The Masque of Africa (29 page)

It wasn’t like that. The place felt cleansed of the presence of Dr. Schweitzer, in spite of the long low-eaved hospital building, with the two rooms at one end that had been the doctor’s. There was a lacklustre piano (the second of the two pianos that the doctor had had sent out to Lambaréné, we were told), with opened sheet music unnecessarily in place (for the actuality, no doubt) forty-four years after the doctor’s death, the exposed music sheet brown from the harsh light of the broad Oguwé. There was a bookcase with some of the doctor’s books: not books he had owned and read, but Asian translations (for
which no true home had been found) of some of the doctor’s own books, part of the unimportant detritus of a writer’s life. In the next room was the doctor’s narrow bed with a mosquito curtain. On a table were technical-looking relics, including a microscope. There were photographs, not easy to look at. It was possible that the real relics were elsewhere, and we were looking only at things that could be spared.

When I was a boy in Trinidad, on the other side of the Atlantic, I used to think that the light and heat had burned away the history of the place. You couldn’t feel that bush or sea had a history. To have a sense of history you needed buildings, architecture; and history came to the place—you seemed to see the change occurring—in Marine Square in the centre of the old Spanish town, and the few ambitious buildings of the British period. Here at Lambaréné there was no architecture, only nondescript tropical buildings, in ochre-coloured distemper, of no distinctive style, that seemed to have eaten up the past.

While we looked, the young woman who was the official guide recited the dates of Dr. Schweitzer’s life: it was part of the continuing hubbub of our welcome.

In spite of that microscope on the table it was well known that Dr. Schweitzer was more of a missionary than a doctor. The medical degree he had taken was the abridged one missionaries took; so that in Africa he was a little like the barefoot doctors the Chinese created for China much later in the century. When he and Lambaréné became famous more qualified doctors came out, attracted by the idea of service which he appeared to exemplify.

Dr. Schweitzer came out to Gabon in 1915. The French colony had been established more than sixty years before, and missionary activity, both American and French, Presbyterian and Roman Catholic, had been going on for almost all that time.

The English traveller Mary Kingsley came to Gabon in 1893 and 1895. Her famous book,
Travels in West Africa
, was published by the house of Macmillan in 1897. (This was the year in which Somerset Maugham published his first novel: it gives a kind of context).

Mary Kingsley describes a busy river life in Gabon, with traders and missionaries. Dr. Schweitzer, when he came to Gabon twenty years later, in 1915, would not have had to live the life of Robinson Crusoe. Mission life by this time would already have been formalised. African children would have been trained in housework; the missionary whose energy was low needed only conduct a service in his church, which might be next door to his house.

Mary Kingsley writes especially about Dr. Nassau, a very early missionary from the American Presbyterian mission. He had been working among Africans for forty years when Mary Kingsley met him. She is full of praise for him; and he is clearly an unusual man, of high intellect, full of energy, and wise about the ways and beliefs of Africans. The subject of African religion interests Mary Kingsley, too. She consults Dr. Nassau at length about what she calls “fetish,” which is her portmanteau word for African belief, and she gives the subject five chapters in her book, a hundred pages.

Set beside Mary Kingsley and Dr. Nassau, Dr. Schweitzer doesn’t shine. Among Africans his reputation, which has lasted down to our own time, is that of a man who was “harsh” to Africans and was not interested in their culture. This perhaps is the true mystery of the man: not his ability in 1915 to turn his back on the civilisation of the time (though the 1914 war might have been a factor), but the—almost heroic—idea of his own righteousness that enabled him to live apart in Africa for all that time: the ideal of the missionary taken to its limit, the man less interested in serving men than in beguiling them.

Early on her travels Mary Kingsley saw the ruins of the first mission house Dr. Nassau built on the upper Oguwé. It was on one side of a ravine, and in front of it, “as an illustration of the transitory nature of European life in West Africa,” was the grave of Mrs. Nassau. The four or five lines about this—the ruined mission house above the grave—make a telling point about dedication and loss and the swift growth of bush.

