Under African Skies

by Charles Larson

  INVESTIGATION TO THE SKULL’S FAMILY’S HOUSE

  When I traveled with him a distance of about twelve miles away to that market, the gentleman left the really road on which we were traveling and branched into an endless forest and I was following him, but as I did not want him to see that I was following him, then I used one of my juju which changed me into a lizard and followed him. But after I had traveled with him a distance of about twenty-five miles away in this endless forest, he began to pull out all the parts of his body and return them to the owners, and paid them.

  After I had traveled with him for another fifty miles in this forest, then he reached his house and entered it, but I entered it also with him, as I was a lizard. The first thing that he did when he entered the hole (house) he went straight to the place where the lady was, and I saw the lady sat on a bullfrog with a single cowrie tied on her neck and a Skull who was watching her stood behind her. After he (gentleman) had seen that the lady was there, he went to the back yard where all his family were working.

  THE INVESTIGATOR’S WONDERFUL WORK IN THE SKULL’S FAMILY’S HOUSE

  When I saw this lady and when the Skull who brought her to that hole or whom I followed from the market to that hole went to the back yard, then I changed myself to a man as before, then I talked to the lady but she could not answer me at all, she only showed that she was in a serious condition. The Skull who was guarding her with a whistle fell asleep at that time.

  To my surprise, when I helped the lady to stand up from the frog on which she sat, the cowrie that was tied on her neck made a curious noise at once, and when the Skull who was watching her heard the noise, he woke up and blew the whistle to the rest, then the whole of them rushed to the place and surrounded the lady and me, but at the same time that they saw me there, one of them ran to a pit which was not so far from that spot, the pit was filled with cowries. He picked one cowrie out of the pit, after that he was running toward me, and the whole crowd wanted to tie the cowrie on my neck too. But before they could do that, I had changed myself into air, they could not trace me out again, but I was looking at them. I believed that the cowries in that pit were their power and to reduce the power of any human being whenever tied on his or her neck and also to make a person dumb.

  Over one hour after I had dissolved into air, these Skulls went back to the back yard, but there remained the Skull who was watching her.

  After they had returned to the back yard, I changed to a man as usual, then I took the lady from the frog, but at the same time that I touched her, the cowrie which was tied on her neck began to shout; even if a person was four miles away he would not have to listen before hearing, but immediately the Skull who was watching her heard the noise and saw me when I took her from that frog, he blew the whistle to the rest of them who were in the back yard.

  Immediately the whole Skull family heard the whistle when it blew to them, they were rushing out to the place and before they could reach there, I had left their hole for the forest, but before I could travel about one hundred yards in the forest, they had rushed out from their hole to inside the forest and I was still running away with the lady. As these Skulls were chasing me about in the forest, they were rolling on the ground like large stones and also humming with terrible noise, but when I saw that they had nearly caught me or if I continued to run away like that, no doubt, they would catch me sooner, then I changed the lady to a kitten and put her inside my pocket and changed myself to a very small bird which I could describe as a sparrow in English language.

  After that I flew away, but as I was flying in the sky, the cowrie which was tied on that lady’s neck was still making a noise and I tried all my best to stop the noise, but all were in vain. When I reached home with the lady, I changed her to a lady as she was before and also myself changed to man as well. When her father saw that I brought his daughter back home, he was exceedingly glad and said thus: “You are the ‘Father of gods’ as you had told me before.”

  But as the lady was now at home, the cowrie on her neck did not stop making a terrible noise once, and she could not talk to anybody; she showed only that she was very glad she was at home. Now I had brought the lady but she could not talk, eat, or loose away the cowrie on her neck, because the terrible noise of the cowrie did not allow anybody to rest or sleep at all.

  THERE REMAIN GREATER TASKS AHEAD

  Now I began to cut the rope of the cowrie from her neck and to make her talk and eat, but all my efforts were in vain. At last I tried my best to cut off the rope of the cowrie; it only stopped the noise, but I was unable to loose it away from her neck.

  When her father saw all my trouble, he thanked me greatly and repeated again that as I called myself “Father of gods who could do anything in this world” I ought to do the rest of the work. But when he said so, I was very ashamed and thought within myself that if I return to the Skulls’ hole or house, they might kill me and the forest was very dangerous travel always, again I could not go directly to the Skulls in their hole and ask them how to loose away the cowrie which was tied on the lady’s neck and to make her talk and eat.

  BACK TO THE SKULL’S FAMILY’S HOUSE

  On the third day after I had brought the lady to her father’s house, I returned to the endless forest for further investigation. When there remained about one mile to reach the hole of these Skulls, there I saw the very Skull who the lady had followed from the market as a complete gentleman to the hole of Skull’s family’s house, and at the same time that I saw him like that, I changed into a lizard and climbed a tree which was near him.

