I I am Mfu, not a bit romantic, a water spirit, a voice from deep in the Atlantic: Mfu jumped ship, made his escape, to find relief from his grief on the way, long ago, to Brazil or Georgia or Carolina - he doesn't know which; but this is real, not a sentimental landscape where he sleeps free in the deep waves, free to speak his music: Mfu looks generously in all directions for understanding of the white men who came to the shores of his nation. Mfu looks for a festive reason, something that night have slipped. Mfu looks back at his Africa, and there at Europe, and over there at the Americas, where many of his kin were shipped and perished, though many survived. But how? In a system of slave-and-slaveholder locked in a dry struggle of social muck. Escape? No such luck then or now. And Mfu hears all around him a whirlwind of praise, explanation, implication, insinuation, doubt, expression of clout - "It was a good time to be white, British and Christian." [H. A. C. Cairns] And remembering the greed of the greedy white men of Europe for - ivory, gold, land, fur, skin, chocolate, cocoa, tobacco, palm oil, coffee, coconuts, sugar, silk, captured Africans, mulatto sex-slaves, "exotic" battles, and "divinely ordained slavery." And it was, indeed, with reverie, heaven-on-earth for white men. But Mfu is even more puzzled by the action of his own village: Mfu, a strong young man, sold in half-light, sold in the cover of night, and muzzled (not a mistake, not a blunder); sold without ceremony or one tap of the drum, sold in the wake of plunder - for a brush, not a sum of money, but a mere shaving brush, sold without consent of air, fish, water, bird or antelope, sold, tied with a rope and chain (linked to another young man from Mozambique's coast, who'd run like a streak but ended anyway in a slave boat without a leak or life-savers); sold, to that filthy Captain Snelgrave, sold by his own chief, Chief Aidoo. Sold for a damned shaving brush. (And Chief Aidoo, who'd already lived sixty winters, never had even one strand of facial hair.) Sold for a shaving brush. Why not something useful? Even a kolanut? A dozen kolanuts? Six dozen kolanuts? Sold for a stupid shaving brush. And why didn't the villagers object? (After all, he'd not been sold from jail, like Kofi and Ayi and Kojo and Kwesi and that girl-woman Efua.) And now Mfu's messenger, Seabreeze, speaks: "Chief Aidoo merely wanted your young wife, but before he could get his hands on her, she, in grief, took her own life - threw herself in the sea." Here in Mfu's watery bed of seaweed he still feels the dead weight of Livingston's cargo on his head, as he crosses - one in a long line of strong black porters - the river into East Africa; in his sea-floor bed of ocean-weed he still hears white men gathered in camp praising themselves, in lamp light, sure of their mission - "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them ..." (Matthew 28:19). Mfu, raised from seed a good boy - to do all he could - never went raving mad at his father, never shied from work, one to never mope: therefore when father said hold the shaving mirror for the white man, he held the shaving mirror for the white man, teaching himself to read the inscription: Kaloderma Shaving Soap. But now Mfu, like a tree, is totally without judgment or ambition, suspended between going and coming in no need of even nutrition - gray, eternal - and therefore able to see, hear, and know how to shape memory into a thing of wholeness and to give this memory not "the Negro revenged" voice of abolitionist Wm. Cowper - bless him - but to see, say, what went into the making of what, in those days, they called Negrophobia. II To understand the contour, Mfu must tour deep into Europe first, explore its sense of Mother Nature: Mother Nature in Europe is a giant pink pig with a black baby at one tit (this is good Europe: charitable, kind, compassionate Europe) and a white baby at the other. …
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Sep 8, 2006
Minnie H Patel + 3
Open Access