West Africa, March 1897
The part of Freetown where Sanie Carter lived was called Little Charleston these days. It was close enough to the port to be walking distance from the warehouses, but far enough up the hill that the air was fresh. The first South Carolina trader had built a house there not long after the last war, the others had put theirs in the same place, and with all the buying and selling that was happening in
this war, the neighborhood had grown to a small town.
Not much like Charleston, though, Carter thought as he made his way up Tubman Street. For one thing, you could stroll down a Charleston street without having to climb it. But it was a lot more than that. The people here weren’t Charleston people – most of them were from the Sea Islands and the lowland Gullah country, and while they might have warehouses and offices in Charleston, it wasn’t where they called home.
Which made it less of an enclave than a real Little Charleston might have been. Most of the rest of the town was Krio, and their language and Gullah were almost the same, and what they did was pretty much what the Gullah did. Sanie’d heard about it, and he’d once met a Krio girl that a distant cousin had brought home, but he hadn’t been prepared for what he’d seen when he finally got here.
The very day he’d arrived, even exhausted from shepherding his consignment of guns and clothing through Liberia [1], he’d known he wanted to stay. That was two years ago. He’d stayed in a dockside hotel for a while, and after he sold his second shipment, he’d bought some land and hired carpenters to build him a house on the hill. It was small next to some of the others – the richest of the South Carolina merchants seemed to have a contest going – but it was big enough for one.
And maybe now for two.
Light spilled out of the house at the top of Tubman Street, and Sanie could hear the music playing even before he set foot in the yard. There were lights and music
in the yard as well; this was a high-society dance, but it was
Gullah high society, and nobody wanted to waste a starlit night with a fresh breeze blowing. There was a scent of sweetgrass and potpourri, and pitchers of ginger-beer for the Muslims and the real thing for the Christians, and if Sanie closed his eyes, the voices sounded like they might have come from home.
There was someone he was looking for, but she found him first, dressed in royal blue and smelling of lavender. He couldn’t take her in his arms like he wanted to do, not here, but he took her right hand in both of his and bowed from the waist.
“You came,” she said, favoring him with a smile.
“I knew you’d be here.”
“Then you know more than my parents do.” She said the words lightly, but he knew they were true; Mary Jaiah was from an old, upright Krio family, and her preacher father didn’t care for dancing. He didn’t care much for Sanie either. But Mary knew her own mind, and ever since the two of them had met in church, she’d found ways.
He offered her an arm and led her to the dancing – pure Sea Islands, not one of the stately waltzes that were the fare at Krio parties or over in the British colony. They’d call it folk dancing in Charleston, much less London, but neither of them cared. “All the society dances were folk dances once,” she’d said three parties ago, or maybe it was four. “Wait twenty years – they’ll be doing this in Paris, and they won’t remember where it came from.”
That wasn’t what she wanted to talk about now, though. “What are your plans, now the war’s almost over?”
He considered as they whirled past the fireflies. “Can’t sell to the soldiers any more, but I’ve got to know some of the Coasters in Monrovia and Lagos. Fernando Po too, even Libreville.”
Smuggling and trading information, he didn’t say – there’d been a lot of both during the war. “With peace coming, this’ll be the perfect meeting place between them and South Carolina. I figure I could do well as a broker and outfitter, maybe sell some palm oil as well.”
Mary nodded gravely. “You’re staying, then.”
“I’ve told you that.”
“During the war. Plans change.”
“I’m not making any plans,” he said firmly, “that take me three thousand miles from you.”
The smile that rewarded him made the first one seem pallid.
Yes, maybe that house will be for two.
I guess it’s only fair that I’m fighting in this war, Paul Koffi thought.
After all, I helped start the damn thing.
He hadn’t meant to, of course – when he and the Sakassou council had refused to cooperate with arbitrary colonial regulations [2], starting a global war had been the last thing on his mind. But it had been their arrest and trial that had caused the socialists to leave the government, and everyone knew what Leclair and his caretaker cabinet had done after that.
Maybe that was why he’d volunteered for the
tirailleurs at the age of forty-five – no one could rationally blame him for the war, but he’d still felt an absurd need to atone for it. That wasn’t the whole reason, though. He was also a French citizen, and even if France had treated him shabbily, the Rights of Man had found their way into his bones.
Liberté, égalité et fraternité were worth fighting for, even if he might have to turn around and fight his own government for them when the war ended.
So he’d gone to the
tirailleurs – and now, when Sakassou and all of Côte d'Ivoire were under British occupation, he was still fighting.
A sound interrupted his thoughts, and he saw that his quarry was coming. There were thirty troopers marching up the track – Asante, most of them, from the British garrison. They were joking, making plans for the war’s end, not paying much attention; after all, this area was peaceful. The nearest French troops were hundreds of miles from here, in the trench line defending Senegal and the Bambara provinces; what could a routine British patrol have to fear?
Koffi fingered his rifle and looked down the line at the others – half of them
tirailleurs like him, the rest Sakassou burghers or recruits from the surrounding villages. Some of them still had French weapons; the others were armed with surplus rifles that he’d bought from the Liberians.
They were happy enough to sell guns to Sierra Leone when the British were under siege; now they’re happy to sell them to us, as long as it’s under the table and we pay in cash.
The Asante patrol had almost reached him now. He felt a pang of guilt for what he was about to do; he had nothing against these soldiers, and if he’d still been mayor of Sakassou and they’d come as traders, he’d have welcomed them to his city. But they had come as invaders to his city and his country, and they had to leave.
He put his rifle to his eye and sighted with practiced ease. “Fire,” he said, and the world exploded with noise.
