Hello to the Cannibals

by Richard Bausch

  Silence.

  There is no other silence here. When a person becomes ill, there is a horrific wailing from the members of the family, and I am sure a clinging fear that one might be perceived as having caused the illness. Among the tribes of the Niger delta, when a woman dies who has a child of six months old or more, they believe she’ll come back for the child, and they perform a ritual of holding the child before her dead form, making it cry out and telling her that it will follow soon, and backing away slowly until others of the family or tribe rush in and cover the body with plantain leaves, thus shielding the mother’s eyes so she may not see the direction in which the child has been taken away. If the child is younger than six months, she is simply thrown into the bush to die, as twins are thrown away to die—and sometimes, among some tribes, the mothers of twins.

  When I was staying with Mary Slessor in Okyon, near Calabar, I saw a lovely child, aged four, whose mother had died at her birth. The others in the compound called her Wonder Child, and I later found that this was because she had survived several days lying alone in the bush. When her mother died having her, this child was, according to the custom, simply thrown away. In a place where famine is common and food is by turns scarce or nonexistent given the extremes of weather and changes in fortune, this custom actually is not quite as dreadful as it sounds. Anyhow, some of the others who regularly go back and forth from Mary Slessor’s compound to the market heard the child crying in the bush, weak little sobbing cries. She was barely alive. The leopards and snakes and other predators had missed her, somehow, as had the killing insects, though ants and flies had swarmed over her eyes and nose and mouth, and into her ears; they had eaten into the nasal cavity and through part of the upper lip. But she survived, and, happily, is not badly scarred. The mark on her upper lip gives her a questioning look that absolutely increases her charm. If I do come to write and finish a book, I would like to express something of this kind of missionary—Miss Slessor and her work, and the work of several I have known like her, are examples of the rare instance when Christian ideals are practiced rather than preached.

  The problem with the African mind is not its simplicity, because it is not simple. The trouble with African culture is that it is so determined by belief. If there is a hypocrite in these tribes, I have not met him yet. It is true that in some tribes a man accused of committing witchery against another can designate a slave to die for him, or pay to have someone else undergo the ordeal of poison, which in almost every case, as I have described it, ends in the death of the person involved. But fetish is so fervently believed as to animate the world—and the Africans are nearly absolute in their observance of their religion. Everything has a soul, and the soul doesn’t leave after a thing dies; it remains for a period of weeks or months, which is why in some of the tribes the bodies of the dead are kept aboveground, and in some instances in plain sight. More so than in any society I know about or have read about, the whole of existence is governed by magic, by spells and witchcraft. It involves death, and it is brutal, though I hasten to add that if one were suddenly plunked down in the middle of a High Church ceremony in Kensington, without previous knowledge of the development of the religion and customs that lead to it—if one looked from a distance of cultural estrangement at the various forms of punishment in English law and at our wars of religion, our own conversion by sword, the crusades and pogroms and historical slaughters, political, religious, or simply inexplicable, as in the recent case of the Cheapside Ripper, one begins to understand that criminals exist in every society and that horrors exist there as well, and people attempt to build workable relations with their fellows as best they can under the specific circumstances. A great deal of African fetish makes a terrible kind of logical sense, given the extreme place in which these people must scrape out an existence; understanding, too, that while it is stalked by leopards, and driver ants, and snakes, and crocodiles; while its other earthly inhabitants can kill you more efficiently than just about anywhere else on earth, it is also the most spectacularly, wondrously, spirit-liftingly beautiful country. A country one loves, and carries into every other place one ever travels. In any case, I have come to like these people. I admire them. Especially the most fierce and feared of them, the Fang (others here call them Fan—the name rhymes with sawn, or long, not ran or sang). They have taken me in. We have tea.

  Two days later. Village of Esoon.

  I went for an excursion with several Fang, some men and a few of their wives (polygamy is practiced in Africa for what I have come to believe is good and sufficient reason, given, as I have already said, the demands of the climate and the work that there is to do merely to stay alive).

  But this isn’t what I have to set down here.

