Unlike most African villages, this one has crossing streets. Mary is taken with the others to the central house, where immediately the trade talk begins. Now she’s glad of the two Fang members of the party, who are being petted and coddled by children, and even admired by some of the young boys and girls. But it is Gray Shirt who does most of the talking. He tells them that ma wants three members of this village to guide her overland to the Remboue River. They all have what the natives call a palaver over it. What will Mary’s party give for the privilege of having these guides along? Mary is aware that without these guides, they may never find the way across to the other river, but she keeps from showing this. She offers some Hatton & Cookson money, a few tins of food and tea, some rum, using Gray Shirt almost exclusively as her interpreter. At one point, the chief Fang gestures as if to catch Gray Shirt’s words and throw them to the dirt floor of the house.
Mary stands her ground, calmly restating what she’s willing to give, and rejecting what fails to interest her. She has been told by her Europeanized Fang that a palaver with these people can last for weeks. She does not have weeks. She doesn’t want to stay here at all, in fact. The village is in a terrible state of disarray and neglect; there are the remains of an elephant or hippo or manatee lying nearby, sending off a suffocating stench, and buzzing so loudly with flies and other insects that, in the dark, one might believe the carcass itself is making the sound. There are bird droppings and other, smaller carcasses hanging from strands of woven grass in the surrounding trees.
Mary keeps tranquilly repeating what she will give and, at last, the friends of Pagan and Gray Shirt, along with a third man, agree to take part in the journey. They say they know a way to the village of Efoua, whose inhabitants have never seen a European at all, but who have forged a wide path down to the Remboue. The deal is struck. And after the fact, several others seem willing to volunteer for the journey. The Ajoumbas are nervous, and say so, about having more than the two other Fang along, for they know stories about Fang killing black traders who happen into their country, eating parts of them and then smoking the rest for later feasts.
So the friends of Gray Shirt and Pagan—their names are Kiva and Fika—and the third one, Wiki, are taken on as guides. This settled, a celebration begins. Mary sends Pagan down to the canoes to fetch Obanjo/Captain Johnson, who strides up to her and says, in a hearty imitation of a drawing room voice:
—Thanks, p’raps, for your gracious excellency.
—You are quite welcome, sir, Mary tells him. P’raps.
—I was p’raps certain of a bad outcome, madam.
—I sensed that you were.
He bows at the waist, without ever taking his sincere and contrite and shamed eyes from her.
—I thank ye once again.
—Do not trouble yourself, she says.
He moves off and finds someone with a calabash full of rum, from which he takes a very long drink. Then he turns and bows.
—Strictest mod’ration, he says. P’raps.
She nods and tries to give him her most compliant smile: he may, tonight, after that scare, get as drunk as he pleases. Were it not for the fact that she is going to be asking him to be taking further risks, she might have told him how frightened she herself was for that very long twenty minutes.
As the leader of the expedition, she is given the best house in the village—Kiva’s—and finds it all but intolerable. She lies on the makeshift bed of bark and straw, in the reek of the place, and waits for all the noise outside to die down. When it has grown quiet enough, for long enough—and she has no sense of having fallen off to sleep even for a moment—she gets up and steps out onto the village street, in the malodorous air of the buzzing carcass in its cloud of feeding insects. Two frighteningly large and heavy-winged vultures rise from it sluggishly as she appears in the dimness of the street, a darker figure on the dark. She makes her way alone down the path to the river, and steps into the water, feeling the chill of it, walking in up to her knees, climbing into the farthest canoe. She paddles out into the current of the river, and away from the island. The air is cool now, though still oppressive with putrefaction, the choking smell of offal. The water makes the softest rippling sound as she glides out, and in the crepuscular dimness she can see the faintest shadow of the other island. She heads for it, working easily in the still water, gliding along. The sky above her is chalky with stars, so bright they make a glitter on the smooth surface. As she nears the smaller island, she hears several splashes on the shore and supposes them to be crocs, so she presses on to the right, circling that side, until she can see what looks like a beach.
It is a group of hippos feeding, their movements in the shallow surf making it white. She skirts this, turns the canoe—with some difficulty—and heads back to the larger island, certain that this exercise will help her sleep when she returns. As she comes around the smaller island, she sees three lights, bright as lanterns, and with as wide a circumference of illumination, moving erratically near the shore. Thinking this is surely some species of flying fish—they seem to be skimming the surface of the river—she paddles quickly toward them, striving for quiet, but hurrying nevertheless. As she approaches them, they spread out, seem actually to circle her, hovering just over the surface. She can turn and try to close on any one of them, but will be leaving the other two behind to do so, and they seem to know it; they seem aware, remaining quite still, suspended at their distance, observing her. She glides slowly, as if to go between two of them, and they spread out as though to let her pass, and when she turns again and attempts to close on one of them, they all circle her again. She stops, and coasts, and they fly away, low across the night-sparkling dark water, quickly outdistancing her, and almost as quickly moving out of sight, except for the last one, which stops, suspended again just out of the water, then comes racing scarily back, seems bent on ramming her, or stinging her, this round, gold illumination the size of a china plate. It stops with a suddenness she takes to be unearthly, seems to wait, and then with something like a wavering dance of some sort of mischief, showing her how little she has to do with any of its movements, sinks suddenly and soundlessly into the water, just next to her canoe, carrying its illumination with it, showing moving fish and nettles and forms of water life, plant and animal, like brief images in a fever dream of light and shadow, until it disappears in the bottomless darkness.
