Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? Read Online Free PDF Page A

prestige as crown prince intact. As a result, for three years Kwame Aniedo had been doing absolutely nothing except eat to his heart’s content, yawn at his musicians playing, and terrorize the girls who refused to go to bed with him. He hated the French who had humiliated his father and lent a sympathetic ear to Hakim’s anticolonialist diatribes, without realizing that the latter was only interested in keeping him company while Kwame slipped out of his clothes and dived naked into the lagoon.
    In the early evening, the usual crowd of brothers and cousins, idle royal princes, streamed into Kwame Aniedo’s hut. The evening was spent downing vast quantities of palm wine while palavering over the fate of the royal concubines. The general opinion was that they should be brought back by force and inflicted a punishment which would serve as an example. The cat-o’-nine-tails was not enough. Rather a few days locked up without food or water. It was late when Hakim finally fell asleep and he was still snoring when a messenger came to wake him: Koffi Ndizi was asking for him. His earthenware pipe wedged between his teeth, the king was pacing up and down. He had not slept a wink all night and had been in constant consultation with the queen mother and the elders. They had finally come to a decision. Since the wretched oblate was the protégée of the French, they had to tread lightly. Hakim would write a polite letter on behalf of the king begging her to return the three concubines. He would explain they belonged to the royal family. To keep them would be a serious breach of tradition, an offense. Hakim therefore went back to look for some paper and a pen and wrote down everything they had asked of him.
    After two weeks it was obvious that Celanire couldn’t care less about the letter Koffi Ndizi had sent her. This was another pretext for deliberation and consultation. The queen mother was outraged. The elders lost their saliva. Some of them called for a punitive raid on the Home, just like in the good old days. But how would they go about it? Nobody knew. As for the fetish priests, they advised on caution as they could not understand who this oblate was. In order to clarify matters, shouldn’t they get her to undergo a trial by ordeal? If she passed the test and came out unscathed, they would know she was a normal person with nothing on her conscience. Okay, but how could they approach her?
    Finally, Koffi Ndizi entrusted Hakim with a mission that was to be a last resort. This time he would go in person to the Home and plead on behalf of the kingdom. Hakim obeyed, with heavy heart.
    When he arrived at the Home, Celanire was teaching in her classroom. Madame Desrussie showed him into an office on the second floor. The view was magical. Beneath the balcony the garden stretched away like a priceless carpet embellished with freshly planted Madagascar periwinkles, coral hibiscus, and oleander already in full bloom. The long rainy season was drawing to a close. The sky was losing its leaden color. If the place was in fact a bordello, it hid it well under its aspect of a Garden of Eden. When Celanire appeared, Hakim did not recognize her. She was wearing a dress of tiny blue-and-yellow squares, buttoned from top to bottom, with a buttercup-yellow neckerchief. Her hair had been braided into two plaits. Without makeup she looked eighteen at the most. She was no longer the sensual vamp, but poetically poignant. While they drank mint tea, she talked of her passion for Africa. In her opinion there was only one dark side to the beauty of its civilization: the treatment of women. Was he aware that the Africans mutilated the female genitals? They excised the clitoris and the labia. Then they sewed up the folds, leaving a narrow passage for the urine and the menstrual blood. Hakim’s imagination had seldom ventured into such places. Ill at ease, he stammered that this practice was the equivalent of male circumcision.