The Shadow of the Sun (25 page)

“The most important thing is to have a multidimensional approach to development: develop regions, develop local societies, develop interdependence rather than intercompetition!”

John Menru from Tanzania: “Africa needs a new generation of politicans who know how to think in a new way. The current one must depart. Instead of thinking about development, they think about how to stay in power.

“The solution for Africa? Create a new political climate:

1. adopt as binding the principle of dialogue;
   
2. ensure society’s participation in public life;
   
3. observe fundamental human rights;
   
4. begin democratization.
   

“Do all this, and new politicians will emerge all by themselves. New politicians, with a clear, well-defined vision. A precise vision—that is what we lack today.

“What is dangerous? Ethnic fanaticism. It can cause an ethnic principle to assume a religious dimension, to become a substitute religion. This is extremely dangerous!”

Sadig Rasheed—a Sudanese, one of the directors of the Economic Commission for Africa: “Africa must wake up.

“One must arrest the process of Africa’s increasing marginalization. Whether this will succeed, I don’t know.

“I worry about whether African societies will be able to assume a self-critical stance, and much depends on this.”

That is precisely the subject of a conversation I have one day with A., an elderly Englishman and longtime local resident. His view: That the strength of Europe and of its culture, in contrast to other cultures, lies in its bent for criticism, above all, for self-criticism—in its art of analysis and inquiry, in its endless seeking, in its restlessness. The European mind recognizes that it has limitations, accepts its imperfections, is skeptical, doubtful, questioning. Other cultures do not have this critical spirit. More—they are inclined to pride, to thinking that all that belongs to them is perfect; they are, in short, uncritical in relation to themselves. They lay the blame for all that is evil on others, on other forces (conspiracies, agents, foreign domination of one sort or another). They consider all criticism to be a malevolent attack, a sign of discrimination, of racism, etc. Representatives of these cultures treat criticism as a personal insult, as a deliberate attempt to humiliate them, as a form of sadism even. If you tell them that the city is dirty, they treat this as if you said that they were dirty themselves, had dirty ears, or dirty nails. Instead of being self-critical, they are full of countless grudges, complexes, envies, peeves, manias. The effect of all this is that they are culturally, permanently, structurally incapable of progress, incapable of engendering within themselves the will to transform and evolve.

Do all African cultures (for there are many of them, just as there are many African religions) belong to this touchy, uncritical mess? Africans like Sadig Rasheed have begun to consider this; they want to find the answer to why, in the race of continents, Africa is being left behind.

Europe’s image of Africa? Hunger; skeletal children; dry, cracked earth; urban slums; massacres; AIDS; throngs of refugees without a roof over their heads, without clothing, without medicines, water, or bread.

The world, therefore, rushes in with aid.

Today, as in the past, Africa is regarded as an object, as the reflection of some alien star, as the stomping ground of colonizers, merchants, missionaries, ethnographers, large charitable organizations (more than eighty are active in Ethiopia alone).

Meantime, most importantly, it exists for itself alone, within itself, a timeless, sealed, separate continent, a land of banana groves, shapeless little fields of manioc, jungles, the immense Sahara, rivers slowly drying up, thinning forests, sick, monstrous cities—a world charged, at the same time, with a restless and violent electricity.

...

Two thousand kilometers across Ethiopia. Empty, unpopulated roads. Mountains and more mountains. At this time of year (it is winter in Europe), the mountains are green. They are sky-high and magnificent in the sun. Profound silence everywhere. But stop for just a moment, sit down by the side of the road, and listen. Somewhere, far off, you will hear high monotonous voices. It is children singing on the nearby slopes—children collecting brushwood, tending herds, cutting grass for the cattle. You will not hear the voices of adults. It is as if this were a world only of children.

And this is a world of children. Half the population of Africa is under fifteen years of age. There are innumerable children in all its armies; children constitute the majority in refugee camps; children work in the fields, buy and sell in the markets. But the child’s biggest role is in the home: he is responsible for supplying water. While everyone else is still asleep, little boys are rising in the darkness and running to springs, ponds, rivers—for water. Modern technology has proven to be their great ally: it gave them a gift—the cheap, light, plastic container. A dozen years ago, this container revolutionized life in Africa. Water is the sine qua non of survival in the tropics. Because there is generally no plumbing here and water is scarce, one must carry it over long distances, sometimes ten or more kilometers. For centuries, heavy clay or stone vessels were used for this purpose. Traditional African cultures did not know wheeled transport, so human beings carried everything themselves, most often on their heads. The division of domestic labor was such that carrying water was women’s work. A child could never manage such a large and heavy receptacle, and in this bare-bones world each house usually had only one.

