Terramoto, sombra, o início do mundo

Abstract

This text is about Victor Bor, Tio Jorge and Ntombikte Na Natchi, who in the mid-1980s felt the inner earthquake of Kyangyang, the “Shadow” in Balanta Kuntohe. This phenomenon took place during the period when Nino Vieira was president of the Republic of Guinea-Bissau, between 1980 and 1998, and when Dutch psychiatrist Joop de Jong ran the psychiatric hospital in Bissau. The Kyangyang went down in history as a post-colonial messianic movement that caused enormous turbulence within the Balanta community of this small West African territory. In general, both the people who were part of the movement and those around them describe it as being made up of people who had been caught up in the Shadow, i.e. who suddenly and synchronously saw and heard the dead reveal to them the secrets of writing and healing. Victor Bor describes visions of lights and explosions that are sometimes confused with episodes from the liberation war that took place a decade ago, but also with the civil war that at the end of the 1990s destroyed the psychiatric hospital designed by Joop de Jong. Tio Jorge, the brother of the woman who became the prophetess of Kyangyang in the 1980s, said in a conversation we had in Bedanda in 2019, in southern Guinea-Bissau, that it all started with a small earthquake.