A BRIDGE IN WEST AFRICA

A memoir

by

Gavan McDonell

We had been staying for a few days at the old abbey in Connemara in the west of Ireland, where the light bursts out of the green hills and the sea dies in a silver shroud of an afternoon when the sun sets beyond Arran. Knowing that we were going on a picnic one of the nuns suggested we take with us a young girl student there whose father was a chief at Bathurst in the Gambia on the West African coast. She was tall and slim and very black, but she had the manner of the demurely convent bred, and the soft stroke of a Connemara accent.

It was mid-summer, and all the clocks had been advanced for daylight saving time. Except in the Abbey where God’s time was not to be interfered with. Carried away with the treat of the afternoon’s holiday with us, the freedom of the hills and meadows, and telling stories of her home, she had let the hours slip by, until she suddenly gave a start, breaking into the dreams of her world, and said in the western brogue,”And now, could you be tellin’ me, what time would it be back in the Abbey?”

Worlds away, and fairy castles, and leprechauns, and the black-robed, gliding nuns, and the toll of the evening bells.

As it turned out a year or so later, Africa began for me in 1958 at Bathurst, with the moist breeze at sunset, opulent hibiscus and fragrance laden frangipani, the stretched dark slab of the Atlantic horizon at dawn, long-gowned servants padding through the mud-walled guest-house, appearing noiselessly in the middle of the room, smiling, always smiling. And it ended, years later, much as it began, not at Bathurst but with the same ease of light, of air, the riffle of a drum, the enigmas of the smiles.

But not long after Bathurst came Accra, the capital of the then new nation of Ghana. Only a year before that broad West African expanse of beaches, rain forest, orchard bush and desert had been known for centuries as the Gold Coast, land of the Ga people, the Akan, the Fante, the Ashanti, the Hausa and the secretive folk of the savannah.

‘Every Sunday they make an offering to Taberah of cankee, which is their bread, mixing it with palm oil. This is a stated custom, but the same is performed occasionally at other times. In special cases, as of some great distress by sickness or want of rains, and apprehension by famine, they sacrifice a sheep or goat; and when the sea is tempestuous for several days together, that they can catch no fish, this they look upon as token of their idol’s displeasure. The victim being killed, and cut in pieces, some part of it is thrown upon the rock, which is interpreted to be eaten by Taberah, because it is devoured, as though by some great birds that hover there; and the other parts of the flesh the people dress for their own eating, and then sit around, and there feast upon it.‘

Thomas Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, London, 1758.

In the market at Accra, a grass-roofed stall, the table covered two feet high with skulls. Dog skulls, goat skulls, snake skulls, bird skulls. Packets of herbs. Rolled in newspaper, and leaves. Powders and berries. Feathers of bright birds in armlets and amulets. Duiker bones and chicken bones. Unspeakable objects, but commonplace, charred. Seared with imaginings. In the middle of the pile a round, brown face with gleaming eye, manic, weaving around, above and among the skulls, the shells, the feathers, casseroled in the smell of herbs and rotting flesh. This was the juju stall, and its vendor. Drums beat in the morning air.

An embarrassed laugh as the white man approached. The sounds of scurrying from the hut behind-a rat, a person, a spirit. The women of the market, wrapped large in their long cloths printed in the colors of the land, greens and browns and reds, big-breasted under white blouses, swaying against the table, fat muscled arms and long molded fingers turning over the talismans of the living spirits around us. As if in protection a tall Fulani man touched with one hand the amulet at this neck containing a fragment from the Koran and with the other stroked up and down, back and forth, a dried brown skull on the bench. The one God fortified with the many.

Dust rose, scattered by the passersby on their way to the meat and fish and cassava and vegetables. Women at the cloth stalls, hung with English and Dutch and Indian cottons in the designs and fashions favored by the Ghanaians, laughed and cackled and flirted with their buyers and assistants, and suckled their babies as they went.

And the mad eye at the juju stall wove in and out, glowing among the dust and bones, in and out of the spotlight of the sun. Lusts, joys, fears, enticements shone out from the eye darting there among the shades. And beneath it all the drums, the rush of intoxication, of desire and love, of rage and madness, close, close.

I went one evening to a dinner party given by a senior English army officer in the military cantonments. During the short twilight drinks were served in the garden by servants in stiff white shirts and long white trousers. The talk was of the current preoccupations-the battles between Nkrumah, the first prime minister of an independent Ghana and the traditional chiefs, the price of cocoa, the lover knifed at a nearby door, de Gaulle’s ambitions in North Africa, two thousand miles away across the Sahara but for Ghana a close neighbor.

But at dinner, in the wine, the four Ghanaian guests, at ease as commissioned ranks and high civil servants and lawyers could be among their European colleagues, spoke of things closer to hand. Two were in the army, one a senior diplomat, one from the Treasury, all of them from Oxford, or Cambridge or Sandhurst, traveled, cosmopolitan, but still not far from the village. Each told stories of the powers, of leaves fluttering on still nights in wild moonlight dances, alternately soaring or softly sibilant. Of death done by ghostly proxy. Of the sacrifice of children at the yam festivals, beheaded without cry or tremor, swaying on their mother’s backs as they walked beside the surf. Of the access of strength, or the conferring of oblivion, upon the great and the powerful. Not long after I met some of the practitioners.

Gerhard Schultz, the contractor’s foreman for the construction of the bridge I had designed across the Tano river, in the rain forests of western Ghana, had only been six weeks in the country. He was unfamiliar with the workings of the clause in all such contracts requiring that local religious customs be observed. This clause stipulated that the contractor should pay the costs of any such observances which were deemed necessary by the local priests or priestesses to smooth the path of the construction through the dwellings of any resident gods.

Late one afternoon I returned home to find awaiting me a telegram from Schultz saying that the work was delayed because of exorbitant demands by the priests. He urged me to go to negotiate for him. I left that night late, driving in the cool and relative safety of darkness when the roads were free of the enthusiastic, erratic drivers of the many mammy-wagons. I arrived at the site about midday.

Schultz had awoken that morning tired, and the events of the previous day we re already obscure in this memory. He had had a tree felled where the bridge was to be built. The local laborers had objected but-this was his first job in Africa-he had overruled them, even the gray-headed, sober headman. The dust from the tree’s fall had scarcely settled before a throng of local people had appeared in the clearing on the river bank where the construction sheds and equipment had been set up. One of the men, with a gold-painted staff and crooked , betel-stained teeth, and one of the women, withered and skinny with flat, scrawny breasts and a dirty, white cloth draped around her waist, separated themselves from the rest and gesticulated and snarled at Schultz.

He did not expect this frontal assault, so soon after his arrival, in what now seemed a strange and hostile land, full of the new political liberties, simply because he had cut down a tree. If this was what could happen over one tree, would the bridge ever be built. But he soon learnt: four gods had been in residence near the bridge site and their peace and dignity had been ruptured by the sacrilegious destruction of the tree. The preparations for construction had begun before any offerings had been made to them or requests to move had been transmitted through their agents, the priests of the area.

In particular Taakora, the god of the holy river Tano, the supreme god on earth of the Akan people, from whom came Nkrumah himself, had been especially disturbed and would require great propitiation. In addition the spot chosen for the bridge was more than usually venerated for there lived nearby four gods watching over not only that vicinity but also long reaches of the river.

The man and the woman snarling at Schultz were priest and priestess. Through the heat and hubbub Schultz learnt that customary religious observances required that, before any building work was commenced, offerings must be made and libations poured to the gods. Further libations would be required at various times while the bridge was being built. No further work was to be allowed until full reparation had been made for the transgressions already committed, libation had been completed and the gods placated. For the due ceremonies to proceed five hundred bottles of gin and six cases of Scotch whisky would be required for use in the rituals and for distribution among the priests and their attendants.

The foreman was angered and afraid. He was afraid because he was the only white man within miles and his offense was great. He knew that the thick green forests around, the dark caverns of vines and bushes, gloomy even in the midday sun, would cover his body without trace. He was afraid, too, of his employers, far away in Switzerland, of their annoyance at the delay and the added costs of the required tribute.

And he was angry at his loss of face, his ignorance and the price he was expected to pay for it all. Five hundred bottles of gin and six cases of whisky to assuage five imaginary gods! The profits would be gone. They had quoted low on the job, hoping to find favour in the eyes of the timber company who were giving the bridge to the local community, and, of course, to allow them to export logs from the rich surrounding forests.

He remonstrated for a while, but he knew the sad-eyed local headman was not translating his words with conviction. He threw his hands up, nodded to the headman, and walked to his pickup. The crowd that had gathered moved slowly, grudgingly, aside. Back at his camp near the town, he thought for a while, drank another beer, and then sent telegrams to his head office and to me.

‘‘The king’s messengers, with gold breast plates, made way for us, and we commenced our round…The caboceers, as did their superior captains and attendants, wore Ashantie clothes, of extravagant price, made from the costly foreign silks…of incredible size and weight, and thrown over the shoulder exactly like the Roman toga. Wolves’ and rams’ heads as large as life, cast in gold, were suspended like round bills, and rusted in blood…The large drums supported on the head of one man, and beaten by two others, were braced around with the thigh bones of their enemies, and ornamented with their skulls…Finely grown girls stood behind the chairs of some, with silver basins. Their stools (of the most laborious carved work, and generally with two large bells attached to them) were conspicuously placed on the heads of favourites…The prolonged flourishes of the horns, a deafening tumult of drums, and the fuller concert of the intervals, announced that we were approaching the king…the king’s four linguists were encircled by a splendor inferior to none, and their peculiar insignia, gold canes, were elevated in all directions, tied in bundles like fasces. A delay of several minutes whilst we severally approached to receive the king’s hand afforded to us a thorough view of h im; his deportment first excited my attention: native dignity in princes we are pleased to call barbarous was a curious spectacle; his manners were majestic, yet courteous;…he wore a fillet of aggrey beads round his temples, …over his right shoulder a red, silk cord, suspending three sapphires cased in gold; his bracelets were the richest mixture of beads and gold and his fingers were covered with rings; his cloth was of a dark green silk.’

TE Bowditch, ‘Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantie’. London, 1819

The paramount chief of that area was a tall, heavy shouldered man, with oiled, dark brown skin and the bearing that went with a long ancestry of chiefs and nobles among the local tribes. He had been enstooled in his paramountcy-that is to say, enthroned-in a large and splendid ceremony just two years before, not long after he had returned from a graduate course in economics at Oxford. He had taken a very ordinary degree from the same university ten years before, spending much of his time and his uncle’s money in the pursuits well suited to West african princes at British places of higher learning in that period. Which means that he was alternatively lionized and patronized. Three years at Oxford, the selective attentions of white women, and the practiced indignities of old colonial hands, stockbrokers’ sons and English landladies had refined an inherited gift for cocking a weather eye and divining a middle way.

His tribe had never been powerful, even though over the centuries it had often patrolled a large area. Its lands lay between the powerful Fante chiefdoms of the coasts and the dominating Ashanti kingdom to the north. Its destiny was to be a buffer zone, and despite all its care it had often enough paid the price. Though the main sources of slaves for the foreign trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been further to the north and east, from time to time this tribe had been raided, when supplies elsewhere were short. At other times, his fathers had had to work diligently to avoid disaster. To spot a dicey situation, to fashion protective if sometimes shifty compromises, came naturally enough to the paramount chief.

When Nkrumah’s independence movement had gathered force and begun to isolated the traditional chiefs and conservative wealthy cocoa farmers, he was one of the few chiefs who had kept foot in both camps. Kwame Nkrumah, the Osagyefo, the Redeemer, had been a young lad from a village not so many miles to the south, near the mouth of the Tano River, who had gone off to the United States and come back to lead the new men chanting independence.

He had come to the district at the head of a motley but overwhelming party of the young, the market women, town workers and the village poor. And the now paramount chief, then merely one of several chiefs, had made sure that he was welcome. Favours followed. The paramount chief had been selected for special tasks as a mediator in the councils of the chiefs and in heading off trouble with factions among the Ashanti, with whom he was on good terms but who were the principal tribal opponents of the new regime. He received his rewards. The nine-month course which he had completed at Oxford, with trimmings to taste, was one of them. And, when he returned, the paramountcy.

Another was the bridge. The timber company which had made the contract, and financed it, was part of a large European conglomerate with diverse interests throughout West Africa. There were many areas in western Ghana covered with tall trees and thick jungle, but companies with the necessary means of bulldozers and machinery and staff and cash to run a logging operation were scarce. For several years the paramount chief had used his influence in the political councils and the public service to have the timber company pointed towards his tribal lands, rather than those of other tribes.

The company itself had received little hint of his direct personal interest and had found the chief stiffly dignified and uncompromising whenever they had had negotiations. In the end, before permission could be obtained for their forestry lease, they had been obliged to agree to build the bridge. It was to be a proper, concrete bridge, not just one made of logs, and it was to be properly designed by an engineer (me, as it turned out). It was to have a pedestrian footway, in addition to the wide one-vehicle lane for timber trucks, to allow people unimpeded passage across the Tano river. There was to be no such bridge for many miles.

To some extent this was simply a gesture by the company, as they would need a robust structure to exploit the several thousand acres of their lease across the river. But they would have preferred to build it much more cheaply, and not be bound in humiliating agreement with an obstinate, up-country chief.

Negotiation with the Asantehene, King of the Ashanti, was something they could understand, carried on with the autocratic ritual and formality of an eighteenth century European court. Dealing with the Asantehene, even the paler version, subdued by the Republic, who now sat in the castle at Kumasi, was one thing; with these conniving country nobodies it was quite another, and the company didn’t like it. Not so long ago it would all have been settled by a bribe to a favorite of the Asantehene, or by some well-placed pressure upon the British District Officer in charge of the area, anxious for his district’s exports.

But to the paramount chief it was a very good deal indeed, the sort that he liked, where everybody, himself especially, won. The company was getting its timber lease and a long flow of profits. The national government was getting handsome royalties, and later there would follow taxes. The people of the area were getting a way across the Tano, open even in the monsoon when the river was a roaring torrent, to the rich hunting and the good land on the other side, and to the large towns further up the road. He, himself, had already received a big ‘dash’, a new Mercedes saloon, and could expect further benefits in the future.

And everybody was getting the good, concrete bridge, symbol of common-sense and mutual support and the modern spirit, solid witness ot the wisdom and good sense of them all, whom it would celebrate for many years to all who knew the story.

And now this foolish Swiss had stirred up the priests and their attendants. The people were anxious. The chief’s rivals were already loose, fomenting fear of foreigners and foreign ways. The timber company might be frightened off.

‘Among many of the peoples of West Africa-and, for that matter, many other parts of Africa, especially in the forests-the closest social bonds lay not within the paternal family, between father and child, but between uncle or aunt and nephew and niece. Descent passed in the female line, Obligations of loyalty, trust, support, affection bound brother and sister. The popular explanation was that one can be sure that one’s sister’s children are of your blood, but can you be sure of your wife’s? When a chief’s mother had died, it was his sister, not his wife, who became the Queen Mother, or, as we would say, the First Lady. This connection was especially strong among families of the royal. It’s history cast a along shadow.

The Pharaonic state was bureaucratic, not feudal…its great title holders were officials, not hereditary territorial magnates…not perhaps inevitably, but not by accident either…a radical growth of the institution produced a corresponding development…in the shape of the god-king, paying the highest honor to his god-bearing mother, and practising royal incest with his potentially god-bearing sister…’

Roland Oliver, ‘The African Experience’. London, 1993

The news had been brought to the paramount chief in mid-afternoon by his linguist Among most of the tribes of the rain-forest running across West Africa the custom was that the chief could not be addressed directly, but only through an official known as the linguist, or okyeami, who provided the channel to and from the royal ears and mouth. The linguist was appointed by the chief, and in turn appointed retainers. The post of linguist was not hereditary. In this one powerful position were combined the two staff, private secretary and press secretary, of which modern potentates feel the need. But other functions were also often joined in this person-confidant, strategist, procurer, fixer.

The paramount chief and the linguist talked long about the crisis in the project on which they had both worked so hard. Sometimes silence fell between them. Sometimes they spoke in rapid exchanges. After one such burst, the linguist went to one of the larger huts and soon returned with a robust woman of about forty, wearing a bright turban and wrapped about in a flower, purple, cotton-print cloth. She was the paramount chief’s younger sister. She sat down with the two men and listened without response, head down, serious, intent, to her brother’s words, and then to the slow sentences of the linguist, heavy with respect. About an hour or so before dark would fall, she and the linguist left.

As he later explained to me about the events of that afternoon and the night, Schultz, after he had sent the telegrams, was sitting on the veranda of his prefabricated hut drinking beer as the light was fading. The first flush of anger, fear and frustration had subsided. He was now puzzling over what to do, how to respond to the heavy demands the priests had made upon him. Absorbed in his thoughts, his cigarettes and his beer, he felt the still, lonely evening settle around him. The soft noises of the steward preparing the meal in the lean-to kitchen, and the subdued by cheerful hum form the village over the hill were reassuring presences.

He did not notice for some time the two girls, quietly tittering, under trees at the edge of the clearing. They had been bathing in the river below. Their hair was still wet and their body cloths were still damp. He had not been long enough in the country to be sure whether what finally stirred his attention were childish giggles coming from embarrassed teenagers, or more mature signals of invitation. But in either case he had no wish to become worse entangled, this time over women. He stood up and made a gesture of dismissal, calling out “Go away, go away” in English, and went inside.

But by the time the dark fall of night had shut out the world beyond, and the hut had become a small glowing center, and he was halfway through his meal and sipping another beer, the two girls had appeared again, this time on his veranda. They were scuffling lightly and grinning wide, white smiles around the door. The soft light from the only kerosene mantle lamp highlighted the blue sheen of foreheads, the shoulders finely sculpted from the daily pounding of the fufu, the cassava meal which was staple food, and the gleam of smiling eyes.

He called out again for them to go away, but less firmly. A little later, he consulted his steward who had long experience of Europeans. The old man assured him there was no danger from the local people if he allowed the young females in his house. They might even think it was a gesture of reconciliation. Schultz told him to ask the by now dancing, humming girls to enter.

They sat on the floor, and on the chairs and table, looked at his cups and fingered his shirt, laughed at his razor and shaving soap, played ball with his just washed clothes which the steward had laid out on his bed. The older, bigger one jumped up and down on the bed and patted the sheet beside her, laughing and joking with her sister as she did.

The faint light from the lamp in the other room shone on her dark arms and breasts from which the cloth had dropped. As he stood beside the bed, arms akimbo, wondering what to do, she took hold of him with one hand and with the other undid his belt. As he fell upon her, the younger one stroked his back from behind. Through the night he played the games of the sexual children who had taken possession of his bed.

When he awoke in the full light of morning he was anxious and confused. His memories of the night were a tangle, a sweet tangle. Those of the previous day, of his anger, fear and frustration, were shadowed by the shapes of the night. The first had gone before first light, one slipping out from beside him on the narrow bed, the other from the mat on the floor where she had finally fallen asleep. They left on his pillow one of the flowers that had adorned their hair when they arrived.

He was drinking coffee when the small group of men arrived at the edge of the clearing. One of them called out to the steward in the local language.

“Master, these men come to make palaver about the bridge.”

Three of the men were barefoot, clad in cloth wrapped around the waist. The fourth, who was tall and strode impressively, wore sandals, had a patterned, handwoven silk cloth draped across one shoulder in toga fashion, and carried a long, carved stave. On its top, painted in shining gold, were two figures. One was of a man, a prisoner, kneeling and bound in chains. His head was pulled back from behind by the left hand of the other figure, an executioner, who, in his right hand, flourished a long, golden knife.

“This man speaks for the chief,” the steward said.

Schultz’s anxieties returned. The events of the night still formed around him a kind of touchable, a transgressive haze. The images of the men before him, even of the gold monstrosity on the top of the staff, were shot across with moving hands, hard nipples and full lips. His thoughts were slowed by the numbnesses of pleasure. But his fears were groundless.

Through the steward the lingust explained the situation in the local language(he could speak passable English, I later discovered, but would not lose face by using it in negotiations). The paramount chief had heard of the dispute the previous day. He was upset that the contractor had been insulted by the priests-”ignorant, foolish people”, the linguist said in anger. The local people were simple and easily stirred, it was important not to offend them.

The paramount chief had intervened on the contractor’s behalf and the priests had agreed that only two-thirds of the amount of whisky and gin they had at first demanded would now be necessary for the offerings and libations. The paramount chief, the linguist explained, was sorry the foreman and his employers had been troubled, but these were simple people, he repeated, and if their small worries were now attended to the paramount chief assured him there would be no more.

He stressed the gracious interest the paramount chief had taken in the unwitting embarrassment to the gods which Schultz had innocently provoked, the gullibility of the people, the anger of the priests, the importance of the bridge, the high expectations the chief had already formed of his company, and, from several reports he had received , of him, Schultz, personally. There was no mention of the girls in the night.

So it was all quickly fixed, and the linguist and his attendants had left the clearing before thirty minutes had gone. I arrived in early afternoon to find bustling preparations for the ceremonies next morning already begun. There was drumming in the village and it continued throughout the night. There were many comings and goings at Schultz’s camp. In mid afternoon two local government councillors and a member of the national parliament for the district turned up in a large American car.

These were great local dignitaries it seemed to Schultz, but were, in fact, to the local people, men of much lower status than the paramount chief and his linguist. Dressed in shirts and well groomed trousers, speaking good English, they explained how easily such misunderstandings as yesterday’s could arise. They, of course, didn’t believe in all the juju but all the farmers and v illage people around did.

“Like children,” the member of parliament said, laughing loudly with his head thrown back, showing red betel nut stains on his teeth, slapping his thigh with one huge hand and with the other emptying the last of yet another bottle of beer down his throat. “Like children”, repeated a councillor, and another round of laughter echoed, and the others joined in and slapped their thighs and quaffed their beer, until at last both Schultz and I, too, laughed uproariously and drank our beer and looked as though we might even slap our thighs.

The light was failing and the frogs and cicadas struck up, the cocoa trees and the banana fronds and the tall forest trees turned black, the lamps flickered in the village, and the drumming, on and on, on and on, went into the night.

Not long after dawn next day the first of hundreds of people had gathered in the clearing above the bridge site. Two priests and two priestesses had spent the night there, their faces and bodies covered with the white powdered clay which, in the Ghanaian forests, is the incense of holiness. Two groups of drummers, using chest-high male and female drums made of hollowed tree trunks with tightly stretched skins across one end, had commenced a low insistent beat.

The paramount chief arrived some time later in his Mercedes, a clutch of councillors in a pickup, the member of Parliament turned up in his Ford. The chief, led by the linguist with his golden staff of office, and shaded by a brilliant gold umbrella held high over him by a stolid attendant, walked down the hilly slope towards the river and sat on a chair near the drummers.

Soon, without announcement, as though on impulse, the priests and priestesses commenced to dance, slow, shuffling, awkward movements of the hips, guttural voices rising and falling in long, drawn-out wails. As they moved their assistants danced with them, sprinkling them with dust and white chalk, poking each other obscenely, treading the steps for a while and then retiring to let another take the place. For several hours the drumming and dancing rolled monotonously, mesmerically, the crowd gelled, the heat and steam of the morning rose, amnesia descended. One by one the dancers wandered off.

Only an old priestess was left, she who spoke for the god of the river, Taakora, himself. The beat of the drums had slowly risen. The drummers were covered in sweat, their shoulders and eyes and legs when twitching. The old, holy crone, her soiled white cloth around her waist, black, wizened face covered with white clay streaked with sweat, flat bags of breazts flapping against her rib-cage, shuffled and flailed around in a circle. Her red eyes rolled, alternately she hissed and spat low sounds or blew out lips in explosive circles. Around and around the drums were volleying.

She stopped and came over to where ‘the official party’ was standing. Starting with the paramount chief she threw white chalk over him, much as priests in Christian churches cast the sanctifying smoke from the censor over the faithful. She moved along the line, hissing as she went, spraying each face with dust, fixing each one with inflamed, red and rolling eyes which gleamed in a fierce glare, and yet focused catatonically inwards.

When she reached Schultz she stopped again. The drums stopped. She walked slowly around him several times, placing each old foot carefully after the other on the damp mud bank. She swayed thin hips, hissing and breathing, stopping sometimes to look at his eyes and to touch him, pulling her hand away as though touching red-hot metal. She stopped again, looking into his pale, nervous eyes with her red, ferocious ones.

The silence was long, no-one moved, standing next to him I could feel him stiffen. She slowly reached out her hand, took some of the white dust from a pottery bowl held by an assistant, gave a cry and a leap and threw it into his face in a light cloud. The drums rang out loudly again, she circled Schultz in that cramped, menacing shuffle, and launched over him great, white, cleansing clouds of benediction.

When she came to me she stopped again, and the drums too, and she walked, not shuffled, around me once, returning to look me in the eyes.. I had not realised before how controlled, baleful, malevolent were those black eyes in their red mesh of veins. She gave one last hiss, stamped her feet, shook her head angrily, threw some dust on the ground and moved away. No blessing for me, apparently, the latecomer, the originator of the bridge, not vouchsafed even the grudging acceptance of which Schultz, the sinner, but now a temporary member of the tribe, had been thought worthy.

As if on a signal the crowd, by now in hundreds, moved towards the river, caught in the one emotion. First the priests and priestesses, then the dozens of attendants and the drummers. Then the paramount chief, splendid in the red and green and gold silks of his kente toga, a blue embroidered skull-cap on his head, sheltered by the golden umbrella held above him by an attendant. Next the linguist and his wooden staff with gilded death on its top. Then Schultz and I and a representative of the timber company, and the politicians. Then the masses of local people and their children, in bright cloths and the women in coloured turbans, skins freshly oiled for the occasion now streaked with sweat and dust. They fanned down in a curve from the slope of the clearing to near the site of the bridge.

The priests had stopped beside the tree trunk Schultz had killed-killed, I write, and killed it was, where it sprawled in the fast, brown waters of the river. The drums were silent now and in the hush the people gathered close beneath the burning midday sun. Quiet. The uneasy shuffle of feet and the soft rush of the river.

The priestesses’ attendants dragged from the shade of the trees two large male goats, one brown, speckled with black, the other completely white. I had not seen them before. No doubt they had been tethered quietly all the time, but in the heated moment it seemed as though they had been spirited into place.

The old priestess came forward once more, muttering and growling, pulling the ears of one goat, pushing the rump of the other, scattering white clouds around her as she went, in and out, between and around the two goats. Then with another mad cry she grabbed the white goat and dragged it towards the river.

When I thought of it later, trying to remember how it happened, it scarcely seemed to have occurred in time at all. Two of the attendants, the two who had done most of the dancing with the old woman, rushed forward, taking the goat from her, almost knocking her over as she tottered off. The goat was hauled a few feet out along the dead tree. A long knife shone and the throat was slit in a stroke. A sharp hiss from the crowd. The paramount chief beside me stood impassive. In front of him the linguist, over whose shoulder I was looking, slowly revolved his staff between his fingers. The sun glinted from the golden figures of the kneeling prisoner and erect executioner as they turned.

The red blood spurted over the tree trunk and into the water. Still twitching in chilling death, the goat was thrown into the brown stream. The gore pulsed from its neck, staining the water as it splashed. A sacrifice to the gods of the river, it was to be carried away by the river. The gods of the place, the people hoped, would go with it, in peace and satisfaction, leaving space for the bridge to be built.

But they wouldn’t go. An eddy caught the body still plunging and kicking in its death throes, and brought it back again. Again it came around, and again, and then the kicking carcass turned, slowly moving out into the center of the stream where the current rushed, drifted downstream a little and, at first uncertainly and then faster, swung back again towards the shore.

The many lips which a few seconds previously had opened with hisses dropped apart in gasps, and a single, stifled gasp rose above the stiffened gathering. Once more the body circled slowly out into midstream, paused shakily on the fringe of the current, and traced its ghostly arc back to the starting point like a spirit in thrall. Breathing had stopped. The gasp was silently held. The old priestess stopped her growling and, bent forward on one leg, her hands crushing white clay between her fingers, she gazed in furious concentration, unmoving, joined with her eye’s beam to the circling corpse.

It turned again to the center of the river and the running current. Poised in midstream, in frozen seconds it inched a few feet downstream, backwards, forwards, still held in the circling eddy, and then broke free and plunged with the rushing water around the river bend. The white body, leaving a wash of bloody rust behind, was gone.

Hundreds of mouths exhaled in a swoosh. The drummer of the male drum beat it loudly, heavily, bang bang bang. I had watched the paramount chief through the last few minutes? hours? seconds? His face had stayed calm throughout. But the cheeks paled beneath their brown, the lips were strained and set as the grey shape circled in the water like a lost soul. Turning, he saw me watching and the face opened in a wide and condescending smile.

“The people will be happy now,” he said.

‘The blacks speak much of spirits appearing to them, and believe these are the souls of deceased persons, but they have little or no apprehension of a future state-they rather think that the soul, after death, keeps haunt about the body, and is latent in, or near its repository; and it must be grounded upon this imagination, that they have a custom of setting pots and basins, and other such furniture and utensils, at the graves of their kindred.

That which in some books of voyages is said, of the negroes of Guinea sacrificing to the devil, may have some truth in it; but nothing of that, literally speaking, is ever practised in any part of the Gold Coast, as I could ever learn by clear information. The blacks at Cape Coast are the very opposite of this, seeming rather to hold him in defiance.’

A BRIDGE IN WEST AFRICA
A Memoir
by
Gavan McDonell

c6600 words
A BRIDGE IN WEST AFRICA
A memoir
by
Gavan McDonell

We had been staying for a few days at the old abbey in Connemara in the west of Ireland, where the light bursts out of the green hills and the sea dies in a silver shroud of an afternoon when the sun sets beyond Arran. Knowing that we were going on a picnic one of the nuns suggested we take with us a young girl student there whose father was a chief at Bathurst in the Gambia on the West African coast. She was tall and slim and very black, but she had the manner of the demurely convent bred, and the soft stroke of a Connemara accent.
It was mid-summer, and all the clocks had been advanced for daylight saving time. Except in the Abbey where God’s time was not to be interfered with. Carried away with the treat of the afternoon’s holiday with us, the freedom of the hills and meadows, and telling stories of her home, she had let the hours slip by, until she suddenly gave a start, breaking into the dreams of her world, and said in the western brogue,”And now, could you be tellin’ me, what time would it be back in the Abbey?”
Worlds away, and fairy castles, and leprechauns, and the black-robed, gliding nuns, and the toll of the evening bells.

As it turned out a year or so later, Africa began for me in 1958 at Bathurst, with the moist breeze at sunset, opulent hibiscus and fragrance laden frangipani, the stretched dark slab of the Atlantic horizon at dawn, long-gowned servants padding through the mud-walled guest-house, appearing noiselessly in the middle of the room, smiling, always smiling. And it ended, years later, much as it began, not at Bathurst but with the same ease of light, of air, the riffle of a drum, the enigmas of the smiles.
But not long after Bathurst came Accra, the capital of the then new nation of Ghana. Only a year before that broad West African expanse of beaches, rain forest, orchard bush and desert had been known for centuries as the Gold Coast, land of the Ga people, the Akan, the Fante, the Ashanti, the Hausa and the secretive folk of the savannah.

‘Every Sunday they make an offering to Taberah of cankee, which is their bread, mixing it with palm oil. This is a stated custom, but the same is performed occasionally at other times. In special cases, as of some great distress by sickness or want of rains, and apprehension by famine, they sacrifice a sheep or goat; and when the sea is tempestuous for several days together, that they can catch no fish, this they look upon as token of their idol’s displeasure. The victim being killed, and cut in pieces, some part of it is thrown upon the rock, which is interpreted to be eaten by Taberah, because it is devoured, as though by some great birds that hover there; and the other parts of the flesh the people dress for their own eating, and then sit around, and there feast upon it.’
Thomas Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, London, 1758.