  There was a crowd of us, on a pleasant afternoon outing, talking as best we could. I’d had five days of waiting and trading and resting and collecting, and I’d decided to go on a stroll with others instead of going alone. So we all headed out from the village, breathing the dry, hot air and taking pleasure in what little breezes stirred, like cool caresses. I was reveling in the lovely wall of forest surrounding us on three sides, and thinking, even then, of being so far out of the pale of the society I knew in England. Over the past weeks, I have often stopped to appreciate my surroundings in just this fashion, wanting merely to savor it; I am here, I have come all this way and I am here.

  Above us shone a lucent, tranquil sky, without a single blemish in it. We had entered the tall blade grass, dry and prickly, sharp as knives, and were on a wide path through it, walking abreast, and there was a lot of laughing and chattering back and forth (one never quite hears about the humor of these people—I have divined something of the sharp and superbly subtle shades of it, even understanding as little as I do; the world is a threatening, haunted place, and still the human laughter rises, a song to the astral foment of the sky).

  This was a perfect day, bright and breezy, and we were strolling, like a group of parishioners looking for a good place to have a picnic, when something came streaking from the forest wall, bursting from that great, shadowy, verdurous gloom like a bolt of lightning—it did not, at first, seem that it could be made of anything but a bolt of insubstantial electricity. But it was a leopard. It plunged across my path within three feet of me and leapt upon one of our party, a tall young man named Talouga. He had just repeated an English word, “dress,” and was proud of himself. I had recited for him one of his words; it was a game we played. The leopard hit him with such force and suddenness that he was on the ground and in a cloud of dust before we quite knew what had happened. There was a horrible personal look to it, man and leopard locked in that grisly embrace. One of the other men had a machete, and we all tried, without success, to get the leopard interested in us. We shouted and flailed at it and swung the machete, but the leopard held tight to Talouga’s throat, and pulled him away from us, looking at us as if to question why we were so interested in this meal he had captured. Talouga’s feet dragged the dust and we chased after—it was only a matter of five or ten yards—flailing away and screaming, and the entire time the animal’s attitude seemed to be that of puzzlement about why we were tormenting him. The man with the machete was someone who had told me his name was Joe and that he had been converted to Christianity. Joe kept calling for Christ and then for Allah to help him, screaming in a tone deeper than terror—there was something horribly incantatory about it—and swinging wildly with the machete. He hit the leopard several times, blood-spattering blows on its neck and shoulders and in the middle of its back; but to no avail. Poor Talouga kept making a drowning, gurgling sound, and then fell ominously silent. We managed at length to drive the leopard away from him, and Joe killed it with one last blow of the machete. The cat’s mouth had opened a killing gash in Talouga’s neck, severing his jugular vein and probably breaking some of the bones there, too. His lower body, while he was still struggling with his hands and arms, had gone quite limp before the thing was over.

  For several
aghast moments we stood around the body, the women crying, the other men beating the grass and waving sticks. They were fearful of another attack, I’m sure, as I was. We looked at the forest, as if it had coughed this up at us—or I suppose it was me that looked at it in this fashion.

  For the rest of that day, the witch doctor, a lugubrious, lanky, ugly man with sharpened teeth and a long, pointed chin that made his face, from certain angles, look like a blade, went among the members of the tribe banging a drum with the flat of his hand, and shouting names. I could do nothing but watch, and wasn’t at all certain that I myself would not be the prime target and sign of a witch. But my animus is too strong for this one—the fact is, he’s frightened of me. So frightened that he glanced my way every time he started to name a person as having witched the leopard into killing poor Talouga, and my frowns kept him from naming anyone. It so happened that earlier that same morning an old woman who had borne twins long ago and had been shunned by the others had died of fever, and the witch doctor took this opportunity, observing my concerned and disapproving countenance, to ascribe the death of Talouga to her. He did so not out of any duplicity, mind you, but out of honest fear of my magic.

  I have come so far from my father’s library.

