n June, I traveled to Bawum, a village in Cameroon’s Northwest Province. I went there to interview Father Berndind, a priest who had set out to eradicate the practice of witchcraft from his parish. Although plenty of priests wanted to do away with witchcraft, Berndind was unique because he waged his campaign from a seminary that bordered the compound of a witchdoctor. His neighbor was Pa Ayamah, a healer renowned for his ability to cure insanity caused by witchcraft.
I went to Bawum with a post-graduate student named Emmanuel. Emmanuel was a thoughtful, good-natured guy who grew up in Bawum, just across the road from both Ayamah and the seminary. Emmanuel agreed to introduce me to both Berndind and Ayamah, as his friend—rather than a foreign researcher—as long as I paid for food and transportation. Emmanuel had written his Master’s thesis on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. “It’s funny,” he said, “You come from America to study Cameroonians, and all I want to do is study Americans.” I imagined jotting down notebook entries that read: “Emmanuel now taking notes about the way I take notes about him taking notes on me.”
We arrived on a Saturday night. Emmanuel took me to Mass the following morning to meet Berndind. The church was built in a pre-fab style; I’d seen churches like it in lower-middle class suburbs in Omaha and Des Moines. Up close, rough planks and uneven nails revealed that the church was not, in fact pre-fab, but had been hand-built to look that way.
During Mass, I felt underdressed. I was the only man not wearing a sports jacket. In Yaounde—the capital— fashion tended towards the sort of suits worn by comic-book villains: red velour, wide pinstripes, bright ties. From the somber colors assembled in that church, I gathered that such fashions had not yet reached the provinces.
I felt better when a young man wearing a ratty t-shirt and taped-together flip-flops wandered in. He was short and strangely proportioned; his squat body rested on thin legs, like a house on stilts. He plunked himself down in the pew in front of me. His feet barely brushed the ground, but his upper body took up almost two spaces. Halfway through the Mass, he craned his head around and stared at me. He pointed at my chest and whispered loudly, “Hey! I like your tie. It’s shiny!”
Heads spun around to appraise my clothing. “Um. Thank you.” The priest glowered at me. I fingered my silk tie, which suddenly seemed garish.
After the Mass, while I waited outside to meet with Father Berndind, the young man in the t-shirt walked past. He followed a thin trail into the bush and disappeared.
“What’s the story with that guy?” I asked. “He kind of embarrassed me in there.”
“Oh, that’s Raymond.” Emmanuel said, “Nobody pays any attention to him. He’s one of Pa Ayamah’s patients.”
“I wasn’t there,” said Raymond’s sister, “But I heard about it. They had to take him back bound at the wrists and ankles.”
“Your teeth have worms in them.” George Fanka told Emmanuel. We had stopped to visit Emmanuel’s Aunt Eliza, before going to Bawum. “That’s why they hurt. They are filled to bursting with worms.”
“Worms?” Emmanuel asked.
“I am good with worms,” George Fanka assured him. “I can pull worms out of pile also.”
George Fanka did not fit my idea of a native doctor. He was my age and wore a Nike track suit. He styled his hair like an American rapper and had a cell phone on a cord around his neck. Emmanuel’s Aunt Eliza had hired George Fanka to treat her for a mysterious illness. She’d spent a good chunk of her life savings on doctors who couldn’t to give her a diagnosis. She was an enormous, ashen-faced woman in a wrinkled orange cava that gave her the look of a pumpkin left out after Halloween. At one point she had been too ill to stand; under Fanka’s care she had recovered enough to walk into the town center.
The night I met George and Aunt Eliza, we sat in her cinderblock living room drinking orange soda while George talked about his abilities as a healer. I got the sense that he was flattered that someone from the States would want to hear about them. “Well, Sir,” he said when conversation turned to his successful treatments, “I come from a long line of doctors. It’s in my blood. My uncle is a famous healer.”
“That’s why he came here,” Emmanuel said, nodding at his aunt. “She needed someone who could live here and George’s uncle recommended him.”
