African Silences Read online

  This is the season of feast and celebration, before the plowing that starts with the first rains, and unlike most spectacles folkloriques, in which the dancers are taken from planting or harvest for the titillation of the tourists and sometimes bribed to perform ritual dances that only initiates should see, the Senoufou dances staged here by the nearby villagers were performed joyfully, with a spontaneity I saw nowhere else.

  The N’Goron dance took place in a garden square beneath a huge silk-cotton tree, around a bonfire that attracted quick, small bats. The troupe from the village of N’Dara included six young girls, none more than fifteen, in the first period of their initiation, and also a group of musicians led by the caparia or whip man (who later did a whip dance and walked barefoot across the fire); the group included a flutist, three tom-tom players, and three players of the balafon, a kind of xylophone with hardwood strips laid across the mouths of opened gourds. The tom-toms, set off by the weird balafons and flute, filled the night with their wild sound; the flute was melodious and wistful, high, unceasing, like the whisper of unseen water in the forest or music for a dance of forest ghosts. Alas, there was no oliphant, or elephant-tusk horn; one can only surmise how balafons and oliphants might sound in concert.

  Hair whisks shimmering in each hand, on each back a shivering bird’s-tail tassel of straw plumes, the children danced forward and back, forward and back, like scratching fowl, yet quick and light, leaping and pantomiming in bird courtship, pausing to strut, flutter, and display, then skipping on again. The dance was a beautiful and stirring ceremony that summoned the deep mystery of earth. Before vanishing out of the firelight into the dark, the little girls dipped forward, touching each guest on both shoulders with their whisks, teasing, tantalizing, yet impersonal, expressionless.

  While in Senoufou Land, we stopped at back-country savanna villages, very clean and quiet by comparison to the large towns. At Ouazamon, the small stone hearths, gourd calabashes of a shining bronze color, long wood ladles and log mortar and pestle seemed laid out, like ancient art objects, on the swept earth. Old women culled groundnuts, a vat of maize was being prepared, young women lifted a mortar, let it fall. An infant boy with fly-filled eyes slumbered in a wooden trough; a black hunting dog with rattan hoops about its neck, to protect it against cornered animals, moved silently away. The village people were not friendly or unfriendly; they avoided looking at us, they waited for us to go.

  The thatched houses with their walls of straw and clay were mostly rectangular, with round maize cribs on clay legs off to the side. Fetish houses were located in a nearby grove of trees. If an unauthorized person should enter a fetish house, said Jacob, he or she would certainly be killed, if not by fetishes then by outraged tribal action; even the groves—high islands of silk-cotton trees that soar from the low woodland—are out of place in the savanna, therefore full of power, therefore sacred.

  In a small shed behind the village, a blacksmith forges heavy blades for tools; a child perched like a troll under the peak cranks a crude bellows that fans the coals. On the ground outside the forge sits an ancient awale game (called bau in East Africa). The smith has made small, hand-faceted iron balls for the wood board, yet is quite indifferent to the most beautiful artifact I have seen in Ivory Coast; he says he would sell it happily, but it is the property of his brother, who has gone off to Korhogo. Jacob Adjemon is indifferent to it, too, indeed he is faintly contemptuous of our interest in these old-time things, the death fetishes, the dusty masks. Before all, this young man is the new African, admiring and envious of Western artifacts, frowning in unslakable discontent.

  West of Ouazamon, the red road enters a new land broken by huge black boulders, the granite outcroppings of Africa’s old mantle. We pass an ancient hunter with his muzzle-loader, an old woman of Niger selling medicines, a solitary patas monkey near the road. The hundreds of miles of rough dirt track that we would travel in this land was not once crossed by a baboon; nor did we see the Abyssinian ground hornbill that was so common in back-country Senegal. This turkey-size hornbill is venerated by the Senoufou as a primordial animal, and is a common subject of the carvings, but even this privileged status has not spared it.

