by Paul Theroux
“But the most remarkable thing is that a village isolated in this way becomes wholly unaware of its isolation. The village is the world, the people are real, and everything else is mysteriously threatening. So the stranger comes, as I did ten years ago to that remote village, and he is viewed from an alarming perspective. He might be seen as dangerous, or else —it happens—as a kind of savior. He is not a man like them. The Bwamba, who had never seen a white woman before, thought my wife was a man. Ten years ago the Bwamba believed white men were cannibals, who fed on Africans. It’s odd: the only mystery for the stranger is that little clearing in the jungle, which thinks of itself as the only real thing.”
He thought the paradox might drag them into motion, but they were unresponsive, sitting at doubtful attention, some in the sleeping postures of broken statuary. Many were still awake—he knew that from their coughing.
“What if it happened,” he went on, “that the stranger was himself from a remote village? Suppose the English villager meets the African villager— the isolation they have in common is the very thing that isolates them from each other. There is not a syllable of speech they can share. Common humanity, you might reply; of course, yes, but if each has been marked by his solitude, aren’t we then dealing with two separate consciousnesses which have evolved in circumstances so different that nothing at all can be spoken and no judgment can be possible? The English villager might report that what he has seen is strange. What will the African report? The same, of course. Mr. Kurtz said his Africans were brutes; what did those Africans make of Kurtz? What did Schweitzer’s patients make of that shambling old man playing his pipe-organ in the jungles of Gabon? Imagine, if you can, the opinions of Livingstone’s porters, Burton’s guides, Mungo Park’s paddlers! Anthropology is man speculating on man, but when the man who is the subject turns around and becomes the speculator, you see how relative the terms ‘barbaric’ and ‘simple’ and ‘primitive' are.
“And reality, what is reality?” he asked of the dozing people in the hall. “It is a guess, a wish, a clutch of fears, an opinion offered without any hope of proof. One might say that only pain can possibly substantiate it You see the oddest things, you know, dead things or specters, that can cause you such panic that to dismiss them makes any argument for reality a series of arrogant notions inspired by the sharpest fear.”
Emma’s eyes were fixed on him. He spoke to her: “We accept what reality is bearable and try to ignore the rest, because we know it would kill us to see it all. I see Fve wandered a little from my subject,” he said. And he had; the impassive, unresponding audience had caused it. He was talking to himself and to Emma. He said, “In closing, let me say that for a long time I’ve thought of doing a rather unfashionable book, in which we see anthropologists through the eyes of their subjects. Think about it for a moment. Malinowski as described by the Trobriand islanders, Levi-Strauss’s fastidious Frenchness noted by the Nambikwara Indians in the Mato-Grosso. The headhunter’s view of the anthropologist, you might say. It would be interesting to see how we invent one another.”
He expected a reaction but got none. There was not a murmur of recognition from the audience. Munday had been talking forcefully in a high-pitched voice, that preaching tone, to stir them. They had not moved. Now he could see that several more had fallen asleep and the rest had a look of nervous fatigue, as if in speaking so loud (he imagined that, being old, many of them were hard of hearing) he had intimidated those he had not put to sleep. He wanted to fly up to the ceiling and look down at those shining bald spots, that white hair, all those small heads.
He described Bwamba music and played his tape, an old Bwamba woman’s lament for a husband who died young. He translated the song, which was a description of the man, praising him, likening him to a powerful crested crane. The song was a harsh series of caws, with a sad muttered refrain; it was accompanied by a plunking finger-harp and several gourd horns. Afterwards there was some whispering in the hall.
Munday said, “Now let’s look at the people themselves. Mr. Lennit?”
Lennit inserted a box of slides into the projector. He said, “Lights, please,” and the hall, in total darkness, began to purr with the murmuring voices of the old people.
Huge trembling fingers appeared on the screen, fretting like swollen spider’s legs. There was some laughter. Lennit said, “She’s jammed, I think,” and the fingers clutched in the empty square of light.
With a resounding clang, a slide of the eastern slopes of the Ruwenzori Mountains appeared on the screen. It had been taken on a clear day, the mountains were emerald, the cloudless sky a bright blue, and in the foreground was a thick grove of banana trees. There were lingering exclamations in the audience, “Oh!” and “Lovely.”
“Mountains of the Moon,” said Munday. He stood next to the screen, tapping it with a slender stick. “Next slide.”
This was of a back road, russet-colored mud cratered with wide pot-holes. “That,” said Munday, “is the main road into the mountains.” He mused, “I broke any number of springs on that particular stretch.”