“Everyone in my family has the ability. There are contests you know. Yes, Contests. Contests.” George repeated words, as though I were selectively deaf. “All the doctors get together and we compete to see who the best is. I won a contest, you know.” He spoke quickly, eagerly.
George took a swig of orange soda, smacked his lips, and hurried on. “I won a contest and that’s how I lost my toes. Well, only on one foot, but that’s how I lost them. I’m a diviner; that’s what I do best.”
I thought I might not have heard him right. “You lost your toes?”
“On my right foot,” George replied. Abruptly, he dropped his soda bottle onto the table. Emmanuel lunged forward to keep it from spilling. George didn’t notice; he was bent over in his chair, tugging off his Nikes. A ripe odor filled the room as George held up his right foot. With a flourish, he tugged off his sock, like a waiter presenting an entrée.
His right foot had no toes. There was a line of angry, puckered scars where his toes had been. They looked like fistulas—like anuses.
“Holy fuck.” It came out before I could catch myself.
Aunt Eliza said something in a flustered Pidgin to George, who was proudly inching his foot towards my face.
Emmanuel moved to intercept George’s foot, but pulled back when I leaned in for a better look. “Are you scared?” he asked.
“No,” I said, “Just caught me by surprise.”
“Yes, sir!” said George, ignoring the interruption, “My toes were burned off by lightening. After I won the contest, I was too proud—I had been playing with my abilities too much. So someone threw lightening to hit me, but it just got my foot.”
George held his foot in the air, while he talked at me from between his legs. I peered closely at his foot. “Take a good look!” George said gleefully.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
As in many other parts of Africa, there are a number of people in Cameroon who claim the ability to conjure and direct lightening. Although everyone I asked told me it was possible to throw lightening—some even promised to introduce me to people who could do it—actually meeting lightening-throwers was very difficult. An English anthropologist named Nigel Barley had spent a year with the Dowayo tribe in Northern Cameroon asking about lightening rituals, only to discover that the Dowayo’s method of directing lightening was to place marbles from Taiwan in little bowls set on a nearby mountainside. My most credible lead was a professor at the University of Yaoundé: he suggested that lightening could be thrown by coaxing a chameleon to walk up a stick.
No matter: there have been some very strange, very public lightening strikes across Africa, many of them during soccer games. On October 25, 1998, eleven professional soccer players were struck by lightening during a crucial match in South Africa. Two days later, eleven Congolese soccer players were killed by a second lightening strike, this time a ground steamer. The worst lightening strike ever recorded occurred at a third soccer game in Malawi: lightening struck a metal fence, killing five people who were leaning on it, and injuring a hundred more. The official response of African Soccer officials to the lightening strikes was to ban witchdoctors from the African Nations Cup.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
I had no idea what toes burnt off by lightening might look like; I imagined they would have looked something like the scarred puckers on George’s foot. I wondered if he had cut his toes off himself, or lost them in an accident, but the wounds looked cauterized, like they had drawn up into themselves.
“Yes, sir,” George said from between his legs. “It might have been another jealous healer, or maybe the spirits thought I was too bold.”
I asked George if he could throw lightening. He dropped his leg and cried “Certainly not! I am a healer and a Christian.” He fixed me with an offended expression and wagged his finger back and forth, “That sort of thing is not what I do. What I do is, see, hold on…” He grabbed an empty glass from in front of him. “I make soapy water and I tell it aloud what a person’s illness is. Then I look into the water and I can see which kind of herbs I need to find. The next day I go out into the forest and get them.”
“I get headaches,” I said. “Do you have something for that?”
“And my teeth hurt,” Emmanuel said. George looked up my nose and at Emmanuel’s teeth. I needed to sneeze more, he told me. Emmanuel, he diagnosed, had teeth full of worms. We made an appointment to return the next day for treatment.
