It is getting late and everyone is going home. The night is here, and the night belongs to the spirits. Where, for instance, do the witches gather? Everyone knows that they hold their meetings and councils in high branches, immersed and concealed in foliage. It is better not to disturb them, to move away from beneath the tree — they cannot stand to be spied and eavesdropped upon, and they are quite capable of vengeance, of persecution, spreading disease, inflicting pain, sowing death.
Therefore the place under the mango tree will remain unoccupied until dawn. At dawn, the sun and the shade of the tree will appear simultaneously. The sun will awaken people, who will immediately strive to hide from it, seeking the shelter of the tree. It is strange but true that human life depends on something as fleeting and fragile as shade. That is why the tree, which bestows it, is something greater than just a tree — it is life itself. If lightning strikes its crown and the mango goes up in flames, people here will have nowhere to find shelter from the sun, or to assemble. Without the means to assemble, they will be unable to make any decision, reach any resolution. But above all they will be unable to recount their history, which exists only in the process of being retold during evening gatherings beneath the tree. Because of this they will quickly lose their knowledge about their yesterday, will lose their memory of it. They will become people without history, meaning — they will be nobody. They will lose that which united them, will disperse, each one going off in a separate direction, alone. But solitude is impossible in Africa; a solitary man will not survive a single day, is automatically condemned to death. That is why if a thunderbolt shatters the tree, the people who lived in its shade will also perish. And so it is said: Man cannot survive longer than his shadow.
Besides shade, the second most valuable thing is water.
“Water is everything,” says Ogotommelli, a wise man of the Dogon people, who live in Mali. “The earth comes from the water. Light comes from water. And blood.”
“The desert will teach you one thing,” a nomadic Saharan merchant told me in Niamey. “That there is something that one can desire and love more than a woman. And that is water.”
Shade and water — two fluid, inconstant things, which appear, and then vanish who knows where.
Two kinds of life, two situations: anyone who finds himself for the first time in an American supermarket, one of those gigantic, unending malls, will be struck by the richness and variety of the goods assembled there, by the presence of every conceivable object that man has ever invented and produced, and subsequently transported, stowed, and piled up, all of which results in the customer not having to think about anything — the thinking was done for him earlier, and now he has everything ready and at hand.
The world of the average African is different indeed. It is a lean world, of the very simplest, most elementary sort, reduced to several objects: a single shirt, a single bowl, a handful of grain, a sip of water. Its richness and diversity are expressed not in a material, concrete, palpable, and visible form, but in the symbolic values and meanings that the African imparts to the most mundane things, imperceptible to the uninitiated on account of their utter ordinariness. Thus a rooster’s feather can become a lantern lighting the way in darkness, and a drop of oil a shield that will protect you from bullets. The slightest object takes on symbolic, metaphysical weight, because man decided that it would be thus and through his choice elevated it, transported it into another dimension, into a higher realm of being — into transcendence.
Once, in the Congo, I was admitted to a secret: I was allowed to see a boys’ initiation school. Upon finishing the school, boys became men, had the right to speak up in clan assemblies, could start a family. The European visiting this place, so critically important in the life of an African, will be stunned, will rub his eyes in puzzlement. How is this possible! Why, there is nothing here! No benches, no blackboard! A few thorny bushes, some bunches of dry grass, and instead of a floor, gray, ashy sand. This is supposed to be a school? And yet the young people here were proud and excited. They had attained a great honor. Everything here was based on a social contract, on an act of profound faith, which was treated very seriously: tradition said that this place was the school that initiated boys into adult life, and therefore it had a privileged status, was a distinguished, even sacred site. A nothing becomes a deeply significant something because we decide that it should be so. Our imagination anoints and exalts it.
A good example of this deifying metamorphosis might be the record of Leshina. She was a Zambian woman, around forty, a street merchant in the little town of Serenge. She did not distinguish herself in any particular way. These were the 1960s, and in various corners of the world one still came upon hand-cranked phonographs. Leshina had such a phonograph, and one completely worn and scratched-up record. It was a recording of Churchill’s 1940 speech, in which he summoned Englishmen to wartime renunciations and sacrifice. The woman set the phonograph up in her yard and cranked the handle. From the green-painted metal tube rose a low, hoarse rumbling, grunting, and gurgling, in which one could pick out some traces of an emotional, dramatic voice, though the sounds were by now incomprehensible and devoid of meaning. Leshina explained to the onlookers — and the gaping crowds kept growing in number — that this was God’s voice anointing her his emissary and commanding absolute obeisance. More and more gathered around her. Her followers, for the most part poor people without a penny to their names, with superhuman effort raised a temple to her in the bush and began conducting prayers there. At the start of each mass, Churchill’s booming bass worked them up into an ecstatic trance. But African leaders are ashamed of such religious cults, and President Kenneth Kaunda sent out the army against Leshina. Several hundred innocent people were murdered, and tanks reduced the clay temple to dust.
The European in Africa sees only part of it, usually only the continent’s exterior coating, the frequently not very interesting, and perhaps least important, part of it. His vision glides over the surface, penetrating no deeper and refusing to imagine that behind every thing a mystery may be hidden, and within as well. But European culture has ill prepared us for these excursions into the depths, into the springs of other worlds and other cultures — or of our own, for that matter. For historically, it was a fact of the drama of cultures that the first contacts between them were most frequently carried out by the worst sorts of people: robbers, soldiers of fortune, adventurers, criminals, slave traders, etc. There were, occasionally, others — good-hearted missionaries, enthusiastic travelers and explorers — but the tone, the standard, the atmosphere were for centuries set and sustained by a motley and rapacious international riffraff. Naturally, respect for other cultures, the desire to learn about them, to find a common language, were the furthest things from the minds of such folk, for the most part benighted, dull-witted mercenaries, lacking refinement and sensitivity, often illiterate, interested only in conquest, plunder, and carnage. As a result of such encounters, the world’s cultures — instead of becoming versed in one another’s ways, drawing closer, permeating one another — became mutually hostile or, at best, indifferent. Their representatives, aside from the rogues, kept their distance, avoided and even feared one another — intercultural exchange was monopolized by a class of ignoramuses. As one consequence, interpersonal contacts were informed from the outset by the most primitive criterion: skin color. Thus racism became an ideology according to which people defined their place in the world. Whites-Blacks: a division that bred discomfort on both sides. In 1894, when the Englishman Frederick Lugard was advancing at the head of a small division deep into western Africa, with the aim of conquering the kingdom of Borgu, he demanded to meet the king. But a messenger arrived to announce that the ruler could not receive him. As he spoke with Lugard, the envoy kept spitting into a bamboo container hanging around his neck. Spitting, it turned out, was deemed protection and purification from the consequences of contact with a white man.