The Viceroy of Ouidah (13 page)

‘Not the boy I knew,' he said.

He decided to risk a letter of congratulation, though five months passed before the reply came — a curt note regretting that public and private pressures no longer allowed him to attend to the African trade.

 

 

 

 

THE NEW BARON of Paraiba did at least have the grace — or the self-interest — to find an agent in Bahia for his ex-colleague.

José de Paraizo was a Portuguese who had learned from the experience of exile the art of making himself indispensable. His first action was to rescue Isidoro da Silva from the gutter. He bought him a new set of clothes, and made him pose in them for his portrait. Then he sent him to Marseille as an apprentice to a shipping company.

He also excelled in finding things to keep the King of Dahomey amused. In the same consignment as the portrait, he sent some lustre-ware kettle-drums, a Noah's Ark and a barrel-organ that played the Psalms. Next, he bought up the costumes that were sold off by the Rio Opera to defray its costs; and for a season, the court functionaries of Abomey swanned about dressed as characters from Rossini's
Semiramide
.

Another time, perhaps as a joke, he sent the canvas of Judith and Holophernes, but Dom Francisco kept it back:

‘These people', he wrote, ‘have so little humour. His Majesty might not be amused.'

Nor was there any way of telling if the King was pleased with a present; for he would frown at each one and lift an eyebrow, as if to say, ‘What have you kept back this time?'

All the serving girls at Simbodji were royal spies: whatever went on in the household the King was the first to know. So, when Dom Francisco bought for himself a silver swan that gobbled up fishes to the airs of Bellini, it vanished overnight, only to be sent back from Abomey with the neck off, the mechanism overwound and a warning never again to send anything broken.

 

 

 

 

THE KING HAD no use for gold. Gold was the currency of his enemy, the King of Ashanti, whereas Dahomey used cowrie-shells that could neither be faked nor adulterated.

But the Cubans and Yankees who came to buy slaves in Ouidah always preferred to pay in gold: ingots, doubloons, louis d'or, napoleons, sovereigns and sometimes the coins of the Great Moghul. Dom Francisco kept his hoard in money barrels buried under the bedroom floor: it alarmed him terribly when the King commanded one of them to be taken up to Abomey.

The King peered at the coins, one after the other, and let them slide through his fingers. He learned the names of Louis Philippe, the Elector of Brandenburg, Tsar Paul and the young Queen Victoria. Then he rolled his eyes and threw the lot to the ground, snorting, ‘I wouldn't let anyone walk off with my head,' and never spoke of gold again.

 

 

 

 

IN THE RAINY season of 1842 Father de Lessa went mad.

He would come into the schoolroom naked and mortify himself with a leather flail. Or he could be seen stalking round the Python Temple, in a mud-spattered soutane, shrieking, ‘I will make this city desolate. I will smite the abominations.'

One Sunday, as he was preparing the sacrament for Mass, he found a python curled up in his vestments and staved its head in with the butt of his processional cross. The fetish priests hauled him out of the chapel and, by the time Dom Francisco had rescued him, he was out of his mind.

He kept seeing an animal called the Zoo.

The Zoo had the head of a monkey, a dog's body, leopard claws, and it would sprawl lecherously across his path and twitter like a bird.

Dom Francisco decided to ship him back to Bahia. But the Zoo was also in the sea; for when they strapped him aboard the canoe, he was still screaming, ‘The Zoo! The Zoo!'

 

 

 

 

ABOUT THIS TIME Isidoro came back from France with the airs of a dandy and a head full of schemes for starting a palm-oil factory: by the 1840s the middle classes of Europe had discovered the blessings of
savon blanc de Provence
.

A Marseille trading company, Mm. Binet and Poncetton, sent a scout to report on the palm plantations of the Slave Coast: it was through Isidoro's help that a thinlipped young man called Blaise Brue reoccupied the old French Fort of Saint-Louis-de-Grégoy.

Blaise Brue played an excellent game of boston and was a welcome dinner guest at Simbodji. It was he who suggested turning Ouidah into a French protectorate.

