Translated from the French by Ellen Conroy Kennedy
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It was hard to distinguish the piles of ruins from the termite mounds, and only an ostrich shell, cracked and yellowed by the weather, still indicated at the tip of a tall column what once had been the mirab of the mosque El Hadj Omar's warriors had built. The Toucouleur conqueror had shorn the hair and shaved the heads of the forebears of those who are now the village elders. He had decapitated those who would not submit to Koranic law. Once again, the village elders wear their hair in braids. The sacred woods long ago burned by the fanatic Talibés have long since grown tall again, and still harbor the cult objects, pots whitened from the boiling of millet or browned by the clotted blood of sacrificed chickens and dogs.
Like grain felled at random beneath the flail, or ripe fruits that drop from branches filled with sap, whole families left Dougouba to form new villages, Dougoubanis. Some of the young people would go off to work in Segou, in Bamako, in Kayes, or Dakar; others went to work the Senegalese groundnut fields, returning when the harvest was in and the product had been shipped. All knew the root of their lives was still in Dougouba, which had long ago erased all traces of the Islamic hordes and returned to the teachings of the ancestors.
One son of Dougouba had ventured farther and for a longer time than any of the others: Thiemokho Keita. From Dougouba he went to the local capital, from there to Kati, from Kati to Dakar, from Dakar to Casablanca, from Casablanca to Fréjus, and then to Damascus. Leaving the Sudan to be
a soldier, Thiemokho Keita had been trained in Senegal, fought in Morocco, stood guard in France, and patrolled in Lebanon. He returned to Dougouba a sergeant, catching a lift in my medical caravan.
I had been making my veterinarian's rounds in the heart of the Sudan when I met Sergeant Keita in a local administrator's office. He had just been discharged from the service and wanted to enlist in the local police, or to be taken on as an interpreter.
“No,” the local commandant told him. “You can do more for the administration by returning to your village. You who have traveled so much and seen so much, you can teach the others something about how white men live. You'll âcivilize' them a bit. Say there, Doctor,” he continued, turning to me. “Since you're going in that direction, won't you take Keita with you? It will spare him the wear and tear of the road and save him some time. It's fifteen years he's been gone.”
So we set out. The driver, the sergeant, and I occupied the front seat of the little truck, while behind, the cooks, medical aides, driver's helper, and the civil guard were crowded together among the field kitchen, the camp bed, and the cases of serum and vaccine. The sergeant told me about his life as a soldier, then as a noncommissioned officer. I heard about the Riff Wars from the viewpoint of a Sudanese rifleman; he talked about Marseilles, Toulon, Frejus, Beirut. He seemed no longer to see the road in front of us. Rough as a corrugated tin room, it was paved with logs covered with a layer of clay, disintegrating into dust now because of the torrid heat and the extreme dryness. It was an unctuous oily dust that stuck to our faces like a yellow mask, making our teeth gritty and screening from our view the chattering baboons and frightened does that leaped about in our wake. Through the choking haze, Keita seemed to see once more the minarets of Fez, the teeming crowds of Marseilles, the great tall buildings of France, the blue sea.
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By noon we reached the town of Madougou, where the road ended. To reach Dougouba by nightfall, we took horses and bearers.
“When you come back this way again,” Keita said, “you'll go all the way to Dougouba by car. Tomorrow I'm going to get started on a road.”
The muffled rolling of a tom-tom announced that we were nearing the village. A gray mass of huts appeared, topped by the darker gray of three palm trees against a paler gray sky. The rumbling was accompanied now by
the sharp sound of three notes on a flute. We were in Dougouba. I got down first and asked for the village chief.
“Dougou-tigui, here is your son, the Sergeant Keita.”
Thiemokho Keita jumped down from his horse. As if the sound of his shoes on the ground had been a signal, the drumming stopped and the flute was silent. The aged chief took Keita's two hands while other old men examined his arms, his shoulders, his decorations. Some old women ran up and began fingering the puttees at his knees. Tears shone on the dark faces, settling in the wrinkles that crossed their ritual scars.
Everyone was saying: “Keita, Keita, Keita!”
“Those,” the old man quavered at last, “those who brought your steps back to our village on this day are generous and good.”
It was in fact a day unlike other days in Dougouba. It was the day of the Kotéba, the day of the Testing.
The drum resumed its rumbling, pierced by the sharp whistles of the flute. Inside the circle of women, children, and grown men, bare-chested youngsters, each carrying a long branch of balazan wood stripped clean and supple as a whip, were turning about to the rhythm of the tom-tom. In the center of this moving circle, crouching with his knees and elbows on the ground, the flute player gave forth three notes, always the same. Above him a young man would come to stand, legs apart, arms spread in the shape of a cross, while the others, passing close to him, let their whips whistle. The blows fell on his chest, leaving a stripe wide as a thumb, sometimes breaking the skin. The sharp voice of the flute would go a note higher, the tom-tom would grow softer, as the whips whistled and the blood ran. Firelight gleamed on the black-brown body and light from the embers leaped to the tops of the palm trees, softly creaking in the evening wind. Kotéba! the test of endurance, the testing for insensibility to pain. The child who cries when he hurts himself is only a child; the child who cries when he is hurt will not make a man.
Kotéba! to offer one's back, receive the blow, turn around, and give it back to someone else. Kotéba!
“This, these are still the ways of savages!”
