Picked-Up Pieces (53 page)

More admired still, however, is the striding Scotsman on the whiskey bottle—“blessed be thou, oh bottle manufactured by the whites.” Another bracing import is law and order, which sends almost all the male villagers to jail for four years. Unlike Beukes, they accept fatalistically these strangers “who rule us, you, me, all the villagers, just as they rule our forest, our stream, our river, and all the animals and fish that live in them.” They are puzzled only by how their first set of white masters, the Germans, who drank from mugs, could have been defeated by the French, who drink from “dolls’ glasses.”

Francis Bebey writes with the lightness and irreverence and affectionate thoughtfulness that the patterns of acculturation have bestowed upon the literature of Francophone Africa. Magic, so deadly in Amadi’s Nigerian fastness, is here playful and amorous: a woman throws salt on a fire to bring on a rainstorm that will protect her and her lover from interruption; in the figure of Mother Evil-Eye the witch and midwife merge. The frightful silence of Ogbunabali becomes the kindly silence of the dead, giving assent to the living:

Even when ritual turns lethal and heaps rocks upon a culprit’s head, his neck by a droll miracle refuses to break. The elaborate parleys, which in
The Great Ponds
present a worthy analogue to the discourse of nations, are here portrayed satirically; venerable formulas mask haggling greed as a bride price is agreed upon. Religion has ebbed, leaving a fertile wash
of credulity. Little myths sprout into instant being; a stray frog hiding in a sleeve becomes in the telling a devil, and a young wrestler feels himself “in the process of gradually becoming a legend.” Darkness, a death-concealing curtain in Chiolu, in this Cameroonian village panders to lovers, covering their comings and goings and even permitting the whispering visits of a white man on a bicycle.

The hero of
The Great Ponds
, Olumba, agonizes between life and death; Mbenda, the hero
of Agatha Moudio’s Son
, vacillates between two women and solves his problem, in the way of his ancestors, by marrying them both. Though both present him with illegitimate children, the triangle is essentially amiable—Fanny, the wife whom the village has chosen for him, urges him to marry as well Agatha, the woman his heart has chosen, though she is a white man’s tart and with time his desire for her has so cooled that she seems “very little different from any other woman.” The novel brims with the village’s most precious gift—its bestowal of value upon every life within it. An illegitimate child, far from unwelcome, “prospered and was the sun of our village.” Uncle Big-Heart, upon whose head the stones are heaped, is deplored because he “had not acted in a brotherly way” toward his fellow-villagers: “After all, just because Uncle Big-Heart could read and write and talk to foreigners, he had no right to neglect his brothers.” And eventually he comes to repentance, appearing at a wedding and announcing, “I was born in this village. I shall stay here all my life, and I don’t intend to be ignored at moments as important as this one.” All forgive him his cheating them, and he forgives their trying to break his neck, and the men imprisoned because of this escapade forgive him their term in jail.

Mbenda, as he narrates these events in a sidling, unpredictable manner, seems ambiguously situated both within and outside the village. He is a fisherman in love with the fisherman’s life, with the “fraternity, solidarity, the sky, the sea, men, men lost in this overwhelming natural setting, simple men living to sea’s rhythm” and solidly of the village. Yet he looks back upon it from a mysterious distance: “Happy life, what would I give to return to you again.” He alludes to intervening experiences not described within the novel’s compass: “Today, time and mixing with people who ‘know about life’ have given my arguments a certain measure of ‘civilization.’ ” The reader expects, then, a scene of severance from this village recalled through a shimmer of nostalgia. It never comes; Mbenda
never leaves. The author, however, the jacket tells us, after being born in Douala, Cameroon, studied at the Sorbonne and has been a “composer, guitarist, broadcaster, and journalist,” and has given recitals “throughout Africa, in Paris, and New York.” The awkwardly obtrusive narrator consciousness, with its unresolved double focus, is the only stammer in this confidently relaxed novel, and is probably symptomatic of an African unease with the device, so natural to the West, of confession, of the narrator as hero. I recall—to be personal once more—a student in Nairobi explaining her aversion to reading novels by saying they were “too much showing off.” Mbenda, in one of his philosophical asides, analyzes his own distrust of books: a book is, “fundamentally, the most indiscreet of friends.… In our society, we had preserved the ancestral custom of communicating things only to those we loved, and with the certainty that they would make good use of our information.”

Agatha Moudio’s Son
culminates, as the title foretells, in the birth of a boy. He is born oddly pale, with straight hair. Mbenda tells himself, “Most black children are born white, and only take on … local colour a few days after coming into the world.” He waits. “You will understand why this child, neither flesh nor fowl, which had just been born, made me so thoughtful, when I tell you the truth: the colour of my own skin is like the deepest shades of ebony.… As for Agatha Moudio, very pretty as you know, she too was quite black, from head to foot.… I kept on hoping for a whole month after the birth of the little boy, but his milk-chocolate complexion barely changed, or so little as to be barely noticeable.” At last, Mother Evil-Eye announces the obvious truth:

But this, too, is in time forgiven—forgiven Agatha, and forgiven her white son, who as he grows and plays in the village with the other children “looks like a child come from afar.” Mbenda, abruptly older, meditates, “When all’s said and done, Agatha’s son expects from me not the wicked and stupid sneer of a man deceived by fate but the parental advice which will bring him happiness in the strange adventure of life as a
man.” And he remembers Mother Evil-Eye’s predicting to him, of Agatha, “She’ll lead you a fine dance till you can’t tell black from white.” Speed the day.

H
ELD ON
January 26, 1973, at the University of Lagos. Text edited by Dr. Theophilus Vincent of the University Department of English and published by the United States Information Service.

