The Masque of Africa Page 15

  That was the first part of the story: the presentation and verification of the witness.

  “My grandmother told my mother that the Ivory Coast president and king, Houphouët-Boigny, went to the high priest and asked for eternal power.” Ivory Coast was next door to Ghana, and similar in many ways. “You should know that the Ivoirians believe that leaders are subject all the time to psychic attacks and have constantly to be purified and strengthened spiritually. So Houphouët was not behaving unusually. The high priest said to Houphouët, ‘All right, you want eternal power. You will have eternal power.’ He gave certain instructions. So in the shrine they chopped Houphouët into small pieces and placed him in a pot of herbs and potions and boiled it. The condition of that chopping and boiling was that Houphouët’s sister had to stand guard by the pot, until the pieces of Houphouët in the pot turned to a snake. Houphouët’s sister did as she was asked, and stayed by the fire until a big snake emerged from the pot. She grabbed the snake with both hands and they struggled so hard, snake and woman, they both fell to the ground, and Houphouët became a man again.”

  This was Richmond’s comment on the story: “The strange thing is that it worked. No one ever challenged him. He owned the whole country. So you see how he misused the power. Now with civilisation catching up with us we are not keen to pay homage to the gods.”

  The comment was puzzling to me because Richmond appeared to be saying two or three different things at the same time: misusing the power, civilisation, paying homage to the gods.

  I wanted to know whether he had relatives who had grown up in a time without education. He gave me much more than I had asked for, and what he said now was not mysterious at all.

  He said, “I have such relatives still. They are myopic in their thoughts. Reasoning and delivery is limited. They are guided only by their own experiences. Their line of reasoning is always guided by what others say or do. Everything is laid out for them, what they see or have been told, or what is traditionally done. Knowing to read and write is not enough. It is only a tool to get out there. If in our setting we are limited we can never be smart. When I was in the USA I saw how limited the average small-town American was. He was as ‘smart’ as his Ghanaian counterpart. Reasoning is limited by your setting. I am sure of that.”

  In a few words he appeared to define the dead-end of the instinctive life. So he had, after all, a gift of analytical thought; and though it might not have been fair to say so, this had perhaps come down to him from the Danish ancestor, who might have been an engineer or a military man or an administrator, a man living by logic, full of internal resources, creating a life for himself in a hard setting far from home.

  Richmond explained why the Christian church had caught on. “It was new. It had a policy of assimilation, like the French in the Ivory Coast, but the English did it in an indirect way. They offered a faith that also brought education. It weakened the traditional religion; in that way it was like Islam. The only thing that has remained intact is the chieftaincy.”

  A day or two after coming back from Kumasi he had been sent by Kojo to look for a hotel site on the east-west Cape Coast, where all the ancient forts and castles were.

  Richmond said, “I went to the office of the traditional chief and saw the homage the people were giving him by bowing. I only offered my hand because I am not from his clan and I am educated. But indigenous people will bow low to him. The land of the ancestors is held by the chiefs as custodians. You have to give gifts of schnapps to tell them that you recognise their authority. If we buy the land the paramount chief will give the money to the clan chiefs and they will distribute to the families that make up the clan.”

  I said, “The other day you told me your brother said it was a curse to be born in Africa.”

  “It is a passionate statement. Being born in Africa is like being born in ignorance. We are indolent. Yesterday I encountered a very embarrassing situation. The chief I went to see lives in a finished building, but it faces a public toilet. The chief saw nothing wrong. I did not want to offend him by telling him that he was living by the cesspit. If I had sat there two more hours I would have gone to hospital, but he was comfortable. That is why I say the white man, bad as he was, brought enlightenment. We have a proverb that the man who has gone nowhere thinks his mother’s soup is the best.”