Then, the plastic container appeared. A miracle! A revolution! First of all, it is relatively inexpensive (although in certain houses it is the only thing of any value): it costs around two dollars. Most important, however, it is light. And it comes in various sizes, so even a small child can fetch several liters of water.

All the children carry water. You see entire flocks of youngsters, playing and teasing one another as they walk to a distant spring. What a relief this is for the exhausted African woman! What a transformation in her life! How much more time she now has for herself, for her household!

The plastic container possesses countless advantages. Among the most important is that it holds your place in line. Often, you have to stand for days in a line for water (in those places, that is, where it is delivered by truck). Standing in the tropical sun is torture. It used to be that you couldn’t just set down the clay pot and go sit in the shade: it was too valuable to risk its being stolen. Now, however, you place your plastic container in the line and then go find yourself some shade, or go to the market, or visit friends. Driving through Africa, one sees these kilometer-long, colorful rows awaiting the arrival of water.

More about the children. It is enough to stop briefly in a village, a town, or simply in a field—a group of children will instantly materialize. All of them indescribably tattered. Little shirts, pants—all frayed and shredded beyond belief. Their entire treasure, their sole nourishment, is a small calabash with a bit of water in it. Each piece of bread or banana will disappear, inhaled, in a fraction of a second. Hunger for these children is something permanent, a way of life, second nature. And yet they do not ask for bread or fruit, or even for money.

They ask for a pencil.

A mechanical pencil. The price? Ten cents. Yes, but where can they possibly get ten cents?

They would all like to go to school, they would like to learn. And sometimes they do go to school (a village school is simply a spot in the shade of an enormous mango tree), but they cannot learn to write because they have nothing to write with—they do not own a pencil.

Somewhere near Gondar (you will come to this town of Ethiopian kings and emperors by traveling from the Gulf of Aden through Djibouti in the direction of Al-Ubayyid, Tersaf, N’Djamena, and Lake Chad), I met a man who was walking south. That is really the most important thing one can say about him: that he was walking north to south. Oh, yes, and that he was searching for his brother.

He was barefoot, dressed in short, patched-up pants, and on his back he had something that might have been called a shirt once. Besides that, he had three things: a wanderer’s walking stick; a piece of cloth, which in the morning served him as a towel, shielded his head during the afternoon heat, and at night covered his body while he slept; and, slung over his shoulder, a wooden water dish. He had no money. If people along the way gave him something to eat, he would eat; if they did not, he walked hungry. But he had been hungry his whole life; there was nothing extraordinary about hunger.

He was walking south, because his brother had once set out from home in a southerly direction. When was this? Long ago. (I was speaking with him through the driver, who knew scant English, and had only one expression at his disposal for referring to the past: long ago.) And he has been walking a long time, from somewhere in the Eritrean mountains, from near Keren.

He knows about walking south: in the morning, you must head straight into the sun. When he meets someone, he asks whether they have seen, or know, Solomon (that’s his brother’s name). No one is surprised at such a question. All of Africa is in motion, on the road to somewhere, wandering. Some are running away from war, others from drought, still others from hunger. They are fleeing, straying, getting lost. This one, walking north to south, is an anonymous drop in the human deluge flooding the roads of the continent, a deluge driven either by fear of death or by the hope of finding a place under the sun.

Why does he want to find his brother?
Why?
He doesn’t understand the question. The reason is obvious, self-evident, not requiring an explanation. He shrugs his shoulders. It is possible that he feels pity for the man he has just encountered and who, though well dressed, is poorer than he in some important, priceless way.

Does he know where he is? Does he know that the place we are sitting is no longer Eritrea, but already Ethiopia, another country? He smiles the smile of a man who knows many things, or who, in any event, knows one thing: that for him there are no boundaries here in Africa, and no states—there is only the burned earth, on which brother seeks brother.

