The Gurugu Pledge

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  ‌

  ‌The Beginning and the End

  I’m African and I was in the same cave as Shania and her husband, the place we called the ‘residence’ to sweeten the bile in our throats. I heard the stories told there first-hand, but they jumbled together in my mind and I struggled to take everything in once I’d found out about the trade in women. Trade if that’s what it can be called, as practised by Aliko and one or two accomplices. I didn’t know the other people in the cave and so there are details I was never party to. Indeed, although I had long yearned to reach the other side, I never expected to find myself gathered with so many young Africans in a place that was neither a town nor a village. I wanted there to be a way for those men’s stories to be told. I found it fascinating to learn why each one of them had left home, every reason different to the hundreds of others, and yet they’d all, we’d all, decided to set out on a journey we knew nothing about, as if in this day and age there was no way of finding out about where we were heading, whichever country we’d chosen for ourselves. For the first time I realised that what mattered was the ideal, that the ideal was greater than anything else in our lives. It wouldn’t have mattered if someone had told us our European lives would actually be worse than the lives we led on the mountain, for the journey itself had come to carry such extraordinary meaning and was therefore unstoppable, for we all know what happens when Africans bring magic into the equation. And I must confess that the ceremony of the pledge made a huge impression on me, because it was as if we’d been sprinkled with a little … well, magic. I didn’t hear the end of what was said, for my spirit had already surrendered to the sentiment, but even so, I didn’t go with them to the fence that day, as I will soon explain. But first I will tell my story.

  In the place I was born, you grew up and you were presented with the facts of life: stories set in stone, restrictions long established. If custom dictated something, then that something was fixed, nobody could touch it or change it. This was because, deep down, nobody really knew where things got decided. So you couldn’t talk about them. This is the way that so many African things, all of them in fact, are left unsaid. But the story of a continent emptying itself in order to go to another one has to be told, and it has to be told where it’s happening, otherwise it would be like a useful object that has two parts and one gets lost: the object would cease to function. You heard me right: a useful object, a tool.

  After seeing what happened on the mountain, and having heard stories both profound and pathetic, my own story, the life I’d led before ending up on the mountain, suddenly seemed trivial to me. It shouldn’t have done, because just as my camp companions had their reasons for leaving their homelands, I had mine, and just as theirs concerned their inability to explain the mysteries that surrounded them, mine too concerned something I couldn’t understand. But it wasn’t just that: in my case there was something painful about what I wasn’t able to comprehend. As I said before, we Africans rarely know where things get decided, and this not knowing is the biggest reason Africa is emptying, because if you don’t know about something, it’s that much harder to change it.

  Given my geographical origins, nobody could have expected me to end up on Mount Gurugu, because nobody could have expected me to take such a tortuous path. If my own land had spat me out, I’d have ended up in the sea, which was not so very far away, unless you set off in the opposite direction. In other words, if you traced a line from my homeland to Gurugu, it would have had as many twists and turns as the story that prompted me to set out in the first place. It’s a story that I still don’t understand myself, even if I tell it well, with all the details. But here goes: I was a teacher in a small school in an area that wasn’t very developed, in terms of what the world generally considers as developed, although we lived as best we could. I went on explaining things and writing on the blackboard until a new colleague arrived. I won’t give his name, but I will say that he was albino. He was a man with a great many philosophical concerns, as if his whole life was spent worrying about the future. In other words, no matter how much we lacked in the here and now, he found holes in which to plant new worries, to add to the troubles of our daily lives. We needed firewood, means to light a fire and ways to protect ourselves from intruders; he asked what would happen if the world’s population increased to such a degree that it became unsustainable and caused a catastrophe; he was worried about what the future would entail if the oil ran out, or if the rivers dried up, the most important ones at least. The man was albino, and when he shared his concerns with me and looked at me, I had to look back at him, because that’s the way with conversation. I had to try to hold his gaze, but I also had to try not to show that I found it disturbing, because his eyes roved around all over the place and never stayed still. It meant that I never knew when it would be appropriate to drop my gaze, for I didn’t want to be discourteous, but I worried that if I held it too long, it would look like I was staring at the frantic dance of his eyeballs, and that too would be rude. Frankly, I didn’t know what to do. But the topics he talked of, his concerns, were deep, and he had me as his confidante: there was absolutely nothing I could do to help him with his troubles, but he expressed his concerns earnestly to me, as if unaware of the limits of my capabilities. For the first time I understood that profound and honest men could also be naive, or appear to be. I began to think that the way he advanced his arguments was connected to the inability of his eyes to focus on any one thing, for he was incapable of worrying about what really ought to have concerned him.