As for Dom Francisco, he jumped at the chance of making clean money in the oil trade. He put his entire workforce at the Frenchman's disposal, and they went into partnership. They unchoked old palmeries and they planted new ones. From distant villages women converged on the Fort with oil calabashes balanced on their heads. In the first season, four thousand barrels were rolled to the beach, and Dom Francisco was seen again to smile.

He smiled as the palm nuts ripened the colour of embers and he smiled to watch the glutinous yellow liquid rise to the surface of the vats. Often, he would turn to his sons and say:

‘One day palm-oil will make us rich beyond the dreams of avarice.'

But the young mulattos were stranded in a limbo. They hated their father. They hated any kind of work and, having no outlet for their energies, turned sour and moody, stole from the storerooms, or took to drink and discovered the pleasures of the knife.

 

 

 

 

DOM FRANCISCO'S LOVE-AFFAIR with France reached a climax when Louis Philippe's second son, the Prince de Joinville, landed off the frigate
Belle
-
Poule
to inspect the French factory.

That night at dinner, he served a Château Margaux of 1811 and provided a silver tooth-pick holder in the form of a porcupine for each officer to take as a souvenir.

The Prince made everyone laugh by telling scandalous stories about the English when he went to fetch the body of Napoleon off St Helena. He discussed the problem of cooling champagne in the tropics and the origin of the expression ‘
Perfide Albion'
. Then he drew a pencil sketch of his host — the basis of all future portraits — and retired to bed in the Goanese four-poster.

Next morning, when he came to leave, the Da Silva boys shouted ‘Vivas!' The girls garlanded him with frangipani; and, presenting him with a box of his best Havanas, Dom Francisco asked him to put in a good word with his brother-in-law, Dom Pedro of Brazil.

‘I shall tell him everything,' the Prince said.

It came as a terrible shock when Blaise Brue got a message from his company in Marseille to drop his association with the infamous slaver.

‘I am sorry, mon vieux,' — and that was all he had to say.

 

 

 

 

IN DESPAIR DOM Francisco turned to the British, hoping that if he helped them, they would help him in return.

When a Bristol barque went ashore four miles down the coast at Jacquin, he cleared the beach of looters and helped the crew salvage the cargo. He rescued a Methodist mission stranded at Lagos, and looked after Mrs McCalvert when her husband blew his brains out. He even entertained the Englishmen who came with Lord Palmerston's draft treaty for abolishing the Slave Trade.

The first ‘Englishman' to visit the King was a Freetown ‘trouser black', the Reverend Tommy Crowder, who was forced to witness the annual sacrifices and came back scared out of his wits. He did, however, just manage to stammer out the greetings of the Great White Queen.

The King's reply, which the clergyman transcribed into a kind of English, asked after the Queen's health and that of ‘His Daughters and His Sons and His Mother and His Grandmother'. It agreed that selling slaves was ‘BAD'; that Brazilians were ‘BAD PIPPLE ONLY WANT SLAVE FOR MONEY'; and that ‘Him Queen' should send a man with a ‘Big Head to hear King Palaver and write Book Palaver and same way King of Dahomey send messenger to Queen bye and bye'.

The man with a ‘Big Head', Captain William Munro, arrived six months later in the uniform of the 1st Life Guards. He had ginger hair, candid blue eyes, a tuft of ginger whiskers on the bridge of his nose, and his conversation was full of the stock phrases of Abolitionist literature. He had brought the King a present of a pair of peacocks, and a spinning-wheel from his mother in the Highlands.

Over dinner he tried to convince Dom Francisco that the soil of Dahomey was ideal for growing cotton.

‘Yes. Yes,' his host replied. ‘It will come. It will all come. You will bring them railways and make them very happy. You may even stop them killing each other. But that will take a long time, and I am much too old and tired to try. All I can do, my dear young friend, is offer you the hospitality of my simple house.'

He was laid up with rheumatism the day the mission left for Abomey; but calling the Captain to his bedside, he gripped his hand and whispered, ‘Do, please, commend me to the King.'

