Authors: Charles Larson

Under African Skies (30 page)

BOOK: Under African Skies

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(BORN 1959) NIGERIA

Ben Okri's star-studded literary career began in 1980, when
Flowers and Shadows
was published. Okri was nineteen. Rooted in the fast-paced lives of many urban Nigerians at the end of the 1970s, the novel is set in the growth years of the country's economy: after the Civil War, when the oil boom brought about rapid social change and many people were out to make a quick fortune. The novel's realism provides a glimpse of the future direction of Okri's writing. The flowers of the title are real, though in time they will wither and grow old; the shadows are constantly changing and elusiveâperhaps untouchable.

In the fiction that was published after his first novelâa second novel,
The Landscapes Within (
1982), and two collections of short stories,
Incidents at the Shrine
(1987) and
Stars of the New Curfew
(1988)âOkri shifted from realism to fabulism. Many of the short stories move effortlessly between the two realms, recording incidents that are often difficult to identify as real. In the title story of
Stars of the New Curfew,
a young man named Arthur resists the criminal opportunities of his immediate world, yet eventually peddles quack medicine to innocent people who are looking for a quick fix for their miseries. Though Arthur himself is concerned about the gullibility of his customers, the fraudulent drug manufacturers are happy enough to take further advantage of their victims.

With
The Famished Road
(1991) and its sequel,
Songs of Enchantment
(1993), Okri's fictive domain shifted more directly into the unseen world. Azaro,
the main character of both novels, is an
abiku
, a spirit-child, fated to a cycle of deaths and rebirths into the same world.
The Famished Road
describes his mother's almost pathological anguish that Azaro will never be of this world, though Azaro himself describes his condition in much more benevolent terms:

“There was not one among us who looked forward to being born. We disliked the rigors of existence, the unfulfilled longing, the enshrined injustices of the world, the labyrinths of love, the ignorance of parents, the fact of dying, and the amazing indifference of the living in the midst of simple beauties of the universe. We feared the heartlessness of human beings, of all who are born blind, few of whom ever learn to see.”

The Famished Road was
the winner of the 1991 Booker Prize. Earlier, Okri had won the Commonwealth Writers' Award for Africa and the
Paris Review
Aga Khan prize for fiction. He received the Chianti RufinoâAntico Fattore International Literary Prize and the Premio Grinzane Cavour Prize in 1994.

In 1995, Okri's most daring novel to date,
Astonishing the Gods,
was publishedâsimukaneousjy a spiritual autobiography for the author and a visionary fable for mankind in general. Okri has also served as the poetry editor for
West Africa
and published a volume of his own poems,
An African Elegy
, as well as a sixth novel,
Dangerous Love
, in 1996.

“A Prayer from the Living” appeared in 1993 on the op-ed page of
The New York Times.
In this powerful response to the famine in Somalia (and, more specifically, to the arrival of American troops in the country), Okri defines a central moral issue of our time: the justification of intervention in cultures other than our own, which too often for the West has meant misunderstanding and ignorance of other people's ways.

A PRAYER FROM THE LIVING

We entered the town of the dying at sunset. We went from house to house. Everything was as expected, run-down, a desert, luminous with death and hidden life.

The gunrunners were everywhere. The world was now at the perfection of chaos. The little godfathers who controlled everything raided the food brought for us. They raided the airlifts and the relief aid and distributed most of the food among themselves and members of their clan.

We no longer cared. Food no longer mattered. I had done without for three weeks. Now I feed on the air and on the quest.

Every day, as I grow leaner, I see more things around us. I see the deadâall who had died of starvation. They are more joyful now; they are happier than we are; and they are everywhere, living their luminous lives as if nothing had happened, or as if they were more alive than we are.

The hungrier I became, the more I saw themâmy old friends who had died before me, clutching onto flies. Now they feed on the light of the air. And they look at usâthe livingâwith so much pity and compassion.

I suppose this is what the white ones cannot understand when they come with their TV cameras and their aid. They expect to see us weeping. Instead, they see us staring at them, without begging, and with a bulging placidity in our eyes. Maybe they are secretly horrified that we are not afraid of dying this way.

But after three weeks of hunger the mind no longer notices; you're more
dead than alive; and it's the soul wanting to leave that suffers. It suffers because of the body's tenacity.

We should have come into the town at dawn. In the town everyone had died. The horses and cows were dying, too. I could say that the air stank of death, but that wouldn't be true. It smelled of rancid butter and poisoned heat and bad sewage. There was even the faint irony of flowers.

