“The child is raised familialy, but as he grows, he sees that the borders of his social world extend further, that other families live nearby, and that these families together constitute the clan. A clan comprises all those who believe that they have a common ancestor. If I believe that you and I have an ancestor in common, then we belong to the same clan. Such a belief carries enormous consequences. For example, a man and a woman from the same clan are forbidden to have sexual relations. This is subject to the strongest possible taboo. In the past, parties violating it were both condemned to death. But even today it is a serious transgression, one that can anger the spirits of the ancestors and bring great misfortune down upon the clan.
“At the head of the clan stands the chief. He is chosen by a clan assembly, which is led by a council of elders. The elders are village chiefs, heads of individual clans, functionaries of all kinds. There can be several candidates and many rounds of voting, for the choice matters deeply: the position of chief is hugely important. From the moment of his selection, the chief becomes a holy person. Henceforth, he is not permitted to walk barefoot. Or to sit directly on the ground. One is not allowed to touch him or speak a bad word about him. One can tell from afar that a chief is coming—because of the open umbrella. A great chief has an enormous, decorative umbrella, held by a special servant; a lesser chief walks about with an ordinary umbrella purchased from an Arab in the marketplace.
“The clan chief has a function of the utmost significance. The central element of the Ashanti faith is the cult of ancestors. The clan comprises a great number of individuals, but we can see and meet only a small percentage of them—those that live on earth. The others—the majority—are ancestors who have partially departed, though in reality they still participate in our lives. They look at us, observe our behavior. They are everywhere, they see everything. They can help us, but they can also punish us. Bestow happiness upon us, or bring about our ruination. They decide everything. That is why maintaining good relations with the ancestors is a precondition for the welfare of the whole clan and of each and every one of us. And it is the chief who is responsible for the quality and closeness of these relations. He is the mediator and link between two integral parts of the clan: the world of the ancestors and the world of the living. It is he who communicates to the living the ancestors’ will and decision regarding any given matter, and it is he who pleads with them for forgiveness if the living have violated custom or law.
“One can obtain this forgiveness by making offerings to the ancestors: sprinkling the earth with water or palm wine, laying food aside for them, slaughtering a sheep. But it all might not suffice—the ancestors might continue to be angry, which for the living means endless misfortunes and illnesses. The greatest anger is caused by incest, murder, suicide, assault, insulting the chief, witchcraft.”
“Suicide?” I was surprised. “How can you punish someone who has committed suicide?”
“Our law commanded us to cut off his head. Suicide was the violation of a taboo, and the principle tenet of the clan legal code is that each offense must be punished. If an offense goes unpunished, the clan will meet with catastrophe, will face ruin.”
We were sitting on the porch of one of the numerous local bars, drinking Fanta, which clearly holds a monopoly here. A young barmaid was napping behind the counter, leaning her head on her hands. It was hot and sleepy.
“The chief,” Kwesi continued, “has many other duties. He decides disputes and resolves conflicts, and is therefore also a judge. An important fact, especially important in the villages, is that the chief allocates land to families. He cannot give them this land, or sell it, for land belongs to the ancestors. They dwell in it, inside it. The chief can only allot it for cultivation. If a field grows barren, he will assign the family another piece of ground, and the former one will lie fallow, gaining strength for the future. The land is sacred. The land gives people life, and that which gives life is sacred.
“While the chief enjoys the greatest respect, he is surrounded by a council of elders and cannot decide anything without seeking their opinion and gaining their consent. That is how we understand democracy. In the morning, each member of the council visits the chief’s house, to greet him. That is how the chief knows that he is governing well and enjoying support. Should these morning visits cease, it means that he has lost the council’s confidence and must go. This will happen if he commits any one of five offenses: drunkenness, gluttony, collusion with sorcerers, bad rapport with people, and governing without seeking the opinion of the council of elders. He must also step down if he is blinded, infected with leprosy, or becomes mentally unsound.
“Several clans together form what Europeans call a tribe. The Ashanti is a union of eight clans. At their head stands a king, the Ashantehene, also surrounded by a council of elders. Such a union is cemented not only by shared ancestors. It is also a territorial, cultural, and political community. It can be very powerful at times, numbering many millions, larger than many a European nation.”
I hesitated a long time, then finally asked him: “Tell me something about witchcraft.” I hesitated, because it is a subject about which one speaks reluctantly here, and often simply passes over in silence.
