Bound to Violence

By Yambo Ouologuem

The Legend of the Saifs

After the death of the just Saif al-Heit, however, the accursed son Saif al-Haram and his minister Al Hadj  Abd al-Hassana, struck by a stone in the soul they did not possess, spent large sums of money supporting the most influential and discontented families at court: twelve thousand dishes were served them at each meal; they received bribes, pensions, and titles of nobility as pompous as they were meaningless; all the magnificence of a fairy tale: their horses, to the number of 3,260, drank milk in mangers inlaid with gold and ivory. Allah harmin katamadjo!

To maintain this ostentation and satisfy his craving for glory and new lands, Saif, thanks to the complicity of the southern chiefs, extended the slave trade, which he blessed like the bloodthirsty hypocrite he was. Amidst the diabolical jubilation of priest and merchant, of family circles and public organs, niggers, who unlike God have arms but no soul, were clubbed, sold, stockpiled, haggled over, adjudicated, flogged, bound and delivered--with attentive, studied, sorrowful contempt--to the Portuguese, the Spaniards, the Arabs (on the east and north coasts), and to the French, Dutch, and English (west coast), and so scattered to the winds.

A hundred million of the damned--so moan the troubadours of Nakem when the evening vomits forth its starry diamonds--were carried away. Bound in bundles of six, shorn of all human dignity, they were flung into the Christian incognito of ships' holds, where no light could reach them. And there was not a single trader of souls who dared, on pain of losing his own, to show his head at the hatches. A single hour in that pestilential hole, in that orgy of fever, starvation, vermin, beriberi, scurvy, suffocation, and misery, would have left no man unscathed.

Thirty percent died en route. And, since charity is a fine thing and hardly human, those amiable slavers were obliged when their cargo was unloaded to pay a fine for every dead slave; slaves who were as sick as a goat in labor were thrown to the sharks. Newborn babes incurred the same fate: they were thrown overboard as surplus. . . . Half naked and utterly bewildered, the niggertrash, young as the new moon, were crowded into open pens and auctioned off. there they lay beneath the eyes of the all-powerful (and just) God, a human tide, a black mass of putrid flesh, a spectacle of ebbing life and nameless suffering.

The heap of slaves writhed, cries and moans were heard, bodies were trampled when the trader cracked his whip to wake up the niggers in the front rows. Those who had come to see the sight kept a respectful distance and watched the priests who were here to proclaim the word of Christ but could only fight down their disgust, hang their heads, and let their rosaries slip through their fingers. . . .

Meanwhile at the court of the Nakem Empire, the unpopular Saif al-Haram, once the restive nobility had been domesticated, incited his minister to stir up "as much trouble as possible" between the backward, untamable, and perpetually warring tribes.

For there were no lengths to which Saif would not go to obtain cattle, land, and other capital goods. Engineered with a more than machiavellian guile, the raids of the Masai, the Zulus, the Jaga so infuriated the victimized tribes, races, and peoples (so it was ordained from On High) that an entire tribe would tremble with impatience when its chief, hurling his lance in the direction of the "enemy race" (accused of having carried off such and such villagers and sold them into slavery), roared that the time had come for their assegais to drink the accursed enemy blood.

Cruel peoples, whose speech is a kind of croaking, fierce killers, men of the jungle, living in a state of bestiality, mating with the first woman they find, tall in stature and horrible to look upon, hairy men with abnormally long nails, the Zulus, Jaga, and Masai feed on human flesh and go naked, armed with shields, darts, and daggers. Savage in their customs and daily lives, they know no faith nor law nor king. in the early dawn they crawl out of their wretched forest huts and destroy everything before them with fire and sword, pillaging the remotest corners of the Nakem Empire and driving the populations of those regions from their homes with no other recourse but to throw themselves on the mercy of Saif or to perish of hunger, sickness, and privation.

