Under African Skies

by Charles Larson

  On his return journey, after this mockery of a conversation, Edanga must have astonished anyone who saw him pass. Every once in a while, he’d stop abruptly in the middle of the road, brandishing an angry fist in empty space, shaking his head, clapping his hands, or simply raising three fingers into the air and shouting, “That’s the last time!”

  He had sworn never again to set foot at Mbankolo with a heavy basket of food on his head only to return alone, tormented by grief and far from his beautiful Angoni. Three years his heart had been bleeding in an endless wait for her whom he had chosen as his life’s companion. Three years …! Night and day, the image of Angoni haunted him, invaded him in the form of a melancholy obsession. He had a wife, but he was vegetating in celibacy. He might have understood if Angoni had rejected his marriage proposal. He might have understood if, for one reason or another, Angoni had been held back by her parents. But that his beloved should remain imprisoned for more than three years in the sixa! He racked his brain to understand it and to find some justification for it. He recited his catechism like a parrot, but it was all in vain, for never after any of the numerous examinations did his name appear on the list of successful candidates! Yet the dowry had been paid in full. Moreover, after the negotiations which accompany any engagement, Angoni had in fact been handed over to him. However, she was not destined to live with him at Nsam for more than three months.

  Yes, three months; that is to say, until that day when the priest of Mbankolo, who was on tour, arrived with a great deal of fanfare. In front of the entire assembled population of Nsam, the missionary became red-faced with anger as he began to rail against the old man, Edanga’s father: “What a scandal to let your child live in a state of mortal sin with his fiancée! You have but a short time left to live on this earth, and yet you are doing everything you can to earn a passage to hell! Do you know that all those sins your son is committing against the sixth commandment redound upon your soul? Do you know that?”

  “Yes, Fada, I know it!” Edanga’s elderly father muttered, trembling with fright.

  He had trembled with fright to see a vision of himself in the other world, being fed into that immense furnace where all those who failed to toe the line in this world would burn forever and ever, according to the decrees of the Holy Roman Church …

  That day had been a day of mourning for the two fiancés. His eyes swollen with masculine tears and his body dripping with sweat, Edanga had thought he would go mad with grief! He felt an invisible dagger bite into his heart. But when he was somewhat cured of his mental sufferings, he had resolved to learn the catechism by heart in order to regain his beautiful Angoni, who had been carried off to the sixa by the priest of Mbankolo …

  Turning over in his head the troubled past, Edanga asked himself as he was walking, “What is it exactly that they teach those women in the sixa? What more than a few scraps of catechism, while making them work like beasts of burden! Besides, the worst of it is that a certain number of them wake up one fine morning to find their stomachs bulging with the fruits of adulteries that go unpunished … !” His legs no longer belonged to him. They moved forward, stumbling more and more frequently. Each time they knocked against a stone, he cried out, “And there you have it! Even the stones in the highway have sometimes had enough of being stepped on by those who pass by!” And he told himself that he, too, had enough of groaning beneath the cruel regulations of those people at Mbankolo.

  Without having noticed either the weight of the heavy basket or the distance traveled, the young man suddenly recognized the Catholic Mission perched on the summit of a hill, there with its church, its plantations, its sixa, and its mysteries … He plunged down a narrow path. When he arrived at the marketplace, he set down his burden in an unoccupied corner and hastened to unwrap it. Then, having arranged all the produce in front of him, he lost no time in selling it all at half price. With the profits from this discount sale in his pocket, he fled into a nearby bar, where he ordered a liter of red wine. Soon it seemed to him as if his blood was circulating with a vigor and a courage unknown to him since the day of his birth. It was in this singular state of well-being that he ascended the hill and walked toward the church, which was already buzzing with pious voices.

