The Viceroy of Ouidah

Table of Contents

 

 

Praise for
The Viceroy of Ouidah

“A superb impressionistic piece of historical reconstruction . . . . This is one of those enigmatic books which might be handed to several friends who could afterwards be lured together for a diverting evening, when each declares what the message is. The prose coruscates, so that many images from this African horror story linger disturbingly in the mind.”

—
The Washington Post

 

“A vivid, lush, seductive book that absolutely captures the look and light and life of the Brazilian wastelands and the hot, breathless African Slave Coast jungles. What an imagination Bruce Chatwin has!”

—
The Wall Street Journal

 

“Robust firsthand observations . . . [
The Viceroy of Ouidah
] is bejewelled with glinting ironies and bizarre details.”

—
Newsweek

 

“Truly wonderful ... Mr. Chatwin, author of that remarkable travel book In
Patagonia,
tells of Francisco Manoel da Silva, a poor adventurer from Bahia who makes a huge fortune in the slave trade; is appointed Viceroy of Ouidah, Dahomey's port city; and then, after falling out with his royal patron, is stripped of his treasure, ending up a halfmad beggar on the streets of the town he once lorded it over. Mr. Chatwin, as readers of
In Patagonia
will remember, has a powerfully visual and aural style; sights and sounds crowd his sentences to the point that the book almost breathes. The narrative of da Silva's rise and fall may be full of ironies and surprise turns and of outré incidents, but the real excitement is the prose.”

—
The New Yorker

 

“It is a sad, barbaric, decadent story told beautifully and brilliantly. Admirers of Conrad and Malcom Cowley will relish it.”

—
The New Statesman

 

Bruce Chatwin was born in 1940, and was the author of
In Patagonia, The Viceroy of Ouidah, On the Black Hill, The Songlines
, and
Utz
. The last three he considered works of fiction. His other books are
What Am I Doing Here, Anatomy of Restlessness, and Far Journeys,
a collection of his photographs which also includes selections from his travel notebooks. Chatwin died outside Nice, France, on January 17, 1989.

SLAVER'S PROVERB

 

 

PENGUIN BOOKS
Published by the Penguin Group
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Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2
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Harmondsworth, Middlesex, England

 

First published in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Ltd 1980
First published in the United States of America by Summit Books,
a division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1981
Published in Penguin Books 1988

eISBN : 978-1-101-50321-8

Copyright © Bruce Chatwin, 1980

All rights reserved

 

 

THE FAMILY OF Francisco Manoel da Silva had assembled at Ouidah to honour his memory with a Requiem Mass and dinner. It was the usual suffocating afternoon in March. He had been dead a hundred and seventeen years.

The Mass was said in the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, a stuccoed monument to the more severe side of French Catholicism that glared across an expanse of red dirt at the walls, the mud huts and trees of the Python Fetish.

Turkey buzzards drifted in a milky sky. The metallic din of crickets made the heat seem worse. Banana leaves hung in limp ribbons. There was no wind.

Father Olimpío da Silva had come into town from the Séminaire de Saint-Gall. A white-haired presence in a crimson cassock, he stood on the south steps, surveying his relatives through steel-rimmed spectacles and swivelling his luminous bronze head with the authority of a gun-turret.

Not only a priest but an ethnographer by calling, he had attended the lectures of Bergson and Marcel Mauss at the Sorbonne; had published an intricate volume, Les
Sacrifices humains chez les Fons
, and was unable to begin a sentence without a qualifying adverb: ‘
statistiquement
. . .
morphologiquement
. . . '

Gravelly organ music floated by; the organist had a limited range of chords.

The Da Silvas had come from Nigeria, from Togo, from Ghana and even from the Ivory Coast. The poor had come by bus and taxi. The rich were in private cars, and the richest of all, Madame Hélène da Silva, better known as Mama Benz, now sat sprawled over the back seat of her cream-coloured Mercedes, cooling herself with a fan of 10,000-franc notes and waiting for the service to end.

Everyone in the family knew their ancestor by his Brazilian name, Dom Francisco.

He came from San Salvador da Bahia in 1812 and, for over thirty years, was the ‘best friend' of the King of Dahomey, keeping him supplied with rum, tobacco, finery and the Long Dane guns which were made not in Denmark but in Birmingham.

In return for these favours, he enjoyed the title of Viceroy of Ouidah, a monopoly over the sale of slaves, a cellar of Château Margaux and an inexhaustible seraglio of women. At his death in 1857, he left sixty-three mulatto sons and an unknown quantity of daughters whose ever-darkening progeny, now numberless as grasshoppers, were spread from Luanda to the Latin Quarter. Yet, among those who gathered in the square, only five had travelled to Europe and none to the Americas.