  Odienné is a Malinke stronghold, a high and open town with a white mosque, set in low hills in the northwest corner of the country, near the Guinea and Mali borders. Of the native woodland, there is little left. At noon, the dust is bright, and the hot wind of the harmattan blows unimpeded through the naked branches of the flame trees. From Odienné a track goes north to Bamako, on the Niger, while the main road back to Abidjan turns south, among citrus groves, guava, and cashew trees. From hilly terrains of thickening vegetation flow thick streams, and farther south the savanna gives way to tropic forest. In the distance, tall pale boles of teak appear at the edge of the green wall, and at the forest edge are birds—big, dark forest hornbills, red-eyed doves, the gray-headed and pygmy kingfishers, elegant shikras and a Gabar goshawk, cattle egrets in multitudes, a tawny eagle. But no animal is seen or heard, only a band of twenty hunters armed with ancient guns, marching empty-handed home along the road. Behind them rises the dark smoke of a fire, for in the absence of public education, local hunters cling to the belief that wildlife is inexhaustible until it disappears entirely, and rarely make the connection between wildlife and habitat that might keep them from using fire as an aid to hunting.

  Not far from Gouessesso is the Dan village of Biankouma, perched on a series of natural steps that rise into hillside forest, and scattered with small groves of banana and papaya, kola nut and coffee. (It was near Biankouma, in 1898, that the Mandingo leader Samory was captured by the French.) Unlike those of the savanna tribes, the houses of this forest people are round, built solidly with sturdy walls and sapling roofs that are lifted onto the hut cylinder in a single piece; the chief’s house, in this village, at least, has a roof of tin. All houses are decorated with a broad white band of kaolin on which red drawings and designs have been inscribed. The designs are made by young initiates to the tribe, and mostly portray the hunting and fishing that is swiftly disappearing from their lives. In addition, there are three fetish houses scattered wide apart in the big village, and readily distinguished by a half-circle of palmettos and a flat stone altar near the entrance. Outside one sits an old man whom everyone ignores; the silence all around is very strange. Indeed, he is like a sacred mask, for according to Jacob, nobody is supposed to see him enter or leave the fetish house; children playing anywhere near are called away. Nor is anyone permitted to take photographs. Explaining all this, Jacob keeps glancing at the fetish house, and before long he is accosted by a man who is offended by Gil Boese’s camera and demands to know why strangers lurk about; hurriedly we apologize and move away. It is the power of the fetish houses, Jacob says, that keeps these Dan from obeying official orders and moving over to New Biankouma, a treeless, muddy, and depressing litter of hard government housing that adjoins the village; such developments, built with customary bureaucratic disregard for the traditions of the people who must live in them, are all too reminiscent of the “efficient” government housing on Indian reservations in the United States. They are a common sight these days in Ivory Coast, and most of them—deservedly—are empty.

  At the next village south, a dancing march is under way, led by a figure in a headdress mask who is hoisting a high pole; a number of costumed figures follow, leading a crowd of stamping, singing villagers. Many of these Dan wear Muslim dress, and it is true that the Malinke have made converts among these people, as they have among the Senoufou, farther north. But Muslim dress is a fashion here, and no proof of religion; where fetish houses and masks occur, the people are still animists, including many who have formally adopted Islam or Christianity. Our Jacob Adjemon is “Christian” but his Beté tribe—of the Kru peoples, who came originally from the Windward Coast—remains in touch with the old ways, and Jacob himself believes that his own brother died by sorcery. Jacob kindly invited us to visit his mother’s house on th
e way back to Abidjan; he says his room is still kept in waiting for his return. But Jacob has lost the family sense that is so powerful in Africa; by jitney bus, his village is not far from Abidjan, yet it has been eight years since he went home.

  Jacob is generous and intelligent, but he is also arrogant and angry. Being a guide to the white tourists gives him a feeling of superiority, and so he resents very much that both of us have been to Africa many times before and might even know more than he does about wildlife, which like many young urban Africans, he fears and despises. His solution is to dispense information in a very loud, abrasive voice whether we want it or not, as if to say, This is my duty, and I mean to do it. Two days ago, he took offense when we declined a side trip out of Boundiali to view some hippopotami in a distant lake; everyone else he had ever guided had been to see those hippos, and although he granted the possibility that we had seen hippos rather often, while they, perhaps, had not, he could not reconcile himself to our defection.

