Umbrarium

Opposite Gorée, Keightley wrote, Jalof (Wolof) speakers of the mainland believed in beings with a surprising correspondence to European fairies. They called them Yumboes, and also Bakhna Rakhna, Good People—the same courtesy Greeks paid the Furies and Gaels paid the sidhe. They are about two feet high and pearly white, as preternatural things often are in the account, sometimes with silver hair. Their dress copies the people’s. Later notes stress that yumboe is a Lebou word and that Gorée is Lebou country; Wolof and Lebou speech meet on that coast, so both names belong in the record.

They live in magnificence beneath the Paps, hills a few miles inland, and come out to dance in moonlight. Underground they keep many storeys reached without stairs. Guests—local and European—are seated at rich tables where only hands and feet of servants are visible, laying and removing dishes. They eat corn stolen from mortars when women step away to sieve couscous, and fish they catch themselves, stealing a little fire to roast it. When plum wine sours they drink, drum, and sing. They attach themselves to particular families; when a member dies, the yumboes are heard lamenting and dancing on the grave. Moors in the same account take them for souls of deceased friends.

Keightley is, so far as scholarship has traced, the only detailed written source, second-hand from a childhood on Gorée. That thinness must stay visible. The resemblance he drew to Gothic fairies is his comparison, not a Wolof theory of origin. The resemblance to ancestral ghosts told elsewhere in West Africa is a better neighbour. Later novels and games that make yumboes house-elves or flesh-eaters are inventions off the spine of the 1850 account and should not be read back into Lebou speech.

Read from the coast, the yumboes are ambivalent little dead: hospitable, thieving, loyal to a household, loud in grief. The temptation is the underground feast and the stolen meal. Isolation is the European guest who accepts a table served by invisible hands. No hunt, no curse-book. Leave them their hills, their couscous, and the courtesy of the name Good People.