  As they travel across the forbidding tracks of swamp and forest, they encounter more Fang who have never set eyes on a European. Many of them show a polite fascination with her hair. They approach and try to touch her, gingerly, and with wonder. Yet it is also quite clear that they find her ugly, the whiteness of her skin seems horrendous to them. She sees a kind of pity in the eyes of the women, and there is the feeling that they’re all regarding her the way people look at a person in terrible misfortune, attempting to stare without seeming to.

  In one village, she’s given the chieftain’s hut, and being more weary than she can believe, she sets about getting herself ready for bed, standing in the light of a tallow candle whose guttering mingles with a rank smell, which she assumes is caused by the closeness of that cramped little space. She has gotten her blouse untied and is about to remove it when she finds that the villagers are peeking at her from every chink in the side walls of the hut. So she buttons the blouse again, and curls up in her boots and dress, and sleeps as best she can. The dark settles around her, the sounds of the village grow still and there is just the raucous forest night. No physical comfort obtains in places like this and sleep comes like a coma, usually, from the bottom of exhaustion. But she can’t sleep. She’s assailed by the increasing odor, a dreadful stench, like a thick layer of bad air, cumbrous, descending over her in a smothering blanket. At last, she sits up and begins to explore, wondering if something has gotten in under the walls and floor and died there. But the odor is coming from above her head, and is unmistakably something rotting. Coming to her booted feet, she reaches up to retrieve several small bags hanging from the ceiling, and is nearly overcome by the odor’s denseness. Whatever is causing the smell is in these bags. She takes them down very carefully, opens them one by one, and pours out their contents on the table. Lumps of some foul-smelling substance, too dark to distinguish as anything but feculence. Upon closer inspection, she recognizes, with a muted gasp, that amid these fragments is a human hand, quite freshly cut off, and she realizes that these other bits are also of human origin: four eyeballs, black as pitch but eyeballs nonetheless, three big toes, two ears, and several other parts she can’t take the time to identify. The hand horrifies her more than the rest—not only because it is fresh, but because it’s a part of the body that acts rather than being acted upon. The ear, the eye, are so much a part of the structures they belong to that one can miss what they are, seeing them this way; but there is no mistaking a hand. The shape of it, the uses of it, arise powerfully in your mind when you see it separated from the body.

  She supposes this cache to have something to do with the notorious cannibalistic habits of the Fang, and quickly puts everything back, gagging as she does so. With a violent hurling of herself she flees the hut, out into the center of the village. Everyone is asleep. All around her are the sounds of the bush at night. She stands there stifling her own urge to gag, sputtering and coughing into her fist. At last, the fit subsides and she can breathe again. There can be no question of returning to the hut. In keeping with her habit of exploring alone, she makes her way down a smooth path to a small stream that several of the women had earlier shown her. How wonderful it will be to bathe the stench from her clothes and body. She’s only a hundred or so meters from the village. A way they travel every day. It is probably safe. She’s almost too tired to care, one way or the other. But she moves with stealth, and is wary, stopping several times to listen.

  In the darkness, the moonless black, she gets out of her clothes as quickly and silently as possible, folding them as she goes and setting them on the bank. Then she turns, and by slow stages, worrying about what she can’t see all the time, enters the cold water. The chill of it wakes her completely. But as she goes under and comes up, paddling in a wide motion with her arms, gliding on her belly and feeling the weight of her drenched hair on her back, she experiences the sense of being pleasurably renewed. She pushes along and then turns and floats, watching the faintest pearly tracings of clouds in the starless dark. She remains in the water for a cleansing hour, and then has to spend the better part of another hour trying to dry herself with her own cummerbund. But she has taken her hair down and wet it good and wrung it out, and she’s more refreshed than she has felt in days.

  The thought comes to her: I do not want to go back to England. Even with what I have seen and heard. I do not want to go back. Not ever.

  It is almost as if someone else has spoken. She starts up the path to the village, and in her mind she sheds the damp clothes and her own skin; she becomes a woman of this place, someone returning from a dream of another world. I wish never…

  5

  THE FOLLOWING MORNING, as they are getting ready to set off, the chieftain whose hut she had slept in wants badly for her to have something special. She realizes that he wishes to trade some more.

