Travels with Herodotus Read online

  Furthermore, it is not merely two gendarmes and a reporter who are participating in this street scene in a small Congolese town. Also present is a huge swath of world history, which already set us against one another many centuries ago. Here between us stand generations of slave traders; the myrmidons of King Leopold, who cut off the hands and ears of the grandfathers of these policemen; the overseers of cotton and sugar plantations, whips in their hands. The memory of those torments was passed down for years in tribal stories, and the men whom I am about to encounter would have been reared on those tales, on legends ending with a promise of a day of retribution. And today is that day—both they and I know it.

  What will happen? We are close already, and getting closer and closer. Finally, they stop. I too stop. And then, from under that mountain of gear and scrap iron, emerges a voice that I will never forget, its tone humble, even pleading:

  “Monsieur, avez-vous une cigarette, s’il vous plaît?”

  What a sight it must have been, the zeal and the haste, the politeness, the servility even, with which I reached into my pocket for a pack of cigarettes, my last, but what does it matter, take it, my dear boys, take them all, sit and smoke the entire pack, right away, until not a puff of smoke is left!

  Doctor Otto Ranke is pleased at my good fortune. These encounters often end very badly. The gendarmes have killed many people already. White and black both come to see Doctor Ranke about their injuries; the badly tortured must be carried in by others. The policemen spare no race, and massacre their own as readily as, even more frequently than, they do the Europeans. In this way they are occupiers of their own country, men who observe no moderation and no boundaries. “If they do not touch me,” says the doctor, “it’s only because they need me. When they are drunk and have no civilian handy upon whom to discharge their rage, they fight amongst themselves, and then they are brought here, for me to sew up their heads and set their bones.” Dostoevsky, Ranke says, described the phenomenon of pointless cruelty. So it is with these gendarmes, he says; they are cruel without reason or necessity.

  Doctor Ranke is an Austrian and has been living in Lisali since the end of World War II. Slight, fragile-looking, yet still lively and indefatigable approaching his eightieth year. He owes his relative good health, he says, to his taking each day in the morning, when the sun is still gentle, a walk out into the green and flowering courtyard, where seated on a stool, he has a servant wash his back with a sponge and a brush so vigorously as to produce from the doctor actual little moans of both satisfaction and pain. These moans, snorts, and the laughter of overjoyed children who have gathered around the doctor to watch the rubdown, awaken me, because the windows of my room are nearby.

  The doctor has a little private hospital—a white-painted barrack standing near the villa where he lives. He did not flee with the Belgians, he says, because he is old already and has no family anywhere. Here people know him and he hopes that they will protect him. He took me in, he says, for safekeeping. As a correspondent, I have nothing to do, because there are no means of communication with Poland. Not a single newspaper is being published in this part of the country, there is no functioning radio station, no government. I am trying to get out of here—but how? The closest airport—in Stanleyville—is closed, the roads (now in the rainy season) are swamped, the ship that once plied the river Congo has long ceased to do so. I do not know what it is exactly that I am counting on. A little bit of luck, I suppose, and the goodwill of the people around me. Most of all I am hoping that the world will change for the better, a chimerical idea to be sure, but I must believe in something. Still it does not keep me from walking around tense and nervous. I feel anger and helplessness—by turns familiar states of mind in this line of work, in which so much time is given over to fruitless waiting for a way to communicate with one’s country and with the world.

  If one happens to hear that there are no gendarmes in town, one can venture an expedition into the jungle. It is all around, rearing up in every direction, screening out the world. One can enter the forest only along the laterite road that has been cut through it. There is no entrance to this otherwise impregnable fortress, a green mass of branches, vines, and leaves; legs sink into slimy, foul-smelling bogs, as all sorts of spiders, beetles, and worms begin to rain down upon one’s head. The inexperienced in any event do not dare plunge into the virgin forest, and the idea of hacking one’s way through it is unthinkable to the locals. The jungle no less than the ocean, or a range of high mountains, is a closed, discrete, independent entity, not to be idly entered into. It always fills me with fear—that from its thickets a predator will suddenly pounce, that a poisonous snake will with invisible speed strike me, or that I will hear too late the swish of an approaching arrow.

  Usually a group of children catches up with me just as I’m setting out toward the green colossus—they want to accompany me. At the outset they are in high spirits, laughing and frolicking about. But when the road enters the forest, they grow silent, serious. Perhaps they imagine that somewhere, in the darkness of the jungle, lurk phantoms, wraiths, and witches that kidnap disobedient children. It is well to be mindful of what even children understand, to be quiet and pay attention.

  Sometimes we stop along the road, right near the edge of the jungle. It resembles twilight here, and the air is thick with aromas. There are no animals on the road, but you can hear the birds. And the sound of drops falling on leaves. Unaccountable rustlings. The children like to come here, they feel at home and know everything. Which plant one can pick and bite into, and which one cannot so much as touch. Which fruit is comestible, and which poisonous. They know that spiders are very dangerous, and lizards not at all. And they know that one must look up at the branches, because a snake might be lurking there. The girls are more serious and more careful than the boys, and so I observe their actions and order the boys to follow suit. All of us are subject to the same sensation, that which reminds me of entering a great, lofty cathedral, in which a human being feels minuscule and conscious of how much larger than himself everything else is.

