The Shadow of the Sun

The Road to Kumasi

What does the bus station in Accra most resemble? The caravan of a huge circus that has come to a brief stop. It is colorful, and there is music. The buses are more like circus wagons than the luxurious vehicles that roll along the highways of Europe and North America.

A bus in Accra has a wooden body, its roof resting on four posts. Because there are open walls, a pleasant breeze cools the ride. In this climate, the value of a breeze is never to be taken for granted.

In the Sahara, the palaces of rulers have the most ingenious constructions — full of chinks, crannies, winding passageways, and corridors so conceived and constructed as to maximize cross-ventilation. In the afternoon heat, the ruler reclines on a mat optimally positioned to catch this refreshing current, which he breathes with delight. A breeze is a financially measurable commodity: the most expensive houses are built where the breeze is best. Still air has no value; it has only to move, however, and then immediately acquires a price.

The buses are brightly ornamented, colorfully painted. On the cabs and along the sides, crocodiles bare their sharp teeth, snakes stretch ready to attack, and flocks of peacocks frolic in trees, while antelope race through the savannah pursued by a lion. Birds are everywhere, as well as garlands, bouquets of flowers. It’s kitsch, but full of imagination and life.

The inscriptions are most important of all. The words, adorned with flowers, are large and legible from afar, meant to offer important encouragements or warnings. They have to do with God, mankind, guilt, taboos.

The spiritual world of the “African” (if one may use the term despite its gross simplification) is rich and complex, and his inner life is permeated by a profound religiosity. He believes in the coexistence of three differerent yet related worlds.

The first is the one that surrounds us, the palpable and visible reality composed of living people, animals, and plants, as well as inanimate objects: stones, water, air. The second is the world of the ancestors, those who died before us, but who died, as it were, not completely, not finally, not absolutely. Indeed, in a metaphysical sense they continue to exist, and are even capable of participating in our life, of influencing it, shaping it. That is why maintaining good relations with one’s ancestors is a precondition of a successful life, and sometimes even of life itself. The third world is the rich kingdom of the spirits — spirits that exist independently, yet at the same time are present in every being, in every object, in everything and everywhere.

At the head of these three worlds stands the Supreme Being, God. Many of the bus inscriptions speak of omnipresence and his unknown omnipotence: “God is everywhere,” “God knows what he does,” “God is mystery.” There are also some more down-to-earth, human injunctions: “Smile,” “Tell me that I’m beautiful,” “Those who bicker like each other,” etc.

We have only to show up in the square, which teems with dozens of buses, before a group of shouting children surrounds us — where are we going? to Kumasi? to Takoradi? or to Tamale?

“To Kumasi.”

Those who are hunting for passengers to Kumasi shake our hands and, bouncing with glee, lead us to the appropriate bus. They are happy, because, having found him a passenger, the bus driver will reward them with a banana or an orange.

We climb into the bus and sit down. At this point there is a risk of culture clash, of collision and conflict. It will undoubtedly occur if the passenger is a foreigner who doesn’t know Africa. Someone like that will start looking around, squirming, inquiring, “When will the bus leave?”

“What do you mean, when?” the astonished driver will reply. “It will leave when we find enough people to fill it up.”

The European and the African have an entirely different concept of time. In the European worldview, time exists outside man, exists objectively, and has measurable and linear characteristics. According to Newton, time is absolute: “Absolute, true, mathematical time of itself and from its own nature, it flows equably and without relation to anything external.” The European feels himself to be time’s slave, dependent on it, subject to it. To exist and function, he must observe its ironclad, inviolate laws, its inflexible principles and rules. He must heed deadlines, dates, days, and hours. He moves within the rigors of time and cannot exist outside them. They impose upon him their requirements and quotas. An unresolvable conflict exists between man and time, one that always ends with man’s defeat — time annihilates him.

Africans apprehend time differently. For them, it is a much looser concept, more open, elastic, subjective. It is man who influences time, its shape, course, and rhythm (man acting, of course, with the consent of gods and ancestors). Time is even something that man can create outright, for time is made manifest through events, and whether an event takes place or not depends, after all, on man alone. If two armies do not engage in a battle, then that battle will not occur (in other words, time will not have revealed its presence, will not have come into being).

Time appears as a result of our actions, and vanishes when we neglect or ignore it. It is something that springs to life under our influence, but falls into a state of hibernation, even nonexistence, if we do not direct our energy toward it. It is a subservient, passive essence, and, most importantly, one dependent on man.

The absolute opposite of time as it is understood in the European worldview.

In practical terms, this means that if you go to a village where a meeting is scheduled for the afternoon but find no one at the appointed spot, asking, “When will the meeting take place?” makes no sense. You know the answer: “It will take place when people come.”

Therefore the African who boards a bus sits down in a vacant seat, and immediately falls into a state in which he spends a great portion of his life: a benumbed waiting.

“These people have a fantastic talent for waiting!” an Englishman who has lived here for years tells me. “Talent, stamina, some peculiar kind of instinct.”

