Devils in the Night

Just shooting the breeze in Maurice's courtyard.



Guinea fowl hoping they don't become dinner.



After over a year in Burkina Faso, I still rarely have any idea what is going on around me. This is most likely due to still not knowing Moore, the local dialect, well enough to understand most of the ambient conversation. Another reason might be the perhaps deliberately vague answers with which many people respond to questions: “Where are we going?” “Over there to see the thing.” You get used to it. Plus, living in a state of oblivion means you never know when you might find yourself in a new and interesting situation.

Such was the case one night when I arrived in Maurice’s courtyard to eat dinner. I helped him feed the pigs, and we circulated around town a bit to greet the neighbors. Maurice’s wife served us the usual millet pate, this time with baobab leaf sauce. So far pretty standard. After we finished, I thought I would be returning back to my house to go to bed. However, at that point I noticed a canister standing by filled with four liters of dolo, the locally brewed sorghum beer. Bedtime, it seemed, would not be coming early tonight.

My anticipation heightened when Albert and Abdulaye, my two favorite old men, arrived at the house. Albert is known for always wearing a cowboy hat and making claims such as that he can ride four horses, all at the same time, all going in different directions, which I believe is called drawing and quartering in other contexts but for some reason sounds more plausible in West Africa. Abdulaye is a beekeeper who lives out in the bush with his hives. Together, the four of us, along with a guinea fowl, got up and headed off into the fields, into the night. I still didn’t know what going on but it looked like we would be eating the guinea fowl and drinking the beer, which sounded reasonable to me.

On the walk, we came across my friend Raouda, clad in nothing but a towel and at least a hundred meters from his courtyard. “Raouda, what are you doing running naked through the millet fields in the middle of the night?” I asked him. No, he responded. He was just there to relieve himself. Well. It’s not every household that has built a latrine yet.

We left Raouda to his business and continued to a clear spot in the middle of the field. As we drank the first round of dolo, the night was nearly silent, save for the songs of the toads and the crickets, and somewhere, a barking dog. Albert said a short prayer in Moore and took out a small calabash filled with a dark something. He poured oil over it and lit the whole thing on fire. “It can burn like this for hours,” he told me.

I asked what was in it. He laughed and said, “Nothing you can understand. It’s gris-gris.” Magic. “If you pour oil on a normal calabash it will burn up in a matter of seconds. This one is magic.”

Meanwhile, Abdulaye had set some branches on fire, and threw on the fowl, which at some point had transformed from a living bird into a carcass. As it popped and cracked on the fire, Albert would periodically shake another calabash, making a rattling noise, and then scatter some of its contents on the ground.

“Is that gris-gris too?” I asked.

It’s to keep strangers away, they explained- devils.

“There are devils here?”

Of course. All over.

“And they’re evil?”

Certainly.

“Is that a devil?” I asked, indicating the light of a motorcycle that was passing on a nearby path.

“No,” Abdulaye answered, “That’s a motorcycle. But devils are everywhere. There’s one that lives in the big shea tree by my beehives.”

“And you aren’t scared?”

“Never!” he replied indignantly. “He’s my friend.”

“But why, then,” I continued, “do we shake the calabash to keep them away?”

They explained that it’s not the devils from Zogore that wish us harm. It’s the devils from neighboring towns who come in the night to cause mischief. Those are the devils we have to keep away.

And so, we ate our guinea fowl and drank our dolo. I’m not quite sure if they really believe what they were telling me. I think they do, at least a little bit. I’m also not sure if they thought I believed them. I doubt it. What I do know, is that the first calabash burned for nearly three hours, and that as long as Albert was shaking the second one, no devils came to bother us.

The country is full of fantastic stories like this. There are soccer players who claim to be able to kick a ball and divide it in two, so the goalkeeper has to guess which one to save. There are masks that roam about villages on appointed nights, killing anyone who ventures outside their house. There is a town that all pregnant women must avoid, lest they birth a baby that looks like a snake. Many of these claims sound ridiculous to westerners. However, I am reminded of a statement by Mary Kingsley, an Englishwoman who left to explore the jungles of West Africa at the end of the nineteenth century, on her own, with no experience, no knowledge of Africa, in her petticoat. In the book describing her adventures, “Travels in West Africa,” Kingsley says regarding the Africans she befriends, “I think them fools of the first water for their power of believing in things; but I fancy I have analogous feelings towards even my fellow-countrymen when they go and violently believe in something I cannot quite swallow.”

Indeed. The same people who talk about devils and magic calabashes here think I’m crazy if I say that a black cat is bad luck. I guess one is just as believable, or not, as another.

Back at the guinea fowl roast, Albert told me that the previous volunteer here hadn’t believed their talk of devils, and asked them to show her one. It seems to me, though, that whatever your thoughts on the supernatural, and whether you believe in devils or not, it’s awfully foolish to go out looking for them.