I turned round. It was Sergeant Keita who had come to join me by the drum.
The ways of savages? This testing, which among other things produced men who were hard and tough! What was it that had enabled the forebears
of these youngsters to march with enormous burdens on their heads for whole days without stopping? What had made Thiemokho Keita himself, and others like him, able to fight valiantly beneath skies where the sun itself is very often sickly, to labor with heavy packs on their backs, enduring cold, thirst, and hunger?
The ways of savages? Perhaps. But I was thinking that elsewhere, where I came from, we had left these initiations behind. For our adolescents there was no longer a “house of men” where the body, the mind, and the character were tempered, where the ancient
passines
, the riddles and conundrums, were learned by dint of beatings on the bent back and the held-out fingers, and where the
kassaks,
the age-old memory-training songs whose words and wisdom descend to us from the dark nights, were assured their place in our heads by the heat of live coals that burned the palms of our hands. I was thinking that as far as I could see we had still gained nothing, that perhaps we had left these old ways behind without having caught up with the new ones.
The tom-tom murmured on, sustaining the piercing voice of the flute. The fires died and were born again. I went to the hut that had been prepared for me. Inside, mixed with the thick smell of
banco
âthe dried clay kneaded with broken rotten straw that made the hut rainproofâa subtler odor hung, the fragrance of the dead, whose number, three, was indicated by animal horns fixed to the wall at the level of a man's height. For, in Dougouba, the cemetery too had disappeared, and the dead continued to live with the living. They were buried in the huts.
The sun was already warm when I took my leave, but Dougouba was still asleep: drunk, both from fatigue and from the millet beer that had circulated in calabashes from hand to mouth and mouth to hand the whole night long.
“Goodbye,” said Keita. “The next time you come there will be a road, I promise you.”
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The work in other sectors and localities kept me from returning to Dougouba until the following year.
It was late in the afternoon after a hard journey. The air seemed a thick mass, hot and sticky, that we pushed our way through with great effort.
Sergeant Keita had kept his word; the road went all the way to Dougouba. As in all the villages, at the sound of the car a swarm of naked children appeared at the end of the road, their little bodies gray-white with dust, and
on their heels came the reddish-brown dogs with cropped ears and bony flanks. In the midst of the children a man was gesticulating, waving a cow's tail attached to his right wrist. When the car stopped, I saw it was the sergeant, Thiemokho Keita. He wore a faded fatigue jacket, without buttons or stripes. Underneath were a
boubou
and pants made of strips of khakicolored cotton, like the ones worn by the village elders. His pants stopped above the knee and were held together with pieces of string. His puttees were in rags. He was barefoot but wore a kepi on his head.
“Keita!”
The children scattered like a volley of sparrows, chirping: “Ayi! Ayi!” (No! No!)
Thiemokho Keita did not take my hand. He looked at me, but seemed not to see me. His gaze was so distant that I couldn't help turning around to see what his eyes were fixed upon through mine. Suddenly, agitating his cowtail, he began to cry out in a hoarse voice:
Listen to things
More often than beings
Hear the voice of fire
Hear the voice of water
Listen in the wind to the sighs of the bush
This is the
ancestors
breathing.
“He's mad,” said my driver, whom I silenced with a gesture. The sergeant was still chanting, in a strange, singsong voice:
Those who are dead are not ever gone
They are in the darkness that grows lighter
And in the darkness that grows darker
The dead are not down in the earth
They are in the trembling of the trees
In the moaning of the woods
In the water that runs
In the water that sleeps
They are in the hut, they are in the crowd.
The dead are not dead.
Listen to things
More often than beings
Hear the voice of fire
Hear the voice of water
Listen in the wind
To the bush that is sighing
This is the breathing of ancestors
Who have not gone away
Who are not under earth
Who are not really dead.
Those who are dead are not ever gone
They are in a woman's breast
In a child's wailing
and the log burning
in the moaning rock and
in the weeping grasses
in the forest in the home
The dead are not dead.
Hear the fire speak
Hear the water speak
Listen in the wind to
the bush that is sobbing
This is the ancestors breathing.
Each day they renew ancient bonds
Ancient bonds that hold fast
Binding our lot to their law
To the will of the spirits stronger than we are
Whose covenant binds us to life
Whose authority binds to their will
The will of the spirits that move
In the bed of the river, on the banks of the river
The breathing of ancestors
Wailing in the rocks and weeping in the grasses.
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Spirits inhabit
the darkness that lightens, the darkness that darkens
the quivering tree, the murmuring wood
the running and the sleeping waters
Spirits much stronger than we are
The breathing of the dead who are not really dead
Of the dead who are not really gone
Of the dead now no more in the earth.
Listen to things
More often than beings â¦
The children returned, circling round the old chief and the village elders. After the greetings, I asked what had happened to Sergeant Keita.
“Ayi! Ayi!” said the old men. “Ayi! Ayi!” echoed the children.
“No, not Keita!” said the old father, “Sarzan,
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just Sarzan. We must not rouse the anger of the departed. Sarzan is no longer a Keita. The Dead and the Spirits have punished him for his offenses.”
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It had begun the day after his arrival, the very day of my departure from Dougouba.
Sergeant Keita had wanted to keep his father from sacrificing a white chicken to thank the ancestors for having brought him home safe and sound. Keita declared that if he had come home it was quite simply that he had had to, and that the ancestors had had nothing to do with it.