The Shadow of the Sun

In the Shade of a Tree, in Africa

It is already the end of the journey. All that remains now is a brief rest in the shade of a tree, on the way back home. The tree grows in a village called Adofo, which lies near the Blue Nile in the Ethiopian province of Wollega. It is an enormous mango tree, with thick, eternally green foliage. Whoever travels across Africa’s plateaux, through the immensity of the Sahel and the savannah, repeatedly sees a startling sight: on the great stretch of sandy, sun-burned ground, on plains covered with parched yellow grasses and sparsely growing, dry, thorny shrubs, there appears every now and then a single, solitary, magnificently branching tree. Its canopy is lush and vibrant, of so intense and saturated a color that it is visible from far away, a pronounced, vivid stain on the horizon. Its leaves, with no apparent trace of wind, move and shimmer. What is this tree doing here, in this dead, moonlike landscape? Why in this precise spot? Why only one? Where does it draw its juices from? Sometimes you will have to travel many kilometers before encountering another one like it.

Perhaps a great many trees used to grow here once, an entire forest that was cut down and burned, and only this one mango tree was left. Everyone from the surrounding area nurtures it, knowing how important it is that it live. A village lies near each one of these solitary trees. Indeed, spotting such a tree from far away, you can head with confidence in its direction, assured that you will find people there, some water, and maybe even something to eat. The tree was saved because without it these people could not live: in this kind of sun, man needs shade to survive, and the tree is that shade’s depository and source.

If there is a teacher in the village, the area under the tree serves as the schoolroom. Village children gather here in the mornings. There are no separate classes or age limits. Whoever wants to, comes. The teacher pins to the trunk a piece of paper with the alphabet printed upon it. He points to each letter with a stick, and the children look and repeat after him. They must learn it by heart — they have nothing to write on or with.

When noontime arrives and the sky turns white from the heat, whoever can do so takes shelter in the tree’s shade: children, adults, and if there are farm animals in the village, they come too — cows, sheep, goats. It is better to sit out the scorching hours under the tree than in one’s own clay house. The houses are cramped and airless, while beneath the tree it is roomy and there is more hope of a breeze.

The afternoons under the tree are very important: it’s when the older people gather for a conference. The mango tree is the only place to meet and talk, the village has no larger venue. People assemble eagerly and willingly, because Africans are collectivist by nature, and possess a great need to participate in everything that constitutes communal life. All decisions, such as who should get how much land to farm, are made collectively, and conflicts and disputes are jointly resolved. According to tradition, each resolution must be adopted unanimously. If someone has a differing opinion, the majority must persuade him to change his position. This can drag on endlessly, because the discussions are famously garrulous. If someone in the village is quarreling with someone else, then the court convened beneath the tree will not try to ascertain the truth, or where justice lies, but will set itself the sole task of ending the conflict and conciliating the warring sides, while granting to each that he is in the right.

When the day ends and darkness falls, the meeting is adjourned and everyone goes home. It is impossible to argue in the dark; discussion requires being able to see one’s interlocutor’s face, to determine whether his words and his eyes are saying the same thing.

Now women and the elderly gather beneath the tree, and children, who are curious about everything. If there is wood, a fire is built. If there is water and mint, a thick, aromatic tea is brewed. Now begins the most pleasant, their favorite, time of day: the retelling of the day’s events, stories that mix fact and fiction, the joyous and the frightening. What dark, savage thing was making such a racket in the bushes that morning? What was that strange bird that flew by overhead and suddenly vanished? The children drove a mole into its burrow. They dug up the burrow — the mole wasn’t there. What happened to it? As the stories unfold, people start to remember — that once, long ago, the old people used to tell of a strange bird that did indeed fly by and vanish. Someone else recalls that his grandfather used to tell of something dark that had long been making a noise in the bushes. How long ago? As far back as one can remember. Because here the outer reaches of memory are the limits of history. Earlier, there was nothing. Earlier does not exist. History is what is remembered.

Africa, except for the Muslim north, did not know writing, and history here is an oral tradition, legends passed from mouth to mouth, a communal myth created invariably at the base of the mango tree in the evening’s profound darkness, in which only the trembling voices of old men resound, because the women and children are silent, raptly listening. That is why the evening hour is so important: it is the time when the community contemplates what it is and whence it came, becomes conscious of its distinctness and otherness, defines its identity. It is the hour for conversing with the ancestors, who have departed yet are nevertheless present, who lead us on through life, and protect us from evil.