Near this same road—but one must walk down, deep into a nearly impenetrable cleft between two steep mountain slopes—lies the monastery of Debre Libanos. Inside, the church is dark and cool. After hours of driving in blinding sun, the eyes must adjust to this place, which at first impression seems submerged in total darkness. After a time you begin to discern frescoes on the walls, and see Ethiopian pilgrims dressed in white lying facedown on the mat-covered floor. In one corner an old monk is chanting a psalm in a drowsy voice, which periodically dies away altogether, in the already dead language of Ge’ez. In this atmosphere replete with a concentrated and quiet mysticism, everything seems beyond time; beyond measure and weight, beyond life.

Who knows how long these pilgrims lay there, for I walked in and out of the church several times in the course of that day, and each time they were still resting motionless on the mats.

All day? A month? A year? Eternity?

The Cooling Hell

T
he pilots have not yet turned off the engines, and already people are rushing toward the airplane. Steps are pulled up. We walk down and fall straight into a panting, yelling crowd, which has now reached the plane and is shoving, grabbing at our shirts, pushing at us with all its might: “Passport? Passport?” insistent voices are barking. And immediately after, in the same threatening tone: “Return ticket?” And still others, sharply: “Vaccination? Vaccination?” These demands, this attack, are so violent and disorienting that, shoved, asphyxiated, pawed at, I start to commit error upon error. Asked about my passport, I obediently take it out of my bag. Instantly, someone rips it out of my hands and vanishes. Hectored about a return ticket, I show that I have it. A second later, it, too, is gone. The same thing with my record of vaccinations: someone pulled the form out of my hand and evaporated. I was left with no documents! What do I do now? To whom should I complain? To whom should I appeal? The crowd that had accosted me has suddenly dispersed and disappeared. I am left all alone. A few minutes later, two young men approach. They introduce themselves: “Zado and John. We will protect you. Without us, you will perish.”

I didn’t ask any questions. All I could think was: how terribly hot it is here! It was early afternoon, the air so humid and heavy, thick, burning, that I couldn’t breathe. If only I could leave here, get to a place with a smidgen of coolness! “Where are my documents!” I started to shout, irritated, despairing. I was beginning to lose control; in heat like this you become nervous, enraged, aggressive. “Try to calm down,” said John, when we got into his car, which was parked in front of the airport building. “Soon you will understand everything.”

We drove through the streets of Monrovia. On both sides jutted forth the black, charred stumps of burned, demolished houses. Not much remains here of such destroyed buildings, because everything—bricks, tin, and surviving beams included—will be instantly dismantled and plundered. There are tens of thousands of people in the city who have fled the bush, have no roof over their heads, and are just waiting for a bomb or a grenade to strike a house. When it does, they descend upon it at once. With the materials they are able to carry away, they will erect a hut, a shack, or simply a roof to protect them from the sun and the rain. The city, which was probably built initially of simple, low buildings, is now cluttered with these haphazardly knocked together structures and looks even more stunted, having assumed the appearance of something makeshift, impermanent, recalling more than anything an encampment of nomads.

I asked John and Zado to take me to a hotel. I don’t know if there were any choices in this matter, but without a word they drove me to a shabby, two-story building with the sign El Mason Hotel. The entrance was through a bar. John opened the door, but could go no farther. Inside, in the artificial colored twilight and hot stagnant air, stood prostitutes. To say that the prostitutes “stood” does not begin to convey the situation. There were maybe a hundred girls in the small room, sweaty, exhausted, and so tightly pressed together, squeezed, jammed in, that one could scarcely push one’s hand in, let alone enter. It worked this way: if a client opened the door from the street, the pressure inside the bar propelled one of the girls, as though from a catapult, straight into the arms of the surprised customer. Then another girl took her place near the exit.

John retreated and looked for another way in. In a small currency-exchange booth next door sat a young Lebanese man with a sunny, kindly appearance—the owner. The girls belonged to him, as did this disintegrating building with its slimy, mold-covered walls, on which long black water stains arranged themselves into a mute procession of elongated, thin, and hooded apparitions, chimeras, and ghosts.

