“The clan lived as if it had given birth to itself. Terrorized by violence, it ritualized and regulated it, so as to resolve conflict with words. Mukano embodied this philosophy to perfection. Did he do wrong?”
Over three and a half centuries, white Europeans transported more than 12.5 million enslaved Africans to the Americas, in a brutal seafaring voyage called “the middle passage.” More than two million died on the voyage, with many others perishing during the march from the interiors to the coasts. The Middle Passage has been depicted in literature, perhaps most famously in Maryse Conde’s Segu. But the industrial scale of the colonial slave trade would never have been possible without the active collusion of some powerful African leaders themselves – an issue that, for obvious reasons, remains sensitive even today. And it is that piece of history that it is at the heart of Leonora Miano’s Season of the Shadow, a novel set in present-day Cameroon, at the beginnings of the transatlantic slave trade.
After a great fire runs through their village, the Mulongo Clan discovers that twelve young men from the tribe have disappeared. To the Mulongo, who live within themselves and have abjured violence in favour of “resolving conflicts with words”, the disappearances are bewildering and inexplicable. And so begins a long quest to discover the fate of the lost young men, a quest that takes the Mulongo, led by their Chief Mukano, to the neighbouring queendom of the Bwele, and into the jaws of the creeping slave trade. At its climax, the story branches into three parts: Chief Mukano’s search for the lost men, the fate of the villagers who stay behind to wait, unmindful of the peril they are in, and the journey of Eyabem one of the bereft mothers, searching for her son through the Bwele queendom and all the way to the murderous coast. And each of these narrative threads finally come together to reveal how the Mulongo have been caught in the crosshairs of a newly-ruthless world:
Now she knows that the shadow that hovered over the hut of the women whose sons went missing is hovering over the world. The shadow drives communities to conflict, pushes people to flee their native lands. Once time will have gone by and moons will have followed on moons, who will retain the memory of all these displacements? In Bebayedi, yet-unborn generations will learn that their ancestors had to run away to save themselves from predators. They will learn why these huts are built over streams. They will be told: Madness took hold of the world but some people refused to live in darkness. You are the descendants of the people who said no to the shadow. (p. 138 – 9)
At one level, Season of the Shadow is a simple and oft-repeated story of the disintegration of an indigenous culture upon first contact. This story has its more famous versions – predictably, Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s The River Between come to mind – although, of course, every fresh retelling brings with it its own unique heartbreak. But there is something more here: while colonialism and the colonial slave trade provide the backdrop to the novel, Season of the Shadow is not about colonialism. It is not even about the conflict between indigenous cultures and the militant spread of Islam within parts of the African content (which was explored in Segu). In Season of the Shadow, it is neighbour who falls upon neighbour, destroying and enslaving for the benefit of the European slave traders. And so, as far as the grand narrative is concerned, Season of the Shadow complicates matters, showing us with great clarity that the moral world is rarely a binary between colonisers and colonised, oppressors and the oppressed, and good and evil.
But beyond that, the power of Season of the Shadow lies in the universality of its story: the loss of innocence, the grief of loss, the admirable wilfulness to hold on to something in the teeth of an altered world, that incontestable core of human dignity in the face of every humiliation imaginable, and more than anything else, the refusal to die, at a moment when living no longer seems worthwhile:
The women say that you cannot dispossess people of what they have received, learnt, experienced. They themselves could not do so, even if they wanted to. Human beings are not empty calabashes. The ancestors are here. They float over bodies that embrace. They sing when lovers cry out in unison. They wait at the threshold of a hut where a woman is in labour. They are in the cry, the babble of newborns … children grow up, learn the words of the earth, but the bond with the realms of the spirit lives on. The ancestors are here and they are not a confinement. They conceived a world. This is their most precious legacy: the obligation to invent in order to survive. (p. 235 – 6)
After finishing Season of the Shadow, perhaps what lingers longest in memory is its depiction of the Mulongo people: an ethical system and a world-view that substitutes violence with words, an origin myth centred around a pioneering woman founder, and a self-contained cosmology and way of life, all of which seems so alien and out of step with the world, that its ultimate destruction appears as a tragic inevitability, like the slow decay and death of a language in a newly-conquered territory. But at the very end, there remains a seed of hope that memory will triumph against forgetting, and that that the “intransigence of reality” will yield to the “plasticity of language”; because, as the Mulongo always say, “May we know how to welcome the day when it comes. The night too.” (p. 237)
anenduringromantic 