The Shadow of the Sun

The Black Crystals of the Night

The orange ball of the sinking sun is just visible at the far end of the road along which we are driving. It will disappear at any moment behind the horizon and cease blinding us, and then night will descend, rapidly, and we will be left alone with the dark. Out of the corner of my eye I notice that Sebuya, the driver of the Toyota, is growing anxious. In Africa, drivers avoid traveling at night — darkness unnerves them. They are so afraid of it that they may flatly refuse to drive after sunset. I have observed them at times when they were nevertheless compelled to do so. Instead of keeping their eyes focused straight ahead, they begin to peer apprehensively to the sides. Their features grow tense and sharp. Beads of sweat appear on their brows. They fidget in their seats, and slide down behind the steering wheel as if someone were shooting at the car. Despite the fact that the roads are rough, full of potholes, washouts, and ruts, instead of slowing down, they accelerate, tearing carelessly along, anything just to reach a place where there are people, where one can hear the hum of human voices and where the lights are shining.

“Kuna nini?” I ask (in Swahili: did something bad happen?). They never answer, just careen along amid clouds of dust and the clang of metal.

—”Hatari?” I ask after a while (some kind of danger?). They remain silent, paying no attention.

They are afraid of something, grappling with a demon that I do not see and do not understand. For me, this night has well-defined and straightforward characteristics: it is dark, almost black, hot, windless, and, if we stop and Sebuya turns off the engine, full of silence. But according to Sebuya, I know nothing of darkness. In particular, I do not know that day and night are two distinct realities, two separate worlds. In daytime, man can cope somehow with his environment, can exist and endure, even live peacefully; the night, however, renders him defenseless, easy prey to his enemies, and conceals forces with nefarious designs upon his life. That is why fear, which during the day slumbers in a man’s heart, secretive and subdued, is transformed at night into an overpowering fright, a haunting, tormenting nightmare. How important it is at that time to be in a group! The presence of others brings relief, soothes the nerves, lessens the tension.

“Hapa?” (here?) Sebuya asked me, when we caught sight of the mud shacks of a village by the roadside. We were in western Uganda, not far from the Nile, driving toward the Congo. It was getting dark and Sebuya was already very jittery. I could see that I would be unable to persuade him to keep going, so agreed to spending the night here.

The villagers took us in without enthusiasm, even reluctantly, which is strange and surprising in these parts. But Sebuya pulled out a wad of shillings, and the sight of money, so extraordinary and tempting for these people, decided things in our favor. Before long, a cleanly swept clay hut lined with fresh grasses had been prepared for us. Sebuya fell quickly into a deep sleep, but I was soon awakened by an army of bustling and aggressive insects. Spiders, cockroaches, crickets, ants, a multitude of tiny, soundless, and busy creatures, which while often invisible, could be felt slithering, clinging, tickling, pinching — sleep was impossible. For a long time I turned from side to side, until finally, exhausted and defeated, I stepped out in front of the hut and sat down, leaning my back against the wall. The moon was shining brightly and the night was clear, silvery. All around was profound silence. Cars rarely appear in these parts, and the wildlife has long been killed off and eaten.

Suddenly, I heard murmurs, steps, then the rapid patter of bare feet. Then silence once more. I looked around, but at first saw nothing. After a moment, the murmurs and steps again. Then silence again. I began to study the features of the landscape — a clump of thin shrubs, several umbrella-shaped acacias in the distance, some rocks protruding from the ground. At last, I spied a group of eight men, carrying, on a simple stretcher made of branches, another man covered with a piece of cloth. They moved in a peculiar fashion. They did not walk in a straight line, but advanced furtively, creeping in one direction, then in another, maneuvering. They crouched down behind a shrub, looked about cautiously, and then scurried to the next hiding place. They circled, swerved, stopped, and started, as if they were children playing some elaborate game of espionage. I observed their bent, half-naked silhouettes, their nervous gestures, the queer, stealthful behavior, until finally they disappeared for good behind a ridge, and the only thing around me again was the silent, clear, inviolate night.

At dawn we drove on. I asked Sebuya if he knew the name of the people in whose village we had spent the night. “They are called Amba,” he said. Then, after a moment, added: “Kabila mbaya” (this means, roughly, “bad people”). He did not want to tell me any more — here, one avoids evil even as a subject of conversation, preferring not to step into that territory, careful not to call the wolf out of the forest. As we drove, I reflected upon the event I had inadvertently witnessed. The nocturnal drama, those puzzling zigzags and twists of the bearers, their haste and anxiety, concealed a mystery to which I had no key. Something was going on here. But what?