  He sat down on a pile of adobe bricks in the main courtyard. From time to time he got up and craned his neck, keeping his eyes fixed upon the visiting room. Once in a while, in front of the horrified and shocked eyes of the faithful, whose late arrival had obliged them to follow the Mass from outside, he made a great show of urinating next to the Holy House of God. Then again he could be heard grumbling and waxing indignant over a Mass that kept dragging on. Finally, to his great satisfaction, the church doors opened, discharging a flood of people into the surrounding area. Suddenly he got up. Running at full speed, he dashed toward the visiting room, climbed the plank wall like a madman, and suddenly found himself in the forbidden enclosure. His heart was beating as if to break open his chest. He waited … Several minutes later, the nuns passed in front of him; they remained silent but were obviously astonished to see a person of the male sex in a cloister reserved for women. Then an endless line of fiancées flowed in. Edanga’s eyes appeared to be popping out of his head as they rested first on one face and then on another … All of a sudden, cries of amazement echoed in the sky, and a stampede broke out among the women. Edanga had sprung forward to grab one of them by the arm. And before they could regain their composure he had dragged her toward the visiting room and smashed the plank wall to pieces with a single powerful kick, and now there he was outside the enclosure with his beautiful and charming Angoni.

  “From this day, on,” he barked, “you will no longer sleep here, far away from me! You will no longer sleep here in this slave camp invented by colonialist missionaries! You are my wife, and you must stay with me at Nsam!”

  Edanga never stopped barking, while Angoni, who was caught fast by the arm, advanced in self-defense. She trembled, shouted, cried, called for help … It wasn’t that she no longer loved her fiancé. But the abduction seemed so strange to her, so scandalous, that she couldn’t prevent herself from trembling, shouting, crying, and calling for help.

  While all this was taking place, the elderly catechist who was in charge of the sixa came running. He seized the young woman by the other arm. Then, during a quarter hour of universal merriment, there ensued a tug-of-war in which the beautiful Angoni fell, first to one side and then to the other, while her heartrending screams pierced the air.

  For an instant, Edanga stopped pulling and shouted at the catechist, “What do you think you’re getting mixed up in, eh?”

  He released his hold on Angoni and fell upon the old man, thrashing him soundly and throwing him on the ground, to the accompaniment of peals of laughter. All the young men regarded Edanga with admiration. To them, he was a liberator of all the women in the sixa. “What cruelty to deprive men of their wives for years! What injustice … !” they yelled on every side. Only the other catechists took it into their heads to champion the cause of their senior, who looked as if he had just been dragged from a flour sack. But they entered the fray at their own peril. Beneath the weight of irresistible blows of the fist, each of them suffered an identical fate.

  Suddenly the peals of laughter ceased. All eyes were riveted on a white silhouette emerging from somewhere down there and clearing its way through the crowd. It advanced with long loping strides, as the sleeves of its cassock were being rolled up. It was the priest of Mbankolo. This missionary was about forty years old, and he had the reputation of being a regular Goliath. This was largely because he never hesitated to use the white man’s pugilistic arts to silence the most boisterous mouths in his parish. That’s what earned him the nickname Fada Boxer. He grabbed Edanga by the collar of his shirt; then, after having shaken him violently as if he were nothing more than a garden snake, the priest dealt him such a powerful blow that, once released, Edanga tottered for an instant and fell flat on his face. Edanga had just found
his master! He lay there in a disconcerting immobility; everyone believed he had fainted. But all of a sudden he was on his feet, towering to the full height of his man’s body. He raised his two hands to his face, pressed his tear-filled eyes, and then ripped off his shirt.

  “I want my wife!” he began to shout at the top of his lungs. “Nothing more than my wife Angoni, for whom I have paid the bride price in front of witnesses …”

  Seated on the ground, Angoni sobbed mutely but incessantly. Edanga saw her and ran in her direction. But just as he was taking hold of her arm again, the boxer priest overpowered him and covered him with a shower of blows. Edanga released his hold on Angoni. Drawing himself up, he saw a large red face. He shouted an oath of war. He advanced toward the missionary. He circled his adversary, while patting one of his pockets from time to time. Then he suddenly plunged his right hand into it. When he raised his fist, a metallic glitter rose with it and inscribed a semicircular arc in space before disappearing into the folds of the cassock. It was in vain that the boxer priest tried to subdue the young man’s arm, which moved mysteriously, frenetically in a back-and-forth motion. They watched the boxer priest weave about on his sturdy legs and, with one hand resting on his stomach, collapse onto the ground as a long-drawn-out moan issued from his lips. A thunderous chorus of exclamations resounded, almost loud enough to make the church walls come tumbling down. The panic-stricken spectators had stopped laughing. Like sheep unexpectedly overtaken by a windstorm, they ran in every direction, continually jostling against each other.