“Not everyone believes in it anymore,” Kwesi answered. “But a lot of people still do. Many are simply afraid of not believing. My grandmother thinks that witches exist and meet at night on tall solitary trees standing in fields. ‘But has Grandma ever seen a witch?’ I once asked her. ‘That would be impossible,’ she answered with conviction. ‘At night, witches envelop the whole world with a spider’s web. They hold one end in their hands, and the other is fastened to every door in the world. If someone tries to open a door and go outside, he moves the spider’s web. The witches feel this and, alarmed, vanish into the darkness. In the mornings one can only see shreds of spiders’ webs hanging down from tree branches and doorknobs.’ ”
I, a White Man
I
n Dar es Salaam I bought an old Land Rover from an Englishman who was returning to Europe. It was 1962, several months after Tanganyika had gained independence, and many Englishmen from the colonial administration had lost their jobs, positions, even houses. In their increasingly deserted clubs, someone was always recounting how he had walked into his office at the ministry, and there, smiling at him from behind his desk, was one of the locals. “Excuse me. I’m very sorry!”
This changing of the guard is called Africanization. There are those who applaud it as a symbol of liberation, while others are outraged by the process. It is clear who is for and who is against. London and Paris, in order to induce their civil servants to go work in the colonies, created for those amenable to the idea a grand quality of life. A minor clerk from the post office in Manchester received upon arrival in Tanganyika a villa with a garden and swimming pool, cars, servants, holidays in Europe, etc. Members of the colonial bureaucracy lived truly magnificently. And now, between one day and the next, the inhabitants of the colony receive their independence. They take over the colonial state in an unaltered form. They even take great care not to alter anything, because such a state offers fantastic privileges, which its new administrators naturally do not wish to renounce. The colonial origins of the African state—a state wherein the civil servant received renumeration beyond all measure and reason—ensured that in independent Africa, the struggle for power instantly assumed an extremely fierce and ruthless character. All at once, in the blink of an eye, a new ruling class arises—a bureaucratic bourgeoisie that creates nothing, produces nothing, but merely governs the society and reaps the benefits. The twentieth-century principle of vertiginous speed applied in this instance as well—once, decades, even centuries, were needed for a new social class to emerge, and here all it took was several days. The French, who were observing the struggle for positions with some wry amusement, called the phenomenon
la politique du ventre
(politics of the belly), so closely was a political appointment connected with huge material gains.
But this is Africa, and the fortunate nouveau riche cannot forget the old clan tradition, one of whose supreme canons is share everything you have with your kinsmen, with another member of your clan, or, as they say here, with your cousin. (In Europe, the bond with a cousin is by now rather weak and distant, whereas in Africa a cousin on your mother’s side is more important than a husband.) So—if you have two shirts, give him one; if you have a bowl of rice, give him half. Whoever breaks this rule condemns himself to ostracism, to expulsion from the clan, to the horrifying status of outcast. Individualism is highly prized in Europe, and perhaps nowhere more so than in America; in Africa, it is synonymous with unhappiness, with being accursed. African tradition is collectivist, for only in a harmonious group could one face the obstacles continually thrown up by nature. And one of the conditions of collective survival is the sharing of the smallest thing. One day a group of children surrounded me. I had a single piece of candy, which I placed in my open palm. The children stood motionless, staring. Finally, the oldest girl took the candy, bit it into pieces, and equitably distributed the bits.
If someone has become a government minister, replacing a white man, and has received his villa, garden, salary, and car, word of this quickly reaches this fortunate one’s place of origin. It spreads like wildfire to neighboring villages. Joy and hope well up in the hearts of his cousins. Soon they begin their pilgrimage to the capital. Once here, they easily locate their distinguished distant relative. They appear at the gate of his house, greet him, ritualistically sprinkle the ground with gin to thank the ancestors for such a felicitous turn of events, and then make themselves at home in the villa, in the yard, in the garden. Before long, we can observe how the quiet residence where an elderly Englishman lived with his taciturn wife is now noisily teeming with the new official’s kinsmen. From the earliest morning, a fire is going in front of the house, women are mashing cassava in wooden mortars, a gaggle of children are romping among the flower beds and borders. In the evenings, the entire extended family sits down to dinner on the lawn—for although a new life has begun, an old custom from the days of unremitting poverty remains: one eats only once a day, in the evening.