  7

  I HAD TOLD Pa-boh that I wanted to see his Gaa high priest. Later I had thought that I didn’t really need to, but it was too late to withdraw. And then Pa-boh said he was coming to see me on Sunday at midday to take me to see the high priest. He couldn’t do it earlier on Sunday because in the morning he would be conducting a service at his church.

  He came as he said. I was in the hotel dining room. His appearance there was startling. He wore a white gown with wide strips of purple. (White, as he had told me, was what the high priests of his traditional religion wore. The purple, which he didn’t tell me about, was more complicated. It went back to classical days in the Mediterranean, when purple, an expensive colour, indicated high rank for both Romans and Carthaginians, and then was taken over by the church. It had a history, Pa-boh’s purple.) He had a silver necklace which was engraved with something about Jesus.

  He was aware of the impression he was making in the busy hotel dining room. He had a little smile on his lips, like a star who wished to play down his fame. I asked him who designed his white gown. He was pleased to be asked. He said the gown had been designed by an elder of his church. So, as I suspected, it had been designed—especially the broad purple band on the left of his heart.

  He didn’t want to eat anything, although he had been preaching for much of the morning; and I thought (since the traditional side of his religion was so full of taboos and portents) it might have been a religious prohibition against eating before a certain time of day.

  What I couldn’t tell Pa-boh was that I had developed nerves about making this trip with him. My friend, Patrick Edwards, the Trinidad ambassador in Uganda, had told me that I should be careful of religious people in this part of the world. Patrick, the ambassador, had told me that it wasn’t only the poor who had to be careful. He had a story from Nigeria. A professional person had been abducted and couldn’t be found. The family of the abducted man had gone to no less a person than the Oni of Ife, and after some time they had heard from the Oni that the abducted person, now dead, was “lying” in a shrine somewhere.

  This gave another idea of what a shrine was. It was one of those words I thought I knew and had not, as it were, researched. I remember, in the early days of preparing for this book, asking a university lecturer in Uganda to come with me to a shrine. She had given a little cry of horror and said no. Other memories had come to me: a shrine was, someone else had told me, a place where body parts might be found scattered about.

  It was because of this anxiety I had asked Richmond to come with me to Pa-boh’s base. I needed his company and his local knowledge. Richmond knew the language of the Gaa, and had some idea of the religion.

  In the beginning this precaution had seemed excessive, especially when I thought of Pa-boh’s face. He was driving ahead of us in a yellowish old Mercedes to show the way. His ecclesiastical dress showed; his face, when I caught sight of it, seemed set in a smile, above the spin of his wheels. I was trying to memorise the journey, in case we had to come back on our own. Our drive, when we left the hotel and were on the highway, was in the full sunlight of midday. No worry there; and no worry a little later when we were passing the cheerful red roofs of a new development where Nigerians, richer than Ghanaians, had been buying property, to secure their wealth, in a country less hectic than their own, and with more municipal regulation.

  But then we turned off the highway, entered a gated area, left it, and turned and turned again. The roads became narrow and crowded and began to twist. Ghanaians are people of municipal order; but now this order began to break down. The shops were little more than boxes, every owner painting his box in a strong flat colour. Me
morising the route became impossible; I gave up.

  The people on the streets made me think of something Pa-boh had said at our first meeting. I had asked whether Accra, the name of the capital, had a meaning. (For black people in Trinidad a word that sounded like it meant a kind of food.) Pa-boh said, “The real word is nkrah, or soldier ants. The Ashanti said they were going to push us into the sea, but they could never conquer us. They attacked us on 7 May 1826, but we just kept coming and coming. So the Ashanti called us nkrah, soldier ants.”

  The people here did indeed create something of that impression. They were Gaa, Richmond said, Pa-boh’s people. You couldn’t do much with them. Whatever you did for them, they went back to their old ways. He said, “They are comfortable.” It was one of Richmond’s words: it meant that the people we were seeing needed little, and it was foolish to give them more. The chief on the Cape Coast Richmond had talked to a few days before—the man who had built his house in front of a cesspit and had no idea what he had done—this man, as Richmond had said, was comfortable.