Afterwards, no one knew if the interpreter was to blame, or Munro's naivety, or the King's desire to please. But the Foreign Office got the impression that the King was a ‘just and humane man', who longed to be rid of the ‘detestable Da Silva' and take up the peaceful arts of agriculture.

In his turn, the King had the pleasing vision of an annual subsidy of three thousand pounds from his White Sister, which would allow him to make war and take as many heads as he liked without the troublesome business of selling captives.

His letter to Queen Victoria promised to expel all the slavers from Ouidah; and since the Queen's heart was a ‘BIG CALABASH overflowing with palm-wine for the thirsty man', he needed a big tent and a golden carriage — now.

Three more English missions came, each worse-tempered than the last, and a Vice-Consulate was set up at Ouidah in the old British Fort.

The King promised one thing, then another, but never put his cross to the treaty. No tent came from England, nor did the golden carriage. Instead Consul Crosby took the King a suit of chain mail, some gutta-percha masks of Punch and Judy, a contraption called Dr Merryweather's Tempest Prognosticator, and a copy of the
Illustrated London News
covering the Great Exhibition.

The meanness of these presents shocked the King into asking Dom Francisco what three thousand pounds would pay for:

‘Your household expenses for one week.'

The Vice-Consul was a sour-faced man, who held himself excessively erect and had cheeks that looked as if they were pumped full of grease. He earned Dom Francisco's undying hatred when he pointed at Taparica and said, ‘I see, sir, that you keep a performing monkey.'

His orders from Lord Palmerston were to insist that Dahomey refrain from attacking the city of Abeokuta, where there were Anglican missionaries. The King, however, had promised his ancestors to leave Abeokuta a pile of ashes — and he promised the English nothing.

At his last audience, Crosby made the mistake of lecturing on the evils of war, at which the King produced a framed engraving of the Battle of Waterloo and said, ‘Whose war, Mr Consul? Whose war?'

The Consul's reply was to present the King with a native hoe together with some comment about ‘doing a useful job of work'. The King then flew into a rage, threw a necklet of bat wings in the envoy's face and bellowed, ‘Take that for the old woman!'

Consul Crosby broke off negotiations and closed the Consulate.

The King went to war.

Two missionaries stationed at Abeokuta, Messrs Bickersteth and Smith, gave the Egbas lessons in arms drill and provided ammunition. On March 3rd 1851, five thousand Dahomeans were killed below the Sacred Rock. It was the worst defeat in their history.

The West Africa Squadron then blockaded the port of Ouidah and the King's ministers blamed Dom Francisco for letting the Englishmen into the country.

 

 

 

 

BUT WORSE TROUBLES were to come from the ‘Brazilians'.

The first ‘Brazilians' in Ouidah were a shipload of ex-slaves, who had bought their freedom and chartered an English merchantman to take them back to Africa. They landed near Lagos, hoping to go upcountry to their old homes in Oyo. But the fetid swamps were far from the paradise of their grandmothers' tales. Villagers stoned them and let loose their dogs. They panicked at the thought of being sold again. They were homesick for Brazil but, with one-way passports, had nowhere else to go.

Dom Francisco heard of their plight and sent his cutter to offer them asylum.

He met them on the beach, the men in stove-pipe hats, the women in white-lace crinolines with their hair ironed flat. He gave them parcels of land and soon their cheerful farms dotted the countryside all the way to Savi.

The ‘Brazilians' turned Ouidah into a Little Brazil. They went on picnics. They gave dinners. They planted pots of love-lies-bleeding and the marvel of Peru. They decorated their rooms with pictures of St George and the Dragon and, at Carnaval, would pelt each other with waxed oranges full of scented water.

The whole town changed colour. Instead of dull pinks and ochres, the houses took on the hues of a Brazilian garden; and as the women leaned over their half-doors, they seemed to be wearing them as an extension of their dress.

On the hot days they would lounge on their balconies, fanning themselves or scratching their backs with ivory back-scratchers. Sometimes, a chain of captives came clanking by with dogs at their heels — and the ‘Brazilians' would fling flowers into the street, shout ‘
Boa Viagem
!' and sigh for the great houses of Bahia and Pernambuco.