African Silences Read Free

Casamance, in the Guinea forest at the coast. The track wanders through small villages, in a fresh open countryside of light and silence, grassland and gigantic figs, rollers and helmet shrikes, long-tailed parakeets and speckled pigeons. This is a country of the Tukulor Fulani, who are agriculturalists as well as herders. As early as A.D. 700, the Tukulor maintained a powerful state that extended north through the Senegal Valley into present-day Mauritania, which had not yet been overtaken by the desert. In the fourteenth century they retreated south before the Berbers, who were fleeing in their turn before the Arabs. Apparently the Tukulor were the first people of this region to accept Islam, which they helped to spread among the Ouolof people on the coast. Meanwhile, nomad Berber groups pressed southward, occupying the drier tracts of the savanna and forming an economic liaison with this tribe, until gradually the two peoples intermingled. In this farming country, the Tukulor are Negroid in appearance, whereas the pastoral “Berber” populations, the Peulh or Fula or Fulani who followed the savanna eastward all the way to Cameroon, are much paler and more narrow in the face—hence the curious name “Tukulor,” which is thought to be of recent derivation, from the English “Two Colors,” or the French “
tout-couleur
,” or even “Tacurol,” an old name for the country. The Tukulor maintained a separate state almost continuously until the middle of the nineteenth century, when theFrench subdued them on the way to the establishment of French West Africa.
    This land is not nearly so dry as the Niokolo Koba country to the east, and yet the air is parched for lack of rain. Man’s thirstless goats, which have helped to spread the deserts of North Africa, pay heat no mind, but the thin sheep press themselves to the clay walls, seeking thin shadow, and the cattle must be brought each day to the village wells. Pumped by draft animals walked in a circle, the well is the center of activity in each village, which here in the backland is no more than a cluster of daub huts.
    In these settlements southwest of Missira, we are struck by the utter friendliness of everyone we see. Even a group of newly circumcised young boys who are living now outside their village, dressed in a uniform of ceremonial sacking, rush to greet us, smiling and waving, eager to be of help. Because the rough and narrow track has frequent forks—and because when giving directions for Gouloumbo, the tribesman, knowing nothing of vehicles, is apt to point eagerly to a fork that later narrows to a footpath—we stop and backtrack many times, and invariably our return is welcomed with glad smiles that whites don’t see much anymore in Africa, smiles that make one happy and also a bit sad, like the last sight of a rare, vanishing bird. While the men laugh, consulting on directions, young children seated in the shade clean silver barbels from a lake not far away; women pause to lean on their big pestles, and girls wave prettily from the well, the water sparkling on round brown breasts.
    These simple places far from the din of modern times reflect an order and well-being that seem missing in the villages by the main road, where noisy vehicles and the hard winds of change stir up the country folk and make them restless. The log mortar and big pestle like a hollowed stump, the three-stone hearth, a few bales of fresh raffia thatching, a few gourds drying on the roof—there is noexcess and no waste, no debris or litter of any kind. The yards look swept. Outside each village, the people have piled the few metal containers that have found their way into these hinterlands, and the pile is neat. A sense of order underlies the harmonious tone of the whole countryside. Perhaps order is quite natural to rural Africans, perhaps the littered habitations of most African towns is a sad symptom of the loss of the old rhythms, of the overcrowding, poverty, and low morale