Quite different is the cluster of granite crosses beside the Lambaréné hospital building. The crosses are close together. They seem
not to leave room for anyone else. These are the Schweitzer family graves. They speak more of possession and triumph than tragedy. Nearby is a caged, depressed-looking pelican, padding about on trampled mud. Dr. Schweitzer had a pet pelican; and this unhappy pelican, flying nowhere, diving nowhere, is kept in his memory.

It became time to get back on the helicopter and leave. Some schoolchildren had been mustered in the afternoon sun for this farewell, and there were photographers. The boy closest to me, living deep in his imagination, blind to everything else, began to shadow-box for the photographers, and they, not seeing him, clicked away.

I
T WAS
the South African winter. In the high land around Johannesburg the air was dry and the grass was brown; outside the airport the jacaranda trees (as they had been identified to me) had turned yellow. Nothing of tropical Africa here, it seemed; the colours were like the winter-bitten colours of places far to the north, Iran, perhaps, or Castile. The straight lines of the industrial buildings on the way to the great city belonged to a culture of science and money, the style of another continent, another civilisation. The African workers at the roadside, at first exotic in this setting, gradually began to fit (though the extraordinary light gave a deeper tint and an extra shine to their blackness).

Two days later, in central Johannesburg, I saw what had befallen a section of the post-apartheid town. The white people, nervous of what the end of apartheid was going to bring, had left, just like that, and Africans had moved in, not local people, but footloose people from the countries round about, Mozambique, Somalia, the Congo and Zimbabwe. The government of free South Africa, in a fit of African-ness, had thrown open its borders to these people, and they were living in their own way in this corner of the too big and too solid
and unyielding city: reducing great buildings and great highways to slum, or at any rate to a kind of half-life, in a way that would have been hard to imagine while the buildings served their original purpose. At road level solid glass panes had been kicked in, and all the way up an office block (or perhaps an apartment block) there were lines of poor washing.

It is a saying of the extraordinary South African writer Rian Malan (born 1954), seeking always without rhetoric or falsity, and in an almost religious way, for an illumination to the racial pain of his country, that in Africa the white people built themselves a moonbase for their civilisation; when that crumbles there is nothing for black or white.

Forty years before, in Rwanda, on the shore of Lake Kivu, I had seen a much simpler Belgian holiday settlement surrendered to forest and people of the forest. The forest people, welcoming ready-made roof and walls and solid floors, ready-made shelter, had moved in, but had then grown unhappy: they didn’t like the rectangular spaces of the Belgian houses, and they had sought gradually to shrink these spaces to the more familiar circular spaces of their huts. Some years later, in the Congo itself, I had seen whole residential areas of the town once called Stanleyville, now called Kisangani, swallowed up by forest, with here and there a bleached signboard from its earlier life showing (though the plan of the streets had already become indecipherable).

This area of Johannesburg, speaking of science, style and architecture (speaking as much of learning and dedication as the mysterious textbook Joseph Conrad found in a hut on the bank of the Congo), had the effect on me of the bush of Kisangani. It sent my mind back to other places of dereliction and ruin I had seen: the wartime rubble of East Berlin kept as a monument in the communist days. But it seemed easier even in the bad days for that part of East Berlin to be rebuilt than it would be for the half-life of this part of Johannesburg to be restored to something like its original meaning. Where would one begin? One would have to begin with the idea of the city, the idea of civilisation;
and already, before one had even begun, one would be swamped by protest.

There were further discoveries to be made within that new slum. A sturdy old warehouse had been given over to new merchandise, which would have been like a parody of what had been here. It was a market of witchdoctors’ goods, and it was extensive. These were the
muti
goods that witchdoctors required their customers to get, to be used by the witchdoctor as he pleased, usually to make medicines, which the unfortunate bewitched man or woman had to drink. The least offensive of these magical goods were the wreaths of herbs which could be used to fumigate a room or house to make life uncomfortable for a bad spirit. Higher up in the scale of seriousness were roots with earth clinging to them; perhaps they were used for purges: the purge is a recurring theme of African magic.

