Picked-Up Pieces (52 page)

The Great Ponds
tells, in a fine quick style airy with unadorned dialogue, of the contest between two villages, Chiolu and Aliakoro, over fishing rights in the Great Ponds, particularly the very rich Pond of Wagabe. The last of a series of wars evidently settled the ownership in favor of Chiolu, but Aliakoro maintains that it possesses a still older claim, and for years its men have poached unchallenged. Now a party of poachers is ambushed, and several of them are held for ransom. In retaliation, Aliakoro kidnaps several Chiolu women, and the conflict escalates to total predation and terror on both sides:

The ceremonious parleys and judicious assemblies whereby this disastrous condition is achieved are related with humorous care and an eye, certainly, on the global wars of the century. Timeless is the mechanism whereby honorable men acting measuredly in what they construe to be self-defense perpetrate ruin. The warfare, performed with arrows and with machetes that behead an enemy at a stroke, is described as in the old chronicles, with a simplicity that leaves the sufferer some dignity without excusing us from fear and pity:

There are no bad men in this story, only men. Though the reader is placed nearer in sympathy to the village of Chiolu, Aliakoro is visited, and its
eze
(chief), its
dibia
(medicine man), and its foremost warrior are characterized as interestingly as their opposite numbers in Chiolu. Indeed, Wago “the leopard-killer,” the Aliakoro warrior who is fanatical about the ponds, and Igwu the reluctant magic-worker, who is indifferent about the ponds but who is pushed by his villagers into the most
demonic kind of sorcery, are rather
more
interesting than their Chiolu counterparts, Olumba and Achichi; Captain Amadi imitates Homer in making the Trojans loom in a way that the Greeks do not. His dozens of characters within the two villages are all distinct. As the war becomes devastating, the book’s microcosm expands, and an intercessory force is revealed: the entire Erekwi clan, whose villages are now threatened by the breach of peace. All the
ezes
meet in splendid panoply and put the dispute up to the gods; a representative from one warring village is to “swear.” Olumba of Chiolu volunteers, and the elders of Aliakoro nominate the god Ogbunabali, the god of night. The “swearing” is a simple rite; Olumba recites:

The novel then shifts from the social realm to the psychological; Olumba, the strongest man of his village, struggles with the invisible. Though elaborate precautions hem in his activity, he impulsively climbs a palm tree, is stung by wasps, falls, and nearly dies. The event is revealed to be the result of a spell Igwu has cast in Aliakoro; a counter-spell, cast by the consulting
dibia
Anwuanwu, saves his life. But as the weeks of his six months drag by, the impalpable weight of the god Ogbunabali preys on the warrior’s mind and wastes him to apathy:

The suspense of Olumba’s struggle not to die is frightful. The motions of his morale feel immense. We see life as pre-scientific man saw it—as a spiritual liquid easily spilled. The invisible forces pressing upon Olumba are totally plausible. The novel treats magic respectfully, as
something that usually works. The recipes of witchery are matter-of-factly detailed, as are the fevers and divinations they inarguably produce. But Olumba’s heroic battle is against a force deeper than magic—the death wish itself, the urge toward osmotic reabsorption into the encircling ocean of darkness wherein life is a precarious, thin-walled epiphenomenon. Ogbunabali has no shrine in Chiolu; he is “therefore non-directional, distant, menacing, ubiquitous.” His silence and neutrality are uncanny and invincible. Ogbunabali is not evil, or even especially concerned; “the gods would rather have fun than run after us.” He is simply Ogbunabali.

As Olumba is about to succumb, a second intercession occurs: others in the village begin mysteriously to die. Olumba’s fighting spirit returns: “His private fears vanished in the face of the village-wide consternation.”
Wonjo
, the coughing sickness, carries off one of his wives and imperils his only son. Nevertheless, as the sixth new moon shines down upon the decimated village, Olumba still lives. And yet, in this defeat, Wago the leopard-killer finds a way to deprive Chiolu of the Pond of Wagaba; the war is carried to a fiendish end, though Aliakoro, too, has been ravaged by
wonjo
. Is
wonjo
the wrath of Ogbunabali, taking vengeance for the impiety of war? The villagers think so, but Captain Amadi tells us, in a last sentence like the lifting of a vast curtain, that

One world indeed. Until this sentence, the apparent isolation of the Erekwi villages has been total and pure; this novel, so revelatory of the human condition both inward and outward, contains no trace of the world of white men save a few old Portuguese swords worn as adornment.

