Travels with Herodotus

by Ryszard Kapuscinski

  From the first days of his presidency, Senghor starts preparing the first-ever world festival of black art (Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Negres). Exactly—world festival: because the goal here is the art of all black people, not just Africans; the ambition is to show that art’s immensity, greatness, universality, diversity, and vitality. Yes, Africa was its source, but it spans the globe.

  Senghor inaugurates the festival in 1963 in Dakar; it is to last several months. Because I am late to the opening ceremonies and all the hotels in town are already full, I secure a room on the island, in the pension de famille run by Mariem and Abdou, Senegalese from Peul, perhaps the descendants of some Egyptian fellahin or—who knows?—even of one of the pharaohs.

  In the morning Mariem sets down before me a piece of juicy papaya, a cup of very sweet coffee, half a baguette, and a jar of preserves. Although she likes silence best, custom dictates serving up a ritual morning portion of inquiries: how did I sleep, am I rested, was it too hot for me, was I not bitten by mosquitoes, did I have dreams? What if I had no dreams? I ask. That, says Mariem, is impossible. She always has dreams. She dreams about her children, about good times, about visiting her parents in the countryside. Very good and pleasant dreams.

  I thank her for breakfast and go to the harbor. The ferry takes me to Dakar. The city lives and breathes the festival. Exhibitions, lectures, concerts, plays. Eastern and western Africa are represented here, as well as southern and central; there are also Brazil and Colombia, and all of the Caribbean, with Jamaica and Puerto Rico at the fore; there are Alabama and Georgia, and the islands of the Atlantic and of the Indian Ocean.

  Theatrical performances abound in the streets and squares. African theater is not as formalistic as the European. A group of people can gather someplace extemporaneously and perform an impromptu play. There is no text; everything is the product of the moment, of the passing mood, of spontaneous imagination. The subject can be anything: the police catching a gang of thieves, merchants fighting to keep the city from taking away their marketplace, wives competing among themselves for their husband, who is in love with some other woman. The subject matter must be simple, the language comprehensible to all.

  Someone has an idea and volunteers to be director. He assigns roles and the play begins. If this is a street, a square, or a courtyard, a crowd of passersby soon gathers. People laugh during the performance, offer running commentary, applaud. If the action unfolds in an interesting way, the audience will stand there attentively despite the punishing sun; if the play does not jell, and the ad hoc troupe proves unable to communicate and move the action forward effectively, the performance is soon over and the spectators and actors disperse, making way for others who may have better luck.

  Sometimes I see the actors interrupt their dialogue and begin a ritual dance, with the entire audience joining in. It can be a cheerful and joyous dance, or the opposite—with the dancers serious, focused, and collective participation in the common rhythm an evidently profound experience for them, something meaningful touching their core. But then the dancing ends, the actors return to their spoken parts, and the spectators, for a moment still as if entranced, laugh once again, happy and amused.

  Street theater includes not just dance. Its other important, even inseparable element is the mask. The actors sometimes perform in masks, or, because it is difficult in this heat to wear one for long, simply hold them near—in their hands, under their arms, even strapped to their backs. The mask is a symbol, a construct full of emotion and resonance that speaks of the existence of some other universe, whose sign, stamp, or presence it is. It communicates something to us, warns us about someone; seemingly lifeless and motionless, it attempts by means of its appearance to arouse our feelings, put us under its spell.

  Borrowing from various museums, Senghor collected thousands upon thousands of such masks. When seen in the aggregate, they evoke a separate, mysterious world. Walking through that collection was a singular experience. One began to understand how masks acquired such power over people, how they could hypnotize, overwhelm, or lead people into ecstasy. It became clear why the mask—and faith in its magical efficacy—united entire societies, enabled them to communicate across continents and oceans, gave them a sense of community and identity, constituted a form of tradition and collective memory.

