Yet Hock was not alone. The football field glowed yellow in the firelight. The ta-dum ta-dum of the drum being slapped, the plink-plink of the plucked finger harp like the shrill notes of a xylophone made of glass, and the far-off yodeling of women mingled with the growls of men. It seemed the whole village was awake.
Had he been a first-timer on a bush walk, down here to look at hippos in the river or to go bird watching in the marsh, he might have seen this as a colorful nighttime get-together. He smiled briefly, the naïve thought of a party crossing his mind, and then he went grim again, picking his way to the fat baobab stump forty yards from his hut. He crouched at the stump. He knew what he was watching, and it was not a party.
In his day, this ceremony had been performed outside the village as an expression of the secret society of men, directed by the chief. It was so hidden that he’d only heard the drumming those nights and seen the exhausted faces the following morning. He’d inquired and been told it was “the Big Dance,” the Nyau or image dance — maybe a wedding, or a funeral, or an ujeni (“whatsit”), they said, meaning something forbidden or not to be spoken about to a mzungu, or an outsider, or an uninitiated girl.
He knew what he was hearing, and he could see the dancers gathering and stamping their feet in time to the drums and the tinkling finger harp, now tripping faster, plinka-plinka-plinka. He knelt and held on to the stump for balance and to ease the weight on his knees. He’d sometimes see a snake here at the stump, a puff adder that swelled to the thickness of his wrist, but snakes didn’t stir at night.
He was more concerned by the crowd gathering around the leaping fire, the sharp gunshot crack of the burning branches, the sparks flying up in clusters — some carried into the sky, borne by the uprush of heat and flames. He had never overcome his fear of an African crowd, how it might grow from a handful of people to a restless sweaty mob. He’d seen such mobs at political rallies in his first years, the crazy mass of yelling men and yodeling women. Once, on the bus to Chikwawa, he’d witnessed a group of men at a roadblock. Laughing with a superior-sounding anger, they boarded the bus and used thick clubs to beat the Sena men who were not wearing the party badge that showed the president’s face. He’d seen one man, begging for his life, kicked and trampled into silence.
The Big Dance, for all its apparent order, was no less menacingly mob-like. It seemed that every man and boy in Malabo was on the field. The women were audible in their ululation, but they were distant, unseen, nearer the huts. Even the orphan boys, in their rags and shaggy hair and torn T-shirts, were stamping to the drumbeat.
Yet just as all those men, sweaty in the firelight, seemed on the verge of rushing apart in a frenzy of aimless rage, a figure appeared before them — Manyenga, like a hectoring choirmaster. He was chanting a word, unintelligible to Hock, and the rest of the crowd took it up as a cry. As they repeated it, they seemed more unified and solemn.
Manyenga took his place on a chair at the edge of the stamping, chanting men, and a masked figure danced before them. The mask was not made of carved wood — the Sena seldom carved; they made wide dugout canoes and shovel-like paddles and sometimes house idols of wood, but not masks. For ceremonies they wove bamboo strips into a frame and covered it with bark and leaves, and that was their conception of a mask, a fluttering headdress of dead leaves.
This was just such a mask — twisted together and ragged, not a face but a deliberate fixture. Knotted to it were scraps of pale cloth and plastic, the flimsy rippings of a white garbage bag, a large swollen beast’s head with a gaping mouth. Hock could see the face of the dancer staring wildly out of the mask’s mouth.
Another dancer met this masked figure in the center of the dance area, brightly lit by the bonfire. This second, opposing figure was cloaked in a dark cape, and instead of a mask its head had been entirely wrapped in a ragged cloth, like a monster with a filthy bandage around its head.
The masks were the more hideous for being so crude. The wooden or dead-leaf masks Hock had been shown by Sena elders in the past had an aesthetic appeal, were well made and symmetrical. But these masks, one of shredded plastic, the other of rags, frightened him with their coarse construction, as though they’d been twisted together by angry men in a hurry, using the castoff scraps from a trash heap. They were clumsy, insulting, grotesque, and terrifying for being so badly made.
Snowdon grinned in the light of the fire, delighting in the noise and flames, as the two figures sparred in a mock struggle, the tall man in the ragged mask of white plastic, and the squirming figure in the cloak and faceless wrapped head. They were also dancing, obeying the rhythm thumped out on the drums.
After less than a minute of this, Snowdon waved a red object at the dancers, and seeing it they faltered, hesitated, disengaged. The dwarf was too small to do much more than gesture with the red object. At the urging of Manyenga, still in his armchair, a bystander took the thing from Snowdon and placed it on the head of the white-masked figure.
Hock recognized it as his own, the red baseball cap he sometimes wore. But if that was meant to be him, the white-masked mzungu figure in the baseball cap, who was that other cloaked, contending figure with its head wrapped in rags? When the dancers resumed, stamping in a circle, it occurred to him that the second figure had no arms and merely swayed, and he took it to represent a snake.
The snake seemed to be getting the better of the Hock figure, backing him up, making him dance in retreat, shuffling and leaning forward like a mamba intending to strike.
He was sure of this when he heard the word njoka—snake! — shrieked by some of the boys, and the drawn-out ’zoongoo mooed by the men. The snake advanced to the plinking of the finger harp. The white-masked figure retreated to the sound of drumbeats and then skipped past the snake, confronting it. The movement was too crude to be balletic, yet there were elements of subtler dance steps, as though with some refinements this could be staged as a drama — the struggle of two masked figures in the firelight, to the counterpoint of drum thumps and finger pluckings.
He was fascinated and appalled to see this battling creature with the horrible face in the ridiculous headdress fending off the snake. The snake Hock took to be sexual, though he knew he was noted for his fearlessness as a snake handler. The bystanders cheered the thrusting body of the snake, the evasions of the masked man.
Is that how I seem to them? Hock wondered — a cringing figure with a beaky nose and peeling skin, dancing away from the confrontation? Each time the snake pretended to strike, driving the mzungu figure backward, a cheer went up, the drums grew more insistent, and the mzungu spun around. But the snake had the advantage, moving smoothly, its whole head a ragged bandage; the mzungu stumbled on two uncoordinated feet.
And what did it mean when the snake twisted aside and a boy dressed as a girl — a rouged face and smeared lips, a tattered yellow dress — approached and these two caricatures began to dance as a pair, as the mzungu figure twitched behind them? Had they been clowning, Hock might have been reassured. But it was late, the fire was hot, the drums were loud, the plinking of the finger harp pierced his heart. This was not clowning.
All this talent, all this energy at night, from those who were so sleepy in the daytime. The spectators, men and boys, were emboldened by the music, perhaps, excited by the towering fire. Faces gleaming with sweat, golden-skinned in the light of the flames, they reached toward the dancing figures, shuffled forward, crowding them.