign of their religious importance.

The high priest was not in the palace. He had been called out, but he had sent a message on his mobile that he was coming, and bringing some people to see me.

There was a dignified old chief who had been waiting for some time. I don't know what story Pa-boh had told him; but it was enough to keep him quiet. He had dressed with care, in a lilac or purple silk gown, and he had white bangles. Below the bangles there were tattoos or markings on his skin; and he also had flat earrings of thin gold. His hair was done with some style. He could certainly have been expecting some schnapps, and perhaps a gift of money.

I was irritated with myself for being where I was. Pa-boh in his conversation had given all that I needed. I didn't need more. Twenty years before, in the Ivory Coast, in my dealings with magicians, I had understood that beyond a certain stage there was no place for simple inquirers; local magicians didn't understand. And it wasn't fair to them. Their faith mattered to them. They didn't like to think it might be mocked.

Pa-boh looked irritated too. He was irked by the presence of Richmond, who understood everything. But neither my irritation with myself, nor Pa-boh's with me, matched the irritation that the old chief in the lilac or purple gown (who understood that I was not a true believer) was exhibiting towards Pa-boh, who might have misled him about the visitor, might have appeared to promise some reward, and involved him in this waste of time, without even the likelihood of a bottle of schnapps at the end.

A curving wooden staircase led up from the ground floor. It led nowhere. There was no upper floor, only glimpses of rough brickwork and electric wires. I thought the staircase might have been inspired by something in a film and had been done to give an extra touch of grandeur to the palace, but Pa-boh said that that they were going to create a s.p.a.ce up there for "archives."

The men in the room began to look grumpy. They had good reason. They had expected me to come alone. The presence of Richmond upset them. Richmond had already begun to tell me what they were talking about. I felt all of this was adding to my get-away bill.

Pa-boh sensed that the situation was deteriorating. He decided to hurry things up. His demeanour changed. He gave a bow of great depth to the people in the room and addressed them. He explained who we were and what we wanted.

At every courtesy I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper.

There now appeared a tall man with light eyes and a strange paunch, high and round and stiff-looking. This man was the oracle-priest, the deputy to the high priest. He said nothing when he came in. He only drew up his legs on to his chair-he too, to my alarm, was barefooted-and looked at me in an a.s.sessing way.

I felt undermined. I thought we should leave. Our bill here-our hongo hongo, so to speak (to use the nineteenth-century Uganda word for a tax on travellers)-appeared to be going up and up. And Richmond, with all his cynicism, agreed.

When they tried to close the door of the palace, I said, "No."

I went to the door. It hadn't been locked. I made my way out; Richmond followed me. The iron gate at the front of the yard hadn't been closed. That was a bit of luck. Once we were out on the squalling street next to Pa-boh's car and the black water b.u.t.ts I felt free. We drove away, but not back to where we had come from. We followed the curve of the road in the other direction; and after a while we saw the other end of the green strip, the big shrine area, that had begun at the white palace.

We left Pa-boh to pick up the pieces. It wasn't fair, but it was something he could do, and do well. He thought of himself as a man possessed; important spiritual forces guided him.

Twice in the next week he left messages for me at the hotel.

8.

AT THE end of the year there was going to be a presidential election. Kojo took me to meet Nana, the man most likely to win. He was intelligent, full of charm and urbanity. His colour posters were everywhere in Accra. end of the year there was going to be a presidential election. Kojo took me to meet Nana, the man most likely to win. He was intelligent, full of charm and urbanity. His colour posters were everywhere in Accra.

There was another man, though, who couldn't be a candidate, because he had been president twice before and const.i.tutionally couldn't run again. This man was Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. He had led two coups in two and a half years, nearly thirty years before, and had twice in that time returned the country to civilian rule. Later he had ruled Ghana for eighteen years. As revolutionary and ruler he would be a ghost-like presence at whatever new presidential feast was coming up.

There wasn't much about him in the newspapers, but he was there. Richmond's friends, when they spoke of this man, attributed extraordinary qualities to him; they said he was what the country needed; if he hadn't done all that he might have done during his eighteen years in power it was because "bad" people surrounded him.

In this way Jerry Rawlings, even while he lived, with a pleasant house in Accra and another house in the country, was becoming mythical in Ghana, more mythical and more mysterious than Nkrumah could ever be; just as in Bengal in India in the late 1940s the nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose became mythical after his death: with many sightings reported, the man who could solve all the problems of Bengal and India, if only by some trick, some great act of faith, or prayer, or national penance, he could truly be returned to the living. It happens like this in some religions too: a great leader dies, and the grief generated by his loss turns to a widespread conviction that the great leader is not dead but only in "occlusion," still watching from his new position on high, his vision greater than before.