  Doctor Ranke’s villa stands beside a wide road that cuts through northern Congo and, running close to the equator, leads through Bangui to Douala on the Gulf of Guinea, where it ends roughly at the height of Fernando Po. But that is far from here, more than two thousand kilometers away. A portion of this road had been paved, but only shapeless scraps of asphalt remain today. When I have to walk here on a moonless night (and tropical darkness is thick, impenetrable), I advance slowly, dragging my feet along the ground, to feel, testing the way as best I can—shur-shur, shur-shur—vigilantly, carefully, because there are so many invisible holes, pits, depressions. When columns of fugitives pass this way at night, one sometimes hears a sudden cry—of someone having fallen into a deep hole and probably broken a leg.

  Fugitives. Suddenly, everyone has become a fugitive. The Congo’s independence in the summer of 1960 was accompanied by the eruption of tribal strife, and eventually warfare, and ever since the roads have been filled with fugitives. Gendarmes, soldiers, and ad hoc tribal militias engage in the actual fighting, whereas civilians, which usually means women and children, flee. The routes of these flights are often difficult to re-create. Generally, the goal is to get as far away as possible from the battle, though not so far as to lose one’s way and later be unable to return. Another important consideration is whether or not one will be able to find something to eat along a particular escape route. These are poor people, and they have but a few belongings: the women, a percale dress; the men, a shirt and a pair of pants. Other than that, perhaps a piece of cloth for cover at night, a pot, a cup, a plastic plate, and a basin in which to carry everything.

  But the single most important factor in choosing a route is tribal relationships: whether a given road goes through friendly territory or, God forbid, leads straight into enemy lands. The relations among the various clans and tribes inhabiting the roadside villages and jungle clearings constitute a difficult and co
mplex body of knowledge, which everyone begins to absorb in childhood. It is what enables people to live in relative safety, avoiding avoidable conflicts. Dozens of tribes inhabit just the one region where I happen to be right now. They are grouped in a variety of associations and confederations whose customs and regulations are known only to themselves. As a foreigner, I have no way of mentally navigating, organizing, deciphering, understanding even a fraction of this knowledge. What possible guide could I have to the state of relations between Mwaka and Panda, or between Banda and Baya?

  But the locals know the state well; their lives depend upon it.

  They know who places poisoned thorns on which path, where a hatchet lies buried.

  Why so many tribes? Just one hundred and fifty years ago there were still ten thousand of them in Africa. Even today, all you have to do is walk down the road a ways: in one village, the Tulama tribe; in the very next one, the Arusi; on one side of the river, the Murle; on the other bank, the Topota. On the summit of the mountain lives one tribe; at its foot, an entirely different one.

  Each has its own language, its own rituals, its own gods.

  How did it come to this? Whence this fantastic diversity, this improbable richness of variation? How did it all begin? When? In what place? Anthropologists tell us it started with a small group. Perhaps with several. Each had to number approximately thirty to fifty. If smaller, men could not defend themselves; bigger ones could not find enough to eat. Even in my time I managed to encounter in East Africa two tribes neither of which numbered more than one hundred people.

  All right, then—let’s say, thirty to fifty individuals. Such is the nucleus of a tribe. But why does such a nucleus necessarily come to need its own language? How could the human mind even invent such an astonishing array of forms of speech, each one with its own vocabulary, grammar, inflections, and so on? A great, million-strong nation creating a language for itself through a prolonged communal effort—that one can grasp. But here in the African bush it is a matter of small tribes barely eking out a living, walking barefoot and eternally hungry; and yet they had the will and the capacity to devise languages for themselves—distinct, proprietary, theirs alone.

  And not just languages. Because simultaneously, since their very origins, they invent gods. Each tribe has its own unique deities. And why should they not have started with one god, but right away with several? Why does humanity endure for thousands and thousands of years before developing the idea of a single deity? Reason might suggest such a concept would first arise.

  And so to resume, science has determined that in the beginning there was only one group—in any event not more than a few. With time, others developed. Curious, that a new group, arriving on the scene, as it were, would not first survey the terrain, size up the situation, listen to the prevailing parlance. No—it emerges with its own language, its own pantheon of gods, its own universe of traditions. With relative immediacy it demonstratively underscores its own otherness.

  Over years, over centuries, there are more and more of these tribal nuclei. It starts to get crowded on this continent of many people, many languages, and many gods.

  Herodotus, wherever he was, always tried to note the names of tribes, their location and customs. Where someone lives. Who are his neighbors. This because knowledge of the world—whether back then in Libya and Scythia or today here in the northern Congo—accrues not vertically but horizontally, synthetically from a bird’s-eye view. I know my nearest neighbors, and that is all; they know theirs; and those know others still. In this way we will arrive at the ends of the earth. And who is to gather up all these bits and arrange them?

  No one.

  They cannot be arranged.

