The elders of my village used to say that a man who has not travelled thinks his mother is the best cook. This morning, with patchy rain drifting in from the hills around Ogidi and the air warming to twenty-three degrees, I sit on the verandah and let the world come to me through the radio, through the newspaper my nephew has carried up from the road, through the small phone my grandson clutches with such gravity, as though it were a calabash holding palm wine for an honoured guest. The world arrives, and it brings its quarrels with it.
In the eastern provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the sickness called Ebola has returned. The doctors of Médecins Sans Frontières say its spread is deeply alarming. A remote town that lives by digging gold is under siege not from an army but from a virus that turns a man's own blood against him. The head of the World Health Organization has gone to see it for himself. The women, the reports say, bear the brunt: nursing the sick, washing the dead, falling sick in their turn. I think of the women of Umuofia who carried the village on their backs when the men were away making war or making palaver with strangers. There is a proverb among my people: when the roof leaks on the head of the elder, the children inside also get wet. The roof of Africa is leaking again, and the rains are not gentle.
It is strange to sit here listening to rain on banana leaves while another rain falls in Congo. Strange too, that in a small flat in eastern Romania, a drone fell out of the night sky and put fire into a family's kitchen. The neighbours say no one feels safe now. The Russians say the drone was Ukrainian; the Ukrainians say it was not theirs; the great alliance called NATO frowns and clears its throat and writes another statement. But the woman whose ceiling is now the sky cares little for whose flag was painted on the machine that ruined her. The flag of the falling thing is always the flag of grief.
When I was a young man, the white missionaries who came to my country spoke of the world as if it were a single house with many rooms. They did not always tell us that the doors between the rooms could be locked from one side only. Today the news from Singapore tells me that the American defence secretary has gathered the Asian ministers and explained to them that those who do more for America will reach, in his own words, the front of the line. There is an older phrase for this kind of arrangement, but I will not use it here. I will only say that the front of the line is always a crowded place, and the back of the line is where the stories are told.
In Colombia they are voting today for a president, and the candidates speak of peace while the gunmen return to the hills. A faction of the old FARC tells the cameras that they took up the rifle again because the peace did not bring them safety. I have lived long enough to know that a treaty signed on fine paper is not the same as a meal cooked at a real fire. A man cannot eat a signature. From Quito the president of Ecuador has telephoned a right-wing candidate in Bogotá and offered to remove tariffs if his man wins. The neighbours are meddling, as neighbours will. The yam, my grandmother said, does not grow well when too many hands are in the soil.
Across the Middle East the festival of Eid al-Adha has come and gone in a strange half-light. In Gaza, in Lebanon, in Iran, the families killed the small ram or did not kill it, prayed the dawn prayer or did not pray it, while bombs fell and queues formed for bread. The Americans and the Iranians are still arguing over a memorandum of understanding; their president, I read, is asking for changes to the nuclear clauses. The Lebanese prime minister calls the latest Israeli incursion a scorched-earth policy. The Iranian football players, who should be packing their boots for the World Cup, are training in Turkey because they have no visas to the country of the tournament. A man with no visa is a man with one foot in the air. He cannot run and he cannot stand still.
Now hear another thing. In Italy, two American singers, Mr Kanye West and Mr Travis Scott, have had their concerts cancelled by the authorities, who cite security. In Paris, the celebrations of a football victory by Paris Saint-Germain turned into the burning of cars and the firing of flares, and hundreds were taken to the cells. The young men of Europe, it seems, have rediscovered the old village dance, only without the elders to keep order. They sing, they break, they burn, they sleep. In the morning the streets are swept by other men and the matter is forgotten until the next final. Football, I have come to understand, is the new masquerade. The masks are bright and the spirits inside them are restless.
There is one item I have saved for last, for it pleases me. In Jamaica, a young film-maker named Sosiessia Nixon has made a picture about obeah, the spiritual practice that the British outlawed three hundred years ago and which has refused to die. Three centuries of prohibition, and still the old knowledge walks at night between the cane fields. This is a story I have told before in different words: that a people may be conquered, their tongues may be twisted, their gods given foreign names, and still, somewhere under the iroko tree of memory, the original drum is being struck. The colonisers always underestimate the patience of what they wish to bury.
The rain on my roof grows softer. A boy passes on the road with a bucket on his head, going to fetch something for his mother. He does not know that in Laos divers have pulled four more men from a flooded cave, that two of their companions are still lost in the dark water. He does not know that the editor of Star Wars, a woman named Marcia Lucas, has died at eighty in a country he has never seen. He does not know any of this and he is not the worse for it. He knows that his mother needs whatever is in his bucket, and that the path home is muddy.
I think the boy is right, and the news is right, and both can be true at the same time. The world is one house, as the missionaries said, but it is a house with many rooms, and in each room a different kettle is boiling. The wise man learns to listen to all the kettles without burning his hand on any of them. The old people of my village put it more simply. They said: when the drums beat far away, the child still hears them, but the child does not have to dance to every drum.
It is enough, on a wet Sunday in Ogidi, to know that the drums are beating, and to remember the names of those whose feet are sore.