  He stood before two plants, then he cut a single opposite leaf from the opposite plant; he held the leaf with his right hand and he was saying thus: “As this lady was taken from me, if this opposite leaf is not given her to eat, she will not talk forever.” After that he threw the leaf down on the ground. Then he cut another single compound leaf with his left hand and said that if this single compound is not given to this lady, to eat, the cowrie on her neck could not be loosened away forever and it would be making a terrible noise forever.

  After he said so, he threw the leaf down at the same spot, then he jumped away. So after he had jumped very far away (luckily, I was there when he was doing all these things, and I saw the place that he threw both leaves separately), then I changed myself to a man as before, I went to the place that he threw both leaves, then I picked them up and I went home at once.

  But at the same time that I reached home, I cooked both leaves separately and gave her to eat; to my surprise the lady began to talk at once. After that, I gave her the compound leaf to eat for the second time and immediately she ate that too, the cowrie which was tied on her neck by the Skull loosened away by itself, but it disappeared at the same time. So when the father and mother saw the wonderful work which I had done for them, they brought fifty kegs of palm wine for me, they gave me the lady as wife and two rooms in that house in which to live with them. So I saved the lady from the complete gentleman in the market who was afterwards reduced to a Skull and the lady became my wife since that day. This was how I got a wife.

  —1952

  Camara Laye

  (1928—80) GUINEA

  On Tuesday, February 5, 1980, Léopold Sédar Senghor, the president of Senegal and one of the earliest proponents of négritude, announced over Radio Senegal that Camara Laye, the Guinean novelist, had died the day before. The fifty-two-year-old writer had been ill for many years—much of the time during his exile in Senegal, where he had resided for thirteen years as Senghor’s guest. Laye was regarded as his continent’s preeminent Francophone novelist.

  Most of Laye’s career as a writer was a continuous struggle against hardship, poverty, and government censorship. Laye had become a writer somewhat by accident. Born in Kouroussa, Guinea, in 1928, he distinguished himself as a student and in time received a government scholarship to a technical school in France. At the end of the year overseas, when Laye decided that he wanted to continue his studies and pursue a bacc
alaureate, his government abruptly cut off his funds.

  Impoverished, Laye took whatever work he could to support himself. Out of loneliness, frustration, and a fear that he would forget his African heritage, he began writing down memories of his childhood in Guinea. Although he never intended his writing to be published, he was persuaded by a Parisian woman who had befriended him to show the material to a publisher. The work appeared in 1954, as L’enfant noir (The Dark Child, or The African Child, as it is translated in the two English-language versions), still perhaps the most beautiful account of traditional African life ever published—in large part because of the haunting portrait of Laye’s mother.

  Laye’s first novel, Le regard du roi (The Radiance of the King), was published two years later, in 1956, by which time he had decided that he wanted to be a full-time writer. This novel—a lengthy narrative about a white man who undergoes a spiritual transformation and becomes an African—has repeatedly been cited, along with Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, as one of the masterpieces of African fiction. Laye—a firm believer in the positive aspects of cultural syncretism, in ethnic reciprocity—was an optimist, in spite of the unsettling difficulties that were about to unfold in his own life.

  Back home in Guinea, Laye was given an innocuous position in the civil service, which permitted him time to write. But when Sékou Touré, the president of Guinea, read the author’s work-in-progress, Laye was given two options: not publish the book or go into exile. Laye chose the latter, and Dramouss (a sequel to L’enfant noir) was published in Paris in 1966, after being postponed for several years.

  In exile in Senegal, Laye was a haunted man. Sékou Touré ordered Laye’s wife imprisoned, apparently in retaliation for the books her husband had published. Laye agonized about his wife and children in Guinea while suffering recurrent physical and psychological illnesses. Like other African writers of his generation, he discovered that his fame as a writer did not bring commensurate economic rewards or intellectual freedom.

  Laye’s writing suffered, though more in quantity than in quality. His final work, Le Maître de la Parole (1979), was published in Paris the year before his death. Though the volume chronicles the life and death of Sundiata, the first Emperor of the ancient Malian empire, The Guardian of the Word (the English-language title) is equally a celebration of the traditional African storyteller, the griot. In the narrative itself, Laye warns the reader not to confuse the true griot with contemporary storytellers, “those music merchants, those choristers or guitarists who wander through the big cities looking for recording studios.”

  Rather, Laye tells us, the true griot, “one of the important members of that ancient, clearly defined hierarchical society, is … preceding his status as a historian … above all an artist, and, it follows, his chants, his epics, and his legends are works of art.”

  Camara Laye was such a custodian of the word.

  THE EYES OF THE STATUE

  Translated from the French by Una Maclean

  She stopped walking for a moment—ever since she set out she had been feeling as though she had earned a moment’s rest—and she took stock of her surroundings. From the top of the hill on which she stood she saw spread out before her a great expanse of country.

