Makeda

by Randall Robinson

  Jeanne and I came down from the separate rooms we had taken to have dinner in the small meeting room on the first floor at the front of the building. There were four round wooden tables in the tiny room pushed inconveniently close to each other, requiring Jeanne and me to snake ourselves between them and into our chairs.

  It was seven o’clock. Dinner for the guesthouse visitors was Western-style, modest, and palatable. Unless whispered, anything said could be heard by everyone.

  Into Jeanne’s ear I said in a low voice, “I’m prepared to talk about Gordon.”

  She awarded me a look of affording kindness. “Oh, Gray, I love you so much,” whispering, “you tell me when you think the time is right.”

  “Okay.” Relieved.

  “Let’s talk about tomorrow’s work. What time do the libraries open?”

  The libraries were the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library and the Library of Cheick Zayni Baye of Boujbeha.

  “I’ve made appointments for us in the morning and in the afternoon.”

  The solicitous man who was in charge of the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library said, “Between the two libraries, there are over 700,000 manuscripts that survive from long ago. There were once many more. Some have disintegrated because of poor storage conditions. Some have been stolen because of their great value on the world market.”

  The man looked around the manuscript-laden room and then back at us as if he were gauging the good faith of our inquiry. Expecting astonishment to register on our faces, he said, “Most of the works here were authored by Africans between 600 A.D. and 1500 A.D.” His expectations realized, he carried forward with heightened enthusiasm.

  “They are not all here, of course, but African literatures from this period are virtually limitless. Epics, poetry, diaries, letters—written in our own African languages, many in Arabic, some now translated into French.” His aspect teased with mild sardonic amusement. “Have no books been written in America about what is here—has been here, for what, more than a thousand years?”

  We didn’t know how to answer him. The librarian then smiled modestly and stopped to consider what more he would say to us. The government in Bamako was military and humorless. We were foreigners from a powerful country. One had to be careful.

  “The documents are not organized as they would be in America. We are a poor country and have no resources for such.” He then paused and reset the expression on his face to something somewhat less administrative.

  “In these rooms rest the surviving literary evidence of Africa’s golden age—our heritage.” His tone changed as he said this.

  The librarian had closed the main entrance door behind us after he ushered us in. The air in the large main room was cool and slightly scented with the odor of mildew that would dissipate with the arrival of the dry season.

  “Was there something specific that you were looking for?” he asked in the French he’d begun to speak once he discovered that Jeanne spoke the language.

  “No sir, not immediately. We’d like to read first and make inquiries of you in an hour or two.”

  “Please sit over here.” He pointed to a long table on which some of the manuscripts were stacked.

  “Thank you,” Jeanne said, and bowed slightly in her long dress that was blue for the occasion, but otherwise not unlike the modest dress she had worn on her arrival the day before.

  The man started to leave and then turned back, facing us. “You are Afro-Americans. Not so?”

  “Yes,” Jeanne said, welcoming the implied suggestion of a bond.

  “We don’t see many Afro-Americans here. Why is that? Do you know?” His voice bore no trace of accusation.

  “I am not sure, sir, but I think it is because we have not been told about it.”

  “Well then, we shall have to do something about that, won’t we?” And then for the second time, the librarian smiled. Before leaving the room, he placed on the table before us two newish-looking scholarly monographs that had been written in English. The first monograph focused on the Greek historian Herodotus and was authored by Gertrude Stryker, an antiquities specialist at the University of London. The second monograph was written by Khalid Said, an Egyptologist at Cairo University.

  While Jeanne was deciding which of the Frenchtranslation documents to read first, I began paging through Stryker’s monograph. I, of course, had read of the muchheralded Herodotus in my humanities courses at Morgan. He’d been described by my professors, and by the Western academy generally, as “the father of history.”

  On page 3 of the monograph, I came upon the following passage written by Herodotus himself:

  The names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt … These practices, then, and others I will speak of later, were borrowed by the Greeks from Egypt.