In the evening, the quiet beneath the tree is only seemingly so. In reality, the stillness is brimming with the most varied voices, sounds, and whispers. They come from everywhere — from the high branches, from the surrounding bush, from beneath the ground, from the sky. It is best to be close to others at such moments, to feel one another’s presence, for this brings comfort and courage. The African always feels endangered. Nature on this continent strikes such monstrous and aggressive poses, dons such vengeful and fearsome masks, sets such traps and ambushes, that man lives with a constant sense of anxiety about tomorrow, in unabating uncertainty and dread. Everything here appears in an inflated, unbridled, hysterically exaggerated form. If there is a storm, then the thunderbolts convulse the entire planet, the lightning tears the sky to shreds; if there is a downpour, then a veritable wall of water pours from the heavens, threatening at any moment now to drown us and pound us into the ground; if there is a drought, then it is one that does not leave a drop of water behind, and we die of thirst. There is nothing here to temper the relations between man and nature — no compromises, no in-between stages, no gradations. Only ceaseless struggle, battle, a fight to the finish. From birth until death, the African is on the front line, sparring with his continent’s exceptionally hostile nature, and the mere fact that he is alive and knows how to endure is his greatest triumph.

So it is evening, and we are sitting under the great tree. A girl hands me a glass of tea. I can hear people, whose faces, strong and lustrous, as if carved out of ebony, are barely discernible against the motionless darkness. I understand little of what they are saying, but their voices are serious and engaged. Speaking, they feel responsible for the history of their people. They must preserve it and enhance it. No one can say, “Read our history in books.” For no one has written such books; they do not exist. History does not exist beyond that which they are able to recount here and now. The kind of history known in Europe as scholarly and objective can never arise here, because the African past has no documents or records, and each generation, listening to the version being transmitted to it, changed it and continues to change it, transforms it, modifies and embellishes it. But as a result, history, free of the weight of archives, of the constraints of dates and data, achieves here its purest, crystalline form — that of myth.

In these myths, instead of dates and mechanical measures of time — days, months, years — other designations appear, like “long ago,” “very long ago,” “so long ago that no one remembers.” Within these time frames everything can still be placed and arranged in a temporal hierarchy, only that within it time will not evolve in a linear fashion, but will mimic the circular, uniform revolutions of our planet. In this view of time, the notion of development does not exist; it is replaced by the notion of the abiding. Africa is eternal abiding.

It is getting late and everyone is going home. The night is here, and the night belongs to the spirits. Where, for instance, do the witches gather? Everyone knows that they hold their meetings and councils in high branches, immersed and concealed in foliage. It is better not to disturb them, to move away from beneath the tree — they cannot stand to be spied and eavesdropped upon, and they are quite capable of vengeance, of persecution, spreading disease, inflicting pain, sowing death.

Therefore the place under the mango tree will remain unoccupied until dawn. At dawn, the sun and the shade of the tree will appear simultaneously. The sun will awaken people, who will immediately strive to hide from it, seeking the shelter of the tree. It is strange but true that human life depends on something as fleeting and fragile as shade. That is why the tree, which bestows it, is something greater than just a tree — it is life itself. If lightning strikes its crown and the mango goes up in flames, people here will have nowhere to find shelter from the sun, or to assemble. Without the means to assemble, they will be unable to make any decision, reach any resolution. But above all they will be unable to recount their history, which exists only in the process of being retold during evening gatherings beneath the tree. Because of this they will quickly lose their knowledge about their yesterday, will lose their memory of it. They will become people without history, meaning — they will be nobody. They will lose that which united them, will disperse, each one going off in a separate direction, alone. But solitude is impossible in Africa; a solitary man will not survive a single day, is automatically condemned to death. That is why if a thunderbolt shatters the tree, the people who lived in its shade will also perish. And so it is said: Man cannot survive longer than his shadow.

Besides shade, the second most valuable thing is water.

“Water is everything,” says Ogotommelli, a wise man of the Dogon people, who live in Mali. “The earth comes from the water. Light comes from water. And blood.”

“The desert will teach you one thing,” a nomadic Saharan merchant told me in Niamey. “That there is something that one can desire and love more than a woman. And that is water.”

Shade and water — two fluid, inconstant things, which appear, and then vanish who knows where.

Two kinds of life, two situations: anyone who finds himself for the first time in an American supermarket, one of those gigantic, unending malls, will be struck by the richness and variety of the goods assembled there, by the presence of every conceivable object that man has ever invented and produced, and subsequently transported, stowed, and piled up, all of which results in the customer not having to think about anything — the thinking was done for him earlier, and now he has everything ready and at hand.