In the market at Accra, a grass-roofed stall, the table covered two feet high with skulls. Dog skulls, goat skulls, snake skulls, bird skulls. Packets of herbs. Rolled in newspaper, and leaves. Powders and berries. Feathers of bright birds in armlets and amulets. Duiker bones and chicken bones. Unspeakable objects, but commonplace, charred. Seared with imaginings. In the middle of the pile a round, brown face with gleaming eye, manic, weaving around, above and among the skulls, the shells, the feathers, casseroled in the smell of herbs and rotting flesh. This was the juju stall, and its vendor. Drums beat in the morning air.
An embarrassed laugh as the white man approached. The sounds of scurrying from the hut behind-a rat, a person, a spirit. The women of the market, wrapped large in their long cloths printed in the colors of the land, greens and browns and reds, big-breasted under white blouses, swaying against the table, fat muscled arms and long molded fingers turning over the talismans of the living spirits around us. As if in protection a tall Fulani man touched with one hand the amulet at this neck containing a fragment from the Koran and with the other stroked up and down, back and forth, a dried brown skull on the bench. The one God fortified with the many.
Dust rose, scattered by the passersby on their way to the meat and fish and cassava and vegetables. Women at the cloth stalls, hung with English and Dutch and Indian cottons in the designs and fashions favored by the Ghanaians, laughed and cackled and flirted with their buyers and assistants, and suckled their babies as they went.
And the mad eye at the juju stall wove in and out, glowing among the dust and bones, in and out of the spotlight of the sun. Lusts, joys, fears, enticements shone out from the eye darting there among the shades. And beneath it all the drums, the rush of intoxication, of desire and love, of rage and madness, close, close.

I went one evening to a dinner party given by a senior English army officer in the military cantonments. During the short twilight drinks were served in the garden by servants in stiff white shirts and long white trousers. The talk was of the current preoccupations-the battles between Nkrumah, the first prime minister of an independent Ghana and the traditional chiefs, the price of cocoa, the lover knifed at a nearby door, de Gaulle’s ambitions in North Africa, two thousand miles away across the Sahara but for Ghana a close neighbor.
But at dinner, in the wine, the four Ghanaian guests, at ease as commissioned ranks and high civil servants and lawyers could be among their European colleagues, spoke of things closer to hand. Two were in the army, one a senior diplomat, one from the Treasury, all of them from Oxford, or Cambridge or Sandhurst, traveled, cosmopolitan, but still not far from the village. Each told stories of the powers, of leaves fluttering on still nights in wild moonlight dances, alternately soaring or softly sibilant. Of death done by ghostly proxy. Of the sacrifice of children at the yam festivals, beheaded without cry or tremor, swaying on their mother’s backs as they walked beside the surf. Of the access of strength, or the conferring of oblivion, upon the great and the powerful. Not long after I met some of the practitioners.

Gerhard Schultz, the contractor’s foreman for the construction of the bridge I had designed across the Tano river, in the rain forests of western Ghana, had only been six weeks in the country. He was unfamiliar with the workings of the clause in all such contracts requiring that local religious customs be observed. This clause stipulated that the contractor should pay the costs of any such observances which were deemed necessary by the local priests or priestesses to smooth the path of the construction through the dwellings of any resident gods.
Late one afternoon I returned home to find awaiting me a telegram from Schultz saying that the work was delayed because of exorbitant demands by the priests. He urged me to go to negotiate for him. I left that night late, driving in the cool and relative safety of darkness when the roads were free of the enthusiastic, erratic drivers of the many mammy-wagons. I arrived at the site about midday.

Schultz had awoken that morning tired, and the events of the previous day we re already obscure in this memory. He had had a tree felled where the bridge was to be built. The local laborers had objected but-this was his first job in Africa-he had overruled them, even the gray-headed, sober headman. The dust from the tree’s fall had scarcely settled before a throng of local people had appeared in the clearing on the river bank where the construction sheds and equipment had been set up. One of the men, with a gold-painted staff and crooked , betel-stained teeth, and one of the women, withered and skinny with flat, scrawny breasts and a dirty, white cloth draped around her waist, separated themselves from the rest and gesticulated and snarled at Schultz.
He did not expect this frontal assault, so soon after his arrival, in what now seemed a strange and hostile land, full of the new political liberties, simply because he had cut down a tree. If this was what could happen over one tree, would the bridge ever be built. But he soon learnt: four gods had been in residence near the bridge site and their peace and dignity had been ruptured by the sacrilegious destruction of the tree. The preparations for construction had begun before any offerings had been made to them or requests to move had been transmitted through their agents, the priests of the area.
In particular Taakora, the god of the holy river Tano, the supreme god on earth of the Akan people, from whom came Nkrumah himself, had been especially disturbed and would require great propitiation. In addition the spot chosen for the bridge was more than usually venerated for there lived nearby four gods watching over not only that vicinity but also long reaches of the river.
The man and the woman snarling at Schultz were priest and priestess. Through the heat and hubbub Schultz learnt that customary religious observances required that, before any building work was commenced, offerings must be made and libations poured to the gods. Further libations would be required at various times while the bridge was being built. No further work was to be allowed until full reparation had been made for the transgressions already committed, libation had been completed and the gods placated. For the due ceremonies to proceed five hundred bottles of gin and six cases of Scotch whisky would be required for use in the rituals and for distribution among the priests and their attendants.
The foreman was angered and afraid. He was afraid because he was the only white man within miles and his offense was great. He knew that the thick green forests around, the dark caverns of vines and bushes, gloomy even in the midday sun, would cover his body without trace. He was afraid, too, of his employers, far away in Switzerland, of their annoyance at the delay and the added costs of the required tribute.
And he was angry at his loss of face, his ignorance and the price he was expected to pay for it all. Five hundred bottles of gin and six cases of whisky to assuage five imaginary gods! The profits would be gone. They had quoted low on the job, hoping to find favour in the eyes of the timber company who were giving the bridge to the local community, and, of course, to allow them to export logs from the rich surrounding forests.
He remonstrated for a while, but he knew the sad-eyed local headman was not translating his words with conviction. He threw his hands up, nodded to the headman, and walked to his pickup. The crowd that had gathered moved slowly, grudgingly, aside. Back at his camp near the town, he thought for a while, drank another beer, and then sent telegrams to his head office and to me.

”The king’s messengers, with gold breast plates, made way for us, and we commenced our round…The caboceers, as did their superior captains and attendants, wore Ashantie clothes, of extravagant price, made from the costly foreign silks…of incredible size and weight, and thrown over the shoulder exactly like the Roman toga. Wolves’ and rams’ heads as large as life, cast in gold, were suspended like round bills, and rusted in blood…The large drums supported on the head of one man, and beaten by two others, were braced around with the thigh bones of their enemies, and ornamented with their skulls…Finely grown girls stood behind the chairs of some, with silver basins. Their stools (of the most laborious carved work, and generally with two large bells attached to them) were conspicuously placed on the heads of favourites…The prolonged flourishes of the horns, a deafening tumult of drums, and the fuller concert of the intervals, announced that we were approaching the king…the king’s four linguists were encircled by a splendor inferior to none, and their peculiar insignia, gold canes, were elevated in all directions, tied in bundles like fasces. A delay of several minutes whilst we severally approached to receive the king’s hand afforded to us a thorough view of h im; his deportment first excited my attention: native dignity in princes we are pleased to call barbarous was a curious spectacle; his manners were majestic, yet courteous;…he wore a fillet of aggrey beads round his temples, …over his right shoulder a red, silk cord, suspending three sapphires cased in gold; his bracelets were the richest mixture of beads and gold and his fingers were covered with rings; his cloth was of a dark green silk.’
TE Bowditch, ‘Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantie’. London, 1819

The paramount chief of that area was a tall, heavy shouldered man, with oiled, dark brown skin and the bearing that went with a long ancestry of chiefs and nobles among the local tribes. He had been enstooled in his paramountcy-that is to say, enthroned-in a large and splendid ceremony just two years before, not long after he had returned from a graduate course in economics at Oxford. He had taken a very ordinary degree from the same university ten years before, spending much of his time and his uncle’s money in the pursuits well suited to West african princes at British places of higher learning in that period. Which means that he was alternatively lionized and patronized. Three years at Oxford, the selective attentions of white women, and the practiced indignities of old colonial hands, stockbrokers’ sons and English landladies had refined an inherited gift for cocking a weather eye and divining a middle way.
His tribe had never been powerful, even though over the centuries it had often patrolled a large area. Its lands lay between the powerful Fante chiefdoms of the coasts and the dominating Ashanti kingdom to the north. Its destiny was to be a buffer zone, and despite all its care it had often enough paid the price. Though the main sources of slaves for the foreign trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been further to the north and east, from time to time this tribe had been raided, when supplies elsewhere were short. At other times, his fathers had had to work diligently to avoid disaster. To spot a dicey situation, to fashion protective if sometimes shifty compromises, came naturally enough to the paramount chief.
When Nkrumah’s independence movement had gathered force and begun to isolated the traditional chiefs and conservative wealthy cocoa farmers, he was one of the few chiefs who had kept foot in both camps. Kwame Nkrumah, the Osagyefo, the Redeemer, had been a young lad from a village not so many miles to the south, near the mouth of the Tano River, who had gone off to the United States and come back to lead the new men chanting independence.
He had come to the district at the head of a motley but overwhelming party of the young, the market women, town workers and the village poor. And the now paramount chief, then merely one of several chiefs, had made sure that he was welcome. Favours followed. The paramount chief had been selected for special tasks as a mediator in the councils of the chiefs and in heading off trouble with factions among the Ashanti, with whom he was on good terms but who were the principal tribal opponents of the new regime. He received his rewards. The nine-month course which he had completed at Oxford, with trimmings to taste, was one of them. And, when he returned, the paramountcy.

Another was the bridge. The timber company which had made the contract, and financed it, was part of a large European conglomerate with diverse interests throughout West Africa. There were many areas in western Ghana covered with tall trees and thick jungle, but companies with the necessary means of bulldozers and machinery and staff and cash to run a logging operation were scarce. For several years the paramount chief had used his influence in the political councils and the public service to have the timber company pointed towards his tribal lands, rather than those of other tribes.
The company itself had received little hint of his direct personal interest and had found the chief stiffly dignified and uncompromising whenever they had had negotiations. In the end, before permission could be obtained for their forestry lease, they had been obliged to agree to build the bridge. It was to be a proper, concrete bridge, not just one made of logs, and it was to be properly designed by an engineer (me, as it turned out). It was to have a pedestrian footway, in addition to the wide one-vehicle lane for timber trucks, to allow people unimpeded passage across the Tano river. There was to be no such bridge for many miles.
To some extent this was simply a gesture by the company, as they would need a robust structure to exploit the several thousand acres of their lease across the river. But they would have preferred to build it much more cheaply, and not be bound in humiliating agreement with an obstinate, up-country chief.
Negotiation with the Asantehene, King of the Ashanti, was something they could understand, carried on with the autocratic ritual and formality of an eighteenth century European court. Dealing with the Asantehene, even the paler version, subdued by the Republic, who now sat in the castle at Kumasi, was one thing; with these conniving country nobodies it was quite another, and the company didn’t like it. Not so long ago it would all have been settled by a bribe to a favorite of the Asantehene, or by some well-placed pressure upon the British District Officer in charge of the area, anxious for his district’s exports.
But to the paramount chief it was a very good deal indeed, the sort that he liked, where everybody, himself especially, won. The company was getting its timber lease and a long flow of profits. The national government was getting handsome royalties, and later there would follow taxes. The people of the area were getting a way across the Tano, open even in the monsoon when the river was a roaring torrent, to the rich hunting and the good land on the other side, and to the large towns further up the road. He, himself, had already received a big ‘dash’, a new Mercedes saloon, and could expect further benefits in the future.
And everybody was getting the good, concrete bridge, symbol of common-sense and mutual support and the modern spirit, solid witness ot the wisdom and good sense of them all, whom it would celebrate for many years to all who knew the story.
And now this foolish Swiss had stirred up the priests and their attendants. The people were anxious. The chief’s rivals were already loose, fomenting fear of foreigners and foreign ways. The timber company might be frightened off.

‘Among many of the peoples of West Africa-and, for that matter, many other parts of Africa, especially in the forests-the closest social bonds lay not within the paternal family, between father and child, but between uncle or aunt and nephew and niece. Descent passed in the female line, Obligations of loyalty, trust, support, affection bound brother and sister. The popular explanation was that one can be sure that one’s sister’s children are of your blood, but can you be sure of your wife’s? When a chief’s mother had died, it was his sister, not his wife, who became the Queen Mother, or, as we would say, the First Lady. This connection was especially strong among families of the royal. It’s history cast a along shadow.
The Pharaonic state was bureaucratic, not feudal…its great title holders were officials, not hereditary territorial magnates…not perhaps inevitably, but not by accident either…a radical growth of the institution produced a corresponding development…in the shape of the god-king, paying the highest honor to his god-bearing mother, and practising royal incest with his potentially god-bearing sister…’
Roland Oliver, ‘The African Experience’. London, 1993

The news had been brought to the paramount chief in mid-afternoon by his linguist Among most of the tribes of the rain-forest running across West Africa the custom was that the chief could not be addressed directly, but only through an official known as the linguist, or okyeami, who provided the channel to and from the royal ears and mouth. The linguist was appointed by the chief, and in turn appointed retainers. The post of linguist was not hereditary. In this one powerful position were combined the two staff, private secretary and press secretary, of which modern potentates feel the need. But other functions were also often joined in this person-confidant, strategist, procurer, fixer.
The paramount chief and the linguist talked long about the crisis in the project on which they had both worked so hard. Sometimes silence fell between them. Sometimes they spoke in rapid exchanges. After one such burst, the linguist went to one of the larger huts and soon returned with a robust woman of about forty, wearing a bright turban and wrapped about in a flower, purple, cotton-print cloth. She was the paramount chief’s younger sister. She sat down with the two men and listened without response, head down, serious, intent, to her brother’s words, and then to the slow sentences of the linguist, heavy with respect. About an hour or so before dark would fall, she and the linguist left.

As he later explained to me about the events of that afternoon and the night, Schultz, after he had sent the telegrams, was sitting on the veranda of his prefabricated hut drinking beer as the light was fading. The first flush of anger, fear and frustration had subsided. He was now puzzling over what to do, how to respond to the heavy demands the priests had made upon him. Absorbed in his thoughts, his cigarettes and his beer, he felt the still, lonely evening settle around him. The soft noises of the steward preparing the meal in the lean-to kitchen, and the subdued by cheerful hum form the village over the hill were reassuring presences.
He did not notice for some time the two girls, quietly tittering, under trees at the edge of the clearing. They had been bathing in the river below. Their hair was still wet and their body cloths were still damp. He had not been long enough in the country to be sure whether what finally stirred his attention were childish giggles coming from embarrassed teenagers, or more mature signals of invitation. But in either case he had no wish to become worse entangled, this time over women. He stood up and made a gesture of dismissal, calling out “Go away, go away” in English, and went inside.
But by the time the dark fall of night had shut out the world beyond, and the hut had become a small glowing center, and he was halfway through his meal and sipping another beer, the two girls had appeared again, this time on his veranda. They were scuffling lightly and grinning wide, white smiles around the door. The soft light from the only kerosene mantle lamp highlighted the blue sheen of foreheads, the shoulders finely sculpted from the daily pounding of the fufu, the cassava meal which was staple food, and the gleam of smiling eyes.
He called out again for them to go away, but less firmly. A little later, he consulted his steward who had long experience of Europeans. The old man assured him there was no danger from the local people if he allowed the young females in his house. They might even think it was a gesture of reconciliation. Schultz told him to ask the by now dancing, humming girls to enter.
They sat on the floor, and on the chairs and table, looked at his cups and fingered his shirt, laughed at his razor and shaving soap, played ball with his just washed clothes which the steward had laid out on his bed. The older, bigger one jumped up and down on the bed and patted the sheet beside her, laughing and joking with her sister as she did.
The faint light from the lamp in the other room shone on her dark arms and breasts from which the cloth had dropped. As he stood beside the bed, arms akimbo, wondering what to do, she took hold of him with one hand and with the other undid his belt. As he fell upon her, the younger one stroked his back from behind. Through the night he played the games of the sexual children who had taken possession of his bed.

When he awoke in the full light of morning he was anxious and confused. His memories of the night were a tangle, a sweet tangle. Those of the previous day, of his anger, fear and frustration, were shadowed by the shapes of the night. The first had gone before first light, one slipping out from beside him on the narrow bed, the other from the mat on the floor where she had finally fallen asleep. They left on his pillow one of the flowers that had adorned their hair when they arrived.
He was drinking coffee when the small group of men arrived at the edge of the clearing. One of them called out to the steward in the local language.
“Master, these men come to make palaver about the bridge.”
Three of the men were barefoot, clad in cloth wrapped around the waist. The fourth, who was tall and strode impressively, wore sandals, had a patterned, handwoven silk cloth draped across one shoulder in toga fashion, and carried a long, carved stave. On its top, painted in shining gold, were two figures. One was of a man, a prisoner, kneeling and bound in chains. His head was pulled back from behind by the left hand of the other figure, an executioner, who, in his right hand, flourished a long, golden knife.
“This man speaks for the chief,” the steward said.
Schultz’s anxieties returned. The events of the night still formed around him a kind of touchable, a transgressive haze. The images of the men before him, even of the gold monstrosity on the top of the staff, were shot across with moving hands, hard nipples and full lips. His thoughts were slowed by the numbnesses of pleasure. But his fears were groundless.

Through the steward the lingust explained the situation in the local language(he could speak passable English, I later discovered, but would not lose face by using it in negotiations). The paramount chief had heard of the dispute the previous day. He was upset that the contractor had been insulted by the priests-”ignorant, foolish people”, the linguist said in anger. The local people were simple and easily stirred, it was important not to offend them.
The paramount chief had intervened on the contractor’s behalf and the priests had agreed that only two-thirds of the amount of whisky and gin they had at first demanded would now be necessary for the offerings and libations. The paramount chief, the linguist explained, was sorry the foreman and his employers had been troubled, but these were simple people, he repeated, and if their small worries were now attended to the paramount chief assured him there would be no more.
He stressed the gracious interest the paramount chief had taken in the unwitting embarrassment to the gods which Schultz had innocently provoked, the gullibility of the people, the anger of the priests, the importance of the bridge, the high expectations the chief had already formed of his company, and, from several reports he had received , of him, Schultz, personally. There was no mention of the girls in the night.

So it was all quickly fixed, and the linguist and his attendants had left the clearing before thirty minutes had gone. I arrived in early afternoon to find bustling preparations for the ceremonies next morning already begun. There was drumming in the village and it continued throughout the night. There were many comings and goings at Schultz’s camp. In mid afternoon two local government councillors and a member of the national parliament for the district turned up in a large American car.
These were great local dignitaries it seemed to Schultz, but were, in fact, to the local people, men of much lower status than the paramount chief and his linguist. Dressed in shirts and well groomed trousers, speaking good English, they explained how easily such misunderstandings as yesterday’s could arise. They, of course, didn’t believe in all the juju but all the farmers and v illage people around did.
“Like children,” the member of parliament said, laughing loudly with his head thrown back, showing red betel nut stains on his teeth, slapping his thigh with one huge hand and with the other emptying the last of yet another bottle of beer down his throat. “Like children”, repeated a councillor, and another round of laughter echoed, and the others joined in and slapped their thighs and quaffed their beer, until at last both Schultz and I, too, laughed uproariously and drank our beer and looked as though we might even slap our thighs.
The light was failing and the frogs and cicadas struck up, the cocoa trees and the banana fronds and the tall forest trees turned black, the lamps flickered in the village, and the drumming, on and on, on and on, went into the night.

Not long after dawn next day the first of hundreds of people had gathered in the clearing above the bridge site. Two priests and two priestesses had spent the night there, their faces and bodies covered with the white powdered clay which, in the Ghanaian forests, is the incense of holiness. Two groups of drummers, using chest-high male and female drums made of hollowed tree trunks with tightly stretched skins across one end, had commenced a low insistent beat.
The paramount chief arrived some time later in his Mercedes, a clutch of councillors in a pickup, the member of Parliament turned up in his Ford. The chief, led by the linguist with his golden staff of office, and shaded by a brilliant gold umbrella held high over him by a stolid attendant, walked down the hilly slope towards the river and sat on a chair near the drummers.
Soon, without announcement, as though on impulse, the priests and priestesses commenced to dance, slow, shuffling, awkward movements of the hips, guttural voices rising and falling in long, drawn-out wails. As they moved their assistants danced with them, sprinkling them with dust and white chalk, poking each other obscenely, treading the steps for a while and then retiring to let another take the place. For several hours the drumming and dancing rolled monotonously, mesmerically, the crowd gelled, the heat and steam of the morning rose, amnesia descended. One by one the dancers wandered off.
Only an old priestess was left, she who spoke for the god of the river, Taakora, himself. The beat of the drums had slowly risen. The drummers were covered in sweat, their shoulders and eyes and legs when twitching. The old, holy crone, her soiled white cloth around her waist, black, wizened face covered with white clay streaked with sweat, flat bags of breazts flapping against her rib-cage, shuffled and flailed around in a circle. Her red eyes rolled, alternately she hissed and spat low sounds or blew out lips in explosive circles. Around and around the drums were volleying.

She stopped and came over to where ‘the official party’ was standing. Starting with the paramount chief she threw white chalk over him, much as priests in Christian churches cast the sanctifying smoke from the censor over the faithful. She moved along the line, hissing as she went, spraying each face with dust, fixing each one with inflamed, red and rolling eyes which gleamed in a fierce glare, and yet focused catatonically inwards.
When she reached Schultz she stopped again. The drums stopped. She walked slowly around him several times, placing each old foot carefully after the other on the damp mud bank. She swayed thin hips, hissing and breathing, stopping sometimes to look at his eyes and to touch him, pulling her hand away as though touching red-hot metal. She stopped again, looking into his pale, nervous eyes with her red, ferocious ones.
The silence was long, no-one moved, standing next to him I could feel him stiffen. She slowly reached out her hand, took some of the white dust from a pottery bowl held by an assistant, gave a cry and a leap and threw it into his face in a light cloud. The drums rang out loudly again, she circled Schultz in that cramped, menacing shuffle, and launched over him great, white, cleansing clouds of benediction.
When she came to me she stopped again, and the drums too, and she walked, not shuffled, around me once, returning to look me in the eyes.. I had not realised before how controlled, baleful, malevolent were those black eyes in their red mesh of veins. She gave one last hiss, stamped her feet, shook her head angrily, threw some dust on the ground and moved away. No blessing for me, apparently, the latecomer, the originator of the bridge, not vouchsafed even the grudging acceptance of which Schultz, the sinner, but now a temporary member of the tribe, had been thought worthy.
As if on a signal the crowd, by now in hundreds, moved towards the river, caught in the one emotion. First the priests and priestesses, then the dozens of attendants and the drummers. Then the paramount chief, splendid in the red and green and gold silks of his kente toga, a blue embroidered skull-cap on his head, sheltered by the golden umbrella held above him by an attendant. Next the linguist and his wooden staff with gilded death on its top. Then Schultz and I and a representative of the timber company, and the politicians. Then the masses of local people and their children, in bright cloths and the women in coloured turbans, skins freshly oiled for the occasion now streaked with sweat and dust. They fanned down in a curve from the slope of the clearing to near the site of the bridge.
The priests had stopped beside the tree trunk Schultz had killed-killed, I write, and killed it was, where it sprawled in the fast, brown waters of the river. The drums were silent now and in the hush the people gathered close beneath the burning midday sun. Quiet. The uneasy shuffle of feet and the soft rush of the river.
The priestesses’ attendants dragged from the shade of the trees two large male goats, one brown, speckled with black, the other completely white. I had not seen them before. No doubt they had been tethered quietly all the time, but in the heated moment it seemed as though they had been spirited into place.
The old priestess came forward once more, muttering and growling, pulling the ears of one goat, pushing the rump of the other, scattering white clouds around her as she went, in and out, between and around the two goats. Then with another mad cry she grabbed the white goat and dragged it towards the river.

When I thought of it later, trying to remember how it happened, it scarcely seemed to have occurred in time at all. Two of the attendants, the two who had done most of the dancing with the old woman, rushed forward, taking the goat from her, almost knocking her over as she tottered off. The goat was hauled a few feet out along the dead tree. A long knife shone and the throat was slit in a stroke. A sharp hiss from the crowd. The paramount chief beside me stood impassive. In front of him the linguist, over whose shoulder I was looking, slowly revolved his staff between his fingers. The sun glinted from the golden figures of the kneeling prisoner and erect executioner as they turned.
The red blood spurted over the tree trunk and into the water. Still twitching in chilling death, the goat was thrown into the brown stream. The gore pulsed from its neck, staining the water as it splashed. A sacrifice to the gods of the river, it was to be carried away by the river. The gods of the place, the people hoped, would go with it, in peace and satisfaction, leaving space for the bridge to be built.
But they wouldn’t go. An eddy caught the body still plunging and kicking in its death throes, and brought it back again. Again it came around, and again, and then the kicking carcass turned, slowly moving out into the center of the stream where the current rushed, drifted downstream a little and, at first uncertainly and then faster, swung back again towards the shore.
The many lips which a few seconds previously had opened with hisses dropped apart in gasps, and a single, stifled gasp rose above the stiffened gathering. Once more the body circled slowly out into midstream, paused shakily on the fringe of the current, and traced its ghostly arc back to the starting point like a spirit in thrall. Breathing had stopped. The gasp was silently held. The old priestess stopped her growling and, bent forward on one leg, her hands crushing white clay between her fingers, she gazed in furious concentration, unmoving, joined with her eye’s beam to the circling corpse.
It turned again to the center of the river and the running current. Poised in midstream, in frozen seconds it inched a few feet downstream, backwards, forwards, still held in the circling eddy, and then broke free and plunged with the rushing water around the river bend. The white body, leaving a wash of bloody rust behind, was gone.
Hundreds of mouths exhaled in a swoosh. The drummer of the male drum beat it loudly, heavily, bang bang bang. I had watched the paramount chief through the last few minutes? hours? seconds? His face had stayed calm throughout. But the cheeks paled beneath their brown, the lips were strained and set as the grey shape circled in the water like a lost soul. Turning, he saw me watching and the face opened in a wide and condescending smile.
“The people will be happy now,” he said.

‘The blacks speak much of spirits appearing to them, and believe these are the souls of deceased persons, but they have little or no apprehension of a future state-they rather think that the soul, after death, keeps haunt about the body, and is latent in, or near its repository; and it must be grounded upon this imagination, that they have a custom of setting pots and basins, and other such furniture and utensils, at the graves of their kindred.
That which in some books of voyages is said, of the negroes of Guinea sacrificing to the devil, may have some truth in it; but nothing of that, literally speaking, is ever practised in any part of the Gold Coast, as I could ever learn by clear information. The blacks at Cape Coast are the very opposite of this, seeming rather to hold him in defiance.’
Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, ibid.
A BRIDGE IN WEST AFRICA
A Memoir
by
Gavan McDonell

c6600 words
A BRIDGE IN WEST AFRICA
A memoir
by
Gavan McDonell

We had been staying for a few days at the old abbey in Connemara in the west of Ireland, where the light bursts out of the green hills and the sea dies in a silver shroud of an afternoon when the sun sets beyond Arran. Knowing that we were going on a picnic one of the nuns suggested we take with us a young girl student there whose father was a chief at Bathurst in the Gambia on the West African coast. She was tall and slim and very black, but she had the manner of the demurely convent bred, and the soft stroke of a Connemara accent.
It was mid-summer, and all the clocks had been advanced for daylight saving time. Except in the Abbey where God’s time was not to be interfered with. Carried away with the treat of the afternoon’s holiday with us, the freedom of the hills and meadows, and telling stories of her home, she had let the hours slip by, until she suddenly gave a start, breaking into the dreams of her world, and said in the western brogue,”And now, could you be tellin’ me, what time would it be back in the Abbey?”
Worlds away, and fairy castles, and leprechauns, and the black-robed, gliding nuns, and the toll of the evening bells.

As it turned out a year or so later, Africa began for me in 1958 at Bathurst, with the moist breeze at sunset, opulent hibiscus and fragrance laden frangipani, the stretched dark slab of the Atlantic horizon at dawn, long-gowned servants padding through the mud-walled guest-house, appearing noiselessly in the middle of the room, smiling, always smiling. And it ended, years later, much as it began, not at Bathurst but with the same ease of light, of air, the riffle of a drum, the enigmas of the smiles.
But not long after Bathurst came Accra, the capital of the then new nation of Ghana. Only a year before that broad West African expanse of beaches, rain forest, orchard bush and desert had been known for centuries as the Gold Coast, land of the Ga people, the Akan, the Fante, the Ashanti, the Hausa and the secretive folk of the savannah.

‘Every Sunday they make an offering to Taberah of cankee, which is their bread, mixing it with palm oil. This is a stated custom, but the same is performed occasionally at other times. In special cases, as of some great distress by sickness or want of rains, and apprehension by famine, they sacrifice a sheep or goat; and when the sea is tempestuous for several days together, that they can catch no fish, this they look upon as token of their idol’s displeasure. The victim being killed, and cut in pieces, some part of it is thrown upon the rock, which is interpreted to be eaten by Taberah, because it is devoured, as though by some great birds that hover there; and the other parts of the flesh the people dress for their own eating, and then sit around, and there feast upon it.’
Thomas Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, London, 1758.

In the market at Accra, a grass-roofed stall, the table covered two feet high with skulls. Dog skulls, goat skulls, snake skulls, bird skulls. Packets of herbs. Rolled in newspaper, and leaves. Powders and berries. Feathers of bright birds in armlets and amulets. Duiker bones and chicken bones. Unspeakable objects, but commonplace, charred. Seared with imaginings. In the middle of the pile a round, brown face with gleaming eye, manic, weaving around, above and among the skulls, the shells, the feathers, casseroled in the smell of herbs and rotting flesh. This was the juju stall, and its vendor. Drums beat in the morning air.
An embarrassed laugh as the white man approached. The sounds of scurrying from the hut behind-a rat, a person, a spirit. The women of the market, wrapped large in their long cloths printed in the colors of the land, greens and browns and reds, big-breasted under white blouses, swaying against the table, fat muscled arms and long molded fingers turning over the talismans of the living spirits around us. As if in protection a tall Fulani man touched with one hand the amulet at this neck containing a fragment from the Koran and with the other stroked up and down, back and forth, a dried brown skull on the bench. The one God fortified with the many.
Dust rose, scattered by the passersby on their way to the meat and fish and cassava and vegetables. Women at the cloth stalls, hung with English and Dutch and Indian cottons in the designs and fashions favored by the Ghanaians, laughed and cackled and flirted with their buyers and assistants, and suckled their babies as they went.
And the mad eye at the juju stall wove in and out, glowing among the dust and bones, in and out of the spotlight of the sun. Lusts, joys, fears, enticements shone out from the eye darting there among the shades. And beneath it all the drums, the rush of intoxication, of desire and love, of rage and madness, close, close.