8
Succeeding slides took them beyond the mountains to the rain-forest, the bush track through the papyrus swamp, the path at the Yellow Fever Camp, and then they were at the village itself. There was a sequence of village slides: of the huts; of Munday smiling (sunburned, almost unrecognizable in shorts and bush jacket) with the headman; women pounding bananas; small children making playful faces at the camera. The whispers, appreciative of landscape slides, grew flat and noncommittal when Africans were shown. Munday had captions for all the slides: “Women’s work is never done,” he said of the banana pounding; “Children are the same all over the world, though after I took this picture one little chap said, ‘You give me shilling,’ ” and “Village beauty,” he said of a bare-breasted girl taken in close-up: her hair was tightly plaited, she wore a beaded necklace, and her earlobes were rent, pulled into long loops.
The circumcision ceremony, nine slides, plunged the church hall into silence. The men looked wild in headdresses and masks and leggings; the boys’ faces were whitened by ashes and their bodies were streaked with yellow and red paint. They held small spears and had feathers in their hair, and they looked very worried. Then they were on their backs and grimacing. “I consider myself rather lucky to have these slides. They only have a male circumcision every fourteen or fifteen years, and fortunately this one coincided with our stay there. As you can see, some are quite advanced in age—there, that one could be twenty-five or so—” Munday blandly explained the procedure, the chanting, the dancing performed to distract the boys from the pain of being cut.
Lennit clicked on, and twice Munday had to say, “Can we have that one back again?”
Casting his shadow on the brown wrinkled pipe of a Bwamba boy’s penis being tugged by a decorated hand, Munday said, “Unfortunately, I have no pictures of female circumcision. Sorry about that. The Sebei people practice it—so do the Chiga, and of course the Kikuyu. But they wouldn’t allow me to photograph that. Extremely painful. Men aren’t allowed to watch. But this reticence is perfectly understandable. We wouldn’t be very eager to have an African photograph us on our wedding night—”
A shocked male voice in the audience gasped, “God, don’t that look awful!”
The hush in the hall was intense. The slide projector’s fan whirred. In the dark village, in that hot church hall, Africa was a bright square of light, pigeons wheeling among huts, a row of dancing men in birds’ plumage and shabby leopard skins, foliagfe so green and wet it looked newly painted, blue curtains of smoke rising from fire pits, dusty feet and legs in every picture, the blur of hands on a drumhead, a wincing white-faced boy. The last slide was of a boy being helped up from the straw circumcision mat. He had turned his face to the camera and wore an expression of utter fear, which was plain even under the ashes of his make-up. Rivulets of sweat streaked his face, his eyes pleaded; he had been forbidden to cry, but there was anguish in his em
pty hands.
“A few minutes before, he was a boy,” said Munday. “Now, he’s a warrior. Lights.”
The lights went on and the audience blinked, as if they had just emerged from a tunnel, or like mice, suspicious and sniffing and glassy-eyed, awakened by a torch stuck in their cage. Some pressed their eyes or made visors of their hands. But many of them made no move at all, and Munday saw they were asleep.
“I want you to have a look at some of the tools and weapons you saw in those slides,” said Munday. “I’ll pass them along to you. Take them, feel them—you’ll see they’re quite strong and well made.” He took them, one by one, from a canvas bag at his feet and explained the function of each, making distinctions between the cutter and scraper, the short jabbing spear and the throwing spear, the wrist-knife, the dagger, and the various circumcision knives. He described how the blades were fixed and drew their attention to the markings. When he finished talking about one he handed it to a man on the end of the front row and asked him to pass it around. A man behind that one leaned forward, resting his arms on the chairback and looked over the man’s shoulder to marvel at them.
“I’ve been doing all the talking up to now,” said Munday. “While that hardware is making the rounds perhaps you’d like to ask some questions.”
Munday gripped the lectern and surveyed the still faces. The steel folding chairs squeaked. He saw the weapons being passed from hand to hand, but there were no hands raised for questions. TTie people cloaked their shyness in an exaggerated interest in the weapons, handling them, turning them over. Then a man in the third row asked, “Did you ever climb those mountains we saw in the first slide?”
“The Ruwenzoris,” said Munday. “Not to the top. I cantered around the slopes quite a bit. The slide you saw of the giant lobelia was taken by Emma here. She’s the mountain climber.”
Heads bobbed, trying to catch a glimpse of Emma.
“A few years ago,” said a man in the comer, half rising and clearing his throat, “the wife and I flew out to Majorca for a little holiday, one of those package tours, you know, get a bit of sun. Went out from Luton, everyone saying Ole! Well, we arrived and had a wash and a meal at the hotel and then took a stroll down the front, sort of a pier. I can’t tell you how hot it was! Temperature must have been in the nineties, and the tarmac was going all soft and sticky—had it all over me plimsolls. I said to the wife, ‘I don’t know how they do it.’ I wasn’t good for anything—after an hour I was all played out. The next day it was the same—worse, really, because the food got to us and we were running to the loo every five minutes. That was the first word I learned, Hombres!”
