Cameron Duodu
Letter from the North
At exactly 11 minutes past 11am on August 11 Britain went bananas. An eclipse of the sun was seen in full totality in parts of the country. Cornwall and Devon were supposed to be two of those places, and great preparations were made by camp site managers and hoteliers to fleece the six million people who were expected to throng the place to see the last solar eclipse of the millennium.
But the British weather put paid to all that. The weather forecast said Cornwall and Devon would be clouded over on the day, and that it would even rain. So only a fraction of the expected hordes turned up.
Television, as usual, proved to be the best purveyor of the eclipse wonder. The BBC sent a Hercules aircraft above the clouds to photograph the event.
And it was spectacular. First it looked as if some monster in the sky was taking tiny bites out of the sun. Then the tiny bites became crescent-shaped. And finally the sun disappeared altogether.
At this point, the commentators ran out of superlative adjectives. Even Patrick Moore, the BBC man who dwells in The Sky at Night, was reduced to only a few words per minute, as against the 50 000 words per second with which he normally catapults his tongue into orbit.
We in London were only expecting a 95% eclipse, and indeed, my corridor darkened as the moment arrived. It really was eerie, as the darkness fell, stayed around for a while, and then made its way back where it had come from, and bright sunshine was fully restored.
It took me back to May 20 1947, when I was a tiny boy in Ghana. We had heard rumours that on that day the “sun would set” in the early afternoon, but “sunrise” would follow, not the next day, but shortly afterwards on the same day!
We knew nothing about eclipses. All we knew was that the sun rose and that the sun set. So these rumours troubled us deeply. Those who had a little knowledge of the Bible told us about darkness coming at an unscheduled hour at the time Jesus was crucified. Others mentioned Joshua and Gideon.
The more apocalyptically minded frightened us with gruesome stories from Revelations telling about the time Jesus would descend down to sentence all sinners to eternal death by burning.
Anyway, the day arrived. Its frightening aspect was heightened by a circular which the white district commissioner had sent to all the chiefs in our area, asking them to beat gong-gong to advise farmers to return home early if they went to work in the forest. We interpreted this to mean that ghosts and goblins would be about that day, and that if we went to the farm, dwarfs, elves and every frightening creature imaginable would be waiting to pounce on us. As would, of course, animals that hunted at night.
Not to be outdone, the Presbyterian church, which ran our school, ordered a special service that afternoon. Our school, which had been due to reopen on that day after the holidays, was told not to.
It was as if the fetish priests and priestesses (sangomas) had bribed the civil and church authorities to advertise their wares. All the normally insecure people who feared that witches would make medicine (muti) against them went to buy special day-of-darkness talismans to protect them from every pestilence you could think of.
Barren women were given special potions to smear on their stomachs while they made love on that day. And sexually dysfunctional males were instructed to find a secret place where they could take out their organ and expose it to the dying embers of the sun, till “daybreak.” If anyone saw them doing this, they could forget about ever having an erection again.
Members of my household scorned all these things. However, we took the precaution of gathering together at the queen mother’s palace, where we knew we would have the strength of numbers. The queen mother sat with us; her officials drank palm wine and told jokes. We kids made forays into the royal kitchen to see whether we could assuage our permanent hunger.
Three o’clock – nothing. Some of the men, now ridden high by the palm wine, began to ridicule the rumours.
“How can the sun set in the daytime?” Hahahaha.
“How can the sun set and rise within the space of a few minutes?” Hahahaha.
“So when it sets in the daytime and you sleep, will you dream?” Hahahahaha.
But at about 4pm they were suddenly driven silent. The sky had began to darken. And continued to darken!
Then the weirdest thing of all happened: the chickens began to cluck. One by one, they made their way to their sleeping places.
At this stage, the queen mother got scared. She ordered: “Beat the drums!”
The kids cowered and huddled together in corners. We began to cry, louder and louder as the darkness increased in intensity.
The men brought the drums and began to beat them. I have never since heard drums beaten with such earnestness.
Over at the Presbyterian church, they began to peal the church bell. They sang a hymn: Darkness Has Fallen upon the Earth!
In the middle of the service, they saw the most powerful fetish priestess enter the church and take a seat. She had taken off all her usual talismans and juju beads. She remained a Christian convert to her last day.