  Because his voucher entitles him to do so, and because he conceives of it as duty, Jacob insists on joining us for every meal. Having appeared, he slumps disconsolately in his chair, eats with his fingers village-style, and declaims against European food; almost invariably, an expensive dinner is left virtually untouched upon the table. In its place, he orders a Coca-Cola in which he marinates a large hard roll until it softens, whereupon he eats it out of the glass, using a fork. He is peremptory with waiters, then becomes furious when they ignore him and deal instead with us. He feels superior to Mamadou, who does not eat with us and is not entitled to a room in these hotels; as for Mamadou, who is quiet and gentle, he is even more exasperated by our haughty guide than we are. Jacob speaks German and English as well as French and expects to be hired shortly by Lufthansa; we’d like to warn him that his manners may count against him, but he is too touchy and volatile to accept this counsel in the way that it is meant. He has a color problem that is common in the new Africa: he envies and imitates the whites and is ashamed of this, and therefore is aggressive in his blackness, which makes him angry at both blacks and whites.

  And so, though we like him, he has gotten on our nerves. Driving along, he will turn up Mamadou’s radio to full volume and join in very loudly and untunefully in the latest love songs. He is an authority on love, and speaks for Africa on this subject as on all others. “In Africa,” says Jacob Adjemon, “we say that first love is the best …”

  Even more than the Senoufou, the Wobe and the “Yacouba” or Dan of the Man region, are famous for their masks, which have a serene and classical expression as well as a shell-like delicacy and lightness that has made them the favorite of Western amateurs of West African art. It is not strange that the Senoufou and the Dan have produced the most sophisticated art (as well as the most striking dances) in the Ivory Coast, since both derive from ancient and intense traditions; as in the great art of Benin, the Dan culture was already advanced before the first white man appeared on the Windward Coast.

  The masks are in no way ornamental, nor is beauty sought; they are consecreated manifestations of the spirits, given human likeness so that they may be perceived by man. There are “small masks” that serve only the maker, and “Great Masks” that serve and protect the whole society in such ways as seeking out sorcerers, dispensing justice, and granting fertility and harmony. In these tasks and others, the masks are abetted by powerful secret societies with animal totems, notably the Gor or Leopard, which impose respect for the masks as well as punishment for those who disturb the public harmony; since this punishment may take the form of a fatal dose of crocodile bile, administered by a shaman who can make himself invisible, or even transform himself into the leopard, the secret societies, and Gor especially, are much respected—all the more so, perhaps, now that real leopards have disappeared.

  The names “Wobe” and “Yacouba” are distortions of the confused responses from outsiders that met the early inquiries of the white explorers; in the great tradition of colonial impatience, words that mean nothing to the tribes became their names. Thus “man,” which in the Dan tongue signifies “I don’t know,” became the name for the great town of this region, the center of the trade in kola nuts to Mali and Senegal, and a depot for Mali cattle on their way south into what is now Liberia. It is still the great trade center of west Ivory Coast, with a vast and tumultuous African market that overflows a great two-story shed, spreading its rich smells and bright colors into the mud streets all around. The town itself is set into a mythic countryside of towering green forest walls and flowering trees surrounded by eighteen conical hills up to four thousand feet in height; the most stirring of these hills is the sacred guardian called the Tooth, which is crowned by a sheer monumental block of granite, and comes and goes mysteriously in the mist. The cloud forest is a phantasmagoric setting for the masks and dances, for Gor the Leopard, for the waterfalls and spidery bridges across the mountain torrents, made of miles of liana that climb to the highest and most delicate branches of the trees, strung magically in a single night, tradition says, and able to carry a weight of fifty tons. But the totem animals of these jungles, from which so much of the power of the old ways derives, are almost gone.

