African Silences (5 page)

Over the passenger gate is a fair warning:

The ferry to Kung is crowded with vehicles and folk of all descriptions, so tightly packed that a beautiful big woman cannot pass her majestic rump between Baba Sow’s front fender and the car adjoining. Though one speaks in a sort of English and the other in French, the big woman and Baba Sow rail, hoot, and banter over this joyous natural phenomenon. Baba Sow, all dressed up in his white
kanzu
, with three boxes of bonbons to present to his children upon arrival in Dakar, is very disapproving of this ancient ferry that accepts chickens as passengers and depends on a narrow
ramp at Kung, on the farther side. “
C’est mal organisé, tout ça
,” he frets, annoyed at the delay. “
Tout ça, c’est vieux, ce n’est pas bon!
” And, detecting a clear space, he quits the ferry and heads north with a dangerous turn of speed, so anxious is he to put Gambia behind him.

Crossing the Senegal frontier, the road passes along the Parc National de Delta du Saloum—the international park to be shared with Gambia, not yet fully opened to the public—which shelters the manatees and river dolphins of the Saloum River as well as the most northerly tract of mangrove left on the West African coast. Once again we have entered the dry woods of the savanna, but soon this vegetation changes to the acacia thornbush that marks the near-desert of the Sahel. At Kaolack, the Saloum is crossed, we strike the bitumened road again, Dakar is no more than two hours away.

André Dupuy, the director of Senegal’s national parks, to whom we went for some advice that afternoon, is a short, florid man with a big voice, much given to oratorical declarations. His self-confidence is quite remarkable, and his energy and enthusiasm most impressive. He dismissed the Parc de Waza (our proposed destination in north Cameroon) as a “lesson in what not to do,” since it tries, says he, to combine too many different habitats. As an ecological unit, it was not to be compared with the six estimable parks of Senegal. Even the tiny Parc des Iles de la Madeleine—the group of islets off Dakar where the beautiful red-billed tropic bird comes to nest—was a precious ecosystem of coastal rocks, the only such in all West Africa! “These are
our
cathedrals, M’sieu Booze,” he bellows, refusing to get Dr. Bo-zee’s name right. It was not as in other lands of Africa, where parks were mostly tsetse wastelands for which man could find no better use; in Senegal, the parks were areas selected to preserve representative habitats, “
un réseau
des parcs complémentaires!
” Besides, Cameroon was part of Central Africa. As for the remainder of West Africa, the chances were that any choice would be the wrong one. Mali, of course, had a wild reserve near the Senegal border that might be thought of as a
parc complémentaire
to Niokolo Koba, and then there were the so-called “Parcs du W” in Benin, Upper Volta, Niger. But access to such “parks” was very difficult, travel inside of them impossible, so how could one say what might be left in the way of animals? Dupuy’s shrug suggested that M’sieu Booze would be well advised to take a closer look at Senegal. Failing that, the next best thing was the Parc de la Komoé in Ivory Coast, since that was where Dupuy’s own former
adjutant
was warden. For want of better information, we took Monsieur Dupuy’s advice and arranged to leave next day for Ivory Coast.

On the flight next day to Ivory Coast, the carry-on baggage of one Senegalese lady consisted of three large and springy fish; the tails of these whoppers refused to fold down neatly, and kept flipping up the wings of their cardboard carton. For lunch we were served “bush meat”—in this case, small and cold dead birds with gloomy sizzled heads, smeared with what we dearly hoped was pâté. Otherwise the flight southeast over the Guinea forests was uneventful until, circling wide over the sea on the approach to Abidjan, there came into view the reddish beach and long, unbroken line of surf that spared this “Windward Coast” (now Liberia and Ivory Coast, which lay to windward of the slave ports of the Gold Coast—modern Ghana) from the worst depredations of the slavers. In the 1770s there was heavy slaving activity at the mouth of the Bandama River, in the region to the west at Grand Lahou, but the absence of a port (and therefore of a European shore station) made the commerce erratic, and until the race for colonies occurred, in the late
nineteenth century, few white men cared what lay behind the thick green jungle walls of this “Bad People’s Coast,” later renamed for the precious ivory of its elephants. Before 1950, when a channel through the barrier beach was stabilized, and a harbor constructed in the vast Ebrie Lagoon, Ivory Coast was no rival to Senegal in trade and benefits from Europe; now oil has been discovered here to augment a prosperous lumber industry and coffee, rubber, and oil-palm plantations, and Abidjan is a boom town of new buildings and new cars. Like Senegal, this country has maintained strong trade relations with the Western World, and today the two are far more prosperous than all other states of former French West Africa combined.

Because prosperity has come too fast, Abidjan is a European city that on this fetid, humid coast retains all the dirt, smells, and decrepitude of the old slave ports. Incompetence is masked with sullenness and the price of sullen service is exorbitant—not an unusual combination on this continent, yet more acceptable in those parts of Africa that are still “African.” Except for a remarkably rude customs, all offices were closed
pour le weekend
; there was no way of obtaining information about travel north to the Parc de la Komoe. Our reservation at the Tiama Hotel, where huge fruit bats flop back and forth in the high trees, was the first of many in this land that were not honored; instead we were banished to Hôtel Ivoire, a huge, sterile, glaring “International Hotel” on its own bluff across the bay, a self-contained complex of expensive services and shops where the isolated guest, fearing the piratical cab fares to the city, is separated remorselessly from all his money. The high and shiny International Hotel in Nairobi is a snug family inn by comparison to its sister ship in Abidjan, which features bowling alleys, four bad restaurants and an awful “snackarama,” a wrap-around swimming pool so vast that part of its acreage has been set aside for boats, and the only iceskating
rink on the whole continent. The Hôtel Ivoire is almost everything that one had hoped would never come to Africa.