The world of the average African is different indeed. It is a lean world, of the very simplest, most elementary sort, reduced to several objects: a single shirt, a single bowl, a handful of grain, a sip of water. Its richness and diversity are expressed not in a material, concrete, palpable, and visible form, but in the symbolic values and meanings that the African imparts to the most mundane things, imperceptible to the uninitiated on account of their utter ordinariness. Thus a rooster’s feather can become a lantern lighting the way in darkness, and a drop of oil a shield that will protect you from bullets. The slightest object takes on symbolic, metaphysical weight, because man decided that it would be thus and through his choice elevated it, transported it into another dimension, into a higher realm of being — into transcendence.

Once, in the Congo, I was admitted to a secret: I was allowed to see a boys’ initiation school. Upon finishing the school, boys became men, had the right to speak up in clan assemblies, could start a family. The European visiting this place, so critically important in the life of an African, will be stunned, will rub his eyes in puzzlement. How is this possible! Why, there is nothing here! No benches, no blackboard! A few thorny bushes, some bunches of dry grass, and instead of a floor, gray, ashy sand. This is supposed to be a school? And yet the young people here were proud and excited. They had attained a great honor. Everything here was based on a social contract, on an act of profound faith, which was treated very seriously: tradition said that this place was the school that initiated boys into adult life, and therefore it had a privileged status, was a distinguished, even sacred site. A nothing becomes a deeply significant something because we decide that it should be so. Our imagination anoints and exalts it.

A good example of this deifying metamorphosis might be the record of Leshina. She was a Zambian woman, around forty, a street merchant in the little town of Serenge. She did not distinguish herself in any particular way. These were the 1960s, and in various corners of the world one still came upon hand-cranked phonographs. Leshina had such a phonograph, and one completely worn and scratched-up record. It was a recording of Churchill’s 1940 speech, in which he summoned Englishmen to wartime renunciations and sacrifice. The woman set the phonograph up in her yard and cranked the handle. From the green-painted metal tube rose a low, hoarse rumbling, grunting, and gurgling, in which one could pick out some traces of an emotional, dramatic voice, though the sounds were by now incomprehensible and devoid of meaning. Leshina explained to the onlookers — and the gaping crowds kept growing in number — that this was God’s voice anointing her his emissary and commanding absolute obeisance. More and more gathered around her. Her followers, for the most part poor people without a penny to their names, with superhuman effort raised a temple to her in the bush and began conducting prayers there. At the start of each mass, Churchill’s booming bass worked them up into an ecstatic trance. But African leaders are ashamed of such religious cults, and President Kenneth Kaunda sent out the army against Leshina. Several hundred innocent people were murdered, and tanks reduced the clay temple to dust.

The European in Africa sees only part of it, usually only the continent’s exterior coating, the frequently not very interesting, and perhaps least important, part of it. His vision glides over the surface, penetrating no deeper and refusing to imagine that behind every thing a mystery may be hidden, and within as well. But European culture has ill prepared us for these excursions into the depths, into the springs of other worlds and other cultures — or of our own, for that matter. For historically, it was a fact of the drama of cultures that the first contacts between them were most frequently carried out by the worst sorts of people: robbers, soldiers of fortune, adventurers, criminals, slave traders, etc. There were, occasionally, others — good-hearted missionaries, enthusiastic travelers and explorers — but the tone, the standard, the atmosphere were for centuries set and sustained by a motley and rapacious international riffraff. Naturally, respect for other cultures, the desire to learn about them, to find a common language, were the furthest things from the minds of such folk, for the most part benighted, dull-witted mercenaries, lacking refinement and sensitivity, often illiterate, interested only in conquest, plunder, and carnage. As a result of such encounters, the world’s cultures — instead of becoming versed in one another’s ways, drawing closer, permeating one another — became mutually hostile or, at best, indifferent. Their representatives, aside from the rogues, kept their distance, avoided and even feared one another — intercultural exchange was monopolized by a class of ignoramuses. As one consequence, interpersonal contacts were informed from the outset by the most primitive criterion: skin color. Thus racism became an ideology according to which people defined their place in the world. Whites-Blacks: a division that bred discomfort on both sides. In 1894, when the Englishman Frederick Lugard was advancing at the head of a small division deep into western Africa, with the aim of conquering the kingdom of Borgu, he demanded to meet the king. But a messenger arrived to announce that the ruler could not receive him. As he spoke with Lugard, the envoy kept spitting into a bamboo container hanging around his neck. Spitting, it turned out, was deemed protection and purification from the consequences of contact with a white man.