“He is such a good boy when he wants to be, or when he can be, maybe.” The nun glanced at a smudge on her frock and frowned. “It is just too bad they have not chosen to place his care in the hands of God.”
Clouds hung low in a leaden sky the morning Emmanuel and I presented ourselves at George’s door for treatment. George had put on a red Adidas shirt for the occasion. He greeted us with a businesslike air. He led Emmanuel and me to a small wooden shack, padlocked shut. The shack consisted of two rooms. The first had a bed and a small stereo; its walls were decorated with magazine cut-outs of American pop-stars. The other room was dark and stale. The door was guarded by a large stuffed baboon. “I’ll sell you the monkey,” George said to me.
George shrugged and led us past the baboon. Inside was a large table covered with old water bottles filled with different colored liquids. There were also little piles of red, brown, and green tree bark, ground up, scattered on newspaper. Emmanuel and I sat on a bench. George moved a few bottles and handed me a little bit of brown powder twisted up in cigarette cellophane. I felt like I was buying heroin. “For your headaches. It is a type of tree bark, okay? You snort a bit of that and then you will sneeze for a while and your head will clear.”
I nodded. George pulled out a dirty flat head screwdriver. “Let’s get rid of those worms,” he said to Emmanuel. “They are in your gums.” George poured some white lotion over a cotton ball. He told me to hold a piece of paper under Emmanuel’s chin. Emmanuel opened his mouth. I had a clear view.
“Hold the paper steady,” George said as he probed Emmanuel’s gum-line with the screwdriver.
Emmanuel’s mouth was very pink; his gums looked inflamed. George rubbed the cotton ball across Emmanuel’s gums. Little white spots appeared against the pink. In about ten seconds the spots grew larger; little white heads began to appear between Emmanuel’s teeth. George reached in Emmanuel’s mouth. He pinched one of the white heads between his screwdriver and his thumbnail and began to pull. The little head stretched and began to pop out, one little segment, then another. George grunted and forced another finger into Emmanuel’s mouth. The last segment of the white-head thing popped out with a little spurt of blood. George held it up for my inspection. It was a small, white, segmented worm, squirming, and ribboned with blood. It was about a two or three millimeters long, as fat as a maggot.
“They die fast in the open air,” he said, and dropped it onto the piece of paper I held. The worm curled up slowly then was still.
“Fuck.” I said. I had been watching carefully for any sleight of hand; I saw none. The worm had just appeared, a fat zit growing in stop-motion capture. I wanted to be skeptical, but the disconnect between my eyes and my brain made my mind go blank. I felt seasick. “Fuck.” I said again.
“You say that a lot,” said George, dropping another worm on the paper, “Uh—oh, I only got half of that one. If they die in there, they rot.” Emmanuel winced. His gums were bleeding profusely by the time George pulled the other half out. The whiteheads seemed to swell of their own accord. By the time he was done, George had pulled four more worms out of Emmanuel’s mouth.
A few days later, I asked Emmanuel if his teeth felt better. “I think so,” he said, “but I also went to a dentist who told me the pain was from an infection. He gave me medicine for it. So I don’t know if I feel better because of George or the medicine. I’m glad I covered all the options.”
I told all this to a prominent American biologist who was visiting the University of Yaounde. He was skeptical. He had never heard of such worms. When I returned to the United States, I went to my University library to research parasitic worms. To the best collective knowledge of Western biologists, there are no segmented parasitic worms that live in human mouths anywhere in West Africa. According to modern science, the worms I’d seen didn’t exist.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Oh it was terrible,” said the tailor who worked alongside the road, “We heard him screaming and laughing down on the road. He was like an animal or something possessed. I was scared.”
Pa Ayamah was a tall man with folds of skin hanging off his face. His eyes glistened; they slipped around in their sockets like ball bearings coated with oil. He spoke no English; Emmanuel translated for us. The three of us sat in a line of rickety chairs, pushed against the far wall of a dark dirt-floored room. Ayamah sat very still, but it was a nervous stillness, like a snake coiled to strike. I was glad that Emmanuel sat between us.