I went one evening to a dinner party given by a senior English army officer in the military cantonments. During the short twilight drinks were served in the garden by servants in stiff white shirts and long white trousers. The talk was of the current preoccupations-the battles between Nkrumah, the first prime minister of an independent Ghana and the traditional chiefs, the price of cocoa, the lover knifed at a nearby door, de Gaulle’s ambitions in North Africa, two thousand miles away across the Sahara but for Ghana a close neighbor.
But at dinner, in the wine, the four Ghanaian guests, at ease as commissioned ranks and high civil servants and lawyers could be among their European colleagues, spoke of things closer to hand. Two were in the army, one a senior diplomat, one from the Treasury, all of them from Oxford, or Cambridge or Sandhurst, traveled, cosmopolitan, but still not far from the village. Each told stories of the powers, of leaves fluttering on still nights in wild moonlight dances, alternately soaring or softly sibilant. Of death done by ghostly proxy. Of the sacrifice of children at the yam festivals, beheaded without cry or tremor, swaying on their mother’s backs as they walked beside the surf. Of the access of strength, or the conferring of oblivion, upon the great and the powerful. Not long after I met some of the practitioners.

Gerhard Schultz, the contractor’s foreman for the construction of the bridge I had designed across the Tano river, in the rain forests of western Ghana, had only been six weeks in the country. He was unfamiliar with the workings of the clause in all such contracts requiring that local religious customs be observed. This clause stipulated that the contractor should pay the costs of any such observances which were deemed necessary by the local priests or priestesses to smooth the path of the construction through the dwellings of any resident gods.
Late one afternoon I returned home to find awaiting me a telegram from Schultz saying that the work was delayed because of exorbitant demands by the priests. He urged me to go to negotiate for him. I left that night late, driving in the cool and relative safety of darkness when the roads were free of the enthusiastic, erratic drivers of the many mammy-wagons. I arrived at the site about midday.

Schultz had awoken that morning tired, and the events of the previous day we re already obscure in this memory. He had had a tree felled where the bridge was to be built. The local laborers had objected but-this was his first job in Africa-he had overruled them, even the gray-headed, sober headman. The dust from the tree’s fall had scarcely settled before a throng of local people had appeared in the clearing on the river bank where the construction sheds and equipment had been set up. One of the men, with a gold-painted staff and crooked , betel-stained teeth, and one of the women, withered and skinny with flat, scrawny breasts and a dirty, white cloth draped around her waist, separated themselves from the rest and gesticulated and snarled at Schultz.
He did not expect this frontal assault, so soon after his arrival, in what now seemed a strange and hostile land, full of the new political liberties, simply because he had cut down a tree. If this was what could happen over one tree, would the bridge ever be built. But he soon learnt: four gods had been in residence near the bridge site and their peace and dignity had been ruptured by the sacrilegious destruction of the tree. The preparations for construction had begun before any offerings had been made to them or requests to move had been transmitted through their agents, the priests of the area.
In particular Taakora, the god of the holy river Tano, the supreme god on earth of the Akan people, from whom came Nkrumah himself, had been especially disturbed and would require great propitiation. In addition the spot chosen for the bridge was more than usually venerated for there lived nearby four gods watching over not only that vicinity but also long reaches of the river.
The man and the woman snarling at Schultz were priest and priestess. Through the heat and hubbub Schultz learnt that customary religious observances required that, before any building work was commenced, offerings must be made and libations poured to the gods. Further libations would be required at various times while the bridge was being built. No further work was to be allowed until full reparation had been made for the transgressions already committed, libation had been completed and the gods placated. For the due ceremonies to proceed five hundred bottles of gin and six cases of Scotch whisky would be required for use in the rituals and for distribution among the priests and their attendants.
The foreman was angered and afraid. He was afraid because he was the only white man within miles and his offense was great. He knew that the thick green forests around, the dark caverns of vines and bushes, gloomy even in the midday sun, would cover his body without trace. He was afraid, too, of his employers, far away in Switzerland, of their annoyance at the delay and the added costs of the required tribute.
And he was angry at his loss of face, his ignorance and the price he was expected to pay for it all. Five hundred bottles of gin and six cases of whisky to assuage five imaginary gods! The profits would be gone. They had quoted low on the job, hoping to find favour in the eyes of the timber company who were giving the bridge to the local community, and, of course, to allow them to export logs from the rich surrounding forests.
He remonstrated for a while, but he knew the sad-eyed local headman was not translating his words with conviction. He threw his hands up, nodded to the headman, and walked to his pickup. The crowd that had gathered moved slowly, grudgingly, aside. Back at his camp near the town, he thought for a while, drank another beer, and then sent telegrams to his head office and to me.

”The king’s messengers, with gold breast plates, made way for us, and we commenced our round…The caboceers, as did their superior captains and attendants, wore Ashantie clothes, of extravagant price, made from the costly foreign silks…of incredible size and weight, and thrown over the shoulder exactly like the Roman toga. Wolves’ and rams’ heads as large as life, cast in gold, were suspended like round bills, and rusted in blood…The large drums supported on the head of one man, and beaten by two others, were braced around with the thigh bones of their enemies, and ornamented with their skulls…Finely grown girls stood behind the chairs of some, with silver basins. Their stools (of the most laborious carved work, and generally with two large bells attached to them) were conspicuously placed on the heads of favourites…The prolonged flourishes of the horns, a deafening tumult of drums, and the fuller concert of the intervals, announced that we were approaching the king…the king’s four linguists were encircled by a splendor inferior to none, and their peculiar insignia, gold canes, were elevated in all directions, tied in bundles like fasces. A delay of several minutes whilst we severally approached to receive the king’s hand afforded to us a thorough view of h im; his deportment first excited my attention: native dignity in princes we are pleased to call barbarous was a curious spectacle; his manners were majestic, yet courteous;…he wore a fillet of aggrey beads round his temples, …over his right shoulder a red, silk cord, suspending three sapphires cased in gold; his bracelets were the richest mixture of beads and gold and his fingers were covered with rings; his cloth was of a dark green silk.’
TE Bowditch, ‘Mission from Cape Coast Castle to Ashantie’. London, 1819

The paramount chief of that area was a tall, heavy shouldered man, with oiled, dark brown skin and the bearing that went with a long ancestry of chiefs and nobles among the local tribes. He had been enstooled in his paramountcy-that is to say, enthroned-in a large and splendid ceremony just two years before, not long after he had returned from a graduate course in economics at Oxford. He had taken a very ordinary degree from the same university ten years before, spending much of his time and his uncle’s money in the pursuits well suited to West african princes at British places of higher learning in that period. Which means that he was alternatively lionized and patronized. Three years at Oxford, the selective attentions of white women, and the practiced indignities of old colonial hands, stockbrokers’ sons and English landladies had refined an inherited gift for cocking a weather eye and divining a middle way.
His tribe had never been powerful, even though over the centuries it had often patrolled a large area. Its lands lay between the powerful Fante chiefdoms of the coasts and the dominating Ashanti kingdom to the north. Its destiny was to be a buffer zone, and despite all its care it had often enough paid the price. Though the main sources of slaves for the foreign trade of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been further to the north and east, from time to time this tribe had been raided, when supplies elsewhere were short. At other times, his fathers had had to work diligently to avoid disaster. To spot a dicey situation, to fashion protective if sometimes shifty compromises, came naturally enough to the paramount chief.
When Nkrumah’s independence movement had gathered force and begun to isolated the traditional chiefs and conservative wealthy cocoa farmers, he was one of the few chiefs who had kept foot in both camps. Kwame Nkrumah, the Osagyefo, the Redeemer, had been a young lad from a village not so many miles to the south, near the mouth of the Tano River, who had gone off to the United States and come back to lead the new men chanting independence.
He had come to the district at the head of a motley but overwhelming party of the young, the market women, town workers and the village poor. And the now paramount chief, then merely one of several chiefs, had made sure that he was welcome. Favours followed. The paramount chief had been selected for special tasks as a mediator in the councils of the chiefs and in heading off trouble with factions among the Ashanti, with whom he was on good terms but who were the principal tribal opponents of the new regime. He received his rewards. The nine-month course which he had completed at Oxford, with trimmings to taste, was one of them. And, when he returned, the paramountcy.

Another was the bridge. The timber company which had made the contract, and financed it, was part of a large European conglomerate with diverse interests throughout West Africa. There were many areas in western Ghana covered with tall trees and thick jungle, but companies with the necessary means of bulldozers and machinery and staff and cash to run a logging operation were scarce. For several years the paramount chief had used his influence in the political councils and the public service to have the timber company pointed towards his tribal lands, rather than those of other tribes.
The company itself had received little hint of his direct personal interest and had found the chief stiffly dignified and uncompromising whenever they had had negotiations. In the end, before permission could be obtained for their forestry lease, they had been obliged to agree to build the bridge. It was to be a proper, concrete bridge, not just one made of logs, and it was to be properly designed by an engineer (me, as it turned out). It was to have a pedestrian footway, in addition to the wide one-vehicle lane for timber trucks, to allow people unimpeded passage across the Tano river. There was to be no such bridge for many miles.
To some extent this was simply a gesture by the company, as they would need a robust structure to exploit the several thousand acres of their lease across the river. But they would have preferred to build it much more cheaply, and not be bound in humiliating agreement with an obstinate, up-country chief.
Negotiation with the Asantehene, King of the Ashanti, was something they could understand, carried on with the autocratic ritual and formality of an eighteenth century European court. Dealing with the Asantehene, even the paler version, subdued by the Republic, who now sat in the castle at Kumasi, was one thing; with these conniving country nobodies it was quite another, and the company didn’t like it. Not so long ago it would all have been settled by a bribe to a favorite of the Asantehene, or by some well-placed pressure upon the British District Officer in charge of the area, anxious for his district’s exports.
But to the paramount chief it was a very good deal indeed, the sort that he liked, where everybody, himself especially, won. The company was getting its timber lease and a long flow of profits. The national government was getting handsome royalties, and later there would follow taxes. The people of the area were getting a way across the Tano, open even in the monsoon when the river was a roaring torrent, to the rich hunting and the good land on the other side, and to the large towns further up the road. He, himself, had already received a big ‘dash’, a new Mercedes saloon, and could expect further benefits in the future.
And everybody was getting the good, concrete bridge, symbol of common-sense and mutual support and the modern spirit, solid witness ot the wisdom and good sense of them all, whom it would celebrate for many years to all who knew the story.
And now this foolish Swiss had stirred up the priests and their attendants. The people were anxious. The chief’s rivals were already loose, fomenting fear of foreigners and foreign ways. The timber company might be frightened off.

‘Among many of the peoples of West Africa-and, for that matter, many other parts of Africa, especially in the forests-the closest social bonds lay not within the paternal family, between father and child, but between uncle or aunt and nephew and niece. Descent passed in the female line, Obligations of loyalty, trust, support, affection bound brother and sister. The popular explanation was that one can be sure that one’s sister’s children are of your blood, but can you be sure of your wife’s? When a chief’s mother had died, it was his sister, not his wife, who became the Queen Mother, or, as we would say, the First Lady. This connection was especially strong among families of the royal. It’s history cast a along shadow.
The Pharaonic state was bureaucratic, not feudal…its great title holders were officials, not hereditary territorial magnates…not perhaps inevitably, but not by accident either…a radical growth of the institution produced a corresponding development…in the shape of the god-king, paying the highest honor to his god-bearing mother, and practising royal incest with his potentially god-bearing sister…’
Roland Oliver, ‘The African Experience’. London, 1993

The news had been brought to the paramount chief in mid-afternoon by his linguist Among most of the tribes of the rain-forest running across West Africa the custom was that the chief could not be addressed directly, but only through an official known as the linguist, or okyeami, who provided the channel to and from the royal ears and mouth. The linguist was appointed by the chief, and in turn appointed retainers. The post of linguist was not hereditary. In this one powerful position were combined the two staff, private secretary and press secretary, of which modern potentates feel the need. But other functions were also often joined in this person-confidant, strategist, procurer, fixer.
The paramount chief and the linguist talked long about the crisis in the project on which they had both worked so hard. Sometimes silence fell between them. Sometimes they spoke in rapid exchanges. After one such burst, the linguist went to one of the larger huts and soon returned with a robust woman of about forty, wearing a bright turban and wrapped about in a flower, purple, cotton-print cloth. She was the paramount chief’s younger sister. She sat down with the two men and listened without response, head down, serious, intent, to her brother’s words, and then to the slow sentences of the linguist, heavy with respect. About an hour or so before dark would fall, she and the linguist left.

As he later explained to me about the events of that afternoon and the night, Schultz, after he had sent the telegrams, was sitting on the veranda of his prefabricated hut drinking beer as the light was fading. The first flush of anger, fear and frustration had subsided. He was now puzzling over what to do, how to respond to the heavy demands the priests had made upon him. Absorbed in his thoughts, his cigarettes and his beer, he felt the still, lonely evening settle around him. The soft noises of the steward preparing the meal in the lean-to kitchen, and the subdued by cheerful hum form the village over the hill were reassuring presences.
He did not notice for some time the two girls, quietly tittering, under trees at the edge of the clearing. They had been bathing in the river below. Their hair was still wet and their body cloths were still damp. He had not been long enough in the country to be sure whether what finally stirred his attention were childish giggles coming from embarrassed teenagers, or more mature signals of invitation. But in either case he had no wish to become worse entangled, this time over women. He stood up and made a gesture of dismissal, calling out “Go away, go away” in English, and went inside.
But by the time the dark fall of night had shut out the world beyond, and the hut had become a small glowing center, and he was halfway through his meal and sipping another beer, the two girls had appeared again, this time on his veranda. They were scuffling lightly and grinning wide, white smiles around the door. The soft light from the only kerosene mantle lamp highlighted the blue sheen of foreheads, the shoulders finely sculpted from the daily pounding of the fufu, the cassava meal which was staple food, and the gleam of smiling eyes.
He called out again for them to go away, but less firmly. A little later, he consulted his steward who had long experience of Europeans. The old man assured him there was no danger from the local people if he allowed the young females in his house. They might even think it was a gesture of reconciliation. Schultz told him to ask the by now dancing, humming girls to enter.
They sat on the floor, and on the chairs and table, looked at his cups and fingered his shirt, laughed at his razor and shaving soap, played ball with his just washed clothes which the steward had laid out on his bed. The older, bigger one jumped up and down on the bed and patted the sheet beside her, laughing and joking with her sister as she did.
The faint light from the lamp in the other room shone on her dark arms and breasts from which the cloth had dropped. As he stood beside the bed, arms akimbo, wondering what to do, she took hold of him with one hand and with the other undid his belt. As he fell upon her, the younger one stroked his back from behind. Through the night he played the games of the sexual children who had taken possession of his bed.

When he awoke in the full light of morning he was anxious and confused. His memories of the night were a tangle, a sweet tangle. Those of the previous day, of his anger, fear and frustration, were shadowed by the shapes of the night. The first had gone before first light, one slipping out from beside him on the narrow bed, the other from the mat on the floor where she had finally fallen asleep. They left on his pillow one of the flowers that had adorned their hair when they arrived.
He was drinking coffee when the small group of men arrived at the edge of the clearing. One of them called out to the steward in the local language.
“Master, these men come to make palaver about the bridge.”
Three of the men were barefoot, clad in cloth wrapped around the waist. The fourth, who was tall and strode impressively, wore sandals, had a patterned, handwoven silk cloth draped across one shoulder in toga fashion, and carried a long, carved stave. On its top, painted in shining gold, were two figures. One was of a man, a prisoner, kneeling and bound in chains. His head was pulled back from behind by the left hand of the other figure, an executioner, who, in his right hand, flourished a long, golden knife.
“This man speaks for the chief,” the steward said.
Schultz’s anxieties returned. The events of the night still formed around him a kind of touchable, a transgressive haze. The images of the men before him, even of the gold monstrosity on the top of the staff, were shot across with moving hands, hard nipples and full lips. His thoughts were slowed by the numbnesses of pleasure. But his fears were groundless.

Through the steward the lingust explained the situation in the local language(he could speak passable English, I later discovered, but would not lose face by using it in negotiations). The paramount chief had heard of the dispute the previous day. He was upset that the contractor had been insulted by the priests-”ignorant, foolish people”, the linguist said in anger. The local people were simple and easily stirred, it was important not to offend them.
The paramount chief had intervened on the contractor’s behalf and the priests had agreed that only two-thirds of the amount of whisky and gin they had at first demanded would now be necessary for the offerings and libations. The paramount chief, the linguist explained, was sorry the foreman and his employers had been troubled, but these were simple people, he repeated, and if their small worries were now attended to the paramount chief assured him there would be no more.
He stressed the gracious interest the paramount chief had taken in the unwitting embarrassment to the gods which Schultz had innocently provoked, the gullibility of the people, the anger of the priests, the importance of the bridge, the high expectations the chief had already formed of his company, and, from several reports he had received , of him, Schultz, personally. There was no mention of the girls in the night.

So it was all quickly fixed, and the linguist and his attendants had left the clearing before thirty minutes had gone. I arrived in early afternoon to find bustling preparations for the ceremonies next morning already begun. There was drumming in the village and it continued throughout the night. There were many comings and goings at Schultz’s camp. In mid afternoon two local government councillors and a member of the national parliament for the district turned up in a large American car.
These were great local dignitaries it seemed to Schultz, but were, in fact, to the local people, men of much lower status than the paramount chief and his linguist. Dressed in shirts and well groomed trousers, speaking good English, they explained how easily such misunderstandings as yesterday’s could arise. They, of course, didn’t believe in all the juju but all the farmers and v illage people around did.
“Like children,” the member of parliament said, laughing loudly with his head thrown back, showing red betel nut stains on his teeth, slapping his thigh with one huge hand and with the other emptying the last of yet another bottle of beer down his throat. “Like children”, repeated a councillor, and another round of laughter echoed, and the others joined in and slapped their thighs and quaffed their beer, until at last both Schultz and I, too, laughed uproariously and drank our beer and looked as though we might even slap our thighs.
The light was failing and the frogs and cicadas struck up, the cocoa trees and the banana fronds and the tall forest trees turned black, the lamps flickered in the village, and the drumming, on and on, on and on, went into the night.

Not long after dawn next day the first of hundreds of people had gathered in the clearing above the bridge site. Two priests and two priestesses had spent the night there, their faces and bodies covered with the white powdered clay which, in the Ghanaian forests, is the incense of holiness. Two groups of drummers, using chest-high male and female drums made of hollowed tree trunks with tightly stretched skins across one end, had commenced a low insistent beat.
The paramount chief arrived some time later in his Mercedes, a clutch of councillors in a pickup, the member of Parliament turned up in his Ford. The chief, led by the linguist with his golden staff of office, and shaded by a brilliant gold umbrella held high over him by a stolid attendant, walked down the hilly slope towards the river and sat on a chair near the drummers.
Soon, without announcement, as though on impulse, the priests and priestesses commenced to dance, slow, shuffling, awkward movements of the hips, guttural voices rising and falling in long, drawn-out wails. As they moved their assistants danced with them, sprinkling them with dust and white chalk, poking each other obscenely, treading the steps for a while and then retiring to let another take the place. For several hours the drumming and dancing rolled monotonously, mesmerically, the crowd gelled, the heat and steam of the morning rose, amnesia descended. One by one the dancers wandered off.
Only an old priestess was left, she who spoke for the god of the river, Taakora, himself. The beat of the drums had slowly risen. The drummers were covered in sweat, their shoulders and eyes and legs when twitching. The old, holy crone, her soiled white cloth around her waist, black, wizened face covered with white clay streaked with sweat, flat bags of breazts flapping against her rib-cage, shuffled and flailed around in a circle. Her red eyes rolled, alternately she hissed and spat low sounds or blew out lips in explosive circles. Around and around the drums were volleying.

She stopped and came over to where ‘the official party’ was standing. Starting with the paramount chief she threw white chalk over him, much as priests in Christian churches cast the sanctifying smoke from the censor over the faithful. She moved along the line, hissing as she went, spraying each face with dust, fixing each one with inflamed, red and rolling eyes which gleamed in a fierce glare, and yet focused catatonically inwards.
When she reached Schultz she stopped again. The drums stopped. She walked slowly around him several times, placing each old foot carefully after the other on the damp mud bank. She swayed thin hips, hissing and breathing, stopping sometimes to look at his eyes and to touch him, pulling her hand away as though touching red-hot metal. She stopped again, looking into his pale, nervous eyes with her red, ferocious ones.
The silence was long, no-one moved, standing next to him I could feel him stiffen. She slowly reached out her hand, took some of the white dust from a pottery bowl held by an assistant, gave a cry and a leap and threw it into his face in a light cloud. The drums rang out loudly again, she circled Schultz in that cramped, menacing shuffle, and launched over him great, white, cleansing clouds of benediction.
When she came to me she stopped again, and the drums too, and she walked, not shuffled, around me once, returning to look me in the eyes.. I had not realised before how controlled, baleful, malevolent were those black eyes in their red mesh of veins. She gave one last hiss, stamped her feet, shook her head angrily, threw some dust on the ground and moved away. No blessing for me, apparently, the latecomer, the originator of the bridge, not vouchsafed even the grudging acceptance of which Schultz, the sinner, but now a temporary member of the tribe, had been thought worthy.
As if on a signal the crowd, by now in hundreds, moved towards the river, caught in the one emotion. First the priests and priestesses, then the dozens of attendants and the drummers. Then the paramount chief, splendid in the red and green and gold silks of his kente toga, a blue embroidered skull-cap on his head, sheltered by the golden umbrella held above him by an attendant. Next the linguist and his wooden staff with gilded death on its top. Then Schultz and I and a representative of the timber company, and the politicians. Then the masses of local people and their children, in bright cloths and the women in coloured turbans, skins freshly oiled for the occasion now streaked with sweat and dust. They fanned down in a curve from the slope of the clearing to near the site of the bridge.
The priests had stopped beside the tree trunk Schultz had killed-killed, I write, and killed it was, where it sprawled in the fast, brown waters of the river. The drums were silent now and in the hush the people gathered close beneath the burning midday sun. Quiet. The uneasy shuffle of feet and the soft rush of the river.
The priestesses’ attendants dragged from the shade of the trees two large male goats, one brown, speckled with black, the other completely white. I had not seen them before. No doubt they had been tethered quietly all the time, but in the heated moment it seemed as though they had been spirited into place.
The old priestess came forward once more, muttering and growling, pulling the ears of one goat, pushing the rump of the other, scattering white clouds around her as she went, in and out, between and around the two goats. Then with another mad cry she grabbed the white goat and dragged it towards the river.

When I thought of it later, trying to remember how it happened, it scarcely seemed to have occurred in time at all. Two of the attendants, the two who had done most of the dancing with the old woman, rushed forward, taking the goat from her, almost knocking her over as she tottered off. The goat was hauled a few feet out along the dead tree. A long knife shone and the throat was slit in a stroke. A sharp hiss from the crowd. The paramount chief beside me stood impassive. In front of him the linguist, over whose shoulder I was looking, slowly revolved his staff between his fingers. The sun glinted from the golden figures of the kneeling prisoner and erect executioner as they turned.
The red blood spurted over the tree trunk and into the water. Still twitching in chilling death, the goat was thrown into the brown stream. The gore pulsed from its neck, staining the water as it splashed. A sacrifice to the gods of the river, it was to be carried away by the river. The gods of the place, the people hoped, would go with it, in peace and satisfaction, leaving space for the bridge to be built.
But they wouldn’t go. An eddy caught the body still plunging and kicking in its death throes, and brought it back again. Again it came around, and again, and then the kicking carcass turned, slowly moving out into the center of the stream where the current rushed, drifted downstream a little and, at first uncertainly and then faster, swung back again towards the shore.
The many lips which a few seconds previously had opened with hisses dropped apart in gasps, and a single, stifled gasp rose above the stiffened gathering. Once more the body circled slowly out into midstream, paused shakily on the fringe of the current, and traced its ghostly arc back to the starting point like a spirit in thrall. Breathing had stopped. The gasp was silently held. The old priestess stopped her growling and, bent forward on one leg, her hands crushing white clay between her fingers, she gazed in furious concentration, unmoving, joined with her eye’s beam to the circling corpse.
It turned again to the center of the river and the running current. Poised in midstream, in frozen seconds it inched a few feet downstream, backwards, forwards, still held in the circling eddy, and then broke free and plunged with the rushing water around the river bend. The white body, leaving a wash of bloody rust behind, was gone.
Hundreds of mouths exhaled in a swoosh. The drummer of the male drum beat it loudly, heavily, bang bang bang. I had watched the paramount chief through the last few minutes? hours? seconds? His face had stayed calm throughout. But the cheeks paled beneath their brown, the lips were strained and set as the grey shape circled in the water like a lost soul. Turning, he saw me watching and the face opened in a wide and condescending smile.
“The people will be happy now,” he said.

‘The blacks speak much of spirits appearing to them, and believe these are the souls of deceased persons, but they have little or no apprehension of a future state-they rather think that the soul, after death, keeps haunt about the body, and is latent in, or near its repository; and it must be grounded upon this imagination, that they have a custom of setting pots and basins, and other such furniture and utensils, at the graves of their kindred.
That which in some books of voyages is said, of the negroes of Guinea sacrificing to the devil, may have some truth in it; but nothing of that, literally speaking, is ever practised in any part of the Gold Coast, as I could ever learn by clear information. The blacks at Cape Coast are the very opposite of this, seeming rather to hold him in defiance.’
Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, ibid.

Thompson, An Account of Two Missionary Voyages, ibid.

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Where Globalization Began:  A  Journey to the Spice Islands

A Memoir

by

Gavan McDonell

The briefing from the international aid agency had said that the purpose of the project was that I should travel to the outer, eastern islands of Indonesia to identify investments in roads, ferries and ferry ports which would improve the reliability and efficiency of inter-island travel and trade. I was to proceed alone to Jakarta to consult with the Department of Communications and from there I would be accompanied by officials who would coordinate my journey and meetings with local government officials. I duly turned up in Jakarta and had a long meeting with the Head of the Communications Department and two other officials who were to be my guides, philosophers and friends.

The senior of the two, Subrowo, was a stout man of medium height, with an expansive stomach, who constantly pulled on kreteks, the powerful, fragrant, clove cigarettes. He had a sombre, somewhat glowering look in constant danger of obliteration behind billowing clouds of smoke, and he shook his head repeatedly as though in a state of mild consternation. He held a high position in the Department of Communications and was to advise me on the policy priorities in the various districts as we went along.

The other officer, the more junior Sadoran, who exuded the calm politesse of the Javanese, was a handsome man of strong build who was always smiling. His job was to coordinate our travel and I felt sure that I was in good hands. And the next day, he informed me, we were to commence our travel to the islands-first to Kupang and Roti in West Timor, then to Flores and Larantuka, in the Lesser Sunda islands, and then to Ternate and Tidore, the Spice Islands themselves, in Maluku, or, as we say in English, the Moluccas. From Jakarta to Maluku is about half the distance across the United States and we would travel it in a variety of air, road and water contrivances of many shades of antiquity. Another cup of tea, and the meeting was over.

Kupang, the capital of West Timor, straggles over a series of hills and along one side of a vee-shaped bay which has sheltered many wayfarers in these unfavoured parts for centuries. William Dampier left for Australia from here in 1599. Before that, for centuries, the local fishermen sailed regularly to the fringing reefs and the bare beaches of north-western Australia, just as they do today, to the alarm of Australian quarantine and immigration officials. William Bligh made his landfall here after rowing in a lifeboat across three thousand miles of sea from the mutiny of the ‘Bounty’. The first escapees from the convict settlement at Botany Bay reached Kupang after rowing up the east coast of Australia, and thence through Torres Strait. Many of the ‘boat people’, the refugees from Vietnam in the 1970s, and others since, made this their last staging point before heading for the northern and western coasts of Australia.

Kupang has been a fortress for hundred of years, but it carries its history lightly-there is a statue of an early sultan at one of the cross roads, the lone monument. Square houses and buildings made from the rough, pock-marked, coral rock which is the base material of the island. A few shrubs and trees. Some very small areas of thin soil reclaimed by piling up the rocks into dry walls, asa in the fields of Ireland, but without the greenness. Goats scrabble among the rocks. Pigs snort along the sea shore. Unkempt soldiers with rifles wander along the road as they probably have done for centuries.

The hotel which lodged us was a long, low building with an outside living room. Old club chairs were placed on the ground in the open air under a light tin roof. The dining room and the office were not far from the road along which desultory groups of people passed on their way down and uphill, to and from the government offices and the town. It was like the set of a modern play with audience participation. As we sipped beer in the middle of the drama, passing boys hailed us in limping English. Sadoran said that we were to meet with BAPPEDA at nine in the morning.

By eleven a.m., after many cups of tea, the local officials had ended their briefing. BAPPEDA was the government agency responsible for district planning, they were the guardians of the Pola, the five year national and regional plan. This was the centerpiece of our conversations, of their lives. A thick, two-volume, foolscap-sized report , the officials frequently referred to its many tables and diagrams and maps, to the lists of goals and priorities, all scrupulously written down and quoted from. The Pola, they said, could be called ‘The Big Picture’.

They answered all my questions and in return wanted to know whether the aid agency would give any priority to programs here in the outer islands, far from the large population centers. Clearly, they had been promised much and received little from other wandering dispensers of hope and expectation like myself. They listened calmly to my assurances. They bowed their heads in understanding. The books were closed and placed in a neat pile. Maps were taken from the walls. Teacups were cleared. There were smiles and small bows. The Pola, like communion wine, had been ministered unto us.

Outside was the four wheel drive, and our helpers in neat blue uniforms. We clattered down over crushed coral roads to the port, a few kilometers away. Awaiting us was a gray-painted, rusty vessel, used on other days for coastal inspections, unlikely looking, but it turned out to be a speedy c raft and took us quickly down the coast, in a clear, blue, breeze-laden morning towards Roti, the large island to the south-west. Perahus with square, lateen sails passed in the other direction, heavily down in the sea, carrying goods to Kupang’s market.

At Roti, the villages came down to the beach and the camat, the local administrative officer, rode up on his Honda motorcycle. It was hot. A boy shinned up a coconut palm, green nuts were brought, a slice taken off the top with a bush knife, and we were given to drink. The slice removed is fashioned with a few blows into a sharp-sided spoon, and with this the tender, white meat which lines the coconut is scraped up and eaten after the clear milk has been drunk.

But Roti’s fame is due not to the coconut but to another palm, the lontar, sometimes called the fan-palm. The hills of the island are covered with stands of this tree, with jagged, pointed fronds and rough limbs. Its stark profile suggests economy and scarcity and endurance in this harsh climate which has long, dry months. Not here the soft flowing romantics of the South Sea coconut palm. This palm is made for survival and it permits the survival, too, of the island people. When tapped, it gives up over forty liters of syrup a week and is the world’s most productive sugar-palm. This, as a drink or boiled down to a syrup, is the staple food of the islanders, the Rotinese.

The palm also provides thatch for roofs and walls, for umbrellas, containers, r opes, bridles, bindings, fence partitions, troughs, funeral mats and even coffins. As Jim Fox, an anthropologist who has written a fascinating account of the Rotinese and the lontar, ”The harvest of the palm”, Harvard University Press, 1978) says, “They are fed, equipped, attired, buried and remembered after their decease by the products of their palms.”

In September, 1770. Captain James Cook passed this way and called at Savu, the next island, with a similar economy to Roti’s. “The fan-palm”, Cook wrote, “requires more particular notice. At certain times it is a secedaneum for all other food both to man and beast. A kind of wine, called toddy, is procured from this tree. The juice is collected, morning and evening, and is a common drink of every individual upon the island. The syrup is prepared by boiling the liquor down in earthenware pots: it is not unlike treacle in appearance, but is somewhat thicker and has a much more agreeable taste…it was more agreeable to our palates than any cane sugar, unrefined, that we have ever tasted…I have already observed that it is given with the husks of rice to the hogs, and that they grow enormously fat without taking any other food…also, this syrup is used to fatten their dogs and their fowls…The leaves of this tree are also put to various uses, they thatch houses, and make baskets, cups, umbrellas and tobacco pipes.”

