He described the cycle and experience of death in an African Village very well.
"From time to time they went outside to check the sky and were chased back in by rain and wind that chilled them to their roots.
And there was death. Cruel, shameless, opportunistic death. This was its finest hour. It needed no stronger cues than these, hunger and foul weather, to begin vigorously attacking anyone whose grip on life was subject to dispute. It curled up in the laps of the very old. It lay uninvited on reed mats next to the newly born. It joined families inside huts and watched nagging coughs turn to advanced bronchitis and finally pneumonia. Back and forth through the rain it followed people with intestinal illnesses to outdoor latrines. "Go away, death," the nervous faces of the sick and elderly said. "The rain can't last forever. Harvest time is soon. Give us time."
But it didn't go away. Death took more villagers during this time of year than any other. The trail, the weak, the afflicted—many just couldn't make it. After each death, women members of surviving families took to the village paths, walking slowly, announcing their loss in the public manner of African custom. They filled the villages with a dark falsetto of song and wailing, of anguished screams and narrative. At night, funeral drums became a constant feature, their weird and surging sounds evoking macabre images like those in medieval paintings of lost souls plunging into nothingness.
During this season of heavy rains, the number of people dying in the villages made me shake. It wasn't just the cries. There were bodies. I saw bodies being buried in family compounds, a piece of wood or a stick cross placed at the head of each new mound. Nothing had prepared me for this. All my life death had been an abstraction, something that occurred infrequently, out of sight, in hospitals. It usually attacked relatives who were extremely old anyway, reducing the pain of the loss. But now I watched people bury their dead, of all ages; every day, all around me. I had seen thousands of murders on television before coming to Africa and had dined at a daily banquet of war and famine in the news. But to see death next door, to hear its attendant cries wafting through your windows, to see real-life people stop breathing and real-life survivors sob with sorrow - that is something else entirely."
(Mike Tidwell. The Ponds of Kalambayi. Pg 120,21)
"From time to time they went outside to check the sky and were chased back in by rain and wind that chilled them to their roots.
And there was death. Cruel, shameless, opportunistic death. This was its finest hour. It needed no stronger cues than these, hunger and foul weather, to begin vigorously attacking anyone whose grip on life was subject to dispute. It curled up in the laps of the very old. It lay uninvited on reed mats next to the newly born. It joined families inside huts and watched nagging coughs turn to advanced bronchitis and finally pneumonia. Back and forth through the rain it followed people with intestinal illnesses to outdoor latrines. "Go away, death," the nervous faces of the sick and elderly said. "The rain can't last forever. Harvest time is soon. Give us time."
But it didn't go away. Death took more villagers during this time of year than any other. The trail, the weak, the afflicted—many just couldn't make it. After each death, women members of surviving families took to the village paths, walking slowly, announcing their loss in the public manner of African custom. They filled the villages with a dark falsetto of song and wailing, of anguished screams and narrative. At night, funeral drums became a constant feature, their weird and surging sounds evoking macabre images like those in medieval paintings of lost souls plunging into nothingness.
During this season of heavy rains, the number of people dying in the villages made me shake. It wasn't just the cries. There were bodies. I saw bodies being buried in family compounds, a piece of wood or a stick cross placed at the head of each new mound. Nothing had prepared me for this. All my life death had been an abstraction, something that occurred infrequently, out of sight, in hospitals. It usually attacked relatives who were extremely old anyway, reducing the pain of the loss. But now I watched people bury their dead, of all ages; every day, all around me. I had seen thousands of murders on television before coming to Africa and had dined at a daily banquet of war and famine in the news. But to see death next door, to hear its attendant cries wafting through your windows, to see real-life people stop breathing and real-life survivors sob with sorrow - that is something else entirely."
(Mike Tidwell. The Ponds of Kalambayi. Pg 120,21)
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