  Walking from one theatrical performance to another, from one exhibit of masks and sculptures to others, I had the sense of being witness to the rebirth of a great culture, to the awakening of its sense of distinctness, importance, and pride, the consciousness of its universal range. Here were not only masks from Mozambique and Congo, but also lanterns for macumba rituals from Rio de Janeiro, the escutcheons of the guardian deities of Haitian voodoo, and copies of the sarcophagi of Egyptian pharaohs.

  But this joy at the renaissance of a worldwide community was accompanied also by a sense of disappointment and disillusion. Example: It is in Dakar that I read Black Power, the affecting and then recently published book by Richard Wright. At the start of the 1950s, Wright, an African American from Harlem, moved by the desire to return to Africa, the land of his ancestors, went on a trip to Ghana. Ghana was fighting for its independence just then, and there were constant meetings, demonstrations, protests. Wright took part in these, got to know the daily life in cities, visited the marketplaces in Accra and Takoradi, conversed with merchants and planters—and concluded that despite his sharing with them the same black skin, they, the Africans, and he, the American, were total strangers to each other, had no common language, and what was important to them was of utter indifference to him. In the course of the African journey the alienation Wright felt became for him increasingly difficult to bear, a curse and a nightmare.

  In the pension de famille I have a room on the second floor. It is immense, all hewn out of stone, with two openings in the place of windows and a single large one, proportioned like an entrance gate, where the door would be. I also have a wide terrace, from which one can see the Atlantic stretching to the horizon. Ocean and more ocean. A cool breeze wafts constantly through the room, and I have the sensation of living on a ship. The island is motionless and in a sense the continuously calm sea is also motionless, whereas the colors are always changing—the colors of the water, of the sky, of day and night. Of everything, really—of walls and rooftops, of the neighboring village, of the sails of fishermen’s boats, of the sand on the beach, of the palm and mango trees, of the wings of the seagulls and terns that always circle here. This sleepy, even lifeless place can render anyone sensitive to color dizzy, can enthrall, stun, and after a time numb and exhaust him.

  Not far from my boardinghouse, between large waterfront boulders and thick vegetation, one can see remnants of calcified walls ruined by time and salt. These walls—and all of Goree, in fact—are infamous. For two hundred years, perhaps even longer, the island was a prison, a concentration camp, and the port of embarkation for African slaves being sent to the other hemisphere—to North and South America and the Caribbean. According to various estimates, several million, twelve million, perhaps as many as twenty million young men and women were deported from Goree. Those were staggering numbers in those days. The mass abductions and deportations depopulated the continent.

  Africa emptied out, became overgrown with bush and weeds.

  For years on end, uninterruptedly, columns of people were driven from the African interior to where Dakar lies today, and from there were conveyed by boats to this island. Some died of hunger, thirst, and disease while awaiting the ships meant to transport them across the Atlantic. The dead were tossed at once into the sea, where sharks got them. The environs of Goree were their great feeding ground. The predators circled the island in packs. Attempting escape was useless—the fish lay in wait for such daredevils, no less vigilant than the white, human guards. According to historians’ calculations, half of those who made it onto the sailing ships died en route. It is more than six thousand kilometers by sea from Goree to New York. Only the stronge
st would endure that distance and the journey’s horrific conditions.

  How often do we consider the fact that the treasures and riches of the world were created from time immemorial by slaves? From the irrigation systems of Mesopotamia, the Great Wall(s) of China, the pyramids of Egypt, and acropolis of Athens, to the plantations of sugar on Cuba and of cotton in Louisiana and Arkansas, the coal mines on Kolyma and Germany’s highways? And wars? From the dawn of history they were waged in order to capture slaves. Seize them, chain them, whip them, rape them, feel satisfaction at having another human being as one’s property. The acquisition of slaves was an important, and frequently sole, cause of wars, their powerful and even undisguised prime motivation. Those who managed to survive the transatlantic journey (it was said that the ships carried “black cargo”) brought with them their own Afro-Egyptian culture, the same one that had fascinated Herodotus and which he had described so tirelessly in his book long before that culture reached the Western Hemisphere.