  At a big, right-angled turn in the road or lane, in front of a whitewashed wall that was extraordinary in its pretensions after what we had been seeing, Pa-boh’s Mercedes stopped. It stopped in the shade of a tree and next to three or four big water butts in black plastic. The water was for sale, in small quantities; the buyers would have been local people, comfortable (to use Richmond’s word) with this arrangement. We parked next to Pa-boh’s Mercedes, and Pa-boh, in his designer Christian costume, and with the little smile on his lips, told us we had come to the “palace” of the high priest of the Gaa cult.

  He wished us to be impressed, and the palace and the wall did make an impression of size and style. But as soon as you began to look at the detail you saw that it was tawdry, in keeping with the area, and, though unfinished, already somewhat run down.

  We followed Pa-boh through the iron gateway into the bare palace yard. From here I could see more clearly that there was an area of vegetation, a strip of trees, a narrow piece of woodland at the side of the yard, beyond the palace wall. This would have been where the shrine was; and though the green would have been welcome a little while before in the mess and crowd of the neighbourhood, now, thinking of it as a place that might be used for special rites, I saw it as menacing.

  A side gate in the wall led to the grove. Women were not allowed to enter here.

  The front door of the white palace was ajar. Various people were waiting for us inside. And since this was a palace, and in palaces in this part of the world there were usually big colour photographs of the ruler and his visitors, there were painted portraits here, such as sign-painters might have done, of three generations of the Gaa high priest. They were strong, heavy-featured men, bearded, in white gowns, and they all held the little brooms that marked them as religious cleansers. They were all barefooted; this was another sign of their religious importance.

  The high priest was not in the palace. He had been called out, but he had sent a message on his mobile that he was coming, and bringing some people to see me.

  There was a dignified old chief who had been waiting for some time. I don’t know what story Pa-boh had told him; but it was enough to keep him quiet. He had dressed with care, in a lilac or purple silk gown, and he had white bangles. Below the bangles there were tattoos or markings on his skin; and he also had flat earrings of thin gold. His hair was done with some style. He could certainly have been expecting some schnapps, and perhaps a gift of money.

  I was irritated with myself for being where I was. Pa-boh in his conversation had given all that I needed. I didn’t need more. Twenty years before, in the Ivory Coast, in my dealings with magicians, I had understood that beyond a certain stage there was no place for simple inquirers; local magicians didn’t understand. And it wasn’t fair to them. Their faith mattered to them. They didn’t like to think it might be mocked.

  Pa-boh looked irritated too. He was irked by the presence of Richmond, who understood everything. But neither my irritation with myself, nor Pa-boh’s with me, matched the irritation that the old chief in the lilac or purple gown (who understood that I was not a true believer) was exhibiting towards Pa-boh, who might have misled him about the visitor, might have appeared to promise some reward, and involved him in this waste of time, without even the likelihood of a bottle of schnapps at the end.

  A curving wooden staircase led up from the ground floor. It led nowhere. There was no upper floor, only glimpses of rough brickwork and electric wires. I thought the staircase might have been inspired by something in a film and had been done to give an extra touch of grandeur to the palace, but Pa-boh said that that they were going to create a space up there for “archives.”

  The men in the room began to look grumpy. They had good reason. They had expected me to come alone. The presence of Richmond upset them. Richmond had already begun to tell me what they were talking about. I felt all of this was adding to my get-away bill.

  Pa-boh sensed that the situation was deteriorating. He decided to hurry things up. His demeanour changed. He gave a bow of great depth to the people in the room and addressed them. He explained who we were and what we wanted.

  At every courtesy I felt myself sinking deeper and deeper.

  There now appeared a tall man with light eyes and a strange paunch, high and round and stiff-looking. This man was the oracle-priest, the deputy to the high priest. He said nothing when he came in. He only drew up his legs on to his chair—he too, to my alarm, was barefooted—and looked at me in an assessing way.

