Convolutions

Among the Nuba people of Africa’s shadowed hinterlands, where the air hums with ancestral whispers and the earth pulses with forgotten rites, traditional theologians tussle over the mystical cults—most susceptible to which are the mothers, those tender architects of life, their hands calloused from cradling both infants and secrets—that bloomed in the crevices of colonial decay.

There’s a stained-glass cult, and within the cult there’s a three-way divide. Eighteen-odd theologians, that’s if memory serves me well anyway, conjecture that stained glass strains light to produce gods—which exist, they note, but must be separated from sunbeams; others claim, with slightly inferior rhetoric, that stained glass transforms light into new gods, radiant and volatile, their divinity a shimmering alchemy of color and chaos.

The most in-touch, as I overheard in hushed tones on my second pilgrimage to the Nuba village, with the traditional African religions insist that god is an entity whose enigma eludes man, a vastness defiant of (or unbound by, or simply ontologically beyond) the frail boundaries of space and time, one only marginally reachable by the spirits that dwell in the world of the living-dead, and intimately reachable by those that dwell in the zamani period. 1 African religious activities, it is believed, are chiefly focused on the relationship between human beings and the departed; which means that, it’s believed, man tries to penetrate or project himself into the world of what remains of him after the physical life. It’s additionally surmised that if the living-dead are suddenly forgotten, they are cast out of the sasa period—a state of personal immortality—and are in effect excommunicated into the zamani period—a state of collective immortality—their personal immortality “destroyed”, and they turned into a state of “non-existence”. This is conjectured to be the worst possible punishment for anyone; the departed, it’s believed, resent it, and the living do all they can to avoid it, for it is feared that it brings illness and misfortunes to those who forget their departed relatives.

Those—both the interceding forgotten and the resentful forgotten—that are believed to dwell in the zamani period, it is conjectured, are the spirits that were forgotten by their loved ones. Theologians from the latter sect further argue—with that persuasion that the dusk’s rusty ember employs to convince man of the world’s beauty—that stained glass transforms light into those spirits that were forgotten by their loved ones and cast into the zamani period.

In villages loomed over by this latter sect, the air grows thick with caution. Warnings are carved into the gnarled trunks of mugavu trees, their bark slashed with cryptic glyphs urging the wary to shun stained glass in their homes. To sleep beneath the gaze of the resentful forgotten, it’s said, is to court nightmares that claw at the mind and fevers that gnaw at the flesh.

The temple masters, however, if I’m not mistaken, use stained glass in the temples’ gothic-sash windows to summon, or so they believe, the interceding forgotten—those that intercede between man and god—without explicit invitation. This practice, once, was believed to summon the resentful forgotten too, until Ndukwe, a chieftain cloaked in reverence and shadow, devised a secret rite—deliberately undisclosed to the masses for reasons pertaining to power—to bar them.

It is whispered, in the twilight’s shadows, that the temple masters often employ quantum theologians that send lasers through half-silvered stained glass to produce superpositions of spirits and not-spirits; the interference fringes are, they conjecture, very sensitive detectors of spiritual presence. Many a natives mutter that the temple masters hate science, but that, I suspect, is just a feint to hide their aggressive adoption of new technologies. For the word of god is most convincing when its speaker knows to play the universe.

Historically opposed to the Nuba people, are the Abulab—whose village is located just adjacent to that of the Nuba. Three northward miles from the Abulab village, in one of the jungle’s manifold sunken glades, the men’s chapel looms. It’s a structure quite unlike the domestic huts, with an uninterrupted dome as the main component of the superstructure. Its exterior is coated in a black mud, dark like iron-rich stool, which the men plunder from a distant village’s quarry. At dusk, the chapel gleams, a marble half buried in the ferns and mulch, reflecting the sun's red sinking eye. The trail leading to it is unkempt, and scrupulously hidden from the women and children. On the midsummer of their 16th year, Abulab males, having endured a brutal day of initiation, are taught to read the secret signs—a bent branch, a stone askew, a whisper in the leaves—pointing to its location amidst the labyrinth.

The chapel is a rasada, a term roughly equivalent to "place that god does not look into". (There is vitriolic debate among the Abulab as to whether the correct formulation states "god does not look" or "gods do not look" — an inconsequence to foreigners, but contested internally due to the ontological implications embedded in their language's plurals). Unlike the Nuba’s stained-glass temples, which aim to aid the divine gaze, the rasada is for the temporary relinquishment thereof, a sanctuary of evasion.

But freedom from the divine gaze is not an architectural property of the chapel. Strict customs must be upheld to maintain its invisibility. One such custom is the relinquishing of all religious trinkets at the threshold; the Abulab are not a theologically unified people despite their small numbers. Amulets of bone; tubers etched with healer’s runes; the braided hair of ancestors and mistresses; scalps won in battle; bulbous fertility icons; wands; even medallions of western saints pilfered from long-dead missionaries. All text is forbidden, as even the most banal may disguise prayer. Within the rasada, the men ought not to refer to each other by name. Even a whispered name will compromise the laboriously preserved stealth of the zone. Men's names draw gods like the crocodiles to a bloodied riverbank.

The women have never found their way to the rasada, and, furthermore, they care little for it; there is no want for it, for it’s believed that the gods never watch women, their hearts walled gardens too high for divine scrutiny. Southward lies their own chapel, where they go when they need to be seen.