The only people who weren't dead were the dead. Singing golden songs in chorus, jubilant everywhere, they carried on their familiar lives. The only others who weren't dead were the soldiers. And they fought among themselves eternally. It didn't seem to matter to them how many died. All that mattered was how well they handled the grim mathematics of the wars, so that they could win the most important battle of all, which was for the leadership of the fabulous graveyard of this once beautiful and civilized land.

I was searching for my family and my lover. I wanted to know if they had died or not. If I didn't find out, I intended to hang on to life by its last tattered thread. If I knew that they, too, were dead and no longer needed me, I would die at peace.

All my information led me to this town. If my lover, my brothers, my family are anywhere, they are here. This is the last town in the world. Beyond its rusted gate lies the desert. The desert stretches all the way into the past; into history, to the Western world, and to the source of drought and famineâthe mighty mountain of lovelessness. From its peaks, at night, the grim spirits of negation chant their awesome soul-shrinking songs. Their songs steal hope from us and make us yield to the air our energies. Their songs are cool and make us submit to the clarity of dying.

Behind us, in the past, before all this came to be, there were all the possibilities in the world. There were all the opportunities for starting from small things to create a sweet new history and future, if only we had seen them. But now, ahead, there lie only the songs of the mountain of death.

We search for our loved ones mechanically and with a dryness in our eyes. Our stomachs no longer exist. Nothing exists except the search. We turn the bodies over, looking for familiar faces. All the faces are familiar; death made them all my kin.

I search on, I come across an unfamiliar face; it is my brother. I nod. I pour dust on his flesh. Hours later, near a dry well, I come across the other members of my family. My mother holds on tightly to a bone so dry it
wouldn't even nourish the flies. I nod twice. I pour dust on their bodies. I search on. There is one more face whose beautiful unfamiliarity will console me. When I have found the face, then I will submit myself to the mountain songs.

Sunset was approaching when, from an unfinished school building, I heard singing. It was the most magical sound I had ever heard and I thought only those who know how sweet life is can sing like that, can sing as if breathing were a prayer.

The singing was like the joyous beginning of all creation, the holy yes to the breath and light infusing all things, which makes the water shimmer, the plants sprout, the animals jump and play in the fields, and which makes the men and women look out into the first radiance of colors, the green of plants, the blue of sea, the gold of the air, the silver of the stars. It was the true end of my quest, the music to crown this treacherous life of mine, the end I couldn't have hoped for, or imagined.

It seemed to take an infinity of time to get to the school building. I had no strength left, and it was only the song's last echo, resounding through the vast spaces of my hunger, that sustained me. After maybe a century, when history had repeated itself and brought about exactly the same circumstances, because none of us ever learned our lesson, or loved enough to learn from our pain, I finally made it to the schoolroom door. But a cow, the only living thing left in the town, went in through the door before I did. It, too, must have been drawn by the singing. The cow went into the room, and I followed.

Inside, all the space was taken up with the dead. But here the air didn't have death in it. The air had prayer in it. The prayers stank more than the deaths. But all the dead here were differently dead from the corpses out side. The dead in the school wereâforgive the paradoxâ
alive.
I have no other word to explain the serenity. I felt they had made the room holy because they had, in their last moments, thought not of themselves but of all people who suffer. I felt that to be the case because I felt myself doing the same thing. I crawled to a corner, sat against a wall, and felt myself praying for the whole human race.

I prayedâknowing full well that prayers are possibly an utter waste of timeâbut I prayed for everything that lived, for mountains and trees, for animals and streams, and for human beings, wherever they might be. I heard the great anguished cry of all mankind, its great haunting music as well. And I, too, without moving my mouth, for I had no energy, began to sing in
silence. I sang all through the evening. And when I looked at the body next to me and found the luminous unfamiliarity of its face to be that of my lover'sâI sang all through the recognition. I sang silently even when a goodhearted white man came into the school building with a television camera and, weeping, recorded the roomful of the dead for the worldâand I hoped he recorded my singing, too.

And the dead were all about me, smiling, serene. They didn't urge me on; they were just quietly and intensely joyful. They did not ask me to hurry to them, but left it to me. What could I choose? Human lifeâfull of greed and bitterness, dim, low-oxygenated, judgmental and callous, gentle, too, and wonderful as well, but â¦ human life had betrayed me. And besides, there was nothing left to save in me. Even my soul was dying of starvation.