  At the foot of the same page, I saw the following connective passage written in 50 B.C. by Diodorus Siculus:

  They also say that the Egyptians are colonists sent out by the Ethiopians … and the larger part of the customs of the Egyptians are, they (i.e., the Greek historians) hold, Ethiopian, the colonists still preserving their ancient manners.

  After reading the first three pages of Said’s monograph on ancient Egypt, which incorporated photographs of ancient Egyptian statuary, I understood why the librarian had wanted us to examine these two documents before delving into the library’s great trove. The Egyptians Herodotus had referred to—Pharaoh Narmer of the first dynasty (3000 B.C.), Cheops, builder of the Great Pyramid, Mentuhotep, founder of the eleventh dynasty, and others—were all very unmistakably black.

  The moldering ancient manuscripts that immediately surrounded us had been originally written in Arabic and in African languages by African scholars between the twelfth and nineteenth centuries. Most had been translated into French. Jeanne read from them aloud in English translating for me as she went. The treatises touched on every imaginable area of scholarly study. The full run of the sciences. Philosophy. Law. Religion. And medicine, as well, studied forward from the seminal work of the ancient Egyptian physician Imhotep (circa 2300 B.C.), to whom the Greek, Hippocrates, following more than 2,000 years behind, owed a great debt.

  Jeanne read to me like this deep into the morning. Giving me an overview of the general tenor of the works, she read a little from one manuscript, and rather more or less from others.

  One document, for example, described the manufacture of pots in the Khartoum (Sudan) of 7000 B.C. Coming well before such had been accomplished in Jericho, the world’s earliest known city. Another described the method used in implementing terraced hillside cultivation at Yeha in Ethiopia that Europeans would borrow and later claim to have invented.

  She read from the writings of the eighteenth-century Timbuktu scholar El Hadj Oumar Tall, and indicated with a telling look her appreciation of the passage’s modern application:

  Tragedy is due to divergence and because of lack of tolerance … Glory to he who creates greatness from difference and makes peace and reconciliation.

  My grandmother liked summer mornings and she liked them best for the moments just after sunrise when she could feel the touch of the cool air’s innocent promise upon her skin. Save for the sleepless crickets’ song, the neighborhood, carved up by the city’s fathers, was stockstill and quiet.

  Jeanne and I, in the late Malian afternoon, were reading documents in the Mamma Haidara library in Timbuktu when my grandmother in the retreating darkness of early morning on Duvall Street made her way down the groaning stair and into the little parlor. She’d raised the window sash six inches and sat down in her padded rocker to breathe in the new day. While trying to envision us a world and eight time zones away, she’d fallen ever so seamlessly into the arms of Morpheus. With little to remind her of the time and place in which she was at present living, the space between the dream and her little parlor seemed to cover scarcely more than an instant. The dream itself may have begun the moment she’d slipped into sleep. It may have lasted little more than a second or two.r />
  As she would later remember it to me, she as a young woman had been standing tiptoed in the orangish late-afternoon sun. She had been waiting—excited and expectant—amongst a crowd of thousands outside the colonnaded stone portico at the Great Hypostyle Hall in the monumental city of Thebes. The massive columns from base to capital measured some thirty feet in height and more than nine feet in diameter. There were 134 of the richly inscribed columns arranged in sixteen rows by the overwhelming structure’s architect.

  The crowd had then sent up a deafening roar. My grandmother had looked toward the hall of columns and seen what had caused the crowd to erupt. From between the towering columns, Pharaoh Mentuhotep, leader of the eleventh dynasty and uniter of two Egypts under one rule, strode out onto the great hall’s tiled forecourt. The great pharaoh, now the ruler of all of Egypt, was tall and handsome and very very black. (His complexion, of course, was quite unremarkable and meant nothing to my grandmother at the time. Indeed, his color had been much the same as that of all the people she had ever seen.) My grandmother had looked then upon the mammoth stone structures that were evidence of Thebes’ undisputed greatness and raised her arms to the sky in praise of the setting sun. All that she beheld that day was of her people’s making and her people’s making alone.

