Wednesday, March 29, 2006. A special day in the
lives of millions of people in Africa living on the route of the eclipse of the
sun from the Atlantic Ocean to Western Mongolia.
Seven forty-five
a.m. I
stepped out.
“Where’re to?” my wife, Viviane, queried.
“We must remain indoors.”
“Sure, but not now,” I said.
As I walked up Avenue Josef Strauss,
I had a sense of premonition. Not a soul walked the usually crowded street. At 8.55
I rushed back home.
The cemetery silence in our noisy
house and noisier city felt strange.
“Papa, it’s eight two,” Christine, my
ten-year-old daughter, broke the silence. “May I go out to see the eclipse?”
I nodded and she snatched the eclipse shade and
burst out. The moon would start eclipsing the sun at that time and inch off its
path completely at 10.15 GMT.
“It’s grabbing it!” Christine announced gleefully.
Her brother, Yema, and Viviane flew out. I kept
indoors. The eyeglasses of protection were not to be used with diseased eyes or
after eye surgery. My eyes were bad.
“The moon has covered a small part of the sun,”
Yema cried.
“What a sight!” Viviane crooned.
For weeks the Government has been warning
people about the dangers of the eclipse; the media have been explaining it; but
conversations showed that people viewed the event as extraordinary, historic,
inviting, and even frightening.
That dusk or night should fall in full day is
unusual and remarkable. The last one happened here on May 20, 1947. And the
next one will occur in 2081!
In Africa, where
public records sometimes go unregistered, the eclipse can be a historical
watershed. You would hear people saying “My child was born nine days before the
moon grabbed the sun;” “I got married a week before the moon caught the sun;”
“Your grandfather died on the day the moon seized the sun.”
The eclipse of the sun is inviting. In my
country Togo,
those who had the means went on top of the highest peak to observe the event. A
seventy-five-year-old woman interviewed there raved: “I’ve also seen it! Hallelujah!”
The eclipse, just like great events covered by
the media, became an accelerated course in planetary science. The explanations
given in the press, on the radio and the TV banished the false idea that eclipse
was a bad omen and that it was beating cans and hooting at the moon that made
it release the sun.
But it was the frightening aspect of the
phenomenon which dominated. On a
continent where ignorance and superstition rein supreme, supernatural events receive
weird interpretations.
“It’s the end time announced by Jesus Christ,”
some members of the new Christian churches prophesied.
“The ancestors would show their wrath on that
day for the present debauched life,” the animists claimed.
As for “street scientists” they announced that
storms will precede the darkness and thick smoke will succeed it and cause skin
cancer.
Fear hung thickly in the air.
The government communiqué, by insisting that
people lock up their children—and themselves—in their rooms on the day of the
eclipse created a psychosis whose effect was dramatic all over the country.
The panic got to its height when the national
TV showed a 67-year-old man who claimed that he went blind during the eclipse
of 1947. “My mother went out and I profited to steal a look at the eclipse,” he
said. “And that’s why I’m blind today. Remain indoors if you don’t want to lose
your eyesight.”
I noticed soon after that people had put blinds
on their louver windows. “The rays filtering into the room are dangerous,” they
claimed. Had the TV and radios stations not insisted that people follow their
live commentary of the event, people would have unplugged all equipment in their
houses. “X-rays pass through them,” they stated.
In the evening people shopped compulsively. They
also locked their main gates around 8
p.m., two to three hours earlier than usual.
The following day, journalists reported that
the towns and the villages of Togo
were “ghost areas.”
“A
strange fear has seized the nation,” a journalist lamented. “And people have imprisoned
themselves.”
People blamed the government’s communiqué for
that.
At 8.30 the hot morning sun dimmed, the sort of
cloudy sky which presages rain. Nineteen minutes later, half of the sun was
totally covered. A private radio reported that not only had some families locked
in their kids but also they had given them sleeping tablets. “’Prevention is
better than cure’”, the journalist quoted them. “They themselves wore the protective
glasses inside their rooms.”
Meanwhile the sun peered out at intermittent periods.
At 9.13 it got totally eclipsed and two minutes later dusk swept across the
city. A roar, as from spectators at a stadium when a goal is scored, broke the
heavy silence. The birds flying behind my house descended into the trees and
those singing fell silent. Three minutes later the sun began to shine again.
The eclipse was over. “The moon is releasing the sun,” Christine announced.
I went around again. Tight knots of people
formed in street corners and argued. Some were disappointed by the brevity of
the event and the partial darkness. “The eclipse is a hoax,” they asserted.
Others believed the government had joined with a foreign superpower to “release
smoke across the sun’s surface to justify the eclipse shades they sold to us.”
But others were impressed. So much so that some
claimed they couldn’t help observing the eclipse with X-ray films, negatives,
broken bottles, and even the naked eye. Many people praised the remote sensing
scientists for predicting the event to the exact second for the entire route of
the eclipse.
For some animals the eclipse was dramatic.
Bats, which are nocturnal animals, were reported to have taken to the air when
the darkness descended and rushed back to their treetops when the sun shone
again. At zoos nocturnal animals became active when darkness came and diurnal
ones dull. Soon they resumed their normal rhythms.
“What a pity that I won’t be around to
experience the next one!” Viviane exclaimed.
“Ma,
you’d be 115 then, if alive.”
“A very old woman.” Yema laughed.
We all giggled.
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