Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi

Yesterday I had, I think, the most surprising seminar of my teaching career. I teach a second-year medieval history course, and I take a seminar group last thing on Friday. They tend to be a bit lacklustre, tired, and/or thinking of the weekend, so it tends to be lacking in excitement. However, this particular group of miscellaneous nineteen-year-olds is additionally ornamented by a middle-aged black man. From an earlier chat when he stopped to ask me a question after a lecture, I knew that he’s from a small up-country village in the Congo. I haven’t been rude enough to enquire what freak of fate has brought him to Aberdeen in middle life: we do have a lot of African students, though they don’t generally come our way in history – both because they tended to be practically oriented in their studies, and also because they feel at a disadvantage in Eurocentric history courses. However, a recent curriculum overhaul now insists that students take at least one course per year outside their chosen discipline so we may find ourselves seeing more of them. This particular chap is charming but quite diffident, and has been very silent in class, though I noticed last week he was gaining confidence. In last Friday’s class, we were looking at the monsters and marvellous creatures on the Hereford mappa mundi, aided by a preliminary slideshow about unnatural history in the middle ages. I stuck up a slide of a mermaid with a comb and a glass in her hand, and asked the group what medieval people believed about mermaids. There was the usual thunderous silence (students’ almost total lack of general knowledge is a melancholy reality – apart from the Harry Potter fans, who can at least do basilisks and mandrakes, none of them ever recognise anything). Then my African student piped up, and said, ‘fishermen catch them, you know, and we buy them in the market’. He then proceeded to unfold his tale: apparently, if you catch a mermaid, you cut the tail off and throw her back, because she can grow another tail .The tail is preserved by salting, and what you do is add a small piece to whatever’s in your pot and because mermaids are powerfully magic, you will become irresistably eloquent, or have power over your enemies, or what you will. ‘So you don’t buy fillet of mermaid?’ I said, ‘just a bit for magical purposes?’ ‘That is correct’, he said gravely.  The rest of the students continued to sit mumchance, but the quality of the silence had changed from mere complete absence of thought to mute flabbergastedness.  Things went back to normal for a bit till we got to another of my slides – I was pursuing the idea that a number of  descriptions of monsters sound like traveller’s tales and trying to attract their attention to the difficulty of formulating an accurate description of something utterly unfamiliar. I’d given them Ctesias’s description of a satyr, a man covered in hair and dwelling in Africa, and followed it up with a picture of a chimpanzee with a quizzical expression looking particularly human. My African student piped up again, with a truly wonderful story. He told us that there was a bit of his local jungle where one didn’t hunt because kings were buried there. A rash and unprincipled individual  went there with his gun, and shot a monkey. As he went to pick up his catch, a chimpanzee emerged from the bush, carrying a gun, and addressed him severely. ‘That’s no monkey’, he said, ‘that’s a human being’. He insisted that the man nick himself, and the chimp did the same, so that they could compare their blood to that of the dead monkey. ‘You see’, he said, ‘that is human blood’. He put his hand on the dead monkey’s chest, and when he lifted it, the bullet was lying on the surface, and the monkey was breathing again. He told the man that his punishment was to be lost in the forest for three days. My student, who was about twenty-five at the time, was part of the search party who went looking for the missing hunter. When he turned up three days later, he said the searchers had passed him repeatedly but couldn’t see him, and conversely, he hadn’t been able to attract their attention. By this time, the rest of the students were looking sort of stunned. ‘Which goes to show it can be very difficult to tell the difference between humans and animals’, I said, trying to wrest the class back on course. We finished my slides, returned decorously to the Hereford map, and looked for Yales and Blemmyes and Bonacons till the hour was over. But it’s a terrific story, and I can’t help wondering what the other students made of it.