its carcass. That is why it is regarded with so much fear.
The consul, dreaming of being the first European to see the legendary creature, was unrelenting. I will try to track down one during my stay here, he said.
We have a saying that only half-eaten corpses know the colour of the mangrove tiger’s eyes, Chief Koko said. He pointed the crown of his walking stick towards his chest. The mangrove tiger sitting here, the Chief added, is also one you haven’t yet seen.
They both laughed, again uneasily. For a while they said nothing, the only sound coming from the foaming waves of the Atlantic crashing repeatedly against the shoreline.
Hamilton broke the silence with a comment about the clear skies. He noted that the weather would be perfect for cricket and proceeded to give Koko an overview of the game, the almost religious devotion he had to it evident in his animated gestures.
Chief Koko’s interest in the meanings of concepts like wickets and runs and over arm bowling was negligible. What intrigued him more were the deeper rituals of cricket, which Hamilton listed out to include fair play and trust. The Chief drew correspondences between those values and the moral principles that defined the practice of age-grade wrestling, his people’s favourite pastime. Both men concluded the parallels between their national sports were indeed striking.
There was some more awkward silence. The Chief and the consul stood up and shook hands, bringing an end to the proceedings. Neither of them could have suspected that that first meeting would also be their last. And neither could have known that events triggered by that single encounter would warp the destiny of an entire subcontinent and turn the two of them into eternal enemies, yet both men, as if in common devotion to a creed that mandates the veneration of contradictions, would never stop calling each other friend.
Even after a century following that encounter between the Chief and the consul, when the landscape of the creeks no longer featured palm-oil casks floating downriver or deck-hands loading cargo into the holds of steamships, when the discovery of a different kind of oil in the delta had inaugurated a new age of pipelines and tankers and derricks flaring natural gas skywards, diverse witnesses would keep on testifying to sighting Consul Hamilton and Chief Koko at midnight re-enacting their only meeting on that desolate beach battered by the rough waters of the Atlantic. Fishermen downing gin after trawling with little profit in the polluted waters would itemise the antiquated clothes once fashionable in a previous century that Koko and Hamilton still wore, and market women would lament the anguish on the faces of the two men doomed to continue recycling the same insignificant chatter about wrestling and marine creatures and cricket every night till the wintery end of time. Soldiers guarding oil rigs would pass time by analysing the positions of Chief Koko’s canoe boys and the Crown’s constabulary, the spectral phalanxes damned for ever to keep glowering at each other from opposing sides of the principal actors. And old women would tell their grandchildren that because those unfortunate combatants and the superannuated translator were implicated by the accident of their mere presence at the seaside summit, they were bound to keep on restaging that spooky theatre as extras to their bosses, like attendants sentenced to everlasting servitude in the courts of ancient monarchs with whom they were entombed. And some historians would go as far as claiming that the meeting between Chief Koko and Consul Hamilton, like the ghostly convocations that followed it, was also a phantom one. Both men had merely been spectators at a public demonstration of their mutual impotence to tinker with the future, the scholars would say, arguing that history’s true meeting was the reception organised for Henry Hamilton by the territory’s leading European merchants.
The
The consul, dreaming of being the first European to see the legendary creature, was unrelenting. I will try to track down one during my stay here, he said.
We have a saying that only half-eaten corpses know the colour of the mangrove tiger’s eyes, Chief Koko said. He pointed the crown of his walking stick towards his chest. The mangrove tiger sitting here, the Chief added, is also one you haven’t yet seen.
They both laughed, again uneasily. For a while they said nothing, the only sound coming from the foaming waves of the Atlantic crashing repeatedly against the shoreline.
Hamilton broke the silence with a comment about the clear skies. He noted that the weather would be perfect for cricket and proceeded to give Koko an overview of the game, the almost religious devotion he had to it evident in his animated gestures.
Chief Koko’s interest in the meanings of concepts like wickets and runs and over arm bowling was negligible. What intrigued him more were the deeper rituals of cricket, which Hamilton listed out to include fair play and trust. The Chief drew correspondences between those values and the moral principles that defined the practice of age-grade wrestling, his people’s favourite pastime. Both men concluded the parallels between their national sports were indeed striking.
There was some more awkward silence. The Chief and the consul stood up and shook hands, bringing an end to the proceedings. Neither of them could have suspected that that first meeting would also be their last. And neither could have known that events triggered by that single encounter would warp the destiny of an entire subcontinent and turn the two of them into eternal enemies, yet both men, as if in common devotion to a creed that mandates the veneration of contradictions, would never stop calling each other friend.
Even after a century following that encounter between the Chief and the consul, when the landscape of the creeks no longer featured palm-oil casks floating downriver or deck-hands loading cargo into the holds of steamships, when the discovery of a different kind of oil in the delta had inaugurated a new age of pipelines and tankers and derricks flaring natural gas skywards, diverse witnesses would keep on testifying to sighting Consul Hamilton and Chief Koko at midnight re-enacting their only meeting on that desolate beach battered by the rough waters of the Atlantic. Fishermen downing gin after trawling with little profit in the polluted waters would itemise the antiquated clothes once fashionable in a previous century that Koko and Hamilton still wore, and market women would lament the anguish on the faces of the two men doomed to continue recycling the same insignificant chatter about wrestling and marine creatures and cricket every night till the wintery end of time. Soldiers guarding oil rigs would pass time by analysing the positions of Chief Koko’s canoe boys and the Crown’s constabulary, the spectral phalanxes damned for ever to keep glowering at each other from opposing sides of the principal actors. And old women would tell their grandchildren that because those unfortunate combatants and the superannuated translator were implicated by the accident of their mere presence at the seaside summit, they were bound to keep on restaging that spooky theatre as extras to their bosses, like attendants sentenced to everlasting servitude in the courts of ancient monarchs with whom they were entombed. And some historians would go as far as claiming that the meeting between Chief Koko and Consul Hamilton, like the ghostly convocations that followed it, was also a phantom one. Both men had merely been spectators at a public demonstration of their mutual impotence to tinker with the future, the scholars would say, arguing that history’s true meeting was the reception organised for Henry Hamilton by the territory’s leading European merchants.
The
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