The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,74

a French army base amid the coconut trees near the airport; and in many places in the Ivory Coast there were French people helping to keep Houphouët’s show on the road. The French were welcomed as investors and they were glad to come since they could repatriate ninety per cent of their profits. They ran the restaurants and they ran them well, giving the Ivory Coast its reputation for fine French food. There was an official word for these French guests who helped to create the illusion that this African state, unlike its neighbours, was on the move. The word was co-opérants; it can best be translated as “helpers.”

Even if one knew nothing about the political situation one could be worried about this French presence. It seemed that a crisis was being prepared, and after Houphouët’s death the crisis came: a very involved business, as crises in small places tend to be, not easy for an outsider to disentangle. There was a many-sided civil war: people of the country against black immigrants from the neighbouring poorer countries, a tribal war with the French on one side, with the French then retaliating against hostile Africans, and finally Africans against the French, so that yet another aspect of Houphouët’s legacy vanished. The day came in 2004 when gangs of black men roamed the streets of Abidjan looking for white people to kill.

There was, as it happened, a survivor of that day staying in the hotel. She was not white; she was of mixed descent, with an African mother and a French father; and she had a black husband. She had gone on that bad day in 2004 to fetch her children from school. A black crowd surrounded her car and pulled her out. Some instinct of self-preservation made her say she was Moroccan, and not half French. She looked Moroccan; perhaps she had been told that before, and now she said it to the crowd, and it saved her. Morocco, perhaps because of its good airline, popular with Africans, has a fair reputation in this part of Africa.

When she told the story she tapped a finger of her right hand on her pale left hand. She said, “They were looking for white skin.”

She had lived all her life in the Ivory Coast. So the experience had undermined her in many ways. It had given her such severe “palpitations” that her black husband, a diplomat, had taken her out of the country for some years. She was now back in the Ivory Coast, but the country still made her uneasy. She still feared the sight of a crowd of black men.

But black crowds couldn’t now be avoided. One Sunday there was to be an African football championship match in Abidjan, in the great orange stadium, named for Houphouët, which lay between the hotel and the lagoon. The Ivory Coast was going to play Zambia. Entrance was free. The match was going to start at four in the afternoon, but from five on Sunday morning people had begun to gather. The stadium had various entrances, far and near. Soon the crowd at each entrance made an unmoving mass; perhaps they didn’t move because the stadium wasn’t open. They looked picturesque, something for a painter of crowds, an African Canaletto: a stippling of black faces, jeans, and tee shirts orange, white or red.

At some time in mid-morning a few people appeared on some of the uncovered seats of the stadium, to the left, which I could see from my hotel window. Those people were going to wait for six hours for the match. The seats would have been hot enough already, and the great heat of the day was to come. I expected the waiting crowd now to move slowly into the stadium, but it didn’t happen like that. It wasn’t possible from my hotel room to understand all the movements of the crowd. From time to time, as the start of the match drew near, the riot police charged sections of the crowd; it was like a game. The charged crowd ran away in various directions. The stippling effect broke up, and what had looked picturesque became frightening. And then, quite quickly, the crowd reformed.

The “Moroccan” lady had seen the crowds. Later she said, “I hate football.”

The Ivory Coast lost to Zambia that Sunday. The local people couldn’t be generous to the winners, after the hours of waiting, the heat, and the occasional trouble with the police. It was easy to understand their frustration.