The Black Halo (25 page)

One day the Reverend Donald Black decided to leave the ministry and go as a missionary to Africa. When he was living in Scotland he was always writing letters to the newspapers
asking why the Sabbath was not being kept, why planes flew about the sky on Sunday, and why the ferries were operating. He believed that Sunday was truly God’s day, the day on which the Lord
had rested, as if in a manse contemplating the elegance and beauty of His creation. As a matter of fact the manse he lived in was old and damp, and the ground around it, which could hardly be
dignified with the name of garden, was choked with wildflowers. Here the unmarried minister would write his sermons, which usually dealt with obscure points of doctrine that his parishioners found
great difficulty in following. In spite of that the minister read diligently in thick books, many of them ancient and discoloured, and written in double columns.

He was a small sturdy man with quick alert eyes. When he visited his parishioners in his old car he liked to argue with them, and then after he was finished put up a prayer for all the
inhabitants of the house. His prayers were usually long and difficult to listen to, for he had the unfortunate habit of stopping in the middle of sentences, unable to think what the next words
should be. In fact he had no eloquence at all, and sometimes felt that God was unfair to him, since after all he believed firmly in the Bible and contended that every word in it was true. Why then
had God not endowed him with flowing speech? Even when he was preaching from the pulpit, tall and bare below the long transparent windows through which in summer a greenish light penetrated from
the leaves outside, these halts and stoppings would embarrass him. It was probably because of his lack of eloquence that he decided to become a missionary. In moments of despair he would remember
Moses who according to the Bible had been something of a stutterer, but who nevertheless had led his people out of the corrupt lands of Egypt.

In fact he thought of Britain and Scotland as corrupt. The pure milk of the Gospel had gone sour, the houses were dens of iniquity, the streets dark with sin and blood. He dreamed of a place
where the children would be well-behaved, the people upright and innocent, the blandishments of civilisation absent, the soul without taint. He thought that God had abandoned his country, that
there was disorder everywhere, and the law itself cracking under the strain.

Since he was unmarried, he would sacrifice himself to the uncorrupted natives of Africa who had been saved by distance from the Sodom and Gomorrah of the west. One dark dismal day he left
Scotland behind him and on a fine hot day arrived at the village where he was to be a missionary. There he found waiting for him a small church and a small congregation. Noticing that the church
was surrounded by foliage and vegetation, the first thing he did was to cut down as much of it as possible so that the church could be seen, white and bare, in its fated place.

He had learned the language of the tribe before he had left Scotland, for he considered that such knowledge was of the greatest importance. Hadn’t Luther translated the Bible into German?
Perhaps, he thought to himself, I shall learn eloquence in another simpler language which has the freshness of novelty and not the staleness of advertising.

The first night he slept in the church he felt a little homesickness but this did not last long and after a few days Scotland was to him as distant and hazy as its bluish mountains seem on a
misty day, insubstantial, vague, almost incoherent. But the heat of Africa beat on him like a hammer.

When he rose from his bed on the first day he went off to see the chief of the tribe, who was sitting outside his hut on a chair which had once been European. He wore on his head a sort of leafy
crown, and carried in his hand a stick which the missionary assumed was meant to be a sceptre. He had calm, merry eyes which regarded the missionary as only one of many who had come to his tribe.
If he thought Donald rather small in stature he didn’t say so but was courteous and benign.

Toko – for that was the chief’s name – greeted him in his own African dialect and Donald replied in the same language.

‘How many Christians have we here,’ he asked him.

Toko began to count serenely on the fingers of his hands and after a while said,

‘Twenty.’

Donald was surprised at this small number for he thought that there would have been more.

‘That is so,’ said the chief gravely, ‘and I myself am one of them. I know about Adam and Eve and about the snake and also about John the Baptist whose head was cut off at a
dance.’ He flashed his teeth in a wide white smile and laughed. ‘I also know about heaven and hell,’ he added.

