Fulfilling Our Foray

It was Gamaliel Harding who brought back the biggest trophy from that trip. I caught malaria. Theophile Karamm grew a heel blister the size of a guinea-fowl egg.

But Gamaliel, who had backed down and wouldn’t dare run his Land Rover up north (it’s tooo hard to get parts now), Gamaliel who made us take Theophile’s red, Toyota jeep up into the arid bush (after one thirty-mile return jaunt to recover his sleeping pillow), Gamaliel who is probably the only African drummer to have played with Charlie Parker, Gamaliel the pure socialist brought back (eventually) an object of worth and beauty.

Theophile was of the third generation of Lebanese traders, reared in Britain away from trade, safari-minded. He wanted an African elephant — no matter how strongly Mr. Marx’s black cameradoes were fighting to prevent him.

So we went right into the bush, far north into the bush up a trail that near the rare villages would be no more than a path through the maize, to a village that seemed at the end of the line, whose mosque was not even a mud one but a keyhole of riddled logs on the dry earth, a lightly raised pattern on the bare rug of the village earth — earth far from Medina.

“That road he be France,” said John Yarro, our guide.

Theophile had selected him and set his first duty: to direct Gamaliel to Lagadouga, where Gamaliel had been told he could obtain a true African xylophone, tuned to the proper mode, with calabash gourds as resonators.

“France, you lazy bugger,” said Theophile, “you mean high-up Volta. France he be civilized. But I thank you, my friend. If ever I want to make a dash out of here, I’ll know where to come. A dash clean into more of America’s strategic space. Very good, Branansi, now where’s Lagadouga. Which road be him, John Yarro?”

John Yarro smiled and pointed out a track, running west, and Gamaliel left along it, in the Toyota. Theophile waved goodbye as though he didn’t expect to see it again. “Watch out for my capitalistic tires,” he shouted at its red back.

“Gawd, if there’s a prize for slipshod, we’ll be awarded it,” Theophile said.

We began the hunt early the next morning. John Yarro directed us, wearing an Olympics T-shirt and bearing Theophile’s borrowed rifle. No firearms were permitted down in the capital, or in any of the large cities, because of the Redeemer’s fear of CIA plots. We had stopped in a northern market town and borrowed two guns from an old trader who remembered Theophile’s grandfather and thought us mad, although he was too polite to say it. He also lent me an old pair of canvas boots. Theophile put his trust in black riding boots.

I bore that shotgun and consoled myself with the thought that the white grandfathers, between 1880 and 1910, had destroyed two out of Africa’s three million elephants and that, in the best of times, there had never been many in this part of the continent. It was difficult to think of a reason why we were there; all I felt was thirst and that something absurd was going to happen. We were headed for a river.

I don’t know if Theophile thought we were really going to find something there or not, but he walked well. We kept to a trail and he walked steadily. The land was dry and crackling. I could only recognize a few of the trees. They were all stunted. At times birds went up from them, and up from the dried grass, dust-coloured birds, but we ignored them. We must have walked fifteen miles before we came to the river and we had talked little. John Yarro had explained where he had learned his English — on the coast in Takoradi when he had been a chainman for a surveyor crew. Theophile mentioned conserving the water several times, but drank most of it from the canteen. He enquired of my feet. We arrived at the river after about three hours of walking and saw at once that there wasn’t enough water around its rocks to fill a sponge.

“What the bloody hell,” enquired Theophile.

I was thinking of the twelve or more miles we would have to walk back. I took off my boots to stuff them with grass.

“There’s not enough water there to rub down a Mini,” Theophile stated. “There’ll never be an elephant there in your life. You’ve been watching too much cinema. Idiot.”

“Come off it,” I said. “You’ll frighten Samba away.”

But Theophile was seriously infuriated. He always spoke to his steward and driver as would a Sir Willoughby Patterne, but now he was unusually harsh. It was as though, after the generation and a half of playing cricket and smoking French cigarettes, unexpectedly, a bolt of Manchester mammy-cloth had been dumped into his hands; mere cloth instead of the long, long-awaited ivory tusk, the blood dripping tusk. John Yarro didn’t cringe, nor did he reply; until finally, quite a while after Theophile had called him foolish, he blinked his eyes and replied that in two or three moons the elephants would come there in multitudes.

Yes, he said that; I wrote it down when we got back.

“Oh, no master. You be completely wrong. Two three moons he go come here plenty.”

Moons.

When I had finished stuffing the canvas boots with river grass we started to walk back. Once John Yarro dug down about ten feet into the earth and came up with a liquid-bearing root, white and sweet. But still our throats dried down to our stomachs. When we came within a mile of the village and passed a girl bearing a gourd of muddy water we drank it.

We came back along the trail the surveyors had made, before they had taken John Yarro down to the coast with them.

I lay under the baobab tree the rest of the late afternoon, the baobab tree of the chief, who sat there also with his wife and a granddaughter of about two. The granddaughter was suffering from kwashiorkor and no one of us moved to stop her as she stuffed her mouth with small handfuls of the dirt on which we sat. From time to time the chief leaned over and attempted to interest her in his hand hoe, a small rectangle of metal fastened to a root carved into the shape of an old man’s curled hand. She showed no interest and cried when it was time for prayers, when the holy man came from his house and faced the far distant holy places and prostrated himself in the sandy dirt on which the keyhole of riddled logs formed the bare outline of a mosque.

The next morning I went out early with one of the real hunters of the village and shot a young antelope before the sun became burning. The hunter had antelope feces tied to his old British Army shirt and we didn’t go far from the village. Then he put me to shame by showing how he could kill a monkey eighty yards away in a tree, while something kept me from even desiring to aim at the absurdly dancing, chattering, swinging family of the hunter’s victim. There was a lovely white pattern to the brown fur of the monkey he had killed, but he built a fire as the day warmed and singed off the pelt deeply so as to preserve the meat against the day.

We shared the antelope with the whole village, feasting on it and on pounded greens prepared as is the fufu of the south by constant and rhythmical strokes of a woman-size mortar and pestle. And that evening it began to rain. Gamaliel walked in four miles to get us because there was a stream he couldn’t cross. He had the xylophone lashed to the top of the jeep and was afraid of jostling it.

The jeep’s tires fell apart before we reached the Spanish trader’s town and we had to have it towed in. Of course there were no spares and we left the jeep with the trader. Theophile later arranged to have the xylophone shipped down and some tires smuggled in. He and Gamaliel rode in a taxi the 150 miles back to Accra and fought each inch of the way.

I left them at Kumasi and rode a lorry into Cape Coast. The malaria had me by then and struck me badly when we got to Abidjan, but that was on another trip, with Rachel, where we didn’t pretend to be on safari but went third-class up into Ivory Coast and enjoyed ourselves through Bouake and Bobo-Dioulasso and Sikasso; and when we got to Bamako in Mali and were settled into a small hotel where they kept two tame antelope on the second- floor balcony that ran around the inner court yard, we made love, and afterwards I told her about how the three of us had been bitter on the trip down, with the rain leaking through the roof and dripping the dye from the native blankets wrapped around the xylophone down onto our faces and turning them indigo. I with the first signs of malaria, and Theophile with a huge blister from his riding boots, and Gamaliel happy with his instrument but uncertain as to how he would use it, I suppose, in the city where people distrusted him because he spoke so much about African personality and where the young people all followed The Avengers, whose electric guitars had been purchased for them by the Minister of Defence.