Whiteman Read online

  Contents

  Title Page

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  AFRICA UNCHAINED

  THE LAHOU BIRDS

  L’ÉTUDIANT

  THE FRANCOLIN HUNTER

  DJAMILLA

  SABINA

  SUSTAINABILITY

  BAMBA

  WU DIDI

  SOGBO’S WIFE

  COLORS

  PETITE AFRIQUE

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright © 2006 by Tony D’Souza

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhco.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  D’Souza, Tony

  Whiteman/Tony D’Souza.—1st ed.

  p. cm

  1. Americans—Côte d’lvoire—Fiction. 2. International relief—Fiction. 3 Political violence—Fiction. 4. Côte d’lvoire—Fiction. 5 Race relations—Fiction 6. Muslims—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3604.S66W48 2006

  813’ 6—dc22 2005025459

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-101145-2 ISBN-10: 0-15-101145-1

  eISBN 978-0-547-35078-3

  v3.0515

  For Hélène,

  in regret

  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.’

  “Amim, 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. “Iniche, 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 Dali 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 Hike 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.

  To make a long story shorter, I had to go out. For one, I was hungry, and for two, I wanted to know what was going on. I got on the bicycle we kept at the house and pedaled out into the city, chased by the vast throng of my neighbors’ kids hurrying barefooted and bare-bodied over the piled trash and foamy sewage rivulets of our street, shouting after me, “Everybody! Everybody! Regards! Regards! It’s the whiteman! Toubabou! Toubabou! Le blanc! Coutoubou! Crazy!”

  The best thing about the coups was the opportunity the lawlessness afforded an otherwise-subdued people to have some real fun. I turned onto one of the three paved roads in town and started down to the city center scattering sheep and goats and chickens and beat-up and mangy dogs and children and women carrying huge loads of firewood on their heads as I went. A long chorus of “Regards le blanc! Coutoubou! Crazy!” shouted by even the adults for a change kept me company and then I came onto a large gathering of young men watching a house burn down. They seemed very excited and happy to see me, so much so that they decided to block my way, their chests glistening with the sweat brought out by the heat of the fire. A leader stepped out from the crowd, set apart from the others, typically, by his massive size, and also by the rainbow-colored clown wig he wore like some kind of insignia of rank—who knows where he got it. I wondered then what this minor general would decide to say to me.

  “Whiteman!” he decided to say.

  “Oui, je suis blanc. Ya rien je peux faire. Papa blanc, mama blanche. Done, je suis blanc.”

  “C’est ça! C’est ça! C’est toujours comme ça! You are white and I am black. There is nothing we can do,” he said with enthusiasm, and we shook hands to seal the agreement.

  “The fire is pretty, is it not?” he asked me, and I had to agree because after all it was: a two-story pillar of flame rising up from the gutted shell of a one-story house. It lifted its roaring face into the cloudless and suddenly beautiful sky.

  “Whose house was that?” I asked him as we appraised this work.

  “A swine-fucking policeman’s,” the young man told me.

  “And who lit it?”

  “We did,” he said, and thumped his chest.

  “Yes, it’s very beautiful,” I said.

  The young man turned to me. He glowered under the wig, a completely different person now: the person who had lit the fire. He said, “You are French.”

  “No, I’m American,” I assured him, glad for a change to actually be one.

  “Not French?”

  “No.”

  “Certain?” he said, and cocked his head.

  “Yes. Very certain.”

  “Well . . . ,” he said, and looked me up and down as if unsure about what to do. “Well, that’s really great,” he said, and smiled broadly. As easily as that, we were friends again. In English, he said, “Are you fine?”

  “Yes, I’m fine.”

  “Eh? You say what?” he said, tapping his ear and making a hard-of-hearing face. “Speak more slowly.”

  I said very slowly, “I-said-I-am-fine.”

  “Yes, okay. Mama fine? Daddy fine?”

  “Yes-every-body-is-fine.”

  “Yes, okay. Sister fine, brother fine?”

  “Yes-every-body. Every-body-is-fine.”

  “I speaking English.”

  “You-speaking-good-English.”

  Then he puffed up his thick chest and looked around the mob to make sure they had seen and heard his linguistic display, and why not? None of them could do it. Then he was back in French again. “You know Michael Jordan?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “You know Jean-Claude Van Damme?”

  “Yes. Him, too.”

  “Me, I want to go to America,” he pronounced. “You will take me when you go?”

  “Yes.”

  Then he said, “Your bicycle is very pretty. Here in Africa, we don’t have bicycles such as this. I admire your bicycle very much. Give me your bicycle. A gift.”

  “Unfortunately,” I said at the prospect of having to travel at the same speed as everyone else on a day like this, “I have to go and see my friend. The older brother of my great, great friend in fact. I have to pay him many respects. Also, his mother, who is very old. Also, their quarter’s imam. The house is very far away, so I need the bicycle. Please forgive me for being so rude. Tomorrow, I will see you and I will definitely give you the bicycle.”

  “Tomorrow, hey? So, whiteman, you know our ways, is it? Well,” the young man the size of a bull and wearing a clown wig and surrounded by a crowd of other young men standing before a house they had destroyed said to me with a smile, “no problem then. Tomorrow we’ll meet and you will give me the bicycle. A gift.”

  “Tomorrow,” I assured him. “Don’t worry. I won’t forget!” I pushed past him, and the crowd of them parted and let me go.

  “Hey, whiteman!”

 
“Yeah?”

  “Have a good time!”

  At first, I pedaled away at a regular speed because we were friends and everything was normal, wasn’t it? Then, away from them, I pedaled as fast as I could. Down by the big intersection where the meat vendors in their shacks lined the roadside among their hanging sheep carcasses and pools of blood, a troop carrier full of grim soldiers holding rifles upright between their knees came barreling along, and I tumbled out of the way and into a gang of goats. Not bothering to brush myself off, I kicked the goats away, hopped back on the bike, and rocketed down the opposite alleyway. When those soldiers met that mob, I guessed it would probably turn out bad. I thought it best to leave them all to it.

  First, I went to the bank, the reason I had come in to Séguéla from my village in the bush. The heavy metal doors were shuttered and the long iron bar with the padlock as big as my chest was drawn down across them as though the bank would never open again. It wasn’t really a very big building. Now it looked like the most secure shoe box in the world.

  A very old man in rags was lying on the steps with his eyes open. He looked like a scrap of trash, like someone had tossed him there. First I thought he was dead, but then he turned his head, hacked, and spit, something I understood he’d been doing for a while because of the running gob of spit dripping down the steps beside him like raw egg whites. When he noticed me looking, his bearded face brightened as though something funny had just happened. He said loudly in excitement, “Hey! A whiteman!”

  “Allah noya kay,” I said to him, ‘God soothe your illness,’ and he said back to me, “Amina, Toubabou-ché,” ‘Thank you, whiteman.’ I knew from the filthy rags he wore that he was wildly insane. Though the insane were mostly left to fend for themselves in this part of the world, they were also treated with courtesy. If you ever bothered to ask them a question, sometimes you’d even get a useful answer. “Papa,” I said, “what’s going on with the bank?”

  “The bank? This bank? This bank behind me? Ha ha! It’s closed!”