What Am I Doing Here? Read Free

letters, that Marxist-Leninism was the one and only guide. In front of the Presidential Palace was a road-block. A soldier waved us to a halt, and then waved us on.
    â€˜Pourriture!’ said my friend Domingo, and grinned.
    Domingo was a young, honey-coloured mulatto with a flat and friendly face, a curly moustache and a set of dazzling teeth. He was the direct descendant of Francisco Felix de Souza, a Brazilian slave-dealer about whom I was writing a book.
    Domingo had two wives. The first wife was old and the skin hung in loose folds off her back. The second wife was hardly more than a child. We were on our way to Togo, to watch a football game, and to visit his great-uncle who knew a lot of old stories about the slaver.
    The taxi was jammed with football fans. On my right sat a very black old man wrapped in green and orange cotton. His teeth were also orange from chewing cola nuts, and from time to time he spat.
    Outside the Presidential Palace hung an outsize poster of the Head of State, and two much smaller posters of Lenin and Kim II Sung. Beyond the road-block, we took a right fork, on through the old European section where there were bungalows and balks of bougainvillea by the gates. Along the sides of the tarmac, market-women walked in single file with basins and baskets balanced on their heads.
    â€˜What’s that?’ I asked. There was some kind of commotion, up ahead, towards the airport.
    â€˜Accident!’ Domingo shrugged.
    The women were screaming, and scattering their yams and pineapples, and rushing for the shelter of the gardens. A white Peugeot shot down the middle of the road, swerving right and left to miss the women, and then, we heard the crack of gunfire.
    â€˜C’est la guerre!’ our driver shouted, and spun the taxi round.
    â€˜I knew it.’ Domingo grabbed my arm. ‘I knew it.’
    The sun was up by the time we got to downtown Cotonou. In the taxi-park the crowd had panicked and overturned a brazier. A stack of crates had caught fire. A policeman blew his whistle and bawled for water. Above the rooftops, there was a column of black smoke, rising.
    â€˜They’re burning the Palace,’ said Domingo. ‘Quick! Run!’
    We ran, bumped into other running figures, and ran on. A man shouted, ‘Mercenary!’ and lunged for my shoulder. I ducked and we dodged down a sidestreet. A boy in a red shirt beckoned me into a bar. It was dark inside. People were clustered round a radio. Then the bartender screamed (wildly, in African) at me. And suddenly I was out again on the dusty red street, shielding my head with my arms, pushed and pummelled against the corrugated building by four hard, acridly-sweating men until the gendarmes came to fetch me in a jeep.
    â€˜For your own proper protection,’ their officer said, as the handcuffs snapped around my wrists.
    The last I saw of Domingo he was standing in the street, crying, as the jeep drove off, and he vanished in a clash of coloured cottons.
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    In the barracks guardroom a skinny boy, stripped to a pair of purple underpants, sat hunched against the wall. His hands and feet were bound with rope, and he had the greyish look Africans get when they are truly frightened. A gecko hung motionless on the whitewash. Outside the door there was a papaya with a tall scaly trunk and yellowing fruit. A mud-wall ran along the far side of the compound. Beyond the wall the noise of gunfire continued, and the high-pitched wailing of women.
    A corporal came in and searched me. He was small, wiry, angular, and his cheekbones shone. He took my watch, wallet, passport and notebook.
    â€˜Mercenary!’ he said, pointing to the patch-pocket on the leg of my khaki trousers. His gums were spongy and his breath was foul.
    â€˜No,’ I said, submissively. ‘I’m a tourist.’
    â€˜Mercenary!’ he shrieked, and slapped my face — not hard, but hard enough to hurt.
    He held up my fountain-pen.