“I don’t have any documents,” I confessed to the Lebanese, who just smiled. “That’s not important,” he said. “Here, few people have them. Documents!” he laughed, and looked knowingly at John and Zado. To him, I was clearly a visitor from some other planet. On the one called Monrovia, the main preoccupation was how to survive from one day to the next. Who cared about papers? “Forty dollars a night,” he said. “But food is not included. You can eat around the corner. At the Syrian’s place.”

I invited John and Zado for a meal. The old, distrustful proprietress, looking constantly at the door, had only one dish: shish kebabs with rice. She stared at the door because she never knew who might come in—customers, to eat something, or robbers, to take everything from her. “What else can I do?” she asked us, setting the plates down in front of us. She had already lost all her nerve and all her money. “I lost my life,” she said, without despair, matter-of-factly even, just so that we would know. The restaurant was empty, a motionless fan hung from the ceiling, flies buzzed, one beggar after another stopped in the door and held out his hand. More beggars crowded on the other side of the dirty window, staring at our plates. Men in tatters, women on crutches, children whose legs or arms had been blown off by land mines. Here, at this table, over this plate, one didn’t know how to behave, what to do with oneself.

For a long time, we were silent; finally, I inquired about my documents. Zado answered that I had disappointed the airport personnel, because I had all my papers. It would have been best if I had had nothing. Unregulated airlines fly in various con men and adventurers here—this, after all, is a country of gold, diamonds, and narcotics. Most of their ilk do not have visas or vaccination records; they pay to be let in. The airport staff live off this, because the government has no funds and does not pay them their salaries. These aren’t even particularly corrupt people. They are simply hungry. I will have to buy back my documents. Zado and John know from whom and where. They can arrange it.

The Lebanese came and left me the key. It was near dusk, and he was going home. He advised that I too should go to the hotel. In the evening, he said, I will not be able to walk around the city by myself. I returned to the hotel, entered through a side door, and walked up to the second floor, where my room was located. By the ground-floor entrance and along the stairs I was accosted by ragged men, who assured me that they would guard me during the night. Saying this, they stretched out their hands. From the manner in which they looked at me, I understood that unless I gave them something, in the night while I slept they would come and slit my throat.

The only window in my room (number 107) gave out on a gloomy, fetid air shaft, from which a revolting odor arose. I turned on the light. The walls, the bed, the table, and the floor were black. Black with cockroaches. I have encountered throughout the world all imaginable types of insects, and have even developed indifference toward the fact, even come to accept, that we live among countless millions of flies, roaches, and ticks, among ever-replenished swarms of wasps, spiders, earwigs, and scarabs, amid billows of gadflies and mosquitoes, clouds of voracious locusts. But this time I was stunned; not so much by the number of cockroaches—although that, too, was shocking—but by their dimensions, by the size of each one of these creatures. These were roach giants, as big as small turtles, dark, gleaming, covered in bristles, and mustached. What made them grow so large? What did they feed on? Their monstrous proportions paralyzed me. For years now I had been swatting flies and mosquitoes, fleas and spiders, with impunity; now, however, I was facing something of an entirely different order. How should I deal with such colossi? What should I do with them? What stance should I adopt toward them? Kill them? With what? How? My hands shook at the very prospect. I felt that I wouldn’t know how, that I wouldn’t even have the courage to try. More—because of the cockroaches’ extraordinary dimensions, I felt certain that if I leaned over them and listened, I would hear them emitting some sound. After all, many other creatures their size communicate in a variety of ways. They squeal, croak, purr, grunt—so why not a cockroach? A normal one is too small for us to be able to hear it, but these giants? Surely they will make noises! But the room remained absolutely quiet: they were all silent—closed, voiceless, mysterious.

I noticed, however, that when I leaned over them, straining my ears, they rapidly retreated and huddled together. Their reaction was identical whenever I repeated the gesture. Clearly, the cockroaches were revulsed by a human being, recoiled with disgust, regarded me as an exceptionally unpleasant, repugnant creature.

I could embellish upon this scene and describe how, infuriated by my presence, they advanced on me, attacked, crawled over me; how I became hysterical, started to tremble, fell into shock. But this would not be true. In reality, if I didn’t come near them, they behaved indifferently, moved about sluggishly and sleepily. Sometimes they pattered from one place to another. Sometimes they crawled out of a crack, or else slid into one again. Other than that—nothing.

