The African Child was first published in 1954. The author was Camara Laye, an African immigrant from Guinea. who lived in France at the time of publication. The author was born in 1928. The first chapter of the book, the focus of this essay, was set at a time when he was very young, he estimated his own age as being between 5 and 6. Therefore, we are looking at an account of events that happened circa 1933/1934.
Laye opened the book with this paragraph:
I was a little boy playing round my father’s hut…My mother was in the workshop with my father, and I could hear their familiar voices above the noise of the anvil and the conversation of the customers”.
Later in the book, Laye will tell us more about his family. His father sounded like a combination of a blacksmith and goldsmith. Laye was of my father’s generation, therefore, the West Africa of his time would have been significantly different from the West Africa of when I was growing up. Nevertheless, reading his book I had flashback of memories. Blacksmiths abounded in the South West of Nigeria of my youth. We also had goldsmiths. I have vague memories of my mother visiting goldsmith or talking about them. I do wonder what globalisation did to indigenous crafts like blacksmith and goldsmith?
Laye lived in a hut, the inference one can draw is that it was not in a built up area. And decades later when I was growing up, most places were not very built up. For example, my high school where I spent five unforgettable years, was in an area that was sparsely populated. I remembered one year during a football match in one of the afternoons when one boy came across a green snake on the pitch.
The most interesting incident in the first page of African Child was an almost deathly game Laye played with a snake. It must have been his first encounter with a snake because he was oblivious to the danger inherent in such a meeting. Laye stuck a reed into the reptile’s mouth and it swallowed it gradually and would have bitten him had not one of his father’s apprentices shouted to trigger a rescue. The response of his mother was very familiar: warnings and some smacking to ensure he doesn’t do that again.
On the second page, there is a description of his father’s hut. It was made of mud “that had been pounded and moulded into bricks with water”. It had only one tiny window. Very quickly, on the second page we had an encounter with the religious/spiritual:
On the left were the boubous and the prayer rugs…hanging over the pillow and watching over my father’s slumber, there was a series of pots that contained extracts from plants and the bark of trees…it did not take me too long to discover that they were the most important things in the hut: they contained the magic charms, those mysterious liquids that keep evil spirits at bay, and smeared on the body make it invulnerable to black magic, to all kinds of black magic. My father, before he went to bed, never failed to smear his body with a little of each liquid, first one, then another, for each charm had its own particular property: but exactly what property I do not know…”
And then, there was that other snake, the black one with strikingly marked body. One day, Laye saw it progressing leisurely towards his father’s workshop. He called his mother, expecting the usual drama, followed by certain death for the snake. However, this was an exception. His mother told him an astonishing story:
My son, this one must not be killed: he is not as other snakes, and he will not harm you; you must never interfere with him…this snake, … is your father’s guiding spirit
Laye watched as the little black snake disappeared into a hole in his father’s workshop. When Laye asked his father about the snake, the response took a while, but it eventually arrived:
That snake is the guiding spirit of our race. Can you understand that? …That snake has always been with us; he has always made himself know to one of us. In our time, it is to me that it has made himself known. …He made himself known in the semblance of a dream…
Laye recollected how his father had known about events that happened when he was not at home and realised it was the snake that revealed those events to his father. His father hinted that Laye could be a potential beneficiary of this power in his generation if not for his absence from home:
There is a certain form of behaviour to observe, and certain ways of acting in order that the guiding spirit of our race may approach you also…but nevertheless, it is true that if you desire the guiding spirit of our race to visit you one day, if you desire to inherit it in your turn, you will have to conduct yourself in the selfsame manner; from now on, it will be necessary for you to be more and more in my company… I fear, very much fear, little one, that you are not often in my company. You are all day at school and one day you will depart from that school, and you will leave me alone, little one…
Laye never discussed the little snake again with his father but once he sees the snake disappeared into the hole, he goes to his father’s workshop where he sees the snake proceeds to his father, with its jaws open. His father will stroke the snake with his hands. The little black snake responds by quivering its whole body, without biting Laye’s father. What an incredible account!
How did Laye’s father develop such a relationship to a snake? Was this a natural, human taught technique of domesticating an animal? Afterall, there are snake charmers. Or was there a supernatural dimension to events that Laye witnessed? Clearly from Laye’s point of view, there was a spiritual and supernatural angle to it: the snake first making its appearance in a dream, and the snake’s capacity to reveal the future to his father.
We see another spiritual/supernatural dimension to what on the surface looks like a man practicing his occupation in the second chapter of the book. A woman brought some gold to be transformed into trinkets. In order to persuade Laye’s father to do this job, she brought a praise singer, who can deploy all his knowledge of history to eulogise Laye’s father and ancestors. Laye remarked that there was more to this operation beyond smelting gold:
The operation that was going on before my eyes was simply the smelting of gold; but it was something more than that: a magical operation that the guiding spirits could look upon with favour or disfavour; and that is why there would be all round my father that absolute silence and expectancy. …The gold now had the fluidity of water. The guiding spirits had smiled on the operation!
Laye continued about the spiritual/supernatural/magical dimension of smelting of gold and the reasons why the task could not be delegated to the apprentices:
Only my father was versed in the science of conjuring the spirits of fire, air and gold, and conjuring evil spirits, and that is why he alone conducted the whole operation.
And the little black snake with patterned body was always around for the big occasions:
But it was extraordinary, was it not miraculous that on these occasions the little black serpent always coiled up under the sheep skin? He was not always there, he did not visit my father everyday, but he was always present whenever there was gold to be worked. …The snake’s presence came as no surprise to me; ever since that evening when my father had talked to me about the guiding spirit of our race, it had ceased to surprise me; it was quite natural that the snake should be there: he had knowledge of the future.
Spirituality is woven into every aspect of their lives, even the smelting of gold. African Traditional Religion no longer dominates the spirituality of the people of West Africa. Christianity and Islam are the dominant religions but intrinsic spirituality of Africans has been fused into these religions.
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