of the Americans fostering the aid mentality, that and those sodding charities. No-one can save the goddamned Philippines but the goddamned Filipinos and until they work that out they’re going to have to go on living a hundred and fifty years in the past …
And so on for quite some time. What was particularly disgraceful about this silent outburst was that it came as if from a reforming zeal I despise and which I dread may be in my genes. It seemed to put me firmly into that class of professional believers in Progress who must often have indulged similar passions of self-righteousness, whether they were Victorian social reformers tackling the rookeries of Tottenham Court Road, missionaries endeavouring to stop penis-eating among the Mbwele or Japanese soldiers trying to get a decent day’s work out of British construction crews on the Burmese railway. Always there is that element of condescension, a disparity between doer and done-to-whether cultural, educational, financial or racial.
Luckily there is no obligation on anybody to do anything for the right reasons, as the piglets discovered when I stopped throwing stones at them because there were no more left of the right size. In any case I was feeling better. The water expert was approaching.
‘You were very wise to go. I think some of the people were ashamed in case you were laughing at them.’
‘
Laughing
at them?’ I say in real surprise.
‘That’s what I tell them. “James is very understanding,” I said. “He never laughs at anybody.” They know that but some are ashamed to you.’
‘Ashamed.’
‘Because of
nono.
’
And suddenly everything becomes clearer and it is my turn to feel shame. It was neither indolence nor fecklessness which caused their change of heart, but superstition. The pantheon of demons, spirits and genii in which many of the villagers believe is vast: I do not think I have learned more than a fraction of it, and that fraction is merely a short list of names. Being able to identify spirits by name is but a beginning; what gives such beliefs their cogency and power is the mass of lore behind them, the myths and stories and inexplicable daily happenings which give them life. Each time I hear a new story I realise how ignorant I am of such matters.
Nono,
then, are spirits whose characteristics seem to vary according to the places they inhabit although they may actually be of different varieties. They range from the reasonably neutral to the nasty: those associated with water as in streams, wells and damp places are reckoned the fiercest. This at once explained the men’s reluctance to go to a part of the forest they anyway normally avoided and start attacking the
nonos
’ residence with spades. That was simply asking for trouble, for displaced ghosts to light upon them. Certain other things began making sense. I had once been looking for wild guavas and chillies somewhat above Lolang Mating’s place and, tired of crashing about, sat down by the stream to watch it for a while with my plastic bag of guavas at my feet. I am very easily entranced by water and must, watching its motion, have become motionless myself. In a short while Lolang Mating appeared wading slowly upstream, her torn dress bunched up in one hand as with the other she made sudden lunges into the water, coming up with small dark crabs she put in a plastic litre pot which had once held motor oil. She was talking out loud to herself, I presumed in the way most people do when engaged in something on their own.
‘Damn you!’ she said mildly as she bent down again. Clearly the crab had eluded her, only it hadn’t for when her hand emerged it held a large specimen which she dropped into the pot where it scrabbled hollowly. But then she said ‘Go away!’
She was not looking at me when she said this; furthermore she had used the plural ‘you’. I had now left it too late to announce my presence. Embarrassed I sat without moving and hoped she hadn’t seen me
And so on for quite some time. What was particularly disgraceful about this silent outburst was that it came as if from a reforming zeal I despise and which I dread may be in my genes. It seemed to put me firmly into that class of professional believers in Progress who must often have indulged similar passions of self-righteousness, whether they were Victorian social reformers tackling the rookeries of Tottenham Court Road, missionaries endeavouring to stop penis-eating among the Mbwele or Japanese soldiers trying to get a decent day’s work out of British construction crews on the Burmese railway. Always there is that element of condescension, a disparity between doer and done-to-whether cultural, educational, financial or racial.
Luckily there is no obligation on anybody to do anything for the right reasons, as the piglets discovered when I stopped throwing stones at them because there were no more left of the right size. In any case I was feeling better. The water expert was approaching.
‘You were very wise to go. I think some of the people were ashamed in case you were laughing at them.’
‘
Laughing
at them?’ I say in real surprise.
‘That’s what I tell them. “James is very understanding,” I said. “He never laughs at anybody.” They know that but some are ashamed to you.’
‘Ashamed.’
‘Because of
nono.
’
And suddenly everything becomes clearer and it is my turn to feel shame. It was neither indolence nor fecklessness which caused their change of heart, but superstition. The pantheon of demons, spirits and genii in which many of the villagers believe is vast: I do not think I have learned more than a fraction of it, and that fraction is merely a short list of names. Being able to identify spirits by name is but a beginning; what gives such beliefs their cogency and power is the mass of lore behind them, the myths and stories and inexplicable daily happenings which give them life. Each time I hear a new story I realise how ignorant I am of such matters.
Nono,
then, are spirits whose characteristics seem to vary according to the places they inhabit although they may actually be of different varieties. They range from the reasonably neutral to the nasty: those associated with water as in streams, wells and damp places are reckoned the fiercest. This at once explained the men’s reluctance to go to a part of the forest they anyway normally avoided and start attacking the
nonos
’ residence with spades. That was simply asking for trouble, for displaced ghosts to light upon them. Certain other things began making sense. I had once been looking for wild guavas and chillies somewhat above Lolang Mating’s place and, tired of crashing about, sat down by the stream to watch it for a while with my plastic bag of guavas at my feet. I am very easily entranced by water and must, watching its motion, have become motionless myself. In a short while Lolang Mating appeared wading slowly upstream, her torn dress bunched up in one hand as with the other she made sudden lunges into the water, coming up with small dark crabs she put in a plastic litre pot which had once held motor oil. She was talking out loud to herself, I presumed in the way most people do when engaged in something on their own.
‘Damn you!’ she said mildly as she bent down again. Clearly the crab had eluded her, only it hadn’t for when her hand emerged it held a large specimen which she dropped into the pot where it scrabbled hollowly. But then she said ‘Go away!’
She was not looking at me when she said this; furthermore she had used the plural ‘you’. I had now left it too late to announce my presence. Embarrassed I sat without moving and hoped she hadn’t seen me
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