Night in Africa - from William

If you happen to be in the bush, then nighttime is exciting. At dusk, the path in front of you glows orange-red with the setting sun, and the sky is kiln-fired to a bright pink and brushed with dusty blue pigments. The earth, the sun, and the trees, the people, the birds, and the fields of maize that stretch out beside you, and even the houses are all clearly made of the same red-orange-pink-blue stuff, and that stuff is in you and in all things, and you walk among the orange stuff and you see the pink and blue stuff, and you are in all that stuff, but you are a part of all that stuff, as well, the stuff that stretches out and makes more room to let the glow of evening fill up the spaces between all things. And then the sun sets, and all the stuff of the earth is glued back together, crystallized into rigid shadows and outlines, dark on light, black superimposed on black. The sense of being a thing among related things begins to fade. You continue along the path, and the outlines of the trees loom up in front of you, guiding your turns. The path glows faintly, if there is a moon out, but early in the evening only the shadows (which are really grasses) and the sound of your feet on the sand can tell you - Yes, this is the path. The way forward is still this way!

Night time is not always quiet. In the center of the villages, the bars are blasting and thump-thump-thump-thumping Congolese rhythms, with the clear intention of deafening everyone for miles, and electric lights blaze overhead, their arcs of light askew and casting fanciful shadows of passersby and shoppers - but not shadows so much as elongations of their souls, cocked at the odd angles that the geometry of Fate might construct to contain them, bouncing off the walls of shops and the uneven leafy-ness of bushes in a mad attempt to transcend The Here, to ascend to Heaven in one quick jump. These shadows, black forms on yellow and white backgrounds, they shimmer and dance out of pace with their bodies, until they shrink down, crammed again into their vessels by enveloping darkness. The shoppers pass on, and the music is still thump-thumping.

So you turn away to the outskirts of the village. There, the night sounds fade to crickets and the path leads away from the village, back towards the fields. The smell of woodsmoke hangs limply in the air, a twinge of humanity's presence in this dark, inhuman world. A dog yips at something until another dog joins in, and another, and another, and suddenly the whole world is howling at something indistinct and thrilling, something bigger than the moon - the moon which has just peeked it's head over the tops of the distant trees, and sits there swollen and still growing, waiting for the right time to grab hold of her rightful seat in the sky - but still something not quiet as big as the sky and all the stars in it. The howls die away, and the occasional voice is heard behind you. A ladle is dropped, laughter suddenly jumps up from the nearby houses. A villager appears - really, you can't see her until she is right in front of you - walking along with a load of wood on her head. Her dress is dark fabric on dark skin enveloping her dark eyes in her head, invisible under her load are her dark tresses, so no wonder she appeared as a ghost in front of you, nothing more than shadow falling on silk. She is late coming home, didn't beat the sun back to the compound, firewood piled high, and people are waiting. Behind you, she turns a corner and disappears into the mystery of blackness that is the night, that is Africa itself.

Mystery has always bred magic. (After all, what is the magician but a controller of illusion, the Ring Master of normality, of rules and oaths, the inventor of a bubble in which things are unknown, unknowable, and mysterious?) And the mystery of night propels you forward with one swift step into the center of town. In one instant, you are in urban Africa, where night has the tang of metal ground into dust and the feel of leather worn, scuffed, and cracked. Here you notice that the air has cooled from the late afternoon rains, and the puddles catch the streetlights, flashing sodium orange globes up at you as you walk past. On raised and covered sidewalks, the evening people - a people seldom met in daylight - these people are crowding close to the artificial lights still on in store windows and hanging under the sidewalk's roof, sticking close to that thing they will not suffer in the day, churning out popcorn or samosas on charcoal fires, selling odd handkerchiefs and battered gents' watches, soliciting exotically at the edge of shadows, or barking at the yawning, toothless portals of nightclubs, from whose dimly lit interior comes the sounds of more Congolese music thump-thumping, the smell of bodies pressed tight against the real blackness, and shouts of revelry in the artificial nighttime.