The accounts of old travelers always surprise by how much they they were able to stack in those cockle-shell boats they whizzed around the world in, and Cook was no exception. When he left Savu, he had crammed the ‘Endeavour’, a modest craft-she was just under thirty metres long and nine meters wide-with “…nine buffaloes, six sheep, three hogs, thirty dozen of fowls, a few lime, and some coconuts, many dozens of eggs, a little garlic and, “the lontar’s largesse,” several hundred gallons of palm syrup.”

It was almost dark when the master said we must leave soon. The crew sat around the foredeck, eating fish and rice from battered aluminum saucepans. A small man, with long locks and a drooping, pirate-chief black mustache, sat propped against the short mast and strummed melodies on his guitar, melodies which came from other Indonesian islands but which had the lilting softnesses of south seas music everywhere.

And thus back to Kupang. It was one o’clock before we got to bed and four thirty when we were awakened for the flight. But it was seven o’clock before we took off, after repeated calls to check tickets, weigh baggage (and ourselves), and sit down again.

We approached Larantuka, on Flores, which is due north of West Timor, just after eight. The island of Solor appeared first, then Flores behind it, and Adonara and Lembata rising to the east. Mountains reaching to sixteen hundred meters cover their surfaces. As the Twin Otter circled over the strait separating Flores from Adonara, just north of Larantuka, two whales surfaced in the gray-blue, light-soaked water, spouting and splashing.

“Of course, “ the bupati , the local district governor, said, and as he spoke his subordinates, sitting around in cane chairs on the pleasant veranda, stilled themselves and listened respectfully. The young man, an administrative assistant, who had greeted us earlier in the evening, dressed in a well tailored bush suit, flicked his ash, crossed his creased trousers, and leaned back portentously in his chair, to hear the better.

“Of course,” the bupati went on, as if the first utterance of the two words had been but a call to attention, “the problems here in Flores, and the people, are very different from Java. Here there are many resources, in Java there are few. Here the problem it is under-population, Java is over-populated. Here there is food, food everywhere,” he opened his arms and waved them widely towards the dark trees and the hills in the night beyond us,” in Java they do not have enough food, there is no more land, and they are having, now the government is having, the transmigrasi, you know,” he raised an eyebrow politely in my direction to ensure understanding, “they are wanting to move peoples to-where?”

“Of course,” and he smiled again, as though the answer was written in lights above his head , and he was merely displaying his courtesy by assuming that his visitors might not know these elementals,” to the outer islands, to Flores, they want to move peoples to all the outer islands of our national archipelago,” flicking his ash carefully into the waiting ashtray fashioned from a great conch shell, crafting a pause in his oration. And then he concluded, taking a final pull on his kretek, ” But what is there here in Flores besides food and land? Nothing, there is nothing, we have small towns, little harbors, tracks for roads-and when it rains, there are no roads, just muddy pools, no factories, no ferries, no experts, that is what we have.”

Mr Michael, a local officer who had been attached to us as our liaison, nodded his head and shifted in this seat, contriving by these two movements both to agree and to disagree with his superior’s assessment. He agreed, he told me later, that there was a sorry state of affairs for planning development. He did not agree there was no local expertise. He, Michael, had spent several years at a Catholic seminary, and since his transfer to Larantuka from Reo, a small town west on Flores, he had reorganized the local agency, set up rural projects, sent people on training courses, decorated his office with colored graphs showing this year’s and last year’s and the coming year’s goals and achievements. And he besieged his head quarters in Jakarta with submissions whose result, generally, was silence. But it was not true that there was no expertise on Flores.

“Of course, “ the bupati commenced again, assuming once more an air of patient explanation, as though his speech was merely commentary upon a mosaic of well-known and inescapable certainties, “ the people of Java are different”. He had picked up the theme which, unspoken, had taken hold of Michael’s thoughts and those of his other listeners-the remoteness of Java, the foreignness of Java.” The Javanese are very cultured, very bureaucratic, very, how do you say it, inward? They like everything to be, ah, just so, everything in a place. It is said that the Javanese are still afraid of tigers, the fierce tigers-oh, yes, very fierce, you know, that used to live in the jungles, and come out at night-and they could feel safe only in their villages and compounds away from savage tigers. Look,” he said as though to underline the difference between Flores and Java, “there is a tiger on my wall,” he smiled and pointed towards a fine spotted skin hanging on the wall of his living room, which could be seen through the internal shutters, clear evidence that he, the bupati, a Timorese, was not as the Javanese, was not afraid of tigers.

“ They do not like anxiety, or uncertainty, the rains come, the rice grows, the priest blesses, the gamelan plays, the gods are happy, everything is in its place” he smiled again, and slightly bared the tips of his top teeth, “ but here, here in the outer islands, here on Flores,” he gestured wide again, with his arms above his head, and looked out to the trees gently rustling in the heavily scented air, which was just beginning to cool, “it is always uncertain. Life has always been a mystery. There are big tornadoes in some places, and earthquakes and volcanoes, oh yes,” he smiled and leaned over to me, pointing vaguely behind him into the dark. “That mountain is a volcano, last year it erupted and all the roads and trees fell rushing down the hill and two hundred people were killed in the town, you know, there on the coast road, near that church, the one you saw, that’s the place, near your hotel, and two years ago there were three hundred people washed away by a tidal wave on Lembata island, “ he pointed east this time, into the darkness,”just two hours away in a motor boat”.

It was then that I realised that I was on a sort of time machine, set in reverse, and running east, that I was drifting backwards through history. From Jakarta, a modern city, an anachronism within the feudal fastnesses of Java, where in its heart still glow the glorious Hindu and Majapahit empires of ages past, through these precarious islands of the Lesser Sundas, fought over for centuries, and still further on to Maluku, the Spice Islands of Ternate and Tidore, and what would we find there?

A calm had settled upon the small group in easy chairs around the bupati’s veranda. At his last words they had all fallen into a silent, collective meditation upon the past. For Indonesians, even very modern ones, the past is a continuing present.

A man in a sarong and patterned shirt had brought cakes and tea, and now returned, and the plates and cups quickly disappeared. We would be leaving soon.

“Have you been yet to Solor and Adonara?” The bupati’s question was a flag signaling the next stage of our mission. He knew, of course, that we certainly had not yet been to the other islands, that there was no chance we had been, for we had been waiting two days for the outboard motor on his motorboat to be fixed.

In fact it never did get fixed before we left, and a day later we went finally by a local passenger boat, a wooden affair about twelve meters long, filled with a giggling, boisterous crowd below and above and spread over the cabin roof , with bundles, wrapped in bright, printed batiks and local, hand-made cloths, piled on the floor and jammed into corners, cages of parrots, and girls sitting on the edge, their feet almost in the water, carefully eating sticky rice from banana leaves.

A short chimney gave off noxious fumes and good-natured honks at random. At the very top of the scene, on the roof, a man from the customs agency, in carefully pressed uniform and with black slicked hair, wrapped himself away from the hubbub, with an air of patiently official detachment, pulled slowly on a kretek, and gazed towards Adonara, where he was going to check some ships.

Thus we went-but we returned by the official motorboat which, on the third and last day of our visit , had achieved miraculous mechanical health and arrived, sharp at 3.30, at the Adonara jetty, to pick us up. During the days we had seen projects for new warehouses, for schools, for roads, where now there were only rutted tracks. We bumped over large, round stones in the road which thumped, like gloves in a prize ring, against the face and chin of the transmission and the sump of the badly punch-drunk truck which was our conveyance. We had seen sites for schools and crowds of quiet children in green and brown and red uniforms of a neatness, starchedness and smoothness which, for Western teachers, have long since passed into the dreams of a golden age. We had been taken from the beating sun in a clear, electric-blue sky to sit once more under palm trees and drink fresh coconut juice and listen to the village head discourse on his people’s need for development.

Finally, we had been set in a small, local wisma, a guesthouse, and watered with beer and fed with deep-fried chicken, and grilled prawns, and piles of fluffy rice, and dishes of pomeloes and mangoes, and pineapples and pawpaws, sliced and manicured and sculptured. While my companions from the Jakarta Ministry talked with local colleagues, I caught sufficient of their conversation in Indonesian to know that it was about two subjects, one painful, one pleasant, one dark and foreboding, one light and playful, which seemed to float into and out of each other’s path, like the colored kites which were being flown overhead in the first breezes of the monsoon season.

And the first of these topics was the low chance of the government and the aid agency coming good soon with funds for the projects, the excellent projects, whose bleedingly obvious merits they had spent so much time in the heat of the day explaining to these visitors from Jakarta, and to me the foreigner, who was beyond all calculation and whose influence could only be likened to that of one of those gods who spring out unpredictably at dramatic moments in passages of the Ramayana epics and must be placated and sated with food and drink. This was one subject which fixed their attention.

And the other, which was embroidered backwards and forwards, like patterns in a batik, was the glory, the generosity and the economy of the women of Ujang Pandang, and especially of Manado, on Sulawesi. These had crossed the path and enlivened the hours of Michael, our liaison, who had been translated to that fair island for training courses and had recently returned, a more contented and a wiser man, and now sat in the corner, complacently, in sharp peaked cap and spruce blue uniform, spinning travelers’ tales.

So the days and hours passed, and we wondered how we would get back to Larantuka. Having waited for three days for the motor boat, and been given lively accounts of what had befallen it, and of the independent spirit of its master, who, it seemed, was proof even against the bupati’s direction , we had fallen into fatalism. We amused each other with jokes about the stories of unlikely interventions in the motorboat’s affairs which we were daily told to fob us off.

“You have seen the whales out there in the sea, Mr Donell,” Subrowo said, shaking and twitching his head and blowing out heavy, scented smoke from his kretek, gazing in his sorrowful way out to sea . From our first meeting he had dispensed with the ‘Mc’ in my name, as some foreign conceit. “Mr Donell, the whale has taken our motorboat with his tail and is swimming to Timor for the volcano relief program where they need more boats, it is part of our new energy saving drive in the Pola, and government and BAPPEDA think of everything. Yes, the Pola, Mr Donell.”

He shook and twitched his head again, more slowly, and looked at me from under curling eyebrows, and paused, and passed on to the next thought: the motorboat was too unpleasant to continue with. “Did you hear that Mr Michael has been to Manado, Mr Donell? Ah, Mr Donell, the girls in Manado are very beautiful, and very cheap, they are Christians, in North Sulawesi there, you know, they are very loving and generous, they are spreading their religion, do you think we can come back through there from Ternate and Maluku, and learn some Christianity?”, and the motorboat, like the sharp edges of other, painful, present realities, faded from view behind the slopes and pastures of a future, warm Manado.

I, too, as one day turned into two and then into three, had had fantasies about the motorboat and, particularly, its driver, who must be some layabout, or else a crook, busy on smuggling, a common occupation in those islands, or a fixer conniving with some other Department to double his fee. Thus had our lonely fears led us on, so that when the motorboat was there, material, before us, bobbing at the Waiwerang jetty, it was surprising at first, and then very comforting, to see how ordinary and well-used and scrubbed it was, and how careful and conscientious the driver seemed to be.

“The motorboat,” the bupati had said,” my motorboat will be there for you at Waiwerang and will bring you quickly back to Larantuka.” And thus it turned out, beyond all reasonable hope. When starting the boat the boat driver contrived an extended, balletic pose, pulling the start cord vigorously with his right arm while his left leg stretched out to grasp, between limber big and first toes, the rubber priming bulb on the gasoline line, squeezing it rhythmically to squirt petrol into the carburetor below, while the cord rotated the flywheel above.

The motor sputtered and then roared, as though over-stimulated by the dual stroking it had received. Soon the wind in our faces quickened, the clouds darkened. Half the height of the tall, jungle-covered mountains on Flores, miles away to the west across the water, were now obscured. By the time we had passed the end of Adonara the wind was whistling and the full strength of the ‘slot’, the fast current which runs down between the two islands, had caught us.

For centuries this rush of water had worked on the side of the Black Topasses, the mixed race inhabitants and defenders of Larantuka who had settled on and ruled these islands over the years. Tall Portuguese and Dutch brigantines had manoeuvred in line abreast through these broad waters, had run brilliant, broadside passages across the channel, and enfiladed the northern peninsula. The Black Topasses replied with cannons from the hills of Adonara and batteries along the Flores foreshore, and calculated the speed of the ‘slot’ rushing through the narrow passage to their advantage. The big ships could never be sure of their aim and Larantuka was never taken.

That late afternoon, the spray spat on us round the edges of the flapping cover , and the boat edged slower and slower against the wind and the wave. The dark clouds squeezed down even further upon the slim space left above us. The town, by now with a few lights showing, seemed ever so far away, and we breathed and felt the reasons for its enduring victory. We passed the line of the peninsula not long after dark and tied up at the jetty in blackness.

The journey back, in the fast official motorboat, had taken two hours and fifteen minutes. The journey out, on the slow public ferry, had taken one hour and a half.

As though primed by some precise, electronic device, or a communication from the kami, the spirits who inhabit the hills and mountains throughout Indonesia, sharp at five o’clock next morning the Angelus bell from the church just down the road tolled its limping notes, and the choir of dogs struck up. The humid air was already warm, and carried the tones of the bell in heavy waves so that they seemed to strike physically against the tympanum of the ear and the surfaces of the face, exposed above the off-white sheet.

I had become used to picking out individual voices among the dogs. The one that barked a steady staccato, consonant with the bell. The one that pitched a high falsetto in leaping spectral discords. Another that yapped a rapid enraged chatter, like a lost and angered soul trying, with some success, to drown out the holy bells. This morning I listened, for the last time, a little more attentively.

The four-wheel drive arrived exactly at six. There were waves and goodbyes from the people of the hotel, already going about their business. Soon after we were at the small airstrip, and, with Indonesian randomness, the flight left exactly on time. We were heading north to Ternate, in Maluku, the Moluccas, the Spice Islands.

There were some Hollanders aboard. Dutch technical and cultural missions were working in the area on, by all accounts, innocent and productive purposes. But Subrowo chose to take another, more Indonesian view. “The Dutch, Mr Donell,” Subrowo said, “think long term”, and shook his head from side to side and drew on his kretek, and breathed vast significance into his words. The Javanese Sadoran raised his eyebrows, and gave an enigmatic Javanese smile which yet implied that his colleague, who was part-Sumatran, and therefore likely to be brash, was, in his, Sadoran’s opinion, being indiscreet. But the breath of politics was not allowed to frost the glass for long.

“But Mr Donell”, Subrowo went on,” I am thinking long term too, I am thinking about the susis. In Ternate I will have a susi. I have spoken to my friend here at the bureau, and he said in there are good susis, yes, he said not too expensive, he said there are widows. Mr Donell, I will have a widow, I do not like these young susi chickens, pfff-it is all over in a few minutes, I am Casanova, Mr Donell, I can tell you about many women,” he laughed wolfishly, and shook his head, and puffed his smoke,”yes, I am Casanova, but I am slow-motion Casanova. I like to take my time. Widows are good, but not too old. In Ternate I will have a not old widow.”

This prospect cheered Subrowo. He had been glum for several days during our longer-than-expected visit to Larantuka, perhaps from the uncertainty of the waiting, but now he chatted while Sadoran sorted out our schedule for the remaining part of our mission, telling me stories of his beddings, of their great variety, of his discriminating taste, and of his plans for Ternate.

We flew north up the coast into Maluku, over still, blue waters, and dark hills stripped of trees by deforestation, and black beaches. While the days was still young the plane banked into the descent towards the smoking, volcanic peak of the island of Ternate, and its twin, Tidore, set in the shining sea like two dark-pearl lobes cast in the navy onyx of the sea, a few miles from the yellow beaches of Halmahera island to the east.

These two small islands have been the trading posts of many empires for centuries. The Arabs were here, long before any Europeans sailed this way, probably from the fourth or fifth centuries, prosecuting a great trade between Arabia and India and China. The Sultans of Ternate descended from Arabs on the male side and were mothered by local women. The palace of the last of the Sultans still stands above the eastern foreshore, a large, handsome building now painted cream, with big brass defending cannons pointing out towards the sea and Halmahera. The first ruler of all Ternate which covered a very large area is said to have been one Mashur Malano in the middle of the thirteenth century, and he had eighteen non-Islamic descendants until 1466, when King Marhum was converted to Islam by a wandering scholar from Java.

This was the beginning of the three centuries of Ternate’s glory. Its writ ran to nearby Halmahera, to Tidore and Bacan, to the islands to the south, west as far as Sulawesi, and east to what is now Irian Jaya, West Papua. It was upon this past hegemony of the Sultan of Ternate, extending so far east, that the new Republic of Indonesia built its claim to the western part of Papua New Guinea.

Ternate and Tidore had been famous for centuries for their spices-cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Asia had vast palaces, large administrations, great fleets, rich cultures and subtle, complex cuisines. Europe was a collection of weak and warring states. Many a powerful warlord in China or Japan disposed of more troops than the contemporary King of Spain, Philip II, the most glorious of his line, the pre-eminent ruler in Europe.

The European fleets were adventurous, but small. The merchant class was just emerging. The culture of the Church of Rome provided the tallest beacons of high art. But the arts of cooking were those of the peasant, and more often than not, even the exalted ate rank meat. Spices were needed to relieve the taste of these unfavored morsels, to perfume the tables of the new bourgeoisie.

On the twenty-first of October, 1579, Francis Drake left Mindanao in the “Golden Hind”, on the last half of his voyage around the world. A few days later he made landfall at Ternate, anchoring off the north of the island. Large war canoes rowed out to meet him and Drake noted that he was greeted by a ‘Moorish gentleman with a chain which seemed of gold about his neck, and some keys hanging to a small silver chain. These were his insignia of office and Drake soon found that they were but baubles compared to the trappings of the man whose chamberlain he was.

“The king,” Sir Francis said of his meeting later with the Sultan himself,”had a very rich canopy with embossings of gold borne over him, and was guarded with twelve lances. From the waist to the ground was all cloth of gold, and that was very rich; in the attire of his head were finely wreathed diverse rings of plaited gold, of an inch or more in breadth which made a fair and princely show, somewhat resembling a crown in form; about his neck he had a chain of perfect gold, the links very great and one gold dubloon; on his left hand was a diamond, an emerald, a ruby and a turquoise; on his right hand, in one ring, a big and perfect turquoise, and, in another ring, many diamonds of a smaller size.”

This was the redoubtable Baabullah who had extended the island’s influence throughout those remote archipelagoes, and was reckoned to be as powerful and wealthy as the greatest of any sultans in Indonesia and its environs. The “Hind” was rowed to its place at the anchorage by four big canoes manned by island oarsmen, warriors and officials. There was much palaver, but Drake did not find easy bargains, he did not risk going ashore, nor did the Sultan come aboard. For each of their parts, Drake and Baabullah had reason to be cautious.

Apart from previous imbroglios the Sultan had had with Europeans he was at the time of Drake’s visit still enraged at the activities of a spy, a Portuguese masquerading as a Chinese, sent by the Governor of the Spanish Philippines. For his part, Drake struck trouble because he would not pay the percentage added to his transactions as a royal fee to help Baabullah maintain Ternate, and himself particularly, in the style to which he had become accustomed.

But in the end a deal was done and on November the ninth the “Golden Hind” sailed off with six tons of cloves, paid for with silks and linens which they had taken from the ships they had captured months previously off the South American coast. Three tons were jettisoned when the ship went on a reef shortly after, west of Sulawesi.

The remaining spices were among the most valuable cargoes from Drake’s voyage when he berthed at home in September 1580. and sold up his stock. It fetched six hundred thousand sterling pounds, he bought Buckland Abbey with the proceeds and was knighted by Elizabeth on the deck of the “Hind”. The return to the shareholders in the voyage was rated at a modest 4700 per centum. He had been away almost three years, the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world, and the first commander of any nation to complete a whole circumnavigation. He had attacked the Portuguese near Cape Verde, sacked towns and looted treasure ships off the west of South America, traded in the Moluccas and made his way safely back. Along the way he executed rivals, and excommunicated chaplains. He was, a contemporary Spaniard said, “of medium stature, blond, rather heavy than slender, merry, careful. He commands and governs imperiously. Sharp, ruthless, well-spoken, inclined to liberality and to ambition, boastful, not very cruel.”

The complete purposes of his voyage are still obscure. Were they, as the public believed, to establish trading bases among the fabled riches of the Pacific and the Moluccas? Or were they to raid the bases, to singe more hairs of the royal Spaniard’s beard in the west of South America, as his Queen hoped. No one really knows, but the call at the Spice Islands and the sampling of its great wealth was part of a careful purpose, though the results could not be calculated.

As John Maynard Keynes, the English economist who worked his own revolution in the international markets of the twentieth century, said in the ‘Treatise on Money”: “The booty brought back by Drake may fairly be considered the fountain and origin of British foreign investment. Elizabeth paid off out of the proceeds the whole of her foreign debt and invested a part of the balance (about forty two thousand pounds sterling) in the Levant Company; largely out of the profits of the Levant Company was formed the East India Company, the profits of which during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were the main foundation of England’s foreign connection.”

The political and commercial strands of mercantilism were inextricably tangles here near th beginning of merchant trading capitalism-the beginning, that is, of what we now know as globalization. The great voyages of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries yielded huge profits; fueled great exchanges; criss-crossed trades in spices, calicoes, silks, dyes, manufactures, precious metals; enticed traders and administrators and soldiers to cross oceans, subdue colonies, build empires, die in the sun. Here, at Ternate, on its black sand beaches, beneath the smoking cone of the volcano, in the dappled cool aromas of the spice groves, was a place where international capitalism, multinational businesses and arms races began.

We stayed for three days at Ternate. The small Chinese hotel had just three rooms and a covered patio which looked over Ternate’s main street to the sea, past the shops on the other side, past the canoes and perahus and motorboats always crossing the calm waters, and beyond, through a smoky haze, to the grey blue outlines of the large island of Halmahera. Behind the hotel, through the big window beside which we would all eat an early breakfast or have tea and cakes in the afternoon, there was a jumble of rusted, iron-roofed houses and compounds and humpies, gradually running into, and being overtaken by, the jungle.

Above the jungles and the tall trees the towering volcano steeply rose. There were usually wisps of smoke breathing from it with flat layers of clouds above; or the blankets of clouds dropped and covered the mountain, cutting off half its height, leaving the fuming cone mysteriously obscured. And always there was the feeling that here was a magic mountain with a life and being of its own, and that witches and trolls and kami would at any moment appear from it.

Along the half-paved and rutted main street a honking babble of motor-bikes, bemos (motor driven rickshaws), small vans, trucks ran from very early morning until after midnight. The bemos and small buses were garishly painted. Several dozen tired and scruffy ponies drawing small covered carts clip-clopped reluctantly along the broken pavement and in and out of puddle holes constantly replenished by the daily falls of rain. From before dawn each day the heat was a stew, relieved only for a while in the afternoon by an intermittent, heavy, plopping rain, which brought bare-chested boys yelling and splashing water on pedestrians sheltering and steaming under the eaves of shops.

There were not many motor vehicles on Ternate, but most of the bemos seemed to spend the day, and much of the night, turning backwards and forwards along these few hundred meters of narrow promenade, flanked by two -story shop houses filled with shoddy collections of good from China, Japan and Singapore, with only an occasional hardware store or vehicle repairer or cobbler giving evidence of solid local industry. Further south this main street ran along the water on one side, with official buildings and the bupati’s offices on the other, and then it ended in the rutted yard of the old port littered with piles of broken cargo, its concrete berths always filled with steel ships, aluminum motorboats and wooden perahus. About a kilometer across the water the volcanic cone of Tidore rose up in almost a mirror image of Ternate. Ruins of old stone forts dotted the jungle on the hills, looking out over the narrow passage where once they poured fire on advancing men-o-war.

The office of the bupati of Ternate was very large and well-equipped, as if to make up in its own dimensions for the smallness and the poverty of the community which it administered. It was a gesture, perhaps, towards a glorious past long gone, and a promise of a future not yet in sight. The usual big map of the region spread right across one wall, and from floor to ceiling. It was finely modeled and sculpted in relief, and painted with great precision. The shape of that town would be just so, one thought, and the curve in that road would be just exactly right, there by those three coconut trees and the fish jumping out of the blue sea, painted with such care and love. There were many tables of figures pinned on the walls, and some officials were putting colored graphs in preparation for a seminar that afternoon on education.

The bupati was direct. He came, apparently, from Sumatra, and he and Subrowo had immediately struck up a joking acquaintance. “The problems of Ternate”, he said, with an almost Gallic shrug, and a lift of his peaked cap, and an understanding, sardonic smile,” is that we are a long way from Jakarta and the money, it has many friends and is offered many homes,” and he drew on his Benson and Hedges, “ it drops off for visits along the way.”

“But now”, he said, “ there is a new objective for Ternate and my district,” and he squared his shoulders, and pointed towards the map,”and you will see, you will see when you go to Halmahera, the big trees, and the many coconuts, and the big land-yes, this district will have a big picture in the future, here in the outer islands.”

We were bound for Halmahera, but it took two days for the bupati’s motorboat to turn up, and here there were no excuses. It had broken down, and there were no spare parts, and we would have to wait, and that was that, as if Ternate’s isolation had been a sufficient explanation for centuries. And when it did arrive, on the third morning, it came only to depart again. It was needed for duty of a higher, undisclosed priority and we would have to take one of the narrow, low, sleek, wooden craft , like Filipino bancas, which speed backwards and forwards between the islands and the coasts. The early breezes of the monsoon were blowing, and young boys, wagging it, or too small for school, were flying their kites from the wharves and in the empty streets on the edge of town. Pink and blue and red and green, big ones, small ones, shaped like birds, or fish, or dragons or ghosts, they were skilfully played in the fitful zephyrs. They are called layang layang in Indonesian. It is an onomatopoeic word: the kites zip up and down, in and out, over and under, again and again, gradually climbing up, until they are many hundreds of feet in the air, frail, coloured membranes testing themselves, tethered in the air beside the smoking mass of the volcano towering beyond.

We didn’t stay long on Halmahera. It was steaming hot. The thin, poor villagers seemed overcome with the heat, reluctant to move from the shade. There were indeed some rich soils and spreading palm groves, but little else. There was no flowering of wealth here, even less so than on Ternate itself. We were shown tall stands of trees, some mean school buildings, a rutted road, a few narrow clearings for new crops, the village head made a brief speech, we were handed green coconuts to drink, and asked to pay for them. Here was the only place we were not freely given local produce in abundance. Over the centuries the peoples of these villages had seen many come and many go, quickly, with their promises and their spoils, and only they had stayed on. We, too, would soon go. Subrowo’s head was shaking more than usual when we boarded the boat and his kretek belched smoke more furiously, and Sadoran’s lips formed a thin, tense smile. The tree of global capitalism, watered from here, had left barren and unfertilized the soil from which its fruits had sprung.

On the way back we dozed on the planked roof of the banca’s low cabin, moving fast across the still, almost leaden, ultramarine sea. We walked home to the hotel as dusk closed in, past the donkey carts and their bells, and the fishing perahus returning with the day’s catch.

That evening, Subrowo found his widow. After the evening meal of soup, deep-fried fish and vegetables, and small bananas, Sadoran and I went for jalan jalan, the evening promenade along the streets, picking our way around the potholes and past the grubby shops. Subrowo stayed behind in silent mystery. When we got back to the hotel about eleven o’clock Subrowo was still sitting on the covered patio, listlessly watching the TV. Sadoran vanished to bed, but I stayed and opened a bottle of beer for each of us. “She hasn’t come,” Subrowo said, “my widow”, and shook his head and blew his smoke in his compulsive way, and again, and again, as though in morose disbelief at the faithlessness of all women. “The boy have arranged it for me”, he went on,” and the bureau man at the port told me he knew the family, she is about thirty, and it is a good family, her husband worked in the customs.”

I lamented her absence, and he shook his head quickly again, and lit another kretek, and we worked our way through that bottle, and another, amusing each other sadly with tales of women and wine. “Perhaps she knows I am slow-motion Casanova and she is giving me slow foreplay,” he said, with his wolfish grin and quick shake again of the head. “You will stay and meet her, Mr Donell,” he said several times, but I thought he was whistling in the wind and at one o’clock I went to bed. We had to be up early again to catch the plane. But before my head had touched the pillow there were voices outside. One of them was soft and female, and they went on quietly talking.

We were awakened at six o’clock and when I appeared shortly afterwards Subrowo was already there, spruce and showered and good humored. I wondered how slow they had been, but he said nothing, and was amiability itself. Sadoran had arranged the luggage briskly and, as usual, had collected the tickets and remade our arrangements yet again. “We are not going to Ambon, I have a new message from Jakarta, we are going to Manado, but we go straight through, we have big meeting in Jakarta with the Minister there tomorrow. Jakarta wants your report.”

During our journey we had identified several feeder roads as investment priorities, three small and two medium sized ports, a new fast ferry-boat, and some community programs. It would make a good sized package for the aid agency. So we were off.

I thought Subrowo would be disappointed at missing out on Manado, but he appeared from within his cloud of smoke, shook his head calmly, and said “Mr Donell, next time, Mr Donell, I think next time we must do field survey among Manado susis, the advancement and welfare of the susis is important part of Pola, yes Mr Donell, we will put it in the Pola. It will be part of the Big Picture. This time Ternate, Mr Donell, next time Manado.”

The aircraft departed exactly on schedule. No hitches, no coughs, no delays, the engines ran sweetly and we lifted off without a flutter of the wings. The sun was not long up, and its rays struck across the silver sand and the beaches below, across the jungle and the dark lava flows, and through thin wisps of smoke rising from the tip of the volcano which this morning was completely clear of cloud. It was a brilliant beginning to the day.

In the town it was already hot and steamy, there were cries and hubbub and bustle, and the smoke from cooking fires drifted slowly, vertically, upwards. In a narrow street of low tin hovels, a few hundred meters back from the ocean, where Drake had moored the “Hind”, and the springs of capitalism had flowed, a boy was flying his layang layang. It dipped and tucked, and did back spins and front spins, and a long run of tumbles going lower and lower, almost to the roof tops, only to shoot upwards again, zipping to the right, slipping to the left, up and up, a small red disc straining playfully against its thin string, above the town, beside the mottled green slopes and smoldering blackness of the volcano. As we straightened on our course due west across the north side of the island, it was the last thing I saw.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A CITY OF THE SUDAN

A Memoir

by

Gavan McDonell

A CITY OF THE SUDAN

‘This is the history of the lords of this country called Kano. Barbushe, once its chief, was of the stock of Dala, a black man of great stature and might, a hunter, who slew elephants with his stick and carried them on his head about nine miles. Dala was of unknown race, but came to this land and built a house on Dala hill. There he lived, he and his wives. He had seven children-four boys and three girls-of whom the eldest was Garageje. This Garageje was the grandfather of Buzame, who was the father of Barbushe. Barbushe succeeded his forefathers in the knowledge of the lore of Dala, for he was skilled in the various pagan rites. By his wonders and sorceries and the power he gained over his brethren he became chief and lord over them…’

The Kano Chronicle

I first came to the city of Kano from the south, driving on the main bitumen highway for several hundred miles through the scrubby orchard bush. This highway, commencing at Lagos, the biggest city of Nigeria, on the coast, stretched for thousands of miles from the edges of the rain forest in the south through the Sahara desert in the north all the way to the Mediterranean, and east-west across West Africa, in fact right across Africa, in parts only a mud track. In the past the name Sudan was given to the whole expanse of this broad zone, the mixing bowl of Africa, not, as at present, only to the Republic of the Sudan in the east of the continent.

