Every now and then our bus stops along the side of the road. Someone wants to get off. If it’s a young woman with a child or two (a young woman without a child is a rare sight), there unfolds a scene of extraordinary agility and grace. First, the woman will secure the child to her body with a calico scarf (her small charge sleeping the entire time, not reacting). Next, she will squat down and place the bowl from which she is never separated, full of food and goods of all kinds, on her head. Then, straightening up, she will execute that maneuver of a tightrope walker taking his first step above the abyss: carefully, she finds her equilibrium. With her left hand she now clutches a woven sleeping mat, and with her right the hand of a second child. And this way—stepping at once with a very smooth, even gait—they enter a forest path leading to a world I do not know and perhaps will never understand.
My neighbor on the bus. A young man. An accountant from a firm in Kumasi whose name I don’t catch.
“Ghana is independent!” he says ecstatically. “Tomorrow, Africa will be independent!” he assures me. “We are free!”
And he shakes my hand in a way meant to signify that now a black man can offer a white man his hand without self-consciousness.
“Did you see Nkrumah?” he asks, interested. “Yes? Then you are a lucky man! Do you know what we’ll do with the enemies of Africa?”
He laughs, ha-ha, but doesn’t say exactly what will be done.
“Now the most important thing is education. Education, schooling, the acquiring of knowledge. We are so backward, so backward! I think that the whole world will come to our aid. We must be the equals of the developed countries. Not only free—but also equal. But for now, we are breathing freedom. And this is paradise. This is wonderful!”
This enthusiasm of his is universal here. Enthusiasm, and pride that Ghana stands at the head of the independence movement, sets an example, leads all of Africa.
My other neighbor, sitting to my left (the bus has three seats in a row), is different: withdrawn, taciturn, unengaged. He immediately draws attention to himself, for people here are generally open, eager to converse, quick to tell stories and deliver various opinions. Thus far he has told me only that he is working and that he is having some troubles at work. What sorts of troubles, he’s not saying.
Finally, however, as the great forest starts to shrink and grow thinner, signaling that we are slowly approaching Kumasi, he decides to confess something to me. So—he has problems. He is sick. He is not sick always, not continously, but intermittently, periodically. He has already been to see various native specialists, but none of them has been able to help him. The thing is that he has animals in his head, under his skull. It’s not that he sees these animals, that he thinks about them or is afraid of them. No. It’s nothing like that. The animals are literally in his head; they live there, run around, graze, hunt, or just sleep. If they happen to be gentle animals, like antelopes, zebras, or giraffes, he tolerates them well; it is even quite pleasant then. But sometimes a hungry lion arrives. He is hungry, he is furious—so he roars. And then this roar makes his head explode.
The Structure of the Clan
I
arrived in Kumasi with no particular goal. Having one is generally deemed a good thing, the benefit of something to strive toward.This can also blind you, however: you see only your goal, and nothing else, while this something else—wider, deeper—may be considerably more interesting and important.
Kumasi lies amid greenery and flowers, on gentle hillsides. It is like a giant botanical garden in which people were allowed to settle. Everything here seems kindly disposed to man—the climate, the vegetation, other people. The dawns are dazzlingly beautiful, although they last but a few minutes. It is night, and out of this night the sun suddenly emerges. Emerges? This verb suggests a certain slowness, a leisurely process. In reality, the sun comes out as if it were a ball catapulted into the air. We suddenly see a fiery sphere, so near to us that we can’t help experiencing a frisson of fear. Moreover, this sphere is gliding toward us, closer and closer.
The sight of the sun acts like a starter’s pistol: the town instantly springs into motion. It’s as if all night long everyone was crouching on his starter blocks and now, at the signal, at that shot of sunlight, they all take off full speed ahead. No intermediate stages, no preparations. All at once, the streets are full of people, the shops are open, the fires and kitchens are smoking.
Yet the bustle of Kumasi differs from Accra’s. It is local, regional, as if self-enclosed. The town is the capital of the kingdom of Ashanti (which is part of Ghana), and it vigilantly guards its otherness, its colorful and robust traditions. Here you can see tribal chiefs strolling along the streets, or the performance of a rite that dates back to ancient times. And in this culture, the world of magic, of spells and enchantments, thrives and prospers.
The road from Accra to Kumasi is not just the five hundred kilometers from the Atlantic coast to the interior; it is also a voyage into those areas of the African continent where there are fewer vestiges of colonialism than along the coastlines. For Africa’s immensity, its dearth of navigable rivers and its lack of roads, as well as its difficult, murderous climate, while presenting an impediment to its development, also furnished a natural defense against invasion: colonialists were unable to penetrate very deeply. They kept to the shores, to their ships and fortifications, their supplies of food and quinine. In the nineteenth century, if someone—like Stanley—dared to traverse the continent from east to west, the feat was widely celebrated for years to come. And it was largely due to these obstacles to communication that many African cultures and traditions have been able to survive intact to this day.