  Emerging from the scales of her short dream back into the cramped drabness of her Duvall Street parlor, she’d said aloud into the tiny room’s barren space, “We can only save ourselves from the inside out.” She had uttered the words while passing through the space—a measureless metaphysical membrane—that separated the life in Thebes she had just visited from her waking contemporary life in the little walk-up on Duvall Street.

  Jeanne was tired but did not feel so, and read further, until it became unmistakably clear how greatly advanced was Africa in the arts and sciences during the whole of the Middle Ages.

  She leaned against me and continued to read. She rested her face on my arm. She read like this until she could read no further, having been overcome by the immensity of the experience that we were sharing. At some point she stopped reading and turned her face to mine. Only then did I realize that what I’d felt on my arm were her tears. I smiled at her, and with my fingertips scarcely brushing her skin, I wiped away her tears.

  I thought about what my grandmother had said metaphorically to me when I was a boy about most people wasting their lives staring at fences. Thinking about her now—sense-messaging her from the marrow of my excited spirit: We’re not staring at a fence here, Grandma. Thanks to your exquisitely special soul, we’re not staring at a fence. It’s like I’m seeing myself whole for the first time.

  My thoughts wandered to Dr. Abana and how what he had said had shocked Morgan’s students but not me. Not me, because of what my grandmother had read to me from the Book of Matthew in the Braille Bible of hers when I was scarcely more than ten. Words that Grandma told me were the words of Jesus:

  The Queen of the South shall rise up in the judgment with this Generation, and shall condemn it: for she came from the Uttermost parts of the Earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon.

  And then, from the Book of Chronicles, she had read to me more than once:

  And when the Queen of Sheba heard of the fame of Solomon, She came to prove Solomon with hard questions in Jerusalem, with a very great company, and camels that bare spices, and gold in abundance, and precious stones: and when she was come to Solomon, she communed with him of all that was in her heart.

  For some reason I’d never thought about, my grandmother read to me from the Bible more about Ethiopia than about anything else. Once I remember her reading to me about a Candace, queen of the Ethiopians; another time, about the wife of Moses—an Ethiopian woman named Zipporah; and just months ago, about an African ruler named Tirhakah, the king of Ethiopia and Egypt (689–664 B.C. twenty-fifth dynasty), who had fought to defend Palestine from domination by the Assyrians. Then, lastly, her reference on the phone to the queen of Sheba’s son Menelik, who had taken the Ark of the Covenant from his father, King Solomon, and carried it home to Ethiopia; a story she had learned from her dreams of Lalibela, as it was not, I now knew, found in the Bible.

  The day dying, I asked the librarian for manuscripts written by and about the Dogon people. He said he would try and find them for me.

  I then, as an afterthought, asked for any manuscripts that had been written by scientists and religious scholars associated with Sankore University in the early 1400s. He said this would be easier to locate and returned ten minutes later with two manuscripts that had been translated into French from the original Arabic.

  Jeanne began to read to me again. In the first of the two manuscripts, an African surgeon named Musa described a successful new surgery he had performed in 1405 at Sankore to remove “clouds from the lens of an elderly religious leader’s eyes.” The patient had been all but blind. Musa had restored the old man’s sight.

  I said to Jeanne that the clouds Musa described were cataracts. I then asked her, “What else does Musa’s report say about the surgery?”

  “Nothing, except the patient’s name.”

  “What was it?”

  “Ongnonlu.”

  I withdrew from the old plastic sleeve the notes I had taken at age fifteen from my grandmother’s description of her Dogon life in the late 1300s. I gave it to Jeanne to read. Within moments, she gasped.

  Ongnonlu was the name of my grandmother’s Dogon father.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  It was easily the most stunning natural formation that I had ever seen. It soared 600 feet above the baked ground like an undulating river-wall of marble red stone. The great Bandiagara escarpment that my grandmother described to me from her dream.