It was late in the rainy season of 1961. Nigeria had won its Independence the previous year. Tall, stiff, green fronds of corn thwacked the brisk breeze like the feathered hafts of flung spears. Small mountains of groundnuts, stacked in beige hessian bags and covered by shiny blue tarpaulins, were growing, like swelling scarabs, at each rail station as dusty labourers slowly slung the hemp sacks from the trays of trucks queued at sidings. In the far, flat fields of rich loam spreading to the horizon, white-capped peasants were breaking sods with steel hoes and wooden digging sticks. At every creek and river tall Hausas in long, patched kaftans swung the shadoof, like a long-handled wooden spoon, to empty dousings of water onto the traceries of irrigation channels which flowed among vegetable patches and groundnut fields.

In late afternoon Kano rose up before us. Shadows cut crisp edges on its high mud walls, and poured dark pools into the obscurities of its narrow streets. We passed through the southwest gate, through the lanes of mud-brick buildings and burnt-umber plastered walls, past vegetable gardens and stagnant ponds. Out through Kofar Nassarawa, the southern gate, to the Provincial Headquarters, the office of the Resident, built near the Emir’s summer palace.

Around us was the old City, with high mud walls, home to the native Hausas and the town Fulani and other northerners; to the north were the corrugated iron shacks of the Sabon Gari, where the people from the South, from Iboland and Yorubaland and the River provinces, dwelt; and to east could be seen the Township with its tidy streets of the neat bungalows and villas of the Europeans and most senior Nigerian officials.

The day’s hot journey had started at early light and now at dusk we had reached the old metropolis, as many thousands of other caravans had done over the centuries, from the south and north, the east and west, to visit its mosques and schools, its offices and bazaars, to buy its goods, to sell and be sold, to slay and be slain. If regions, rather than states, had capitals and possessed souls, then Kano City was surely the capital of the Sudan. Other cities of the north were older and holier, but Kano was its beating heart, the source of its soul.

There has probably been a settlement in the vicinity of Kano, the southern city terminus of the old trans-Saharan caravan trade, for several thousand years. The Kano Chronicle, a unique document in the history of this part of Africa, records the reigns of forty eight kings, Emirs, as they were later called, or, in Hausa, Sarkin Kano, the head of Kano. For nearly a thousand years they reigned, from the time when the town emerged from prehistoric dust and mud at the close of the first millennium till the end of the nineteenth century. There is still an Emir of Kano, much reduced in power.

‘Bagoda, Son of Bauwo: AD 999-1063

Then came Bagoda with his host, and was the first Sarki of this land. His name was Daud. His mother’s name was Kaunasu. He began by occupying Adirani fro two years. Thence he moved to Barka, and built a city called Talutawa, where he reigned two years.

The names of the pagan chiefs whom Bagoda met were Jankare, Biju, Buduri (who had many children-about a hundred) and Ribo. Bagoda overcame them and killed their leader Jankare. Then he came to Sheme, and found Gabusani, Bouni, Gazauri, Dubgege, Fasatoro and Bakin Bunu there. He conquered them all, and built the city, and reigned at Sheme sixty six years…..’

The Kano Chronicle

“EE Roads. Fyi. Pls spk. SRE”

The summons from the Senior Roads Engineer, scrawled in a slant, downwards-sloping script on the bottom right of the foolscap memorandum, a wandering line of pale-blue fountain pen ink running off the page, sketched so well the personality of the writer. There mightn’t be too much to graphology, I had often thought, but this writing was the SRE to a tee-weak, evasive, sluggish, indecisive. I would have to go and talk with him.

Above the first inscribed minute at the bottom of the page was another in the now familiar bureaucratic short hand, done with a broad-shovel nib, a direction from the Provincial Administrative Officer (PAO), but with an added call to action:

‘SRE. We spoke this afternoon. Fyi & a. PAO’

And above that again was the direction to the PAOvfrom God Himself, the Sole Commissioner, in a florid, well-formed, gentian red, written with a ballpoint.

‘PAO. Pls initiate the action as outlined this pm. SC’

Not ‘begin’, but ‘initiate’-this was the language of power. And the ballpoint. From what we had heard of him-lofty, confronting, sharp-you might well have guessed that the Sole Commissioner, scion of a born-to-rule English colonial family, would be the only one of the officers toiling in the off-cream Headquarters building to have broken with the fountain pen. The announcement of his coming, specially appointed by the Government of the Northern Region of Nigeria, had shaken all the people of the city, from the spacious dwellings of the expatriates in the Township to the last dusty hovel in the old City. And it looked as though I was to be initiated into action.

‘Gajemasu. AD 1095-1134

The Sarki consulted the people about building a city. The people agreed. “Come”, they said, “let us build, for we have the power and the strength”. So they began to build the city. They began the wall from Raria. The Sarki slaughtered a hundred cattle on the first day of the work. They continued the work to the gate of Mazugi, and from there to the water gate and on to the gate of Adama and the gate of Gudan; then past the gates of Waika, Kansakali and Kawungari, as far as the gate of Tuji. There were eight gates.’

The Kano Chronicle

The Sole Commissioner had appeared in the Provincial Headquarters three days before. It was a Monday. Kano had awakened early that morning to find squads of screeching motor cycle police outriders manoeuvring on its streets. Platoons of police sitting in the back of blue riot vans, their rifles upright between their knees, were driving at speed around all of the three precincts which made up the whole city. There was a stir of alarm. Then at seven a.m. came the news, a statement on the radio from Kaduna, the administrative centre of Northern Nigeria where sat the Regional Government. The Premier, the Sardauna of Sokoto, had set up an inquiry into the financial affairs of the Kano administration. It was to be conducted, said the mellifluous Nigerian announcer, by a Sole Commissioner, a very senior official of the Northern Region Ministry of the Interior, David Muffett.

The city surveyed the motorcycles and inspected the personnel carriers; gawked at the logo painted on the their sides-a rampantly erect, blue police baton contained within the arms of a laurel crown, like wings. The occupying squads immediately became the Flying Pricks. Wondering eyes considered the gas masks and the rifles and the occasional machine gun. There were mutterings and fear. But by the middle of the morning the city had resumed its pace.

Kano had been attacked and occupied many times in its long history-from the desert to the north, from the forests to the south, from its sister states to east and west. But always its trade went on, its workshops hummed, its crafts expanded, its merchants grew rich. Attacked and occupied but never conquered, the city remarked the presence of its gaolers and went about its business…..

‘Tsamia, son of Shekkarau. AD 1307-1343

When he came to the throne he assembled the pagans and said to them, “love transmits love, and hate transmits hate; there is nothing between us except bows and spears and swords and shields; there is no deceit and no deciever except he who is afraid.” Tsamia excelled all men in courage, dignity, impetuosity in war, vindictiveness and strength...When the morning broke Tsamia, Sarkin Kano, came forth from his house, and went to the place of the god. In front of him were seventy men, each with a shield made of elephant’s hide. When Sarki came near to the place of the god he prevented the pagans entering. As the fight waxed hot, the Sarki cried, “Where is Bajeri?” Bajeri heard the words of the Sarki and took a spear and rushed into the battle, cutting his way until he reached the wall of the sacred place, near the Tchibiri tree…The Sarki returned to the tree, and destroyed the wall together with all else connected with Tchibiri which was beneath the tree. All the pagans had in the meantime fled…In the time of this Sarki long horns were first used in Kano. The tune that they played was “Stand firm, Kano is your city”. He reigned thirty years.’

The Kano Chronicle

Not long after I had received the minute from the Senior Roads Engineer I had a call from the Principal Administrative Officer, now in the gleaming new role of the Inquiry’s executive officer, to attend on the Sole Commissioner. When I walked into his office, the SC was sprawled across and around the desk which was set on the opposite side from the door, looking like a groper in a cave.

The office, formerly a conference room, was bare of furniture except for his desk and swivel chair, a straight backed wooden chair in front of the desk, and a table in the left hand corner on which many files were stacked. The blinds on the windows were drawn, and light within was dim. On the desk were two black telephones, a few files, and, very conspicuously in the centre, a tape recorder.

The SC’s forearms were thrown loosely forward on the desk, the hands showing out from the cuffs of a white shirt fastened with engraved gold links. Shoulders hunched, he looked up with brown eyes in confident confrontation as I walked, it seemed for minutes, across the length of the office. I was not guilty of anything of importance to the Sole Commissioner, as far as I knew. But by the time I had reached the straight-backed chair, and accustomed my eyes to the gloom, I noticed that the tape recorder was gently whirring, I was uncertain. I hoped it did not show in my voice.

“I had a message that you wished to see me, Mr Commissioner.”

“Mr McDonell, please sit down,” he commenced, without introduction,” you know what this Commission is about, you read the local rag. I’m sure you have the benefit of the latest briefings.”

What he was referring to was that famous hub of intelligence gathering, the bars and surrounds of the Kano Club, the social gathering place to which all expatriates repaired. And he was right there. For the last few nights the Club could hear of nothing else. Talk over beers after work of plans for the next Open Night, the local polo team’s recent visit to the championships in Zaria, the case of the English trader and the disappearing Lebanese girl, which had the ladies around the swimming pool agog-all these and more were stilled and replaced by rumour, charge and counter charge about the Inquiry, and what the Sole Commissioner was really up to. “Oh, of course, they want to get the Emir, that’s obvious, and they will too, but what is the real reason?”, they asked. “It’s not what it seems, you know, if they’ve brought him up here”. Powerful impressions of inscrutable ruthlessness lingered from Muffett’s previous postings in the Province.

And so they went on, scurrying, perplexed, peering under every stone, turning each new story, each freshly suspected motivation, on its head, spinning sticky webs of fascinated paranoia. There always had to be a real reason, some reason beyond all other reasons. “You can’t know what these new bastards are up to. Of course, the Sardauna”, they said,” he wants to get the Emir. We know that. But what else is there?” The Sardauna of Sokoto was the long-standing title of the civil leader of Sokoto, the holy city of the North, where lived also the most senior of the Region’s Islamic clerics, the Sultan of Sokoto. Now the bearer of the title was the first elected premier of the Northern Region of the independent Nigeria, located hundred of miles to the south in Kaduna.

Only Sophie, the tall, radiantly tanned, French-Arab woman from Algeria, to be found of an afternoon in a bikini, propped on an elbow along a deck-bed under a palm tree, stroking her flank, watching the splashings of her children in the pool, retained her hauteur and her assurance that she saw to the heart of things. “The tawny beast of the glorious buttocks”, Cartwright, the local expert on Arab literature and sexual preferences, used to call her in impotent admiration,” heavy like twin hills of sand”, painstakingly adding that it was a quote from The Perfumed Garden. If you asked Sophie what was up she gazed with cool penetration into your eyes and breathed, easing herself a little higher on the deck-bed, “ it is de Gaulle”, with a stiff twitch of her shoulders and jaw, as if it could be no other.

The War of Independence in Algeria to our north was drawing to a long drawn out and painful close. After years of what came to be recognised as one of bloodiest of the era’s struggles between the European colonisers and their colonised natives, the War, begun in 1954, had reached a stage where isolated skirmishes and assassinations still occurred. But creaking negotiations had begun and sputtered from detente to detente with outbreaks of hostilities in-between. Above it all stood General Charles de Gaulle, President of France, who had masterminded a change of direction and moves towards an independent Algeria which led to the Evian Agreements in April 1962 and thus to Independence. In Algeria, and elsewhere by people like Sophie, he was profoundly distrusted by those patriots who would have preferred the future of Algeria to be as a province of France.

Among the leaders of the Independence movement perhaps the most famous were Ahmed Ben Bella,who in 1963 became the first President of an independent Algeria, and Houari Boumédiène. At that time in 1961 Boumédiène was the chief of staff of the ALN, the national liberation army, the military wing of the national political movement, the FLN. He subsequently deposed Ben Bella in a bloodless coup and was President of Algeria from 1965 till his death in 1978.

But I had more immediate concerns than Sophie’s imaginings.

“By instrument of authority issued by the Premier of Kaduna four days ago I am empowered to elicit any information, and obtain the cooperation of any person, I judge to be of relevance to the Inquiry’s objectives. “

The overblown language was numbing.

“I have very good information-some of it, incidentally, from that little rat you passed on your way in”, the small man in a stained kaftan had looked sad and worried,” that there has been corruption and malpractice from top to bottom of the Emir’s administration in the letting of public works contracts. I impress upon you that the Regional Government regards the deficiencies of the Emir and his administration, and the possible ill-effects upon the good name of the Government of open and flagrant corruption in one of its principal cities, as a matter of the utmost seriousness.

Flagrant, I have no doubt, I thought to myself, but open I’m not so sure.

The Sole Commissioner had spoken as though reading from Standing and Daily Orders. The light from the lamp behind him cut a circle on the desk, shrouding his face. From outside came the scurry of petty contractors, and mammy traders with their baskets of betel nut and sweets and perfumes waiting for the offices to close at noon, two hours early today, being Friday, mosque day.

“As Executive Engineer in charge of road works for the Township, the City and the Province you are to be responsible- responsible, directly to me as Sole Commissioner-for the complete investigation of all contracts let in the last three years. You will use whatever methods you think necessary, subject only to clearing anything unusual with me, and, of course, no extortion. You may not pay for information, you will refer anything like that to me. As you do not know Hausa, the local language, you may consult on a need to know basis with Mallam Mohammad Musa, the Nigerian administrative officer who is assisting the Inquiry.”

I knew Musa well, a sociable young man connected by family to one of the royal houses of the North. He had gone to University in Lagos and now, in the push for Nigerianisation which had come with Independence, was one of the comers.

“You will be briefed from time to time by the Principal Administrative Officer. You will no doubt hear that there are international plots and ploys involved, that all of this here is tied up with the situation in Algeria and what’s going on in what used to be the Congo. Ignore all that, it is the product of sodden brains, unused wombs and too many spy novels in the Kano Club’s library. Folly and nonsense.”
He paused for emphasis.

“Make no mistake-Kano leaves a great gaping hole in the Region’s coffers. .We have reason to believe that one of the largest sources of corruption for the slush funds of the Emir and his minions has been the public works programme, especially all the road works for Kano City which are directly under the Emir’s control. As the Executive Engineer it is easy for you to gain access to all the paperwork concerned with Kano roads. You are to examine personally, personally,” he repeated,” all the contracts for road works for the last three years and check the details on the contracts with the works that have actually been carried out. You are to come back to me with a written report in one month from today. Good afternoon.”

What a game, what big, shiny toys, he, and we, had to play with. I laughed at the theatre of it all, at the grand guignol touches, the heroics of the darkened room; but just below my navel I felt the first small gnaw of a grub of anxiety. It took an extra munch when I noticed, sitting on the bench outside the door waiting to enter after me, a blue-robed Hausa man whom I had known as an austerely composed and aristocratic member of the Regional parliament and chair of several committees. He looked up with a flare of eye-white as I came out. He was composed no longer. Now he was fidgety, eyes closed, fingers telling his rosary at speed, jaw grinding, composure drained.

Would it also be a dangerous game?

‘Yaji, son of Tsamia. AD 1349-1385

The eleventh Sarki was Yaji, called Ali. His mother was Maganarku. He was called Yaji because he had a bad temper when he was a boy, and the name stuck to him. He drove the Sarkin Rano from Zamma Gaba, went to Rano and reigned at Bunu for two years…In Yaji’s time the Wangarawa came from Melle (now known as Mali) bringing the Mohammadan religion. The name of their leader was Abdurahaman Zaite. When they came they commanded the Sarki to observe the times of prayer. He complied and made Gurdamus his Liman, and Luaul his Muezzin…the Sarki commanded every town in Kano country to observe the times of prayer. So they all did so. A mosque was built near the sacred tree facing east, and prayers were made at the five appointed times in it.‘

The Kano Chronicle

I had discovered that Sole Commissioner David Muffett was well known in Kano. A few years earlier he had been one of the most senior officers in Kano Province. He had spent his whole career in the Nigerian service and stood high in that elite whose members had never moved from the Northern Region. He and his like in the Northern service were fluent in the languages and the lineages, the traditions and intrigues, of the areas they were posted to. Some were acknowledged scholars of Sudanese and Muslim history and law, necessary expertise for a colonial administration meeting the challenges of long traditions of religious learning and legal doctrine. Some of them were experts in specific regions, spending most of their careers there and becoming intimately familiar with all the leading figures of the colonised communities.

Above all, the elite of the elite, there were those who had spent their years among the old walled cities, Kano, Katsina, Sokoto and others in the north. Here were the families of the conquering Fulani, the pale-skinned people of mysterious origin who had come from the north. Their ancestors had been the revered priests and savage warriors, who, under the famous Sheik, Usman dan Fodio, had swept across from the western plains in a great jihad early in the nineteenth century. They established dynasties in all the major cities, in the area which came to be called Hausaland, after the local people. These dynasties, even in the nineteen sixties, still wielded great power, religious and political, across the north, in that broad zone of savannah, between the jungle and the desert.

These top officials came to be friends of the Sultan of Sokoto, known as the Sarkin Mussulmi, the spiritual head of all the Muslims, and of the Emirs of the northern cities and provinces right across the north, even of the Premier of the Northern Region, Alhaji Alhmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. He was, since Independence had come to Nigeria, the most powerful figure in the north. Many of them had been at school or university in England with the new African leaders with whom they now shared power, and polo once a week, and the princely sons had visited their homes and families in England during vacations.

When Independence came men like Muffett had stayed on under the new black government and scarcely noticed the difference. For some years there was, in any case, little transition to be made. The senior British officers had for decades run the place as a colony with scarce a let or hindrance, and continued to do so under the indigenous regime. But this Kano Inquiry was one of the first signs that the old state of affairs was ending. That the new politicians were beginning to call the shots.

The elected members of the Northern government, who were the traditional lords of the Hausa states dressed up in democratic masks and modern play-clothes, had decided that the Emir of Kano, the richest and most lordly of all the chiefs of the northern cities, the least inclined to bend the peaked turban towards the new boys in Kaduna, had to go. The financial housekeeping of his administration, corrupt and messy, as were all the provincial administrations, was to provide the chopping block and in Muffett they had chosen a very keen hatchet.

‘Bugaya, son of Tsamia. AD1385-1390

The twelfth Sarki was Bugaya, called Mohammed. He had the same father and mother as Yaji. …after Zamnagawa killed Tsamia, he made ovdertures to his widow, Maganarku, but she said, “I am with child.” So Zamnagawa gave her drugs, without her knowledge, to procure an abortion. In spite of this, however, she gave birth to a living child and gave him the name Bugaya. It was this Sarki who ordered the Maguzawa to leave the rock of Fongui and scatter themselves through the country. He then gave all power into the hands of the Galadima (senior official), and sought repose.”

The Kano Chronicle

There had been a Sarkin Kano for a thousand years. The Emir’s forefathers had multiplied their gold and slaves, their jewels and harems and palaces, from the trade north across the Sahara and south through the rain forests, and from the skills and industry of their people.

In more recent times the Sarkin Kanos had enlarged their fortunes and strengthened their hold over the millions who acknowledged their feudal lordship. Their thorny independence was achieved from the harvests of the wide networks of good fields and waterchannels which produced the many pyramids of groundnuts exported each year, from the largest area of production in the world. They had cultivated, too, the networks of lineage and the channels of intelligence which linked the old cities of West Africa right up to the seaboard of the Mediterranean, through Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, even Egypt.

It was these connections, also, which guided trans-Saharan camel caravans, still persisting in the modern age, winding in and out of the many modern nations of west and northern Africa . Shadowy fleets with shadowy cargoes, they wound through old desert pathways and unmarked tracks in derisory disregard of the official frontiers on maps, mere paper inventions of the colonial powers in the nineteenth century when they sat around European tables and divided Africa up.

The Emir raised his own taxes, kept his own army, held his own courts, appointed his own spokesmen as elected members in the National Assembly, attended each Friday at his own city mosque, the finest in the north, kept his own harem in the dark depths behind the thick mud-walls of his palace: for the new masters of an independent Northern Nigeria, he was much too big a nut to be left uncracked.

What to do, to bring this crusty autarch down from his ancient citadel? An open attack was out of the question. An embargo on his trade? Tricky, difficult to pin down, rich city revenues would be lost. An enquiry into his finances? Much better. The men behind the Regional Government, the Emir’s titular peers, were themselves city potentates who knew that any one of them could be seized for corruption. What was corrupt to modern European law was ancient custom and feudal privilege here in the North. They had practised it in all its subtle and unsubtle forms for centuries, and where more so than in Kano, the most successful in the slave trade, in the traffic in gold, in the trades of the caravans, in the vigour of its modern industries. Corruption? By almost any definition it would be found somewhere in the administration of the City of Kano, if one knew where and how to look. The Emir’s time was up.

‘Kanajeji, Son of Yaji AD 1309-1410

The thirteenth Sarki was Kanajeji. His father’s name was Yaji. His mother’s name was Aunaka. He was a sarki who engaged in many wars. He hardlhy lived in Kano at all, but scoured the country around and conquered the towns….He sent to the Kwararafa and asked why they did not pay him tribute. They gave him two hundred slaves. Then he returned to Kano and kept sending the Kwararafa horses while they continued to send him slaves. Kanajeji was the first Hausa sarki to introduce “Lifidi” and iron helmets and coats of mail for battle….He remained at Betu two years. The inhabitants, unable to till their fields, were at length starved out, and had to give in to him. They gave him a thousand male, and a thousand female slaves, their own children. They also gave him another two thousand slaves. Then peace was made.’

The Kano Chronicle

The small grub of anxiety had not detained me long as I soon had images of agreeable escapes to occupy my fantasies. I had been spending time in the evenings preparing for travels during my end-of-tour leave, due in a few months, and thinking of travelling overland to Egypt. Gumel and Hadejia in the north east had been on my mind for it was in that direction that I would probably go: east to Maiduguri and then south of Lake Chad, through Chad and across Central Africa and southern Sudan to El Obeid, thence to Khartoum and up the Nile to Cairo.

I had recently ridden a survey of a line of proposed new road out along the Hadejia River and watched the local men, naked, dark-brown, intent, silent, floating on large calabashes as though on great balloons in the water. They were throwing nets in graceful arcs to catch the giant Niger perch, giwan ruwa, the elephant of the river. It was intensely hot, and further on I was given water from a brown clay pot by a woman who knelt beside my horse and raised the pot to her shoulder, eyes averted, for me to drink, as she would for any man. Beyond that I had come on to the main Gumel road and my overseer Mohammadu Halilu had met me with the office pickup and taken me to the eastern border. I had thought then of what it would be like to travel on, and on, across Africa.

The man who came to my house after I returned from polo that evening was announced by Audu, our new cook-steward. He was a trader from Khartoum who drove his truck and organised convoys from Gao in French Territory to the north on the Niger River down to Kano and then across the savannah, the orchard bush and deserts to the markets of East Africa, the Nile and the Red Sea coast, as far as Djibouti.

One evening in the Club, talking to a District Officer who had come only the previous month from a posting in the eastern Provinces, I had asked about the condition of the roads in that area. The man from Khartoum was the one to talk to, I was told, he knows the way, trades backwards and forwards every month while the weather holds. What does he carry, I asked. Salt, skins, civet cats from Chad (Europe used them for perfumes), camel hair rugs from Timbuktu, carvings from Upper Volta, bronzes from Benin, pilgrims for Mecca, slaves, they say, for the sheikhs in Zanzibar, some gold, maybe some diamonds, local produce to and fro, what else?-that sort of thing.

The trader had fine features, lightly brown, with a genial smile. He wore a long cream turban raised in an elegant and commanding roll on his brow, and a long cotton gown, the riga, of purest white. This he arranged precisely and solemnly around his knees and buttocks as he prepared to sit cross-legged on my parquet floor. He took his rosary of brown wooden beads from his pocket, laid it on his left knee , and fixed me with a direct look, as though alerting an orchestra. A still space formed around him. He spoke excellent English in clear, short sentences

At the end of each speech he would rise slightly on his haunches and adjust his riga, unwind the scroll of turban from his head in a measured arabesque, and rewind it slowly as if tracing a calligraphic phrase. Yes, he could take me, the rains would be past, though the roads could still be up in places. But any delays would be brief. Are there motor roads all the way? Of course, I and my brothers go back and forth every month except in the rains. Lake Chad, south Sudan, the Congo? Ah, yes, there are some no good men there-quick, sociable, understanding smile-yes, further south there is Congo and Katanga and though Lumumba was killed not long ago, there are still wars in the Provinces and there is this Mobutu that nobody knows about, and there is Tshombe and many no good men.

He was obviously well up on the many troubles of Central Africa and the Congo and the savage wars that had ravaged the region. Who knows? But he, himself, he was a trader, he said with a relaxed smile, and his father, too, had been a trader, yes, Mr McDonell, my father was a famous trader in Khartoum, and a great scholar, too, even the mallams used to ask him for his opinion on the law, and he came many times to Kano and to Gao, but, of course, he is retired now and lives with his wives and children.

Yes, he said, there have been some problems in some places, but they are further south, very much south , but we don’t go near there. Anyway, he and his brothers and his father know many people and many roads. Through all those areas they know many good people they could trust. There would be no trouble, no trouble, and certainly not for the Bature McDonell who was known and liked among all the gravel traders and works contractors and repair shops in the City and the Sabon Gari. And many of his brothers, brothers of him, the man from Khartoum, knew the Bature McDonell, too. And is not Mr McDonell a good friend too of the Sole Commissioner, too? Is he not now a special friend of the Inquiry?
My interview in the darkened office had been only that afternoon. Already the word was out.

Even my wife was impressed by the man from Khartoum and began to think that the whole scheme to go home via Egypt might not be as harebrained as it sounded. So he must have been persuasive because at the time she was especially sensitive to any hint of danger, what with all the police around since the Inquiry had begun. And, further, she had been exposed to Sophie’s dark thoughts more than I had been.

Most afternoons she took the three boys to the Club to play in the swimming pool and there the handsome Algerian woman would hold court in her wobbly Frenglish. And Sophie was convinced that the Inquiry was not just some local squabble among the Northern Nigerian traditional chiefs. No, the tang of high politics was in the air.

‘Mohamma Rimfa, son of Yakubu. AD1463-1499

The twentieth Sarki was Mohamma, son of Yakubu, commonly called Rimfa. His mother’s name was Fasima Berana. He was a good man, just and learned. He can have no equal in might, from the time of the founding of Kano, until it shall end. In his time the Sherifa came to Kano. They were Abdu Rahaman and his people…Abdu Rahaman lived in Kano and established Islam. He brought with him many books. He ordered Rimfa to build a mosque for Friday, and to cut down the sacred tree and build a minaret on the site. And when he had established the Faith of Islam, and learned men had grown numerous in Kano, and all the country round had accepted the Faith, Abdu Karimi returned to Massar…Rimfa was the author of twelve innovations in Kano. He built the Dakin Rimfa. The next year he extended the walls …the next year he entered his house…He established the Kurmi Market…He was the first Sarki who used “Dawakin Zaggi” in the war with Katsina…He appointed Durman to go round the dwellings of the Indabawa and take every first-born virgin for him. He was the first Sarki to have a thousand wives. He began the custom of “Kulle”. He began the “Tara-ta-Kano”. He was the first to have “Kakaki” and “Figinni”, and ostrich-feather sandals…In his time occurred the first war with Katsina. It lasted eleven years, without either side winning. He ruled thirty seven years.’

The Kano Chronicle

Rodney Thomas Geoffrey Blackett was a member of the Rural Water Supplies branch of the Ministry of Works. This group lived rough out in the bush, putting in and maintaining the precious water supplies for remote villages and sometimes deputising on other engineering works. Years before, like many an ‘RWS’, as they were called, he had been in the Army, in the Royal Engineers. During the War he had been in the Middle East, rarely in the action, usually before it or after it had passed, preparing the way for the infantry and armour, or clearing up after them. Long practice in many postings had taught him how to keep his head down and his arse out of trouble. The men of the RWS liked living and working on the fringe, on the edge, on making do, on beating the system, your friend’s system, your enemy’s system, any system. In short, to survive, where survival itself was beating the system.

He came from a lower middle-class family on the outskirts of London, had been to a middling grammar school and at the end of it faced the job queues of the lingering Depression. The War provided an escape. He joined up as a sapper and went into a unit of the Royal Engineers. After the stifle of the suburbs, the open air life, building Bailey bridges, rigging up water supplies, setting long chains of dynamite, it all agreed with him. He had some women in Italy and, after long spells smoking kif in misty hammams in the Middle East, a boy or two, but in the end he had stayed alone and learnt to drink. He didn’t take a social beer, or carouse regularly at the Kano Club, or tank up on alcohol day to day. He went on benders, sharp and savage bouts when the world was dark while the sun shone. He was eaten within by a growling rage, tearing, biting-but instead of lashing out he hit the bottle.

After the War he found he had a touch of the sun and couldn’t bear the English fogs. He worked with a contracting company in Libya for a while, but he didn’t like the constant change from project to project, from team to team. He preferred his own company and he found the RWS. He was among his peers.

At the time I was there, Blackett was one of only two Bature, Europeans, living in the Emirate of Gumel which covered much of the far northeast of Kano Province. Here the orchard bush petered out and the Province’s northern border, which it shared with the French colony of Niger, flattened into the dusty plains of sand and rocky desert of the Sahara which stretched without a bound across Africa until it reached the shores of the Mediterranean.

The other Bature, also an Englishman, was the District Officer for the Emirate, the DO Gumel, as he was known, who was responsible for all the administration and law-keeping in that vast Emirate. By education, training and position he should have known more of what went on in the area than the RWS. In some ways-generally unimportant ways, from the point of view of the local native powers-he did, busily writing down in his report each month to headquarters in Kano all the things the local nabobs let him know. They were happy to keep him chained to his desk in the District Office and he was never let out of sight of at least one servant of the Emir of Gumel, a subordinate of the Emir of Kano.

Blackett, though, knew many things they would rather he didn’t. But they were reluctant to interfere with him, because he was so useful. Besides water supply he was also responsible for all the local roads in Gumel Emirate. He would turn up with his small gang of African tradesmen in out-ot-the-way villages mending pumps, or organising labour to push through new feeder roads or dig new wells up around the border or out towards the rivers where the groundnuts were struggling. In practice, the budget of the Rural Water Supplies Branch was a honeypot of patronage from the Northern Government Ministers to the local Emirs and other chiefs, and they dropped dollops of it around the region as their interests dictated and the villages supplicated.

So, in Gumel, Blackett had pretty much free rein. He lived in a Rest House in a small village near Gumel township, he travelled all over the Emirate and was welcome. He kept the wells full, the roads open, and his mouth shut. He saw some things that he didn’t want to, many things that he didn’t need to, and much that he wasn’t supposed to. He wrote no reports about them, and said not a word. In fact, he scarcely thought of them.

One of the things he did ponder, though, from time to time, as, like ghosts, they appeared and disappeared among the sands and the dusty gloom of a falling night, were the scruffy caravans of camels. There were sometimes one dozen, or two dozen, but lately there had been several occasions when he had seen scores of the grunting, awkward beasts, ambling through the patchy scrub, laden with hessian sacks. Even more surprisingly, those hessian sacks sometimes contained large wooden crates with numbers and letters painted on them. No trace would be left of their passing which would not be blown away in a day or so by the wind.

