A week after what became known as ‘the Announcement’, the first signs of the end of time began to appear. The birds had gone from the sky, leaving an empty abyss, a sign of a divine anger which even the cleverest sorcerers, powerless in the face of their panoply of limp, unresponsive amulets, could not fathom. These sages came together in a plenary session and took a decision that caused a general uproar: a woman must be ‘handed over’ to appease the divine wrath, and take on her own head the burden of human sin. According to this august assembly, men did not possess this redeeming power, God had only given it to women. The women took this verdict as an insult, and most of the young women shrank from the idea, saying their job was to ensure the line of descent. So that left only the older women. But they said, just because they had reached the twilight of their existence didn’t mean they must accept a sacrifice devised for them by a bunch of old guys using their so-called knowledge of the world of darkness to camouflage their own cowardice. What did they stand to gain, anyway, their lives were nearly over, why should they sacrifice themselves for a happiness they’d never see? While the men and women were arguing it out, the situation got worse. The desert had by now absorbed a good part of the Mayombe forest and was heading off at full pelt towards the country’s heartland. Seeing the country was in a state of breakdown, the miracle woman came down from her cabin perched up on the mountain top, and turned up uninvited in front of the wise men. On the night of a full moon, four sages from the village of Louboulou, and all its sorcerers, dragged her off, far away, into what was still left of the bush. Her hands were tied behind her back with strands of creeper. To some she was a scapegoat, to some a victim who died for the sins of others. They treated her roughly and abused her, which showed how deep was the community’s belief that she had caused all the bad luck that had hit the region. No longer just a willing sacrifice, she was now truly guilty, and had given herself up, and in some people’s eyes that was sufficient, they grabbed their whips, gritted their teeth, and lashed her. Stoically, she stood firm, and walked her Way of the Cross.
In time they came to a waterhole, though it was so small it would probably dry up in a few hours. The moon was full, just brushing the tops of the drought-withered trees. The Eye in the Sky had decided to witness this settling of human scores, so it shed its light upon the scene, until one of the sorcerers, in a quavering voice, began to read out the accusation, decreeing that in the public interest the old woman must live inside the luminous disc from now on and carry a basket on her head till the end of time; unprotesting, the sacrificed woman knelt down in the middle of the waterhole, her hands still bound, and raised her head to the sky. She made not a sound as one of the sorcerers stepped forward with a knife raised above his head. A deathly silence fell, as the sorcerer, with one single, swift and decisive movement, slit the woman’s throat. At once the moon vanished, and did not reappear until the following month, with this time, trapped inside it, an old woman carrying a basket on her head. The southerners were amazed at the sight.
It was decreed that the first Friday of every new year should be the festival of the Sacrifice, when homage would be paid to the old woman. The birds reappeared in our sky, rain fell for a whole week, the harvest brought forth fruit once more, the rivers ran high and teemed with fish, and the animals went forth and multiplied till the bush was crawling with every imaginable species…
I’m grown up now, but belief remains intact, protected by a kind of reverence that resists the lure of Reason. And returning to my roots after twenty-three years away, I feel my faith more than ever. At every full moon anxiety takes hold of me, and pulls me out of doors. Everywhere I see the outline of things, like shadows watching me, surprised to see I’m not paying homage to the miracle woman. And I look up at the sky and I think that maybe the old bohemian has found eternal rest and been replaced by another woman, a bit younger than her, the woman I know best and who would have accepted the sacrifice too, the woman who brought me into the world, Pauline Kengué, who, I will say it, and write it now, to clear up any confusion, died in 1995…
The woman from nowhere
My mother left me with the enduring memory of her light brown eyes. I had to peer down deep into those eyes to catch sight of her worries; she had a way of keeping them from me, through a sudden contraction of her pupils. For her it was a defensive impulse, and for me was one explanation, among others, for why I felt that throughout my childhood she never looked me straight in the eye. I mistrusted her sudden joyful outbursts, which, deep down, concealed her sorrows, and presented me with a distorted image of my mother, as someone well armoured against the frustrations of daily life. I tried to see her more cowardly actions as the sign of inner suffering, but each time I came up against the same mask of serenity she wore every day of her brief existence. It would have been the height of dishonour for her to show me her vulnerability. In almost everything she did, she had one single purpose: to prove to me that with the blessing of our ancestors there was no difficulty on earth she could not overcome, like the time she dreamed that her mother, N’Soko, now deceased, had buried five hundred thousand CFA francs in the sand on the Côte Sauvage, so she went down there at sunrise with her eyes half closed and her hair still wild about her head. There, by chance, she found the stash of money, which made it possible for her to go back into business. Or when she got back from the Grand Marché on a day when things hadn’t gone well, she’d distract me, sending me off to buy a litre of petrol, some spare wicks for the two Luciole storm lamps, then shut herself up in her room, and go back over her accounts. She didn’t notice I was back again, and could hear her still murmuring prayers, blowing her nose and saying my grandmother’s name, over and over, her words interspersed with sobbing. I knew it wasn’t the bad day that had done this to her, it was the presence of the scary straw-hatted scarecrow behind the bedroom door. To me he felt like a human, watching us, moving about. His rags looked like strands of tangled creeper, waving around when you entered the room. My mother had been there when he was made, in Louboulou, the day Grandmother N’Soko, finding her maize plantation half ravaged by an army of persistent birds, had placed it in the middle of her field to protect the crops. Years later, when my grandmother died, Maman Pauline was determined she should inherit this object, while her brothers and sisters, baffled by her insistence, and by her disregard for material goods, had made a grab for the cattle and the plantation and sold them, since none of them wanted to set themselves up in the bush.
My orders were not to go near the scarecrow unless my mother said I should. She didn’t really need to tell me, since I was already terrorised by the fact of its existence, and I couldn’t understand what use he could be in our home. I would start shaking whenever, before a test or end-of-year exam, my mother would make me go and salute him, before setting off to school. Seeing me shrink from the bogeyman, she’d reassure me, saying, ‘He’ll bring you good luck, he’ll tell you what to write to get a good mark.’