  When one reads in Herodotus those lists of tribes and their customs, which stretch for pages on end, it seems as if neighbors select one another based on differences. That is why there is so much enmity between them, so much fighting. It is thus in Doctor Ranke’s hospital as well. Night and day families at the patients’ bedside, individual clans and tribes, occupy separate rooms. The goal is to have everyone feel at home, and to prevent one side from casting spells on the other.

  Discreetly, I try to infer the differences. I walk around the little hospital, look into the rooms—not a difficult thing to do, because in this hot and humid climate everything is wide open. But the people all seem alike, invariably poor and listless, and only if one listens carefully does one notice that they speak different languages. If one smiles at them, they will respond in kind, but a smile such as theirs will take a long time forming and will remain upon the face for only a moment.

  THE GREEK’S TECHNIQUE

  I’m leaving Lisali because I have managed to hitch a ride. Hitching a ride—that is how one travels here these days. All of a sudden, a car appears on a road that has been deserted for days. At the mere sight our hearts start to beat faster. We flag it down as it draws near. “Bonjour, monsieur,” we say ingratiatingly to the driver, and then, hopefully, “avez-vous une place, s’il vous plaît?” Of course he doesn’t—the cars are always full. But everyone inside, already squeezed together, now, instinctively and without prodding or persuasion, squeezes together even more, and somehow, all of us jammed into the most back-bending positions, now set off. It is only when the car is once again on its way that we ask those sitting closest to us if by any chance they know where we are going. There really isn’t a clear answer to this question, because no one actually knows our destination. We are simply driving where we can.

  One quickly gets the impression that everyone would like to journey as far as possible. The war surprised people in the farthest corners of the Congo—an enormous country with no public transportation system—and now those who were far away from their homes, either looking for work or visiting their families, would like to return but have no means of doing so. Their only hope is to hitch rides going in more or less the desired direction—simply to drive.

  There are people who have already been on the road for weeks, months. They have no maps, but even if they should happen on one, it is doubtful that they would find upon it the name of the village or town to which they wish to return. Even if it were there, it would be of little use to them—they are largely illiterate. What is astounding about these wanderers is their acquiescence to everything they encounter. If there is an opportunity to get a ride, they take it. If there isn’t, they squat down on a roadside rock and wait. I was most fascinated by those who, having lost any sense of direction and unable to associate the names of locales they came across with any familiar to them, ended up someplace far from home in every sense. Now what? How exactly would they reorient themselves? Where they now found themselves, the names of their home villages meant nothing to anyone.

  When drifting and straying in this way, it is best to stay together, to travel in a larger, tribal group. Of course, one cannot then count on getting a ride, and one has to walk—for days, weeks. Just walk. One encounters such wandering clans and tribes often. Sometimes they form long, staggered columns, carrying all their possessions on their heads—in bundles, basins, buckets. The hands are always kept free, which is necessary for maintaining one’s balance and useful for chasing away flies and mosquitoes as well as wiping the sweat off one’s face.

  One can stop at the edge of the road and strike up a conversation with these wayfarers. If they know how to reply, they answer one’s questions willingly. Asked “Where are you going?” they respond, to Kindu, to Kongolo, to Lusambo. Asked “Where is that?” they are embarrassed; how does one explain to a stranger where Kindu is? But on occasion some of them indicate a direction with their hand—to the south. Asked “Is it far?” they are even more embarrassed, because, if truth be told, they don’t know. Asked “Who are you?” they answer that they are called Yeke, or Tabwa, or Lunda. “Are there many of you?” This again they do not know. If one queries the young, they will suggest that one go and speak to the elderly. If one asks the elderly, they will begin to argue among themselves.
/>   From the map which I’m carrying (“Afrique. Carte Generale,” published in Bern by Kummerly + Frey, undated), it appears that I am somewhere between Stanleyville and Irunu. I am trying to get to Kampala, in then still peaceful Uganda, from where I hope to be able to communicate with London and with their assistance to start sending dispatches to Warsaw. In this profession, the pleasure of traveling and the fascination with what one sees is inevitably subordinate to the imperative of maintaining one’s ties with headquarters and of transmitting to them what is current and important. That is why we are sent out into the world—and there are no other self-justifications. If I can just reach Kampala, I think to myself, then I’ll be able to get to Nairobi, from there to Dar es-Salaam and Lusaka, then on to Brazzaville, Bangui, Fort Lamy, and beyond. Plans, intentions, dreams, drawn with a finger on a map while sitting on the wide verandah of a charming villa drowning in bougainvillea, sage, and climbing geraniums, which has been abandoned by a Belgian, the owner of a now-shuttered sawmill. Children standing around the villa observe the white man attentively, in silence. Strange things are happening in the world—not long ago, adults were telling them that the whites had gone, and now it seems that they are back again.

  The African journey goes on and on, and with the passage of time places and dates become tangled—there is so much of everything here: the sheer number of events—that my impressions of the continent swell uncontrollably. I travel and write, the whole while feeling that all around me important and unique things are occurring to which I must also bear witness, however fragmentarily.