THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH - BRUCE CHATWIN

This book checked off three boxes for me. First, it’s short and I’m trying to speed run through a few things before I move. Which brings me to two, the setting of this book, Ouida, but more generally West Africa, where I’ll be living soon and thus would like to have a sense of. And finally, three, this is another Chatwin book, whose oeuvre I’m slowly working through. I have a buddy with a Master’s Degree in Chatwin and I’ve enjoyed every one so far. He's got a good fiction/non-fiction mix going on in his work that resonates with me, this book being no exception. This novel follows a fictional version of Francisco Félix de Sousa, who Chatwin names Francisco Manuel da Silva, who really was a prominent Brazilian slave trader who did decades of work with the Dahomey. The Dahomey are fascinating for a dozen different reasons. We know a lot about them due to their geographic location and reach, they engaged in these enormous yearly festivals, called xwetanu in Fon, which involved human sacrifice, they had an all-female unit of their army and a (to Western eyes) despotic king. They feature pretty heavily in the Western imaginary, as the quintessential slaving African kingdom. The last slave ship to reach the USA was from Dahomey. Sadly, this book focuses more on Fran Manuel’s descent than it does on the Dahomey themselves, and in this sense the book is very close to HEART OF DARKNESS. A YT man comes to Africa to make money in a brutal business, in this case slaving, and is slowly driven insane and ruined. Da Silva hopes to use his money to set his family up in Brazil but, of course, he never returns to his home country. Slowly times change and “The West” decides it’s moved past slavery and the whole thing is a bit of an embarrassment so people ice out Da Silva. They got very, very rich of of slavery then decided to cut ties and claim a moral high-ground. Likewise, the Dahomey, who’s power had been based on their ability to sell slaves to the Europeans were also pushed to the side and thrown away, no longer being useful. By the time Da Silva’s family gathers in Ouidah for the 100th (I think) anniversary of his death, there are 100’s of descendants and they are not only not rich nor Brazilian, they’re not YT. The writing is very sharp and simple and there are basically no likeable characters. Sadly, since we only glimpse the Dahomey perspective through the lens of the various non-African characters, we don’t get a good sense of how they fit into Africa as a whole, which can make it seem, to people who maybe don’t know about the history of West Africa (read FISTFUL OF SHELLS, if you’re interested in that) that the Dahomey are a representative group and this oversight shades into whatever the African version of Orientalism is. On a biographical note, Chatwin was one of the first major artistic figures (especially amongst the British) to die of HIV. He buckled to the stigma and didn’t announce his status, though he did apparently tell people he got it from a rape he suffered in Ouidah while researching the book (he was put in jail on suspicion of spying). Now this is certainly possible, though he was also lovers with Mapplethorpe’s lover Sam Wagstaff so it’s much more likely that he acquired the virus through more “typical” means though the quickness with which he invokes the violence and death of West Africa seems like a mindset you find in this book. Just a thought. Either way, the book is quite short and very tautly written. Like I said, it’s only bad guys doing bad stuff and you should know something about WA going in but overall, I enjoyed it. 1904 cowry shells