Ayamah began by announcing that he was of the sixth generation of healers to specialize in the mentally ill. He was the sole heir to two hundred years of practice. Ayamah spoke to Emmanuel, not me; Emmanuel waited until Ayamah finished before he translated his words.
“He says that the knowledge will die with him,” Emmanuel said. “His sons have left him to try to become businessmen in the cities.”
Ayamah spoke again, sharply; he stared at the empty space in front of him while Emmanuel translated. “They will end up as market boys. He says that they have forsaken their heritage to be market boys. He finds it shameful.”
Ayamah wore an old fedora with a snakeskin band. He said there were three causes of mental illness. The first cause was God, by which Emmanuel explained he meant Fate. The second reason a man might go crazy was because he’d neglected his ancestors. Ayamah’s expertise lay in the third reason for insanity—curses placed upon a victim by a malicious act of witchcraft.
“What happens after people go crazy?” I asked. Ayamah puckered his lips and blew in exasperation. His answer lasted over a minute. Emmanuel cleared his throat and gave a one word translation, “Encopresis”
“That means shit-smearing, right?”
“Yes, and they fight with it. Many things having to do with shit.”
“What does he do about it?” I gave up trying to phase my questions in the second person. Like Ayamah, I began to speak to Emmanuel directly.
“He has someone clean it up. They can make a real mess.”
“No, I meant for the treatment.” Emmanuel relayed the question. Ayamah looked at his forearm as if it he was waiting for it to tell him the answer. His tendons stood out; he had the physique of a much younger man.
Ayamah had only one method which he used to treat all forms of insanity: he and his assistants tied up the patient and beat him. When the patient became docile, he stuffed a special blend of herbs up their nose mornings and evenings. “He also maintains a small shrine to commune with his ancestors in the spirit world,” Emmanuel explained. “And he might consult the Bible for wisdom.”
“The Christian Bible?”
“Well, they translated it into the Bawum dialect,” Emmanuel said, misinterpreting my surprise.
“Yeah, but isn’t it sort of a contradiction to commune with one’s ancestors and then consult the Bible? You know, one God, above all others?”
Emmanuel translated the question; he laughed at Ayamah’s response. “He says ‘What’s the difference?’ Jesus is just a really old ancestor of yours. If he wants really old knowledge he talks to Jesus. When he wants to talk to someone more up-to-date he consults his own ancestors.”
Pragmatic, I thought.
Emmanuel waited a moment to see if I had any more questions, then went on. The only modifications Ayamah made to his treatments were for those who threw their shit. The shit-throwers he chained hand and foot. For everyone else, he simply took a log, drilled a big hole in it, and, after sticking the patient’s leg through the hole, nailed it tight. Patients found it difficult to go any farther than the compound’s edge while dragging a log attached to one of their feet.
“Doesn’t the sight of that bother you?” I asked Emmanuel.
Emmanuel scratched at a five o’clock shadow contemplatively. “I guess it might have, but I grew up in this village. You might say that the sight of madmen in logs was part of my childhood.”
Ayamah picked his nose and blew snot on the floor.
“What about Raymond, that guy I saw in church?” I asked, “How come he doesn’t have a log on his leg?”
Ayamah chuckled slightly when Emmanuel translated the question. His response had a lot of sound effects. At one point Ayamah acted out hitting something with his walking stick and cried, “Bam-Whacka–Bam!”
Emmanuel turned to me when Ayamah was finished. Again the translation was noticeably shorter than the story. “He said Raymond was a hard case. He never threw his shit, but he made trouble in other ways. He thought he wasn’t crazy. They had to beat him to make him understand he was unwell. Once he understood, he was docile.”
Joseph, the cook, agreed with all the others, “I was one of the people who brought Raymond back. Some other men had gathered and asked me to help them. I like him. He likes the food I make. I wasn’t happy to see him like that.”
