Travels with Herodotus (21 page)

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 complex 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.

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.

Despite this, however, I still try, in my spare moments and if I have strength enough, to read: the 1899
West African Studies
, by the Englishwoman Mary Kingsley, who was penetrating in her observations and courageous in her compass;
Bantu Philosophy
, by the priest Placide Tempels, published in 1945; or the profound, thoughtful
Afrique ambiguë
, by French anthropologist Georges Balandier (Paris, 1957). And in addition, of course, Herodotus.

But during this period, I abandoned momentarily the fortunes of the people and wars he wrote about and concentrated instead on his technique. How did he work, i.e., what interested him, how did he approach his sources, what did he ask them, what did they say in reply? I was quite consciously trying to learn the art of reportage and Herodotus struck me as a valuable teacher. I was intrigued by his encounters, precisely because so much of what we write about derives from our relation to other people—I-he, I-they. That relation’s quality and temperature, as it were, have their direct bearing on the final text. We depend on others; reportage is perhaps the form of writing most reliant on the collective.

I noticed also from reading books about Herodotus that no authorities concerned themselves exclusively with the Greek’s text itself, with its accuracy and reliability, generally paying no heed to how he gathered his raw material and then wove from it his immense and rich tapestry. It is precisely that aspect that seemed to me worth delving into.

And there was more to the idiosyncrasy of my engagement. As time went by and I kept returning to
The Histories
, I began to feel something akin to warmth, even friendship, toward Herodotus. I actually became attached not so much to the book, as to its voice, the persona of its author. A complicated feeling, which I
couldn’t describe fully. It was an affinity with a human being whom I did not know personally, yet who charmed me by the manner of his relationships with others, by his way of being, by how, wherever he appeared, he instantly became the nucleus, or the mortar, of human community, putting it together, bringing it into being.

Herodotus was a child of his culture and of the climate—so favorable to humans—within which it developed. It was a culture of long and hospitable tables, at which one sat in large groups of a warm evening to eat cheese and olives, drink cool wine, converse. Open space unrestricted by walls, either at the seashore or on a mountainside, liberated the human imagination. The conviviality afforded confabulators the chance to shine, to engage in spontaneous tournaments during which those who recounted the most beguiling tale, retold the most extraordinary events, would reap regard. Facts mixed here with fantasy, times and places were misstated, legends were born, myths arose.

Reading Herodotus, we have the impression that he eagerly participated in such banquets as an attentive and self-applied listener. He must have had a phenomenal memory. We modern folk, spoiled by the power of technology, are cripples when it comes to recollection, panicking whenever we do not have a book or computer at hand. Yet even today there are societies to be found that demonstrate how prodigiously capacious human memory can be. And it is precisely in such a world of seemingly total recall that Herodotus lived. The book was a great rarity, inscriptions on stones and walls an even greater one.

The stuff of community was made up of two essential elements: first, individuals, and second, that which they transmitted to one another through immediate, personal contact. Man, in order to exist, had to communicate, and in order to communicate, had to
feel beside him the presence of another, had to see him and hear him—there was no other form of communication, and so no other way of life. The culture of oral transmission drew them closer; one knew one’s fellow not only as one who would help them gather food and defend against the enemy, but also as someone unique and irreplaceable, one who could interpret the world and guide his fellows through it.