She paddles back to the larger island, watching all the time for more of them. But nothing comes. In the village, she sits outside Kiva’s house, opens a bottle of red wine Conklin gave her, and drinks it down. It tastes like wet stones, and is not very warming; it has no effect at all on her. She has the sudden realization, tinged with fear, that she is soon going to be thirty-two years old. And for perhaps the last time in her life, she wonders, with her old hard objectivity about herself, what could have possessed her to want to make this life out of her life, this living from the living she was doing in England, a girl with so little experience of anything.
In the morning, she tells Gray Shirt what she saw on the waters of the Ogowe, without mentioning that she had been out there in a canoe. He tells the Fang about it, and they smile at her.
—Akom, Kiva says. Devil Bush.
4
July 1895
Somewhere between the Ogowe and Remboue Rivers:
I have been up the Ogowe, in the rapids of it, fighting through them, periodically jumping for the bank when the rocks loomed too close, and being therefore by turns drenched and then dried in the blazing sun. Along with the others I am accompanied now by three Fang from M’fetta, the first pure Fang village we visited. At the end of the river trip, the group of us labored over ground on which no European, male or female, has set foot. Yet I felt strangely as though all this was familiar and I had lived it before. I felt as if I had come to the farthest reaches of my life, and all of it really had been a sort of flight, to alight at last on my own ground, the ground on which I was born to live.
The Afric
ans have a song about it—a plaint, when someone dies.
—Come back, it says. Hi, hi, don’t you hear? Come back. Come back. See here. This is your place.
I understand it so well, now, though I am of course still far from comprehending the mind and spirit of these strange, unpredictably resourceful, powerful human beings.
Their humanity is available to me in every gesture and in every sign, every motion of their eyes, the expressions on their faces, their tears and laughter and worries and loyalty and humor. Yet so much of the time they are eerily “other” to me. And if they are so to me, they must be and are of course infinitely so to other Europeans.
I imagine you in some future, with a finer instrument of understanding than my own—someone to whom my questions must seem as childish as the questions of so many of my friends and acquaintances among the Africans.
All of this stems from the complex of the African’s beliefs about the physical, natural, and spirit worlds. Because everything in Africa is haunted with life; everything is spirit. And the spirits are seldom benign ones—nothing, to the African, is random.
In many tribes, even death, every death, is explicable in terms of witching, of ill will. The God who made everything in the universe is not personally involved in it; he keeps his distance. But there are a host of lesser spirits, or souls, who must be pled with or placated, and, as with the Greeks—and there are strong similarities—these lesser spirits are involved with human beings and behave very much like human beings. Each person is believed to have three souls, and only the first one is the animate being one sees or speaks to. The other two souls are always there, and indeed the Africans build little huts to offer shelter for one, called the Bush soul. You may see these small structures on the sides of the paths near the villages along the Ogowe. There is also a soul that a person possesses that he can use to cause harm to another—he can “witch” that person.
Ill will, in Africa, has power.
When a man dies, his slaves and friends and everyone he knew and all the members of his family, including his wives, come under suspicion of witchcraft; and there are rituals devised by the witch doctors to reveal the guilty party. I know of one instance where a man’s death from fever resulted in the deaths of four other people—the witch doctor stalked down the village street slapping a straw basket lid on and taking it off and slapping it on again, and saying the names of everyone in the huts, one by one, and when the lid did not come exactly over the lip of the basket with one swipe, as it did not seven times, the unfortunate individuals whose names were called in each instance were then hauled out of their huts and forced to swallow a terrible substance made from tree bark, a poison that killed two of them outright, caused three of them to vomit—which was interpreted as meaning that their souls rejected the evil spirit and therefore exonerated them—and did nothing to the other two (apparently the poison weakens with exposure to the air). These two who did not vomit were roasted slow over a fire, until at last, as an act of screamed-for mercy, their throats were cut. The terror of this practice is rife all over the Congo, and in several instances has caused tribes to be practically wiped out. It is all in the hands of the witch doctors, and they are a force unto themselves, identified from earliest youth, and singled out for training. And beyond dealing with witchcraft they have various remedies for rheumatism and other human maladies. I saw a witch doctor treat a man with a broken arm by means of shoving a bamboo stick into the wound, and then tying the broken bone to it and wrapping it in palm leaves soaked in some substance that smelled of cacao. Not long after this, I saw the injured gentleman, and the skin was healed, but the arm itself was withering rapidly from the inside. Yet I have also seen wounds and festering sores, and one bad snakebite, healed in a matter of a few hours with the use of certain concoctions put together by the witch doctor.
But in a place where so many things can kill you, the obvious terror is in supposing every death to be the effect of witchcraft.