I knew that a difficult and sleepless night awaited me (also because the room was inhumanly airless and hot), so I reached into my bag for some notes about Liberia.

...

In 1821, a ship arrived at a place near where my hotel now stands (Monrovia lies on the Atlantic, on a peninsula), bringing from the United States an agent of the American Colonization Society, Robert Stockton. Stockton, holding a pistol to the head of the local tribal chief, King Peter, forced him to sell—for six muskets and one trunk of beads—the land upon which the aforementioned American organization planned to settle freed slaves (mainly from the cotton plantations of Virginia, Georgia, Maryland). Stockton’s organization was of a liberal and charitable character. Its activists believed that the best reparation for the injuries of slavery would be the return of former slaves to the land of their ancestors—to Africa.

Every year from then on, ships came from the United States carrying groups of liberated slaves, who began to settle in the area of present-day Monrovia. They did not constitute a large population. By the time the Republic of Liberia was proclaimed in 1847, there were only six thousand of them. It is quite possible that their number never even reached twenty thousand: less than 1 percent of the country’s population.

The fate and behavior of these settlers (they called themselves Americo-Liberians) is fascinating. Yesterday still they were black pariahs, slaves from America’s southern plantations, with no legal rights. The majority of them did not know how to read or write, and had no trade or professional skills. Their fathers had been kidnapped years earlier from Africa, transported to America in chains, and sold in slave markets. And now they, the descendants of those unfortunates, until recently slaves themselves, found themselves once again in Africa, in the land of their ancestors, among kinsmen with whom they shared common roots and skin color. At the will of liberal white Americans, they were brought here and left to themselves, to their own fate. How would they conduct themselves? What would they do? In contrast to their benefactors’ expectations, the newcomers did not kiss the ground or throw themselves into the arms of the local Africans.

From their experience in the American South, the Americo-Liberians knew only one type of relationship: master-slave. Their first move upon arrival in this new land, therefore, was to recreate precisely that social structure, only now they, the slaves of yesterday, are the masters, and it is the indigenous communities whom they set out to conquer and rule.

Liberia is the voluntary continuation of a slave society by slaves who did not wish to abolish an unjust order, but wanted to preserve it, develop it, and exploit it for their own benefit. Clearly, an enslaved mind, tainted by the experience of slavery, a mind born into slavery, fettered in infancy, cannot conceive or conjure a world in which all would be free.

A large portion of Liberia is covered in jungle. Thick, tropical, humid, malarial, and inhabited by small, impoverished, and weakly organized tribes. (Powerful communities, with strong military and state structures, lived most often on the wide, open expanses of the savannah. The unhealthy conditions and difficulty of movement and communication in the African jungle prevented such societies from arising there.) Now, newcomers from across the ocean start to move onto these terrains, traditionally occupied by an indigenous population. Relations develop badly and are hostile from the very start. To begin with, the Americo-Liberians proclaim that only they can be citizens. They deny that status, that right, to the rest—to 99 percent of the population. Laws are passed defining this majority as merely “tribesmen,” people without culture, savage, heathen.

The two groups usually live far from each other, and their contacts are infrequent and sporadic. The new masters keep to the coast and to the settlements they have built there, of which Monrovia is the largest. It would not be until one hundred years after the creation of Liberia that its president (it was then William Tubman) ventured for the first time into the country’s interior. The newcomers from America, unable to set themselves apart from the locals by skin color or physical type, try to underline their difference and superiority in some other way. In the frightfully hot and humid climate, men walk about in morning coats and spencers, sport derbies and white gloves. Ladies usually stay at home, or if they do go out into the street (until the middle of the nineteenth century there were no asphalt roads or sidewalks in Monrovia), they do so in stiff crinolines, heavy wigs, and hats decorated with artificial flowers. The houses the members of these high, exclusive echelons live in are faithful reproductions of the manors and palaces built by white plantation owners in the American South. The religious world of the Americo-Liberians is similiarly closed and inaccessible to the native Africans. They are ardent Baptists and Methodists. They build their simple churches in the new land, and spend all their free time within, singing pious hymns and listening to topical sermons. With time, these temples will come to serve also as venues for social gatherings, as exclusive private clubs.