The Rawlings story lent itself to myth. He was born in 1947, his mother Ghanaian, his father Scottish. He was a big and handsome man, and was the first man of mixed origin to become a political leader in Ghana. He had gone to good schools. Later he had joined the Ghana air force. He loved flying; he became a flight lieutenant. He came to power in a way that was full of romance and drama. As an air force officer he, greatly daring, had thrown in his luck with an anti-government coup. The coup had failed, and he was charged with treason. During his trial he made a remarkable speech about the corruption of the government. It was a brave thing to do; anything might have happened to him; inst.i.tutions in Ghana, especially after Nkrumah, were still shaky. But in his speech he had spoken for much of the country; and his bravery on that day in court was his making as a politician. He was jailed on the treason charge, but he didn't stay long in jail. In the very next month some junior officers successfully brought about a coup. They freed Rawlings, and he declared himself head of state.

For four months after that he sought to cleanse the country of its bad elements among officials, army people, business people. He then returned the country to civilian rule. It was his romantic idea: if you cleaned a country up, it looked after itself. But people and countries were more complicated than he thought; and a year later he led another coup against the people he had placed in power. This time he stayed in charge. Nine years later he gave Ghana a new const.i.tution. He served for two terms as a const.i.tutional president, and then was voted out.

He had been out of office for eight years, but his myth still held. He was the man who had risked his career and perhaps life to serve the people. He had handed back power twice. If he had failed it was only because he had been surrounded by bad people.

I BEGAN BEGAN to think I should try to see him. I asked Kojo, who appeared to be able to do everything. But Kojo said he couldn't help in this matter; and I remembered that politically Kojo was on the other side. Other people were unwilling as well, and my time was getting short. I asked John Mitch.e.l.l, the Trinidad consul; he said he could help, but he had to go away for a few days. I mentioned my difficulty to Richmond, the man with the unlikely Danish ancestor; and he (of course) at once said, "My father and Rawlings are cousins. His mother is my father's auntie. This is why my father has dreams of being a politician." to think I should try to see him. I asked Kojo, who appeared to be able to do everything. But Kojo said he couldn't help in this matter; and I remembered that politically Kojo was on the other side. Other people were unwilling as well, and my time was getting short. I asked John Mitch.e.l.l, the Trinidad consul; he said he could help, but he had to go away for a few days. I mentioned my difficulty to Richmond, the man with the unlikely Danish ancestor; and he (of course) at once said, "My father and Rawlings are cousins. His mother is my father's auntie. This is why my father has dreams of being a politician."

I think both requests-from John Mitch.e.l.l and Richmond-got to Rawlings's office; but it was John Mitch.e.l.l who, the day before I left, drove me to the Rawlings house for lunch.

The house was in an area of Accra known as the Ridge. It was well away from the centre. It had a big iron gate, and the shady compound had two big neem trees. There were a few other parked cars. A black poodle considered John Mitch.e.l.l and me, but it didn't bark. Away from us, near the stairs to the raised house, a tall and powerfully built man in a loose white s.h.i.+rt was talking to a little group. He had his back to us. This, of course, was Rawlings, fitting every description of him that I had read.

I had a moment's hesitation, not knowing whether we should advance or wait. It was a brief moment, because almost at once a slender woman detached herself from the group and came towards us, waving and smiling. She would have been Mrs. Rawlings: dark, fine-featured, striking in black slacks and a floral blouse. The earlier group began to leave, making for one of the cars parked below the neem trees. Rawlings came towards us. He was built like a boxer and he had reading gla.s.ses on the edge of his nose. We began to go up the steps to the raised house. Remarkably, at the side of the steps, among the plant pots, was a grey and white kitten, self-possessed, of great beauty. It was the first happy kitten I had seen in Ghana. Mrs. Rawlings said it was a pet; they also had many dogs. I began to be prejudiced in favour of the house.

The sitting room was s.p.a.cious and cool and comfortable. There was an empty aquarium with plastic flowers on it, and there were family photographs on a wall: in one of them I recognised Rawlings as a young man. We sat down on leather sofas. He sat on the sofa next to mine, but within reach of me. He called me "chief." I thought it was his style; and it might have done away with the need to remember names.

He said-and it was like a puzzle, like a continuation of some of the things he had been talking about with the people before-"Eight generals are executed just to prevent the country from sliding into chaos, but you do not take a man's life to do the same. I tried to rejuvenate this nation. This nation was ready to fly. Ghana was ready to fly. All we did was to empower the people. I say: give the people the right leaders.h.i.+p, and they will deliver."