  Far away in the distance was a town, or, rather, the remains of a town, for there was no trace of movement to be seen near it, none of the signs of activity which would suggest the presence of a town. Perhaps it was merely distance which hid from her sight all the comings and goings, and possibly once within the town she would be borne along on the urgent flood of activity. Perhaps.

  “From this distance anything is possible,” she was surprised to hear herself say aloud.

  She mused on how, from such a vast distance, it seemed still as though anything could happen, and she fervently believed that if any changes were to take place they would occur in the intervals when the town was hidden by the trees and undergrowth.

  There had been many of these intervals and they were nearly always such very long intervals, so long that it was now by no means certain that she was approaching the town by the most direct route, for there was absolutely nothing to guide her and she had to struggle continually against the intertwining branches and tangled thorns and pick her way around a maze of swamps. She had tried very hard to cross the swamps but all she had succeeded in doing was getting her shoes and the hem of her skirt soaking wet and she had been obliged to retrace her steps hurriedly, so treacherous was the surface of the ground.

  She couldn’t really see the town and she wasn’t going straight toward it except for the rare moments when she topped a rise. There the ground was sparsely planted with broom and heath and she was far above the thickly wooded depths of the valleys. But no sooner had she finished scrambling up the hills than she had to plunge once more into the bushes and try to force her way through the impenetrable undergrowth where everything was in her way, cutting off her view and making her walk painful and dangerous again.

  “Perhaps I really ought to go back,” she said to herself; and certainly that would have been the most sensible thing to do. But in fact she didn’t slacken her pace in the least, as though something away over there was calling to her, as though the distant town were calling. But how could an empty town summon her. A silent deserted town!

  For the closer she came to it the more she felt that it must really be a deserted city, a ruined city in fact. The height of the bushes and the dense tangled undergrowth about her feet convinced her. If the town had still been inhabited, even by a few people, its surroundings would never have fallen into the confusion through which she had been wandering around for hours; surely she would have found, instead of this tangled jungle, the orderly outskirts of which other towns could boast. But here there were neither roads nor paths; everything betokened disorder and decay.

  Yet once more she wondered whatever forced her to continue her walk, but she could find no reply. She was following an irresistible urge. She would have been hard put to it to say how this impulse had arisen or indeed to decide just how long she had been obeying it. And perhaps it was the case that if only she followed the impulse for long enough she would no longer be capable of defying it, although there was no denying that it was grossly irrational. At any rate the urge must have been there for a very long time, as she could tell from the tiredness of her limbs, and moreover it was still very close. Couldn’t she feel it brimming up within her, pressing on her breast with each eager breath she drew. Then all of a sudden she realized that she was face-to-face with it.

  “The urge is me,” she cried.

  She proclaimed it defiantly but without knowing what she was defying, and triumphantly although unaware of her opponent. Whom had she defied, and what could she be triumphing over? It was not simply that she was identifying herself with the strange compulsion in order to get to know more of it and of herself. She was obliged to admit that the urge was indefinable, as her own being forever escaped definition.

  After one final struggle with the branches and obstacles, and after skirting one more morass, she suddenly emerged in front of the city, or what remained of it. It was really only the traces of a town, no more than the traces, and in fact just what she had feared to find ever since she set out, but so sad, so desolate, she could never have imagined such desolation. Scarcely anything but rough heaps of walls remained. The porticoes were crumbling and most of the roofs had collapsed; only a column here or a fragment of a wall there proclaimed the former splendor of the peristyles. As for the remaining buildings, they seemed to waver uncertainly, as though on the very point of tumbling. Trees had thrust their branches through broken windows, great tufts of weeds pushed upwards the blocks and the marble slabs, the statues had fallen from their niches, all was ruined and burst asunder.

  “I wonder why these remains seem so different from the forests and bush I have come through already?” she said to herself. There was no difference except for the desolation and loss, rendered all the more poignant by t
he contrast with what had once been. “What am I searching for here?” she asked herself once more. “I ought never to have come.”

  “Many people used to come here once,” said an old man who appeared out of the ruins.

  “Many people?” she said. “I have not seen a single soul.”

  “Nobody has been here for a very long time,” said the old man. “But there was a time when crowds of people visited the ruins. Is that what you have come for?”

  “I was coming toward the city.”

  “It certainly was a great city once. But you have arrived too late. Surely you must have been delayed on the road.”

  “I should not have been so late but for my battles with the trees and undergrowth and all my detours around the swamps. If only they hadn’t held me back …”

  “You should have come by the direct route.”

  “The direct route?” she exclaimed. “You cannot have any idea of the wilderness round this place.”

  “All right, all right,” he said. “I do have some idea of it. As a matter of fact, when I saw that people had stopped coming, I guessed how it was. Perhaps there isn’t any road left?”