On my way home from my interview with Pa Ayamah, I came upon Raymond crouched on a log. He was reading a pamphlet . He looked up. “Hey, it’s the missionary,” he said, grinning. “How’s the church work?”
“What? No, I’m not a missionary.” I said quickly.
“But you’re a white man. And I saw you at church.”
“I’m a student. I came to talk to Pa Ayamah.”
I took a seat next to him. He showed me his pamphlet. It explained the process of setting-up a library, catalogued according to the Dewey decimal system. “I’d like to go to a library again. Now I just read about them.”
“Did you used to go to libraries?”
Raymond laughed. “I wasn’t always like this. I used to study economics at the University. I was good at it too.”
You weren’t always like what? I wanted to ask. Raymond was odd—but living in Ayamah’s compound would give anyone a few quirks.
“Why did you quit?” I asked.
Raymond waved his hand airily. His wrists were too thick to make the gesture look natural; it came off as studied or affected. “My uncle. He put a curse on me…”
Raymond’s story sort of rolled out of him. It sounded as if he’d never told it before; he kept skipping back and forth, then pausing, thinking, trying to turn what had happened into words:
Raymond was six or seven, when his father died. His father practiced polygamy. As tradition dictated, Raymond’s father’s brother took Raymond and his widowed mother to live with his family. Raymond’s uncle beat him; Raymond’s aunt, jealous of another woman in the house, refused to feed him. Raymond pulled back his lips to show me how malnourishment had ruined his teeth. “Worst of all,” Raymond said, “My uncle was an evil man. He was a member of a secret society. The only thing he was good at was witchcraft.” Raymond said this as if he were confiding a secret.
Despite his harsh upbringing, Raymond was awarded the opportunity to study at the University of Buea, as was his cousin. “My uncle was furious that I should go to the same university as his son. He kept asking me who I thought I was. But he couldn’t stop me and my mother secretly gave me some money.” During the school year there wasn’t enough money for Raymond and his cousin to both come home on vacation, so Raymond stayed at the university studying economics, while his cousin came home during breaks.
“What type of economics did you study?” I asked.
Raymond furrowed his brow. “How do you mean?”
“I mean what exactly did you study economics for?”
Raymond inhaled sharply and shifted closer me; he grasped my knee. His face was mottled with little scars, but beneath them the skin was unlined. The whites of his eyes were completely clear, remarkable, given the dust and dirt of the place. “Oh you, know,” he said in an off-hand tone. “Lots of different things.”
Abruptly, Raymond lifted his head and looked off towards the tops of the trees. “Do you smell something burning?” he asked.
I sniffed the air. “No. I don’t smell anything.”
Raymond shrugged and went on with his story.
After months without seeing his family, Raymond’s uncle called him home just before exam period. When Raymond left, his uncle gave him ten-thousand francs. His uncle had never done anything like that before. “The money was cursed,” Raymond said. He spoke simply and directly, as if he was talking about the weather. As he went on, he stood and waved his hands to act out what he said. It was rare, in that region, to find anyone who spoke Standard English as well as Raymond did. He wore an old, torn t-shirt; dirt caked his legs and pants. His words, though, were clear; his accent crisp.
Raymond returned to school in time to begin cramming for exams. Although he felt he had much work to do, his thoughts kept on focusing on the ten-thousand franc note he had stashed away in his economics textbook. “It was calling to me. Like a beautiful prostitute. Something you know is wrong, but attracts you so much.” Twenty or thirty times in a day he would stop what he was doing and check to see if the money was still there.
“It got very bad,” Raymond said in a pleading voice, “This obsession with the money. I was studying all day for the exams, but I was thinking about the money. The night before the exams, I got sick. It was like a fever, and my chest was tight. I was sweating and moaning and I put the text book with the money in it in my bed.”
“Look, the experience you describe kind of sounds like an anxiety attack,” I broke in. “My friend Judd gets those from Malaria pills. Maybe you were stressed over exams.”
