The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,72
chickens, and he carried a long thin knife. He ran the dark limber blade between the metal uprights of the rail at the edge of the water. It made a scraping, clacking sound. This was the signal to the crocodiles that it was feeding time, and they swam towards the two or three big rocks, like places for basking, that were just next to the rail and the white-gowned feeder.
The meat in the bucket was thrown to them; some of it went to the meat-eating turtles that could be seen swimming below the surface of the water. It was the turn then of the chickens. The spectators on the causeway between the public road and the palace, or at the water’s edge between the rail and the palace wall, gave little gasps of horror. The crocodiles with their apparently smiling eyes snapped their jaws. It wasn’t always a neat kill. The crocodile’s jaws were too rigidly hinged; they couldn’t swivel or turn; and the chickens appeared to escape. But not for long. A few more snaps of the jaws, a small adjustment of the body, and the chicken that had appeared to get away could be seen as a mash of white feathers in the maw of the crocodile.
In 1982 I had seen this ritual at sunset, the proper time. Now, twenty-seven years later, I went in the middle of the day; I couldn’t wait for sunset. I remembered a planting of young coconut trees on both sides of the causeway across the lake. Coconut trees grow fast. I had expected those I had seen to be tall and beginning to be spindly. But they were not tall; perhaps the trees I had seen had been replaced; or perhaps the fetid water of the lake or moat had stunted their growth.
Perhaps the same fetid water had done away with the meat-eating turtles. I had seen them clearly in 1982, coming for their meat, swimming below the surface of the light-brown water, showing their underside, strong and silent and agile, more disturbing in a way than the crocodiles. Now in the dark water they were not to be seen. Perhaps it was this bad water that was going to do away with this ritual of Houphouët’s kingship, slowly killing or choking the crocodiles that survived. (Though I was told later that crocodiles, rising to the surface to breathe, could survive fetid water.) There was a baby crocodile, pale, two or three feet long, away from the others, resting out of the water on a concrete pier of the causeway.
In ancient Egypt the crocodile was a sacred animal; most people here looked upon it as food. In Indian mythology the earth rests on a turtle’s back. Some instinct, or the wisdom of some shaman, had led the old king to do honour to these creatures of ancient awe. But few people now, in 2009, were looking for the crocodiles in the water, though they were easy to see. Few people were present. Some young men and a strange young begging woman, possibly disturbed, passed by. The woman had a wild look in her eyes; she was more interested in the visitor than in the crocodiles. The young men were more interested in the silver helicopter which appeared over the town and seemed to be making for the presidential palace behind the ochre walls.
The guard on the causeway (he was there to keep unauthorised people away) said that the president was arriving that day, and of course he meant the new president that had come to the Ivory Coast after all the troubles that had befallen the country since the death of Houphouët.
The Romans decreed godhood for quite a few of their early emperors. But the Romans, when they made Augustus a god, also had the good sense to create a school of priests to serve the new cult. These priests of Augustus would have been people of good social standing; that, rather than piety or priestly knowledge, would have been the most important requirement. The cult wouldn’t have survived the turbulence of the next two centuries; and it would have disappeared with Christianity. I doubt whether the fact of its demise, the pointlessness of its once proud school of priests, would have been recorded.
It was possible now in the Ivory Coast to wonder how much longer a cult set up—over so many years and at such expense—by Houphouët would survive, and what form its forgetting would take.