Turbaned ladies hobbled towards the cathedral, scuffing the dust with feet too splayed and calloused to admit the wearing of shoes. Their cottons were printed with leaves and lions and portraits of military dictators. They hauled themselves into the teak pews.

Little girls tripped about in frilly dresses: their hair was balkanized into zones, each zone twirled up in a tinselled plait.

Their brothers wore tight pants and shifted from foot to foot, holding, but not wearing, the red-starred caps of the Jeunes Militants.

The younger men were in national costume, the old men in suits of white duck or faded khaki.

The lives of the older Da Silvas were empty and sad. They mourned the Slave Trade as a lost Golden Age when their family was rich, famous and white. They were worn down by rheumatism and the burdens of polygamy. Their skin cracked in the harmattan; then the rains came and tambourined on their caladiums and splashed dados of red mud up the walls of their houses.

Yet they clung to their képis and pith-helmets as they clung to the forms of vanished grandeur. They called themselves ‘Brazilians' though they had lost their Portuguese. People slightly blacker than themselves they called ‘Blacks'. They called Dahomey ‘Dahomey' long after the Head of State had changed its name to Benin. Each hung Dom Francisco's picture among their chromolithographs of saints and the Virgin: through him they felt linked to Eternity.

Father Olimpίo rose before the altar and intoned his annual message in a consoling baritone: the Father-of-Them-All had not died but come to Life Everlasting. He looked down on his Children from his Heavenly Resting Place. He counselled them from the infinite store of his wisdom, ‘especially,' he added in an undertone, ‘in this, your hour of need'.

At the
Credo
, the ladies sighed, heaved their thighs and got to their feet. Letters, lions, leaves and military dictators rustled and recomposed themselves.

Mrs Rosemary da Silva, the wife of a Lagos accountant, shut her ear to the blasphemies: she was a Methodist. She sat when they kneeled for the
Sanctus
and she sat through the
Agnus Dei
. Her husband, Ernest, was beside her, sweating into an English blazer, wishing she hadn't come. He felt a rush of love and pity for his own kind. She merely did her best to embarrass him.

She made a show of adjusting her straw boater. She smoothed the folds of her white piqué dress and clacked three ropes of glass beads against her bosom. When the Da Silvas went up to receive the Host, heads bowed in reverence, she looked airily up at the ceiling, wondering how long it would take to fall down.

The building reeked of decay. Seams of rust were splintering the iron pillars of the aisle. The blue planks of the roof were rotten. Someone had stolen the ivory Dove of Peace inlaid into the altar table. Though the Virgin still beckoned from her niche, her hands were tied in a tangle of cobwebs.

And there were one or two more conspicuous changes: a Red Star hovered over the Crèche; the faces of the Holy Family had been repainted the colour of Balthazar, and the confessional was full of scarlet drums.

After the Benediction, the family sang the canticle
Mi do gbe we
(
Salve Regina
) in Fon. Father Olimpίo slapped his missal shut and small boys scampered for the sunlight.

 

 

 

 

ON THE STEPS of the cathedral the Da Silvas posed for their annual photograph.

Agostinho-Ezekiel da Silva was in charge of the ritual. A birdlike gentleman of eighty-nine, he was one of the four surviving grandchildren of the Founder, and Head of the Family.

His skin stretched tight over a bald and shining skull and his toothless mouth was drawn to a perfect O. Silently, he waved instructions with a silver-headed cane: the old people would sit on chairs, the young would stand on the steps and their parents would fill the space between.

Two spindly boys helped him compose the group. Their names were Modeste and Pierre and they were having a terrible time with the ladies.

‘
Mettez-vous là, madame!
'

‘
Bougez, madame!
'

‘Ne bougez pas, madame!
'

But the ladies went on fidgeting, arguing, elbowing and shoving their sisters aside.

Nor were the men behaving any better.

Uncle Procopio, a retired flautist of the Dakar Conservatoire, was reciting his ‘Ode to the Death of the Dahomean Republic'. Gustave the intellectual told him to shut up. Africo da Silva was describing his gas station. Karl-Heinrich said that Togolese State Railways ran on time, while old Zéférino, a Kardecist medium, spoke of the planchette conversation he had had with his brother, Colonel Tigré da Silva, in exile on the Champs-Élysées: as usual the colonel had been sipping champagne and eyeing the girls.