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Viceroy of Ouidah

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As an aspiring travel writer who has yet to publish anything, I turned green with envy on reading Bruce Chatwin's novel. In terse, spare prose, he summons up images that seem drawn from photography or haiku rather than from ordinary literature. He presents distant times (late 18th and early 19th century) and places (Brazil and Dahomey) linking them seamlessly with the steamy, sordid present---the paranoid military dictatorship of Benin in the crumbling West African post-colonial 1970s. Every page is redolent of color, smell, sound, and imminent disaster: every scene appears like a bead in a necklace of decay, corruption, cruelty and disaster. There are no wasted moments, no lagging sections. A poor boy from the Brazilian backlands becomes a rich, powerful slave trader in West Africa, but his background betrays him at home, his connections in Africa ultimately do the same. His largely illegitimate family continues into the seedy Benin of the present. My only criticism of this work is that Chatwin chose to concentrate solely on the Brazilian side of things, leaving the Africans as part of the backdrop--more acted upon than actors. Dahomey was a fascinating society and besides the anthropological researches of M. Herskovits, one can read Frank Yerby's "The Dahomeyan", though Yerby's prose pales in comparison to Chatwin's. A far better book, one which focuses on the Dahomeyan connection to Brazil as well, is Judith Gleason's "Agõtime", a possible antidote to the slant taken by Chatwin. Otherwise, this book contains superlative writing on every page, writing redolent with human nature, the mysteries of the soul, and the mundane horrors of much of human history. "The Viceroy of Ouidah" has the power to open periods and locations for readers that have seldom featured in Anglo-American writing. It is a stunning book.

The Viceroy of Ouidah was Francisco Manoel De Souza, (da Silva in Chatwin's book) who came to Ouidah (also spelled "Whydah"; part of the Abomey Empire, later called "the Slave Coast", Dahomey, and currently, Benin) in the 1750s and eventually became the main broker between African slave sellers and European slave buyers. He played a significant role in the nation's history, and was actually named Viceroy of Ouidah by an Abomey king.

Chatwin's "The Viceroy of Ouidah" (his fist novel, written after visiting West Africa) is a very well written book. I found it a pleasure to read, hard to put down (it is one of the few books I have read in a single sitting). It is a short book: nothing in Chatwin's text is extraneous; every sentence advances his story, which is an intriguing blend of fact and fiction, past and present.

Werner Herzog made a film titled "Cobra Verde" (1988, starring Klaus Kinski) which is based on "The Viceroy of Ouidah". In his "Wonders of the African World" book and television program Henry Louis Gates, Jr. travels to modern-day Ouidah and encounters the descendents of De Souza, who still live on his estate.

For sheer dripping tropical lushness of prose that at the same time is watertight and flowing, nothing can beat Chatwin's VICEROY OF OUIDAH. I have long admired the author's essays, and this is only my second (and far from last) foray into his fiction. Picture to yourself a story in two parts, each occupying roughly half the book. The first is a gathering of Francisco da Silva's descendents years after his death; the second follows his life from its humble beginnings in Brazil to his glory days as a much-loved and much-hated slave-trader and finally ending in his slow undoing in the vortex of passions, jealousies, and greed in the West African society in which he lives.

That same society was described by another great writer almost a century earlier. Sir Richard Francis Burton's A MISSION TO GELELE, KING OF DAHOMEY captures the scene perfectly some 50 years or so after da Silva's passing, including the all-female army regiments of the King and the weird dysfunctionality of his court. Chatwin seems to have taken a few leaves from Burton's book and woven a fascinating study of the rise and fall of a very limited man.

We never really see into da Silva's mind: In the first part of the book, he is merely a revered forefather; in the second, an adventurer whose decline is as precipitate as Citizen Kane's. The King's Amazon warriors howl at his passing: "It was not the leopard that killed him. Not the buffalo that killed him. It was night. Night that killed him." That -- and everything else.