“Be welcome here,” said Aguibou Tall, and ushered the desert chieftains into the chamber. They were in an upper room of the Sankoré mosque, filled with dusty volumes, and a table was laid with flatbread, goat cheese and cups of thick
eghajira.
The men gave Aguibou the barest of nods – something of which he approved, emperor though he was – and seated themselves at the table. They were veiled, which Aguibou also approved; he knew they didn’t do it for modesty’s sake, but it was still fitting that men would cover their faces before God. He regarded them as he sipped a ladle of the
eghajira, the tang of the goat cheese contrasting with the sweetness of the dates and milk.
“You have come for judgment?”
“We have, sidi.” The men at the table launched into a story of an ancient dispute over an oasis; generations ago, their two tribes had come to an agreement over its use, but one held that the land had been sold while the other argued that there had only been an
ijarah – an easement or lease – and that the right to use the oasis had now reverted to them.
“Were there documents, when the contract was made?”
“No, sidi, there were not.” Aguibou had expected that; few of the desert Tuaregs were literate, and even fewer had been when the tribes had made their pact.
“Were the words of the agreement passed down, then?”
Both men answered at once, spelling out the contract as told to them by their ancestors. The words weren’t the same, and Aguibou had no way of telling which of them remembered the pact correctly – if, indeed, either of them did.
“I will have to consult the
ulema on this,” he said; the dispute had passed beyond pure contract law, which he could judge himself, into the law of evidence or even the weighing of competing traditions. There should be more than one judge for this dispute, and the judges should be greater scholars than he was.
And besides, he reflected,
my triumph is that they’ve come to me in the first place.
Once, in the early days of the war, Aguibou’s troops had turned away Tuaregs and Bedouins at the border, lest the French chase them onto his territory. But then the front lines in the desert had moved north, and those to the south were now static by unspoken mutual consent, with the French unable to attack and the British unwilling to pay the price of pushing into Senegal or the French Sudan. There was no more danger in accepting embassies from the desert – and with France pushed out of its farcical Kingdom of the Arabs, and no one else to rule in its place, the tribesmen had grown used to taking their disputes to him.
And now, refreshed, he took the chieftains up to the minaret, where they looked out over the city while the
ulema was summoned. He could see the dark waters of the Niger, and the ancient houses, and the smokestacks of the factories in the new city to the east, selling their wares to the Malê. Somewhere in there was another embassy, not from the clean desert but from the hucksters in Ilorin. It was a part of the city that Aguibou didn’t care to think about, but he suddenly realized that it seemed less threatening.
Usman Abacar was clever when he came here and set up his embassy [3],
but he didn’t see everything. The Malê leader had thought that if he took his case to the townsmen and the industrialists, they would force Aguibou to do his bidding. But the townsmen weren’t all the people, and Aguibou too had been able to find new horizons; the men of the desert were well suited to the scholars’ and herders’ commonwealth that his father had envisioned, and they added to his strength as Usman had added to the industrialists’.
I need the factories, he thought, watching the smoke rise to the pale sky,
but I won’t surrender to them. We’ll build the future together.
The place where Sergeant Salifou Mindaoudou stood had once been a village – he could tell by the burnt remains of huts, the jumble of stones that had once surrounded a well, the thorn-fence growing out from the few places where the fire hadn’t touched it. He didn’t know whether the village had been destroyed by the advancing French or by the Sultan’s own army in retreat, and it hardly mattered now. It had been that kind of war.
There were rules, and both the French army and that of Bornu had largely kept to them, but that hardly mattered either. Three years of scorched-earth warfare, back and forth across the country, took their toll with the best of intentions. The battle deaths had been the least of it; far worse had been the privation, hunger and disease that had followed in the armies’ wake. Bornu had survived, and was even victorious, but the price didn’t bear thinking on. The wise men said that a sixth of all the people who’d lived in Bornu before the war were dead now, and the books and records confirmed that a third of the soldiers were.
And so there were villages like this one, all over the Sultan’s realm. No one knew where the villagers had gone; some were surely dead, others taken refuge with friends or strangers, still more with the armies or the labor battalions in the cities. They, and the citizens of a thousand other villages, were scattered like the dust, far beyond anyone’s ability to gather them together again. Which was why Sergeant Mindaoudou and his company were here.
They were soldiers no longer. Peace had come to Bornu; the fighting was in Algeria now, and it looked like there wouldn’t be much more to it. The army was being reduced to peacetime strength, and those who remained were being sent, troop by troop and company by company, to resettle the land. This would be home now; Mindaoudou and his men, and the camp-followers and children who trailed after them, would rebuild it together as Belloists ought to do.
At least the war taught us what Belloism was really about. In the Peace Before, as people were calling it now, it had become enmeshed in rituals and trappings; the wise men speaking at the assemblies, the ritual teachings in village squares, the sultan ostentatiously paying his labor-tax. It had taken the war for the sergeant to remember what Belloism truly was: communities working and praying together, learning from each other and teaching their neighbors. His company had become that; he wasn’t afraid to ask help from his soldiers, and at prayer, camp-followers and cooks were equal to the commander.
Mindaoudou looked around the ruined village, and he could see the others doing likewise: assessing, planning, deciding which of the myriad tasks of reconstruction would have to be done first. It seemed overwhelming, especially to those already exhausted from the last four years’ trials, but they’d survived the war, and they would survive this too.
Belloism started in places like this – villages on the frontier, communities built from barren ground. We will restart it here. Together.
_______
[1] See post 1924.
[2] See post 1133.
[3] See post 1644.
