Margaret Laurence - This Side Jordan

Until the Lord have given your brethren rest, as he hath given you, and they also have possessed the land which the Lord your God giveth them; then ye shall return unto the land of your possession, and enjoy it, which Moses the Lords servant gave you on this side Jordan toward the sunrising.

(Joshua I:15)

The Day Will Come
Authority Is Never Loved
Flee, Oh Ye Powers Of Darkness
Rise Up, Ghana

(Slogans from African mammy-lorries)

Oh God, there is something above, let it reach me.

(Akan proverb)

T he six boys were playing the Fire Highlife, playing it with a beat urgent as love. And Johnnie Kestoe, who didnt like Africans, was dancing the highlife with an African girl.

Charitys scarlet smile mocked his attempts to rotate his shoulders and wriggle his European hips to the music. Her own fleshy hips and buttocks swayed easily, and her big young breasts, unspoiled by children and only lightly held by her pink blouse, rose and fell as though the music were her breath. Johnnie grinned awkwardly at her, then he jerked his head away.

Fiyah, fiyah, fiyah, fiyah-ma,
Fiyah deah come baby!
Fiyah, fiyah, fiyah, fiyah-ma,
Fiyah deah come ah ah!
I went to see my lovely boy,
Lovely boy I love so well

At one of the tables around the outdoor dance floor, a young European woman watched thoughtfully. At another table an African man watched, then turned away and spat. Both were angry, and with the same person.

Music was the clothing of West African highlife, but rhythm its blood and bone. This music was sophisticated. It was modern. It was new. To hell with the ritual tribal dance, the drums with voices ancient as the forest.

The torn leaves of the palm trees shivered in the wind and the strings of fairy lights glittered like glass beads in the musty courtyard.

The dancers themselves did not analyse the highlife any more than they analysed the force that had brought them all together here, to a nightclub called Weekend In Wyoming, the wealthy and the struggling, the owners of chauffeur-driven Jaguars and the riders of bicycles.

They were bound together, nevertheless, by the music and their need of it. Africa has danced pain and love since the first man was born from its red soil. But the ancient drums could no longer summon the people who danced here. The highlife was their music. For they, too, were modern. They, too, were new.

And yet the old rhythms still beat strongly in this high-life in the centre of Accra, amid the taxi horns, just as a few miles away, in Jamestown or Labadi, they pulsed through the drums while the fetish priestess with ash-smeared cheeks whirled to express the unutterable, and the drummers eyes grew glassy and still, his soul drugged more powerfully than the body could be.

Into the brash contemporary patterns of this Africas fabric were woven symbols old as the sun-king, old as the oldest continent.

Johnnie Kestoe was thin in a sharp, almost metallic way, like a man made of netted wire upon which flesh has been inadequately spread. He had the extreme whiteness of skin that sometimes accompanies dark hair, and although he was not tall, the thrusting energy with which he invariably moved gave him a passable substitute for height.

He held the brown girls hand tightly, their gearfingers meshed to synchronize their separateness. His other hand rested on her shoulder; his fingertips received the tremor of her upstretching muscles, the delicate levering of bones, and he was guided by her through the highlifes gradual frenzy.

The music was languid on the surface. The main beat was lazy and casual. Then the second and third rhythms the racing inner pulse, the staccato heartbeat in the slow flesh.

Oppressive and stifling, the air seemed to be hung with hot unshed rain, and the leaves of the palm trees crackled like breeze-fanned flames. But the African dancers were unaffected by the heat. They moved to the new-old drumcall as though it were their only purpose.

Johnnie was still new enough to want to stare at them. He looked forward to the time when he would be as blas as the other Europeans in the Firm: that attitude marked the men of experience from the green boys.

A fat old mammy, purple-swathed, enormous of buttock, squealed with laughter as she bounced her melon breasts up and down. And the young man with her laughed too, perhaps at himself.

Around the edge of the dance floor, in a huge shuffling circle, African couples danced without touching one another. The rhythms of the highlife seemed to make each body an extension of the other, of every other. To Johnnies mind there was something weird about it, like a sexual experience with more than two. But his arms tightened around the girl. Her moist skin and the smooth-oiled twisting of her body caused in him an itch of curiosity.