l6o JOURNEY WITHOUT MAPS

Zigita is the principal town of the Buzie tribe, it is a
town where even the commonest bush cutlass is
beautiful, but it isn't happy. It is Buzie in another
fashion, the fashion of witchcraft and fear.

The village women danced to us that evening in
starlight to the music of rattles. It was not a lovely
dance; they were not lovely dancers but emaciated
old women slapping their pitted buttocks in a kind
of Charleston; but they were cheerful and happy, and
we were happy, too, as they slapped and rattled and
laughed and pranced, and we drank warm boiled
water with whisky and the juice of limes, and the
timelessness, the irresponsibility, .the freedom of
Africa began to touch us at last.

It wasn't easy to analyse the fascination behind the
dirt and disease, but it was more than a personal
fantasy, satisfied more than a personal need.
Different continents have made their call to different
ages, and people at every period have tried to
rationalise in terms of imperialism, gold or conquest
their feeling for an untouched land, for a country
"that hath yet her maidenhead, never sacked, turned,
nor wrought, the face of the earth hath not been
torn, nor the virtue and salt of the soil spent by
manurance; the graves have not been opened for
gold, the mines not broken with sledges, nor their
images pulled down out of their temples."

The old women danced and were cheerful, with the
sores on their breasts and the silver arrows in their
hair. There were mines in Nigeria broken by sledges:
over the border in Sierra Leone were other mines,
Justice ruled on the north, the east and the west:
--here there was injustice, massacres, exaction, but the