Imagine Africa

Abdourahman Waberi Translated from the French by david and nicole ball
The Divine Song
an excerpt
lily williams, Sammy’s grandmother,
was lucky enough to have
known his great-great-grandmother,
who was born in Africa. She was a very
beautiful woman. Tall, with her skin
the color of night. She came into the
world in the court of a great king. The
old woman told the children that all
the Blacks bought by the Whites did
not become slaves. At the time, in this
royal court, lit by six torches dipped in
okoumé resin, salt was a precious product;
her grandfather was in charge of
lighting. She said that life was pleasant
before the arrival of the soul-eaters. But
little by little, all joy was extinguished.
As soon as night fell, the villages were
deserted. The soul-eaters would go out
on the prowl, preceded by hyenas, jackals
and vultures.
All the Blacks did not become
slaves, the old woman repeated for
our innocent ears. Often captives
would disappear during the voyage,
definitively escaping from slavery.
Vanished into thin air. They had special
ways and fetishes that assured
their access to the unknown by taking
steep, dangerous paths.
Growing up with my African parents
was an incredible piece of luck, she
would whisper, for from an early age, I
had the opportunity to listen to many
stories. In those days, said the old lady
named Adelina, to be a good person
you had to acquire supernatural powers
in yout early adolescence. It was the
duty of the grandparents to see their
grandchildren reach adolescence before
they could transmit to them the secrets
surrounding the preparation of magic
potions. Making fetishes and relics
was practiced away from the visible
world, in the depths of the forest. And
the Blacks of the Coast who were the
Whites’ allies were extremely interested
in supernatural powers. It made their
mouth water. Attracted by the smell of
blood, they threw themselves into the
search for fetishes, walking back and
forth over the deepest reaches of the
land, killing everything in their path.
But the men of the forest were adept at
using the cutlass. Nothing could resist
them, not even an assault by a herd of
water-buffalo. If by chance they were
captured by the courtiers of the coast,
tied up and ready to be delivered to the
Whites, all the men of the forest needed
was a password for their bonds to be
sundered immediately. They fled. Once,
twice, ten times. But unfortunately
for them, the men of the forest could
not all get very far because the Whites
would kill them with their long rifles.
Others would panic and say to themselves:
“We must stay calm because the
stick in the hands of the White man can
kill an elephant.” This, said my grandmother’s
grandmother, named Adelina
in honor of a Spanish nun, is how
they carried off the men of the forest,
defeated by the fetishes of the Whites.
The ones who fled would plunge
deep into the forest, hiding in the
Mbelet and Mamfumbi mountains,
searching for new fetishes. The results
did not always measure up. My
grandmother Adelina’s grandmother
had heard that the powers of some
fetish-makers would only awake on
moonless nights. The Whites would
hear the far-off growls of the panther
that protected the Ouidah court and
at the exact same time, the carcass of
a slave would begin to jerk around at
the bottom of the hold. Frightened,
the Whites said to themselves:
“Look at him! His eyes are coming
out of their sockets. He has the hair
of a panther. What can we do? He’s in
a trance.” Without delay, the Whites
would throw him overboard. On
contact with the water, the spirits
would free his fleshly envelope and
leave. And the slave, or, more exactly,
his mortal coil, would die of drowning
out at sea. While his ethereal part,
eternally renewed, would return to
the forest just like that, at the snap
of a finger. That is what was told
to me by the grandmother of my
grandmother named Adelina in honor
of a Spanish nun who came to the
assistance of the Blacks of Florida.
And that’s what I myself told my little
Sammy, baptized Sammy in honor
of an ancestor whose face was all
spotted with red freckles as if he had
come out of an inferno. This black redheaded
ancestor had known the Spanish
nun. His name was Samuel, too.
Lilly was not an ordinary woman.
She was a born storyteller. And like
the teller of the seven truths, she
would roll out her esoteric stories
while keeping their codes and enigmas
to herself. Once the story was
over, she would pick up her bundle
again, spring to her feet and return to
her big stainless steel basins. To her
sheets and the rest of the wash, for
she fed her children and grandchildren
by means of her soapsud-cover
wrists. All one could do was wait
for the next occasion. On summer
evenings, there was no lack of
spontaneous festivities. The grounds
and backyard of the church were
full to bursting. Weddings, baptisms,
harvests, the arrival of new people in
the neighborhood, any occasion was
matter for celebration. Members of
the family, neighbors, tenant farmers
of surrounding towns, wandering
singers, the parishioners and the passing
pilgrims would all come together
for interminable feasts followed by
interminable dances and celebrations.
The old woman’s stories were a
revelation. Her whole lineage kept
a trace of them without knowing it.
Lilly was one of those people who
could draw a family toward the light,
the light of day, to dawns and never
to sunsets.