  And what of Herodotus himself, what sort of slaves did he have? How many? How did he treat them? I think that he was a kind-hearted man, and gave them little reason to complain overly much. They visited a huge expanse of the world with him, and later perhaps, when he settled in Thurii to write his Histories, they served him as living memories, as walking encyclopedias, reminding him of names, places, and details of stories which he needed help remembering as he began writing them down, and in this way they contributed to the astonishing richness of his book.

  What happened to them after Herodotus’s death? Were they put up for sale in the marketplace? Or were they maybe as aged as their master and likely to have followed him shortly after into the next world?

  SCENES OF PASSION

  AND PRUDENCE

  The most pleasant thing I can imagine to do in Goree would be to sit in the evening on the terrace, next to a table with a lamp, and to read Herodotus while listening to the murmur of the sea. But this is extremely difficult, because the instant you light the lamp, the darkness comes to life and billowing swarms of insects begin to move closer. The most excited and inquisitive specimens, seeing a brightness before them, rush blindly in its direction, slam their heads against the burning bulb, and fall dead to the ground. Others, still only half-awake, circle more cautiously, although unceasingly, tirelessly, as if the light infused them with a kind of inexhaustible energy. The greatest nuisance is a type of tiny fly, so fearless and fierce that it cares not at all about being chased away and killed—one wave of them perishes and another is already waiting impatiently to attack. Beetles and various other intrusive and malicious insects whose names I do not know exhibit a comparable zeal. But the greatest obstacle to reading are certain moths, which, apparently alarmed and irritated by something about human eyes, try to cluster around and cover them, papering them over with their dark gray, fleshy wings.

  From time to time, Abdou comes to my rescue. He brings a beat-up little kiln with glowing coals inside, on which he sprinkles a mixture of bits of resin, roots, rinds, and berries, before blowing on the sizzling grate with all the might of his powerful lungs. A sharp, heavy, choking odor begins to waft through the air. As if on command, the majority of the buggy crew makes a panicked run for it, and the rest, all those that weren’t paying attention, become stupefied, crawling over me and the table for a while, then, suddenly growing paralyzed and motionless, drop to the ground.

  Abdou walks away with a look of satisfaction and I can read in peace for a while. Herodotus is slowly approaching the end of his opus. His book closes with four scenes:

  I. A battle scene (the last battle—Mycale)

  The very day that the Greeks routed the Persian forces at Plataea and what was left of them began their homeward retreat, on the other, eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, at Mycale, the Greek fleet crushed another division of the Persian army, thereby bringing to an end Greece’s (that is, Europe’s) victorious war with the Persians (that is, with Asia). The battle at Mycale was short. The two armies stood facing each other. The Greeks completed their preparations and set out towards the Persian lines. As they were beginning their assault, they suddenly learned that their kinsmen had just defeated the Persians at Plataea!

  Herodotus does not say how exactly they received the message. It is a mystery, since the distance between Plataea and Mycale is great—at least several days’ sailing. Some today speculate that the victors could have passed the news through a chain of bonfires lit on separate islands—whoever saw a distant fire stoked his own, the next in line saw it and did likewise, and so on; each neighbor has his neighbors in turn. But once the mysterious rumour had sped its way to them, [the Greeks] advanced into the attack with more energy and speed. The battle was fierce, the Persian resistance firm, but the Greeks prevailed in the end. After the Greeks had killed most of the enemy, either while fighting in the battle or while trying to escape, they set fire to the Persian ships and to the entire stronghold—but not before they had brought the booty out on to the beach …

