Drink the Bitter Root. Gary Geddes
assume control. That was certainly the case with Laurent Kabila in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Luis Moreno-Ocampo—the fiery and dynamic new chief prosecutor of the ICC, who had come through the turbulent ’80s in Argentina with its torture and disappearances—was especially concerned with the “corporate factor,” Béatrice said, the role of resource companies in conflicts worldwide. The OTP’s team of lawyers investigating war crimes had been allowed to interview victims, rebel militias, even soldiers in the DRC, but their activities were cut short by the government the moment they tried to interview the white managers and executives of foreign companies in the conflict zone.
All this talk of universal justice left me troubled. While I could see many elements in African and Asian societies—including stoning, the chopping off of hands, female circumcision, forced marriages, child labour and slavery—that cried out for change, there was no ignoring the travesties of justice in the West, where money, plea bargaining, evidence tampering and jury rigging often precluded a fair trial, where innocent people could be put away for life and killers walk free. I had come across a telling anecdote about the communal aspects of justice in Patrick Marnham’s book, Fantastic Invasion, in which he talks about justice in Africa:
In the eighteenth century King Damel of the Wolofs captured (after a fierce battle) his neighbour King Abdulkader, who had invaded his country on a Moslem jihad and who had announced his intention, for the glory of God, of slitting King Damel’s throat. By tradition the victorious Damel should have placed his foot on Abdulkader’s neck and stabbed him with a spear. Instead, Damel asked Abdulkader what he would have done had he been the victor. Abdulkader gave the traditional account of behaviour and said that he expected the same treatment, and make it snappy. Damel declined, saying that if he made his spear any redder, it would not build up his town or bring to life the thousands who had fallen in the woods. Instead, he kept King Abdulkader as his slave for three months and then, at the request of the king’s subjects, released him. This story was cited all over Senegambia as an example of wisdom and justice. Doubtless King Damel’s merciful behaviour was exceptional, but it reveals that the indigenous African sense of justice had no need to be bolstered by the Northern legalism that has supplanted it.
CONVERSATION AT MEAL times on international flights is difficult to avoid. There’s something faintly ridiculous about stuffing your mouth in such close quarters with fellow humans, hands raised like a squirrel’s to negotiate the limited space, and maintaining a strict silence. I was preparing myself to engage with my seatmates when the woman beside me spoke.
“Would you mind holding my tray while I get up? I’m sorry about the timing, but I have to visit the washroom.”
I held the tray of unopened items until the woman disappeared down the aisle, then returned it to her folding table. On impulse, I picked up the Bible she’d left on the seat, pleased to see it was the King James Version, which at least delivers its tales of rape, murder, mayhem and redemption with a poetic flourish. The soft, black pebbled leather cover, marbled endpapers and gold-edged pages were also tasteful. I could not resist checking to see what she had been reading, indicated by the position of a narrow linen bookmark sewn into the binding. The Bible opened invitingly, and the soft onionskin pages spread flat in my palm with none of the stiffness and resistance of ordinary paper.
“I see you’re not only an avid reader yourself, but also a curious observer of the world at large. And what exactly is the good lady reading?” inquired my neighbour in the window seat who, up to that point, had been plugged into earphones. Damn, I thought, caught in the act.
I replaced the Bible and undid the screw cap on my tiny bottle of red wine while I considered my reply. “Given that I need a drink to cover my embarrassment, it would not have surprised me to find she was reading from Proverbs 20:1: ‘Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging, whosoever is deceived thereby is not wise.’ However, the truth is she was reading from Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians 13:13: ‘And now abideth faith, hope, charity and the greatest of these is charity.’ It would be extremely charitable if you ignored my bad manners.”
“Andrew,” he said, extending a very large hand. I mumbled my first name and nodded. Then, in his plummy Oxford accent, he added: “I did not take you for a religious person.”
I managed a poor imitation of a grin, took another sip of wine. “What are the distinguishing characteristics of a religious person? Don’t be deceived by these civilian clothes; I could be a plainclothes priest or a terrorist.”
“Is there a difference? At least you’re well-read, whatever species. Toujours la manière. If we’re all to die or be pummelled in the interests of virtue, it’s nice to know it will at least be done with style.”
“I’m a word addict,” I confessed. “I quote from cereal boxes, too. Sometimes, if the words are clever, beautiful or in just the right order, they nest in my ear. My wife considers my punning a pathology. I trust you won’t disclose my indiscretion to the lady.”
Andrew laughed, broke off a piece of bun and dipped it into the remaining chicken gravy on his tray. “Mum’s the word,” he said. As the lady in question slid into her seat, the conversation was once again submerged in engine noises, a public announcement about potential turbulence and the drinks wagon coming down the aisle. Andrew replaced his earphones and resumed the movie. Our trays were removed, the lady’s meal untouched.
I was too wired to sleep, so I spent the final three hours of the flight to Entebbe reading a play by the Nigerian Wole Soyinka called Death and the King’s Horseman and looking through my dog-eared copy of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, its title drawn from W.B. Yeats’s apocalyptic vision of the world in his poem “The Second Coming.” Set amidst Nigeria’s Ibo tribe, Achebe’s novel offers a unique perspective on Caucasian-African relations, showing how foreign priests are advance troops in the process of pacifying and colonizing the “natives.” A slave boy, who is offered to atone for the death of a girl from the tribe, is later required to be killed. Refusing, for fear of appearing weak, to exempt himself from the ritual murder of this child, whom he has come to love as a son, Achebe’s central character, Okonkwo, brings shame and bad luck upon himself and goes into self-imposed exile. He returns home after seven years only to find the old ways are under threat by the colonialists. When Okonkwo asks his friend Obierika if the white man understands local customs, he gets this reply: “How can he when he does not even speak our tongue? But he says that our customs are bad; and our own brothers who have taken up his religion also say that our customs are bad. How do you think we can fight when our own brothers have turned against us? The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.” If justice and hope were in such short supply in the fictional world of African writers, I thought, they were likely to be even scarcer on the ground.
I was already familiar with Soyinka’s essays and fiction, where it is not so much the “oppressive boot” of colonialism that is held up to scrutiny as irreconcilable notions of foreign justice and native spirituality. Yoruba tradition, I learned as I immersed myself in Death and the King’s Horseman, requires that when a chief dies, his personal horseman must commit suicide and follow his leader into the afterlife; otherwise, the chief’s soul will wander aimlessly and create chaos for the people. In the play, Elesin, the dead chief’s horseman, celebrates life to the fullest as he prepares to meet his obligation. However, the British district officer, Mr. Pilkings, intervenes, insisting the ritual is degrading and primitive. The disruptions of community life resulting from this break with tradition are manifold: Elesin is cursed by his neighbours; his son returns from medical school in Europe and, for the honour of his family, commits suicide in his father’s place; the father then kills himself in despair, condemning his soul and bringing disgrace to the community. The blame for Elesin’s failure to complete the ritual remains ambiguous, a complicated mixture of vanity, cultural misunderstanding, fleshly indulgence that saps the hero’s resolve and blind foreign intervention. Pilkings, still in his skeletal party costume and surrounded by the carnage his intervention has created, asks Elesin’s loyal wife, Iyaloja: “Was this what you wanted?”