  We carried on in this way, that man and I, until a number of new students began to arrive at the school, students who were all albinos like him. My first reaction was that it made sense, that he was a man of his race, or race within a race, who’d made a name for himself and so his reputation had inevitably reached the ears of others like him. Or my first reaction was actually nothing: I didn’t wonder about or pay any attention to the stream of albino boys and girls arriving at our school, not until the evidence became overwhelming, not until it had become an exodus. Our school had turned into the place where all the albinos in the region sought refuge. Indeed, a dormitory and a dining room and a kitchen and wash facilities were built, so that the children could live their lives right there in the school. At which point I had to ask myself what was happening: Why couldn’t those children live with their own families? I needed to know the truth. I looked into it and was told that the path those children had to take between home and school was so long that it had become dangerous for them, and that’s why it was decided they should live at the school. Then women had to be brought to cook for them, men to watch over and protect them.

  I began to reflect on my colleague’s concerns, and on the fact that if you held his gaze, it went elsewhere, and that I’d become anxious because of the way his focus strayed. I ought to reiterate, this was no simple staring into the distance, it was something quite remarkable, and it had always made me think of faraway countries when I talked to him, because his wandering eye made my mind wander too. But the worst of it came when I asked him the obvious questions about why our school had turned into an albino boarding school. What was going on? Well, what was going on awoke me from my slumber, or snapped me out of my stupor, my self-absorption, for that man’s dancing eyes were nothing compared to his story, or the story of those albino children, which was essentially the same thing.

  It so happened that, according to a science written in no book, or according to traditions not taught or practised in public, it was believed that albino lives had extraordinary qualities, so extraordinary they had to be exploited. So whenever these traditions dictated, people flocked to albino children seeking the benefits of their extraordinary selves. I don’t really know how to explain it, and if the wise African scholars had come to the mountain and any of us had dared ask them about it, they would have taken fully five minutes or more just thinking about how to answer. Indeed the first scholar to answer would probably have said that he would prefe
r to keep his counsel on the subject.

  ‘I didn’t know there were certain matters you couldn’t reflect on, doctor,’ one of the Gurugu inhabitants would have said, surprised.

  ‘It’s not quite that, lad. It’s just that some matters cannot be trivialised.’

  ‘I’m not asking you to trivialise it, doctor, just clarify it,’ the lad would have said, his surprise growing.

  ‘Using reason to try and explain occult phenomena risks trivialising the matter, that’s all I meant.’

  ‘Ah, OK, thanks, doctor.’

  ‘I know I haven’t resolved your doubts, but believe me, any attempt to do so would only make matters worse.’

  In other words, it would have been the hardest thing for even a group of distinguished scholars to explain. They would not have come across the story in any of the books they’d read. Nevertheless, it was a story, a real and painful story.

  Told within its precise context, the better that it may be properly understood, the story gives me the same sinking feeling I experienced in my discussions with my colleague. It so happened that in the communities those albinos had been born into there was a coterie of men and women who believed in the occult powers of anything related to albino beings. The belief was so strong that it led people to do things so wicked that for a long time I was unable to speak of them. I saw the consequences for myself one morning when I got to school. The children’s cook couldn’t speak. The man who opened and closed the school gate and watched over where the albino children slept couldn’t speak either. Dozens of people had gathered at the dormitory door and they were speaking, but for all their bluster, nothing they said helped alleviate the pain.

  It went like this: it’s night time, you know the teacher and you know he’s albino, but other than his philosophical concerns, his human needs are the same as anyone else’s. You meet him one day and another day you greet him and the next day you see he’s missing a hand; he’s wounded, but he’s conscious and he talks. He tells you a story, full of blood and pain: he was attacked and physically harmed by strangers, and it’s a miracle he’s still alive; you’re sorry, you swallow your saliva and you hope time will heal him. The day passes, other days pass, you feel sorry for him, for his sadness and for the way you can see him making an effort to fix his gaze; you pity his errant eyes. Night comes and you part until the next day and you see him and he’s been wounded again; from the stump of his hand, his attackers have now cut up to the elbow, and thank God he was found when he was because life had been spilling out of him, drop by drop. Many weeks pass and he pulls through, but one day you say farewell and he’s attacked again and this time he has his foot cut off. He’s in great distress after such a devastating injury, but the people who found him acted fast and he will recover, though the road will be long. He heals and he comes in to school on crutches, kindly donated by a convent and tracked down only after a lengthy search. It’s by now very difficult for him to exercise his profession, and increasingly painful to watch him trying to hold his wandering gaze. But he recovers and he hobbles around and through great effort he carries on teaching, but one dark night, evil people enter the place he sleeps and with a savage incision they sever off the whole of his remaining arm. He could hardly defend himself, given his disfigurements, and now his fragile body has suffered so terribly that his very survival is in jeopardy. Albinos were so prized by followers of the occult sciences that respectable sums of money were exchanged for large or small pieces of them, pieces of their already unfortunate lives. I found all this out that day. And because my colleague had reached a certain professional standing, he’d proven his extraordinariness, so that vital pieces of him were worth more.