  II. A love scene (a love story and an inferno of jealousy)

  At the same time that the Persian armies are bleeding and dying at Plataea and Mycale, and their survivors, pursued and murdered by the Greeks, are trying to reach the Persian city of Sardis, King Xerxes, hiding in that very city, is not thinking about the war at all, or about his ignominious flight from Athens, or about the total collapse of his empire. He immerses himself instead in perverse and risky amorous escapades. Psychology is well acquainted with the concept of denial—someone who has had unpleasant experiences and subsequent painful memories denies them, erases them, and thereby achieves inner peace and spiritual equilibrium. Clearly, such a process must have occurred in Xerxes’ psyche. One year, puffed up and imperious, he leads the world’s greatest army against the Greeks; and the next, having lost, he forgets about everything and henceforth is interested in one thing only—women.

  After fleeing from Greece and taking refuge in Sardis, Xerxes had fallen in love with [his brother] Masistes’ wife, who was also there. She proved impervious to his messages, however … Under these circumstances, with all other options closed off, Xerxes arranged for his son Darius to marry the daughter of this woman and Masistes, since he expected to have a better chance of seducing the woman in this situation. At first, therefore, the king preys not on a young girl, but on her mother, his own sister-in-law, who struck him, at least while they were still in Sardis, as more attractive than her own daughter.

  However, when Xerxes returns from Sardis to the royal palace in Susa, the imperial capital, his tastes change. After he had arrived and had received Darius’ wife into his house, he dropped Masistes’ wife and began to desire Darius’ wife, Masistes’ daughter, instead. Her name was Artaynte, and he was successful with her.

  After a while, however, the secret got out. What happened was that Amestris, Xerxes’ wife, wove a wonderful shawl, long and colourful, as a present for Xerxes. He liked it a lot, and wore it when he went to visit Artaynte. She gave him pleasure too—so much so that he told her he would give her anything she wanted in return for the favours she had granted him; whatever she asked for, he assured her, she would get.

  Without hesitation, his daughter-in-law said the shawl. Frightened, Xerxes tries to dissuade her, for one simple reason: if he gives her the shawl, Amestris’s suspicions about his misdeeds will be confirmed. So he offers the girl cities, unlimited gold, and sole command of any army. But the spoiled little mule says no. She wants the shawl, only the shawl, and nothing else.

  And the sovereign of a world empire, who rules over millions of people, holding their life and death in his hands, must yield. Eventually, then, he gave her the shawl, which she liked so much that she used to wear it and show it off.

  Amestris heard that Artaynte had the shawl, but this information did not make her angry with Artaynte. Instead she assumed that her mother was to blame and was responsible for the whole business, and so it was Masistes’ wife whose destruction she started to plot. Sh
e waited until her husband Xerxes was holding a royal banquet—that is, the banquet which is prepared once a year on the kings’ birthday…. This is the only time of the year when the king anoints his head with

  oil, and he also distributes gifts among the Persians. So when the day arrived, Amestris told Xerxes what she wanted her gift to be—Masistes’ wife. Xerxes under stood the reason for her request, and was shocked and horrified, not only at the thought of handing over his brother’s wife, but also because she was innocent in this matter.

  His wife was implacable, however, and he was constrained by the tradition that on the day of the royal banquet no request could be refused, so he agreed, with extreme reluctance. He turned the woman over to his wife and told her to do with her what she liked, and also sent for his brother. When he arrived, he said, “Masistes,… you are a good man. I want you to divorce your present wife, and I’ll give you my daughter instead. You can have her as your wife. But get rid of the present one; the marriage displeases me.”

  Masistes was astonished at the king’s words. “Master,” he said, “what a cruel thing to say! Can you really be telling me to get rid of my wife and marry your daughter? I have grown-up sons and daughters by my wife … Besides, she suits me perfectly well…. Please let me stay married to my wife.”

  This reply of his made Xerxes angry, and he said, “Do you want to know what you’ve done, Masistes? I’ll tell you. I withdraw the offer of marriage to my daughter, and you’re not going to live with your wife a moment longer either. That will teach you to accept what you’re offered.”