“The author is faced with this difficulty. He has to write on a private level, on the social level and on this other level which, for want of a better word, we may call the supernatural. So you may find things happening in the African novel which normally would be quite untenable from the Western point of view. Why should a man die because some gods are angry? It is rubbish, it is childish, it doesn’t happen.… And yet, down in the village, this is the reality. If someone is sick in the village it is not enough for the medicine man or even for the doctor to give him an injection. It may be a purely organic disease, so he gets this injection. Now if he has not lost his innocence, you will find that he will not recover until he has also satisfied his gods. In other words this emotional aspect of the thing is very much tied up with his illness. Even now in the village you find a relation of yours falls ill and then there is the usual divination. With your sophistication and Western education, you say, ‘Look, mommy, this is trash. I will take you to the doctor; you will be all right.’ Then you bundle the old lady to the doctor and the doctor does his bit and she does not recover, even with all the drugs. Now she has to go back and, if she believes strongly in this thing, and most of them do, the native doctor is called in, he does his bit and then she recovers. This is the reality of the African situation. We have not lost all our innocence and if we try to lose it, I think we would be losing a very great deal. So we have to write in three dimensions.… One may ask: is this not perpetrating something which really ought to be done away with? Why resurrect all this stuff of the gods and the supernatural and so on? Well, my answer is: we really do not know—I mean, there is so much about nature that we do not know. Nowadays hypnotism is standard practice in psychotherapy. When Mesmer was exploring this art, he was dubbed a
quack and he was abused and mesmerism was very much in disrepute. But today, hypnotism is an accepted part of psychotherapy. People are researching in telepathy and gathering evidence every day on this. In other words, we do not really know much about nature and it may well be that the ignorant villagers are right after all.”

—C
APTAIN
E
LECHI
A
MADI
,
novelist

“… The old forms, which Capt. Elichi Amadi says we have to bring in, like the fisherman who wants fish and has to go through the gods, are changing. If I want fish I have to go to the water and get the fish and not try to go through some gods. These things are changing. I mean this now and what happens every day. People want fish, they want money from it. They are not going to consult somebody who will get in their nets and make sure it works very well. If they are going to use poison for the fish, they throw it into the water and wait for the fish to die and collect them. The old forms are going to die. The new forms of doing things have not yet taken hold on us, so we are in a society which is in flux and is changing.”

—K
OLE
O
MOTOSO
,
novelist

“… satire has the value of working like an invocation. In traditional society as our fathers have told us, the best way to disarm a baleful influence, an evil spirit, is to call it by its name, that is, evoke it. You can stare this baleful influence in the face and so it becomes powerless. I think this is exactly what satire is doing.… Who are the audience of the African writers? I think at this stage of our development the power is not really with the common people. We may deceive ourselves with socialist slogans about power to the masses. The power is in the hands of the few elite who are going to determine the future of the country, and it is among these few that you get the intelligent ones who will read the novels. I do not think it matters very much that the novel is not accessible to the ordinary person.…”

—D. S. I
ZEVBAYE
,
critic and scholar

“… what our writers are tracing, what they have been charting, is a kind of moral decline due to the shock of the colonizer, the breakdown in values, the incoherence that was sort of an aftermath of our colonial experience which has produced the present situation in which we are
living. The writers have always been present to report on this, to tell us about this, to write about this. They have never, it seems to me, abdicated this particular responsibility. So this moral concern may be taken as something that distinguishes the African novel today.”

—F. A. I
RELE
,
critic and scholar

“… It should not really matter whether these things get read and understood in America or Europe. I think first our writers should aim at getting their works read locally. This is part of what I see as the failure of works like
The Interpreters
, not only because as some people might say it is faulty in its form, but because it is not really there—it does not belong to the society. That is why works like
Things Fall Apart
get read much more widely; they are directed to a certain simple but literate audience, such as school girls.… I think that within the reality of African life and African tradition there is a certain kind of sacredness which even the writer must respect, however iconoclastic he wants to be. There is a certain sacredness bound up with our spirituality.… This is the dimension which I would like to add to this discussion.”

—I
ME
I
KEDDEH
,
critic, scholar, editor

“It seems to me that the suggestion has been made that the African artist lives in a world of his own and that the nature of his own type of reality must necessarily and artistically be different from the nature of European reality.… I think we should always look on the African artist or the African writer as belonging to a certain community that speaks generally to humanity.… the really solid thing about the good African novel is that it is a novel whose realities have not been so exclusively culturally bound as the topic of this symposium would seem to suggest.”

—T
HEOPHILUS
V
INCENT
,
critic and scholar

“In this country we have a class of people who are known as poltergeist, medicine men or even rain doctors as they call them—who use incantations, incantations and so forth. That is all oral poetry; and all that the Yoruba praise singers who sing on festive days the praises of chiefs and recall past events and so forth, sing, is poetry.… Everybody enjoys and admires these praise singers, these priests; that is everybody in the rural areas. Everybody admires the rain doctor. Why is he so admired? Because his poetry is functional. The poetry tries to change some form of
the human condition. If a threatened calamity, say, famine or problem of epidemic rages somewhere, they all crowd to this medicine man.… He manipulates words and sounds and appears to change the human condition.… He satisfies the demands of the community.”

—G
ABRIEL
O
KARA
,
poet

“… if the writer were accepted in African society he would be rather like the bird in the folk-tale that always appears on the wall and pipes a particular tune. When you hear that tune you know that there is tragedy somewhere; someone has died or something quite serious is happening. The bird disappears and within a moment you get the illumination of the bird’s visit. The writer is this kind of bird. He pipes the tune which gives the warning.”