In Alex La Guma’s novel of South Africa, white men are everywhere, “pink and smooth as strawberry jelly.” They function as bosses, owners, policemen, and torturers.
In the Fog of the Season’s End
has a setting as thoroughly urban as that of
The Great Ponds
is rural:

There is cosmopolitan glitter for whites:

and ghetto squalor for blacks:

Through this crowded, active, bipartite cityscape (Cape Town, though not named as such) moves our hero, Beukes, “a brown man in a brown suit.” He works for “the movement,” and in the course of the novel goes about distributing incendiary leaflets, meeting varieties of coöperation and distrust among his fellow black Africans, catching odd hours of sleep in borrowed rooms, reminiscing about his life and his love, Frances, whom we never meet. At the end, the Security Police surround a tin shack where he is conferring with Elias Tekwane, an older revolutionary; Beukes escapes, but Tekwane is captured and tortured to death. The last scene shows three young blacks being smuggled north to join the army of freedom fighters while Beukes stands in the brightening sunlight and thinks, “They have gone to war in the name of a suffering people.… What we see now is only the tip of an iceberg of resentment against an ignoble regime, the tortured victims of hatred and humiliation.”

Mr. La Guma is not, then, one to let his message slip by unnoticed, nor is his descriptive prose shy of insistence. Similes proliferate; at their best they quicken their referent:

and at their worse smother it beneath a clumsy muchness:

Faces especially excite the author to a viscous overflow of imagery:

The writing does, however, convey a jumbled, sweaty sensation not inappropriate to the subject—the human jungle the white man has imposed upon the South African black. And when La Guma’s prose connects directly to outrage—as when Tekwane is tortured by two tweedy policemen, or when the maze of permits the police state has created is dramatized—the fuzz of overwriting burns away. As a thriller,
In the Fog of the Season’s End
suffers not only from its chosen interweave of flashbacks but from a certain languid futility in its basic mission; the risk Beukes runs distributing the leaflets seems far greater than any possible effect they can have. As political description, the book is less strident than its metaphors. The black population Beukes moves through is represented, in what feel to be fair proportions, as amused, threatened, or inspired by him and his cause. Personal friendship among these oppressed counts for more than political commitment. We are aware how far we have come from the villages of
The Great Ponds
when a character responds, “Strangers? I dunno. I reckon there’s always strangers hanging about like. People you don’ know.” In Chiolu and Aliakoro, there are no people you don’t know. In a modern state, strangers are the rule, and Beukes more than once reminds himself of the uncomfortable, comforting
fact that he is anonymous while, with his carton of pamphlets addressed to the faceless masses, he dodges from one island of acquaintanceship to another. I have heard it observed that among black Africans South African exiles invariably stand out as the most dynamic. Perhaps “dynamic” should be read as “best able to deal with strangers.” The people in La Guma’s world are fighting for identity; Amadi’s villagers have had theirs bestowed upon them—in their kinship, in their nicknames, in their hierarchical roles. Dragging its captive blacks in the ruck, the South African state has nevertheless dragged them into modernity, into the post-tribal impersonality that makes it necessary for the narrative artist to particularize every face. The need to describe, excessively felt in
In the Fog of the Season’s End
, arises when teller and listener no longer share a common reality.

As protest, La Guma’s cry from this particular underworld has a value that transcends its artistic faults—a special value, it may be, to Americans. For at this distance it is easy to be complacent or forgetful about South Africa, which sends us only its admirable white athletes and, with less publicity, its pleasant investment dividends. Perhaps one has to visit black Africa to realize how automatically is assumed the complicity of the United States in the continued white rule of that continent’s rich southern third. The Portuguese supposedly fight with weapons we supply them through NATO; the Afrikaners buttress their tyranny with our capital; our new Vietnam will (supposedly) come here.
In the Fog of the Season’s End
contains only the occasional overheard invitation to Los Angeles, the glimpsed Coca-Cola billboard. But the glistening white world that hangs above the black townships like a forbidden paradise does have a familiar air. We live there.

Agatha Moudio’s Son
takes place in an agreeable intermediate climate: its Cameroonian fishing village is intact but not untouched. White power has planted a public fountain in the center of the village and run a paved highway through it. A party of hunters comes on Sundays to shoot monkeys in the forest—an intrusion considered “picturesque.” They are admired as exotic creatures: