Chapter One
Africa Unchained
At nine a.m., the doorbell rang. I couldn’t see who it was
because of the high wall surrounding the house, but after a
moment’s debate whether I shouldn’t just ignore it, I picked
up the crowbar we’d been keeping handy and started across the
courtyard to the security door. I’d talked with the girls
about getting a gun in the black market, but we hadn’t gone
that far yet. “Jack’s a man. He’ll protect us,” Samantha had
winked and said, and I’d shaken my head and told them, “Then
consider yourselves dead already.” Because while I didn’t like
to think of myself as a coward, my first impulse on hearing
gunfire was to hit the floor and crawl under something. At the
door, I raised the crowbar like a baseball bat. I’d never
swung a weapon at anyone, didn’t know if I could now, but I
held it like that anyway. “C’est qui?” I shouted, trying to
sound larger and more menacing than I really was.
“Adama, restes tranquille,” a woman’s voice called to me.
“C’est Méité Fanta, ta voisine.”
I quickly turned the lock and pushed open the door onto Ama
Méité, a weathered old woman with a steel tub on her head, the
heads of the fish in it peeking down at us like children
eavesdropping on adults. She also had a stick poking out of
the corner of her mouth, an extra-large toothpick. Ama Méité
was grandmother to the rabble of naked children who played
dust-raising ragball on our street in Séguéla, hollering all
day like they owned the place, which they did, and who had
brought us water, bucket-by-paid-for-bucket, from
their well during the last coup when the water and electricity
had been cut in the city. Méité’s face did not change when she
saw the crowbar in my hand. She went on chewing her stick, the
local version of a toothbrush, as though it were a carrot, or
a tasty piece of licorice. But I knew from experience that it
wasn’t tasty at all, that it was infused with a bitter oil as
succulent as varnish. People were like that here.
We quickly went through the morning salutations in Worodougou,
a cultural requirement you couldn’t ignore in the biggest of
rushes, even if, say, you felt like the world was ending.
“Manisogoma,” I said, lowering my eyes in respect. ‘Good
morning, respected mother.’
“Say va! Ah see la,” Ama Méité said like shouting, which was
how it was done. ‘Thank you, respected sir. Did the night pass
well?’
“Em’ba, Ama,” I said. ‘Thank you, respected mother, yes.’
“Allah bis sonya!” ‘God bless your morning.’
“Amina, Ma.” ‘Amen, Mother.’
“Allah kenna ahdi.” ‘God grant you beautiful health.’
“Amina, Ma,” I said, touching my hand to my forehead as if
bowing in thanks and deference to her benedictions.
“Allah ee balo,” she said. ‘God grant you a wonderful youth.’
“Amina, Ma.”
“Allah bato luma.” ‘God nourish your home and family.’
“Amina, Ma.”
“Allah bo numa.” ‘God bless all that you do.’
“Amina, Ma,” I said louder than before, indicating in their
way that I’d received all the benedictions I could bear.
“Iniché, iniché. Allah ee braghee.” ‘Amen, Mother. Thank you,
thank you. God bless you in thanks for your benedictions over
me.’
“Amina, Va!” ‘Amen, sir.’
“Allah den balo, Ma.” ‘God bless and protect your children, Mother.’
“Amina, Va!”
“Allah kenna ahdi.” ‘God grant you beautiful health.’
“Amina, Va!”
“Allah sosay djanna.” ‘God grant you long life.’
“Amina, Va!”
“Allah bis sonya.” ‘God bless your morning.’
“Amina, Va! Iniché. Adama Diomandé.” ‘Amen and thank you,
respected Adama Diomandé.’
Then we were done with that and Ama Méité said to me, “Bon,”
flatly in French because we could now get on with our lives. I
could already feel the sweat starting to stand out on my
forehead, and the fish in the tub on Méité’s head seemed to me
to be wilting in the sun now, hanging over the rim like the
melting watches in the Dalí painting. She rolled her eyes from
the weight of the load and planted her hands on her hips,
which were wrapped in a wildly colored bolt of cloth depicting
cellular phones. The cloth was a pagne celebrating the arrival
of Nokia to our stretch of West Africa two weeks ago, and many
women in Séguéla were wearing them, were tying their infants
snugly onto their backs with them. Coups and guinea worm and
female circumcision and HIV and mass graves in Abidjan full of
the Muslim north’s political youth and the women had turned
traditional dances all night around bonfires to celebrate the
arrival of the cell phone. This was what West Africa was
about: priorities. “So you already know about the coup,” Ama
Méité chewed on her bitter stick and said.
“Know about the coup?” I said. “All I know is that I got up
this morning and turned on the radio and there wasn’t any
radio.”
“Oui,” she said, “so you know about the coup. But what are you
going to do with that stick? When the bandits come, they will
have guns. Therefore, you should buy a gun. A rich man like
you, Adama, with so many wives-”
“They’re not my wives!” I started, like a thousand times
before. “They’re my colleagues. I work with them. Nothing
else.”
“If they’re not your wives, oh, then why won’t you marry my
daughter Nochia, oh?” she sang in French to embarrass me. “She
knows how to cook and likes to work in the fields. If you know
how to do anything, she’ll give you many healthy children,
maybe even twins. And even if you don’t know how to do those
things, she will teach you. Like that you will be rich in
America and make your mother proud. Then you will bring us
health and happiness and, of course, many gifts, oh, when you
come and visit. Anyway,” she said, spitting wads of mulled
wood on the ground between us like hay, “you should buy a gun.
My son knows a man who can sell you a strong gun washed with
good magic.”
“We are a humanitarian organization, Ama,” I said lamely. “We
don’t believe in guns.”
And she said, “In all the films from America, all is guns. So
don’t tell me! What I’ve come to say is this: Don’t open the
door today, Adama Diomandé. There are many looters and
bandits. They will come and rob you. Everybody knows whites
live in this house. And who knows what riches you have in
there, anyway? So do not open the door. Now I have to go to
market and sell these fish. They don’t care if there’s a coup
or not. All they care is that they want to stink soon.”
“Thank you, Ama,” I said as she turned to walk back to her
compound, where the children were kicking a soccer ball that
was really half of a coconut shell, were playing hopscotch in
the dirt and clapping and singing like it was the best day
ever, like always. She waved her hand back at me and said,
“You whites are bizarre, oh! Going to chase away bandits with
a stick, Allah!”
I could not remember if this was the third coup or the fourth
in the two months since I’d arrived up north, and anyway, talk
of coups was a very complex thing because you had bloody coups
and bloodless coups and attempted coups and aborted coups and
averted coups and rumored coups and the coups that happen that
nobody knows about except you go to the post office one day to
mail a letter to your retired mother in Florida to say
everything’s getting all blown out of proportion in the
Western media and there’s a new general-president smiling at
you from the stamp like somebody who’s gotten away with
something big, and also there were the couvre-feus, which is
pronounced somewhat like “coup” but means you can’t go out at
night or you’ll be shot, which should not be confused with
coups de grâce, which is how chickens were killed for dinner.
All of this is to say that every three weeks the country was
erupting into general mayhem from the capital to Korhogo,
producing very little change except for a mounting body count
and the ulcers growing in my stomach. Oh yes, there was also
the matter of a few towns in the far north like Kong and
Tengréla that had declared themselves independent states and
were being deprived of all services by Abidjan in an apparent
attempt to siege them into submission. There was also the
small matter of the new guns the traditional hunters and witch
doctors were showing off in the villages, shiny AKs that they
said came from Mecca, and other small matters such as the
Christian military kicking in people’s doors like storm
troopers and beating old women, and the list could go on for a
very long time, but after I locked the door behind Ama Méité,
I went inside to call the Potable Water International office
in Abidjan-my organization-for an update and found that the
line had been cut, which wasn’t reassuring. Then I sat on the
couch and fiddled with the shortwave’s antenna. Just as I was
able-with many strange maneuvers of my arms like a
semaphore-to draw in the BBC, where the female announcer was
calmly saying in her lovely British voice, “… rebel forces
in the Ivory Coast …,” all the power was cut and then I
was suddenly very alone in a dark and quiet house in what the
U.S. embassy security officer had referred to just weeks
before as “the most unstable city in the country.” I switched
the shortwave over to its batteries. Of course nothing
happened. I turned the radio over. The cover to the battery
compartment was missing, and so were the batteries. One of the
girls knew where they were no doubt, as one of them was out in
the bush right now, humming softly as she dug a new latrine,
working to the music playing from her battery-powered
Walkman.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Whiteman
by Tony D’Souza
Copyright © 2006 by Tony D’Souza.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Harcourt Trade Publishers
Copyright © 2006
Tony D’Souza
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-1510-1145-1