  I felt undermined. I thought we should leave. Our bill here—our hongo, so to speak (to use the nineteenth-century Uganda word for a tax on travellers)—appeared to be going up and up. And Richmond, with all his cynicism, agreed.

  When they tried to close the door of the palace, I said, “No.”

  I went to the door. It hadn’t been locked. I made my way out; Richmond followed me. The iron gate at the front of the yard hadn’t been closed. That was a bit of luck. Once we were out on the squalling street next to Pa-boh’s car and the black water butts I felt free. We drove away, but not back to where we had come from. We followed the curve of the road in the other direction; and after a while we saw the other end of the green strip, the big shrine area, that had begun at the white palace.

  We left Pa-boh to pick up the pieces. It wasn’t fair, but it was something he could do, and do well. He thought of himself as a man possessed; important spiritual forces guided him.

  Twice in the next week he left messages for me at the hotel.

  8

  AT THE end of the year there was going to be a presidential election. Kojo took me to meet Nana, the man most likely to win. He was intelligent, full of charm and urbanity. His colour posters were everywhere in Accra.

  There was another man, though, who couldn’t be a candidate, because he had been president twice before and constitutionally couldn’t run again. This man was Flight Lieutenant Jerry Rawlings. He had led two coups in two and a half years, nearly thirty years before, and had twice in that time returned the country to civilian rule. Later he had ruled Ghana for eighteen years. As revolutionary and ruler he would be a ghost-like presence at whatever new presidential feast was coming up.

  There wasn’t much about him in the newspapers, but he was there. Richmond’s friends, when they spoke of this man, attributed extraordinary qualities to him; they said he was what the country needed; if he hadn’t done all that he might have done during his eighteen years in power it was because “bad” people surrounded him.

  In this way Jerry Rawlings, even while he lived, with a pleasant house in Accra and another house in the country, was becoming mythical in Ghana, more mythical and more mysterious than Nkrumah could ever be; just as in Bengal in India in the late 1940s the nationalist Subhas Chandra Bose became mythical after his death: with many sightings reported, the man who could solve all the problems of Bengal and India, if only by some trick, some great act of faith, or prayer, or na
tional penance, he could truly be returned to the living. It happens like this in some religions too: a great leader dies, and the grief generated by his loss turns to a widespread conviction that the great leader is not dead but only in “occlusion,” still watching from his new position on high, his vision greater than before.

  The Rawlings story lent itself to myth. He was born in 1947, his mother Ghanaian, his father Scottish. He was a big and handsome man, and was the first man of mixed origin to become a political leader in Ghana. He had gone to good schools. Later he had joined the Ghana air force. He loved flying; he became a flight lieutenant. He came to power in a way that was full of romance and drama. As an air force officer he, greatly daring, had thrown in his luck with an anti-government coup. The coup had failed, and he was charged with treason. During his trial he made a remarkable speech about the corruption of the government. It was a brave thing to do; anything might have happened to him; institutions in Ghana, especially after Nkrumah, were still shaky. But in his speech he had spoken for much of the country; and his bravery on that day in court was his making as a politician. He was jailed on the treason charge, but he didn’t stay long in jail. In the very next month some junior officers successfully brought about a coup. They freed Rawlings, and he declared himself head of state.

  For four months after that he sought to cleanse the country of its bad elements among officials, army people, business people. He then returned the country to civilian rule. It was his romantic idea: if you cleaned a country up, it looked after itself. But people and countries were more complicated than he thought; and a year later he led another coup against the people he had placed in power. This time he stayed in charge. Nine years later he gave Ghana a new constitution. He served for two terms as a constitutional president, and then was voted out.

  He had been out of office for eight years, but his myth still held. He was the man who had risked his career and perhaps life to serve the people. He had handed back power twice. If he had failed it was only because he had been surrounded by bad people.