This African, electricity-deprived darkness is the kind of impenetrable that your eyes never get accustomed to. A curtain shrouding the world, shutters over your eyes: even these comparisons are not strong enough. It is a darker kind of darkness, more like a black box you inhabit -- one that not only envelops everything, but at the same time lays itself over your eyes like an untouchably light, still seemingly infinitely tight ribbon wrapped around your head that does not leave the thinnest fissure of light shining through. As wide open as your eyes may be, it is a black, blank screen between you and the world that shuts out all shapes and colours leaving you wide-eyed and without bearings. In other words, this flawless African darkness imitates blindness so meticulously, your pupils may expand and get as big as millstones, but the world around you stays engulfed in impenetrable black. And any ever so faint light, even one resembling only the age old flicker of a heavenly body fallen and lost among the underwood, can become your guiding beacon. The prospect of finding some company, possibly with a radio to while away the time so forcefully spent in a total black-out, as well as a glass of tea or three over glowing embers will keep you going despite the obvious hazards.
Proceeding in this kind of perfect, irremediable black means you find yourself feeling around in the dark, cautiously tip-toeing, proceeding by centimetres, your hands stretched out in front of you. And even in this manner you are eternally at risk of falling flat on your face because of some hook in the ground you would have stepped over had you know it was there, of walking straight into some inconveniently placed house's wall -- in either case, you have no way to anticipate the sheer number of dangers. The night is simply so black that you may as well have got stuck in that proverbial paper bag that you are too dumb to get out of in whichever way suits you best.
Then, a week later, down the same narrow village street, at first the darkness seems just as unfathomable. But with time, as your eyes get used to it and the black cloud around your expanding pupils lifts and the shadows start to detach themselves, first from each other. Hesitantly, tentatively, the fissures of light break, and, each night being granted one moonbeam more or two, the first puddles of bluish light throw themselves between these perfectly opaque masses. And as the week moves on, the nights become clearer, the dark bodies blend less and less, and their edges become starker, until there are clear lines separating one core from the other and even building a superimposed relief of shapes and depths and even colours around the clear, luminescent carpet that the pale but potent full moon has rolled out. Still, even under this glaring nocturnal headlight, the darkest shadows will huddle together like a coagulated absence of light. Lying about along the feet of walls, hung up between the corners of houses, interwoven inextricably with the crowns of the tall trees, they seem held together by magnetic forces at the impenetrable centres they group around, their edges clearly defined, circumscribed by the illumined backdrop of the night sky itself.
And only when the moon is on the wane again and becomes too weak to keep the shadows at bay, those edges start fizzling out, those magnets start losing their hold, the darkness starts fleeing from its own center, spilling into the world around it, and once again the shadows start stretching out and reaching out to each other from whichever corner they were huddling in, moving on and out, bit by bit, with each hour and each night growing larger, denser, sending their gluey fangs out to clutch onto the other shadows and to draw them in to their communal centre in the great scheme of unifying the moonless night. Such is the rhythm of light and darkness that that moon dictates. That moon which so heavily rolls across our sky, moving the tides, moving the blood in my veins. My view on it now has changed.