  Three of us and a driver had traveled three hours by donkey cart from Bankass, a gateway village to Dogon country. Jeanne sat beside Douda, the driver, on the little wooden bench board. I sat in the load-bearing section of the cart beside a foreign-educated Dogon guide who had been introduced to us by the solicitous curator of the Mamma Haidara Commemorative Library.

  The guide’s name was Yéhéné. He looked to be in his mid-thirties and was otherwise unremarkable of appearance save for his eyes which were pacifistically quiet and inward-looking. I asked him a number of questions about the Dogon’s Bado rites, how they were performed, their mystical meaning.

  The rocky road, winding snugly along the base of the cliff, traveled noisily under the crick-crack of the steel-belted wooden wheels of the cart, making conversation all but impossible.

  The sky was high and clear. The cliff ribboned ahead as far into the distance as the eye could see.

  It was late afternoon and cool under the great cliff’s canopy of shade. I watched the back of Jeanne’s body rocking in lazy counterpoise over the irregularities of the bumpy trail. She turned and smiled toward me before looking up at the sculpted striated massiveness of the bluff. In a communion of discovery, she glanced back at me again and shook her head in marvel.

  Impressively—since there was no telephone service to Teli at that time—Yéhéné had somehow managed to arrange a meeting for us in the little cliff-side village with a hogon, the highest of Dogon religious authorities.

  Yéhéné told us that he did not normally make such arrangements, but he had done so in our case because it was plain to him that we were not conventional tourists, and that we knew a great deal about Dogon religious beliefs as well. This knowledge was uncommon, he said, particularly in Americans.

  Before leaving Timbuktu in a weathered Renault station wagon, Jeanne had studied my ten-year-old handwritten record of my grandmother’s dream, as well as her sketch of the elliptical orbits of Sirius A, Sirius B (Po Tolo), and Emme Ya (the Sorghum Female) around the bright star, Sirius.

  On the morning of our departure, we had talked over both the notes and the drawing with Yéhéné. He affirmed to us their general accuracy and did not inquire into the provenance of either.

  Yéhéné had briefly visited New York City for the
first time the year before on diplomatic assignment to the Malian Mission at the United Nations. He half-jokingly told us that he had been “surprised” at the way Americans casually disparage their religious and political leaders publicly. He had not seen the practice as an expression of free speech, but rather as a show of “bad manners and a failure of human charity.” When he spoke to us of his own local officials, his hogon, his elders, his priest, he used words (“peaceful … loving”) that would strike most Americans as hagiographic. (He did not speak of the president in Bamako who was a military man.) Though he did not say it in so many words, our impression was that Americans appeared to him generally crude and overly aggressive.

  Much of this had come out over a lunch of rice and vegetables that we had taken back at Bankass, the village in which we transferred from the Renault station wagon to the more terrain-appropriate donkey cart.

  Onward, the little cart creaked.

  I felt inexpressibly free beneath the cloudless sky, undisturbed, comforted even, by the unobtrusive salving sounds of nature—the small bray of the donkey, the caw of an unfamiliar fowl, the unintelligible quiet greeting of a passerby, nature’s soothing rhythm unmarred.

  Western civilization, wherever it could, had laid waste to the natural world, while forgetting the human animal’s essential need of it.

  Here was time passing without the metronomic measure of its relentlessly invasive tick. We were here at the base of the magnificent escarpment. That was all. Jeanne, Yéhéné, Douda, and I.

  Being. Just. By itself sufficient. Time, neither enemy nor friend. Only there. As witness. Assigning value to life in its silent ration of it.

  In the swirling high stone face of the escarpment, Yéhéné pointed out to us pockets where homes had been carved out and decorated with elaborately fashioned dark hardwood doors. The doors, Yéhéné told us, were displayed as works of art in homes around the world.