Further away from the center of town, the lights fade down to just streetlamps. (The moon is still rising, but now it is obscured entirely by the trees around you.) Along the edge of the street, the sidewalk gradually gives way to a path in the grass, then fades to a track amid grasses cut low just today, then descends down to the street and over the curb, and flows away on the asphalt, invisible. You walk along the edge of the road, following the raised black-white-black-white paint of the curb. Soon, the night's orb spreads a glimmer of silver through the tops of the trees, but no light reaches down to the ground yet, just the black-white-black-white of the curb and your feet softly padding along in rhythm, left-right-left-right, still the same rhythm of the thump--thump-thump-thumping in the clubs and in the village, and the whole world is moving 1-2-1-2-1-2-1-2 with you. In and out of the streetlights, you walk through their pools of yellow light, the buzzing of electric daylight above. At first, your shadow leaps out behind you, stretching to grasp at the inky street, but then it is compressed around you, becomes a blanket wrapped around your body as you reach the center, then - sensing relief - it rushes again towards the nighttime on the other side. Your shadow always reaches the far side of the light first, where it waits, taunting you, but ready once again to travel with you through the nighttime.

The street is not yours alone, however. Behind you, the whistle of the cars becomes a rush becomes a crashing elephant becomes a beeping horn - Do you need a Taxi, my Friend? - and then flies past, leaving a womp-womp-womp-womp sound of unevenly filled tires on unevenly worn pavement and the light in front is replaced with the dull, red-orange-amber, evil grin of the tail lights, watching you with warning and malice - Don't Follow Me! In the opposite lane, the cars appear as if by angelic appointment, just two (but often only one) white globes suspended near where you think the horizon might be. Again the whistle and the rush and the crash of elephants and also a beeping horn - Should I take you to your destination, Boss? - and then it passes you, showing you the same demonic smile, issuing the same demonic warning - Don't Follow Me! A dog darts across the road, tail between her legs, not trespassing into the light, just skirting the edge of the street lamp's domain. Other people walk along - before and behind you - their dark skins reflecting only brown and orange light under the streetlamps, then disappearing into the night between the lights again, and again glowing, now disappearing, until they turn off the road and into a compound or down a side street.

You walk along 1-2-1-2 until you pass under the last streetlamp. The darkness is there, waiting. Now the people walking along here are fewer. And, like the woman in the field, they appear as a whisper of motion, more of a hint of being there than something truly seen, just at the edge of vision where night takes Truth and Knowing and Safety and smelts them all into mystery.The lights of the houses on either side stab brightly into the dark, short rapiers thrust into the folds of something much to large to comprehend, let alone wound or slay. You look away because they rob you of what little perception can be had without moon or sun or torch to light the road in front of you. Now the road is becoming rutted, riddled with potholes. The cars no longer speed past you, but creep, winding along various paths of their own designing, seeking the low, smooth bottom of the road - a rivulet flowing through a river otherwise tormented by rocks, eddies, and whitewater. When the headlights of the cars catch people moving in front of them, their silhouette stands out from the ankles upwards but disappears at the knees, melting back into darkness. Their shadows reach out in front of them, though, tall and proud and you can't begin to tell which of these mysterious figures belongs to whom, for is it the shadow standing in the air or lying along the ground?

You leave these troubling ghouls of nighttime and walk to the edge of town. Again, you have reached the fields and the bush, and you stand at the top of a rise, which descends slowly to a river before rising again to the forest on the other side. All of this you can see clearly - the mango trees lining the path, their branches loaded with sweet fruits, the grasses swaying along the river's edge, bowing in obeiscence to the soft breeze, the outline of a house across the bank, and the lines of maize and sweet potato beds running in exact parallel through it all, criss-crossed by the wandering paths carved out by ten thousand feet. A veil of moonlight seems laid down upon the earth, illuminating most things, but revealing nothing in the face of her mystery.

-William