The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,76

be a botanical garden. On the outer wall, freshly distempered, an enormous sign, newly done over in fancifully shaded letters at least two feet high, says that there is a garden. All that is missing is the garden.

After two short lines of ancient and very fat bamboo clumps, dead and grey in the centre, then yellow, then streaky green—clearly from the original garden, and they still cast a pleasant shade, bamboo’s great virtue in the tropics—after this there is nothing, only bush and a few mildewed concrete buildings. But the guides still want to show you the gardens and the plants.

When they give up they tell you that destruction came to the botanical gardens of Bingerville during the troubles, the many little wars that undid the country when Houphouët left it. So the developer’s landscape that disfigures what might have been beautiful hills between Abidjan and Bingerville, and these tragic gardens might also be said to be part of the legacy of Houphouët, who allowed the French to keep the country going, while practising magic for himself, wasting the substance of his country, building religiously, like a Pharoah—Shelley’s Ozymandias again.

The land is full of cruelty which is hard for the visitor to bear. From the desert countries to the north long-horned cattle are sent for slaughter here in big ramshackle trucks, cargoes of misery, that bump along the patched and at times defective autoroute to Abidjan, to the extensive abattoir area near the docks. And there in trampled and vile black earth these noble creatures, still with dignity, await their destiny in the smell of death, with sometimes a calf, all alone, without a mother, finding comfort of a sort in sleep, a little brown circle on the dirty ground, together with the beautiful goats and sheep assembled for killing. The ground around the abattoir goes on and on. When sights like this meet the eyes of simple people every day there can be no idea of humanity, no idea of grandeur.

5

IT WAS part of the wisdom of the country that nature here was bountiful and unfailing; it was what brought the immigrants. Part of the bounty of nature were the bats. For half an hour or so every day in the late afternoon the bats came, flying low, just outside the windows of taller buildings. They speckled the sky. One million bats would have made a memorable show, but prodigal nature provided four or five millions, at least. The bats flew in a circle over the city. They had no fixed destination. They roosted on trees, hanging upside down within the pale-pink protection of their wings, which they folded around themselves with an almost human gesture. The trees from which they hung were damaged at the top, half stripped.

Africans eat everything that nature provides (except when a particular animal is the totem of a tribe or clan). The local people liked eating these bats. The main trouble was in getting them down. Some people used slingshots, and then there was the trouble of cooking the creatures. The bats were tough (all that flying) and had to be cooked for hours before they became acceptable.

It might have been thought that with all that flying some hundreds of bats would have dropped dead every evening and fallen from the sky to a grateful people. But no one had seen such a thing, a bat dead on the ground. And I was told by someone (perhaps not an expert) that when bats had to die they did not show themselves, but hid away, being in this like cats, who could leave their houses and go away to die.

This, however, was a luxury few of the cats of the Ivory Coast could enjoy. No cats wandered the streets here. Cats were eaten; they were part of the bounty of nature, and they could be reared to be killed. “Like chickens,” the youngish man said, and the comparison amused him.

It was only on the last morning of my stay, on my way to the airport, that I found out what was the best way in the Ivory Coast of killing a cat or kitten. You put them in a sack of some sort, and then you dropped the sack in a pot of boiling water.

The thought of this everyday kitchen cruelty made everything else in the Ivory Coast seem unimportant.

Then, a few days later, when I was in Gabon, I learned more about the bats of Abidjan. They were fruit bats; they were also