  When she and the others first arrived, in order to make it quite clear that she was there for trade (and not as an invader, or as a part of their purported diet) she gave him, in exchange for some balls of rubber, a favorite red scarf—a gift from Lucy Toulmin-Smith, that she had taken with her to Paris. He prized this, and wore it all through the evening, and he wore it in the pale dawn when he walked up from one of the other huts and questioned her, with a bemused, tolerant expression of compassion, about why she was outside his hut, sleeping on her blankets, rather than inside.

  —Out of them night, he said.

  —Please, your name, she said.

  He uttered something in Fang, that for the second time, she missed. She decided not to press it. They stood together and she indicated the beauty of the sky and the pleasantness of the surroundings as her reason for sleeping outside the hut.

  Now, he seems to want the whole village turned upside down to find the one thing he feels she should have.

  But it has been misplaced, apparently. She and her group stand waiting. They have their packs on, and are sweating in the hot, dry, risen sun.

  Obanjo, who is traveling under his African name on this particular leg of the journey, says:

  —This is indubitably something he has been in possession of for some lengthy long time, madam.

  —I don’t know what I have left to give him for it, Mary says. Is it a religious object, do you think?

  —I have, on the other hand, p’raps, no way of confirming such.

  They wait. Mary goes over in her mind what she has so far been able to discover about fetish, and perhaps this will be something to add to it, some juju that the chief can explain to her, and that she can therefore add to her collection.

  The precious item is at last brought to her in several layers of sackcloth, folded many times. She believes she’s about to be shown something of immeasurable value in her quest for kn
owledge about the spirituality of these people. The chief stands there gazing at her with all the anticipatory emotion of a child on a birthday while she unfolds the last part of the cloth—and uncovers an ordinary straight razor, the kind that any English gentleman would use. The look on her face betrays her disappointment. He’s seen this. He appears momentarily crestfallen, even embarrassed. It is a profoundly unpleasant thing to witness embarrassment in someone so fiercely proud and dignified. She reaches into her portmanteau and hands over to him a belt that she has little use for, and that he can have little use for, and she behaves as though this is of great value. He’s instantly delighted, and the two of them go into his hut, with its horrible ornaments hanging from the ceiling (what is it about daylight and the air of daylight that keeps the odor somewhat abated in these places?), for tea. Tea. In the day and a half that she has been with them, she has taught them to drink tea, and they all love it. So they have tea together, Mary and her friend the chief of this Fang village. She’s uncertain that the value he placed on the old straight razor is not akin to the value she places on her belt. They are, after all, traders together in the same enterprise of give and take. But neither of them speaks of it again. They have a pleasant tea together, and part as friends.

  She trudges with the others up the slow incline of a wide expanse, climbing to a height and then making the slow descent, and then climbing again, all of this in the hot dimness, the verdant dark; above them, the sun sluices through thousands of tiny interstices of leaf and branch, and the trail closes off. They have to use the machetes. Mary keeps up with them, wearing her dark dress, keeping her increasing exhaustion and discomfort to herself. Near the base of a gigantic rock that looks as though it could have been dropped from the sky, they encounter a cobra, perhaps twelve feet long, the fanning black hood opening with an alarming and impressive fullness as its body coils and rises. They all shy back from it, keeping a distance. It’s as if the cobra wishes to block their path, stop their already slow progress across the trackless marshy breadth of the field before them. Mary asks for a machete and is refused. Pagan takes aim with a pistol. But the snake lowers its head, slithers into an opening at the base of the rock, and is gone. They all wait for a time, listening, and then very carefully they skirt the area, entering the wild grass and chopping their way with the machetes. Mary, too, wields one before it is all over. Her palms blister, and the joints of her fingers seize up, so that for periods of time she can’t close her hands to make fists, can’t open them, or grip anything. Adjusting her collar in the heat amounts to flapping her limp hands against it, the hands trembling so badly, the ends of the fingers numb to the touch. She endures it, tries to think beyond it, pushing on, aware of the others watching her.