The Masque of Africa_ Glimpses of African Belief - By V. S. Naipaul Page 0,86

laughed, at the double irony of her words, which acknowledged what was said about Africans by people outside, and, within that, what was said about pigmies by the Bantu. She said, “Life is simple in the forest. You have no urban stress. You bathe in the river. You eat from communal kitchens, and you go to sleep at seven. The forest is peaceful and tranquil and I can think about ‘myself.’ I am not afraid of the forest. I never think of the dangers there, because you radiate energy. Animals can smell negative waves of fear and then they attack. It is here, in the forest, that I understood that the forest talks to us. It asks us questions, and it feeds us. It is the beginning and the end, and that is why pigmies, who understand this, are the masters.”

I wanted to know about death: how do pigmies deal with it?

“Pigmies believe in nature. They believe they come from the earth, and that is why they do not want to pollute it with the dead. They do not bury the dead. When a master dies they wrap him in a mat and put him under a big tree. They leave him there to rot, and no one will go to that place. They will not hunt or forage there. When decomposition is complete they put the bones in a grave, and they will quarantine that area. They cannot understand Christianity.”

“What do they find especially hard about it?”

“They fail to see why Jesus should have all the power. For them power has to be distributed among many chiefs.”

“How long do they live?”

“The average span is fifty years. Life is short because civilisation has introduced many diseases that were not known to them. Alcoholism, HIV.”

“How dark is the forest?”

“During the day light filters through the canopy and it is full of shadows. At night it is pitch dark. I think of it as a ‘locked’ darkness. It is important, too, to remember that the canopy absorbs pollution. This is why we must preserve the forest.”

4

FROM THE air the depredation of the loggers hardly shows. The forest seems whole and tight and eternal. At ground level it’s another story. There are the logging roads; the rains wash the loosened earth into the rivers, and the fish suffer. For anyone who feels a mystical bond with the old forest there is pain. Mme Ondo, a high civil servant, and a very elegant lady, felt that pain acutely. She was of mixed ancestry, but her heart was all African.

She said, “We were told that we would plant a tree for every tree we cut, but it is not so. It sickens my heart that we don’t follow that principle. When I see a truck full of logs, I don’t see trees or wood. I see murdered people. They are not logs for me, but dead people. The trees are creatures just like us. Trees live longer than human beings, and they give us everything, even oxygen. We need to learn a lot from trees.”

Mme Ondo was elegant, but that elegance was not a simple matter of inheritance. It came from deep within her. Her mother was a peasant, and so was her mother’s mother.

“I used to help on the small farms they worked on, and I used to go with my mother to the forest. I was brought up by an aunt and uncle. Once, when I was eight, they took me to the forest and left me alone in an encampment while they went fishing in the big river. I was alone in the night, and I was afraid because I kept thinking of the stories of the anaconda snake that comes at night looking for children. In the morning I was very glad to eat the fish they had caught, but at night it was a different story.”

Later she became attuned to the beauty of the forest.

“The positive side is that it is very cool. There is a great calm. The birds sing, and there is great beauty in the trees. And if you see the small path twisting and turning like a snake in the forest you think of the image of the absolute. The search for the truth comes from the forest. I adore the forest, and even if I spend years abroad I have to come back and rush to the forest. I need the thick forest to feel alive.”

“Will the philosophy of the people change with the thinning