Pensativities: Selected Essays

Travelling Fire Raisers

One of the debates to which I have been invited to contribute in Mozambique is aimed at combatting the so-called “uncontrolled bush fires.” This fight seems totally justified: it is about protecting ecosystems and conserving useful and productive spaces.

However, I fear it may be one of those thankless battles that has no chance of immediate success. In reality, we do not understand the complex ecology of fire on the African savannah. We do not understand the factors that foreshadow fire. Despite this, I’m frequently asked to speak to the country folk about the noxious effects of rural fires. I have to confess that I’ve never been capable of fulfilling this task.

Instead I have tried to discover why country dwellers convert their grasslands into flames. We know that slash-and-burn agriculture is one of the main reasons for such fire-raising practices. But people don’t often talk of that other guilty party, a character I shall call the “male visitor,” and whom I shall talk about during the course of this brief address.

In the rural families of Mozambique, the division of tasks reveals a society in which most of the work falls on women’s shoulders. Those who love nothing better than to quantify social relations have already published figures and tables that provide abundant proof that while the man rests, the woman is busy all day long. But this same peasant is involved in other things that escape the notice of social accountants. Among the invisible occupations carried out by the rural man, the most obvious is that of visitation. This activity is central to the rural societies of Mozambique.

The man spends months of the year visiting neighbours and distant relatives. These visits do not appear to have a practical or well-defined purpose. When one asks one of these visitors what the purpose of his journey is, he replies: “I’m just visiting.” In fact, visiting is a way of preventing conflicts and creating harmonious relations that are vital in a society that is dispersed and lacking in the state mechanisms that guarantee stability.

Visitors spend much of their time in rituals of welcome and leave-taking. To open the doors of a place requires an understanding with the ancestors that are the place’s true “custodians.” These male visitors therefore cover incredible distances on foot. As they progress, they set fire to the grass. Unless it’s in the middle of winter, the grass doesn’t burn much. The fire spreads and peters out in the immediate vicinity of the paths taken by our travellers. These fires have a number of purposes and advantages that become clear on the return journey: they provide a reference map, discourage snakes and the dangers of ambush, provide a firm footing and altogether make the return journey easier and safer.

As an intruder in this form of logic, I have never accepted the militancy with which I have been expected to combat these fires: nor have I ever been able to convince one of these travelling fire raisers to desist from his activity. And it’s absolutely true that I’m not sufficiently moved by conviction. Even if I had strong beliefs on the subject, I would never be able to convince any of these country dwellers to do otherwise. For they are motivated by reasons that are not solely practical. We shall come back to these reasons later on.

The question that provides the excuse for our meeting here is a simple one: what causes us to wander when we could stay quietly where we are? This question induces other ones. Some of them are near to my domain of knowledge: is the desire to travel written into our genes? Is it part of our nature?

I believe that the essential characteristic of Mankind is to have no essential character. That’s why, when we ask ourselves about Man’s predilection for walking, the answers should be sought in our history. It’s here that we shall understand the origin and development of this preference. It’s here that we shall understand our time-honoured appetite for travel.

Our species was nomadic for hundreds of thousands of years. If we accept that our birth as a subspecies dates from 250,000 years ago, we have had 12,000 years of sedentary existence as opposed to 240,000 years as nomads. Almost 90 percent of our existence has therefore been spent as hunters, wandering across the African savannah.

During the entire childhood and adolescence of our species, our primary vocation was hunting. Hence our constant, intrinsic need to leave, search, turn our space into a territory for gathering and for hunting our prey. Our link to a place was always provisional, ephemeral, lasting for as long as the seasons and the bounty lasted. We had no idea of how to take possession. And perhaps we didn’t know how to take possession of the soil because we were scared of being possessed by it. We survived because we were eternal wanderers, hunters of chance, visitors in places that were yet to be born.

Hunting isn’t limited to the act of ambush and capture. It suggests that we can read signs in the landscape, listen to different types of silence, master languages and share codes. It suggests that we learn through play, just as feline animals do; it suggests that we develop a taste for fear and fright, and it suggests that we gain skill in the art of surprise and in the game of pretence. We produce our prey, but, above all, it was our prey that made us into a creative, imaginative species. For thousands of years, we perfected a culture of exploiting our environment; we had an inquisitive relationship with our surroundings. For millennia, our home was a world without a fixed dwelling place.