At that same time the Nakem provinces suffered such famine and pestilence that a very little food came to cost the price of a slave--at least three florins. under the lash of necessity a father sold his son, a brother his brother; no villainy was too great if food might be procured by it. Those who were sold under pressure of starvation were bought by traders come from São Tomé in ships laden with food. the sellers claimed that these people were already slaves, and the sold, in their eagerness to be fed, were only too glad to concur. And so countless free men made slaves of themselves, sold themselves by necessity.

In almost every part of the empire and its dependencies an unprecedented orgy of violence ensued. the capture of rebel tribes, of free men, of defeated warriors, the sacrifice of their chief and the feasting on his flesh, became ritual acts, which entered into the customs of those jittery jigs, whose barbarity fell in with the plans of the emperor and his notables. . . .

Through intermediaries, Saif al-Haram encouraged the raiders to bless the wounded captives with a stroke of the saber, to carry their skulls spitted on lances and assegais to the door of the victor who--God wills it!--was feasted as a hero. And as though a Black really had the soul of a man, the chief of the prisoners and his family were given over to the mercies of the village women and children who whirled around them, leaping, dancing, singing, shouting insults, and spitting on them in order, so they swore, to cleanse their souls of Satan's blackness. On the third day of their captivity, the sorcerer, his eyes aflame with pride and avenging hate, skinned more than shaved their skulls, which were then rubbed with karite butter.

Then each village in turn danced around the prisoners with a crudely carved knife and "stabbed" the chief once for every year of his won age and once for every relative he himself had lost in the last slave raid. And before yielding his place to the next villager's blood lust, he bent his knee before the prisoner, taunted him and reviled him, spat on him and gave him three sharp blows, punctuated with a clicking of the tongue. And all laughed uproariously at the sight of the blood oozing from the victim's bruises.

On the night of the third day, his ankles weighed down with tinkling bells, the chief of the prisoners--bound hand and foot as the women whirled around him, lewdly uncovering their nakedness for a flashing moment, arching their backs and tapping their pubic hair with the palms of their hands--was castrated by the sorcerer amidst the ecstasy of the crowd, whose collective rejoicing verged on hysteria.

And paralyzed with pain, the castrated husband, his thighs sticky with blood, looked on helpless as his wives--first standing, but in that same instant rolled in the dust--became the harlots of the victorious village, stripped, and then to the mad rhythm of the tom-tom taken each in turn by every man and woman in the village. . . .

The next day but one, on the eve of the sacrifice, men and women were "purified" by bathing and massaged with cow butter (their children had been disemboweled immediately after the raid). On the seventh day of their captivity, they were so rubbed with peanut oil and tied to a pole, half dead with pent-up rage under the taunting words and gestures of the villagers. Made  feverish by the thought of their impending death, with burning eyes and foaming mouths, the captives butted the air with their heads and, frantic to kill their enemies, clawed and bit and snarled at them as they passed.

On the evening of the seventh day all the prisoners, glutted with palm wine, drunk on millet beer, were howling like dogs. At midnight they died on the wood fire, in the crackling hiss of their ft, presenting to the the expert fingers of the cannibals human flesh as white as that of a suckling pig. The brains and the women's sexual parts were set aside for the "eminent men"; with clearly aphrodisiac intent, the chief's testicles were sprinkled with pepper and strong spice, to be relished by the women in their communal soup. ordained by hatred, innate evil, blood lust, thirst for vengeance, or perhaps by a desire to inherit the qualities of the devoured victims, the ghoulish feast ended in an orgy of drinking. Cannibalism was one of the darkest features of that spectral Africa over which hung the malefic shadow of Saif al-Haram. A sob for her.

On April 20, 1532, on a night as soft as a cloak of moist satin, Saif al-Haram, performing his conjugal "duty" with his four stepmothers seriatim and all together, had the imprudent weakness to overindulge and in the very midst of his dutiful delights gave up the ghost. . . .

Source: Bound to Violence by Yambo Ouolohuem; translated by Ralph Manhein. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. New York, 1971, pp. 13-16.

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update 7 July 2008