Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? Read Free

to the recently pacified territory of Ivory Coast, while Bokar was left to languish in a school way out in the bush on the edge of the desert. It was here he was to commit suicide several years later. Hakim received the news of his death like a slap in the face. Ever since, there had never been a lack of opportunities—mainly French civil servants come to bury their youth under the sun in the colonies. But Hakim had never given in. He knew he would bring death to those who got too close. He cut short Karamanlis’s shallow chatter by suggesting they go and listen to some music at the compound of King Koffi Ndizi.
    Under the terms of a treaty signed two years earlier, the French had paid King Koffi Ndizi one hundred rolls of assorted fabrics, one hundred barrels of gunpowder, one hundred shotguns, two sacks of tobacco, six two-hundred-liter casks of brandy, five hats, a mirror, an organ, four cases of liqueurs, and three skeins of coral. In exchange for all that, they whittled down his power. Fortunately for Koffi Ndizi, his fetish continued to strike awe in his subjects, who, among other things, made him offerings of concubines, oxen, sheep, and fowl. His compound was a maze of courtyards and huts into which at least one hundred and fifty people were squeezed. Of an evening, his slaves served roast meat and carp fried in palm oil to almost a thousand admirers while his griots delighted the ear with music from koras and balaphons . On this particular evening nobody was in a mood to listen to them. Nor even badmouth the French, which was normally their favorite occupation. Two subjects dominated the conversation: the sudden death of Monsieur Desrussie and the arrival of the oblate. On the surface, the two events were unconnected. However, on second thought, who gained to profit from this death? Wasn’t it the oblate who very likely would be appointed director of the Home? A woman, director of the Home, and a black woman into the bargain? Come now!
    Exasperated, Hakim pushed his way to the royal dais. Koffi Ndizi was overweight, susceptible to inexplicable bouts of suffocation that alarmed him a lot. Like Hakim, he was in no mood to listen to the nonsense from his entourage. Three nights in a row, Zokpou, his senior fetish priest, had had dreams of ill-omen. The first night he had seen vultures swooping down on an impala and devouring it raw. On the second night an anthill over fifteen feet tall had suddenly crumbled into dust. On the third night the Ebrié lagoon was dyed red with blood. Zokpou had concluded that a succession of moons, portents of strange events, would be seen in the kingdom. But what would happen, he did not know. He did know, however, that for once it would not be the fault of the French. Besides, what more could they do? They had already turned Koffi Ndizi into a toothless, maneless lion.
    Koffi Ndizi motioned to Hakim to approach. He liked the schoolteacher, always ready to run down his enemies, the French. He was well familiar with his tendencies, but was easygoing, having groped a good many boys in his youth. Together with incest, sodomy is a king’s privilege. For two years he had been plotting unsuccessfully to overthrow Thomas de Brabant, the governor’s deputy, a poker-faced individual who had two obsessions: building roads and railways. Next to the Romans, de Brabant would say, the French were the people who best realized the importance of roads. He was responsible for countless fathers being snatched from their homes to break stones under the sun. Koffi Ndizi and Hakim had tried to hide a mamba in a drawer of his desk and bribe his cook to poison his meals. Once they had buried a doll in his image in the entrails of a black cat. Nothing doing!
    Hakim sat down on a corner of the mat he was offered and recounted his latest readings, for the king, however much a king, could neither read nor write. In India, the British did not attack the traditional authorities. They formed