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We’re not far from the border, and the people of this region look and speak so much as they did in Kilanga I was dumbstruck when we first came here by a sense of childhood returned. I kept expecting someone I knew to come around the corner: Mama Mwanza, Nelson, Tata Boanda in his red trousers, or most eerily, my father. Obviously, the boundary between Congo and Angola is nothing but a line on a map-the Belgians and Portuguese drawing their lots. The ancient Kongo used to stretch across all of central Africa. As a nation it fell, when a million of its healthiest citizens were sold into slavery, but its language and traditions did not. I wake up to the same bubbling mbote! shouted outside the open window of our station house. The women wrap and rewrap their pagnes in the same way, and press the palm-oil harvest in the same kind of contraption that Mama Lo used. Often I hear ghosts: the upward slant of Pascal’s voice in the question Beta nki tutasala? What are we doing?
I don’t hear it often, though. In our village there are very few boys of an age to climb trees for birds’ nests, or girls stomping self-importantly down the road with a sibling clutched sideways like an oversized rag doll. I notice their absence everywhere. The war cost most of its lives among children under ten. That great, quiet void is moving slowly upward through us. A war leaves holes in so much more than the dams and roads that can be rebuilt. I teach classes in nutrition, sanitation, and soybeans, to women who respectfully call me Mania Ngemba and ignore nine-tenths of what I tell them. Our hardest task is teaching people to count on a future: to plant citrus trees, and compost their wastes for fertilizer. This confused me at first. Why should anyone resist something so obvious as planting a fruit tree or improving the soil? But for those who’ve lived as refugees longer than memory, learning to believe in the nutrient cycle requires something close to a religious conversion.
I ought to understand. I’ve been as transient in my adult life as anyone in our cooperative. And only now, after working this same land for ten years, am I coming to understand the length and breadth of outsiders’ failure to impose themselves on Africa. This is not Brussels or Moscow or Macon, Georgia. This is famine or flood.You can’t teach a thing until you’ve learned that. The tropics will intoxicate you with the sweetness of frangipani flowers and lay you down with the sting of a viper, with hardly room to breathe in between. It’s a great shock to souls gently reared in places of moderate clime, hope, and dread.
The Portuguese were so shocked, evidently, that they stripped the gentle Kongo and chained them down in rows, in the dark, for the passage. Condemned for their lack of cash crops. The Europeans couldn’t imagine a reasonable society failing to take that step, and it’s hard for us to imagine even now. In a temperate zone it’s the most natural thing in the world, right as rain, to grow fields of waving grain. To grow them year after year without dread of flood or plague, in soil that offers up green stems that bend to the scythe again and again, bread from a bottomless basket. Christians could invent and believe in the parable of the loaves and fishes, for their farmers can trust in abundance, and ship it to burgeoning cities, where people can afford to spend their lives hardly noticing, or caring, that a seed produces a plant.
Here you know what a seed is for, or you starve. A jungle yields no abundance to feed the multitudes, and supports no leisure class. The soils are fragile red laterite and the rain is savage. Clearing a rain forest to plant a
If I could reach backward somehow to give Father just one gift, it would be the simple human relief of knowing you’ve done wrong, and living through it. Poor Father, who was just one of a million men who never did catch on. He stamped me with a belief injustice, then drenched me in culpability, and I wouldn’t wish such torment even on a mosquito. But that exacting, tyra
Adah Price
ATLANTA
A TOAD CAN DIE OF LIGHT! Emily warned us, as she peered out at the street from between her drawn curtains. Death is the common right of Toads and Men. Why swagger, then?
My colleagues in medical school accused me of cynicism but they had no idea. I am a babe in the woods, abandoned at the foot of a tree. On the day I swore to uphold the Hippocratic oath, the small hairs on the back of my neck stood up as I waited for lightning to strike. Who was I, vowing calmly among all these necktied young men to steal life out of nature’s jaws, every old time we got half a chance and a paycheck? That oath never felt safe to me, hanging around my neck with the stethoscope, not for a minute. I could not accept the contract: that every child born human upon this earth comes with a guarantee of perfect health and old age clutched in its small fist.
The loss of a life: unwelcome. Immoral? I don’t know. Depends perhaps on where you are, and what sort of death. Hereabouts, where we sit among such piles of leftover protein we press it into cakes for the pets, who usefully guard our empty chairs; here where we pay soothsayers and acrobats to help lose our weight, then yes, for a child to die from hunger is immoral. But this is just one place. I’m afraid I have seen a world.