BIRAGO DIOP AND SUPERNATURAL

When writers meet supernatural:

Breaths, lures and gleams
More often listen to
The things than the human beings,
The voice of the Fire is heard,
Listen to the voice of Water,
In the wind listen to
The bush in sobs,
It is the breath of the ancestors.
Those which died never left.
They stay in the shade which lights
And in the shade which thickens,
Deads are not under the ground,
They are in the tree which shivers,
They are in the wood which groans,
They are in the water which runs,
They are in the water which sleeps,
They are in the hut, they are in crowd,
The deads are not dead.

wrote the african poet, Birago Diop,in 1960, in one of the most beautifull poem of his continent, Africa, showing the spirituality of a continent so wrongly described as full of "fetishism" and prelogical "infantilism".

In such a continent, where wizards and people are used to call regularly divine and supernatural, never the wizards, never the kings... generated a church or a dogma. They remain intermediaries deprived of ideological power.

Their role of obliged intermediaries for supernatural could confer them a frightening capacity if the field of divine and supernatural were not irreductibly opened to all the african people.

Inserted in cosmos, the man according to Africa thus forms part of the indivisible One as much as of the great Whole. Divine he stays on the earth, brother of mother nature.