The healing wisdom of Africa

Melidoma Patrice Some is one of the leading exponents of African wisdom in the West. As a small child he was forcibly taken away from his Dagara family and village to be taught in a Jesuit school. As a young man, he ran away and returned to his own people. Then, hampered by his Western conditioning but driven by a great need to return to his roots, he had to learn the Dagara ways afresh. This gave him a unique vantage point from which to interpret African tribal wisdom to our Western understanding.

To help me reintegrate into my family and village, the elders decided that I should undergo the initiation rituals appropriate to the boys of the village who are on the verge of puberty. There I was, taking part in processes with boys many years younger than I. The pressure on me not to fail was enormous, for failing initiation rituals could have meant death (for some of the rituals are physically dangerous) or the inability to reconnect with my people and be accepted as an adult.

The initiation processes were physically excruciating. On this particular afternoon, I had exhausted every resource in trying to outwit the elders who had given me the assignment to sit down and look at a tree until its true nature was revealed. The idea, of course, was completely absurd, because my rather Westernized mind (I had by that time been educated for fifteen years in French mission schools) was totally unable to grasp what it meant just to sit down and look at a tree. The experience was made worse by complete physical discomfort. I remember well the temperature of a hundred and ten degrees, my nakedness, sweat, and hunger, the hot gravel and crawling ants. In the middle of all this I was being asked to ignore the discomfort and focus my attention on a tree - a stupid exercise, I thought. After about thirty hours of this excruciating discomfort, including the shame of being caught trying to lie about what I was experiencing in order to fool the elders into thinking I had gotten it,' I realized that the one thing I had to do was to find some way to end the ordeal. I had moved to the critical juncture:
I could give up and terminate the exercise right there, which would mean terminating my initiation. Or I could find some way through.

I felt shame and failure, and I was crying.
What was wrong with me that I could not do what I was asked to do? I was failing at an initiation task, and my sense of ostracism from my peers - they hadn't been taken away from home and asked to endure fifteen years in a foreign culture - became even more painful and intolerable. Through my tears, however, I continued to keep an eye on the tree. As I looked at it, I suddenly began speaking to it, as if I had finally discovered that it had a life of its own. I told it all about my discontent and my sadness and how I felt that it had abandoned me to the shame of lying and of being laughed at.

I then spoke to the tree again, not angrily, but respectfully. I told her that, after all, it was not her fault that I could not see, but mine. I simply lacked the ability. What I really needed to do was to come to terms with my own emptiness and lack of sight, because I knew she would always be there when I needed to use her to take a good look at my own shortcomings and inadequacies.

What happened next is the kind of experience that moulded my perception forever. The tree that I had been watching for so long was no longer there, and in its place was a beautiful green lady. I do not know if the tree became her, or if she stepped out of the tree, but this really doesn't matter. Where the tree had been there was now a figure that looked like a human being, in the shape of a woman, very tall, probably seven and a half feet tall. Her  tunic was silky and black, and she wore a veil over her face, and when I looked again, she had lifted the veil, revealing an unearthly face. 

I call her the green lady because she was green, her skin was green. But the greenness in her had nothing to do with the colour of her skin. She was green from the inside out, as if her body were filled with green fluid. I do not know how I knew this, but this green was the expression of immeasurable love. As soon as she appeared I felt some sort of shock that enveloped my whole body. It produced in me a feeling of the type that I had never experienced before and that I've never experienced again. There was a magnetic pull toward her, and I don't know how I got there, whether I crawled or ran, but I found myself in her arms. It was a homecoming of utmost healing. I was sobbing as I had never done before, for I felt that I was in the hands of the ultimate divine being, hands that provided the ultimate sense of acceptance and home that could never be denied.

I had no idea how long I was in her arms, but it felt like a long time. I had no intention of ending this embrace. Having finally gotten this feeling, this support, this love, I had the feeling that all we needed to do was just go home and live happily ever after. But then I realized that she was telling me that she needed to go, and I needed to go too. Of course, that was not part of my plan, and as a result I found myself clinging to her. How could she go without me? I was with her, holding her totally in my hands, so I held her more strongly. It was then that a strange thing happened, which I have never been able to figure out, changing the softness of her feminine body into some kind of ruggedness that became more and more uncomfortable. With a pleading gesture I lifted my head to beg her to stay, and my eyes told me that I was hugging the tree. 