Officially, but only officially, colonialism reigned in Africa from the time of the Berlin West Africa Conference (188485), during which several European states (mainly England and France, but also Belgium, Germany, and Portugal) divided the whole continent among themselves, a status that persisted until Africa won independence in the second half of the twentieth century. In reality, however, colonial penetration began much earlier, as long ago as the fifteenth century, and flourished over the next five hundred years. The most shameful and brutal phase of this conquest was the trade in African slaves, which went on for more than three hundred years. Three hundred years of raids, roundups, pursuits, and ambushes, organized, often with the help of African and Arab partners, by white men. Millions of young Africans were deported across the Atlantic in horrific conditions, stuffed down the hatches of ships; those lucky to emerge alive would with their sweat build the riches and might of the New World.
Africa—persecuted and defenseless—was depopulated, destroyed, and ruined. Whole stretches of the continent were deserted; barren bush supplanted what had been sunny flowering lands. But the most painful and lasting imprints of this epoch were left upon the memory and consciousness of the Africans: centuries of disdain, humiliation, and suffering gave them an inferiority complex, and a conviction, deep in their hearts, of having been wronged.
When World War II erupted, colonialism was at its apogee. The course of the war, however, its symbolic undertones, would sow the seeds of the system’s defeat and demise.
How and why did this happen? First, a short detour into the foul realm of racial thinking. The central subject, the essence, the core of relations between Europeans and Africans during the colonial era, was the difference of race, of skin color. Everything—each exchange, connection, conflict—was translated into the language of black and white. And, of course, white was better, higher, more powerful than black. Whites were sir, master, sahib, bwana kubwa, unchallenged lords and rulers, sent by God to hold sway over the blacks. Into the African was inculcated the notion that the white man was untouchable, unconquerable, that whites constituted a homogeneous, cohesive force. Such was the ideology that ably supported the system of colonial domination, by teaching that to question or contest the system was absolutely pointless.
Then, suddenly, Africans recruited into the British and French armies in Europe observed that the white men were fighting one another, shooting one another, destroying one another’s cities. It was a revelation, a surprise, a shock. African soldiers in the French army witnessed their colonial sovereign, France, defeated and conquered. African soldiers in the British army saw the imperial capital, London, bombed; they saw whites seized with panic, fleeing, pleading, sobbing. They saw ragged, hungry whites, crying for bread. As they moved east, fighting white Germans alongside white Englishmen, they encountered columns of white people dressed in stripes, people-skeletons, people-rags.
The shock the African experienced as scenes from the white man’s war passed before his eyes was all the more powerful because earlier the inhabitants of Africa (with few exceptions, and in the case of the Congo, for example, none) were not permitted to travel to Europe, or anywhere else beyond their continent. And so their views of the lives of white men was based only on the luxurious circumstances whites enjoyed in the colonies.
And another thing: the inhabitant of Africa in the middle of the twentieth century had no sources of information other than what a neighbor, his village chief, or a colonial administrator told him. Therefore he knew of the world only as much as he was able to glean from his immediate surroundings, or what he heard from others during an evening’s chat by the fire.
The veterans of World War II who returned from Europe to Africa shortly reappear in the ranks of various movements and parties fighting for national independence. The number of these organizations swells rapidly; they spring up like mushrooms after a rain. They have various points of view, and various goals.
Those from the French colonies initially make limited demands. They do not speak yet of freedom. They ask only that all the inhabitants of the colony be made French citizens. Paris rejects this. Yes, someone who has been educated in French culture, who raises himself to its level—the so-called
évolué
—can become a French citizen. But such individuals will turn out to be exceptions.
The organizations in the British colonies are more radical. Their inspiration and program are the bold visions of the future as formulated by the descendants of slaves, Afro-American intellectuals of the second half of the nineteenth century and first half of the twentieth. They called their doctrine pan-Africanism. Its principal creators: the activist Alexander Crumwell, the writer W. E. B. Du Bois, and the journalist Marcus Garvey (this last one from Jamaica). They differed among themselves, but agreed on two points: (1) that all blacks in the world—be they in South America or in Africa—constitute a single race, a single culture, and they should be proud of the color of their skin; (2) that all of Africa should be independent and united. Their slogan was “Africa for Africans!” On other matters they differed, W. E. B. Du Bois for example proclaimed that blacks should remain in the countries in which they now live, while Garvey held that all blacks, wherever they may be, should return to Africa. For a time he even sold photographs of Haile Selassie, proclaiming each was a valid return visa. He died in 1940 never having seen Africa himself.
