Status Updates From Another Day of Life (Pengui...

People are losing their heads. I drop by my room and find that Dona Cartagina has packed my bag herself. And where are the newspaper clippings that I have been collecting for three months, my greatest treasure? Where are the clippings? She threw them into the toilet and flushed them! (It was my misfortune that Ribeiro had fixed the pumps that day and there was water.)

The world contemplates the great spectacle of combat and death, which is difficult for it to imagine in the end, because the image of war is not communicable – not by the pen, or the voice, or the camera. War is a reality only to those stuck in its bloody, dreadful, filthy insides. To others it is pages in a book, pictures on a screen, nothing more.

So I thought, although to tell the truth I wasn’t thinking at all, because if I had really considered matters I might have lost the inclination to go. On the other hand, if I had considered the matter more carefully, I might have wanted to make the trip because, as I see it, it’s wrong to write about people without living through at least a little of what they are living through.

Only those Africans who have acquired a university education, who have learned to read, got out into the world, and seen films – only they understand that decolonization has created a chance for rapid material advancement, for accumulating wealth and privileges.

All our enemies feed on the backwardness of the people, he says, and pay handsomely to keep the tribal wars going without end. We have a hundred tribes and must build one nation out of them. How long will it take? Nobody knows. We have to wean the people from hatred. We have to introduce the custom of shaking hands

For them, the land ends at the last village where the people speak a language they understand. That’s the border of their world. But, we asked, what lies beyond that border? Beyond that border lies another planet inhabited by the Nganguela, which means non-humans. You have to keep an eye on those Nganguelas, because there are a lot of them and they use an incomprehensible language that conceals their evil designs.