Here, even if a person is taken by a crocodile or a lion, the animal is thought to have been witched by someone else, and the round of rituals seeking the culprit begins. In other words, in this place that Europeans see as having no respect for life, there is such deep respect for it that every death is perceived as murder, and therefore every death must be avenged. Every death. And of course there are the souls everywhere: the Africans worship while pounding grain into powder, or while hunting antelope, or eating. I have seen the medicine men ingest something from a wooden bowl, and begin to foam and froth at the mouth, their eyes becoming unnaturally bright, and yet they are lucid, and rather scarily acute, their senses seem enhanced, as if they had taken on the nerves of the animals they hunt—and they look into you; they understand what you say, even when you speak your own language, or another (I have spoken German to these men and found myself to be communicating with them).
I’m so frightened all the time. I ride over a titanic loneliness, and am all too painfully aware of my strangeness to everyone. My only defense for it is this exterior of proper decorum and bravado; the calm of the lady in her own drawing room. My curiosity is like a drug. If I find nothing to exercise it with, I feel dead.
One week later, at Egaja, Congo Français:
I write Lady MacDonald, I write Lucy, and friends in Cambridge, and Gunther, and Guillemard, and all the other acquaintances and friends, and then I write you, so much farther away than anyone, and yet the one of all of them with whom I can be entirely myself. You, who can never answer. And of course we have established this. I cannot bring myself, even so, even given the nature of these letters, which will be silent until they stand up and speak to someone—I can’t bring myself to think of you as many. Perhaps several—or many—pairs of eyes will see me here, but there is one pair of eyes I take to my heart. I imagine you, one person, among however many.
We have been collecting and trading in several Fang villages along the path to the Remboue. Among the pleasures of the stay was that I had word of Corliss through one of the Fang minstrel singers we encountered. It came about quite by accident. We were watching him perform (the African minstrel is an astoundingly gifted storyteller/musician, whose one function in life is to tell stories. These are not, as you might expect, lore, or the history of any given tribe or people; they are not religious or admonitory or inspirational or cautionary, but are simply stories for the sake of the stories, filled with magic and mystery, usually violent and always at least as entertaining as much of the popular literature that I used to read—one must barter with these men first, of course, since everything on the continent is based on trade. One must ask for a given story from a cache of them that each one keeps, often represented by the various charms and objects that dangle from their bodies). At any rate, in the middle of one medium-priced tale that the others had decided upon, Obanjo/Captain Johnson, my African who is more English than the English, turned to me and said:
—Corliss, madam.
At first I didn’t understand him. But he repeated it, and I nodded at him.
—You understood, p’raps? This gentleman speaks of you and a person of the male gender by the appellation of Corliss.
—Yes, I said.
—Corliss is in this story. The big captain demised a crocodile with a machete. This man says he heard it from Corliss. You p’raps understood this?
Again, I told him I had.
—Corliss was in the small boat trapped by mud in the river, p’raps. He demised the big croc in his little boat while protecting the damsel of great distress, p’raps. A jolly good story.
—Oh, so, that is true, then, I said, thinking of the boasting boy in Corliss that I hadn’t known was there. But then of course I wanted to know how it was that the minstrel knew Corliss, and of my association with Corliss. I suddenly missed David Corliss with a physical ache, and had to lower my eyes.
—I sabe Corliss, the minstrel said. He talk about you all one time.
Which means that he talks about me nearly incessantly, since
in Africa the English expression for anything ongoing and continuous is all one time.
My heart quickened like a little girl’s, to think of David Corliss talking about me. A silly little girl at an afternoon tea with a young suitor. I was quite ridiculous to myself, and even so I quickly assayed to discover news of him. But Obanjo informed me, in his inimitable way, that the minstrel had no news. Only more stories and songs, about other heroes.
One of the sorrows of this wandering existence I’m now leading is that I’m always passing in and out of lives. The conversation with Conklin shook me at a level I was unprepared to think about, or decide about. In any case, it becomes quite easy to believe that I will end my life in this country. I am filled with wonder every minute, even so. In a place not far from here, a missionary named Robert Nassau and I spent a wonderful evening discussing fetish. He’s one of the few of his type who allows these people their culture; he’s become quite expert at their religious beliefs, and is happy merely to serve them in practical ways. I mentioned Mary Slessor to him and was pleasantly surprised to find that he knows her well, that the two of them have been corresponding for years. I think, like her, he’s more African than European, and as a result lives among them as a brother. He maintains his faith (he also has chided me for my increasing use of the Lord’s name, and the name of Allah when in moments of surprise or consternation), and of course he still believes that these people can only be saved by Christianity; yet he keeps from proselytizing them to what I will call the usual harmful effect. There is nothing so heartrending as seeing a converted African in pain, suffering and seeking some solace from the silent God. Nobody to blame for his grief, no culprit with which to exorcize the anguish by exacting revenge. Their world is alive with souls, as I’ve said, and the souls are very active and filled with sound and fury, since they exist in every moving thing and, in some cases, in the whole visible and invisible world. These converted Africans have not the solace of supposing a spirit to be displeased with them or ill-disposed toward them; no, they have the curse of Deuteronomy, and the silence.
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