He stood up and began walking up and down the room. He came back to me and tapped me on the knee and said, "Chief, I want to tell you about language, how important it is. There is a spiritual quality to language, to words. If you use language as a tool to suppress the people it will lose all its spirituality. There is a special quality to the language of our ancestors, and we have lost that by having another language imposed on us. Our mother tongue has historical elements, and words were important."

He was in an excited state and, like some intellectuals seeking to make an impression, he was laying down the subjects he wanted to talk about.

I said, to keep things going, "But some people can have two languages."

He said, "Yes. But we are not going anywhere by having two or more languages. If we speak English we must learn to use it with its words. Once the language is spoken correctly it comes with its own spirituality. Language always evolves, but African is under threat. You attack their culture and tradition."

He took off his gla.s.ses and looked hard at me. He said, "Chief, let me tell you. In 1979, when I came to power, there were cases that had been in the courts for five to ten years. They were robed in the Latin language. I solved them in five to six days. Justice was given to the people." He had begun to talk loudly. He stopped, as though he had lost his way among the many memories he had released.

(I was reminded of Pa-boh. He too had been taken up from obscurity and quite suddenly then had discovered his gifts of arbitration: in a few days he had solved for an important chief a dispute that had dragged on for seventeen years.) Rawlings asked his wife, "Where was I?"

She said, "You were talking about justice."

He slapped his knees. "Ah. I remember. On one occasion, in the earlier part of the PNDC, angry people emerged as leaders. But as things calmed down respectable people found a place in it, and it became the NDC, the National Democratic Congress." He was talking about old political wars. "One of our areas was health and hygiene. I used to lead the people in cleaning campaigns. I went to a big open gutter in one village. It was full of filth and disease. I and my party wanted to give a social sense of responsibility by cleaning the gutter. It became clean and modern."

He had begun again to talk loudly, booming across the room. And again he stopped. When he started up again he began to jump from topic to topic, as though looking for the right one. His wife looked at him (aware as she did so that we were looking at her), and so did two of his old political colleagues, a former minister and a lawyer, who had also been invited to the lunch and had come to the house before us. Rawlings stood up and told one of these men to tell us about language and its spiritual element. He then left the room, and his wife followed him.

His voice, and his undeniable presence, had filled the room, and now that he was out of it the room felt quiet and incomplete, although the former minister was trying to talk about language.

The house was well run. No word had been said but, to bridge the gap left by Rawlings and his wife, a well dressed waiter appeared with coffee and fruit juice. I went to the lavatory. I saw the family dogs in two big paved cages at the back of the yard. One cage had small dogs. The other cage had big dogs, a Dalmatian and various hounds, all fine and well exercised and happy. While I watched I saw them fed by a servant who entered the cages with their food. I could have looked at the feeding scene for a long time.

I went back to the sitting room. After a few minutes Rawlings reappeared. He sat down energetically in his chair and, as though to get started again, called me chief. He gave me a flick on the knee and said, "As a pilot I flew around the country, and I used to notice a green patch near every village. I never thought about it, but when I came into government I realised it was the compound of the village school. It was very clean. They were dirty in their homes, but clean in their schools. I go to a factory. It looks so clean. I beg them, I tell them, 'Take this cleanliness to your homes. Why do you leave it here when you go home?' What can I do to revive this sense of responsibility?"

He leaned back, took a long breath, and said, "Chief, let me give you one last example. In my last term in office the chaps in my castle"-some of the old castles and forts on the Atlantic coast had been turned into government offices-"the chaps in my castle had proved troublesome in headquarters. I was very anxious. I thought: 'What can I do to lower the temperature?' The culture of logic given us by the outside power was in the negative. The English word 'sorry' would not have done. It was not good enough. I said, 'Use the traditional way.' Down here when people want to apologise sincerely they wake you very early in the morning. I made my chaps go early in the morning, and it worked."

Someone in France had asked him whether it wasn't the uniform that kept him in power. He had said it wasn't the uniform; it was the quality of integrity.

He was talking about the rights of the people when Mrs. Rawlings came in and in a nice clear voice said, "Lunch."

We looked at her, but Rawlings went on talking about the difference between power and moral authority. Mrs. Rawlings said with some firmness that we should move, and we did, moving first into a corridor, and then into the splendid dining room where the table could seat fourteen. It was laid with fine bone china. The food was Chinese and Ghanaian: yams and meat and goat stew, with some fish. It was an absolute feast. There were no place settings. Mrs. Rawlings made me sit next to her. Everybody else had to fend for himself. John Mitch.e.l.l, the Trinidad consul, silent all the while, came at last into his own. He couldn't conceal his pleasure at seeing the meat stew and the steaming yams. But Rawlings outdid him in pleasure and zest.

We talked about names. Mrs. Rawlings said she had been given an Ashanti name by her father-she was, in fact, an Ashanti princess-and that had caused a certain amount of trouble when, in the fifth cla.s.s, she had to be confirmed as a Christian. She was asked by her Sunday school teacher about her Christian name. She had no idea what the teacher meant. The teacher persevered: was she Esther, Veronica, Mary, Ruth? She said she had only the name she had. The teacher said she was to stay out of the cla.s.s until she could show her baptism certificate; she could not be confirmed otherwise.

She telephoned her father. He was enraged. The very next day he came from k.u.masi and took her to the headmaster of Achimota. He had the baptism certificate but refused to show it. He said his daughter was baptised with an African name and was going to be confirmed with that name. The headmaster agreed.

Someone at the table asked how Rawlings and his wife had met.

She said they had been childhood sweethearts. Rawlings, full of food at this stage, and now reaching for a dish of Chinese noodles, said, "Nonsense. It took me nine years just to hold your hand. She was an Ashanti princess. While I was from the ghetto." He looked up. "A n.o.body."

"Well," she said, "you did come to wash our car."

He laughed, and the moment pa.s.sed.

CHAPTER 4.

The Forest King.

HOUPHOUeT B BOIGNY had been the enduring president of the Ivory Coast, loved by the French, adored by his people: a man so enduring he could be called a king. had been the enduring president of the Ivory Coast, loved by the French, adored by his people: a man so enduring he could be called a king.

Richmond had heard a marvellous story from his aunt about the way Houphouet had prepared himself for his life of power. Houphouet, in this story, had had a consultation with a great shaman or witchdoctor. Following the advice of this remarkable man, Houphouet had had himself cut into little pieces, and these pieces had been boiled together with some magical herbs in a cooking pot. In that cooking pot at a critical moment the Houphouet pieces had come together and turned into a powerful snake that had to be wrestled to the ground by a trusted helper. The snake had then turned into Houphouet again. The story had a reliable witness: the trusted and powerful helper who had wrestled the snake to the ground. She was Richmond's aunt, and had been Nkrumah's cook, no less: Nkrumah the first president of independent Ghana, and one of the great men of modern Africa.

What Richmond had told me would have been told-in various versions-to tens of thousands in the country. It was not disrespectful, as might have been thought; it was by such supernatural or magical tales that the ruler's myth was kept alive among his people.

It was a tale for believers. I was not a believer. I fell at the first hurdle. In this fairytale the cutting up of the great man was too easy. He was like a worm, soft and uniform in texture; he could be sliced. No bones or muscle or delicate organs met the knife; there was no blinding spurt of blood. Richmond (who had a Danish ancestor) didn't look for that kind of detail. What was important for Richmond was that the witchdoctor's prescription had worked. Everywhere in Africa there was change, often b.l.o.o.d.y change. But Houphouet had ruled for life. Towards the end he had been challenged, but he had seen his challengers off. He had remained father of his people, a grand old man, le vieux le vieux.

He died at the age of eighty-eight. This was his official age; he was believed by many to be much older. His great age was further proof of his fetish-given power. He was said to have died on an important political anniversary. But no one in the country at large knew for sure. The private life of the ruler, the king, was always a mystery.

The royal compound was in the middle of the town of Yamoussoukro. This town was built around the site of Houphouet's natal village. A chief's village, but it would originally (before the French) have been close to bush. The compound was now surrounded by a high ochre-coloured wall nine miles long and was closed to ordinary visitors. From the outside you could see something like a young wood behind the wall. Heaven knows what secret rituals, what sacrifices, served by heaven knows what secret priesthoods, contrived to keep the king and his kingdom safe, at a time when nothing in Africa seemed solid.

Far away from the royal compound, at two different points in the new town which he had built, were mighty emblems of the imported faiths: a beautiful white mosque in the North African style, a style that had had to cross the Sahara to this far-off place in the wet forests of tropical Africa; and a cathedral that in its design paid homage to St. Peter's. It was said to be higher than St. Peter's (in spite of the pope's request that its dome might be shortened by a metre or two). This was more than cross-cultural town-building. Mosque and cathedral, growing out of no communities, might have seemed like a game in the desert, the whim of a rich ruler looking for foreign approval. But they were seriously meant. Religion mattered to Houphouet; it was what kept him afloat; he would have felt, almost, that he ruled because he was religious. It pleased him, in his expensive new town, to honour these two world faiths, even while yielding to the profounder African stirrings which might have been played out in private rituals, meant for the king alone, in the royal compound, beyond the moat with its sacred crocodiles, fed at great expense every day.

Richmond had said that Houphouet's magic had worked for him. And so it had. Power had stayed with him to the end. But even a king was only a man, and when his time had come Houphouet had died from prostate cancer.

Twenty-seven years before, when I had first gone to the Ivory Coast, I had been told by someone at the local university that when a great ruler died, his servants or slaves had to take care to run, because they might be buried with their master. The academic who told me this seemed to think it funny. He was an African who was proud of African traditions, but in his African way he thought domestic slaves were also funny. Telling me about the dangers to slaves at the time of the master's death, he had clapped his big palms together and then used them to make a swift rubbing gesture, a gesture of comedy, to indicate the slave's need for flight.

I heard this time, what I had not heard before, that there were servants of such extreme loyalty they would have wanted to die with their master. They would have thought of that death as a final service. But no one knew what had happened here at Houphouet's death. The ochre walls and the palace behind, with the wood or forest, kept their secret. From a foreign (but well-placed) source I heard that "hundreds" had been killed at Houphouet's funeral-not necessarily slaves or servants, but people picked up outside, wanderers or vagrants who would not be missed.

There were still crocodiles in the moat or lake outside the palace wall. Houphouet had introduced those crocodiles, and in 1982 they were still sufficiently new for their feeding at dusk to be one of the sights of the town. A tall man with a red cap and a long white priestly gown came out of the palace gate and made his way between the rail outside the wall and the moat. He brought chopped-up meat in a plastic bucket, a number of trussed white chickens, and he carried a long thin knife. He ran the dark limber blade between the metal uprights of the rail at the edge of the water. It made a sc.r.a.ping, clacking sound. This was the signal to the crocodiles that it was feeding time, and they swam towards the two or three big rocks, like places for basking, that were just next to the rail and the white-gowned feeder.

The meat in the bucket was thrown to them; some of it went to the meat-eating turtles that could be seen swimming below the surface of the water. It was the turn then of the chickens. The spectators on the causeway between the public road and the palace, or at the water's edge between the rail and the palace wall, gave little gasps of horror. The crocodiles with their apparently smiling eyes snapped their jaws. It wasn't always a neat kill. The crocodile's jaws were too rigidly hinged; they couldn't swivel or turn; and the chickens appeared to escape. But not for long. A few more snaps of the jaws, a small adjustment of the body, and the chicken that had appeared to get away could be seen as a mash of white feathers in the maw of the crocodile.

In 1982 I had seen this ritual at sunset, the proper time. Now, twenty-seven years later, I went in the middle of the day; I couldn't wait for sunset. I remembered a planting of young coconut trees on both sides of the causeway across the lake. Coconut trees grow fast. I had expected those I had seen to be tall and beginning to be spindly. But they were not tall; perhaps the trees I had seen had been replaced; or perhaps the fetid water of the lake or moat had stunted their growth.

Perhaps the same fetid water had done away with the meat-eating turtles. I had seen them clearly in 1982, coming for their meat, swimming below the surface of the light-brown water, showing their underside, strong and silent and agile, more disturbing in a way than the crocodiles. Now in the dark water they were not to be seen. Perhaps it was this bad water that was going to do away with this ritual of Houphouet's kings.h.i.+p, slowly killing or choking the crocodiles that survived. (Though I was told later that crocodiles, rising to the surface to breathe, could survive fetid water.) There was a baby crocodile, pale, two or three feet long, away from the others, resting out of the water on a concrete pier of the causeway.

In ancient Egypt the crocodile was a sacred animal; most people here looked upon it as food. In Indian mythology the earth rests on a turtle's back. Some instinct, or the wisdom of some shaman, had led the old king to do honour to these creatures of ancient awe. But few people now, in 2009, were looking for the crocodiles in the water, though they were easy to see. Few people were present. Some young men and a strange young begging woman, possibly disturbed, pa.s.sed by. The woman had a wild look in her eyes; she was more interested in the visitor than in the crocodiles. The young men were more interested in the silver helicopter which appeared over the town and seemed to be making for the presidential palace behind the ochre walls.

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 Houphouet.

The Romans decreed G.o.dhood for quite a few of their early emperors. But the Romans, when they made Augustus a G.o.d, 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 Houphouet 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 Houphouet'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.