One day during my time
at University, by a rare turn of opportunity and not a little persuasive charm
on my side, I managed to gain access to the archives of Canterbury Cathedral.
It was the fascination of every theology student, this mysterious catalogue of
ancient books locked behind Access Only glass doors in the crypts of the
cathedral. Masquerading as a research assistant for a PhD student, I passed an
afternoon in there with no company but my friend, a few thousand books and a
wheelie ladder. Amidst leather-lined volumes that have passed more winters than
some of the world's nations (one dated 1604!), I came upon something
fascinating.
Diaries. The diaries of
Britain's first missionaries, handwritten as they had walked the plains and
wilds of Africa. History in my hands. At this point I had no idea, could not
have imagined, that I would one day walk those wilds myself. Still I picked one
up, flicked through the taut, discoloured pages. It was penned in the archaic
elegance of all old handwriting, with that characteristic tilt and flourish. I
imagined the author, sitting against a tree, his diary perched in his knees as
the setting sun throws a dark orange hue across its pages. He looks about him.
The haze of dust and smoke drifting across the horizon reminds him of the city
smog of home. But he is a world away. He wants to make note of everything: the
wildlife, the smell of the soil; he wants to scratch all he can into that
journal and take a palmful of Africa home with him. He wants his friends and his
family to catch what he longs to share with them, wants his world to meet with
a world it hasn't known. It is all he can bring.
And so he writes what
he can. He writes of how the ears of African elephants are shaped like Africa,
of how smoke breaking through the thatched roofs of mud huts makes them look
like giant cooking pots, of how shadows cast by the setting sun span the ground
like a zebra's stripes, and of how all of it plays its part to make a vast,
complex and boundless symphony One.
But that is the
unimportant stuff.
He writes of the people,
for a land is nothing without its people. They are difficult to know, like
Africa itself, impossible to hedge or characterise. Just when you think you
have plumbed the depths of their culture and character you find you have only
run a spoon along the surface. He calls them savage, not with that kind of
carnivorous and primitive savagery, but savage as synonym for passion. They
bear their heart and emotions boldly and loudly and do not wrap them in a cloak
of sophistication. So when they grieve it is loud and bitter, when they celebrate
it is fierce, when they laugh it is as if it bubbles up from the very depths of
heart and soul.
He writes of their
resilience, it is his favourite thing about them. Many live a hard life,
inexpressibly hard, yet no matter what depth of pain or poverty they are
steeped in their capacity for faith and hope seems incorruptible. They continue
on, through the seasons, undefeated.
Our missionary wants
his world to encounter and be transformed by this, by the heart of a land and
its people. He wants to tell of it, he must, but trying to define Africa, even
that tiny patch of it he has come to know so well, beggars language. And at the
end of his journal, though not an inch of its pages remains unmarked, he knows
he has written nothing. Nothing he could put to words would truly tell of the
fierce, beautiful, warm, unpredictable, chaotic, ancient and endless place they
call Africa.
For the Dark Continent is not so dark after all, he writes, but vibrant with colours that cannot be imagined
or described. You have to see them for yourself.
This is our
missionary's final word. Laying against his tree, the sun set but for a last
vestige of dying red on the horizon, he closes his journal in his lap. He hopes
only that his words will do enough to inspire those who read them to come and
see for themselves, even a boy two hundred years his younger passing a summer's
afternoon amidst dusty forgotten archives.