  “He killed him! He killed him!”

  “Tell somebody to notify the white Commandant … ! Arrest him! Arrest him … I” they were yelling in every corner of the courtyard.

  But no one dared arrest Edanga. He was no longer a man, but a wild animal foaming at the mouth and spitting blood—a wild animal leaping about and running in all directions at once as he brandished a bloodstained dagger in the blinding midday sun.

  “Today will be the last day for anyone who comes near me!” he shouted from the depths of his rage-congested lungs. “Where is Angoni, my beautiful Angoni, for whom I have paid the bride price in front of witnesses?”

  Angoni had disappeared. Like all the women of the sixa, she had fled, trembling in horror, to find a secure hiding place.

  Half an hour later, an automobile arrived like a whirlwind, trailing a halo of dust in its wake. As it screeched to a halt beside the motionless body that lay on the ground, it made a war-like sound. The white Commandant and his guards emerged. Before they could even ask who had committed the crime, accusing fingers were already pointing at Edanga, who alone remained at the scene: increasingly distant voices competed with each other to proclaim: “There he is! There he is!”

  A swarm of hands seized hold of Edanga. Then, handcuffed and beneath a hail of punches, whiplashes, and blows from wooden clubs …

  “I only wanted my wife, my wife Angoni, for whom I paid the bride price in front of witnesses—my wife who has been held prisoner for the past three years … ! And everyone saw how the Fada hit me first … ! Look at my bloody mouth! All that because I wanted my wife Angoni, my wife for whom I paid the bride price in front of witnesses.”

  The young man was shouting at the top of his lungs and crying; he could be heard calling out to several young people in the crowd, inviting them to testify against the boxer priest! But no one dared come forward. They all moved away and prudently ducked behind their neighbors, admonishing him: “Keep us out of your affair!”

  “Don’t do anything to him, Commandant!” exhorted the priest, playing out his mournful role, “I … am … dying … a martyr … !”

  Several minutes later, the automobile drove away. It was carrying Edanga, who, though trussed up like a giant human sausage, continued to howl incessantly, “The true martyr is me! The true martyr is me … !”

  —1984

  Tijan M. Sallah

  (BORN 1958) GAMBIA

  Tijan M. Sallah’s versatility as a writer has never been in question: poet, writer of fiction, editor—if these weren’t enough, he has also written more than his share of official reports for the World Bank in Washington, D.C., where he currently works. The Gambian writer’s books include When Africa Was a Young Woman (1980), Kora Land (1989), and Dreams of Dusty Roads (1993), his collections of poetry; Before the New Earth (1988), short stories; Wolof (1996), for The Heritage Library of African Peoples; New Poets of West Africa (1995), edited by him; as well as his work in progress, Heart of Light, a biography of Chinua Achebe. Oona Strathern, in Africa: Traveller’s Literary Companion, remarks: “[Sallah] is noted in much of his work not only for his observation of the corruption of the motherland itself, but more unusually for his sensitivity to women’s suffering.”

  Sallah was born in Sere Kunda, Gambia, in 1958. After attending local schools as a child, he came to the United States, where he earned a B.A. at Berea College and later a Ph.D. in economics at Virginia Polytechnic Institute. Before joining the World Bank as an economist, he taught in several American universities.

  In one of the poems in When Africa Was a Young Woman, Sallah proclaims: “Tarzan never lived in my Africa”; and in “On Culture and Development,” from Dreams of Dusty Roads, he says:

  Food production is based on culture;

  So is town-planning and architecture.

  So is textile and other manufacture.

  So is management of time and space, culture.

  For without culture

  Does development not despair?

  Without culture,

  Do we not all despair?

