Africa39 (7 page)

Chief Koko and Mr Henry Hamilton shook hands firmly. Under a clear tropical sky and on a sunny beach lapped by the waters of the Atlantic, the two men, born at about the same time but on different continents and brought into contact by the impassive deviousness of history, sat down and began talking.

The evening after the boat conveying Hamilton towards his new post sailed out of Plymouth, the consul, tormented by boredom and the ubiquitous pestilence of cockroaches, had struck up a conversation with an old seaman stationed by the boat’s safety valve. Over copious swigs of liquor, the sailor regaled Hamilton with stories from the decades he had spent as a crewman ploughing a variety of marine craft across the seas. Punctuating these colourful narratives was the plaintive refrain of the seaman that the years had drained him of wanderlust. He wished for a transfer to a boat plying the other leg of the trip, the one from Tenerife to Fernando Po where his family lived, so he could be assured of spending a few days with his grandchildren every month.

Hamilton asked the seaman for his hometown. The old sailor replied that he was a kinsman of Chief Koko. There on the deck, over another bottle of schnapps, the consul struck a deal with the seaman. Hamilton would employ his influence to get the sailor posted to his preferred route. In return, the seaman would tutor Hamilton in the language and culture of the old man’s homeland.

Each kept his side of the bargain. During the remainder of the month-long journey, Henry Hamilton learned more every day about his destination than was contained in all of the seventeen worthless files dumped in his lap by the round-spectacled bureaucrats at the Foreign Office. On disembarking at Fernando Po, he was almost fluent in Chief Koko’s language – the nineteenth of the twenty-six languages in which Hamilton would be able to claim competence.

After their handshake, the first sentence voiced by Henry Hamilton was an obscure proverb in the Chie
f
’s mother tongue, delivered almost without accent by the newcomer whose mission was to impose dominion over the general’s homeland on behalf of a distant Queen.

I am delighted to be here, said Henry Hamilton. I have done some travelling in Africa but I have never been to this part of the Dark Continent.

My nation welcomes with peace all strangers who come visiting in peace, replied Chief Koko. He waited for the full import of his words to sink in before continuing. Many visitors from your country have told me you don’t have as much sunlight in your land as we do here.

Oh, yes. That is in a period that is very cold, much colder than anything you ever experience here. For a good part of the year the sun almost never comes out, and the weather gets so cold you need a fire to keep yourself warm.

If your people spend so much time in darkness, why do you attribute darkness to this place, where the sun always comes out, rather than to your homeland?

Henry Hamilton frowned. There are many good reasons for that, he said.

Chief Koko shrugged. From my discussions with your white brothers who visited us before you, it is clear that my people and yours see many things in this world with different eyes, he said.

Koko had learned English through his interactions with European merchants but he never spoke it at official functions, so a translator had been made available. Hamilton and Koko chatted on in the Chie
f
’s mother tongue, without recourse to the translator. The subjects they avoided were more important than the ones they discussed. Some would later say this duet of omission was tacit acknowledgement from the two men that Berlin had made dialogue redundant long before they met. So Hamilton spoke about his rafting down the Nile, whose delta was a distant sister to the creeks patrolled by Chief Koko’s canoe boys. The consul went ahead to describe his almost successful attempt to scale the heights of the Kilimanjaro, and he spoke about how delighted he was to be the discoverer of a river’s mouth near the mountain.

Were there no people living in the area? Chief Koko asked.

There is a big village in the vicinity. Two natives who knew the mouth guided me there.

The Chie
f
’s brows creased.

But how can you say you found the river’s source when others had been there before you?

Henry Hamilton was irritated by the doubts being raised about an achievement that had been gazetted by the Royal Geographical Society. I was honoured for that achievement some months ago in my country, the consul replied.

It will be more interesting to go where
nobody
has ever been, Chief Koko said. The moon, for instance.

The two men laughed, nervously.

Henry Hamilton had been casting awestruck glances in the direction of Chief Koko’s walking stick. In response to Hamilton’s curiosity, Koko mentioned the names of the creatures etched along the length of the staff. The terrifying distortions wrought on the figures violated every virtue expected of good art in Hamilton’s homeland, so the consul couldn’t understand why he had fallen under the spell of their artistry. Your walking stick is amazing, he gushed.

I am pleased to know that you appreciate its gracefulness, said Chief Koko. The carver who gave me the staff spent many months working on it.

The Chief began describing the habitats and mannerisms of the fauna carved on the staff. When the verbal safari through the delta that he was conducting for Hamilton’s benefit got to the mangrove tiger snarling at the walking stick’s head, the consul asked, Does that animal truly exist?

It is a creature much feared in my kingdom and beyond, Chief Koko replied.

Hamilton, a keen naturalist whose childhood hero was Carl Linnaeus, enquired further, Do you know of anyone who saw one recently?

Why?

As far as we know, tigers don’t exist in Africa, the consul said.

The Chief smiled. You never see it until the instant before you become its carcass. That is why it is regarded with so much fear.

The consul, dreaming of being the first European to see the legendary creature, was unrelenting. I will try to track down one during my stay here, he said.

We have a saying that only half-eaten corpses know the colour of the mangrove tiger’s eyes, Chief Koko said. He pointed the crown of his walking stick towards his chest. The mangrove tiger sitting here, the Chief added, is also one you haven’t yet seen.

They both laughed, again uneasily. For a while they said nothing, the only sound coming from the foaming waves of the Atlantic crashing repeatedly against the shoreline.

Hamilton broke the silence with a comment about the clear skies. He noted that the weather would be perfect for cricket and proceeded to give Koko an overview of the game, the almost religious devotion he had to it evident in his animated gestures.