Raymond shook his head disdainfully. “This,” he said, “was not an anxiety attack. I was afraid to trust anyone. It was terrible. I locked myself in my room and held the book with the money in it to my chest. I was like that for twenty four hours; I missed my exams. Finally it was too much. I took the ten thousand francs and went to the market to buy medicine. But instead of medicine, I asked for poison.”
“They sell poison in the markets?” I had never seen any, but then again, I hadn’t looked.
“For animals. But they wouldn’t sell me poison, so I tried to buy Valium to take an overdose, but I was wild and out of control, so they wouldn’t sell me any.”
“If you could spend the money on Valium, why didn’t you just buy some expensive shoes or something and just be rid of it?”
Raymond shook his head impatiently, his wide-set eyes bulging. “Don’t you see? They controlled me! I couldn’t spend the money on anything but poison! Why of all the ways to kill myself did I try to use the money to buy poison? The money made me do it!”
Suddenly aware that he was shouting, Raymond gave me a weak smile and pulled his arms close to his body, “Sorry, I forget myself sometimes. Not exactly a smart thing for madman to do.”
“I hardly noticed,” I said, “Go on.”
“I went home in a rage and pulled down the light from the ceiling of my room and tore it open.”
Raymond seemed to forget his fear of yelling and began to mime the act of tearing apart a light fixture using flailing arm gestures. “ I took it so there were two wires, full of electricity, and I grabbed one with each hand so the electricity could flow through me and cure me of the fever.”
It was quiet where we sat; I could hear the whir of cicadas and the gurgle of a nearby stream. Raymond’s long toes scraped the dirt in front of me. His arms grasped imaginary wires; his body writhed; muted screams escaped through clenched teeth as he pantomimed his suicide attempt. The pantomime lasted long enough for me to grow frightened. Just as I was about to say something, Raymond collapsed. He lay motionless on the dirt.
In the morning, on the day Raymond decided to cross the road, he awoke on the floor of his hut. A white butterfly had landed on his upper lip. Half-asleep, he crushed it. The wings of the butterfly left traces of powder that smelled like burnt rubber. He dabbed his tongue across his lips; they tasted of copper…
“He was shouting about being on the road.” The sun-blackened old man whose only job seemed to be to sit on the lawn chair in front of the tailor’s shop agreed with everyone else. “And so what?" he said. “ I’m down on the road everyday. It’s nothing to get so excited about.” The old man took a pull on his cigarette and nodded sagely at his own words.
Raymond said that after he tried to electrocute himself, he awoke in a hospital. His burnt hands had been tied to the side of his bed. He’d been examined while unconscious. A foreign doctor had found evidence of possible brain anomalies and ordered a few basic tests to be conducted at the provincial hospital. If anything was found, further tests could be run in the capitol city of Yaounde. The doctor concluded, though, that Raymond was most likely suffering from something like anxiety or depression.
Raymond felt otherwise. The pieces fit together easily in his mind. His illness was caused by witchcraft on the part of his uncle, most likely with the help of a secret society and most likely with the help of other members of his family. Why else was he suddenly called home? Why else the sudden gift of ten thousand francs, from a man who had never before given him anything? His uncle had given him a gift of bewitched money. Everyone knows money is one of the strongest mediums for witchcraft.
Although I found it hard to draw the same initial conclusion as Raymond did, the description of his relationship with his uncle and his uncle’s actions follows an almost classic model of bewitchment. Accusations of witchcraft most often occur within families, or at least along some form of kinship lines. Witches and the bewitched almost always know each other. When Raymond suspected his illness was caused by witchcraft, he looked to the person who hated him most. His uncle’s gift became suspect when placed in its own cultural context.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
While traveling around Cameroon, I found that while I could not leave any of my belongings lying around because they inevitably would be stolen, loose cash left in plain sight was never touched. In the town of Kribi, a group of children went into hysterics when I picked a hundred-franc coin off the beach. The instant I touched the coin, the children screamed “No! Drop it! Drop it! Mami Water, she’ll get you! Mami Water! Mami Water!” The youngest of them were nearly in tears. In Kribi, no one touched lost money because of the belief that loose money was the way Mami Water—a mutation of the mermaid myth—enticed men into the ocean to drown them.
