Read Online Under African Skies by Charles Larson - Free Book Online

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.
    Â 
    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 …

    The children returned, circling round the old chief and the village elders. After the greetings, I asked what had happened to Sergeant Keita.
    â€œAyi! Ayi!” said the old men. “Ayi! Ayi!” echoed the children.
    â€œNo, not Keita!” said the old father, “Sarzan, 1 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.”
    Â 
    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.
    â€œLeave the dead be,” he had said. “They can no longer do anything for the living.”
    The old chief had paid no attention and the chicken had been sacrificed.
    When it was time to work the fields, Thiemokho had called it useless and even stupid to kill black chickens and pour their blood into a corner of the fields. The work, he said, was enough. Rain would fall if it was going to. The millet, corn, groundnuts, yams, and beans would grow all by themselves, and would grow better if the villagers would use the plows the local administrator had sent him. Keita cut down and burned the branches of Dassiri, the sacred tree, protector of the village and the cultivated fields, at whose foot the dogs were sacrificed.
    On the day when the little boys were to be circumcised and the little girls excised, 2 Sergeant Keita had leaped upon their teacher, the Gangourang,
who was dancing and chanting. He tore off the porcupine quills the Gangourang wore upon his head, and the netting that hid his body. From the head of Papa Djombo, the venerable grandfather who taught the young girls, Keita had ripped the cone-shaped yellow headdress topped with gri-gri charms and ribbons. All this he called “the ways of savages.” And yet he had been to Nice, and seen the carnival with the funny and frightening masks. The whites, the Toubabs, it is true, wore masks for fun and not in order to teach their children the wisdom of the ancients.
    Sergeant