The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,73

capital, there was a United Nations man who was doing work on epidemics. Epidemics were strange things, he said. In the beginning they swept everything before them; later, for no discernible reason, the virus or disease moderated. This had happened with syphilis. It was as though the virus feared that if it killed everybody it would destroy itself, since it would have no one to infect. Something like this seemed to have happened with Houphouët’s crocodiles. They were no longer feared; people lived more easily with the idea of the thing, which as a result appeared to lose its power.

In any event the ritual could hardly survive its founder. It was built around his need. And it was as though with his death much of Houphouët’s grandeur had disappeared into thin air. The airport still carried his name; so did the big orange-coloured stadium on the edge of the lagoon in Abidjan, and the stadium was also hung with a very big photograph of the man. But something like bad magic was about to befall that stadium. Some weeks after I left the Ivory Coast there was a calamity during the football match against Malawi. A wall fell (too many people perhaps); the police for some reason fired tear gas at the panicking crowd; and in the mêlée sixty-nine people died. It would not be easy for Houphouët’s name to recover. Already, even before that tragedy, people were ready to speak less reverentially about the king and were ready at the same time to dismiss as Togolese the rituals that had once been used to perpetuate the rule of the crocodile master. (Houphouët’s wife came from Togo.)

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IN 1982, when the crocodiles and the meat-eating turtles were the draw in Yamoussoukro, the cathedral existed only in outline, with the dome (intended to be higher than the dome of St. Peter’s) only a few curving lines in metal. There was nothing more to see. Now the cathedral was what visitors were taken to Yamoussoukro to see. It was, indeed, a creation, beautiful and unexpected and staggering. It echoed St. Peter’s in its dome and its tall outside columns. In some accounts it had cost 300 million dollars; in some it had cost 400 million; and there were vain local people who said, boastfully, but without truth, that it had bankrupted the country.

The steps to the plinth were of white marble from Italy, and the floor was a Roman design in coloured marble. Below the famous dome the strong tropical glare was softened by very tall French stained-glass windows in blue and purple that ran from the floor to the dome. At the far end was a copy of Bernini’s baldaquin in St. Peter’s (which had itself been partly made from bronze impiously stripped from the ancient Roman Pantheon, a full fifteen hundred years after Hadrian’s reconstruction of the burnt-out original). A notice asked pilgrims and visitors to be silent: we were in a house of God.

It was quite desolate outside. The columns of the porch framed extensive flat gardens: shrubs trimmed low to fill a European-style design. Various comparisons came to mind. It could have been a pastiche somewhere in the United States. For its costliness—and thoroughness—it could have been Houphouët’s Taj Mahal.

The architect had left out a device whereby cleaners or their brooms could have got up to the coffered ceiling between the high columns of the porch. Cleaners couldn’t get up, but tropical spiders could: they had begun to create noticeable brown webs up there. Elsewhere, between one column of the porch and the outer skin of the dome a fair-sized piece of stucco had fallen off, revealing the metal armature. Much complicated scaffolding would be needed before that could be put right; perhaps it never would be. It was possible that this was how it would be nibbled away, this piece of vainglory of the forest king. A woman guide said that on Sundays up to nine hundred people came for the services. This might have been so; but until the government moved the capital the hundred and fifty miles from Abidjan to Yamoussoukro (as was projected) there could be no rooted community in the forest town. Even then there would be much to do. Hidden from the cathedral and its gardens were moraines of uncollected garbage that lay in all the streets of the town: Africa reclaiming its own.

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AS MUCH as on his magic Houphouët’s rule had depended on the support of the French. In 1982 there was