So had the camels come and gone for centuries, carrying the cargoes of the day. But why now, when there was plenty of modern transport-bitumen roads and large trucks and railway waggons waiting at railheads?

As the lurching rumps faded in the haze, he would wonder what consignments they might carry. Ammunition? Rifles? But he never enquired, certainly not of those silent turbanned figures he would always spot gazing at him from the shade of nearby trees when he turned around to go to his pickup. In the African bush, as Karen Blixen said in “Out of Africa”, you are never alone.

‘Abdulahi, son of Mohamma Rimfa 1499-1509

The twenty-first Sarki was Abdulahi. His mother’s name was Auwa. Her influence was very strong among the rulers of the day. She built a house at Doseyi, hence its name, “Gidan Madaki Auwa”. In his time Ahmedu, who was afterwards Liman of Kano, arrived. Abdulahi conquered (the city of) Katsina. He advanced as far as Katsina itself and encamped on the river near Tsagero. He remained four months at Tsagero and then went to Zukzuk and made war there.’

The Kano Chronicle

The voice on the telephone of Mohammadu Halilu, my Senior Roads Overseer, was bright. It had the light overlay of high frequencies, brief ululations and slight crowdings of the rhythms which signalled, I had come to learn, that he had a special message to impart. But he started off with the ritual string of solicitations and salutations which among the Hausa and the Fulani preface any conversation-thoughtful, caring questions about my family, my health, my recent doings. And then banter about the prayer boards he had given me a few days before, inscribed with propitious suras from the Koran for health, prosperity, many children, for averting dangers in travel. The verses had been brushed in ink with a flowing Arabic-style script in a style said to be exactly the same as that used by the great scholar and leader, Usman dan Fodio himself.

The occasion had been my birthday, and he had had the boards prepared as a mark of special favour by a man famous in Kano as the greatest calligrapher of them all. He lived in the City, Halilu said, and was frequently called upon by the mallams, the holy men, to write scrolls from the Koran. This man, moreover, was both deaf and dumb, and couldn’t read. The gift of great drawing skills was one directly from Allah in recompense for his disabilities, a sign of God’s mercy and magnificence. Halilu said this man was widely known, consequently, as ‘him with the gifts of God’, or simply ‘the gifts of God’-for his unerring sight and perfect command of his fingers’ sinews, and so his ability to produce verisimilitude. Thus the great leader’s script from the nineteenth century lay before me on the prayer boards as though freshly inscribed by the divine reformer,dan Fodio. Whether, when I pressed the point, anyone could be sure that the texts of which my boards held the replicas actually had been written by the holy Fulani scholar wasn’t at all clear. Halilu was quietly, but definitely, pained by my enquiries. But what was sure was that what I held was an exact copy of the originals, known to be very old.

My SRO passed from the prayer boards to what he had to tell me about the problems of a bridge we were constructing, how the road maintenance gangs were performing, whether our target date for re-gravelling the highway would be met, and the rest of his routine report. But he soon came to the main item he was eager to transmit, an eagerness signalled by an especially high ululation. He had seen Blackett, he said. The RWS had been helping one of the road gangs with a bridge near Babura west of Gumel, but in a few days he was going to move his camp back near Maigatari, north of Gumel near the border with the French colony of Niger.

There was an out-of-the-way village near there for which the Madaki, the equivalent of a Mayor in the North’s Native Administration, wanted the RWS to drill a well. Then Halilu paused, and an ululation swung upwards, and he knew that I would listen closely, before he slowly remarked that he had seen a camel caravan that morning, unusual near the main road, a large caravan, a very large caravan. The high frequencies trilled more insistently. Yesterday afternoon, he said, the Madaki and Alhaji Ahmadu Gumel had sat talking all afternoon in the Emir of Gumel’s peacock garden. Into the dusk they had stayed, and several times messengers had come to them with messages which had been read, scribbled upon, returned, and they had gone on talking. Halilu’s phone call was ending, and we turned to the chant of goodbyes which brought it to a close.

‘Mohamma Kisoki 1509-1565

The twenty-second Sarki was Mohamma Kisoki. He was the son of Abdulahi and Lamis, who built a house at Bani-Buki and established a market there, and was the mother of Dabkare Dan Iya. Kisoki was an energetic sarki, warlike and masterful. He ruled over all Hausaland, east and west, and south and north. He waged war on Mirnin N’guru because of Agaidam. When he entered the town Sarkin Kano took his seat beneath the ‘kuka’ tree…and assembling the inhabitants of the town at the Kofan Bai reduced them to terrified submission. He gave orders that no men were to be made prisoners, but that only clothes and horses were to be taken…In Kisoki’s time Saite, Tamma, Buduru, and Koda came to Kano. Kisoki ruled the town with his mother Iya Lamis and his grandmother Madaki Auwa, and Guli the brother of Madaki Auwa. Guli was much respected by the Sarki; he came to have power over the whole country. This is the reason every councillor is called Na-Guli.’

The Kano Chronicle

The Dan Iya of Kano was a scion of one of the longest lineages of the North. His family traced back to the heroes of the 1819 jihad. He grew up surrounded by the symbols and realities of honour, affluence and pomp. As a boy he had been sent under the care of the Emir’s legal adviser, the father of my overseer, Mohammadu Halilu, no less, to the great Islamic school of Timbuktu. This was a centre of fame and respect stretching back many centuries to the Moslem occupation of Spain when it had been a link with the Moorish world and the great European universities.

At that time he was a tall handsome man, wearing pitch black sunglasses with golden rims, and a white turban of finest muslin. As a boy he had been kept away from English or other European forms of modern education, and was given formal Islamic instruction. He had not even learnt the English language in school, and employed aides to translate for him, but now he spoke it fluently enough, with a heavy accent. Grown-up, he had done a series of jobs for the Emir, in and around Kano, went on errands to the Emir of Katsina, a powerful potentate and rival of Kano, stayed some time at Birnin Kudu in the southeast where he could keep an eye on his father’s not always reliable underlingss in the district, and on the road to the east.

For several years he had done the old man’s bidding down in Lagos for the negotiations over Nigerian Independence. And then as a reward for all of this, and as the safest of safe hands, Sarkin Kano had had him made Chairman of the Regional Marketing Board. Through this institution streamed the rivers of cash which flowed from the vast international trade in groundnuts, in which Kano Province was so prolific. It was the juiciest and ripest of plums.

All the policy and administrative work, of course, was done by white civil servants, headed by Graham Edwards, the Board’s chief executive whom he saw often, signing papers, discussing briefing notes, being steered to halting exchanges with appropriate companions at formal cocktail parties. But even Edwards, and certainly few others, knew little of his other activities.

One of those activities, it was rumoured, not least by Sophie at the Club,was that he had underlings scour the city for women and girls. There were rumours that daily he used two of them before lunch in the special room he had had installed below his office in the Marketing Board’s building. And many others at night when, again it was rumoured, he smoked hashish and practised sadisms, indulging violent tastes in his own palace of thick mud walls not far from the Emir’s. But of what went on there, and to what extremes, noone could be sure.

‘Abubakr Kado, son of Rimfa 1565-1573

The twenty -fifth Sarki was Abubakr Kado, son of Rimfa and full brother of Abdulahi. His mother’s name was Auwa. In his time the men of Katsina worsted the men of Kano until they came to the very gates of Kano…the men of Kano went out to fight, but they were beaten and scattered, and had to take refuge in the town. Devastation went on, and the country was denuded of people. The only place where people were found was in walled towns and rocks…Abubakr Kado did nothing but religious offices. He disdained the duties of Sarki. He and all his chiefs spent their time in prayer. In his time eunuchs and mallams became very numerous…Tamma was the greatest of them. When they first came they lived in Katsina land…Afterwards they moved to Kano and settled at Godia. The town was called Godia after a certain woman, a harlot. She and the Sarki reigned jointly over the town. The Sarkin Godia said to Tamma, “Settle at Godia”. So Tamma settled at Godia and married Godia…Abubakr was the Sarki who made the princes learn the Koran…’

The Kano Chronicle

The groundnut trade of Gumel, and especially that from across the border, was largely in the hands of Alhaji Ahmadu Gumel, whom we have already met, in Halilu’s telephone call, talking with the Madaki of Gumel in the Emir of Gumel’s peacock garden. He was one of the most influential merchants of Kano. He had been born in Gumel Emirate, the son of one of the later wives of a minor nobleman, but had lived for many years in Kano.

At first he had busied himself only with the Gumel trade, and especially in groundnuts. His influence there had been useful to the Emir of Kano and, in the early days of the Independence movement, to the Region’s political leaders. Through this, and because of substantial payments to Party funds and to the expenses of several important politicians with whom he developed the sort of client/patron relations which were common in the North, he had been able to extend his business widely in the Province. He had also spread his agents and his stores across the border into French territory and through the long trails north over the Sahara to Zinder and Agadez and Tamanrasset in Algeria.

But Gumel was still his base. The trade there, the contraband crops and other cargoes moving across the border, the alliance with the Emir of Gumel and the local nobles, the political support in the rather independent and very fortunately located Emirate were all essential to him, and through him to the Emir of Kano.

His partner in the conversation, the Madaki of Gumel, was, in effect, the chief minister and administrator of the Emirate. He was also a member of the National Assembly in Lagos. He came from a family which had been slaves of the Emir’s family for centuries, in that long tradition in which the servitor was in a relation similar to that of feudal vassal in medieval Europe.

His position, at the present time, was delicate. As one of the Regional members of the National Assembly in the South he possessed wide influence. But he was a pawn of the Premier, the leader of the Northern Government which had brought the Inquiry into the Emir of Kano’s financial doings. Both he and the Emir of Gumel were heavily beholden to Kano by tradition, blood and law. Sarkin Kano was, as his ancestors had been, the acknowledged suzerain of Gumel, bound to him by mutual ties of feudal relations among the Moslem states, large and small, of Northern Nigeria. So Muffett’s inquiry was a direct threat, for who was to say what the burly Englishman would discover once he started snooping around.

The late afternoon sun lit the haze hanging in the air. The two men sat in verandah chairs with canvas seats, sheltered from the sun’s slanting rays by several lines of dark green citrus trees. More citrus, and tall palms, enclosed the garden in a straggly barricade. In a corner was a well used from time to time by one of the women from the Emir’s compound as she watered the few beds of hardy red geraniums and bright green vegetables. Along one edge of the garden grew tall corn, and the mud wall of the Emir’s palace marked the northern boundary. Under the trees and along the paths peacocks promenaded, a cock and two hens. They would stand for minutes, quietly pecking at the spiky desert grass, and then the cock would start off again on a grand parade, slowly, ritually, head advancing, withdrawing, colours shimmering in the splendid fan.

The two men talked through the afternoon. Occasionally they would stop, as if at an end, and gaze bemused at the peacock’s processional, at the measured step and the slow quiver of the fan, envying perhaps its easy exercise of sovereignty. Beads of their rosaries dripped through their fingers. Turbans were unrolled and rewound, feet slipped in and out of open sandals, toes wiggled in the dusty sand. After the silences, more talk, slow, spare. Sometimes they would gaze, wordlessly, to the north, to where the border ran invisibly through the scrub and across the dunes. Then they would start again, quietly, by turns, nodding in unison as they went, as though setting out a route upon a map.

‘Mohamma Shashere, son of Yakufu, 1573-1582

The twenty-sixth Sarki was Mohamma Shashere…His mother’s name was Fasuma. He was unmatched for generosity among the Sarkis. He was the first to give a eunuch the title of Wombai…He determined on an expedition against Katsina. He said to the Alkali Mohamma, the son of Tanko, the son of Jibril, the son of Mugumi:”Find me an Alkali to take with me to war with Katsina. When I go to war, I shall not return alive unless I beat the Katsinawa.” The Alkali gave him his pupil Musa, whose mother’s name was Gero. The Sarki made Musa Alkali. Now when he came to Katsina, the men of Katsina came out to fight. The armies met at Kankia and fought there. The Katsinawa won because they were superior in numbers. The Kanawa ran away-deserting their Sarki-with the exceptions of San Turaki Mainya Narai, San Turaki Kuka Zuga and Dan Dumpki …these returned home together with their Sarki and entered Kano with him. The Sarki was very grieved. His men said to him, “Lay aside your grief, next year we will defeat the Katsinawa, if Allah wills.”’

The Kano Chronicle

For three weeks after my interview with the Sole Commissioner I entertained in my small office a long line of Emirate officials, politicians from the national and regional parliaments, contractors, Ministry of Works supervisors, bank clerks, truck drivers. I called in people from the Sabon Gari and the City whom I thought, as it turned out in vain, might have an inkling of what had been afoot.

For something, a lot, certainly had been afoot. I had asked Mohammadu Halilu to help me prepare schedultes of all the contracts for recent years: miles of road resurfaced, lengths of kerb and guttering laid, culverts and bridges constructed, cubic yards of gravel dumped, timber delivered, sacks of cement used. All the lists were checked against the work on the ground, rechecked, cross-checked.

Many more contracts had been written than had been delivered. The scams ran into millions of pounds. But all the documents were in perfect order. All had the right signatures, the appropriate disclaimers, the signatories were a very few senior officers, both Bature and Nigerian, who upon examination were beyond reproach. Yet the signatures, and any written amendments, were all perfect. Perfect forgeries. Where was the forger?

I had the tale from Mohammad Musa. During the third week after I had been interviewed by David Muffett the young Nigerian officer and I met at the Provincial office and we went off to a nearby bar to swap notes. I pulled at a beer while he sipped an orange Fanta. Like me, he had searched for a break in the chain. Some of his suspects were recalled several times, questions repeated, materials sifted, new checks made: brick walls. Brick walls of ignorance, fear, impregnable alibis, silence.

At last, he got the clue, from a lowly headman in the Emirate’s Works Office, and it came from an act of kindness. Musa had heard some time previously that this man, of good reputation, and whom we had no reason to suspect, was the father of a nubile young woman. Halila was her name, and she was one of those abducted by the Dan Iya’s thugs. She was later left broken and bleeding back on her father’s doorstep.

As part of a normal line of questioning Musa had told the father that we suspected that the Dan Iya and others were involved in the frauds, and asked him if he knew anything: but to no avail. Nothing could budge him. As the headman was leaving yet another fruitless interrogation, which he had endured with courtesy, restraint and fear, he and Musa fashioned the exchange of courtesies which marked a departure and, as part of it, Musa asked him, almost without thinking, “How is Halila now?”

The mood of submission shifted, the stress of the long interview brimmed, the fear denied, the anger suppressed. He looked at Musa sharply. “She has died. You knew about Halila?” He went once more to the door and, as he passed through it, turned back and said, “Allah be praised-you must see the gifts of God.”

I was puzzled but it was clear at once to Musa. The calligrapher, and his nickname, were very well known in the City. Like many others he had a day job. He worked as a clerk in the Native Affairs Administration but no-one had thought to question a deaf mute who could neither read or write. But, of course, he could copy. This was his gift from God.

Musa went to the dusty wooden building with narrow verandahs, peeling paint and bulging manila files in red-taped bundles standing high on pine tables where this man worked by day. No matter what the main occupation by which they earned their livelihood many people tried to find a ‘respectable’ job, one which sounded worthy to the ears of Batures and other powerful persons. ‘Part-time calligraphic artist’, even if very famous, was not such a title, and he was on the books of the Works Office as a clerk, a much more acceptable address. Musa gave him some hand written notes and indicated to him to copy it, a quite usual chore in those days without photo-copiers. He took the paper, inspected it intently for some time, and commenced to write. When he had finished he handed it back to the goggle-eyed Musa. The copy was an indistinguishable facsimile of the original.

‘Mohamma Zaki, son of Kisoki 1582-1618

The twenty-seventh Sarki was Mohamma Zaki…The name of his mother was Hausatu, the daughter of Tamma. When Mohamma became Sarki, Tamma came to live at Kano together with his men, the Kartukawa… The Sarki’s men kept saying to him,” Sarkin Kano, if you leave the Katsinawa alone, they will become masters of all Kano and you will have nothing to rule but a little”. The Sarki said, “I will conquer the Katsinawa if Allah wills.” At this time the Sarkin Kwararafawa came to attack Kano. The people of Kano left the city and went to Daura, with the result that the Kwararafawa ate up the whole country and Kano became very weak. The men of Katsina kept on harrying Kano. If it had not been for the sake of the mallams in Kano, they would have entered and destroyed the city. There was a great famine which lasted eleven years…’

The Kano Chronicle

The Dan Iya was gone. Noone knew how he had gone or to where. Disappeared one night shortly after the discovery of the gifts of God. It was kept quiet for awhile but before long it came out. There was much consternation in the Club. There were many theories but only Sophie knew for sure.

She had been quiet lately, much quieter than usual. There were rumours she was having it off with Barratt, the new executive at Barclays Bank DCO. He had turned up recently, riding his camel all the way on transfer from Kaduna, the Regional capital. Tall, fair, good-looking in the English way, he would tie up his camel at the Club where others would park their cars, and, dressed in his tuxedo, would walk confidently in. But whatever about all the charms of that, a good mystery was too much for Sophie.

As usual she was in no doubt. She had been speaking to a friend of hers, she told me one evening as we were hanging out the decorations for the following Saturday’s South Seas night at the Club. This friend was a French businessman who came and went and had, Sophie said, good reason for maintaining connections on both sides in Algeria. He had seen the Dan Iya in Cairo, in a restaurant which the FLN were known to use, and he had been with-Boumédiène. And that was all.

Noone in the Administration believed it-”Sophie’s fumes have gone to her head, we all know that”, the PAO had tartly said, with pitying shakes of his head, when I passed on the piece of gossip: Sophie and her husband were rumoured to have brought with them strange practices and misty potions from the souks of the French-held north and the settlements of the Ouled-Nail. That was all we ever heard.

‘Mohamma Nazaki, son of Zaki 1618-1623

The twenty-eighth Sarki was Mohamma Nazaki. His mother’s name was Kursu. When he became Sarki he sent messengers to make peace with Katsina. Sarkin Katsina refused his terms and invaded Kano. The Kanawa came out and a battle took place in which the Kanawa defeated the Katsinawa….Next year the Sarkin Kano went to Kalam. He left the Wombai Giwa behind at Kano because he was sick. When the Wombai recovered he said,”What can I do to please the Sarki?” His men said,“Add to the city.” He said, “Very well.” So he built a wall from the Kofan Dogo to the Kofan Gadonkaia, and from the Kofan Dakawuyia to the Kofan Kabuga, and to the Kofan Kansakali. He spent an enormous amount of money on this improvement. Every morning he brought a thousand calabashes of food and fifty oxen for the workmen till the work was finished. Every man in Kano went to work…He slaughtered three hundred cows at the Kofan Kansakali and gave the mallams many presents. When the Sarkin Kano returned from war, the Wombai gave him a hundred riding horses. Each horse had a mail coat. The Sarki was very pleased. He said, “What shall I do for this man, to make his heart glad?” His men said, “Give him a town.” So the Sarki gave him Karayi. Hence the song, “Elephant Lord of of the town, Abdullah foe of the bull hippopotamus, whose chains for taking captive women are hoes and axes.”

The Kano Chronicle

I had finished the draft of my report and it was with Celestine, my Ibo typist. It was just over four weeks since that briefing with the Sole Commissioner, a Monday, always a busy day, and there was a rush on to get the report finished in time to hand it to the great man that afternoon.

The phone burred. It was Halilu. There had been an accident in Gumel Emirate. Blackett had blown himself up on Sunday while down at the well site at the village near the border to which he had moved his camp. “It must have been an accident”, the overseer said.”I saw him last week and he was very cheerful”.

Two of the Madaki’s men had been in the village and when they had got to him there was just a hole in the ground where the drill rig had been. He was on the ground. His hands and his mind had gone. It was hours to the nearest hospital and he bled to death on the way. They said he had been drinking hard that weekend. Halilu was fond of Blackett, known him for years, but he, being a good Moslem and strict teetotaller, was mystified how the Army man, the old sapper, always careful of his tools, could have brought himself to such a pass. “I am very sad, Mr McDonell, this Bature was a good man, he was my friend”.

They didn’t hold a wake at the Club, but the next Saturday night the DO Gumel, who had come to town for the funeral, got up after dinner and said what a good officer of the Northern Service Blackett had been and what a good war he’d had, and how much the colony owed to men like him, with a quick double-take, sorry, it’s now Independence, and then gave a toast to the dead man. And everybody stood and drank to the lonely figure few had even known. “A great RWS”, they said. It was a night for Red Sea rig, and all the men looked very well in their monkey-suits, black ties and red cummerbunds, with the women all in long dresses and pearls and jewellery. “He would have liked that “, Bob the Bull murmured, remembering his days also in the Army and the RWS. “If he’d been here, he would have thought it looked just like his Regimental Mess.” Everybody said what a terrible accident it had been.

Except Sophie. She had been sceptical from the beginning, as soon as she heard the news and the talk of an accident. It was a plot.

“Zis ingénieur des eaux, zis guerilla of the RWS, ‘e was an expert in the maquis, oui? Zis, ‘ow you say, bushman, zis ingénieur, ‘ow ‘e ‘ave zis accident”, she asked, “’e was lighting ‘is cigarette with ze dynamite stick?” But even Sophie thought the little ceremony at the Club was sympathique.

Kutumbi, son of Mohamma Nazaki 1623-1548

The twenty-ninth Sarki was Kutumbi, the son of Mohamma Nazaki, otherwise called Mohamma Alwali. His mother’s name was Dada. He was a great Sarki. He had a friend whose name was Kalina Atuman, to whom he entrusted great power. No one would believe the extent of this power except one who saw it. He ruled over town and country of Kano until his power equalled that of the Sarki, while the Sarki was like his Wazir (prime minister). This Kalina Atuman was in power twelve years and then he died…Kutumbi was the father of Bako. No prince could compare with him. In everything, in doing good, in doing ill, in courage, anger, generosity he was like a Sarki, even while he was only a prince. He had six hundred horses and ninety mailed horsemen. He went to Kurmin Dan Ranko to war and took much spoil…When he returned to Kano he was given the title of Jurumai for this exploit. Afterwards he pray to die and died, for f ear of civil war after his father’s death….The next year Kutumbi went to war with Katsina. He was victorious and took much spoil. He camped at Dugazawa for nine months, during which time no one could venture out of Katsina. From this siege came the song:”Alwali shutter of the great gate, Kimbirmi, shutter of the great gate”…He was the first Sarki of Kano who collected the Jizia from the Fulani…He collected a hundred cows from the Jafunawa, the chief clan of Fulani, seventy from the Baawa, sixty from Dindi Maji, fifty from the Danneji, and others too numerous to mention….Whenever Kutumbi went to war or to Salla, he was followed by a hundred spare horses. Forty drums were in front of him, and twenty five trumpets, and fifty kettle-drums. He was the first Sarki to create a ‘Berde kererria’. He was always followed by a hundred eunuchs who were handsomely dressed and had gold and silver ornaments…As regards Sarkin Kano some people say he was killed in Katsina, others say that he died in Kano. The latter is the better account…..

The Kano Chronicle

Sallah, the festival held at Id el Fitr, the commemoration of the birth of the Prophet at the end of Ramadan, fell some months after the Inquiry began, after the eruption of the police onto the streets, the impeachment of the Emir, and all the dramas that had followed.

I had been to the great day the year before. It was the largest event and the most joyful occasion in the Kano calendar. On the flat ground outside Kofar Nassarawa used for military parades and grand displays hundreds of horsemen had disposed themselves in groups according to their leaders: the nobles holding the named titles of Kano-Galadima, Madaki, Waziri, and others; the rural principalities beholden to the Emir of Kano as their leige lord, such as Kazaure, Gumel, Hadejia; the traditional rulers of important towns and groups of villages; the aristocratic families and their retainers.

Thousands of people, brightly dressed and jubilant, crowded around the City walls, on roofs of buildings, on vehicles, or stood in dancing lines edging this large space where the Sallah procession was traditionally held. Surrounded by nobles and officials, at the far end on a dais, wearing the ostrich feather shoes, sat the Emir, in regal vestments and the distinctive white muslin turban with the rabbit ear peaks of the Sanusi family.

The procession was led by the Emir’s guard brandishing muskets, in royal scarlet and green livery, with the shantu, the trumpeters, and the kuge, the horn blowers, blasting boisterously. The kakali, the special silver horns which had announced the Emir since Rimfa’s day, came next and then the dokin zage, the Emir’s led horse. The bowmen entered, and the horsemen in chain mail, with mounts agleam in caparisons of green, yellow, brown and red leathers, bridles studded with silver and precious stones, silver bells attached to halters and breastplates, saddles richly embossed. The nobles and leaders wore silks and velvets, muslins, and cottons in vivid colours., scrolled embroideries of white and silver, gold and scarlet, elegant capes, jewelled sandals. Finally, shouting and surging, arrived the guards on foot. Tumultuous sounds-the shantu, the kuge, the kakali, the smaller horns and trumpets, the large drums carried by horses, the kettle drummers marching in file, songs and cries, high spirits, the hilarity of thousands.

At the end, after, it seemed, the cavalcade had ended, and the tension was ebbing away, there was a breathtaking display, the high point of the afternoon, the thrilling final act. Far away, perhaps about a mile distant, groups of horsemen in full regalia appeared. With shouts that resounded even from such a distance, they set out at full gallop across the open space towards the Emir’s throne firing muskets, waving spears and yelling war cries. And when each group at thundering pace drew level with their lord they reined back their horses, reared them onto back legs so that the riders stood in their saddles, and with ululating shouts punched their right arms into the air in triumphant salute.

This year, though, there had been rumours that Sallah wouldn’t be held at all. But in the end it was-the powers must have decided that not to have it would be too big an insult to the Kano people themselves. The Emir didn’t appear. The procession was thin, but all the main groups were there. No shouting, no drums, no trumpets, no riveting final salute. Silence, total silence, except for the tinkle of silver bells on the bridles as the horses slowly paced the length of the grounds, and the chink of harness. Many of the rural dignitaries didn’t come: each just sent his horse, fully decked out like the previous year, but with its saddle reversed, and one after another the riderless mounts were led past the Emir’s vacant throne, their hooves sloughing sadly in the sand.

The end of my contract came up not long afterwards. I left Kano, though I didn’t go east through the Sudan to Khartoum and the Nile. That idea had always been a bit of a pipe-dream. Just as well, probably-with wars and unrest along the way that road was no longer safe. Instead we flew home and before long Kano and the North all seemed far, far away.

I didn’t catch up with what happened for months until a former Senior DO, who’d taken the golden handshake and was now looking for a life in Australia after the colonies, came to Sydney and we got together. Muffett’s report wasn’t published. But they’d sacked the Emir and exiled him to Azare, east past the Kano Province border in Bauchi Province. He was replaced by a relative from another branch of the family, but the newcomer died after only three months on the throne.

A CITY OF THE SUDAN
A Memoir

by

Gavan McDonell

A CITY OF THE SUDAN

‘This is the history of the lords of this country called Kano. Barbushe, once its chief, was of the stock of Dala, a black man of great stature and might, a hunter, who slew elephants with his stick and carried them on his head about nine miles. Dala was of unknown race, but came to this land and built a house on Dala hill. There he lived, he and his wives. He had seven children-four boys and three girls-of whom the eldest was Garageje. This Garageje was the grandfather of Buzame, who was the father of Barbushe. Barbushe succeeded his forefathers in the knowledge of the lore of Dala, for he was skilled in the various pagan rites. By his wonders and sorceries and the power he gained over his brethren he became chief and lord over them…’
The Kano Chronicle

I first came to the city of Kano from the south, driving on the main bitumen highway for several hundred miles through the scrubby orchard bush. This highway, commencing at Lagos, the biggest city of Nigeria, on the coast, stretched for thousands of miles from the edges of the rain forest in the south through the Sahara desert in the north all the way to the Mediterranean, and east-west across West Africa, in fact right across Africa, in parts only a mud track. In the past the name Sudan was given to the whole expanse of this broad zone, the mixing bowl of Africa, not, as at present, only to the Republic of the Sudan in the east of the continent.
It was late in the rainy season of 1961. Nigeria had won its Independence the previous year. Tall, stiff, green fronds of corn thwacked the brisk breeze like the feathered hafts of flung spears. Small mountains of groundnuts, stacked in beige hessian bags and covered by shiny blue tarpaulins, were growing, like swelling scarabs, at each rail station as dusty labourers slowly slung the hemp sacks from the trays of trucks queued at sidings. In the far, flat fields of rich loam spreading to the horizon, white-capped peasants were breaking sods with steel hoes and wooden digging sticks. At every creek and river tall Hausas in long, patched kaftans swung the shadoof, like a long-handled wooden spoon, to empty dousings of water onto the traceries of irrigation channels which flowed among vegetable patches and groundnut fields.
In late afternoon Kano rose up before us. Shadows cut crisp edges on its high mud walls, and poured dark pools into the obscurities of its narrow streets. We passed through the southwest gate, through the lanes of mud-brick buildings and burnt-umber plastered walls, past vegetable gardens and stagnant ponds. Out through Kofar Nassarawa, the southern gate, to the Provincial Headquarters, the office of the Resident, built near the Emir’s summer palace.
Around us was the old City, with high mud walls, home to the native Hausas and the town Fulani and other northerners; to the north were the corrugated iron shacks of the Sabon Gari, where the people from the South, from Iboland and Yorubaland and the River provinces, dwelt; and to east could be seen the Township with its tidy streets of the neat bungalows and villas of the Europeans and most senior Nigerian officials.
The day’s hot journey had started at early light and now at dusk we had reached the old metropolis, as many thousands of other caravans had done over the centuries, from the south and north, the east and west, to visit its mosques and schools, its offices and bazaars, to buy its goods, to sell and be sold, to slay and be slain. If regions, rather than states, had capitals and possessed souls, then Kano City was surely the capital of the Sudan. Other cities of the north were older and holier, but Kano was its beating heart, the source of its soul.
There has probably been a settlement in the vicinity of Kano, the southern city terminus of the old trans-Saharan caravan trade, for several thousand years. The Kano Chronicle, a unique document in the history of this part of Africa, records the reigns of forty eight kings, Emirs, as they were later called, or, in Hausa, Sarkin Kano, the head of Kano. For nearly a thousand years they reigned, from the time when the town emerged from prehistoric dust and mud at the close of the first millennium till the end of the nineteenth century. There is still an Emir of Kano, much reduced in power.

‘Bagoda, Son of Bauwo: AD 999-1063
Then came Bagoda with his host, and was the first Sarki of this land. His name was Daud. His mother’s name was Kaunasu. He began by occupying Adirani fro two years. Thence he moved to Barka, and built a city called Talutawa, where he reigned two years.
The names of the pagan chiefs whom Bagoda met were Jankare, Biju, Buduri (who had many children-about a hundred) and Ribo. Bagoda overcame them and killed their leader Jankare. Then he came to Sheme, and found Gabusani, Bouni, Gazauri, Dubgege, Fasatoro and Bakin Bunu there. He conquered them all, and built the city, and reigned at Sheme sixty six years…..’
The Kano Chronicle

“EE Roads. Fyi. Pls spk. SRE”
The summons from the Senior Roads Engineer, scrawled in a slant, downwards-sloping script on the bottom right of the foolscap memorandum, a wandering line of pale-blue fountain pen ink running off the page, sketched so well the personality of the writer. There mightn’t be too much to graphology, I had often thought, but this writing was the SRE to a tee-weak, evasive, sluggish, indecisive. I would have to go and talk with him.
Above the first inscribed minute at the bottom of the page was another in the now familiar bureaucratic short hand, done with a broad-shovel nib, a direction from the Provincial Administrative Officer (PAO), but with an added call to action:
‘SRE. We spoke this afternoon. Fyi & a. PAO’
And above that again was the direction to the PAOvfrom God Himself, the Sole Commissioner, in a florid, well-formed, gentian red, written with a ballpoint.
‘PAO. Pls initiate the action as outlined this pm. SC’

Not ‘begin’, but ‘initiate’-this was the language of power. And the ballpoint. From what we had heard of him-lofty, confronting, sharp-you might well have guessed that the Sole Commissioner, scion of a born-to-rule English colonial family, would be the only one of the officers toiling in the off-cream Headquarters building to have broken with the fountain pen. The announcement of his coming, specially appointed by the Government of the Northern Region of Nigeria, had shaken all the people of the city, from the spacious dwellings of the expatriates in the Township to the last dusty hovel in the old City. And it looked as though I was to be initiated into action.