This won’t do, thought Donald. They know all about the violent parts of the Bible but they do not know the pure milk of it. He looked inside the large hut and saw a number of women sitting
cross-legged there in an attitude of eternal patience. They were naked to the waist and in the half-darkness he could see their drooping breasts like pale fruits. They were however wearing grass
skirts.

How shameful, he thought. But though the heat was almost unbearable he himself didn’t remove his collar which he considered to be a symbol, and a defence against the laxity of the people
and the vegetation.

A few children were playing on the road but they unlike the women were totally naked and completely brown.

‘Isn’t it time that these women wore clothes,’ he asked the chief. ‘Especially as you yourself are a Christian.’

‘That would be impossible,’ said the chief serenely, ‘because it is very hot and also they have no clothes to wear.’

Donald didn’t say any more about this, and left the topic lying there ticking away like a watch that he must later adjust.

All around him there were other huts and sitting in front of them men and women who regarded him with the same profound eternal look, as if they had been there forever and would be there after
he had gone.

‘I shall expect the Christians tomorrow in church,’ he said and turned away.

What am I going to do here, he asked himself, and he looked at the trees which were heavy with their fruit. His collar was biting into his neck which was wet with sweat as was his whole body
encased in its black clothes. Thinking that he was the only person there who was really black, he walked among the sheaves of shadows till he arrived at his church. Once he looked back, only to see
that Toko was still sitting in his European chair clutching his sceptre which was only a curved stick. The shepherd of his flock, thought Donald. But he could have sworn that the chief was secretly
laughing at him.

The following day, arrayed in his robes, Donald climbed into the pulpit and stood looking down at his black congregation, their faces calm and shining and impenetrable, their breasts naked.

‘There are two things we must remember,’ he said. ‘One is the Law and the other is the Grace. Christ said that he came to fulfil the law which the Pharisees had made
intolerable.’ He stopped, for it occurred to him that they might not have heard of the Pharisees, and in the blatant unhypocritical light of this country they seemed very far away.

‘At any rate,’ he continued, ‘there is only the one God. He exists in the heavens and also in our own souls.’ They regarded him with kind uncomprehending eyes.

‘God is like a judge. He commands us not to make graven images, not to steal and not to commit adultery. You know all these things already for my predecessor must have told you.’

Hearing shouting outside the church he asked them what it meant. A small sturdy man with sad eyes told him that some of the youth of the village came to the church regularly to mock the
Christians and call them ‘the white ones’. The missionary left the pulpit and strode out of the door into the unabated sunlight. He saw in front of him a group of tall gangling boys who
had been throwing stones and pebbles at the door. ‘Get out of here,’ he shouted. ‘Get out of here at once,’ and his face was so red and his whole body so bristling and
hostile – as if he were swelling like a cockerel that crows with inflated breast at dawn – that they ran away at great speed, not once looking back. Then he returned to the church.

When the service was over the small man who had told him about the boys stood up and said that the previous missionary had allowed them to ask questions after the sermon.

‘Do you have any questions then,’ asked Donald who loved argument of any kind.

‘I have a question,’ said the small man. ‘My name is Banga. A man belonging to the tribe has taken my wife away from me. I would like to cut his throat but I wanted to ask you
first since you are a Christian.’

‘The Bible tells us that killing is forbidden,’ said Donald, ‘and that what we must do is turn the other cheek. Christ did not struggle when he was crucified, even though he
wept a little in the Garden of Gethsemane. I am sure that God will punish that man in his own good time. Where is your wife now?’

‘She is with him in his hut and she has put me to shame.’

‘Well,’ said Donald, ‘I will speak to that man. What is his name?’

‘Tobbuta.’

‘She will return to your house, never fear,’ Donald said with great resonance and conviction. ‘For it is the law that whom God has joined together no man dare put asunder. It
tells us that in the Bible, and it is the teachings of the Bible that I have come to instruct you in. If necessary I shall myself drag her home to you.’