And then we were in the realm of awfulness: animal body parts laid out neatly on a kind of platform. The hawker was sitting on a low stool beside his goods. The goods themselves were stored in the market; people like the hawker didn’t have to drag everything away at the end of the day and bring it all back in the morning; municipal regulation helped the
muti
market. He was a skilled hand at arranging this kind of display, our hawker; he could set disparate things side by side, a jaw, a rib, and make them appear to be related or part of a series. In the top left-hand corner of his display were three horse heads with fur still on the heads, suggesting that these pieces, given pride of place among his goods (and clearly precious), had at one time come fresh from the slaughter-house. They would not have been easy to come by. A most grievous kind of bewitching would have lain on the man who had been asked by the witchdoctor to go and get a horse head. It would have been an expensive piece of magic. (But perhaps not as expensive as the white woman’s breasts that, according to the police, someone had been offering as
muti
.)

I would have liked to get a price for the horse head, but I was nervous of asking. I had asked many questions already and had exhausted
my credit with the hawker. He was beginning to look cantankerous. He was proud of his stock and the way he laid it out. Every day he would have had idlers like me, visitors, tourists, coming and asking about the purpose of this and that, without any intention of buying, just wasting a dealer’s time, and expecting to be taken seriously.

In addition to the horse heads there were a number of heads of deer, split down the middle with a single blow from a sharp knife or axe, the way in a cocoa estate, at harvest time, a cocoa pod, held in the left hand, might be split by a machete held in the right. The neatness and speed were necessary so that the brain of the poor animal could be taken away from the cranium and hawked about; and it was done so quickly that the thin-muzzled heads were still dainty and undamaged, and could be offered for sale in the market, with eyes that continued to look alive and interested and unafraid.

The smell was abominable. In addition to body parts spread out flat on the hawker’s platform there were stomach parts that were hung out on display lines, like pieces of fabric, so that the expert in body parts might choose or examine what he wanted. These display parts were white or whitish, without colour; they had gathered dust.

The hawker had two guinea pigs in a cage. They were tormented by the smell of death and huddled together, finding a fleeting comfort in the warmth and life of the other. The hawker, noticing my worry, called out that they were his pets. It was his joke. The guinea pigs, when they were sold, would be ritually slaughtered, with a knife to the heart, very painful, but the favoured way, and their fresh blood drunk, at the witchdoctor’s direction, part of the sacrifice.

I thought it all awful, a great disappointment. The people of South Africa had had a big struggle. I expected that a big struggle would have created bigger people, people whose magical practices might point the way ahead to something profounder. It was impossible for any rational person to feel that any virtue could come from the remains of these poor animals. As it was impossible later to feel that any succour the local diviners offered could put right the great hurt that the big city and its ancillary too-stringent townships inflicted on the people who
lived in them. There was nothing here of the beauty I had found in Nigeria among the Yoruba people, with their cult, as it seemed to me, of the natural world; nothing here like the Gabonese idea of energy which was linked to the idea and wonder of the mighty forests. Here was only the simplest kind of magic which ended with itself, and from which nothing could grow.

Yet only a couple of hours before, at the Apartheid Museum, I had been dealing with another kind of African pain. The two Africas were separate; I could not bring them together. That was how it was here when you began to look: you swung from one Africa to another. And moving in this way from one set of ideas to another, you came to a feeling that its politics and history had conspired to make the people of South Africa simple.

Not far away from the
muti
-market was the street of diviners. Spaces were very small; the counter and the bench for customers took up most of the consulting room. In the first shop there was a very thin woman who had come to get some medicine for her baby girl—clearly some trouble with AIDS, but I didn’t want to ask. She gave the healer a hundred rand and the healer came back very soon with forty rand and some herb or herb dust in a piece of newspaper, with which the thin woman was pathetically pleased, thinking she had bought health for her baby. Across the road was another consulting room. Space again was a problem, and it was dark. There were two candlesticks. The diviner squatted low, made us throw bones, just as we had done some months before in Nigeria, in a space just as cramped, and she interpreted the signs for us.