The Poisonwood Bible

 People are bantu; the singular is muntu. Muntu does not mean exactly the same as person, though, because it describes a living person, a dead one, or someone not yet born. Muntu persists through il those conditions unchanged. The Bantu speak of “self” as a vision residing inside, peering out through the eyeholes of the body, waiting for whatever happens next. Using the body as a mask, muntu watches and waits without fear, because muntu itself cannot die. The transition from spirit to body and back to spirit again is merely a venture. It is a ride on the power of nommo, the force of a name to call oneself. Nommo rains from a cloud, rises in the vapor fom a human mouth: a song, a scream, a prayer. A drum gives hommo in Congo, where drums have language. A dance gives nommo Where bodies are not separate from the will that inhabits them. In that other long-ago place, America, I was a failed combination of too-weak body and overstrong will. But in Congo I am those things perfectly united: Adah, 

&

I'm losing my family, piece by piece. Father is lost, wherever he. is. Rachel I could only despise more if I knew for sure which way to direct my ire, presumably South Africa, where I guess she’s finally hit paydirt with her exceeding whiteness and mercenary husband. I can’t reliably get a letter to Mother or Adah. Mobutu’s chief postal minister, a relative of Mobutu’s wife, stopped paying all the post workers for the last year so he could use the money to build himsef a mansion in Thysville. Now it takes a huge bribe or a person contact to get mail out of the country, and the letters incoming] can only suppose are piling up somewhere in Léopoldville, beng sniffed for money or valuables. 

If people are shocked by these unexplained losses—the post, thet salary, a friend walking home on the road—they don’t mention it What do people here know but forbearance? They take one look a the expensive, foreign-made uniforms of Mobutu’s police and know to keep their thoughts to themselves. They know who stand behind Mobutu, and that in some place as far away as heaven, where the largest rules are made, white and black lives are different kind: of currencies. When thirty foreigners were killed in Stanleyville, each one was tied somehow to a solid exchange, a gold standard like the hard Belgian franc. But a Congolese life is like the useless Congolese bill, which you can pile by the fistful or the bucketful into a merchant’s hand, and still not purchase a single banana. It’s dawning on me that I live among men and women who’ve simply always understood their whole existence is worth less than a banana to most white people. I see it in their eyes when they glance up at me. 

&

 “What is that, Aunt Adah? And that?” their Pascal asks in his wide-eyed Way, pointing through the aisles: a pink jar of cream for removing hair, a can of fragrance to spray on the carpet, stacks of lidded containers the same size as the jars we throw away each day. “They're things a person doesn’t really need.” “But, Aunt Adah, how can there be so many kinds of things a person doesn't really need?”