At no time does da Silva understand the irony of his being a slave broker whom the slaving ship captains could trust. We do not follow the slavers to the New World, just see them off at the docks as they begin their grim voyage. The Dahomean kings use da Silva, but profoundly distrust him. When he no longer serves their purpose, they and the whole society in which he lives drive him to the final extremity.

There is one link between the life of da Silva and the celebrations of his descendents: The character of Mama Wewe. We see her only at the end of both parts, yet she unifies and justifies Chatwin's bi-partite division. Put this one on the shelf next to Conrad's HEART OF DARKNESS.

I am not a great fan of this novel. For me, this is Chatwin at his most show offy. This book followed hot on the heels of his thumpingly successful debut 'In Patagonia' and Chatwin was clearly garnering a reputation for describing far flung places in an original and inventive way. This he does in the Viceroy of Ouidah, a short biographical novel about the Brazillian Manoel de Silva who rose from poverty and obscurity to become the head of slave trading in Dahomey, now Benin in West Africa. A potentially brilliant framework for Chatwin's prose style to let rip you might think, but I think he goes overboard on the lush descriptions of the geography, climate and people of the regions he illuminates and loses sight of how to really engage the reader in the novel.

This novel was not all that well received when it first came out. His next work 'On the Black Hill' reveived the 1982 Whitbread Literary Award for Best First Novel, overlooking the fact that Chatwin had alreay published Viceroy previously and I think this is telling. I found the novel lacking in the gripping substance, intangible though that may be that really makes a great novel. Like one of the many works of art Chatwin catalogued when he was working at Sotheby's, it is a glistening gem, but beneath the surface, there is little that stirs the soul and lodges in the memory as passages of great fiction do.

Still worth reading though, as Chatwin at his worst is better than many writers at their best.

After revelling in the experience that was 'Songlines,' I decided to try one of Bruce Chatwin's novels. Africa has long held its spell over me and thus, 'Viceroy of Ouidah,' seemed the obvious choice. At a little over 120 pages, 'Viceroy' is one of Chatwin's shortest works, but don't let its size deter you. Every page is a treasure onto itself and soon you'll be wishing it were longer.

Chatwin, in his never-ending quest to illuminate places that fall well off the beaten track, brings the tiny African nation of Dahomey, known nowadays as Benin, into the light. Home to an indomitable fighting-machine filled with fierce women warriors, a series of cannibalistic tyrant-kings with a penchant for human sacrifice, Dahomey was a place long-feared by the European colonizers. Eventually subdued by the French in 1885, Dahomey, along with neighboring Ghana and Nigeria supplied the Americas with a large portion of its brutalized and very 'unwilling immigrants.'

Chatwin's protagonist is one Francisco Manoel De Silva, a penniless Brazilian sharecropper who longs to find his fortune. Africa captures him in her mesmerizing embrace and Francisco finds himself not only a new home, but also a new life as well, that of a slave-trader. Allying himself with the demented King, De Silva monopolizes the internal slave-trade and soon makes a fortune and a name for himself sending unfortunates back home through the British blockade. His dream is to one day return to his beloved Bahia, rich and respected. As somebody. Instead, he slowly and inevitably becomes part of the continent he has made his home in. Surrounded by his multitude of mulatto offspring, the King's Viceroy slips into the quagmire of his delusions. An outcast at home and abroad, his soul never finds its true solace.

Those familiar with Chatwin's nomad philosophy will find ample material in 'Viceroy.' De Silva's life underscores Chatwin's belief that our earthly existence is ultimately rootless. Chatwin not only mocks the idea that we can eventually 'return home,' but also questions whether we can call any place 'home.' According to Chatwin, constant movement on the road of life is about the best we can hope for.

The novel is artfully structured into two parts. The beginning takes place in modern-day Benin, where De Silva's mixed progeny come to pay their respects to their 'Brazilian' progenitor. Here, Chatwin gives us a glimpse into the chaos of post-colonial Africa, with its coups and fatigue-wearing thugs. The second part goes back in time to the sad story of the Viceroy himself. Tight, vibrant sentences greet you on every page. With Chatwin, it's not only what he says, but rather how he says it that grabs the reader. His descriptions of people and place are some of the richest in recent English letters. Bursting with color, stench and sound, Chatwin brings Africa to our eyes, noses and ears. And with the greatest of economy. Like his master, Hemingway, Chatwin uses the 'nickel and dime' style, but unlike his master, he makes every word paint a picture. In fact, this novel is akin to a giant canvas of virulent and violent images.

