Perhaps a great many trees used to grow here once, an entire forest that was cut down and burned, and only this one mango tree was left. Everyone from the surrounding area nurtures it, knowing how important it is that it live. A village lies near each one of these solitary trees. Indeed, spotting such a tree from far away, you can head with confidence in its direction, assured that you will find people there, some water, and maybe even something to eat. The tree was saved because without it these people could not live: in this kind of sun, man needs shade to survive, and the tree is that shade’s depository and source.
If there is a teacher in the village, the area under the tree serves as the schoolroom. Village children gather here in the mornings. There are no separate classes or age limits. Whoever wants to, comes. The teacher pins to the trunk a piece of paper with the alphabet printed upon it. He points to each letter with a stick, and the children look and repeat after him. They must learn it by heart — they have nothing to write on or with.
When noontime arrives and the sky turns white from the heat, whoever can do so takes shelter in the tree’s shade: children, adults, and if there are farm animals in the village, they come too — cows, sheep, goats. It is better to sit out the scorching hours under the tree than in one’s own clay house. The houses are cramped and airless, while beneath the tree it is roomy and there is more hope of a breeze.
The afternoons under the tree are very important: it’s when the older people gather for a conference. The mango tree is the only place to meet and talk, the village has no larger venue. People assemble eagerly and willingly, because Africans are collectivist by nature, and possess a great need to participate in everything that constitutes communal life. All decisions, such as who should get how much land to farm, are made collectively, and conflicts and disputes are jointly resolved. According to tradition, each resolution must be adopted unanimously. If someone has a differing opinion, the majority must persuade him to change his position. This can drag on endlessly, because the discussions are famously garrulous. If someone in the village is quarreling with someone else, then the court convened beneath the tree will not try to ascertain the truth, or where justice lies, but will set itself the sole task of ending the conflict and conciliating the warring sides, while granting to each that he is in the right.
When the day ends and darkness falls, the meeting is adjourned and everyone goes home. It is impossible to argue in the dark; discussion requires being able to see one’s interlocutor’s face, to determine whether his words and his eyes are saying the same thing.
Now women and the elderly gather beneath the tree, and children, who are curious about everything. If there is wood, a fire is built. If there is water and mint, a thick, aromatic tea is brewed. Now begins the most pleasant, their favorite, time of day: the retelling of the day’s events, stories that mix fact and fiction, the joyous and the frightening. What dark, savage thing was making such a racket in the bushes that morning? What was that strange bird that flew by overhead and suddenly vanished? The children drove a mole into its burrow. They dug up the burrow — the mole wasn’t there. What happened to it? As the stories unfold, people start to remember — that once, long ago, the old people used to tell of a strange bird that did indeed fly by and vanish. Someone else recalls that his grandfather used to tell of something dark that had long been making a noise in the bushes. How long ago? As far back as one can remember. Because here the outer reaches of memory are the limits of history. Earlier, there was nothing. Earlier does not exist. History is what is remembered.
Africa, except for the Muslim north, did not know writing, and history here is an oral tradition, legends passed from mouth to mouth, a communal myth created invariably at the base of the mango tree in the evening’s profound darkness, in which only the trembling voices of old men resound, because the women and children are silent, raptly listening. That is why the evening hour is so important: it is the time when the community contemplates what it is and whence it came, becomes conscious of its distinctness and otherness, defines its identity. It is the hour for conversing with the ancestors, who have departed yet are nevertheless present, who lead us on through life, and protect us from evil.
In the evening, the quiet beneath the tree is only seemingly so. In reality, the stillness is brimming with the most varied voices, sounds, and whispers. They come from everywhere — from the high branches, from the surrounding bush, from beneath the ground, from the sky. It is best to be close to others at such moments, to feel one another’s presence, for this brings comfort and courage. The African always feels endangered. Nature on this continent strikes such monstrous and aggressive poses, dons such vengeful and fearsome masks, sets such traps and ambushes, that man lives with a constant sense of anxiety about tomorrow, in unabating uncertainty and dread. Everything here appears in an inflated, unbridled, hysterically exaggerated form. If there is a storm, then the thunderbolts convulse the entire planet, the lightning tears the sky to shreds; if there is a downpour, then a veritable wall of water pours from the heavens, threatening at any moment now to drown us and pound us into the ground; if there is a drought, then it is one that does not leave a drop of water behind, and we die of thirst. There is nothing here to temper the relations between man and nature — no compromises, no in-between stages, no gradations. Only ceaseless struggle, battle, a fight to the finish. From birth until death, the African is on the front line, sparring with his continent’s exceptionally hostile nature, and the mere fact that he is alive and knows how to endure is his greatest triumph.
So it is evening, and we are sitting under the great tree. A girl hands me a glass of tea. I can hear people, whose faces, strong and lustrous, as if carved out of ebony, are barely discernible against the motionless darkness. I understand little of what they are saying, but their voices are serious and engaged. Speaking, they feel responsible for the history of their people. They must preserve it and enhance it. No one can say, “Read our history in books.” For no one has written such books; they do not exist. History does not exist beyond that which they are able to recount here and now. The kind of history known in Europe as scholarly and objective can never arise here, because the African past has no documents or records, and each generation, listening to the version being transmitted to it, changed it and continues to change it, transforms it, modifies and embellishes it. But as a result, history, free of the weight of archives, of the constraints of dates and data, achieves here its purest, crystalline form — that of myth.
In these myths, instead of dates and mechanical measures of time — days, months, years — other designations appear, like “long ago,” “very long ago,” “so long ago that no one remembers.” Within these time frames everything can still be placed and arranged in a temporal hierarchy, only that within it time will not evolve in a linear fashion, but will mimic the circular, uniform revolutions of our planet. In this view of time, the notion of development does not exist; it is replaced by the notion of the abiding. Africa is eternal abiding.