  Somewhere in between these two quotations lies the domain of much of Sallah’s short fiction.

  Of “Innocent Terror,” he states: “The story was inspired by a slice of Gambian reality: the government’s favoritism, the preferential treatment toward the Lebanese community in the Gambia. I see the Lebanese immigrants as a source of new energy, dynamism, and enormous learning. They bring with them their mini-cultures, grafting them on foreign stems, creating hybridized beauties. In West Africa, the Lebanese have been a great source of entrepreneurial dynamism and cultural enrichment.

  “But they also have had an inordinate share in public corruption, particularly in countries like Sierra Leone and, of course, the Gambia, where the Lebanese have helped disproportionally to subvert the prevailing system of law and order. In my view, Lebanese immigrants should be treated no differently from natives, and should abide by the established norms of their receiving society. They carry their accumulated memories, geographies, pride and prejudices, and we should welcome them. But we should also insist that the Lebanese immigrants be good ambassadors, not vessels of criminality.

  “The Wolof saying puts it well: ‘A visitor should never untie the goat of his host.’”

  INNOCENT TERROR

  It was one of those incidents that we saw in cowboys-and-Indians movies. Or frontiersmen of the wild American West. But it happened in our territory. It was unfortunate. Even sad. But it was one of those terrible events that arrest the long festival of innocence. Yeats would have understood it, for he wrote about it in his poetry. Out of it, a terrible beauty. A terrible beauty is born. And the ceremony of innocence is drowned.

  He pulled the trigger on a cook and the rest was cold-blooded history. And it was an innocent cook. He pulled the trigger to retrieve a primitive thirst. The thirst for hunting which the city could not avail him. He had decided that in the absence of four-legged creatures, a two-legged one would suffice as game. The act, of course, was tainted with supercilious innocence. He did not load the gun. He just did the trigger-pulling. But could he be excused for pointing the mouth of even an empty gun at a cook? The reality was that the killing of the cook was monstrous. It happened in open daylight. As the fidgety finches sang in the mangoes. As the customers crowded the counter of his father’s store.

  His father was notoriously rich. And gold afforded the son the luxury of killing. Perhaps killing for the
hell of it. Gold, that yellowish necessary devil. And how it can make inadequates into gods. Gold, King Midas died from it. Solomon did not plead for it; wise Solomon, he chose the path of sagacity. Gold, that god that can lure away reason and bribe emotions onto the path of tantrums. Gold, especially effortless gold, the genie that can elevate amateur hunters onto the stage of life so that they can treat bloody life as a pantomine. O gold, madness in the lunch basket, the sexy maiden under the periwinkle sky, beautiful in expanding the range of options but gaudy for circling the rich with myopia. And how they may not see beyond their noses, and how they may eat in the restaurant of human anguish and, at nightfall, count their coins with wine and Bach, cheering with senseless delight.

  The air smelled of blood, the corpse lying in a corner of the kitchen. Flies partook of their share in the primal visit, feasting and exploring the dripping saliva from the corner of the mouth, leaping on the contours of the resigned face. Sometimes they would leap onto the kitchen table, then bounce back on the face, or just glide around the upper air of the body as if targeting some favored spot. The young man gazed at the corpse and mourned in his heart. He felt bereft. A bereavement mixing self-pity with remorse. He pondered about his family’s reactions and the potential repercussions.

  Two days after the incident, the newspapers ran front-page articles about it. Titles flamboyantly captured the tragedy with blinking flames. The popular Outlook ran a front-page feature titled “Kololian Cook Terrorized by Lebanese Youth.” People who saw the title initially thought that Middle Eastern terrorism had found fresh ground, and so the title triggered immediate and enormous interest. One street commentator, a university graduate, upon seeing the feature’s title hastily ran his mouth the way a child babbles verbal diarrhea. “These Arabs and Israelis,” he asserted, “they have ruined their countries with violence. And now they export their anguish … They visit the morning of our land with their terror.” A passing bank officer shrugged his head and shoulders in disapproval of the statement. But all over, the talk of the town was the dead cook and the untutored youth.