The story varied place to place, but the theme was the same: don’t take money from strangers. Cash is the perfect medium for sorcery.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Although Raymond remained distrustful of his uncle, he nonetheless left the hospital with him. His uncle remained silent, while his mother pressed his hand and told him that they had borrowed a car and arranged to bring him to Yaoundé where he could be given modern medical treatment. Instead, they drove west into the grassland regions along the Ring Road. In the village of Bawum, they parked the car on the path that led to Pa Ayamah’s compound.
“My uncle got out of the car and walked away. He came back with two men, who opened my car door and pulled me out. I was so shocked I didn’t do anything. I fell out of the car and they began to beat me while my uncle and my mother watched. I cried out for my mother to help me, but she kept repeating, ‘These men are going to help you.’ Then my uncle stood between us. I cried her name many times as they beat me and I began to bleed.” Raymond inhaled audibly and pulled at his ear. “My mother began to ask if it wasn’t enough, but my uncle pushed her into the car and they drove away.”
Almost an hour had passed since I had sat down next to Raymond. We were both sweating in the sun. Raymond lifted the bottom of his t-shirt to wipe away his sweat. It darkened the fabric.
“They had me chained to a post the first two months,” Raymond said, and picked at a stray thread on his shirt. “At first I tried to reason with them. I have had enough education to speak well and I yelled for days about the rights of man and how it was not right to treat me as they did.”
“Were you speaking in English?” I asked.
“Yes, some Pidgin, but mostly English. I don’t speak quite the same dialect as they speak here. It’s really kind of funny, because I was trying so hard to reason with them, but I was talking about the rights of man, you know, Liberte, Egalite, and Fraternite, which must have sounded like complete nonsense. It’s no wonder everyone thought I was crazy. It must have sounded like I was speaking in tongues! A total madman!” Raymond laughed. A sad, rueful laugh.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
What the “white man’s world” has so often seen as the mystifications of mumbo jumbo and the gibberings of witchcraft, the “black man’s world,” knowing its own reality, has recognized as, typically, the codified guarantee of survival and expansion in an immense process of continental growth and settlement.
– Basil Davidson, Black Man’s Burden
Raymond squinted at the sun. “I think I will go get a snack.”
“What are you having?”
“It’s mango season. Mangos.”
I walked with Raymond to the center of the compound, where he’d left a plastic bag of mangos. Mangos grew everywhere; at night, ripe fruit thumped to the ground like giant raindrops. We leaned against a plank, as we sat and ate. A schoolroom chalkboard hung on a wall across from us. The rules of the compound—Ayamah’s rules—were written on it:
Rules
- Take medicine at 9:00 and 5:00
- Clean personal space.
- No fighting.
- Bathe twice a week.
- Attend nightly prayers
- No crossing the stream.
- No crossing the road
The letters were written in a shaky hand. It looked like there had once been nine rules, but the last two had been washed off by rain. “Can I take a picture of that?” I asked, pulling a little point-and-click from my pocket.
Raymond looked eagerly at the camera. “I’ve never taken a picture before.”
I gave the camera to him and showed him how to zoom in and out. “Can you take a picture of those rules?” He stood up and carefully lined up the shot, trying different angles. Behind him, a huge man carrying a load of wood walked around the corner. The man looked like was a comic book artist’s drawing of a bodybuilder. In one fluid motion, the man dropped the firewood, caught one of the falling sticks and flung it at Raymond. The stick flashed past Raymond’s ear as Raymond pressed the shutter. The man was upon us in a roar, towering over me and dwarfing Raymond. Raymond smiled benignly and lowered the camera. There was a quick exchange in Pidgin and Raymond handed me back the camera. The behemoth fixed me in a hard squint. “That is a madman!” he growled. I didn’t say anything. He backed away with a menacing finger pointed at Raymond. Raymond and I stayed quiet while he gathered his firewood and stalked past us.