The feeling was very humbling. I felt at first that I had been deceived, yet my body and spirit felt very subdued, with an almost religious posture. I didn't dwell in the feeling of being tricked, because the strong feeling of the reality of what I had experienced was still present. I was bitterly disappointed at not being able to go with her, and disappointed that such a powerful and loving being had been turned back into a tree. As I sobbed holding the tree, I became aware of the comments that the elders who had been watching me were making. I heard one of them say, They are always like this. First, they resist and play dumb when there are a lot of things waiting to be done, and then when it happens, they won't let it go, either. Children are so full of contradictions. The very experience you rejected before with lies, you are now accepting without apology.'

This last sentence seemed to have been directed at me. I looked up at the elder who spoke. He met my eyes, and I felt no further need to be holding on to the tree. Hours had passed, and the sun had already set. Go find something to eat, and make your bed for the night,' he said gently.

What can one make of my experience? It could easily be dismissed on the grounds of some well-known theories. After all wasn't it very hot that day? What kinds of hallucinations might arise in a person who is dehydrated, hot, and hungry? I've followed that line of reasoning myself many times, only to turn back from it ultimately. Two things have brought me back from doubt. The first is my continued interaction, as a Western-educated adult, with the Other World. The other thing is that elders who were there with me that day were obviously sharing my experience. These witnesses had seen what I had seen, and they were not dehydrated or thirsty. This tells me that more things exist than what my powerful Western education can explain. And for some reason, the things I cannot explain using my Western education seem much more interesting to me than the mundane facts of everyday experience. Hence my deliberate attempt to share these experiences.

My experience with the green lady raises an important issue, namely, the true identity of the elements of nature. What if they are not inanimate objects, as people in the West have been taught to believe, but rather living presences? How would we need to change if we granted to a tree the kind of life that we usually reserve for so-called intelligent beings? If you peek long enough into the natural world - the trees, the hills, the rivers, and all natural things - you start to realize that their spirit is much bigger than what can be seen, that the visible part of nature is only a small portion of what nature is.

The elders say that there is much, much more to seeing than simple sight. To me at least, the green lady is a being who took that form to convince me of the vitality inside that tree. Nature shows itself in some unique way to every individual during his or her initiation, and I know of the stories of many other people who have been touched in this way by nature. The deepest dimension of my own transformation came about through being touched in this way. My jumpy, doubting mind began to find some rest. The fires in me of alienation, pride, and anger began to be quenched by the waters of accepting love. I no longer felt like a proud, wounded outsider. The experience with the green lady resolved that, for all of a sudden I belonged. I could feel it, I could sense it, I was in it. The isolation brought about by becoming alienated from my own native language and able to speak only in the language of the colonizer was wiped out in one shot with the experience with the green lady. She changed me from deep inside. She allowed me to break through the wall of perception that my western education had erected in me, and she connected me intimately with nature, the way my fellow villagers experienced it. She had brought me back home.

My intellect cannot logically explain or justify it, but my heart, every time I am brought to remember that experience again, leaps out of me with such force that the objections of my mind are put to rest. I relive the intensity and cannot deny the reality that I experienced. My own experience and the similar experiences of others are undeniable examples of the healing power of nature, not only as deeply transformative but as an experience that can radically widen the horizon of one's perception.

This radical connection to nature that I am speaking of is difficult in the West, where any emotionally powerful experience can be dissected and explained away by the intellect as some example of a personal psychological aberration. I have watched such diminishing in my work with ritual in the West. I have seen situations where people experience something so radical that they are almost frantic in telling about it. Because the others present did not participate in this person's experience, they tell the person to calm down, offering alternative, usually more logical and rational, explanations for the person's experience. I notice that my heart hurts whenever someone begins to dissect in psychological or political terms such a powerful and intimate experience. Such behaviour only serves to reinforce the notion, common to the Western mind, that there is a division between the real and the supernatural. And all I can say is that at best this dilemma illustrates the line dividing the modern mind from the indigenous mind, not the line between truth and falsehood.

The profoundness of my experiences with the green lady, along with many other transforming experiences of nature, have helped me to understand the deep reverence with which indigenous people view nature. They view it as their first home, the home that holds the wisdom of the cosmos. To many Westerners, indigenous people's reluctance to disturb the balance of nature has looked like failure to use the raw materials that are just waiting to be harvested and developed. For indigenous people, by contrast, nature is profoundly intelligent as it stands, and human beings would do well to learn from its wisdom.