A young activist and theoretician from Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah, became an enthusiast of pan-Africanism while studying in America. He returned home in 1947 and founded a political party into which he recruited former World War II combatants as well as the young. At a rally in Accra he issued a war cry: “Independence now!” In those days, in colonial Africa, this resounded like a bomb exploding. Ten years later, Ghana became the first independent African country south of the Sahara, and Accra immediately became the provisional, informal center of all movements, ideas, and activities for the entire continent.
The town burned with liberation fever, and people flocked here from all over Africa. Journalists from around the world also arrived. They came out of curiosity, uncertainty, and even the fear growing in Europe’s capitals—what if Africa explodes, what if the blood of white men flows here, and, even, what if armies are formed, and then, supplied with weapons by the Soviets, attempt—in a gesture of hateful vengeance—to strike at Europe?
...
In the morning I bought the local newspaper,
Ashanti Pioneer,
and set out in search of its editorial offices. Experience teaches that one can learn more passing an hour in such an office than in a week of walking around to see various institutions and notables. And so it was this time.
In a small, shabby room, with a strange mix of odors, overly ripe mango and printer’s ink, I was greeted effusively by a cheerful, corpulent man, Kwesi Amu. “I am also a reporter!” he exclaimed by means of introduction, and as though he had been waiting for this visit for who knows how long.
The course and temperature of the first greeting are of utmost significance to the ultimate fate of a relationship, which is why people here set much store by the way they salute each other. It is essential to exhibit from the very beginning, from the very first second, enormous, primal joy and geniality. So, for starters, one extends one’s hand. But not in a formal manner, reticently, limply: just the opposite—a large, vigorous gesture, as if one’s intention were not so much to offer one’s hand as to tear the other’s off. If, however, the other manages to keep his hand, whole and in its proper place, it is because, understanding the ritual rules of the greeting, he has likewise executed the same broad, forceful gesture. Both of these extremities, bursting with tremendous energy, now meet halfway and, with a terrifying impact of collision, cancel out the two opposing forces. Simultaneously, as the hands are rushing toward each other, the two individuals share a prolonged cascade of loud laughter. It is meant to signify that each is happy to be meeting and warmly disposed to the other.
There ensues a long list of questions and answers, such as “How are you? Are you feeling well? How is your family? Are they all healthy? And your grandfather? And your grandmother? And your aunt? And your uncle?”—and so forth and so on, for families here are large with many branches. Custom dictates that each positive answer be offered with yet another torrent of loud and vibrant laughter, which in turn should elicit a similar or perhaps an even more homeric cascade from the one posing the questions.
You often see two (or more) people standing in the street and dissolving with laughter. It does not mean that they are telling each other jokes. They are simply saying hello. And if the laughter dies down, then either the act of greeting has come to an end and they will now move on to the substance of the conversation, or, simply, the newly met have fallen silent to allow their tired vocal cords a moment’s respite.
After completing the raucous and cheerful ritual, Kwesi and I started to talk about the Ashanti kingdom. The Ashanti resisted the British until the end of the nineteenth century, and really never fully capitulated to them. Even now, after independence, they hold themselves at a distance from Nkrumah and his supporters from the coast, whose culture they don’t value highly. They are closely attached to their extremely rich history, their traditions, beliefs, and laws.
In all of Africa, each larger social group has its own distinct culture, an original system of beliefs and customs, its own language and taboos, and all of this is immensely complicated, intricate, and mysterious. That is why anthropologists never spoke of “African culture,” or “African religion,” knowing that no such thing exists, and that the essence of Africa is its endless variety. They saw the culture of each people as a discrete world, unique, unrepeated. And they wrote accordingly: E. E. Evans-Pritchard published a monograph on the Nuer, M. Gluckman on the Zulu, G. T. Basden on the Ibo, and so on. Meantime, the unschooled European mind, inclined to rational reduction, to pigeonholing and simplification, readily pushes everything African into a single bag and is content with facile stereotypes.
“We believe,” Kwesi told me, “that man is composed of two elements. Blood, which he inherits from his mother, and spirit, donated by his father. The stronger of these components is blood, which is why the child belongs to the mother and her clan—not to the father. If the wife’s clan orders her to leave her husband and return to her native village, she takes all the children with her, for although the wife lives in her husband’s village and house, she is there really only as a guest. This possibility of returning to her clan gives the woman a place to go should her husband abandon her. She can also move out herself, should he prove to be a despot. But these are extreme situations; usually, the family is a strong and vibrant unit in which everyone has a traditionally assigned role and everyone understands his or her duties.
“The family is always large—several dozen people. The husband, the wife (or wives), the children, the cousins. The family gathers as frequently as possible and spends time together. Time spent communally is highly valued and accorded much respect. It is important to live together, or near one another: there are many tasks which can be accomplished only collectively—otherwise, there is no chance of surviving.