‘Gajemasu. AD 1095-1134
The Sarki consulted the people about building a city. The people agreed. “Come”, they said, “let us build, for we have the power and the strength”. So they began to build the city. They began the wall from Raria. The Sarki slaughtered a hundred cattle on the first day of the work. They continued the work to the gate of Mazugi, and from there to the water gate and on to the gate of Adama and the gate of Gudan; then past the gates of Waika, Kansakali and Kawungari, as far as the gate of Tuji. There were eight gates.’
The Kano Chronicle

The Sole Commissioner had appeared in the Provincial Headquarters three days before. It was a Monday. Kano had awakened early that morning to find squads of screeching motor cycle police outriders manoeuvring on its streets. Platoons of police sitting in the back of blue riot vans, their rifles upright between their knees, were driving at speed around all of the three precincts which made up the whole city. There was a stir of alarm. Then at seven a.m. came the news, a statement on the radio from Kaduna, the administrative centre of Northern Nigeria where sat the Regional Government. The Premier, the Sardauna of Sokoto, had set up an inquiry into the financial affairs of the Kano administration. It was to be conducted, said the mellifluous Nigerian announcer, by a Sole Commissioner, a very senior official of the Northern Region Ministry of the Interior, David Muffett.
The city surveyed the motorcycles and inspected the personnel carriers; gawked at the logo painted on the their sides-a rampantly erect, blue police baton contained within the arms of a laurel crown, like wings. The occupying squads immediately became the Flying Pricks. Wondering eyes considered the gas masks and the rifles and the occasional machine gun. There were mutterings and fear. But by the middle of the morning the city had resumed its pace.
Kano had been attacked and occupied many times in its long history-from the desert to the north, from the forests to the south, from its sister states to east and west. But always its trade went on, its workshops hummed, its crafts expanded, its merchants grew rich. Attacked and occupied but never conquered, the city remarked the presence of its gaolers and went about its business…..

‘Tsamia, son of Shekkarau. AD 1307-1343
When he came to the throne he assembled the pagans and said to them, “love transmits love, and hate transmits hate; there is nothing between us except bows and spears and swords and shields; there is no deceit and no deciever except he who is afraid.” Tsamia excelled all men in courage, dignity, impetuosity in war, vindictiveness and strength…When the morning broke Tsamia, Sarkin Kano, came forth from his house, and went to the place of the god. In front of him were seventy men, each with a shield made of elephant’s hide. When Sarki came near to the place of the god he prevented the pagans entering. As the fight waxed hot, the Sarki cried, “Where is Bajeri?” Bajeri heard the words of the Sarki and took a spear and rushed into the battle, cutting his way until he reached the wall of the sacred place, near the Tchibiri tree…The Sarki returned to the tree, and destroyed the wall together with all else connected with Tchibiri which was beneath the tree. All the pagans had in the meantime fled…In the time of this Sarki long horns were first used in Kano. The tune that they played was “Stand firm, Kano is your city”. He reigned thirty years.’
The Kano Chronicle

Not long after I had received the minute from the Senior Roads Engineer I had a call from the Principal Administrative Officer, now in the gleaming new role of the Inquiry’s executive officer, to attend on the Sole Commissioner. When I walked into his office, the SC was sprawled across and around the desk which was set on the opposite side from the door, looking like a groper in a cave.
The office, formerly a conference room, was bare of furniture except for his desk and swivel chair, a straight backed wooden chair in front of the desk, and a table in the left hand corner on which many files were stacked. The blinds on the windows were drawn, and light within was dim. On the desk were two black telephones, a few files, and, very conspicuously in the centre, a tape recorder.
The SC’s forearms were thrown loosely forward on the desk, the hands showing out from the cuffs of a white shirt fastened with engraved gold links. Shoulders hunched, he looked up with brown eyes in confident confrontation as I walked, it seemed for minutes, across the length of the office. I was not guilty of anything of importance to the Sole Commissioner, as far as I knew. But by the time I had reached the straight-backed chair, and accustomed my eyes to the gloom, I noticed that the tape recorder was gently whirring, I was uncertain. I hoped it did not show in my voice.
“I had a message that you wished to see me, Mr Commissioner.”
“Mr McDonell, please sit down,” he commenced, without introduction,” you know what this Commission is about, you read the local rag. I’m sure you have the benefit of the latest briefings.”
What he was referring to was that famous hub of intelligence gathering, the bars and surrounds of the Kano Club, the social gathering place to which all expatriates repaired. And he was right there. For the last few nights the Club could hear of nothing else. Talk over beers after work of plans for the next Open Night, the local polo team’s recent visit to the championships in Zaria, the case of the English trader and the disappearing Lebanese girl, which had the ladies around the swimming pool agog-all these and more were stilled and replaced by rumour, charge and counter charge about the Inquiry, and what the Sole Commissioner was really up to. “Oh, of course, they want to get the Emir, that’s obvious, and they will too, but what is the real reason?”, they asked. “It’s not what it seems, you know, if they’ve brought him up here”. Powerful impressions of inscrutable ruthlessness lingered from Muffett’s previous postings in the Province.
And so they went on, scurrying, perplexed, peering under every stone, turning each new story, each freshly suspected motivation, on its head, spinning sticky webs of fascinated paranoia. There always had to be a real reason, some reason beyond all other reasons. “You can’t know what these new bastards are up to. Of course, the Sardauna”, they said,” he wants to get the Emir. We know that. But what else is there?” The Sardauna of Sokoto was the long-standing title of the civil leader of Sokoto, the holy city of the North, where lived also the most senior of the Region’s Islamic clerics, the Sultan of Sokoto. Now the bearer of the title was the first elected premier of the Northern Region of the independent Nigeria, located hundred of miles to the south in Kaduna.
Only Sophie, the tall, radiantly tanned, French-Arab woman from Algeria, to be found of an afternoon in a bikini, propped on an elbow along a deck-bed under a palm tree, stroking her flank, watching the splashings of her children in the pool, retained her hauteur and her assurance that she saw to the heart of things. “The tawny beast of the glorious buttocks”, Cartwright, the local expert on Arab literature and sexual preferences, used to call her in impotent admiration,” heavy like twin hills of sand”, painstakingly adding that it was a quote from The Perfumed Garden. If you asked Sophie what was up she gazed with cool penetration into your eyes and breathed, easing herself a little higher on the deck-bed, “ it is de Gaulle”, with a stiff twitch of her shoulders and jaw, as if it could be no other.
The War of Independence in Algeria to our north was drawing to a long drawn out and painful close. After years of what came to be recognised as one of bloodiest of the era’s struggles between the European colonisers and their colonised natives, the War, begun in 1954, had reached a stage where isolated skirmishes and assassinations still occurred. But creaking negotiations had begun and sputtered from detente to detente with outbreaks of hostilities in-between. Above it all stood General Charles de Gaulle, President of France, who had masterminded a change of direction and moves towards an independent Algeria which led to the Evian Agreements in April 1962 and thus to Independence. In Algeria, and elsewhere by people like Sophie, he was profoundly distrusted by those patriots who would have preferred the future of Algeria to be as a province of France.
Among the leaders of the Independence movement perhaps the most famous were Ahmed Ben Bella,who in 1963 became the first President of an independent Algeria, and Houari Boumédiène. At that time in 1961 Boumédiène was the chief of staff of the ALN, the national liberation army, the military wing of the national political movement, the FLN. He subsequently deposed Ben Bella in a bloodless coup and was President of Algeria from 1965 till his death in 1978.
But I had more immediate concerns than Sophie’s imaginings.
“By instrument of authority issued by the Premier of Kaduna four days ago I am empowered to elicit any information, and obtain the cooperation of any person, I judge to be of relevance to the Inquiry’s objectives. “
The overblown language was numbing.
“I have very good information-some of it, incidentally, from that little rat you passed on your way in”, the small man in a stained kaftan had looked sad and worried,” that there has been corruption and malpractice from top to bottom of the Emir’s administration in the letting of public works contracts. I impress upon you that the Regional Government regards the deficiencies of the Emir and his administration, and the possible ill-effects upon the good name of the Government of open and flagrant corruption in one of its principal cities, as a matter of the utmost seriousness.
Flagrant, I have no doubt, I thought to myself, but open I’m not so sure.
The Sole Commissioner had spoken as though reading from Standing and Daily Orders. The light from the lamp behind him cut a circle on the desk, shrouding his face. From outside came the scurry of petty contractors, and mammy traders with their baskets of betel nut and sweets and perfumes waiting for the offices to close at noon, two hours early today, being Friday, mosque day.
“As Executive Engineer in charge of road works for the Township, the City and the Province you are to be responsible- responsible, directly to me as Sole Commissioner-for the complete investigation of all contracts let in the last three years. You will use whatever methods you think necessary, subject only to clearing anything unusual with me, and, of course, no extortion. You may not pay for information, you will refer anything like that to me. As you do not know Hausa, the local language, you may consult on a need to know basis with Mallam Mohammad Musa, the Nigerian administrative officer who is assisting the Inquiry.”
I knew Musa well, a sociable young man connected by family to one of the royal houses of the North. He had gone to University in Lagos and now, in the push for Nigerianisation which had come with Independence, was one of the comers.
“You will be briefed from time to time by the Principal Administrative Officer. You will no doubt hear that there are international plots and ploys involved, that all of this here is tied up with the situation in Algeria and what’s going on in what used to be the Congo. Ignore all that, it is the product of sodden brains, unused wombs and too many spy novels in the Kano Club’s library. Folly and nonsense.”
He paused for emphasis.
“Make no mistake-Kano leaves a great gaping hole in the Region’s coffers. .We have reason to believe that one of the largest sources of corruption for the slush funds of the Emir and his minions has been the public works programme, especially all the road works for Kano City which are directly under the Emir’s control. As the Executive Engineer it is easy for you to gain access to all the paperwork concerned with Kano roads. You are to examine personally, personally,” he repeated,” all the contracts for road works for the last three years and check the details on the contracts with the works that have actually been carried out. You are to come back to me with a written report in one month from today. Good afternoon.”
What a game, what big, shiny toys, he, and we, had to play with. I laughed at the theatre of it all, at the grand guignol touches, the heroics of the darkened room; but just below my navel I felt the first small gnaw of a grub of anxiety. It took an extra munch when I noticed, sitting on the bench outside the door waiting to enter after me, a blue-robed Hausa man whom I had known as an austerely composed and aristocratic member of the Regional parliament and chair of several committees. He looked up with a flare of eye-white as I came out. He was composed no longer. Now he was fidgety, eyes closed, fingers telling his rosary at speed, jaw grinding, composure drained.
Would it also be a dangerous game?

‘Yaji, son of Tsamia. AD 1349-1385
The eleventh Sarki was Yaji, called Ali. His mother was Maganarku. He was called Yaji because he had a bad temper when he was a boy, and the name stuck to him. He drove the Sarkin Rano from Zamma Gaba, went to Rano and reigned at Bunu for two years…In Yaji’s time the Wangarawa came from Melle (now known as Mali) bringing the Mohammadan religion. The name of their leader was Abdurahaman Zaite. When they came they commanded the Sarki to observe the times of prayer. He complied and made Gurdamus his Liman, and Luaul his Muezzin…the Sarki commanded every town in Kano country to observe the times of prayer. So they all did so. A mosque was built near the sacred tree facing east, and prayers were made at the five appointed times in it.’
The Kano Chronicle

I had discovered that Sole Commissioner David Muffett was well known in Kano. A few years earlier he had been one of the most senior officers in Kano Province. He had spent his whole career in the Nigerian service and stood high in that elite whose members had never moved from the Northern Region. He and his like in the Northern service were fluent in the languages and the lineages, the traditions and intrigues, of the areas they were posted to. Some were acknowledged scholars of Sudanese and Muslim history and law, necessary expertise for a colonial administration meeting the challenges of long traditions of religious learning and legal doctrine. Some of them were experts in specific regions, spending most of their careers there and becoming intimately familiar with all the leading figures of the colonised communities.
Above all, the elite of the elite, there were those who had spent their years among the old walled cities, Kano, Katsina, Sokoto and others in the north. Here were the families of the conquering Fulani, the pale-skinned people of mysterious origin who had come from the north. Their ancestors had been the revered priests and savage warriors, who, under the famous Sheik, Usman dan Fodio, had swept across from the western plains in a great jihad early in the nineteenth century. They established dynasties in all the major cities, in the area which came to be called Hausaland, after the local people. These dynasties, even in the nineteen sixties, still wielded great power, religious and political, across the north, in that broad zone of savannah, between the jungle and the desert.
These top officials came to be friends of the Sultan of Sokoto, known as the Sarkin Mussulmi, the spiritual head of all the Muslims, and of the Emirs of the northern cities and provinces right across the north, even of the Premier of the Northern Region, Alhaji Alhmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto. He was, since Independence had come to Nigeria, the most powerful figure in the north. Many of them had been at school or university in England with the new African leaders with whom they now shared power, and polo once a week, and the princely sons had visited their homes and families in England during vacations.
When Independence came men like Muffett had stayed on under the new black government and scarcely noticed the difference. For some years there was, in any case, little transition to be made. The senior British officers had for decades run the place as a colony with scarce a let or hindrance, and continued to do so under the indigenous regime. But this Kano Inquiry was one of the first signs that the old state of affairs was ending. That the new politicians were beginning to call the shots.
The elected members of the Northern government, who were the traditional lords of the Hausa states dressed up in democratic masks and modern play-clothes, had decided that the Emir of Kano, the richest and most lordly of all the chiefs of the northern cities, the least inclined to bend the peaked turban towards the new boys in Kaduna, had to go. The financial housekeeping of his administration, corrupt and messy, as were all the provincial administrations, was to provide the chopping block and in Muffett they had chosen a very keen hatchet.

‘Bugaya, son of Tsamia. AD1385-1390
The twelfth Sarki was Bugaya, called Mohammed. He had the same father and mother as Yaji. …after Zamnagawa killed Tsamia, he made ovdertures to his widow, Maganarku, but she said, “I am with child.” So Zamnagawa gave her drugs, without her knowledge, to procure an abortion. In spite of this, however, she gave birth to a living child and gave him the name Bugaya. It was this Sarki who ordered the Maguzawa to leave the rock of Fongui and scatter themselves through the country. He then gave all power into the hands of the Galadima (senior official), and sought repose.”
The Kano Chronicle

There had been a Sarkin Kano for a thousand years. The Emir’s forefathers had multiplied their gold and slaves, their jewels and harems and palaces, from the trade north across the Sahara and south through the rain forests, and from the skills and industry of their people.
In more recent times the Sarkin Kanos had enlarged their fortunes and strengthened their hold over the millions who acknowledged their feudal lordship. Their thorny independence was achieved from the harvests of the wide networks of good fields and waterchannels which produced the many pyramids of groundnuts exported each year, from the largest area of production in the world. They had cultivated, too, the networks of lineage and the channels of intelligence which linked the old cities of West Africa right up to the seaboard of the Mediterranean, through Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, even Egypt.
It was these connections, also, which guided trans-Saharan camel caravans, still persisting in the modern age, winding in and out of the many modern nations of west and northern Africa . Shadowy fleets with shadowy cargoes, they wound through old desert pathways and unmarked tracks in derisory disregard of the official frontiers on maps, mere paper inventions of the colonial powers in the nineteenth century when they sat around European tables and divided Africa up.
The Emir raised his own taxes, kept his own army, held his own courts, appointed his own spokesmen as elected members in the National Assembly, attended each Friday at his own city mosque, the finest in the north, kept his own harem in the dark depths behind the thick mud-walls of his palace: for the new masters of an independent Northern Nigeria, he was much too big a nut to be left uncracked.
What to do, to bring this crusty autarch down from his ancient citadel? An open attack was out of the question. An embargo on his trade? Tricky, difficult to pin down, rich city revenues would be lost. An enquiry into his finances? Much better. The men behind the Regional Government, the Emir’s titular peers, were themselves city potentates who knew that any one of them could be seized for corruption. What was corrupt to modern European law was ancient custom and feudal privilege here in the North. They had practised it in all its subtle and unsubtle forms for centuries, and where more so than in Kano, the most successful in the slave trade, in the traffic in gold, in the trades of the caravans, in the vigour of its modern industries. Corruption? By almost any definition it would be found somewhere in the administration of the City of Kano, if one knew where and how to look. The Emir’s time was up.

‘Kanajeji, Son of Yaji AD 1309-1410
The thirteenth Sarki was Kanajeji. His father’s name was Yaji. His mother’s name was Aunaka. He was a sarki who engaged in many wars. He hardlhy lived in Kano at all, but scoured the country around and conquered the towns….He sent to the Kwararafa and asked why they did not pay him tribute. They gave him two hundred slaves. Then he returned to Kano and kept sending the Kwararafa horses while they continued to send him slaves. Kanajeji was the first Hausa sarki to introduce “Lifidi” and iron helmets and coats of mail for battle….He remained at Betu two years. The inhabitants, unable to till their fields, were at length starved out, and had to give in to him. They gave him a thousand male, and a thousand female slaves, their own children. They also gave him another two thousand slaves. Then peace was made.’
The Kano Chronicle

The small grub of anxiety had not detained me long as I soon had images of agreeable escapes to occupy my fantasies. I had been spending time in the evenings preparing for travels during my end-of-tour leave, due in a few months, and thinking of travelling overland to Egypt. Gumel and Hadejia in the north east had been on my mind for it was in that direction that I would probably go: east to Maiduguri and then south of Lake Chad, through Chad and across Central Africa and southern Sudan to El Obeid, thence to Khartoum and up the Nile to Cairo.
I had recently ridden a survey of a line of proposed new road out along the Hadejia River and watched the local men, naked, dark-brown, intent, silent, floating on large calabashes as though on great balloons in the water. They were throwing nets in graceful arcs to catch the giant Niger perch, giwan ruwa, the elephant of the river. It was intensely hot, and further on I was given water from a brown clay pot by a woman who knelt beside my horse and raised the pot to her shoulder, eyes averted, for me to drink, as she would for any man. Beyond that I had come on to the main Gumel road and my overseer Mohammadu Halilu had met me with the office pickup and taken me to the eastern border. I had thought then of what it would be like to travel on, and on, across Africa.
The man who came to my house after I returned from polo that evening was announced by Audu, our new cook-steward. He was a trader from Khartoum who drove his truck and organised convoys from Gao in French Territory to the north on the Niger River down to Kano and then across the savannah, the orchard bush and deserts to the markets of East Africa, the Nile and the Red Sea coast, as far as Djibouti.
One evening in the Club, talking to a District Officer who had come only the previous month from a posting in the eastern Provinces, I had asked about the condition of the roads in that area. The man from Khartoum was the one to talk to, I was told, he knows the way, trades backwards and forwards every month while the weather holds. What does he carry, I asked. Salt, skins, civet cats from Chad (Europe used them for perfumes), camel hair rugs from Timbuktu, carvings from Upper Volta, bronzes from Benin, pilgrims for Mecca, slaves, they say, for the sheikhs in Zanzibar, some gold, maybe some diamonds, local produce to and fro, what else?-that sort of thing.
The trader had fine features, lightly brown, with a genial smile. He wore a long cream turban raised in an elegant and commanding roll on his brow, and a long cotton gown, the riga, of purest white. This he arranged precisely and solemnly around his knees and buttocks as he prepared to sit cross-legged on my parquet floor. He took his rosary of brown wooden beads from his pocket, laid it on his left knee , and fixed me with a direct look, as though alerting an orchestra. A still space formed around him. He spoke excellent English in clear, short sentences
At the end of each speech he would rise slightly on his haunches and adjust his riga, unwind the scroll of turban from his head in a measured arabesque, and rewind it slowly as if tracing a calligraphic phrase. Yes, he could take me, the rains would be past, though the roads could still be up in places. But any delays would be brief. Are there motor roads all the way? Of course, I and my brothers go back and forth every month except in the rains. Lake Chad, south Sudan, the Congo? Ah, yes, there are some no good men there-quick, sociable, understanding smile-yes, further south there is Congo and Katanga and though Lumumba was killed not long ago, there are still wars in the Provinces and there is this Mobutu that nobody knows about, and there is Tshombe and many no good men.
He was obviously well up on the many troubles of Central Africa and the Congo and the savage wars that had ravaged the region. Who knows? But he, himself, he was a trader, he said with a relaxed smile, and his father, too, had been a trader, yes, Mr McDonell, my father was a famous trader in Khartoum, and a great scholar, too, even the mallams used to ask him for his opinion on the law, and he came many times to Kano and to Gao, but, of course, he is retired now and lives with his wives and children.
Yes, he said, there have been some problems in some places, but they are further south, very much south , but we don’t go near there. Anyway, he and his brothers and his father know many people and many roads. Through all those areas they know many good people they could trust. There would be no trouble, no trouble, and certainly not for the Bature McDonell who was known and liked among all the gravel traders and works contractors and repair shops in the City and the Sabon Gari. And many of his brothers, brothers of him, the man from Khartoum, knew the Bature McDonell, too. And is not Mr McDonell a good friend too of the Sole Commissioner, too? Is he not now a special friend of the Inquiry?
My interview in the darkened office had been only that afternoon. Already the word was out.
Even my wife was impressed by the man from Khartoum and began to think that the whole scheme to go home via Egypt might not be as harebrained as it sounded. So he must have been persuasive because at the time she was especially sensitive to any hint of danger, what with all the police around since the Inquiry had begun. And, further, she had been exposed to Sophie’s dark thoughts more than I had been.
Most afternoons she took the three boys to the Club to play in the swimming pool and there the handsome Algerian woman would hold court in her wobbly Frenglish. And Sophie was convinced that the Inquiry was not just some local squabble among the Northern Nigerian traditional chiefs. No, the tang of high politics was in the air.

‘Mohamma Rimfa, son of Yakubu. AD1463-1499
The twentieth Sarki was Mohamma, son of Yakubu, commonly called Rimfa. His mother’s name was Fasima Berana. He was a good man, just and learned. He can have no equal in might, from the time of the founding of Kano, until it shall end. In his time the Sherifa came to Kano. They were Abdu Rahaman and his people…Abdu Rahaman lived in Kano and established Islam. He brought with him many books. He ordered Rimfa to build a mosque for Friday, and to cut down the sacred tree and build a minaret on the site. And when he had established the Faith of Islam, and learned men had grown numerous in Kano, and all the country round had accepted the Faith, Abdu Karimi returned to Massar…Rimfa was the author of twelve innovations in Kano. He built the Dakin Rimfa. The next year he extended the walls …the next year he entered his house…He established the Kurmi Market…He was the first Sarki who used “Dawakin Zaggi” in the war with Katsina…He appointed Durman to go round the dwellings of the Indabawa and take every first-born virgin for him. He was the first Sarki to have a thousand wives. He began the custom of “Kulle”. He began the “Tara-ta-Kano”. He was the first to have “Kakaki” and “Figinni”, and ostrich-feather sandals…In his time occurred the first war with Katsina. It lasted eleven years, without either side winning. He ruled thirty seven years.’
The Kano Chronicle

Rodney Thomas Geoffrey Blackett was a member of the Rural Water Supplies branch of the Ministry of Works. This group lived rough out in the bush, putting in and maintaining the precious water supplies for remote villages and sometimes deputising on other engineering works. Years before, like many an ‘RWS’, as they were called, he had been in the Army, in the Royal Engineers. During the War he had been in the Middle East, rarely in the action, usually before it or after it had passed, preparing the way for the infantry and armour, or clearing up after them. Long practice in many postings had taught him how to keep his head down and his arse out of trouble. The men of the RWS liked living and working on the fringe, on the edge, on making do, on beating the system, your friend’s system, your enemy’s system, any system. In short, to survive, where survival itself was beating the system.
He came from a lower middle-class family on the outskirts of London, had been to a middling grammar school and at the end of it faced the job queues of the lingering Depression. The War provided an escape. He joined up as a sapper and went into a unit of the Royal Engineers. After the stifle of the suburbs, the open air life, building Bailey bridges, rigging up water supplies, setting long chains of dynamite, it all agreed with him. He had some women in Italy and, after long spells smoking kif in misty hammams in the Middle East, a boy or two, but in the end he had stayed alone and learnt to drink. He didn’t take a social beer, or carouse regularly at the Kano Club, or tank up on alcohol day to day. He went on benders, sharp and savage bouts when the world was dark while the sun shone. He was eaten within by a growling rage, tearing, biting-but instead of lashing out he hit the bottle.
After the War he found he had a touch of the sun and couldn’t bear the English fogs. He worked with a contracting company in Libya for a while, but he didn’t like the constant change from project to project, from team to team. He preferred his own company and he found the RWS. He was among his peers.
At the time I was there, Blackett was one of only two Bature, Europeans, living in the Emirate of Gumel which covered much of the far northeast of Kano Province. Here the orchard bush petered out and the Province’s northern border, which it shared with the French colony of Niger, flattened into the dusty plains of sand and rocky desert of the Sahara which stretched without a bound across Africa until it reached the shores of the Mediterranean.
The other Bature, also an Englishman, was the District Officer for the Emirate, the DO Gumel, as he was known, who was responsible for all the administration and law-keeping in that vast Emirate. By education, training and position he should have known more of what went on in the area than the RWS. In some ways-generally unimportant ways, from the point of view of the local native powers-he did, busily writing down in his report each month to headquarters in Kano all the things the local nabobs let him know. They were happy to keep him chained to his desk in the District Office and he was never let out of sight of at least one servant of the Emir of Gumel, a subordinate of the Emir of Kano.
Blackett, though, knew many things they would rather he didn’t. But they were reluctant to interfere with him, because he was so useful. Besides water supply he was also responsible for all the local roads in Gumel Emirate. He would turn up with his small gang of African tradesmen in out-ot-the-way villages mending pumps, or organising labour to push through new feeder roads or dig new wells up around the border or out towards the rivers where the groundnuts were struggling. In practice, the budget of the Rural Water Supplies Branch was a honeypot of patronage from the Northern Government Ministers to the local Emirs and other chiefs, and they dropped dollops of it around the region as their interests dictated and the villages supplicated.
So, in Gumel, Blackett had pretty much free rein. He lived in a Rest House in a small village near Gumel township, he travelled all over the Emirate and was welcome. He kept the wells full, the roads open, and his mouth shut. He saw some things that he didn’t want to, many things that he didn’t need to, and much that he wasn’t supposed to. He wrote no reports about them, and said not a word. In fact, he scarcely thought of them.
One of the things he did ponder, though, from time to time, as, like ghosts, they appeared and disappeared among the sands and the dusty gloom of a falling night, were the scruffy caravans of camels. There were sometimes one dozen, or two dozen, but lately there had been several occasions when he had seen scores of the grunting, awkward beasts, ambling through the patchy scrub, laden with hessian sacks. Even more surprisingly, those hessian sacks sometimes contained large wooden crates with numbers and letters painted on them. No trace would be left of their passing which would not be blown away in a day or so by the wind.
So had the camels come and gone for centuries, carrying the cargoes of the day. But why now, when there was plenty of modern transport-bitumen roads and large trucks and railway waggons waiting at railheads?
As the lurching rumps faded in the haze, he would wonder what consignments they might carry. Ammunition? Rifles? But he never enquired, certainly not of those silent turbanned figures he would always spot gazing at him from the shade of nearby trees when he turned around to go to his pickup. In the African bush, as Karen Blixen said in “Out of Africa”, you are never alone.

‘Abdulahi, son of Mohamma Rimfa 1499-1509
The twenty-first Sarki was Abdulahi. His mother’s name was Auwa. Her influence was very strong among the rulers of the day. She built a house at Doseyi, hence its name, “Gidan Madaki Auwa”. In his time Ahmedu, who was afterwards Liman of Kano, arrived. Abdulahi conquered (the city of) Katsina. He advanced as far as Katsina itself and encamped on the river near Tsagero. He remained four months at Tsagero and then went to Zukzuk and made war there.’
The Kano Chronicle

The voice on the telephone of Mohammadu Halilu, my Senior Roads Overseer, was bright. It had the light overlay of high frequencies, brief ululations and slight crowdings of the rhythms which signalled, I had come to learn, that he had a special message to impart. But he started off with the ritual string of solicitations and salutations which among the Hausa and the Fulani preface any conversation-thoughtful, caring questions about my family, my health, my recent doings. And then banter about the prayer boards he had given me a few days before, inscribed with propitious suras from the Koran for health, prosperity, many children, for averting dangers in travel. The verses had been brushed in ink with a flowing Arabic-style script in a style said to be exactly the same as that used by the great scholar and leader, Usman dan Fodio himself.
The occasion had been my birthday, and he had had the boards prepared as a mark of special favour by a man famous in Kano as the greatest calligrapher of them all. He lived in the City, Halilu said, and was frequently called upon by the mallams, the holy men, to write scrolls from the Koran. This man, moreover, was both deaf and dumb, and couldn’t read. The gift of great drawing skills was one directly from Allah in recompense for his disabilities, a sign of God’s mercy and magnificence. Halilu said this man was widely known, consequently, as ‘him with the gifts of God’, or simply ‘the gifts of God’-for his unerring sight and perfect command of his fingers’ sinews, and so his ability to produce verisimilitude. Thus the great leader’s script from the nineteenth century lay before me on the prayer boards as though freshly inscribed by the divine reformer,dan Fodio. Whether, when I pressed the point, anyone could be sure that the texts of which my boards held the replicas actually had been written by the holy Fulani scholar wasn’t at all clear. Halilu was quietly, but definitely, pained by my enquiries. But what was sure was that what I held was an exact copy of the originals, known to be very old.
My SRO passed from the prayer boards to what he had to tell me about the problems of a bridge we were constructing, how the road maintenance gangs were performing, whether our target date for re-gravelling the highway would be met, and the rest of his routine report. But he soon came to the main item he was eager to transmit, an eagerness signalled by an especially high ululation. He had seen Blackett, he said. The RWS had been helping one of the road gangs with a bridge near Babura west of Gumel, but in a few days he was going to move his camp back near Maigatari, north of Gumel near the border with the French colony of Niger.
There was an out-of-the-way village near there for which the Madaki, the equivalent of a Mayor in the North’s Native Administration, wanted the RWS to drill a well. Then Halilu paused, and an ululation swung upwards, and he knew that I would listen closely, before he slowly remarked that he had seen a camel caravan that morning, unusual near the main road, a large caravan, a very large caravan. The high frequencies trilled more insistently. Yesterday afternoon, he said, the Madaki and Alhaji Ahmadu Gumel had sat talking all afternoon in the Emir of Gumel’s peacock garden. Into the dusk they had stayed, and several times messengers had come to them with messages which had been read, scribbled upon, returned, and they had gone on talking. Halilu’s phone call was ending, and we turned to the chant of goodbyes which brought it to a close.

