The Wheelchair Painting

My painting is a spin on a play / film called Kongo. A stage magician is left paralyzed from the waist down by a rival for his wife's affection. After a while the wife returns but dies before he can talk to her. With her is a small child, a girl, whom the magician assumes is his rival's. The magician vows revenge and takes the child with him to Africa to root out his rival, an ivory trader. He gives the child to a whorehouse in Zanzibar, where she eventually contracts syphillis, and sets himself up as a sort of witch doctor among the natives, who follow his every command. After stealing many loads of ivory from his rival he eventually confronts him, planning to have him killed. The custom in these parts is that when a man dies, his daughter or wife must be burned alive along with his body on the funeral pyre, thus the magician has his revenge. But the rival has his own surprise, the child his not his but the magician's, who in his thirst for vengeance has degraded his own daughter. The natives kill the rival and demand the sacrifice of the daughter. Using some of his old stage tricks, the magician allows his daughter to escape and he himself is then sacrificed on the funeral pyre. In the story, the daughter never finds out who her true father was. In my painting she has found out and goes to visit the hut where he and his pet chimpanzee once lived, only to find his abandoned wheelchair.