Raymond switched back to English and said in a steady voice. “He is one of the men whose task is to beat and control us. He doesn’t want me talking to you.”
“Why not?”
“Because I am a madman, of course. Just as he said.”
Raymond picked at the gaps between his teeth during the silence that followed. I couldn’t tell if he was serious. He may have been a bit odd: He talked in church; he thought he knew more about economics than he did- but, when he spoke to me, he was always lucid. In fact, Raymond was the most friendly, forthcoming, and sensible person I had met in days.
“Okay,” I said finally, “But you don’t really seem like a madman. Forgive me for saying so, but mostly you just seem unlucky.”
Raymond held out an empty hand and a sour look crossed his face. “As I told you, I am a simple man. It was my uncle’s witchcraft that drove me insane. The madness is there, even if it doesn’t show. Not to you. Not to me. But it is there.”
I put the camera back in my pocket. “People write books about that, you know. The insane are insane because they don’t know that they are insane. By that logic, I would say if you believe in your own madness it proves that you are fine.”
Raymond sighed and spat on the ground. “That’s a fun word game,” he said at last. “But it means nothing. Some of us in places like this require more than that. We must prove our insanity to ourselves.”
“How could you possibly have done that?” I cut in.
Raymond pointed at the chalkboard. “Do you see rule number 7?”
“Yeah. ‘No crossing the road’.”
Raymond turned and pointed in the direction of the road. “You might think that Pa Ayamah has that rule to keep us from wandering through town. That’s not it. Pa Ayamah says that this area is protected. Out on the road, we are exposed once more to the demons that cause our madness. If we cross the road, we go mad again.”
Raymond tapped his head. “A few days before you arrived, I went and tested his rules. I’m a madman all right.”
“A butterfly that tastes like copper?”
I had told Raymond’s story to an American biologist. An eminent American biologist. He frowned.
“That’s what he told me.”
“I really don’t know about that. But hey, maybe he was he having a seizure when he ate it. Epileptics taste copper before seizures. It's called the “Epileptic Aura.”
Raymond stood on the far side of the road and waited to go insane. Nothing happened, and it wasn’t long before it was clear that nothing was going to happen. It was all bullshit, the rules weren’t worth anything. He was fine.
“Please,” Raymond shouted to the empty road, “I have crossed the road and nothing happened. What’s more, I will cross it again!” He was almost hysterical with laughter as he sprinted back across the road. Three months of beatings had almost convinced him. He remembered how seriously he had begun to take Ayamah’s mumbo jumbo and hooted at the thought.
“I felt like celebrating. It felt wonderful to be so free,” he would later recall. “It was a wonderful celebration. I knew at that moment that I was cured. Probably there was nothing wrong with me in the first place.”
Four times he crossed the road. Each time he proclaimed his accomplishment to the uncaring trees and dusty rocks. Then it was ten times. His voice was hoarse with laughter and he barely had enough breathe to keep it coming. Standing in the middle of the road, he raised his hands heavenwards and shouted, “I am free to cross the road. Free to cross the road!”
Just beyond the far side of the road, a stream ran fast and clear over brown pebbles. A young girl had been wading in the water, her red dress turned dark at the hem. Frightened by the shouting, she ran to the nearby cooking shack where her mother was pounding huckleberries. The mother wiped her hands on a rag blackened by kitchen smoke and told her daughter to go inside. Outside the sound of shouting carried across treetops. On top of a bridge made of split logs, a group of villagers all faced the same direction. The mother followed their gaze. On the road, a young man skipped and laughed as he crossed and re-crossed the road, proclaiming his accomplishment each time. The women clucked their tongues in dismay, while the men discussed how to subdue him. How sad that so promising a youth could be so hopelessly and so obviously insane.