I opened my eyes for the last time. I saw the cameras on us all. To them, we were the dead. As I passed through the agony of the light, I saw them as the dead, marooned in a world without pity or love.

As the cow wandered about in the apparent desolation of the room, it must have seemed odd to the people recording it all that I should have made myself so comfortable among the dead. I did. I stretched myself out and held the hand of my lover. With a painful breath and a gasp and a smile, I let myself go.

The smile must have puzzled the reporters. If they had understood my language, they would have known that it was my way of saying goodbye.

â1993

Alexander Kanengoni

(BORN 1951) ZIMBABWE

The pastâparticularly the recent struggle for freedomâlooms ominously in many of Alexander Kanengoni's short stories. The title of one of them (“Things We'd Rather Not Talk About”) itself suggests the tortured lives of men caught up in the resistance activities that led to Zimbabwe's independence. In another powerful story, “The Black Christ of Musami,” the narrator seeks comfort in his own ancestry, also against the backdrop of guerrilla activities. The story concludes: “There was a huge old
mukamba
tree watching silently over our home from a small hill in the east which never seemed to shed any of its brittle, evergreen leaves. It was a towering giant that marked our home from miles around. Each time I came home from the city, I went up the hill and crouched under the tree, talking to it, talking to my deceased grandfather â¦ .”

Alexander Kanengoni was born in 1951, in Chivu, Rhodesia. He attended Marymount Mission in Mt. Darwin and had his secondary education at Kutama College, St. Paul's Teacher Training College, as well as the University of Zimbabwe, where his major was English. He taught briefly before leaving the country to join the liberation war in 1974. At the time of independence in 1980, he was appointed to a position in the Ministry of Education and Culture. Currently, he heads the Television Services of the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation.

Kanengoni has published three books, the novels
Vicious Circle
(1983) and
Echoing Silence
(1996), as well as a collection of short stories,
Effortless Tears
(1993). He writes, he says, “to reconcile raging turmoils” inside him.

EFFORTLESS TEARS

We buried my cousin, George Pasi, one bleak windswept afternoon: one of those afternoons that seem fit for nothing but funerals. Almost everyone there knew that George had died of an AIDS-related illness but no one mentioned it. What showed was only the fear and uncertainty in people's eyes; beyond that, silence.

Even as we traveled from Harare on that hired bus that morning, every one of us feared that at last AIDS had caught up with us. In the beginning, it was a distant, blurred phenomenon which we only came across in the newspapers and on radio and television, something peculiar to homosexuals. Then we began hearing isolated stories of people dying of AIDS in far-flung districts. After that came the rumors of sealed wards at Harare and Parirenyatwa, and of other hospitals teeming with people suffering from AIDS. But the truth is that it still seemed rather remote and did not seem to have any direct bearing on most of us.

When AIDS finally reached Highfield and Zengeza, and started claiming lives in the streets where we lived, that triggered the alarm bells inside our heads. AIDS had finally knocked on our doors.

For two months, we had watched George waste away at Harare Hospital. In desperation, his fatherâjust like the rest of usâskeptical of the healing properties of modern medicine, had turned to traditional healers. Somehow, we just could not watch him die. We made futile journeys to all corners of
the country while George wasted away. He finally died on our way home from some traditional healer in Mutare.

All the way from Harare to Wedza, the atmosphere was limp. January's scorching sun in the naked sky and the suffocating air intensified into a sense of looming crisis that could not be expressed in words. The rains were already very late and the frequent sight of untilled fields, helplessly confronting an unfulfilling sky, created images of seasons that could no longer be understood. The crops that had been planted with the first and only rains of the season had emerged only to fight a relentless war with the sun. Most had wilted and died. The few plants that still survived were struggling in the stifling heat.

Now, as we stood forlornly round the grave, the choir sang an ominous song about death: we named the prophets yielded up to heaven while the refrain repeated: “Can you see your name? Where is your name?”

This eerie question rang again and again in our minds until it became part of one's soul, exposing it to the nakedness of the Mutekedza communal land: land that was overcrowded, old, and tired. Interminable rows of huts stretched into the horizon, along winding roads that only seemed to lead to other funerals.

Not far away, a tattered scarecrow from some forgotten season flapped a silent dirge beneath the burning sun.

Lean cattle, their bones sticking out, their ribs moving painfully under their taut skin, nibbled at something on the dry ground: what it was, no one could make out. And around the grave the atmosphere was subdued and silent. Even the once phenomenal Save River, only a stone's throw away to the east, lay silent. This gigantic river, reduced to puddles between heaps of sand, seemed to be brooding on its sad predicament. And behind the dying river, Wedza Mountain stared at us with resignation, as if it, too, had given up trying to understand some of the strange things that were happening.