‘But,’ said Banga in the same even sad voice as before, ‘I should cut his throat anyway.’

‘I will put the matter right,’ said Donald firmly. ‘You leave it with me. There will be no killing. Everything will be settled according to the law.’

When he had finished a girl with large eyes and shining youthful breasts, who was sitting in front of him, said:

‘My father is very old. He is ninety-four years of age and he is blind, deaf and bad-tempered and he spends most of his time in bed. We don’t have enough food for him and when we do
give him food he complains and says that we are trying to poison him. We are very poor and don’t have much food for ourselves and what he eats is taking away from the younger ones. What does
your mastership say?’

‘What is your name?’ Donald asked, as he watched the sunlight throb in her black hair.

‘Miraga.’

‘Well, Miraga,’ said the missionary turning his eyes away from her firm breasts, ‘God, as I said, does not want us to kill anyone, least of all our father whom we are told to
respect. Respect thy father and thy mother that thy days may be long on the earth, that is what God says. I hope I will never hear you saying anything like that again. Are you listening to
me?’

‘Yes,’ said Miraga, ‘but he is old and we have no food in the house. The children are hungry. I myself am hungry.’

‘There are things in the world more important than the body,’ said Donald. ‘The body passes but the soul remains.’ But when he looked around him he saw no white and
fluttering soul, benign though faint, but only the shining black bodies and the green light on the windows. I am a bachelor, thought Donald despairingly, how much do I know about the world?
Especially how much do I know about women? But then the thought, which did not seem blasphemous, occurred to him, that Christ was a bachelor also, though his father was a carpenter and not, like
his own, a minister.

His father’s ferocious beard seemed to glare down at the girl’s naked breasts which seemed to tremble in front of his eyes. Miraga Miraga Miraga. The name brought to his mind water
and daybreak and sun on tranquil rivers.

‘Does anyone else have a question?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ said a big slow man who clutched the seat in front of him as he stood up. ‘My name is Horruga. We hear in the Bible the story of how Peter cut off the ear of a soldier.
What was the reason for that?’

‘He had no right to do that,’ said Donald briskly. ‘Christ himself reminded him that he had sinned. Surely my predecessor told you that.’ When he mentioned his
predecessor they began to look at each other slyly as if they had an unfathomable secret which like children they were unwilling to divulge.

‘You did listen to him, didn’t you?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes oh yes,’ they all replied like children chanting in a primary class. ‘Oh yes.’

‘Well then,’ said Donald, ‘I hope you learned from him.’

When he was about to leave the church at the end of the sermon he saw that left on top of one of the seats there was an image of Christ carved from wood and that the image represented a plump
smiling man with a crown on his head and what appeared to be an animal like a deer in front of him. It looked suspiciously like the chief but he knew that it was meant to be Christ because of the
yellow rays that shone from the crown. He threw it out into the strong barbarous sunlight which beat on the street with an even eternal heat.

Can I bear this heat? he asked himself. It is like hell itself. He looked down at his hands which were already turning brown. The collar was chafing his neck as usual.

He was about to eat one of the fruits from a neighbouring tree when he heard someone shouting, ‘They are poisonous.’ When he lowered his eyes from the tree and looked into the
darkness of the sun he saw after a while that it was the witch doctor who had spoken and that down his face red and black stripes poured. His face like that of the chief was laughing.

That night he found by chance a diary that his predecessor had been keeping and after a short struggle with his conscience he began to read it, justifying his action on the
grounds that he might find out more about the work ahead of him. He read by the light of the lamp, lying in the bed which was in the church itself. While he was doing so it occurred to him that he
did not know anything at all about his predecessor, his appearance, his beliefs, his thoughts, and this troubled him a little, but he soon forgot about it as the contents of the diary occupied his
mind more and more.

This is what he read:

17 March
. I have arrived at this place at long last. Though Britain was dark and melancholy, this country is hot and bright. I think I will like it.