slab that served as a walkway around the cabin for hours, my gaze lost in that immensity, following the waves of wind over the grasses, fixing my eyes on the little dusty whirlwinds that danced here and there over the dry earth, scrutinizing the splotches of shade at the foot of the irokos. I really was on the deck of a ship. Our cabin was the boat, not only the cinder block walls and the sheet-metal roof, but everything that had to do with the British Empire – not unlike the George Shotton, a vessel I had heard about, an armoured steamship equipped like a gunboat, topped with a roof of leaves where the British had set up the consular offices, that sailed up the Niger and the Bénoué Rivers back in the days of Lord Lugard.
I was only a child, quite indifferent to the power of the empire, but my father followed its rules as if it alone gave meaning to life. He believed in discipline in the minutest acts of everyday life: rise early, make one’s bed immediately, wash with cold water in the tin basin and save the water for soaking socks and underwear. My mother’s lessons every morning, spelling, English, arithmetic, prayer time every evening, and curfew at nine o’clock. Nothing in common with the French style of upbringing, the games of “drop the handkerchief” and freeze tag, the joyful meals where everyone talks at the same time, and in the evening the chante-fables that my grandmother used to recite, daydreaming in bed, listening to the weather vane squeaking on the roof and to the adventures of a travelling magpie flying over the Norman countryside in the book entitled The Joy of Reading. In leaving for Africa, we had changed worlds. The freedom during the days compensated for the discipline in the mornings and evenings. The grassy plain in front of the house was immense, both dangerous and alluring like the sea.
I don’t recall the day my brother and I first ventured out into the savannah. Maybe we were needled into it by the children in the village, an eclectic group including very small, completely naked toddlers with swollen bellies and near-adolescents of twelve or thirteen, dressed in khaki shorts and a shirt just as we were, and who had taught us to take off our shoes and wool socks to run barefoot through the grass. The same ones I see surrounding us in the rare photographs of that time, very dark-skinned, gangling, undoubtedly jeering roughnecks, but who had accepted us in spite of our differences.
In all probability, it was strictly forbidden. Since my father was gone all day, not to return until nightfall, we must have realized that applying the rules could only be relative. My mother was mild-mannered. She was undoubtedly busy with other things, reading, or writing inside the house to escape the afternoon heat. She had tried to become as African as she could. I suppose she must have thought there wasn’t a safer place in the world for two boys of our age.
Was it hot? I can’t recall in the least. I remember the cold in winter, in Nice, or in Roquebillière, I can still feel the freezing wind blowing through the narrow streets, cold as ice, as snow, in spite of our gaiters and sheepskin vests. But I don’t remember being hot in Ogoja. When she saw us going out, my mother made us put on our Cawnpore helmets – in reality they were just straw hats that she had bought us before our departure in a shop in the old part of Nice. Among other rules imposed by my father was wearing wool socks and shiny leather shoes. As soon as he left for work, we took them off to run around barefoot. In the beginning, I wounded my feet running on the cement floor – I don’t know why, I was always stubbing the big toe of my right foot. My mother would put a bandage on my foot, and I would hide it in my sock, and it would begin all over again.
Then one day, just the two of us went running over the straw-coloured plain towards the river. The Aiya wasn’t very wide in that particular place, but it rushed past with a mighty current, ripping clumps of red mud from the banks. The plain on either side of the river seemed endless. Here and there, in the middle of the savannah, stood tall trees with very straight trunks, which I later learned were used to supply mahogany floors to industrialized countries. There were also cotton plants and acacias that cast dappled shadows. We ran, almost without stopping, through the tall grasses that whipped our faces around the eyes, guided by the stems of the tall trees, until we lost our breath. Even today, when I see images of Africa – the vast parks of Serengeti or Kenya – I feel a thrill in my heart, it’s as if I recognize that plain we ran over every day, in the afternoon heat, aimlessly, like wild animals.
In the middle of the plain, far enough away so that we could no longer see our cabin, there were castles. Along a barren, dry patch of ground, dark red ruins of walls, the tops of which were blackened by fire, like the ramparts of an ancient citadel. Here and there, jutting up along the walls, were towers whose pinnacles seemed to have been pecked away by birds, hacked at, burned by lightning. The great walls encompassed an area as vast as a city. The walls, the towers, were taller than we were. We were only children, but as I remember them, those walls must have been taller than an adult man, and some of the towers must have been over six and a half feet tall.
We knew it was the city of termites.
How did we know? Maybe through my father, or one of the boys from the village. But no one came out there with us. We learned how to demolish those walls. We must have started by throwing a few rocks, to test it out, to listen to the cavernous sound they made in hitting the termite mounds. Then we started hitting the walls, the tall towers, with sticks, to watch the powdery earth crumble, lay bare the galleries, the blind creatures that lived in them. The next day, the workers had plugged up the cracks, tried to rebuild their towers. We struck again, until our hands were aching, as if we were combating an invisible enemy. We didn’t talk, we just kept pounding, letting out cries of rage, and new sections of walls went crumbling down. It was a game. Was it a game? We felt imbued with power. Today I don’t think of it as a spoiled child’s sadistic pastime – the gratuitous cruelty little boys sometimes enjoy meting out to defenceless life forms, tearing the legs off a beetle, crushing a toad in the door jam – but as if we were under some sort of spell that the open stretch of savannah, the proximity of the forest, the fury of the sky, and the thunderstorms had cast upon us. Or perhaps it was our way of throwing off our father’s draconian authority, returning blow for blow with our sticks.
The village children were never with us when we went out to destroy the termite mounds. That insatiable desire to demolish would certainly have astonished them. They, who lived in a world in which termites were a fact of life, played a role in legends. The termite god had created the rivers in the beginning of the world, and it was he who was guardian of the water for the inhabitants of the earth. Why destroy his home? The gratuitousness of that violence would have made no sense to them: with the exception of game-playing, any form of activity was for earning money, getting a treat, hunting for something saleable or edible. The older boys took care of the younger ones, they were never alone, never left to fend for themselves. Games, discussions, and light work alternated with no specific schedule: they gathered dead wood and dried manure patties for fuel while out for a walk, they spent hours drawing water at the wells while they chatted, they played trictrac on the dusty ground, or sat in front of the door to my father’s house gazing out into the distance, not waiting for anything. If they pilfered something, it had to be useful, a piece of cake, a box of matches, an old rusty plate. From time to time the “garden boy” got irritated and shooed them off, throwing stones, but a second later they were back again.
So we were wild, like young colonists, sure of our freedom, our impunity, with no responsibilities, no elders. When my father wasn’t home, when my mother was asleep, we would escape, the straw-coloured prairie would snatch us up. We went running as fast as we could, barefoot, far from the house, through the tall grasses that blinded us, jumping over rocks, on the dry, sun-crackled earth, all the way out to the termite cities. Our hearts were pounding, rage came spilling out with our heaving breaths, we picked up rocks, sticks, and we struck, struck, made great sections of those cathedrals topple, for no reason, simply for the pleasure of seeing the clouds of dust rise, hearing the towers come crashing down, the stick echoing on the hard walls, laying open to the light the red veins of the galleries seething with pallid, nacreous life. But perhaps in writing about it, I’m making the furore that ran through our arms as we struck at the termite mounds too literary, too symbolic. We were simply two children who had lived through the seclusion of five years of war, been brought up in a
