African Silences (7 page)

After four flat tires, we had lost faith in our car, and, having missed the early game viewing for want of a vehicle, Dr. Boese decided to leave the Parc de la Komoé as soon as possible. With tires repaired, we headed west again across the Bandama River, which flows down to the coast at Grand Lahou. In the empty country beyond Ferkessédougou came the fifth flat tire in twenty-four hours, and this time, in attempting to repair it, Sauri the driver stripped the lug threads, making it impossible to remove the wheel. A vehicle bound for Korhogo, twenty miles away, took Sauri in, and when, two hours later, he had failed to reappear, Jacob Adjemon caught a ride in the same direction, returning an hour later in a taxi. We proceeded straight to the tour agent in Korhogo, to have words about the caliber of the car, but this Malinke gentleman, M. Toure Basamanno, blamed everything
on poor Sauri, and swore roundly that Sauri would pay; far from expressing regret at our inconvenience, Basamanno saw himself as the real victim. He had another driver, Mamadou, whose car was in such superb condition that Basamanno’s great regret—and here he belched—was that he could not accompany us himself. This weary and cynical fellow had just lunched, and now he lay across his desk in postprandial repose; his shifting eye did not inspire confidence, and his questing mouth contained an outsized kola nut, bright orange in hue, that rolled into view like a hanged man’s tongue each time he spoke. Later we were told by Mamadou that this
sacré
Basamanno had yet to pay him for four days’ work performed last January.

Korhogo is a great center of Senoufou culture, and before leaving we visited its markets, where masks and statues, brown-and-black paintings on raw linen weavings, anklets and bracelets of old brass, carved ivory, wooden boxes, beads, and exotic knickknacks of all kinds are hawked by the network of Senegalese who control most of the antiquities trade in Ivory Coast. While some of the wood carvings were old, most were quite new, and in another street, we watched the carvers hard at work with “
les vrais hâches de leurs grand-pères.
” The growing tourist trade has taken precedence over tradition, and most of the stuff, hacked out with an eye for quantity rather than quality, is rather bad; the wax job that gives it a high shine only points up the facile decadence of style.

The Senoufou, like the Lobi, are a Voltaic people from the north; they call themselves Sienamana. Like many other peoples of West Africa, they were driven south toward the forest edge by Arab slavers, and have remained here due to the spread of the Sahara. Senoufou Land was formerly much larger, extending from Odienné to Kong and Katiola, but it was pressed in from east and west by invasions of the Malinke (or North Mande or “Mandingo”), a Niger River people who were also driven south by Arab encroachment.
As early as the seventeenth century some Malinke were converted to Islam, and in the nineteenth century, led by a famous despot named Samory, they scourged and ruled almost all of the interior—Mali, Niger, Upper Volta, the northern Ivory Coast, Sierra Leone—until French troops from Senegal captured Samory and assigned his enormous empires to themselves. Like the Peulh, the Malinke are widely scattered in West Africa, north to Timbuktu and all the way west to Casamance, in Senegal. In the country east of Ferkessédougou (which was founded in the nineteenth century by Senoufou driven north and west by the king of Kong) they are called “Dioula” or “Traders,” having turned their warrior instincts toward commerce. The insistent pressures of the Malinke have forced the Senoufou to congregate in the large communities that are probably the source of their advanced culture, instead of littering the landscape in the usual pattern of savanna villages, and in the open countryside a few birds may still be seen—stone partridge, francolins, laughing doves, a hawk.

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.