People like the Amba and their kinsmen believe profoundly that the world is ruled by supernatural forces. These forces are particular — spirits that have names, spells that can be defined. It is they that inform the course of events and imbue them with meaning, decide our fate, determine everything. For this reason nothing happens by chance; chance simply does not exist. Let us consider this example: Sebuya is driving his car, has an accident, and dies. Why exactly did Sebuya have an accident? That very same day, all over the world, millions of cars reached their destinations safely — but Sebuya had an accident and died. White people will search for various causes. For instance, his brakes malfunctioned. But this kind of thinking leads nowhere, explains nothing. Because why was it precisely Sebuya’s brakes that malfunctioned? That very same day, all over the world, millions of cars were on the road and their brakes were working just fine — but Sebuya’s were not. Why? White people, whose way of thinking is the height of naivete, will say that Sebuya’s brakes malfunctioned because he failed to have them inspected and repaired in good time. But why was it precisely Sebuya who failed to do this? Why, that very same day, a million… etc., etc.

We have now established that the white man’s way of reasoning is quite unhelpful. But it gets worse! The white man, having determined that the cause of Sebuya’s accident and death was bad brakes, prepares a report and closes the case. Closes it!? But it is precisely now that the case should begin! Sebuya died because someone cast a spell on him. This is simple and self-evident. What we do not know, however, is the identity of the perpetrator, and that is what we must now ascertain.

Speaking in the most general terms, a wizard did it. A wizard is a bad man, always acting with evil intent. There are two types of wizards (although our Western languages do not differentiate adequately between them). The first is more dangerous, for he is the devil in human form. The English call him witch. The witch is a dangerous person. Neither his appearance nor his behavior betray his satanic nature. He does not wear special clothing, he does not have magical instruments. He does not boil potions, does not prepare poisons, does not fall into a trance, and does not perform incantations. He acts by means of the psychic power with which he was born. Malefaction is a congenital trait of his personality. The fact that he does evil and brings misfortune owes nothing to his predilections; it brings him no special pleasure. He simply is that way.

If you are near him, he need only look at you. Sometimes, you will catch someone watching you carefully, piercingly, and at length. It might be a witch, just then casting a spell on you. Still, distance is no obstacle for him. He can cast a spell from one side of Africa to the other, or even farther.

The second type of wizard is gentler, weaker, less demonic. Whereas the witch was born as evil incarnate, the sorcerer (for that is what this weaker sort is called in English) is a career wizard, for whom the casting of spells is a learned profession, a craft, and a source of livelihood.

To condemn you to illness or bring some other misfortune down on you, or even to kill you, the witch has no need of props or aids. All he need do is direct his infernal, devastating will to wound and annihilate you. Before long, illness will fell you, and death will not be far behind. The sorcerer does not have such destructive powers within himself. To destroy you, he must resort to various magical procedures, mysterious rites, ritual gestures. For example, if you are walking at night through thick bush and lose an eye, it is not because you accidentally impaled yourself on a protruding yet invisible branch. Nothing, after all, happens by accident! It is simply that an enemy of yours wanted to exact vengeance and went to see a sorcerer. The sorcerer fashioned a little clay figure — your likeness — and, with the tip of a juniper branch dipped in hen’s blood, gouged out its eye. In this way he issued a verdict on your eye — cast a spell on it. If one night you are wending your way through dense bush and a branch pokes out your eye, it will be proof positive that an enemy of yours wanted to avenge himself, went to see a sorcerer, etc. Now it is up to you to uncover who this enemy is, go visit a sorcerer, and in turn order your own revenge.

If Sebuya dies in a car crash, then the most important thing for his family now is to ascertain not whether his brakes were bad, for that is of no consequence, but whether the spells that caused this death were cast by a wizard-devil (witch) or an ordinary wizard-craftsman (sorcerer). It is a critical question, entailing a long and intricate investigation, into which will be pressed various fortune-tellers, elders, medicine men, and so forth. The outcome of this detective work is of utmost significance! If Sebuya died as a result of spells cast by a wizard-devil, then tragedy has befallen the entire family and clan, because a curse like that affects the whole community, and Sebuya’s death is merely a foretoken, the tip of the iceberg: there is nothing to do but await more illnesses and deaths. But if Sebuya perished because a wizard-craftsman wanted it thus, then the situation is far less dire. The craftsman can strike and destroy only individuals, isolated targets: the family and the clan can sleep in peace!

