“One can obtain this forgiveness by making offerings to the ancestors: sprinkling the earth with water or palm wine, laying food aside for them, slaughtering a sheep. But it all might not suffice — the ancestors might continue to be angry, which for the living means endless misfortunes and illnesses. The greatest anger is caused by incest, murder, suicide, assault, insulting the chief, witchcraft.”
“Suicide?” I was surprised. “How can you punish someone who has committed suicide?”
“Our law commanded us to cut off his head. Suicide was the violation of a taboo, and the principle tenet of the clan legal code is that each offense must be punished. If an offense goes unpunished, the clan will meet with catastrophe, will face ruin.”
We were sitting on the porch of one of the numerous local bars, drinking Fanta, which clearly holds a monopoly here. A young barmaid was napping behind the counter, leaning her head on her hands. It was hot and sleepy.
“The chief,” Kwesi continued, “has many other duties. He decides disputes and resolves conflicts, and is therefore also a judge. An important fact, especially important in the villages, is that the chief allocates land to families. He cannot give them this land, or sell it, for land belongs to the ancestors. They dwell in it, inside it. The chief can only allot it for cultivation. If a field grows barren, he will assign the family another piece of ground, and the former one will lie fallow, gaining strength for the future. The land is sacred. The land gives people life, and that which gives life is sacred.
“While the chief enjoys the greatest respect, he is surrounded by a council of elders and cannot decide anything without seeking their opinion and gaining their consent. That is how we understand democracy. In the morning, each member of the council visits the chief’s house, to greet him. That is how the chief knows that he is governing well and enjoying support. Should these morning visits cease, it means that he has lost the council’s confidence and must go. This will happen if he commits any one of five offenses: drunkenness, gluttony, collusion with sorcerers, bad rapport with people, and governing without seeking the opinion of the council of elders. He must also step down if he is blinded, infected with leprosy, or becomes mentally unsound.
“Several clans together form what Europeans call a tribe. The Ashanti is a union of eight clans. At their head stands a king, the Ashantehene, also surrounded by a council of elders. Such a union is cemented not only by shared ancestors. It is also a territorial, cultural, and political community. It can be very powerful at times, numbering many millions, larger than many a European nation.”
I hesitated a long time, then finally asked him: “Tell me something about witchcraft.” I hesitated, because it is a subject about which one speaks reluctantly here, and often simply passes over in silence.
“Not everyone believes in it anymore,” Kwesi answered. “But a lot of people still do. Many are simply afraid of not believing. My grandmother thinks that witches exist and meet at night on tall solitary trees standing in fields. ‘But has Grandma ever seen a witch?’ I once asked her. ‘That would be impossible,’ she answered with conviction. ‘At night, witches envelop the whole world with a spider’s web. They hold one end in their hands, and the other is fastened to every door in the world. If someone tries to open a door and go outside, he moves the spider’s web. The witches feel this and, alarmed, vanish into the darkness. In the mornings one can only see shreds of spiders’ webs hanging down from tree branches and doorknobs.’ ”
I, a White Man
In Dar es Salaam I bought an old Land Rover from an Englishman who was returning to Europe. It was 1962, several months after Tanganyika had gained independence, and many Englishmen from the colonial administration had lost their jobs, positions, even houses. In their increasingly deserted clubs, someone was always recounting how he had walked into his office at the ministry, and there, smiling at him from behind his desk, was one of the locals. “Excuse me. I’m very sorry!”
This changing of the guard is called Africanization. There are those who applaud it as a symbol of liberation, while others are outraged by the process. It is clear who is for and who is against. London and Paris, in order to induce their civil servants to go work in the colonies, created for those amenable to the idea a grand quality of life. A minor clerk from the post office in Manchester received upon arrival in Tanganyika a villa with a garden and swimming pool, cars, servants, holidays in Europe, etc. Members of the colonial bureaucracy lived truly magnificently. And now, between one day and the next, the inhabitants of the colony receive their independence. They take over the colonial state in an unaltered form. They even take great care not to alter anything, because such a state offers fantastic privileges, which its new administrators naturally do not wish to renounce. The colonial origins of the African state — a state wherein the civil servant received renumeration beyond all measure and reason — ensured that in independent Africa, the struggle for power instantly assumed an extremely fierce and ruthless character. All at once, in the blink of an eye, a new ruling class arises — a bureaucratic bourgeoisie that creates nothing, produces nothing, but merely governs the society and reaps the benefits. The twentieth-century principle of vertiginous speed applied in this instance as well — once, decades, even centuries, were needed for a new social class to emerge, and here all it took was several days. The French, who were observing the struggle for positions with some wry amusement, called the phenomenon la politique du ventre (politics of the belly), so closely was a political appointment connected with huge material gains.
But this is Africa, and the fortunate nouveau riche cannot forget the old clan tradition, one of whose supreme canons is share everything you have with your kinsmen, with another member of your clan, or, as they say here, with your cousin. (In Europe, the bond with a cousin is by now rather weak and distant, whereas in Africa a cousin on your mother’s side is more important than a husband.) So — if you have two shirts, give him one; if you have a bowl of rice, give him half. Whoever breaks this rule condemns himself to ostracism, to expulsion from the clan, to the horrifying status of outcast. Individualism is highly prized in Europe, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America; in Africa, it is synonymous with unhappiness, with being accursed. African tradition is collectivist, for only in a harmonious group could one face the obstacles continually thrown up by nature. And one of the conditions of collective survival is the sharing of the smallest thing. One day a group of children surrounded me. I had a single piece of candy, which I placed in my open palm. The children stood motionless, staring. Finally, the oldest girl took the candy, bit it into pieces, and equitably distributed the bits.
If someone has become a government minister, replacing a white man, and has received his villa, garden, salary, and car, word of this quickly reaches this fortunate one’s place of origin. It spreads like wildfire to neighboring villages. Joy and hope well up in the hearts of his cousins. Soon they begin their pilgrimage to the capital. Once here, they easily locate their distinguished distant relative. They appear at the gate of his house, greet him, ritualistically sprinkle the ground with gin to thank the ancestors for such a felicitous turn of events, and then make themselves at home in the villa, in the yard, in the garden. Before long, we can observe how the quiet residence where an elderly Englishman lived with his taciturn wife is now noisily teeming with the new official’s kinsmen. From the earliest morning, a fire is going in front of the house, women are mashing cassava in wooden mortars, a gaggle of children are romping among the flower beds and borders. In the evenings, the entire extended family sits down to dinner on the lawn — for although a new life has begun, an old custom from the days of unremitting poverty remains: one eats only once a day, in the evening.