Africa39 by Wole Soyinka Read Free Book Online Page B

before they told me what they knew. They said that Naalu’s father, fearing that I would turn her into a good-for-nothing millet-eating uncivilised northerner, had enrolled her in a Catholic boarding school to join the Order of St Bruno, the crazy nuns who committed to a vow of silence and solitude for the rest of their lives.
    Chei , I thought. Such nonsense.
    But it was not nonsense, of course, because Naalu did not return.

from a novel in progress
    Rotimi Babatunde
    The Tiger of the Mangroves
    Perhaps the sorry-looking, rat-infested boat that came in weekly from Fernando Po was to blame for the end of the affair. When the new steamships arrived hungry for the palm oil needed by the smoking factories of Europe, Chief Koko seized the moment to establish – with arms bought from his white merchant friends – a monopoly that stretched along the length of the palm coast.
    It was a relationship that benefitted both parties. The merchants got their oil, the Chie f ’s coffers swelled by the year, and the romance between the African middleman and Europe’s merchants seemed set to last for ever. But on the last leg of the trip from Europe, the boat from Fernando Po brought, along with passengers and the mail, newspapers already a month old. After those dailies brought the white merchants the good news that the resolutions of Berlin had granted the British dominion over Chief Koko’s kingdom, the merchants converted to the gospel of free trade and began grumbling about the fortune Chief Koko was raking into his palace vaults. The Crown will soon fly the Union Jack over the hinterland, Europe’s merchants reassured one another, but the months lengthened into years and yet the Crown dawdled over taking possession of the territory. As the years went by, the resentment of the merchants towards Chief Koko mounted.
    Almost a decade would pass after the deliberations in Berlin before the decrepit boat from Fernando Po finally brought over the boyish-faced fellow who couldn’t sleep in his cabin because of the crawling vermin but instead spent most of his time on the deck with the sailors. No one paid much attention to the nondescript man who stood on the boat’s prow and continued applying brushstrokes to a canvas, even after the vessel had dropped anchor and his fellow passengers were making their way down the gangplank. Only later would people come to know that the painter was no one less than Henry Hamilton, the territory’s pioneer consul, who was recording his first view of the creeks Europe considered the Crown’s because of a few signatures scribbled years earlier in Berlin.
    Chief Koko was conducting his weekly council when he received the report that Henry Hamilton was the person mandated to oversee the affairs of his nation on behalf of Her Majesty. The Chief laughed. No wonder people from Hamilton’s native land always pray that God should save the Queen, he said. Surely, the poor woman must have an appetite for sticking her nose into troubles bigger than she could handle. Why else would her subjects be forever begging God to save her from one distress or another?
    He laughed again. No other person in his royal chamber was relaxed enough to laugh along with him.
     
    Chief Koko and Consul Hamilton met under a brightly coloured parasol on a beach a long way down the coastline from the stretch where the European merchants had their warehouses. Henry Hamilton was surprised by how young Chief Koko was. The consul had been expecting a wizened warrior, like the battle-hardened sheiks he had encountered a decade earlier during his youthful travels along the fringes of the Sahara studying Maghreb art and architecture. This anticipation had been reinforced by the fat dossier containing chronicles of the Chie f ’s military and political exploits which Hamilton had been given during his briefing at Whitehall, but the beguiling face of the man scrutinising the consul with intense but tender eyes belied the fearsome portrait