  I worked as a teacher and when that attack occurred I was struck by the great incongruity of performing normal teacherly duties on the one hand, and confronting such irrationality on the other. I couldn’t think of anything to justify such a state of affairs, and I didn’t think I should have to go on witnessing things that, for a long time, I was unable to speak of. I needed another kind of life and I’d need to cross some kind of threshold or travel over a vast plain before I could put into words what happened at the school that night. That’s why I left my country and set out on such a tortuous path, the long road to nowhere.

  I spent several months living on the banks of a large lake, having fallen in with a group of Congolese who were fleeing their own sorry fate, seeking more tranquil climes. But the banks of the lake were not tranquil enough for me and, as I travelled lightly, I chose to strike out on my own. I decided I needed a new future and the more distance I put between myself and my homeland the better. I continued my journey, crossing whatever nature put in my path, and after many months of wandering, and many brief stints doing various jobs, I ended up on Mount Gurugu – in the residence, where I met many admirable people.

  If I’d opened my mouth to tell my tale to the other residents, no one else would have had the chance to speak. Besides, I didn’t want to recount anything as painful as my story, given the situation we were in. I didn’t think it right that my story, or rather the story of what happened in a school where I’d taught, be told in the residence, even though it was the reason why I was there, the reason I’d abandoned the part of Africa that corresponded to me. I felt I needed some sort of permission to tell it, that something had to happen to make me feel I could tell the story, and that something never happened, so I kept quiet. I think I did right. Talking about that school would have done nothing for the spirit in the camp. So I waited for others to tell their stories and I enjoyed listening to them, especially the ones that brought a little cheer, until the time came to leave the camp.

  Let me now tell of the hours that immediately followed the pledge that was sworn on Mount Gurugu. I sat silently in my tent, or lay on my cardboard, until they woke me and told me it was time for the great march. I told them the truth: I wasn’t fit enough to join them: I hadn’t recovered from the injuries I’d sustained in a previous attempt at scaling the fence, which had ended with the Spanish police refusing to let us get down. There was not much vegetation on the mountain, but I had some knowledge of plant medicine, so I hung around the camp to see if I could be of any help to those who returned, for I felt sure there would be some. Later, once the sun had risen and it was possible to see, I wandered down to the lower part of Gurugu and from there I saw two bodies on top of the fence. I didn’t know what had happened to the others, but I doubted they’d reached Spanish soil. That said, they didn’t come back to the mountain. After seeing what remained of the mass scaling, I turned around and went back up the hill, hoping that the police would realise sooner rather than later that those two people weren’t up there out of choice. Despairing, I began thinking about how there wasn’t enough earth on the whole mountain to dig the tombs the women deserved, if what I feared had happened proved to be true. I decided to abandon the mountain, hoping there was still somewhere on this earth where people had a heart, but the truth is I didn’t know where to head, for I’d ended up on Mount Gurugu by following destiny’s trail.

  So why did I abandon my quest to reach Europe? One day at the camp, just a normal day, we were told we had visitors: a journalist and his cameraman had come to the mountain to interview and film us. The journalist told us they’d sneaked into the forest, for they hadn’t known whether they ought to ask permission, and if so, of whom. He’d come to see us, to see what we thought about the fact that we’d left our own countries and ended up on Mount Gurugu, living like lepers. We couldn’t all talk at once, so one of the French speakers went first and began to tell the story from his particular perspective. The journalist went on asking questions, he seemed like a good person, and that brother answered as best he could. But the visit wasn’t just the journalist asking questions and us answering them, he also wanted to try and get inside our heads, to try to understand why we persisted in our goal, time and time again. He showed us photos and video footage of attempts to reach the other side, and their results. The French
-speaking companion told the journalist his thoughts and we helped him, adding our own opinions. We told the journalist the truth, that we didn’t want to go on cursing fate forever, but that we also had many reasons for wanting to leave our respective countries and we weren’t yet ready to talk about them. This didn’t satisfy him, he couldn’t really understand it, but it was the only truth we had. I remember we asked the journalist his name, and he told us he was called Jordi Abolé; if that’s not exactly it, it can’t be far off. So while we talked, the better to make us understand what lay in store for us, and maybe because he didn’t understand our reasons for being there, he switched on his laptop and showed us some video footage and then a newspaper article with a photo of Africans lying sprawled out on a beach.