If the novel has a weakness, it's the lack of psychology in it. Like one reviewer aptly put it, 'We never get into Francisco's head.' Chatwin has painted a true and luscious tapestry, but he has left the questions and analysis up to us. Not surprising when considering Chatwin's past as an art critic for Sotheby's.

Yet, don't let this minor criticism put you away from reading a brilliant introduction to Chatwin's fiction. Moreover, anybody enraptured with the 'dark continent,' would do well to check out 'Viceroy of Ouidah.'

Bruce Chatwin's The Viceroy Of Ouidah masquerades as a small book. In 50,000 words or so, the author presents a fictionalised life that has been embroidered from truth. History, hyper-reality, the supernatural and the surreal and the cocktail that creates the heady mix through which strands of story filter. Overall the experience is much bigger than the slim book suggests.

We meet Francisco Manuel da Silva, a Brazilian born in the country's north-east in the latter part of the eighteenth century. We learn a little of his background and then we follow him to Dahomey in West Africa, the modern Benin. He finds a place in society, consorts with kings, encounters amazons and conjoins with local culture. He also becomes a slave trader, making his considerable fortune by moving ship-loads of a cargo whose human identity is denied, as if it were merely the collateral damage of mercantilism. Francisco Manuel survives, prospers and procreates with abandon. He fathers a lineage of varied hue, a small army of males to keep the name alive and further complicate identity, and a near race of females who inherit the anonymity of their gender.

But The Viceroy of Ouidah is much more than a linear tale of a life. Bruce Chatwin's vivid prose presents a multiplicity of minutiae, associations, conflicts and concordances. Each pithy paragraph could be a novel in itself if it were not so utterly poetic. A random example will suffice to give a flavour.

"Often the Brazilian captains had to wait weeks before the coast was clear but their host spared no expense to entertain them. His dining room was lit with a set of silver candelabra; behind each chair stood a serving girl, naked to the waist, with a white napkin folded on her arm. Sometimes a drunk would shout out, `What are these women?' and Da Silva would glare down the table and say. `Our future murderers.'"

Within each vivid scene, we experience history, place, culture, and all the emotions, disappointments and achievements of imperfect lives. A jungle vibrates with untamed life around us. Treachery sours and threatens, while disease and passion alike claim their victims. It is a book to be savoured almost line by line. It provides an experience that is moving, technicoloured, but, like all lives, inevitably ephemeral. Like the outlawed trade that endowed riches, it eventually comes to nought, except of course for those who are inadvertently caught up in its net and whose lives were thus utterly changed if, indeed, they survived.

I read The Viceroy Of Ouidah without a bookmark, always starting a few pages before where I had previously left off. Each time, I read through several pages convinced that it was my first time to see them and then I would reach a particularly striking phrase and realise I had been there before. The extent of the detail and complexity of the images present a rain-forest of detail that is completely absorbing. The Viceroy Of Ouidah is thus surely a book worth reading several times.