Whoever has a more mobile occupation, and less respect for tradition, tries to cover his tracks. In Dodoma, I once ran into a street vendor hawking oranges who used to bring these fruits to my house in Dar es Salaam. I was happy to see him, and asked him what he was doing here, five hundred kilometers from the capital. He had had to flee from his cousins, he explained. He had shared his meager profits with them for a long time, but finally had had enough, and ran. “I will have a few cents for a while,” he said happily. “Until they find me again!”
Social advancements of this type are still relatively infrequent in Dar es Salaam in the years immediately following independence. In the white neighborhoods, whites still dominate. For Dar es Salaam, like other cities in this part of the continent, consists of three distinct quarters, separated from one another either by water or by a stretch of bare ground.
The best neighborhood, close to the sea, belongs of course to the whites. It is called Oyster Bay: magnificent villas, gardens exploding with flowers, thick lawns, smooth, gravel-strewn avenues. Yes, you can live truly luxuriously here, especially since you don’t have to do anything yourself: everything is taken care of by quiet, vigilant, discreetly moving servants. Here, a man ambles along as he probably would do in paradise: slowly, loosely, content that he is here, enchanted by the beauty of the world.
Beyond the bridge, on the other side of the lagoon, significantly farther from the sea, lies a paved-over, crowded, busy, mercantile neighborhood. Its inhabitants are Indians, Pakistanis, natives of Goa, arrivals from Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, all of them collectively called Asians here. Although there are several men of great wealth among them, the majority are middle class, living without any excess. They are traders. They buy, sell, act as middlemen, speculate. They are always counting something, counting endlessly, shaking their heads, quarreling. Dozens, hundreds of shops, wide open, their goods spilling out onto the sidewalks, onto the streets. Fabrics, furniture, lamps, pots and pans, mirrors, knickknacks, toys, rice, syrups, spices—everything. In front of a shop sits a Hindu, one foot resting on the seat of his chair, his fingers digging at his toes.
Every Saturday afternoon, the inhabitants of this airless, swarming neighborhood go to the seashore. They dress in their finest clothes—the women in golden saris, the men in neat shirts. They travel by car. The whole family piles in, perched on one another’s laps, shoulders, heads—ten, fifteen people. They stop the car on the steep slope above the ocean. At this time of day, the incoming tide pounds the beach with powerful, deafening waves. They open the windows. They breathe in the salty smell. They air themselves. On the other side of the immense body of water before them lies their country, which some don’t even know anymore: India. They spend fifteen minutes here, maybe a half hour. Then the convoy drives off and the shore is empty again.
The farther from the sea, the greater the heat, the aridity, and the dust. It is there, on the dry sand, on the bare, barren earth, that stand the clay huts of the African quarter. Its individual neighborhoods bear the names of the old slave villages of the sultan of Zanzibar: Kariakoo, Hala, Magomeni, Kinondoni. The names may vary, but the quality of their clay houses is uniformly low, and their standard of living wretched, with no prospect of improvement.
For the people of those neighborhoods, independence means being free to walk at will the main streets of this city of more than a hundred thousand, and even to venture into the white areas. It was never really forbidden, because the African could always turn up there, but he had to have a clear, concrete goal: he either had to be going to work, or going home from work. The policeman’s eye easily distinguished between the gait of someone hurrying to some task and purposeless, suspicious loafing. Everyone, depending on the color of his skin, had his assigned role and prescribed place.
Those who wrote about apartheid emphasized that this was a system invented and enforced in South Africa, a state governed by white racists. But apartheid is a much more universal, common phenomenon. Its critics maintained that it is a system instituted by rabid Boers so that they could rule indivisibly and keep the blacks in the ghettos, which were called bantustans. The ideologists of apartheid defended themselves: We believe that all people are entitled to better their circumstances and to develop, but, depending on the color of their skin and their ethnicity, to develop separately. This was a piece of fraudulence, for whoever knew the reality understood that behind this support for equal development lay a deeply inequitable and unjust state of affairs: the whites possessed the best plots of land and the cities’ richest neighborhoods, and they controlled industry, while the blacks were consigned to crowded, wretched scraps of semi-arid land.
