African Silences (8 page)

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 the 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.