In only 101 pages, Bruce Chatwin (BC) evokes the life and times of Francisco Manoel da Silva (FMdS), who was a Brazilian slave trader in the African kingdom of Dahomey from 1812 until his death in 1857. His brilliant novella starts with a powerful description of the annual celebration of his passing away in Benin by his many present-day rather impoverished descendents, who today form branches of a true Diaspora. They hope, some are convinced that somewhere, somehow the supposed tremendous richness accumulated by the founder of the dynasty, is hidden, buried somewhere. BC's novella is a dazzling piece of reading and in today's terms politically incorrect, as it should be: each character is simply an extension of the era's principal protagonists' world views about the need for human sacrifice, for warfare, for profit from dealing in human bodies.
E.g., the Dahomey king argues: tradition rules there shall be war every dry season. What to do with captives? Behead them to reassure the elders, the Dead Kings that I have not gone soft in the head, or sell them in one piece to FMdS to live on in Brazil? There is a lot of madness in this book.
BC's previous job at Sotheby's guarantees total authenticity for the novella's visual impact by effortlessly naming the artefacts en vogue at the time, the imported brands, fabrics, household items, luxuries, tools, pieces of dress, etc. Similarly, BC has done exhaustive archival and field research in Britain, Brazil and Benin, as Dahomey is called today. In fact, during his early research there, he was mistaken for a mercenary after a failed coup and almost executed. In his posthumously published collection of journalistic writing called What Am I Doing Here, he admits the incident delayed the writing of this truly fabulous novella.
In 1988 Werner Herzog turned the novella into a movie called Cobra Verde, with Klaus Kinski playing FMdS. Director and star made four previous films and this (final) cooperation was not rated their best. Which proves that the book is always better than the film.

I came to Chatwin's The Viceroy of Ouidah by way of Werner Herzog's (very loose) film adaptation of it, "Cobra Verde." Herzog's film doesn't quite work. At the end of the day, it's rather fragmented. Chatwin's novel does work.

The storyline is simple, and ultimately, I think, not as important as the mood the novel creates. Francisco Manoel da Silva is an early 19th century Brazilian sharecropper who sails to the west African kingdom of Dahomey, makes a fortune in the slave trade, but is eventually brought low and dies penniless and mad. His descendants, wanting desperately to think of themselves as white and Brazilian, fetishizing their ancestor's memory, and nostalgically harkening back to the day when the da Silva name meant something in Dahomey, congregate annually to commemorate him. At the annual gathering that opens the novel, Eugenia, the only suriving child of Francisco, is dying. She's well over 100 years old.

None of this is remarkable. What's so powerful about The Viceroy of Ouidah (not an especially good title, by the way) is the mood it creates. Even better than Joseph Conrad, Chatwin draws a portrait of the dark and unfathomable forces of nature--both human and nonhuman--that we "civilized" folks who confront them can't even begin to imagine. We may think for a while, as Francisco does, that we're their master. But in the long run, to cite an unsettling scene in the novel, the night will slay us. The night will destroy us.

Paralleling the wild, insane, destructive forces of nature in the novel is the equally destructive slave trade that Francisco engages in. One reviewer has remarked that we gain no insight into Francisco's psychology, and I think this is an accurate statement. He remains opague to the reader. But this may be intentional on Chatwin's part: in his own way, Francisco is part of the very darkness that destroys him, and that darkness is too inky, too swamp-like, for clarity.

An extraordinary allegory. Not as rich as the author's later Utz, but well worth reading.

Chatwin possessed the rare gift of suggesting in such a slight volume the destiny of a man, of times and of places that are completely lost in the terrae incognitae blanks of our minds. The density of his prose, the way it goes so immediately to the heart of the matter (and the matter here is human flesh, corrupted by the years, sold on slave markets, cut in pieces to make Dahomey-style kitchenware) like African termits are supposed to ruin overnight wooden mansions. Quite a fascinating tale. Good fiction, it reminded me, cannot lie, it merely unfolds glimpses of truths that have or have not been but that would be lost to the historian or the anthropologist. But of course this shouldn't be read as an impartial account of the "ebony trade".

In this text, "THE VICEROY OF OUIDAH," author Bruce Chatwin takes the reader on an engaging journey into the life of Francisco Manoel da Silva, a man who: Became the "best friend" of the King of Dahomey. Was granted the title of Viceroy of Ouidah and a monopoly over the sale of slaves. Fathered "sixty-three mulatto sons and an unknown quantity of daughters." And, whose now black descendants gather each year to "mourn the Slave Trade as a lost Golden Age."

At 155 pages, the reader can easily devour this tantalizing read in one weekend! This is a great book of blended fiction and historical fact. I have been a closet fan of Chatwin for some time and I heartily recommend this book to anyone looking for a great book premised on a remote and gritty topic. You'll love it! Five stars. Bravo.