That is why it is puzzling that we should ask ourselves nowadays why we like to wander so much. The theme of our meeting should, in fact, be inverted. Why have we developed a taste for standing still? To stay behind is the exception. Leaving is the rule. Homo sapiens survived because he never ceased to travel. He spread over the planet, he left his footprint beyond the last horizon. And even when he remained behind, he was always leaving for places he discovered within himself.

With the birth of agriculture, we developed a sense of place. From then on, we started giving names to places, we tamed the ground. Ties of kinship between humanity and the landscape were forged. The earth took on the quality of the divine; it became a mother. For the first time, we had roots, we lived in an endless season. The ground didn’t just provide us with a bed. It was a womb. And it required an enduring marriage.

Paradoxically, sedentary life ushered in the idea of exile. The appetite for travelling now needed to be limited. Sowing was what was now required. The land now became an object of possession. The idea of a frontier became inscribed as a tacitly accepted law. Beyond, lay the realms of others. The world began to have an “inside” and an “outside,” an “over here” and an “over there.” And so travelling began to bring with it additional risks. Fear began to grow that one might never return. The first epic journey in literature — the story of Ulysses — is the narrative of a return. The exaltation of return atoned for the fear of departure.

It’s possible that this may have been the case. It’s impossible to know for sure. Maybe this distinction in time periods is too arbitrary, too literary. Perhaps things were more complex, more mixed. We are all the mestizo descendants of hunters, gatherers and sowers of seed.

What is important is that our relationship with travel has never been objective, cold, or exempt from fantasy. Even the hunters of old, those who lived as travellers, even they carried out rituals in order to familiarize themselves with the unknown. Before reaching their destination, they sent their collective imagination on ahead. Just as they painted the animals they were going to hunt on the walls of their caves, they fantasized over distant places; they dressed them in beliefs and turned them into narratives. In the end, even when we lived in caves, we had travel agents who domesticated the unexpected for us, while stimulating our taste for adventure.

And so that’s what happened: both the remotest desert and the most impenetrable forest were peopled with our ghosts. That’s why all places nowadays begin with a name, a legend, a myth, stories. There is no such thing as an external geography as far as we are concerned. Places — no matter how unknown to us — reach us dressed with our own imagination. The world no longer lives outside a map, and it doesn’t live outside our own inner cartography.

I shall now return to the male visitor, that fire raiser of the Mozambican prairies, in order to get to know his hidden reasons better. None of them ever paid me any attention and I almost take pride in my failure. Our travelling fire raiser must be imagined in a world where the highway is a luxury and transport a rarity.

This is the reality of the savannah that I am obliged to travel in my work as a biologist. And I have to confess that I experience a fearful shudder when the outline of a path is no longer visible in front of me. Love of wandering seems to collide with the absence of a road. Faced with a world with no footprints, I am assaulted by an eerie sense of fragility, as if I had committed some religious offence, a disrespect for a law dating from before the arrival of men. In such circumstances, I also feel like lighting a thread of fire myself in order to give distance a human dimension.

Apart from the practical simplicity of the phenomenon, the truth is that the travelling fire raiser is a map-maker and is recording the signs of his presence on the landscape. He writes the narrative of his journey with fire. Not because he is scared of getting lost, but because he wants geography to come and drink from his hand. The travelling fire raiser says: “I am the master of fire. My gesture makes and unmakes landscapes. There is no horizon where I may get lost, for I am a creator of paths. I am master of fire and I am master of this world that I cause to burn. My kingdom is one of smoke and ash. At the moment when my flames consume everything, at that moment alone, am I divine.”

When it comes down to it, we are like this visitor. The difference is that in our case, it’s not the landscape that burns, but we ourselves. We become consumed in that moment when, even as we stand still, we set off in search of what we cannot be. We are recreating the world, refashioning it in the manner of one of our childhood books. We are playing with our fate like the cat who pretends the ball of wool is a mouse.

In the beginning, we travelled because we read and listened, propelling ourselves forward in boats made of paper, on wings made from ancient voices. Today, we travel in order to be written, to be words in a text that is greater than our own Life.

Address to the Conference on Travel Literature,

Matosinhos, Portugal, 2006.

Mia Couto