  From these hilltops on the rare clear days, one can see as far west as Mount Nimba, which forms a common corner of three countries (Ivory Coast, Liberia, and Guinea) and at 6,069 feet is the highest mountain in West Africa. Using “bush taxis”—small jitney buses with such names as “Tahiti” and “Bob Dylan”—I had hoped to go straight across from Man to the slopes of Mount Nimba, in Liberia, to join friends on an ornithological safari, but the tour people in Abidjan, as well as the authorities in Man, assured me that this journey was not possible; there was no passable road beyond Danané, which was separated from the frontier by dangerous rivers and impenetrable forest, nor was there any road on the far side. No, no, they said, I would have to return all the way east and south again to Abidjan, take an international flight west to Monrovia, on the Liberian coast, then make my way as best I could inland to Nimba; in other words, travel a thousand miles to reach a point less than a hundred miles from where I stood. I would later discover, as a fitting end to my sojourn in Bad People’s Coast, that three months previously a new road had been put through that connected Mount Nimba to the main road to Man; instead of wasting six whole days and failing to arrive in time (which is what happened), I could have reached my destination in three hours.

  And so from Man, we headed south again, on our way to the Parc Marahoué; this is the region of the Gagou, small forest folk who are sometimes described as being covered in reddish hair. (Both the Dan tribes and the Kru from farther south attest that they displaced these little hairy aborigines when they first came to these forests from the west; to the Lobi, in the far northwest, they are known as the Koutowa.) Western authorities have classified the Gagou as “small Negroes,” not true Pygmies—a contradiction, since “Pygmies” are also regarded as small Negroes, despite marked morphological differences which may include yellowish skin color and thick body hair—and even suggest that the small size of Bushmen and Pygmies is quite recent, an adaptation to the marginal environments into which both groups were forced by stronger peoples.

  There is a possibility, at least, that “little people” not described by science still exist. The eminent animal collector, Charles Cordier (whose work is much respected by no less an authority than Dr. George Schaller), was so impressed by field evidence of unknown bipedal anthropoids in the upper Congo that he published a paper on the subject. Earlier (1947) a Professor A. LeDoux, at that time head of the Zoological Department in the Adiopodoume Institute, outside Abidjan, testified to several persuasive recent reports of small, manlike creatures with reddish body hair, including one that was shot at that same year in the great forest between the Cavally and Sassandra rivers by a celebrated elephant hunter, Monsieur Dunckel. In fact, agogwe—which the Africans regard as a small man-ape—have been reported from many forest regions all across tropical
Africa, from Ivory Coast to Tanzania, and a Belgian zoologist makes a bold suggestion: “Although these ‘little hairy men’ agree with nothing known to the zoologist or anthropologist, their description could not agree better with a creature well known to paleontologists by the name of Australopithecus, which was still living in South Africa not more than five hundred thousand years ago, at a time when all existing African species were already formed.”*

  The Ivoiriens assure us that unbroken jungle is all that may be seen at Marahoué, but a large part of this two-hundred-fifty-thousand-acre park is comprised of grassland and small hills set about with woods. In the deep forest, we observe magnificent butterflies of several genera and a white-collared mangabey (Cercocebus torquatus) an angular gray monkey with a reddish crown, sitting sprawl-legged in a tree crotch on the farther side of a green meadow by the forest wall, keeping company with smaller relatives, the mona monkeys. Atop a hill overlooking open country, we came upon a lepidopterist, caught in an illicit act of lepidoptery, who testified nervously that hartebeest and buffalo had been in view only this morning, but though we poked about the tracks until late afternoon, we saw no sign of bouffle nor bubale, nor even one dropping of the elephants that are supposed to frequent Marahoué, as well. The best that can be said for all too many of these “forest reserves” in the West African countries is that one cannot absolutely deny the presence of large animals, any more than one can prove a negative proposition; how can one say they are not there, since one cannot see them?

  That night we stopped at Yamoussoukro, until recent years the small home village of the country’s president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, who owns a coffee plantation and a factory there as well as a colossal modern palace that overlooks a manmade “Lake of the Sacred Crocodiles.” (We detected no sign of crocodiles, sacred or otherwise.) The village itself has been buried by grandiose housing projects, for the most part empty, as well as a number of pretentious, rather lonely modern buildings and an ornate hotel with a piscine that all but rivals the lagoon at the Hôtel Ivoire, all linked together by millions of dollars’ worth of broad triumphal avenues that soon die out in a worn countryside of red termite hills and scrubby bush. In Ivory Coast, as in many other countries of the new Africa, a privileged few have acquired enormous wealth, but for the rest things are much the same as they were in the colonial times from which their leaders saved them.