Racism, hatred and contempt for others, and the desire to exterminate them, have their roots in African colonial relations. Everything was invented and honed there centuries before totalitarian systems grafted those grim and disgraceful impulses onto twentieth-century Europe.

The cultural monopoly of crude know-nothings had a further consequence: European languages did not develop vocabularies adequate to describe non-European worlds. Entire areas of African life remain unfathomed, untouched even, because of a certain European linguistic poverty. How do we describe the dark, green, dank interior of the jungle? Those hundreds of trees and shrubs — what are they called? I know names like “palm,” “baobab,” “euphorbia,” but they happen not to grow in the jungle. And those enormous, ten-meter-high trees in Ubangi and Ituri — what are they called? What about the countless species of insects, which are everywhere continually attacking and biting us? Sometimes one can find a Latin name, but how might that help the average reader? And these are mostly the problems of botany and zoology. What of the immense realm of the psychology, faith, and mentality of Africans? The richness of every European language is a richness in ability to describe its own culture, represent its own world. When it ventures to do the same for another culture, however, it betrays its limitations, underdevelopment, semantic weakness.

Africa is a thousand situations, varied, distinct, even contradictory. Someone will say, “There is war there,” and he will be right. Someone else, “It is peaceful there,” and he too will be correct. Because everything depends on where and when.

During precolonial times, and hence not so long ago, more than ten thousand little states, kingdoms, ethnic unions, and federations existed in Africa. Roland Oliver, a historian at the University of London, draws attention to a general paradox in his book, The African Experience (1991): it has become common parlance to say that European colonialists partitioned Africa. Partitioned? Oliver marvels. Colonialism was a brutal unification, brought about by fire and sword! Ten thousand entities were reduced to fifty.

But much of the underlying variety, this mosaic — this shimmering collage of pebbles, bones, shells, bits of wood, pieces of tin, and leaves — has remained. The more closely we stare at it, the better we see how the bits and pieces of this tableau change place, shape, and hue, giving rise to a spectacle staggering in its mutability, richness, pulse of color.

Several years ago I was spending Christmas Eve with friends in the Mikumi National Park, deep in Tanzania. The evening was warm, clear, windless. In a clearing in the bush, under the open sky, stood several tables piled high with fried fish, rice, tomatoes, local pombe beer. Candles, lanterns, and oil lamps were burning. The atmosphere was jovial, easy. There were jokes, laughter, and much storytelling, as is always the case in Africa on such occasions. In attendance were Tanzanian government ministers, ambassadors, generals, clan chiefs. Midnight passed. Suddenly, I sensed in the impenetrable darkness, which began immediately beyond the illumination of the tables, a rocking and thundering. The din intensified rapidly, and then, just at our backs, from the depths of the night, an elephant emerged. It is one thing to find yourself eye to eye with an elephant in a zoo or a circus — quite another in the African bush, where the elephant is the formidable lord of his world. The lone elephant, apart from the herd, is often an animal running amok, a frenzied predator that attacks villages, tramples mud houses, kills people and cattle.

This one was truly immense, his glance gimletlike, strangely piercing. And he was silent. We could not tell what was going on in his gigantic head, what he would do a second from now. He stood for a while, and then began to stroll among the tables. Everyone was dead silent, frozen with fear, paralyzed. You cannot move — for what if that should trigger his fury? And he is fast: you cannot run away from an elephant. Sitting motionless, on the other hand, you expose yourself to a full frontal attack, and might die crushed under the giant’s legs.

So the elephant sauntered about, looked at the set tables, at the flickering lights, at the motionless people. One could see by his movements, by the way he swayed his head, that he was hesitating, that he hadn’t yet reached a decision. This went on and on, seemingly forever, an icy eternity. At a certain moment I intercepted his gaze. He was watching us attentively, heavily, and in his eyes was a profound, unwavering sadness.

Finally, having made his rounds of the tables and the clearing several times, the elephant left us, simply walked away and was swallowed up by the darkness. When the ground ceased rumbling, and the dark grew still again, one of the Tanzanians sitting next to me asked: “Did you see?”

“Yes,” I answered, not quite daring to move yet. “It was an elephant.”

“No,” he replied. “The spirit of Africa always appears in the guise of an elephant. Because no other animal can vanquish an elephant. Not a lion, not a buffalo, not a snake.”

Everyone walked in silence to their huts, and the boys snuffed out the lights on the tables. It was still night, but Africa’s most dazzling moment was approaching — the break of day.