Africans believe that a mysterious energy circulates through the world, ebbing and flowing, and if it draws near and fills us up, it will give us the strength to set time into motion — something will start to happen. Until this occurs, however, one must wait; any other behavior is delusional and quixotic.

What does this dull waiting consist of? People know what to expect; therefore, they try to settle themselves in as comfortably as possible, in the best possible place. Sometimes they lie down, sometimes they sit on the ground, or on a stone, or squat. They stop talking. A waiting group is mute. It emits no sound. The body goes limp, droops, shrinks. The muscles relax. The neck stiffens, the head ceases to move. The person does not look around, does not observe anything, is not curious. Sometimes his eyes are closed — but not always. More frequently, they are open but appear unseeing, with no spark of life in them. I have observed for hours on end crowds of people in this state of inanimate waiting, a kind of profound physiological sleep: They do not eat, they do not drink, they do not urinate; they react neither to the mercilessly scorching sun, nor to the aggressive, voracious flies that cover their eyelids and lips.

What, in the meantime, is going on inside their heads?

I do not know. Are they thinking? Dreaming? Reminiscing? Making plans? Meditating? Traveling in the world beyond? It is difficult to say.

Finally, after two hours of waiting, the bus, now packed full, leaves the station. On the rough potholed road, shaken this way and that, the passengers come to life. Someone reaches for a biscuit, someone else peels a banana. People look around, wipe sweaty faces, neatly fold wet handkerchiefs. The driver is talking nonstop, holding the steering wheel with one hand, gesticulating with the other. Everyone keeps bursting out in laughter, the driver the loudest, the others more softly; perhaps they’re just doing it out of politeness, because they feel they should.

We’re on our way. My fellow passengers are only the second, perhaps even the first generation of Africans fortunate enough to be conveyed to their destinations. For thousands and thousands of years, Africa walked. People here did not have a concept of the wheel, and were unable to adopt it. They walked, they wandered, and whatever had to be transported they carried — on their backs, on their shoulders, and, most often, on their heads.

How is it that during the nineteenth century there were ships on lakes deep in the interior of the continent? They were first disassembled at oceanic ports, then carried piecemeal on people’s heads and put back together again on the shores of the lakes. Cities, factories, mining equipment, electrical plants, hospitals, all were carried in sections deep into Africa. All the products of nineteenth-century technology were transported into Africa’s interior on the heads of its inhabitants.

The people of northern Africa, even of the Sahara, were more fortunate in this respect: they could use a beast of burden, the camel. But neither the camel nor the horse was able to adapt to regions south of the Sahara — they perished, decimated by the encephalitis borne by the tsetse fly, as well as by other fatal diseases of the tropics.

The problem of Africa is the dissonance between the environment and the human being, between the immensity of African space (more than thirty million square kilometers!) and the defenseless, barefoot, wretched man who inhabits it. Whichever direction he turns, there is distance, emptiness, wilderness, boundlessness. Often one had to walk for hundreds, thousands of miles to encounter other people (to say “another human being” would be inappropriate, for a lone individual could not survive in these conditions). For the most part information, knowledge, technological innovation, goods, commodities, and the experiences of others did not penetrate here, could not find a way in. Exchange as a means of participating in world culture did not exist. If it appeared, it did so only accidentally, as a rare event, an exception. And without exchange there is no progress.

Most frequently, people lived in small groups, clans, tribes isolated and scattered over vast, hostile territories, in mortal peril from malaria, drought, heat, hunger.

Living and moving about in small groups allowed them to flee danger more easily and thereby survive. These peoples applied the same tactic once practiced by light cavalry on the European field of battle: the keys were mobility, the avoidance of head-on confrontation, the skirting and outsmarting of peril. As a consequence, the African was a man on the move. Even if he led a sedentary life in a village, he was also on the move, for periodically the entire village would set off: either the water had run out, or the soil had ceased to bear crops, or an epidemic had broken out, and off they would go, in search of succor, in the hope of finding something better. Only city life brought them a measure of stability.

The population of Africa was a gigantic, matted, crisscrossing web, spanning the entire continent and in constant motion, endlessly undulating, bunching up in one place and spreading out in another, a rich fabric, a colorful arras.

This compulsory mobility of the population resulted in Africa’s interior having no old cities, at least none comparable in age to those that still exist in Europe, the Middle East, or Asia. Similarly — again in contrast to those other regions — many African societies (some claim all of them) today occupy terrain that they did not previously inhabit.

All are arrivals from elsewhere, all are immigrants. Africa is their common world, but within its boundaries they wandered and shifted about for centuries, a process that continues in certain parts of the continent to this day. Hence the striking physical characteristic of civilization is its temporariness, its provisional character, its material discontinuity. A hut put up only yesterday has already vanished. A field still cultivated three months ago is today lying fallow.

The continuity that lives and breathes here, and that creates the threads of the social fabric, is the continuity of family tradition and ritual, and the pervasive and far-reaching cult of the ancestor. Rather than a material or territorial community, it is a spiritual community that binds the African to those closest to him.

