The Viceroy of Ouidah Read Free

the Second Chief, painted in Bahia to celebrate his twenty-first birthday in 1837. The young mulatto dandy was shown standing in a book-lined library, wearing a blue frock-coat, a velvet cravat, and with a flowered white satin waistcoat shining over his paunch. One hand clutched at his lapel, the other fingered the diamond knop of his cane.
    The portraits of his brothers, Lino and Antonio, were also the work of the Sicilian dauber. There was a sepia photograph of Cândido, the Fifth Chief, in the uniform of an Honorary Colonel of the Portuguese Infantry. And lastly there was a framed page of the souvenir catalogue of the Paris Exhibition of 1900, where Estevāo da Silva and his son Agostinho-Ezekiel were exhibited as ‘ Fils et Petit-Fils du Négrier ’.
    Dom Francisco himself lay sleeping under his bed, in a chamber that overlooked a garden of red earth and plastic flowers where lizards sunned themselves on the flat white marble tombs. The room was the preserve of Yaya Adelina, a laundrywoman, who would allow no one to enter without permission.
    The bed was a Goanese four-poster with ebony up-rights and a headboard set with ivory medallions. But the most arresting feature was a painted plaster statue of St Francis of Assisi, his brown cassock girdled with a rope of real knots, gazing at the mildewed sheets of his name-sake and lifting his hands in prayer.
    A white marble plaque, set into the floor, read:
    FRANCISCO MANOEL DA SILVA Nascido em 1785 Brazil Fālecido a 8 de março 1857 em Ajuda (Ouidah)
    A wreath of arums bore the legend ‘Pour Notre Illustre Aïeul!’ and on a shelf stood a gilt crucifix, a yellowing Ecce Homo and a silver elephant, which was the family emblem.
    Yaya Adelina carried her veneration of the ancestor to such lengths that she kept a bottle of Gordon’s Gin open on the bed-table in case he should wake up.
    Every morning, in case he wanted to wash, she refilled the silver water-jug cast from Maria Theresa thalers that melted when a British shell fired a warehouse in the 1840s.
    From time to time she would remove the white cloth covering a rusty iron object resembling an umbrella, clotted with blood and feathers, and stuck into the floor.
    This was an Asin , the Dahomean Altar of the Dead.
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    TWO DAYS BEFORE the celebration there was a moment of alarm when Lieutenant-Colonel Zossoungbo Patrice of the Sûreté Nationale burst in on Papa Agostinho’s siesta and banned the celebration.
    The colonel was twenty-four, and had long curly eye-lashes and knife-edge creases to his green paratrooper fatigues. Two grenades, the shape of scent-bottles, were slung from his belt.
    Papa Agostinho wrapped a towel round his tummy and rocked his rocking chair, while the young revolutionary paced up and down, waving a North Korean sub-machine gun to emphasize important points:
    Family festivals, he shouted, were the barbarous and fetishistic survivals of the colonial period . . .
    But the afternoon was hot and the colonel was tired.
    His voice rose to a childish treble. He was terrified of not making the right impression and, when Papa Agostinho made a very modest cash offer, was so relieved and grateful that he allowed the Da Silvas to go ahead — on one condition (he had to make a condition): they must listen to the Presidential broadcast at eight o’clock.
    Then, with a smile of radiant innocence, he doffed his cap as if it were a schoolboy cap, and edged out backwards.
    His boot crushed a begonia as he went.
    The colonel’s visit explained the brown plastic radio blaring martial music as the guests came in to dinner.
    There was a table covered with red-chequered oilcloth. Kerosene lamps spread streams of yellow light over the aerial roots of the banyan. Two mango trees, glimmering with fireflies, cut arcs of blacker velvet in the sky.
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    NEVER, NOT EVEN in the time of Dom Francisco, had Ouidah witnessed so unctuous a