Who Slashed Celanire's Throat? Read Online Free PDF

But it was an intolerable aggression, she exclaimed indignantly, perpetrated against women in order to control their sexuality. Then she changed the subject and began to describe the great solitude of her life. She had never known her true parents and was nothing but a foster child. Oh, she had nothing against her foster parents, especially her papa. But it was tough not knowing the sperm that fathered her or the womb that carried her. At Adjame-Santey, she felt an outsider. Thomas de Brabant possessed her body but not her heart. Stunned by her candor, Hakim was rendered speechless. She then turned to interrogate him, and he heard himself confiding and revealing all his childhood troubles. He too felt an outsider in Adjame-Santey. Moreover, he had always felt an outsider in Africa. In short, one hour later, furious with himself, he was back on the path taking him home. Not only had he not breathed a word about the mission Koffi Ndizi had entrusted him with, but he had promised Celanire he would pay her many more visits.
    Had she bewitched him?
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    The rains had let up now for two weeks. The hedges of croton bordering the houses of the Europeans could finally lift their heads. The clumps of guinea grass sprouted green along the embankments. Behind the fences of secco the animals frolicked for joy. Only Koffi Ndizi’s compound remained unaffected by this springlike revival. One night Tanella, a concubine of Mawourou, the king’s uncle on his mother’s side, had stuck a knife in his heart while he was asleep. Once the deed was done, she had fled.
    Two years earlier Tanella had been one of the gifts, together with the fowl, dried fish, and richly woven wrappers, the village of Attonblan had offered Koffi Ndizi. She had never been much to his liking, and he had left her to Kwame Aniedo, who for a time had used her for his pleasure. One day, while she was pounding plantains in one of the courtyards, Mawourou had caught sight of her fifteen-year-old breasts. Mawourou had fathered a dozen sons, already fathers to sons themselves; but he was still so troubled by the desires of the flesh that he employed an army of fetish priests to concoct his aphrodisiacs. Tanella’s crime was only discovered the next morning when the blood that had trickled out under the doors of Mawourou’s hut coagulated into a red crust in the very middle of the courtyard. Murder was so rare an occurrence in the region that people first attributed the gaping hole in the old man’s heart to a fit of anger by the spirits. Then the truth became obvious. The evil deed had been caused by a human hand. Some women who had got up early recalled having seen Tanella running away in blood-soaked clothes and remembered she had complained of Mawourou on many occasions. His breath was fetid. He had trouble getting a hard-on; he beat her. They searched for her throughout the compound, in the vicinity of the lagoon, and even as far as the forest. A few men ran along the road to the village of Attonblan but came back empty-handed. Nobody had seen Tanella. At day’s end the rumor spread that she had found refuge at the Home for Half-Castes. So the widows, the children, and the friends of Mawourou, all those who had known him while he was alive and all those who had nothing better to do, assembled into a crowd and marched off to fetch her back from the Home.
    The procession slowly wound its way through Adjame-Santey, where the population, struck with horror, commented on the terrible turn of events. Karamanlis watched from his store as he saw Hakim and his pupils bringing up the rear of the cortege. He eyed him scornfully. So there he was a “liberated” young man taking the side of a lascivious old man, abuser of young girls, who after all had only reaped what he sowed. On reaching the Palace of Justice (a fine name for a clay hut), the procession swelled with all the idle bystanders and onlookers who happened to be around. On the outskirts of