‘Mohamma Kisoki 1509-1565
The twenty-second Sarki was Mohamma Kisoki. He was the son of Abdulahi and Lamis, who built a house at Bani-Buki and established a market there, and was the mother of Dabkare Dan Iya. Kisoki was an energetic sarki, warlike and masterful. He ruled over all Hausaland, east and west, and south and north. He waged war on Mirnin N’guru because of Agaidam. When he entered the town Sarkin Kano took his seat beneath the ‘kuka’ tree…and assembling the inhabitants of the town at the Kofan Bai reduced them to terrified submission. He gave orders that no men were to be made prisoners, but that only clothes and horses were to be taken…In Kisoki’s time Saite, Tamma, Buduru, and Koda came to Kano. Kisoki ruled the town with his mother Iya Lamis and his grandmother Madaki Auwa, and Guli the brother of Madaki Auwa. Guli was much respected by the Sarki; he came to have power over the whole country. This is the reason every councillor is called Na-Guli.’
The Kano Chronicle

The Dan Iya of Kano was a scion of one of the longest lineages of the North. His family traced back to the heroes of the 1819 jihad. He grew up surrounded by the symbols and realities of honour, affluence and pomp. As a boy he had been sent under the care of the Emir’s legal adviser, the father of my overseer, Mohammadu Halilu, no less, to the great Islamic school of Timbuktu. This was a centre of fame and respect stretching back many centuries to the Moslem occupation of Spain when it had been a link with the Moorish world and the great European universities.
At that time he was a tall handsome man, wearing pitch black sunglasses with golden rims, and a white turban of finest muslin. As a boy he had been kept away from English or other European forms of modern education, and was given formal Islamic instruction. He had not even learnt the English language in school, and employed aides to translate for him, but now he spoke it fluently enough, with a heavy accent. Grown-up, he had done a series of jobs for the Emir, in and around Kano, went on errands to the Emir of Katsina, a powerful potentate and rival of Kano, stayed some time at Birnin Kudu in the southeast where he could keep an eye on his father’s not always reliable underlingss in the district, and on the road to the east.
For several years he had done the old man’s bidding down in Lagos for the negotiations over Nigerian Independence. And then as a reward for all of this, and as the safest of safe hands, Sarkin Kano had had him made Chairman of the Regional Marketing Board. Through this institution streamed the rivers of cash which flowed from the vast international trade in groundnuts, in which Kano Province was so prolific. It was the juiciest and ripest of plums.
All the policy and administrative work, of course, was done by white civil servants, headed by Graham Edwards, the Board’s chief executive whom he saw often, signing papers, discussing briefing notes, being steered to halting exchanges with appropriate companions at formal cocktail parties. But even Edwards, and certainly few others, knew little of his other activities.
One of those activities, it was rumoured, not least by Sophie at the Club,was that he had underlings scour the city for women and girls. There were rumours that daily he used two of them before lunch in the special room he had had installed below his office in the Marketing Board’s building. And many others at night when, again it was rumoured, he smoked hashish and practised sadisms, indulging violent tastes in his own palace of thick mud walls not far from the Emir’s. But of what went on there, and to what extremes, noone could be sure.

‘Abubakr Kado, son of Rimfa 1565-1573
The twenty -fifth Sarki was Abubakr Kado, son of Rimfa and full brother of Abdulahi. His mother’s name was Auwa. In his time the men of Katsina worsted the men of Kano until they came to the very gates of Kano…the men of Kano went out to fight, but they were beaten and scattered, and had to take refuge in the town. Devastation went on, and the country was denuded of people. The only place where people were found was in walled towns and rocks…Abubakr Kado did nothing but religious offices. He disdained the duties of Sarki. He and all his chiefs spent their time in prayer. In his time eunuchs and mallams became very numerous…Tamma was the greatest of them. When they first came they lived in Katsina land…Afterwards they moved to Kano and settled at Godia. The town was called Godia after a certain woman, a harlot. She and the Sarki reigned jointly over the town. The Sarkin Godia said to Tamma, “Settle at Godia”. So Tamma settled at Godia and married Godia…Abubakr was the Sarki who made the princes learn the Koran…’
The Kano Chronicle

The groundnut trade of Gumel, and especially that from across the border, was largely in the hands of Alhaji Ahmadu Gumel, whom we have already met, in Halilu’s telephone call, talking with the Madaki of Gumel in the Emir of Gumel’s peacock garden. He was one of the most influential merchants of Kano. He had been born in Gumel Emirate, the son of one of the later wives of a minor nobleman, but had lived for many years in Kano.
At first he had busied himself only with the Gumel trade, and especially in groundnuts. His influence there had been useful to the Emir of Kano and, in the early days of the Independence movement, to the Region’s political leaders. Through this, and because of substantial payments to Party funds and to the expenses of several important politicians with whom he developed the sort of client/patron relations which were common in the North, he had been able to extend his business widely in the Province. He had also spread his agents and his stores across the border into French territory and through the long trails north over the Sahara to Zinder and Agadez and Tamanrasset in Algeria.
But Gumel was still his base. The trade there, the contraband crops and other cargoes moving across the border, the alliance with the Emir of Gumel and the local nobles, the political support in the rather independent and very fortunately located Emirate were all essential to him, and through him to the Emir of Kano.
His partner in the conversation, the Madaki of Gumel, was, in effect, the chief minister and administrator of the Emirate. He was also a member of the National Assembly in Lagos. He came from a family which had been slaves of the Emir’s family for centuries, in that long tradition in which the servitor was in a relation similar to that of feudal vassal in medieval Europe.
His position, at the present time, was delicate. As one of the Regional members of the National Assembly in the South he possessed wide influence. But he was a pawn of the Premier, the leader of the Northern Government which had brought the Inquiry into the Emir of Kano’s financial doings. Both he and the Emir of Gumel were heavily beholden to Kano by tradition, blood and law. Sarkin Kano was, as his ancestors had been, the acknowledged suzerain of Gumel, bound to him by mutual ties of feudal relations among the Moslem states, large and small, of Northern Nigeria. So Muffett’s inquiry was a direct threat, for who was to say what the burly Englishman would discover once he started snooping around.
The late afternoon sun lit the haze hanging in the air. The two men sat in verandah chairs with canvas seats, sheltered from the sun’s slanting rays by several lines of dark green citrus trees. More citrus, and tall palms, enclosed the garden in a straggly barricade. In a corner was a well used from time to time by one of the women from the Emir’s compound as she watered the few beds of hardy red geraniums and bright green vegetables. Along one edge of the garden grew tall corn, and the mud wall of the Emir’s palace marked the northern boundary. Under the trees and along the paths peacocks promenaded, a cock and two hens. They would stand for minutes, quietly pecking at the spiky desert grass, and then the cock would start off again on a grand parade, slowly, ritually, head advancing, withdrawing, colours shimmering in the splendid fan.
The two men talked through the afternoon. Occasionally they would stop, as if at an end, and gaze bemused at the peacock’s processional, at the measured step and the slow quiver of the fan, envying perhaps its easy exercise of sovereignty. Beads of their rosaries dripped through their fingers. Turbans were unrolled and rewound, feet slipped in and out of open sandals, toes wiggled in the dusty sand. After the silences, more talk, slow, spare. Sometimes they would gaze, wordlessly, to the north, to where the border ran invisibly through the scrub and across the dunes. Then they would start again, quietly, by turns, nodding in unison as they went, as though setting out a route upon a map.

‘Mohamma Shashere, son of Yakufu, 1573-1582
The twenty-sixth Sarki was Mohamma Shashere…His mother’s name was Fasuma. He was unmatched for generosity among the Sarkis. He was the first to give a eunuch the title of Wombai…He determined on an expedition against Katsina. He said to the Alkali Mohamma, the son of Tanko, the son of Jibril, the son of Mugumi:”Find me an Alkali to take with me to war with Katsina. When I go to war, I shall not return alive unless I beat the Katsinawa.” The Alkali gave him his pupil Musa, whose mother’s name was Gero. The Sarki made Musa Alkali. Now when he came to Katsina, the men of Katsina came out to fight. The armies met at Kankia and fought there. The Katsinawa won because they were superior in numbers. The Kanawa ran away-deserting their Sarki-with the exceptions of San Turaki Mainya Narai, San Turaki Kuka Zuga and Dan Dumpki …these returned home together with their Sarki and entered Kano with him. The Sarki was very grieved. His men said to him, “Lay aside your grief, next year we will defeat the Katsinawa, if Allah wills.”’
The Kano Chronicle

For three weeks after my interview with the Sole Commissioner I entertained in my small office a long line of Emirate officials, politicians from the national and regional parliaments, contractors, Ministry of Works supervisors, bank clerks, truck drivers. I called in people from the Sabon Gari and the City whom I thought, as it turned out in vain, might have an inkling of what had been afoot.
For something, a lot, certainly had been afoot. I had asked Mohammadu Halilu to help me prepare schedultes of all the contracts for recent years: miles of road resurfaced, lengths of kerb and guttering laid, culverts and bridges constructed, cubic yards of gravel dumped, timber delivered, sacks of cement used. All the lists were checked against the work on the ground, rechecked, cross-checked.
Many more contracts had been written than had been delivered. The scams ran into millions of pounds. But all the documents were in perfect order. All had the right signatures, the appropriate disclaimers, the signatories were a very few senior officers, both Bature and Nigerian, who upon examination were beyond reproach. Yet the signatures, and any written amendments, were all perfect. Perfect forgeries. Where was the forger?
I had the tale from Mohammad Musa. During the third week after I had been interviewed by David Muffett the young Nigerian officer and I met at the Provincial office and we went off to a nearby bar to swap notes. I pulled at a beer while he sipped an orange Fanta. Like me, he had searched for a break in the chain. Some of his suspects were recalled several times, questions repeated, materials sifted, new checks made: brick walls. Brick walls of ignorance, fear, impregnable alibis, silence.
At last, he got the clue, from a lowly headman in the Emirate’s Works Office, and it came from an act of kindness. Musa had heard some time previously that this man, of good reputation, and whom we had no reason to suspect, was the father of a nubile young woman. Halila was her name, and she was one of those abducted by the Dan Iya’s thugs. She was later left broken and bleeding back on her father’s doorstep.
As part of a normal line of questioning Musa had told the father that we suspected that the Dan Iya and others were involved in the frauds, and asked him if he knew anything: but to no avail. Nothing could budge him. As the headman was leaving yet another fruitless interrogation, which he had endured with courtesy, restraint and fear, he and Musa fashioned the exchange of courtesies which marked a departure and, as part of it, Musa asked him, almost without thinking, “How is Halila now?”
The mood of submission shifted, the stress of the long interview brimmed, the fear denied, the anger suppressed. He looked at Musa sharply. “She has died. You knew about Halila?” He went once more to the door and, as he passed through it, turned back and said, “Allah be praised-you must see the gifts of God.”
I was puzzled but it was clear at once to Musa. The calligrapher, and his nickname, were very well known in the City. Like many others he had a day job. He worked as a clerk in the Native Affairs Administration but no-one had thought to question a deaf mute who could neither read or write. But, of course, he could copy. This was his gift from God.
Musa went to the dusty wooden building with narrow verandahs, peeling paint and bulging manila files in red-taped bundles standing high on pine tables where this man worked by day. No matter what the main occupation by which they earned their livelihood many people tried to find a ‘respectable’ job, one which sounded worthy to the ears of Batures and other powerful persons. ‘Part-time calligraphic artist’, even if very famous, was not such a title, and he was on the books of the Works Office as a clerk, a much more acceptable address. Musa gave him some hand written notes and indicated to him to copy it, a quite usual chore in those days without photo-copiers. He took the paper, inspected it intently for some time, and commenced to write. When he had finished he handed it back to the goggle-eyed Musa. The copy was an indistinguishable facsimile of the original.

‘Mohamma Zaki, son of Kisoki 1582-1618
The twenty-seventh Sarki was Mohamma Zaki…The name of his mother was Hausatu, the daughter of Tamma. When Mohamma became Sarki, Tamma came to live at Kano together with his men, the Kartukawa… The Sarki’s men kept saying to him,” Sarkin Kano, if you leave the Katsinawa alone, they will become masters of all Kano and you will have nothing to rule but a little”. The Sarki said, “I will conquer the Katsinawa if Allah wills.” At this time the Sarkin Kwararafawa came to attack Kano. The people of Kano left the city and went to Daura, with the result that the Kwararafawa ate up the whole country and Kano became very weak. The men of Katsina kept on harrying Kano. If it had not been for the sake of the mallams in Kano, they would have entered and destroyed the city. There was a great famine which lasted eleven years…’
The Kano Chronicle

The Dan Iya was gone. Noone knew how he had gone or to where. Disappeared one night shortly after the discovery of the gifts of God. It was kept quiet for awhile but before long it came out. There was much consternation in the Club. There were many theories but only Sophie knew for sure.
She had been quiet lately, much quieter than usual. There were rumours she was having it off with Barratt, the new executive at Barclays Bank DCO. He had turned up recently, riding his camel all the way on transfer from Kaduna, the Regional capital. Tall, fair, good-looking in the English way, he would tie up his camel at the Club where others would park their cars, and, dressed in his tuxedo, would walk confidently in. But whatever about all the charms of that, a good mystery was too much for Sophie.
As usual she was in no doubt. She had been speaking to a friend of hers, she told me one evening as we were hanging out the decorations for the following Saturday’s South Seas night at the Club. This friend was a French businessman who came and went and had, Sophie said, good reason for maintaining connections on both sides in Algeria. He had seen the Dan Iya in Cairo, in a restaurant which the FLN were known to use, and he had been with-Boumédiène. And that was all.
Noone in the Administration believed it-”Sophie’s fumes have gone to her head, we all know that”, the PAO had tartly said, with pitying shakes of his head, when I passed on the piece of gossip: Sophie and her husband were rumoured to have brought with them strange practices and misty potions from the souks of the French-held north and the settlements of the Ouled-Nail. That was all we ever heard.

‘Mohamma Nazaki, son of Zaki 1618-1623
The twenty-eighth Sarki was Mohamma Nazaki. His mother’s name was Kursu. When he became Sarki he sent messengers to make peace with Katsina. Sarkin Katsina refused his terms and invaded Kano. The Kanawa came out and a battle took place in which the Kanawa defeated the Katsinawa….Next year the Sarkin Kano went to Kalam. He left the Wombai Giwa behind at Kano because he was sick. When the Wombai recovered he said,”What can I do to please the Sarki?” His men said,“Add to the city.” He said, “Very well.” So he built a wall from the Kofan Dogo to the Kofan Gadonkaia, and from the Kofan Dakawuyia to the Kofan Kabuga, and to the Kofan Kansakali. He spent an enormous amount of money on this improvement. Every morning he brought a thousand calabashes of food and fifty oxen for the workmen till the work was finished. Every man in Kano went to work…He slaughtered three hundred cows at the Kofan Kansakali and gave the mallams many presents. When the Sarkin Kano returned from war, the Wombai gave him a hundred riding horses. Each horse had a mail coat. The Sarki was very pleased. He said, “What shall I do for this man, to make his heart glad?” His men said, “Give him a town.” So the Sarki gave him Karayi. Hence the song, “Elephant Lord of of the town, Abdullah foe of the bull hippopotamus, whose chains for taking captive women are hoes and axes.”
The Kano Chronicle

I had finished the draft of my report and it was with Celestine, my Ibo typist. It was just over four weeks since that briefing with the Sole Commissioner, a Monday, always a busy day, and there was a rush on to get the report finished in time to hand it to the great man that afternoon.
The phone burred. It was Halilu. There had been an accident in Gumel Emirate. Blackett had blown himself up on Sunday while down at the well site at the village near the border to which he had moved his camp. “It must have been an accident”, the overseer said.”I saw him last week and he was very cheerful”.
Two of the Madaki’s men had been in the village and when they had got to him there was just a hole in the ground where the drill rig had been. He was on the ground. His hands and his mind had gone. It was hours to the nearest hospital and he bled to death on the way. They said he had been drinking hard that weekend. Halilu was fond of Blackett, known him for years, but he, being a good Moslem and strict teetotaller, was mystified how the Army man, the old sapper, always careful of his tools, could have brought himself to such a pass. “I am very sad, Mr McDonell, this Bature was a good man, he was my friend”.
They didn’t hold a wake at the Club, but the next Saturday night the DO Gumel, who had come to town for the funeral, got up after dinner and said what a good officer of the Northern Service Blackett had been and what a good war he’d had, and how much the colony owed to men like him, with a quick double-take, sorry, it’s now Independence, and then gave a toast to the dead man. And everybody stood and drank to the lonely figure few had even known. “A great RWS”, they said. It was a night for Red Sea rig, and all the men looked very well in their monkey-suits, black ties and red cummerbunds, with the women all in long dresses and pearls and jewellery. “He would have liked that “, Bob the Bull murmured, remembering his days also in the Army and the RWS. “If he’d been here, he would have thought it looked just like his Regimental Mess.” Everybody said what a terrible accident it had been.
Except Sophie. She had been sceptical from the beginning, as soon as she heard the news and the talk of an accident. It was a plot.
“Zis ingénieur des eaux, zis guerilla of the RWS, ‘e was an expert in the maquis, oui? Zis, ‘ow you say, bushman, zis ingénieur, ‘ow ‘e ‘ave zis accident”, she asked, “’e was lighting ‘is cigarette with ze dynamite stick?” But even Sophie thought the little ceremony at the Club was sympathique.

Kutumbi, son of Mohamma Nazaki 1623-1548
The twenty-ninth Sarki was Kutumbi, the son of Mohamma Nazaki, otherwise called Mohamma Alwali. His mother’s name was Dada. He was a great Sarki. He had a friend whose name was Kalina Atuman, to whom he entrusted great power. No one would believe the extent of this power except one who saw it. He ruled over town and country of Kano until his power equalled that of the Sarki, while the Sarki was like his Wazir (prime minister). This Kalina Atuman was in power twelve years and then he died…Kutumbi was the father of Bako. No prince could compare with him. In everything, in doing good, in doing ill, in courage, anger, generosity he was like a Sarki, even while he was only a prince. He had six hundred horses and ninety mailed horsemen. He went to Kurmin Dan Ranko to war and took much spoil…When he returned to Kano he was given the title of Jurumai for this exploit. Afterwards he pray to die and died, for f ear of civil war after his father’s death….The next year Kutumbi went to war with Katsina. He was victorious and took much spoil. He camped at Dugazawa for nine months, during which time no one could venture out of Katsina. From this siege came the song:”Alwali shutter of the great gate, Kimbirmi, shutter of the great gate”…He was the first Sarki of Kano who collected the Jizia from the Fulani…He collected a hundred cows from the Jafunawa, the chief clan of Fulani, seventy from the Baawa, sixty from Dindi Maji, fifty from the Danneji, and others too numerous to mention….Whenever Kutumbi went to war or to Salla, he was followed by a hundred spare horses. Forty drums were in front of him, and twenty five trumpets, and fifty kettle-drums. He was the first Sarki to create a ‘Berde kererria’. He was always followed by a hundred eunuchs who were handsomely dressed and had gold and silver ornaments…As regards Sarkin Kano some people say he was killed in Katsina, others say that he died in Kano. The latter is the better account…..
The Kano Chronicle

Sallah, the festival held at Id el Fitr, the commemoration of the birth of the Prophet at the end of Ramadan, fell some months after the Inquiry began, after the eruption of the police onto the streets, the impeachment of the Emir, and all the dramas that had followed.
I had been to the great day the year before. It was the largest event and the most joyful occasion in the Kano calendar. On the flat ground outside Kofar Nassarawa used for military parades and grand displays hundreds of horsemen had disposed themselves in groups according to their leaders: the nobles holding the named titles of Kano-Galadima, Madaki, Waziri, and others; the rural principalities beholden to the Emir of Kano as their leige lord, such as Kazaure, Gumel, Hadejia; the traditional rulers of important towns and groups of villages; the aristocratic families and their retainers.
Thousands of people, brightly dressed and jubilant, crowded around the City walls, on roofs of buildings, on vehicles, or stood in dancing lines edging this large space where the Sallah procession was traditionally held. Surrounded by nobles and officials, at the far end on a dais, wearing the ostrich feather shoes, sat the Emir, in regal vestments and the distinctive white muslin turban with the rabbit ear peaks of the Sanusi family.
The procession was led by the Emir’s guard brandishing muskets, in royal scarlet and green livery, with the shantu, the trumpeters, and the kuge, the horn blowers, blasting boisterously. The kakali, the special silver horns which had announced the Emir since Rimfa’s day, came next and then the dokin zage, the Emir’s led horse. The bowmen entered, and the horsemen in chain mail, with mounts agleam in caparisons of green, yellow, brown and red leathers, bridles studded with silver and precious stones, silver bells attached to halters and breastplates, saddles richly embossed. The nobles and leaders wore silks and velvets, muslins, and cottons in vivid colours., scrolled embroideries of white and silver, gold and scarlet, elegant capes, jewelled sandals. Finally, shouting and surging, arrived the guards on foot. Tumultuous sounds-the shantu, the kuge, the kakali, the smaller horns and trumpets, the large drums carried by horses, the kettle drummers marching in file, songs and cries, high spirits, the hilarity of thousands.
At the end, after, it seemed, the cavalcade had ended, and the tension was ebbing away, there was a breathtaking display, the high point of the afternoon, the thrilling final act. Far away, perhaps about a mile distant, groups of horsemen in full regalia appeared. With shouts that resounded even from such a distance, they set out at full gallop across the open space towards the Emir’s throne firing muskets, waving spears and yelling war cries. And when each group at thundering pace drew level with their lord they reined back their horses, reared them onto back legs so that the riders stood in their saddles, and with ululating shouts punched their right arms into the air in triumphant salute.
This year, though, there had been rumours that Sallah wouldn’t be held at all. But in the end it was-the powers must have decided that not to have it would be too big an insult to the Kano people themselves. The Emir didn’t appear. The procession was thin, but all the main groups were there. No shouting, no drums, no trumpets, no riveting final salute. Silence, total silence, except for the tinkle of silver bells on the bridles as the horses slowly paced the length of the grounds, and the chink of harness. Many of the rural dignitaries didn’t come: each just sent his horse, fully decked out like the previous year, but with its saddle reversed, and one after another the riderless mounts were led past the Emir’s vacant throne, their hooves sloughing sadly in the sand.
The end of my contract came up not long afterwards. I left Kano, though I didn’t go east through the Sudan to Khartoum and the Nile. That idea had always been a bit of a pipe-dream. Just as well, probably-with wars and unrest along the way that road was no longer safe. Instead we flew home and before long Kano and the North all seemed far, far away.
I didn’t catch up with what happened for months until a former Senior DO, who’d taken the golden handshake and was now looking for a life in Australia after the colonies, came to Sydney and we got together. Muffett’s report wasn’t published. But they’d sacked the Emir and exiled him to Azare, east past the Kano Province border in Bauchi Province. He was replaced by a relative from another branch of the family, but the newcomer died after only three months on the throne.

‘Oh! happy is the man who sits

Beside or at the feet of Fritz’…

– Kenneth Boulding, a distinguished and versatile economist who once remarked that among men of affairs he passed as an economist, and among economists as a man of affairs

Fritz Machlup had arranged the lunch. After a lecture a week or so earlier I had run into him in the brown-panelled corridor of the Philosophy Faculty. In his kindly way he had enquired how I was getting on, when I would come and see him, would I be attending the Rubin seminar, ‘Friday, yes, come on Friday after Rubin’s seminar, the great Rubin, you will not, of course, miss him, will you,’ a simple stataement of fact,’ come in and you will tell me what you are doing, and’, after an arch pause injected like a question mark into the musical, almost accentless English of the Viennese elite, ‘what you are going to do’.

Fritz was a leading economist of the Austrian School, an influential group founded in the nineteenth century, which included the philosophers von Mises and von Hayek. Their writings on freedom and government and their individualist and somewhat parsimonious thoughts on social policies such as welfare assistance and the evils of economic regulation were to influence much of the orthodixy of the times later on in the 1980s nd 1990s. Nixon might have said in the sixties that we were all Marxists now, but Reagan in the eighties with some truth might have affirmed that we were all Austrians.

Always diligent, always in a hurry but never appearing so, he kept, despite what some might have thought his stern political philosophy, a caring finger on all the students of Johns Hopkins` economics department for whom he felt responsible. And not least this gangling Australian, who was not even an economist, but for whom he certainly was responsible, for it was he and he alone who had got me there.

The year before I had wandered into his in-tray, and then, beyond what I reckoned were all the odds, into his life and the Johns Hopkins University’s lecture rooms. I had sent him a a letter I’d worked over for a week of nights back in Accra, the capital of Ghana, after my then day job as an engineer alone in a consulting office tending bridges, designing buildings, checking roads washed out by monsoon rains, interpreting the offbeat prose of supplicant local contractors. On the strength of that letter, which had explained to him, far away in Baltimore, Maryland, that I taken some courses in economics a few years before in Tasmania, had some construction experience, and, further, on a presumption he made of my proficiencies, derived from the civil engineering degree, in mathematics-a subject he strictly eschewed in his economics but a knowledge of which he thought provided good moral training-he had let me in to the Master’s program.

The Departmental Seminar, staged fortnightly, was the single most revered event in the cycle of the Department’s liturgy. Located handily between Washington and New York, close to many of the nation’s policy, intellectual and scientific centres, Hopkins, as the University is familiarly called, had a special allure because, founded by a prominent abolitionist and businessman, it provided the model in the US of the modern research university. In addition the economics Department-more formally the Department of Political Economy, a title which heightened the allure, taken as it was from the name of the discipline as it was way back in Adam Smith’s day -was adorned by a faculty of distinction and variety, and was readily able to attract glowing orbs from the economic firmament to adjust their fiery paths for an afternoon to take in the port city, famous for its trading and whaling past.

The great Rubin was a Board member of the US Federal Reserve Bank, of New York, the largest of the Federal Reserve Banks, the first among the equals of all the regional Federal Reserve Banks, and Rubin was thus one of the highest economic gods. But more, he was a theorist whose fame and fluency had ensured that the large seminar room was crammed with all faculty and postgraduate students. A substantial man of a comfortable friendliness, he dizzyingly argued that, in that year of 1960, the natural rate of interest on capital across the globe was five per cent per annum. This confidently produced pronouncement of a vision encompassing all the economic activities of the whole world, reducing them to a single, round-sell odd-number, fell upon us from a lightly floating skein of gold sparkled dialectic.

Overcome by the glory of sitting before this visiting god, his edict it seemed to me was fit to have issued from the lips of Abelard orating at the pulpit of Notre Dame to the assembled multitudes. I had indeed been overcome by these regular demonstrations of lofty talk and academic grace from the start. Conscientious though the stafff back home at Queensland had been, so spending a couple of hours would have been doggedly rebuffed as much a waste compared with taking that much further the tricky design question we had recently been set.

A few, low-modulated questions from the more illustrious of the staff. Not one from a student’s trembling lips. Good humoured respectful thanks from the presiding chair. A witty compliment from Machlup himself, to was it the Department Chair. Rubin concluded.

I emerged in a daze of wonder and delight and slowly wandered down the corridor, and, leaving my companions still mesmerised by the great man’s flights, entered Fritz’s plain but elegant office. Light came from casement windows overlooking a courtyard. The square room was made comfortable with a long neat desk and a couple of leather arm chairs. Long shelves of books imposed an academic gravity. A bunch of them were Machlup’s own.

Fritz was wearing a plain, blue, singlebreasted, well-tailored suit and a matching, full, bow-tie with spots of red. He sat behind a tidy desk with leathered insets of some antique style. Always affable, he received my recent progress in the courses I was taking with other lecturers, and regretted my decision not to avail myself of the PhD scholarhip he had some time earlier indicated he could make available. With two young boys, a third recently on the way, belief in the ‘rhythm method’ now in shreds, I could not accept the prospective life of a student in a foreign land. Besides, Fritz himself and several of the other people I would especially want to work with were departing in one of those noisy academic flights which certainly in those days frequentl marked the drying up of sustaining funds in one University and the opening up of others in another. And there was another reason: I wasn’t sure that to wall myself into no matter how well furnished an ivory tower, as in those days I still saw universities to be, was the way really to do something in the world What then for when I had completed my present course work and later on the thesis?

He took it entirely for granted that furthering the careers of his students was a part of the professorial canon, and tried whenever possible to fulfil the rol of rainmaker for his students. Most of them came with some affiliation to a former alma mater, sometimes with funding. But he took his self-imposed responsibilities as seriously, perhaps more so, even when the object of his interest appeared, as did the case before him, in some random way from Australia via West Africa, and unnourished by any kind of educational gravy train.

Would I be interested, perhaps, in an introduction to the world of papermaking, to , no less, the colossus of Reed, one of the great forestry and paper corporations? They pay well, he quickly added, apparently especially moved by what I had thought had been a only lightly sketched account of my slenderfinancial position. It was only much later that I learnt that his family, back in Austria, had had large interests in paper, and that he personally had worked in the field as a young man, before he had moved, in the thirties, to the US not far ahead of the Nazis. This was among his various other professional engagements in finance, banking and international trade. In short, he was reaching into his personal casket to offer me some of the cake of his birthright.

Perhaps it was just as well that I didn’t know that at the time. I found ir easier than it might have been to turn the generosity aside and to explain, once again, as I had done in that first letter to him, and when I had pitched up on his step to begin the course, that my interests lay in the developing nations then emerging in the world, especially in the Chinese and Asian areas, which later in the century carryied the French term, ‘le monde troisieme’, the third world, as their label.

‘The World Bank!’, he exclaimed with a big smile, a big satisfied smile, that showed the issue now resolved. You should talk to the World Bank. I will speak with Penrose.’

I knew that Ernest Penrose, who supervised my international field studies, had long been an international official in various roles combining it with a career as an economics professor. He was married to Edith Penrose an economist also at Hopkins who supervised my economic field studies and both of them had not long before spent some years at the Australian National University, and so took a special interest in me so far from home, and at a time when postgraduate students from Down Under were rarities in the United States. Ernest Penrose had made a career of moving to and for between the world of affairs and the world of the book; but it had certainly not occurred me that he could be plucked so readily to play an introductory gavotte to accompany my advance into the salons of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), familiarly known as the World Bank, and thence into the anterooms of the third world.

A tall, lean, somewhat vague, always smiling man, generally wearing a neat, tweed jacket, the Englishman was now nearing the end of his career. Both he and Edith had had long associations with Hopkins and now he was coasting down the runway to an agreeable retirement while she, much younger, was diverting from formal economic theory to the economics of energy, then a new field to which she later made important, foundational contributions. Ernest, who guided my forays into the theory of international relations and especially the history of the Indian subcontinent, had taken a good natured interest in me from the start and, on my side, I had been chuffed that he approved warmly of my plan to combine a practical life with an academic one, a venture which didn’ appeal to many, in particular my mother, who with sober anxiety, saw it as yet another manifestation of my grass-hopper mind. REWRITE

Only a couple of days later, at our next tutorial, Pen told me he had arranged for me to call David Symondss at the World Bank to fix a lunch to consider ways in which I might ener that illustrious institution. (That eldeer mentors intorducing disciples to preferred career paths was an quite normal way for Pen to proceed, it left me totally amazed and indeed I came to see that this was not how David Symonds viewed the matter.

FM sitting in bowtie, paper company, World Bank, David ?Schwarz/2 weeks after /WB on 1818 H street, meat and two vegs, a piece of apple tart, and a cup of coffee, reference to FM’s call and my purposes, hasty departure with his arm in mine, and stroll around the adjoining streets, apparent this to avoid eavesdropping whether by human ear or concealed radio ear, quietly explained only experienced,