The preacher told the parable of the Ten Virgins. He warned that when the Lord unexpectedly came and knocked on our door, like the clever five virgins, we should be found ready and waiting to receive Him.

Everyone nodded silently.

George's grandfather mourned the strange doings of this earth. He wished it was he who had been taken away. But then such were the weird ways of witches and wizards that they preferred to pluck the youngest and plumpestâalthough George had grown thinner than the cattle we could see around
us. We listened helplessly as the old man talked and talked until at last he broke down and cried like a small child.

George's father talked of an invisible enemy that had sneaked into our midst and threatened the very core of our existence. He warned us that we should change our ways immediately or die.

He never mentioned the word “Aids,” the acronym AIDS.

George's wife was beyond all weeping. She talked of a need for moral strength during such critical times. She readily admitted that she did not know where such strength could come from: it could be from the people; it could be from those gone beyond; it could be from God. But wherever it was from, she needed it. As if acting upon some invisible signal, people began to cry. We were not weeping for the dead. We were weeping for the living. And behind us, while Wedza Mountain gazed at us dejectedly, the Save River was silently dying.

The coffin was slowly lowered into the grave and we filed past, throwing in clods of soil. In the casket lay George, reduced to skin and bone. (Most people had refused a last glimpse of him.) during his heyday we had called him Mr. Bigstuff because of his fast and flashy styleâthat was long ago.

As we trudged back to the village, away from the wretched burial area, most of us were trying to decide which memory of George to take back with us: Mr. Bigstuff or that thread, that bundle of skin and bones which had died on our way back from some traditional healer in Mutare.

Out there, around the fire, late that Monday evening, all discussion was imbued with an a painful sense of futility, a menacing uncertainty, and an overwhelming feeling that we were going nowhere.

Drought.

“Compared to the ravaging drought of 1947, this is child's play,” said George's grandfather. “At that time, people survived on grass like cattle,” he concluded, looking skeptically up into the deep night sky.

No one helped him take the discussion further.

Politics.

The village chairman of the party attempted a spirited explanation of the advantages of the government's economic reform program: “It means a general availability of goods and services and it means higher prices for the people's agricultural produce,” he went on, looking up at the dark, cloudless sky. Then, with an inexplicable renewal of optimism peculiar to politicians, he went on to talk of programs and projects until, somehow, he, too, was overcome by the general weariness and took refuge in the silence around the dying fire.

“Aren't these religious denominations that are daily sprouting up a sign that the end of the world is coming?” asked George's grandfather.

“No, it's just people out to make a quick buck, nothing else,” said George's younger brother.

“Don't you know that the end of the world is foretold in the Scriptures,” said the Methodist lay preacher with sharp urgency. He continued: “All these things”âhe waved his arms in a large general movementâ“are undoubtedly signs of the Second Coming.” Everyone looked down and sighed.

And then, inevitably, AIDS came up. It was a topic that everyone had been making a conscious effort to avoid, but then, like everything else, its turn came. Everyone referred to it in indirect terms: that animal, that phantom, that creature, that beast. It was not out of any respect for George. It was out of fear and despair.

“Whatever this scourge is”âGeorge's father chuckledâ“it has claimed more lives than all my three years in the Imperial Army against Hitler.” He chuckled again helplessly.

“It seems as if these endless funerals have taken the place of farming.”

“They are lucky, the ones who are still getting decent burials,” chipped in someone from out of the dark. “Very soon, there will be no one to bury anybody.”

The last glowing ember in the collected heap of ashes grew dimmer and finally died away. George's grandfather asked for an ox-hide drum and began playing it slowly at first and then with gathering ferocity. Something in me snapped.

Then he began to sing. The song told of an unfortunate woman's repeated pregnancies which always ended in miscarriages. I felt trapped.

When at last the old man, my father, stood up and began to dance, stamping the dry earth with his worn-out car-tire sandals, I knew there was no escape. I edged George's grandfather away from the drum and began a futile prayer on that moonless night. The throbbing resonance of the drum rose above our voices as we all became part of one great nothingness. Suddenly I was crying for the first time since George's death. Tears ran from my eyes like rivers in a good season. During those years, most of us firmly believed that the mighty Save River would roll on forever, perhaps until the end of time.

But not now, not any longer.

â1993

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