Chief Koko’s interest in the meanings of concepts like wickets and runs and over arm bowling was negligible. What intrigued him more were the deeper rituals of cricket, which Hamilton listed out to include fair play and trust. The Chief drew correspondences between those values and the moral principles that defined the practice of age-grade wrestling, his people’s favourite pastime. Both men concluded the parallels between their national sports were indeed striking.

There was some more awkward silence. The Chief and the consul stood up and shook hands, bringing an end to the proceedings. Neither of them could have suspected that that first meeting would also be their last. And neither could have known that events triggered by that single encounter would warp the destiny of an entire subcontinent and turn the two of them into eternal enemies, yet both men, as if in common devotion to a creed that mandates the veneration of contradictions, would never stop calling each other friend.

Even after a century following that encounter between the Chief and the consul, when the landscape of the creeks no longer featured palm-oil casks floating downriver or deck-hands loading cargo into the holds of steamships, when the discovery of a different kind of oil in the delta had inaugurated a new age of pipelines and tankers and derricks flaring natural gas skywards, diverse witnesses would keep on testifying to sighting Consul Hamilton and Chief Koko at midnight re-enacting their only meeting on that desolate beach battered by the rough waters of the Atlantic. Fishermen downing gin after trawling with little profit in the polluted waters would itemise the antiquated clothes once fashionable in a previous century that Koko and Hamilton still wore, and market women would lament the anguish on the faces of the two men doomed to continue recycling the same insignificant chatter about wrestling and marine creatures and cricket every night till the wintery end of time. Soldiers guarding oil rigs would pass time by analysing the positions of Chief Koko’s canoe boys and the Crown’s constabulary, the spectral phalanxes damned for ever to keep glowering at each other from opposing sides of the principal actors. And old women would tell their grandchildren that because those unfortunate combatants and the superannuated translator were implicated by the accident of their mere presence at the seaside summit, they were bound to keep on restaging that spooky theatre as extras to their bosses, like attendants sentenced to everlasting servitude in the courts of ancient monarchs with whom they were entombed. And some historians would go as far as claiming that the meeting between Chief Koko and Consul Hamilton, like the ghostly convocations that followed it, was also a phantom one. Both men had merely been spectators at a public demonstration of their mutual impotence to tinker with the future, the scholars would say, arguing that history’s true meeting was the reception organised for Henry Hamilton by the territory’s leading European merchants.

The reception was held a week after the consul’s meeting with the Chief at the oceanfront residence of John Holt. The warehouse on the premises was the largest in the territory. Mr Holt was notorious for being so taciturn that some people joked that his mouth moved only when eating. He didn’t need to speak much. The coin in his pocket couldn’t have purchased him a return ticket when in his youth he sailed from England to begin trading in Fernando Po, and the saga of his ruthless rise from an anonymous shop assistant to the mercantile titan whose fleet steamed palm oil to Liverpool and brought back guns and gin to Africa communicated his ambition eloquently enough to all. The most important of his fellow merchants loathed one another, so Mr Holt had to do more talking than he had in a long while before he could convince them to raise the white flag as a banner to war against Chief Koko, their common enemy.

The crickets were chirping in full chorus when the twenty-seven guests began eating. The welcome dinner was enlivened by the presence of Mary Kingsley, a family friend of the Holts who was passing through town on one of her many journeys. The unapologetic woman explorer had grabbed a centre seat for herself in the stag party of the imperial enterprise, and it was the scale of her achievements that silenced the grumbling that at first dogged her activities. Her most rigid male detractors were won over by her distinction of being the first European woman to reach the peak of Mount Cameroon, but whenever her countrymen congratulated her on the achievement, she curtly replied, I was actually the third Englishman, sir.

Though Mary Kingsley had little liking for sweet potatoes, she didn’t mind them if they were buttered and browned the way Mrs Holt ensured her cooks did. As the guests tucked away the buffet of soursop with mutton and potatoes and bananas baked with rice, Ms Kingsley regaled the table with stories about her recent travels way down south in the Ogowe swamps, a place none of her fellow diners had ever visited. The explorer told them about the sword grass tramp­led into wide paths by hippo herds. Even the sternest of the merchants laughed when she called those hippos the road-makers of the region. And she went on to talk about the incident in which her canoe would have been upturned by a snapping crocodile, if not for quick-thinking by locals standing on the river bank.

The Bengas and the Krus are considerably superior in intelligence to their Bantu neighbours, Mary Kingsley said. I find it laughable when the ignorant lump the whole bunch together as primitive. But that is not to say that any other race is close in abilities to our Caucasian own, Allah forbid an utterance that untutored from me. And I say this without forgetting the frequency with which our people make shocking fools of themselves along the length of this coast.

Mary Kingsley’s speech was habitually powered by such contrary sensibilities, generating sentences equally discomfiting as reassuring. Some months earlier, confronted with the paradoxes of her tangled position on native rituals, an official at the Colonial Office had thrown up his hands in exasperation and labelled her the Most Dangerous Woman on the Other Side.

After they were done with eating, the merchants relocated to the smoking room. As usual, Mary Kingsley, who would die young while serving as a volunteer nurse in the Second Boer War, went along with the men. Mrs Holt and the other ladies went into the kitchen for tea.

Over cigarettes, the matter of Chief Koko finally came up. We were informed that your meeting with Koko went on for quite a while, one of the merchants said.

You are the representative of Her Majesty, said another merchant. It came as a surprise that you found worthwhile matters to discuss with such a knave.

Henry Hamilton squirmed.

Are you sure the Foreign Office would be delighted with your conduct? asked a third merchant. Jaw-jawing with that native scoundrel, as if he were your equal, doesn’t strike us as seemly.