There was laughter again—they had laughed when he had said 016—and Munday saw that the audience knew the man as a joker who was seizing an opportunity to perform. Munday said, “I don’t see what any of this has to do with—”
“But we took the usual stroll,” the man went on, chatting easily, “and I drank gallons of that mineral water. The sun was a penance—couldn’t stick it, so I sat in the shade under one of those umbrellas and watched the holiday-makers and the people going about their business. They say Spanish people are lazy and don’t want to work, but these blokes were really hard at it. I’ve been a socialist all my life, and that kind of thing impresses me. I took one aside —I suppose I was getting to be a bit of an anthropologist myself—he was the waiter, and I said to him, 1 don’t know how you people do it.’ But he just smiled and took my order with the sweat pouring down worse than those African pictures. It’s an amazing thing, really, but I got to thinking to myself, do you suppose those people would live in a place like that if they didn’t have to? What I mean to say is, they don’t have much choice, but if they did have a choice don’t you think it’s a sure five they’d leave a flaming hot place like that Majorca and maybe go somewhere else where they could live a decent life without having to fan themselves with paper plates? That’s my question.”
Munday, irritated by the question, said curtly, “No,” and looked for another questioner.' But when the same man began to speak again, he interrupted, adding, “Those Spaniards would be as uncomfortable in Four Ashes as you were in—where was it, Palma?”
“Playa del Sol,” said the man. “Fillet of sole, the wife calls it.”
“Wherever,” said Munday. “And the same goes for Africans. Their village is the world. Beyond it is terra incognita."
A tall man stood up in the center of the hall. He had good posture, a kind of military bearing, and his accent was educated. “Unlike my friend in the corner,” he said, “I haven’t been to Majorca—fish and chips in Spain is not one of my favorite holidays—”
“I didn’t—” the man started to object “But I agree with him completely,” continued the tall man, his chummy agreement silencing the complaint. “I was a D.C. in Western Uganda—well before your time. Your lantern show took me back a few years! Crumbs! I know the Bwamba. Used to think of them as frightful little persons, always hiding from one and sort of grinning out at one from the branches. Reminded me of the Irish a good deal, getting up to all sorts of mischief—made my life a misery, I can tell you. I saw a lot of your chaps, too. And I remember, oh, years ago, one of your anthropologists coming into my office and absolutely pleading with me to get him out of there. Couldn’t take another minute of it, he said. Claimed they were robbing him blind, all sorts of things. I took care of him—buck up, I said, and one of my chaps saw him to the train.”
“Your question, then?” said Munday.
“It’s not a question so much as a challenge, actually,” said the man, and Munday could tell from the laughter that the audience was on the side of the tall man, who somehow represented their unformed boredom and made their disinterest into outright rejection. Facing the tall man he felt he faced them all.
The man bore down, losing his humorous tone: “You told this gentleman the Africans would be uncomfortable out of their villages. It’s the first Fve heard of it, and it doesn’t square with my experience at all. Africans are perfect little deserters ”
“I don’t agree,” said Munday. The faces were on Munday.
“I didn’t think you would,” said the man. “But do let me finish, won’t you?”
“Carry on,” said Munday. The faces turned to the man.
“I’ve never met people so anxious to get away— anywhere—to the towns, another village, wherever they heard there were a few shillings or a few women to be had for the taking. Someone would hint that life was better in Kampala and they’d be off like a shot. And pray tell, who are these Africans one sees collecting tickets on the Underground if not villagers? They come as students—the word ‘student' covers a multitude of sins—but they haven’t the slightest intention of going back. Your younger African is dying to leave. Get to London, streets paved with gold, what-have-you. It used to amaze me. I mean, I liked Africa infinitely better than they!”
“I daresay,” said Munday—the faces turned from the man to him—“the Africa you lived in was not quite the same one they did.”
“The very same,” said the man, now humorously. The humor was like an affectation of tolerance, putting Munday in the wrong. “Though I must admit they had all the fun. I was stuck behind a desk with masses of official bumf to deal with. I used to hear them chattering outside the window, laughing and so forth—I suppose they were making plans to leave.”
“In my ten years—”
“But it’s an odd thing. I still dream about the damn place. I have this dream about once a month, a nightmare in actual fact. I see Fort Portal, that lovely little town, but in my dreams it’s full of chemist’s shops and petrol stations, and neon lights so bright you can’t see the mountains. Well, I won’t bore you any further, but you understand I felt I had to speak my mind.”
He sat and there was an expectant moment, a rustling preparation, as if the people were gathering their hands to applaud him for scoring against Munday. But it passed, the motion in the hall that was like approval settle
d into silence.
Munday had seen the hall as full of feeble people, inattentive in their distressed old age, derelict, simply warming themselves and going to sleep in the heat. In those snoozing, uncaring faces he had not identified the tall man who was so unlike them, and he had not guessed that the challenge of the man’s authority would stir them. Munday heard his own reply as unsympathetic, even hostile; he felt the man had assumed temporary leadership as a spokesman and turned them against him, and he had become defensive—needless on so insignificant an occasion. But what was maddening was the figure of the man, how, seated, he was no different from any of the old people, and standing so assured.