The concept of apartheid was so perverse that with time its principal victims began to discover certain advantages in it, a chance for a kind of self-reliance, the comfort of being in one’s own backyard. The African could say: “It is not only I, the black man, who cannot enter your area, but you, too, the white man, if you want to stay in one piece and not place yourself in danger, you had better not come into my neighborhood!”
It was in such a city that I arrived as the correspondent of the Polish Press Agency, and in which I was to spend several years. Going about its streets, I quickly realized I was in the net of apartheid. First of all, the issue of skin color suddenly loomed large. In Poland, in Europe, I never thought about it. Here, in Africa, it was becoming the most important determinant of my identity, and for simple people, the sole one. The white man. White, therefore a colonialist, a pillager, an occupier. I subjugated Africa, conquered Tanganyika, put to the sword the entire tribe of the man just now standing before me, the tribe of his ancestors. I made him an orphan. Moreover, a humiliated and powerless orphan. Eternally hungry and sick. Yes, when he looks at me, this is exactly what he must be thinking: the white man, the one who took everything from me, who beat my grandfather on his back, who raped my mother. Here he is before me, let me take a good look at him!
I could not adequately resolve the question of guilt. In their eyes, I was guilty. Slavery, colonialism, five hundred years of injustice—after all, it’s the white men’s doing. The white men’s. Therefore mine. Mine? I was not able to conjure within myself that cleansing, liberating emotion—guilt; to show contrition; to apologize. On the contrary! From the start, I tried to counterattack: “You were colonized? We, Poles, were also! For one hundred and thirty years we were the colony of three foreign powers. White ones, too.” They laughed, tapped their foreheads, walked away. I angered them, because they thought I wanted to deceive them. I knew that despite my inner certainty about my own innocence, to them I was guilty. These barefoot, hungry, and illiterate boys had a moral advantage over me, the sole advantange an accursed history bestows upon its victims. With rare exceptions, they, the black men, had never conquered anybody, hadn’t occupied, hadn’t enslaved. They could regard me from a position of superiority. They were of a black race, but a pure one. I stood among them weak, with nothing more to say.
I didn’t feel comfortable anywhere. The color of my skin, albeit privileged, also confined me to the cage of apartheid. A gilded cage—Oyster Bay—but a cage nonetheless. Oyster Bay is a beautiful neighborhood. Beautiful, blooming with flowers—and boring. Granted, one could stroll here amid tall palm trees, admire the billowing bougainvillea and the elegant, delicate tuberose, the cliffs covered with thick seaweed. But what else? Besides this, what? The residents of the neighborhood were colonial bureaucrats, who thought only of getting to the end of their contract, buying a crocodile skin or a rhinoceros horn as a souvenir, and leaving. Their wives discussed either the children’s health or a past or upcoming party. And I had a daily story to file! About what? Where would I get the material? There was one small local newspaper, the
Tanganyika Standard
. I visited its editorial offices, but the staff consisted of these very same Englishmen from Oyster Bay. And they too were already packing.
I went to the Indian quarter. But what was I to do here? Where was I to go? Who was there for me to talk to? The heat was dreadful, and it was impossible to walk for any length of time: there is no air to breathe, your legs grow weak, your shirt drips with sweat. After an hour of wandering around, you are fed up with everything. You have but one desire left: to sit down somewhere in the shade. Better yet, beneath a fan. And then a thought strikes you: do the inhabitants of the North appreciate what a treasure they possess in that gray, drab, perpetually cloudy sky, with its one great, miraculous advantage—that there is no sun in it?
My main goal, of course, was the African suburbs. I had their names written down. I had the address for the office of the ruling party, TANU (Tanganyika African National Union). But I couldn’t find it. Identical streets, sand up to your ankles, children who won’t let you pass, crowding around you, amused, aggressively curious—a white man in these inaccessible back alleys is a sensation and a spectacle. With each step I lose my confidence. I feel the attentive gaze of men sitting idly in front of houses, following me with their eyes. The women don’t look, turning their heads away: they are Muslims, dressed in black, loosely draped gowns called bui-bui, which completely conceal their bodies as well as part of their faces. The irony of the situation is that even if I were to strike up a conversation with one of the Africans and wished to talk further to him, we would have nowhere to go. The good restaurant is for Europeans, the bad one for Africans. They never frequent each other’s establishments; it isn’t the custom. Each one would feel ill at ease if he found himself in a place inconsistent with the dictates of apartheid.