Mixtape

Audio / Video files of songs mentioned in The Village of Waiting

Three hundred and fifty voices, so quiet I didn't hear them begin, were singing the national anthem. "La Togolaise" has a sweet melody, a little like the French children's  song "Alouette," oddly free of the bombast of most anthems.  The voices rose and fell:

Si nous sommes divisors, 

Nos enemies nous vaincront ...

Egged on by her parents the family's teenage daughter, in glasses and braces, sang a mildly naughty version of "Twelve Days of Christmas" that she'd learned at the school she attended in the Ivory Coast: football players took the place of turtle doves.

The stereo was playing, Bing Crosby was dreaming of a white Christmas, and the guests were devouring red-and green-frosted cookies and unspoiled eggnog.

Immediately a group of young men under one of the baobabs lit into their drums, another roar went up, and a line of boys and girls came dancing out from behind the VIPs onto the grass. ... The drums were beating up-tempo, bodies of all sizes were making rapid-fire synchronized moves, absurdly unlike anything from traditional dance-a twirl of the index finger, a clawing at the air on one side, then the other, touching a toe, pointing to the sky, like background vocalists of a Motown group. Drums stopped with a thump, the students shouted “Hey!” and froze in place. Their two leaders tossed out questions.
“Are you you ready to work the land?”
The answer came back in a chant:
“Yes, and of course yes! Eating to one’s fill must be the enterprise of Africans in general and of Togolese in particular, by the harvest of our own garden!”
More questions, more answers. Long-winded French phrases about “economic independence” and “authentic culture”; a local proverb I couldn’t quite make out that ended, “It is the hunter who dies!” Then a chanted tribute to Eyadema: “Thanks to him the spirit of the new Togo has been born. Merci, merci, merci.”

Someone was getting into my house. Coming in and stealing, leaving small things out of place. My wallet was in the wrong pants pocket, with a bill or two gone. Change disappeared from my desktop. Mints my aunt sent vanished from my frigo one afternoon; the thief left me three to nibble on. A Bob Dylan tape - Blonde on Blonde.

Dove was only five - old enough to see the fate that lay in store for her, young enough to find it funny.  She was always full of beans, dancing across the yard while the older kids were in school, mouthing French animation songs and the songs I'd taught them in English: "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," "Shortening Bread," "Sugar Pie Honey Bunch."

I had a shortwave radio, a Sony 5900W.  

It was about ten inches square, a wonderfully sleek thing with an elaborate bunch of dials, needles, and switches that made it look vaguely military. 

I sat up nights at the desk in my bedroom, a kerosene lamp burning, and moved the knobs between Paris, Sydney, London, Hanoi.  Through the static an exotic array of tongues filled my room - French, Dutch, Swahili.  A flick to the left and Radio Moscow came on: the precise belabored tones of a propagandist well trained in English, indistinguishable from the Voice of America announcer  unless you listened to what they were saying.  I carried on abusive dialogues with both.  A flick to the right and it was the pop African guitars and horns of Africa Number One in Gabon, images of fat hipsters in wild local shirts on a nightclub stage.  Another flick to the right brought a babble of Vietnamese or Slavic. Every evening at six-the ritual became sacrosanct - I tuned to the BBC just in time to hear a familiar voice declare, "This is London."  Then the absurd jingle, brassy imperial trumpets.  The time signal: five short beeps, one long.  "Eighteen hours Greenwich Mean Time. The news read by John Sloane."  And then the crisp reassuring proof that e world outside Lavie still existed.

“... Now Mrs. Henley would like to hear ...” And then the trite request, Handel’s “Water Music” or something from Gilbert and Sullivan.

Marcel put on a tape of King Sunny Ade and the Africian Beats; it was a good machine and the room filled with the sound of juju music, like a fly buzzing near the ear then flitting off.

"Twenty-five black Americans, direct from Chicago and Detroit.  They come to Africa singing, 'We shall overcome!' They ask to see the slave forts, the Be voodoo market, the artisanal center in Kapalime, and, since it is the extended version, big game up in the Keran Reserve.  I show them everything, and they say, 'Ooh! Look at that,' and do you know what?  The entire trip I want to tell them, "You shall never overcome this way.  You say we are your brothers, but to us you seem like whites.'  Ha-ha!" 

Somewhere in the second time around the circle I stopped stumbling and found the rhythm and was brought to the verge of what I'd craved as long as I'd been in Lavie, of leaving my separate thoughts, my unreality here, going outside myself among them; and I mouthed the words that just now seemed full of joy:  

Ne amewo zidodui ha la

Ne amewo zidodui ha la

Ne amewo zidodui ha la

Ekema djifofe Mawu la ana be kpewo a do yli

Ekema djifofe Mawu la ana be atiwo a do yli

Even if the people keep quiet

Even if the people keep quiet

Even if the people keep quiet

Heavenly God will make stones shout

Heavenly God will make trees shout