The bus is going deeper and deeper into the thick, tall, tropical forest. Biology in the temperate zones exhibits discipline and order: there is a little stand of pines here, some oaks over there, and birch trees somewhere else. Even in mixed forests a certain clarity and propriety prevail. In the tropics, however, the flora exists in a state of frenzy, in an ecstasy of the most untrammeled procreation. One is struck immediately by a cocky, pushy abundance, an endless eruption of an exuberant, panting mass of vegetation, all the elements of which — tree, bush, liana, vine, growing, pressing, stimulating, inciting one another — have already become so interlocked, knotted, and clenched that only sharpened steel, wielded with a horrendous amount of physical force, can cut through it a passage, path, or tunnel.

Because in the past there was no wheeled transport on this enormous continent; there were also no roads. When the first cars were brought here, early in the twentieth century, they didn’t really have anywhere to go. A paved road is something new in Africa, at most several decades old. And in certain areas it still remains a rarity. Instead of roads, there were trails, usually shared by people and cattle alike. This age-old system of paths explains why people here are still in the habit of walking single file, even if they’re traveling along one of today’s wide roads. It explains, too, why a walking group is silent — it is difficult to conduct a conversation single file.

One can’t afford to be less than a great expert on the geography of these paths. Whoever knows them less than well will lose his way, and if forced to wander too long without water and food will of course perish. Various clans, tribes, and villages have their own paths, which cross one another, and someone unfamiliar with their points of intersection can walk along one assuming it is taking him in the right direction, while in fact it may be leading him astray, even toward death. The most perplexing and dangerous are jungle paths. You are constantly caught on thorns and branches, reaching a destination all scratched and swollen. It is a good idea to carry a stick, for if a snake is lying across the path (as happens often), you must scare it off, and this is best accomplished with a stick. Talismans present further dilemmas. Inhabitants of the tropical forest, living in an impenetrable wilderness, are by nature wary and superstitious. To scare off evil spirits, they hang all kinds of talismans along the pathways. What should you do when you come upon a lizard’s skin left hanging, a bird’s head, a bunch of grass, or a crocodile’s tooth? Should you risk continuing, or, rather, turn back, knowing that beyond this warning sign something truly evil might be lurking?

Every now and then our bus stops along the side of the road. Someone wants to get off. If it’s a young woman with a child or two (a young woman without a child is a rare sight), there unfolds a scene of extraordinary agility and grace. First, the woman will secure the child to her body with a calico scarf (her small charge sleeping the entire time, not reacting). Next, she will squat down and place the bowl from which she is never separated, full of food and goods of all kinds, on her head. Then, straightening up, she will execute that maneuver of a tightrope walker taking his first step above the abyss: carefully, she finds her equilibrium. With her left hand she now clutches a woven sleeping mat, and with her right the hand of a second child. And this way — stepping at once with a very smooth, even gait — they enter a forest path leading to a world I do not know and perhaps will never understand.

My neighbor on the bus. A young man. An accountant from a firm in Kumasi whose name I don’t catch.

“Ghana is independent!” he says ecstatically. “Tomorrow, Africa will be independent!” he assures me. “We are free!”

And he shakes my hand in a way meant to signify that now a black man can offer a white man his hand without self-consciousness.

“Did you see Nkrumah?” he asks, interested. “Yes? Then you are a lucky man! Do you know what we’ll do with the enemies of Africa?”

He laughs, ha-ha, but doesn’t say exactly what will be done.

“Now the most important thing is education. Education, schooling, the acquiring of knowledge. We are so backward, so backward! I think that the whole world will come to our aid. We must be the equals of the developed countries. Not only free — but also equal. But for now, we are breathing freedom. And this is paradise. This is wonderful!”

This enthusiasm of his is universal here. Enthusiasm, and pride that Ghana stands at the head of the independence movement, sets an example, leads all of Africa.

My other neighbor, sitting to my left (the bus has three seats in a row), is different: withdrawn, taciturn, unengaged. He immediately draws attention to himself, for people here are generally open, eager to converse, quick to tell stories and deliver various opinions. Thus far he has told me only that he is working and that he is having some troubles at work. What sorts of troubles, he’s not saying.

Finally, however, as the great forest starts to shrink and grow thinner, signaling that we are slowly approaching Kumasi, he decides to confess something to me. So — he has problems. He is sick. He is not sick always, not continously, but intermittently, periodically. He has already been to see various native specialists, but none of them has been able to help him. The thing is that he has animals in his head, under his skull. It’s not that he sees these animals, that he thinks about them or is afraid of them. No. It’s nothing like that. The animals are literally in his head; they live there, run around, graze, hunt, or just sleep. If they happen to be gentle animals, like antelopes, zebras, or giraffes, he tolerates them well; it is even quite pleasant then. But sometimes a hungry lion arrives. He is hungry, he is furious — so he roars. And then this roar makes his head explode.