In foreign parts, so it is said, the pampered guts of Americans, then Scandinavians, are those most easily undone by the local germs, due to the fanatical hygiene in our countries. Regretfully, I add our names to the doleful list. Having survived without ill effect the casual back-country cookery of Senegal, we scarcely expected tumultuous stomachs on the
haute cuisine
of the Hôtel Ivoire; yet by Monday both of us were sick, although we had eaten nowhere else. Also, Gil Boese was going broke. We were frantic to leave Abidjan, but there was no space to be had all week on any flight north to Korhogo. We therefore arranged with the state-owned tour company for
wagon-lit
berths on the evening train for Ouagadougou (Wagga-doogoo) in Upper Volta, which would let us off just after daybreak at Ferkessédougou, in north Ivory Coast.

At six that evening, we were waiting at the railroad station for this train supposed to leave at seven, accompanied by a bright young Ivoirien named Jacob Adjemon who had been assigned to us by the tour office as a guide. Jacob turned out to be a fount of knowledge, not always easy to believe, far less turn off, and the first information that he offered was the evil news that the tour office had not bothered to secure our reservations in the
wagon-lit
, despite its breezy guarantees at nine that morning: we would have to take our chances when the train appeared.

People—not all of them going anywhere—were camped all over the railroad platforms, and peddlers hawked bread, fruit, and water, as well as “notions” of all kinds. One man specialized in socks and purses, another in fezzes and prayer mats, for in the north part of this country, as in Niger and Upper Volta, near the desert, the sway of Islam remains strong. Near where we stood in the dying heat that followed the sudden sinking of the sun was a
group of black-garbed women with narrow, elegant brown faces—these are Peulh-de-Niger, says Jacob Adjemon, a nomad people who have drifted southward with their herds of zebu cattle since the great drought years of 1973–1976. “Peulh” is one of many names of the Fulani, whom we first saw as sedentary agriculturalists in Senegal. But while the Tukulor Fulani were Negroid in appearance, these people are distinctly “northern” in the caste of face, betraying much more of the ancestral Berber whose pastoral way of life they have retained; it is because of this “Ethiopian” appearance that the Fulani are thought to have come originally from the northeast. Bartering their animal products for food grown by the farmers, they have attached themselves to local tribes across the whole of the West Sudanian savanna, over two thousand miles from Senegal to Cameroon.

A scarred and drunken tribesman from Upper Volta was attempting to sell us “China Balm” in a green box decorated with bright dragons; the inscrutable packaging reminded me of “Foul Mesdames,” the brand name of the cans of Chinese beans that may still be found in the back-country shops of Tanzania. Teased by a colleague who was seeking to tempt us with a bad sort of meat pie, China Balm’s man threw a punch and nearly fell, having described a complete circle in the process. He was shouting angrily, and Jacob, translating, began to laugh: “Here I am talking to Big Man,
White
Man, and you come around here with your dirty food trying to spoil my business!” But even China Balm could not have soothed us in the series of mishaps that continued to befall us throughout our sojourn in the former Bad People’s Coast. When the train appeared, it was quite clear that the
wagons-lit
were full, beyond all hope of argument or bribe, and the first-class seats to which we were entitled had been sadly overbooked; only quick action secured us stiff chairs in the dining car, which we would defend for the next fourteen hours.

The train moved fitfully toward the north into the heavy equatorial darkness. To blur the night ahead, we drank, and the early evening passed in a pleasant manner. A decent supper came and went as warm, sweet jungle air poured through the window, and afterward, staring outward at the forest, deep black against that other black of the night sky, I saw under the stars and moon an enormous burning tree of the doomed African forest.

Later on the air grew cold, and as we stopped at station after station—Dimbokro, Bouaké, Katiola—the dining car grew very crowded, until desperate travelers began to enter through the windows. Two of these were cadaverous young Frenchmen kitted out with rucksacks and guitars, who established themselves at a table of Africans and began to inveigh against the tourists who were starting to spoil this former land of French West Africa. The Ivoiriens, nonplussed, listened politely, but after a while, one man said quietly, “
Et
vous,
Messieurs? Vous êtes quelle sorte de touriste?
” Clutching his guitar, one youth said lamely, “
Nous sommes des touristes de la musique!
” No one laughed, and a merciful silence followed until dawn.

Daybreak came early to a broken country of low savanna woodlands, sudden hills. I had not slept, and my headache and increasing fever were intensified by transistor radios, a howling baby, and the exertions of a hungry man who was hammering coconuts on the car floor. In search of a breakfast chair for a rich old Muslim, the steward, put off by my grim expression, singled out the most defenseless among those who had filled the seats during the night, a confused peasant with young wife and infant who looked as if he might not know his rights. In the confusion, the infant urinated on the floor, in a sad puddle that rolled across the aisle as the train swayed; the mother rose, bent over forward, and laid the baby on her back, which it clasped unaided like a tree frog, its little seat supported by her own protruding rump, until she had bound it tight in her
katanga.
In my feverish state, it seemed to me that I had hit upon an explanation for the development of the African posterior, where the infant rides as an appendage of the mother: in early days when
katangas
were unavailable and a child was affixed precariously with a frond, this sturdy shelf on which it rode while its mother walked or worked her field would surely have been an evolutionary advantage.