Evil is the curse of the world, and that is why I must keep wizards, who are its agents, carriers, and propagators, as far away from myself and my clan as possible; their presence poisons the air, spreads disease, and makes life impossible, turning it into its opposite — death. The wizard, by definition, lives and practices among others, in another village, in another clan or tribe. Our contemporary suspicion of and antipathy for the Other, the Stranger, goes back to the fear our tribal ancestors felt toward the Outsider, seeing him as the carrier of evil, the source of misfortune. Pain, fire, disease, drought, and hunger did not come from nowhere. Someone must have brought them, inflicted them, disseminated them. But who? Not my people, not those closest to me — they are good. Life is possible only among good people, and I am alive, after all. The guilty are therefore the Others, the Strangers. That is why, seeking retribution for our injuries and setbacks, we quarrel with them, enter into conflicts, conduct wars. In a word, if unhappiness has befallen us, its source is not within us, but elsewhere, outside, beyond us and our community, far away, in Others.

I had long forgotten about Sebuya, about our expedition to the Congo, and about the night spent in the Amba village, when years later, in Maputo, a book fell into my hands about magic in eastern Africa, specifically a report by the anthropologist E. H. Winter on studies he conducted among the Amba.

The Amba, Winter states, are a highly unusual social group. Like other tribes on the continent, they take seriously the existence of evil and the danger of spells, and thus fear and hate wizards, but contrary to the widely held view that wizards dwell among others, that they act from without, from a distance, the Amba maintain that the wizards are among them, within their families, within their villages, that they form an integral part of their community. This belief has resulted in the gradual disintegration of Amba society, corroded as it has become by hatred, consumed by suspicion, confounded by free-floating fear. Anyone can be a wizard, brother fears brother, son fears father, a mother fears her own children. The Amba rejected the comfortable and comforting view that the enemy is the stranger, the foreigner, the man of a different faith or skin color. No! Possessed by a peculiar kind of masochism, the Amba live in torment and distress; at this very moment, evil can be under my own roof, asleep in my bed, eating from the same dish as I. And there is an additional difficulty: it is impossible to determine what wizards look like. After all, no one has seen one. We know they exist because we see the results of their actions: they caused the drought, as a result of which there is nothing to eat, fires keep igniting, many people are sick, someone is always dying. Plainly, wizards never rest, endlessly occupied as they are with raining misfortunes, defeats, and tragedies down upon our heads.

The Amba are a homogeneous, cohesive community who live in small villages scattered in sparsely wooded bush; often they suspect a neighboring village, inhabited by their kinsmen, of harboring the wizard who has caused them misfortune. They declare war on the village they judge to be evil. The besieged community defends itself, and sometimes undertakes a war of retaliation. The unceasing wars the Amba wage among themselves leave them thoroughly weakened and defenseless against aggressors from other tribes. Nonetheless, they are so preoccupied with the internecine threat that they are oblivious to this danger. Paralyzed by the specter of an enemy within the gates, they tumble unrestrained into the abyss.

The depressing fate that has come to weigh upon them at least unites them, makes possible a paradoxical solidarity. If I become convinced, say, that a wizard hiding in my village is plaguing me, I can move to another one, and even if that village is at war with my own, I will be hospitably received. This is because all Ambas appreciate how much a wizard can torment you. Consider the paths along which you walk: he can scatter on them pebbles, leaves, feathers, little twigs, dead flies, monkey hairs, or mango peelings. It is enough merely to step on any one of those things — you will at once sicken and die. And such small nothings can be found on every trail. So, practically speaking, you cannot move? That is correct, you cannot. You are afraid even to step out of your mud house, for right there on the threshhold might be a piece of the bark of a baobab, or a poisoned acacia thorn.

The wizard wants to hound us to death — that is his objective. There is no medicine against him, there is no protection. The only option is flight. That is why the people I saw that night, carrying a sick man on a stretcher, were moving so furtively: they were escaping. A wizard had cast a spell on the sick man, and the illness was a sign that the wizard was preparing the man’s death. That is why the victim’s relatives, under the cover of darkness, were trying to hide him, conceal him from the wizard’s view, save his life.

Although no one knows what the wizard looks like, we know a lot about him. He moves only at night. He participates in ceremonies during which sentences are meted out — we are sleeping, and over there, unbeknownst to us, our demise has been decided. He can transport himself to wherever he wishes with fantastic speed, quicker than lightning. He adores human flesh, dotes on human blood. He does not speak, so we cannot recognize his voice. We do not know his facial features, the shape of his head.

But it is possible that one day a man will be born with such strength of vision and such willpower that, staring intently into the blackness, he will see the night begin to thicken, stiffen, coalesce into black crystals, and then will see these crystals compose themselves ever more clearly into the silent and dark visage of a wizard.