It’s finally dawn and cowardice curls at my feet like a serpent. We are shadows with the night. Before we all start lifting our weaponized hands, we are still sons of women, not animals. We have been loved and nurtured but we have also, ironically, I must add, been prepared for this moment when we stand at the very precipice of violence and possible death. And we are proud of it.
Except me, of course. I’m scared.
Rege’s silhouette rises as a mature anthill before us. His back is as wide as an old bull’s thigh. He’s only 23 years old, barely able to fit into manhood himself, but already hardened and coming with his own legend. He’s our leader tonight as he has been a leader of many other men for many other raids before. We fan behind him, the bitter cold and the tension hardening our nipples. Of course, we are shirtless and young and wide-eyed, staring at the sleeping village before us. Our hearts beat furiously together as we wait for the first sign of grey light.
Standing next to me, to my right, is a boy not much older than me. I’m 15. I have three younger brothers and one older sister who got married last harvest. I know the boy standing to my left; Yego. We were circumcised together by River Chida many moons ago. We understand pain, comradeship and fear. I can hear his breathing and I’m so close to him I can see the little plumes of mist rising from his mouth when he breathes out. All around me, about 30 boys, we stand motionless as we wait for fate and glory.
Before we set off at sunset, my mother came to the hut where my brothers and I sleep. I was lying down on the mat, already geared; face painted, biceps wound in sisal, my spear resting against the mud wall. I was emptying fear off me, quieting the noise inside my bones, or what in many years lactose intolerant city dwellers would call meditation. She never spoke a word to me, mother, but the way she looked at me conveyed her confirmation. She knew I wasn’t a warrior. Your mother always knows who her child is. I was too tender. I gave lambs names. I nursed cursed puppies back to life. I gazed at sunrise. I loved oral poetry. I had no business throwing a spear. My mother knew this and spoke of it with her stoic silence. And as the loud horn of war sounded for us young killers to gather in the field for the village medicine man to spray our faces with holy water from his mouth, and rub special dust through the raw incisions above our navels, mother turned away from my door, leaving me to my destiny.
And so, in a long windy single file, we trudged along under the starless sky. Rege seemed to know all the valleys and hills by some innate compass; after which shadowy tree to turn, at which part of the river to cross, which trees to avoid walking under as they teemed with leopards, here, at the fork of the road, do we turn right or left? He – also a celebrated tracker – knew it all by heart. When we started off we sung songs of triumph, then as the night wore on we settled into the traditional humming sound of war. Most of our voices, only recently broken, hummed gutturally, an organised cacophony of battle. After hours and hours of walking, we settled in silence with only our feet finding their own synchrony, and making their own music, the soundtrack of fate. We rested twice; once huddled together at the edge of what seemed like an open field with a soft thick carpet of grass,
and the second time on a hill overlooking a swampy area from where we heard hippos clear their throats. At a thin stream, we scooped water with our palms to quench our thirst, as the frogs suddenly settled in silence.
The scout – a stout boy with the wide face of a man – comes back and we gather in a tight circle around him. He explains the layout of the village. “The cows are all in the middle of the boma, so no surprises there,” he whispers loudly. “There are five soldiers on duty, four of them are asleep.” The boy, who we call Mudho, because of his ability to blend with darkness, speaks fast retrieving every single detail from his memory. Rege listens raptly, his head cocked slightly to one side. Our spears all point skyward like a sharp forest of pine.
“How many cattle?” Rege asks.
“Three hundred? Maybe more?” Mudho says. He has a slight lisp, so it sounds like, “thii handyeth.” I don’t know how nobody is giggling because I want to giggle. This is how you know I’m not a warrior.
“How many huts?”
“Thathy thee.”
“What?”
“Thathy thee.”
“The f*k you sayin’ Mudho?” Rege hisses in irritation.
“He means thirty three,” a voice says in the circle.
Rege shakes his head. “Okay, boys, I don’t have to flog a dead donkey here, do I? This is the moment. For those of you who this is their first time, remember that if you stand you die, so you keep moving, you…stop biting your nails, Rwot!” he raises his voice at me. Now you know my name, Rwot. I don’t know what it means, but my grandfather told me it might mean the paws of a cat. That nobody sees me coming.
“Do you want us to give you time to keep your nails clean?” He asks me. “Are your cuticles going to get in the way of this raid?”
“No.”
“Do you perhaps also want to run a comb through your hair, just in case?”
“I’m sorry,” I mumble, my face burning. Everybody is now looking my way.
“First group, the cattle.” Rege having adequately embarrassed me proceeds. “Second group, the main huts where the boys sleep. Third group; gather all the women and children. For the newcomers, no raping. I repeat, we don’t rape women. Tie them up and move them east, towards those hills, proceed with them until you find a big Ongowang tree. Fourth group; kill all men and boys. That includes babies. Burn everything to the ground.”
“Will we have time?” a voice asked.
“Who’s that?” Rege growled.
“It is I, Nyakonyolo,” the voice said.
“Will we have time for what?”
“To check the gender of these babies? Why don’t we just kill them? It will save us time.”
“How long does it take to check the gender of a baby, Nyakonyolo?” Rege demanded.
“I…I was just thinking that perhaps we don’t – ”
“How many raids have you been to, Nyakonyolo?”
“Uhm, two.”
“I have been to 23 raids,” Rege said. “You are a warrior, you follow my orders. So leave the thinking to me. OK?”
“Clear,” Nyakonyolo said.
“All babies under 3 years die this morning. We won’t have time to babysit on our way back,” Rege said. “Everything we have learnt, everything we have been brings us to this moment. Glory is within reach. Respect awaits us. So does death for some of us but death is an honour. May the gods of Jaak and Juong be with us. Let’s get blood on the tips of our spears, gentlemen.”
***
I would never have imagined how it would feel to kill a man. I thought there would be some sort of a darkening to that spirituality, something that sits heavy on your soul like a rock. I later marveled how colourless and undramatic it was, and how the drabness of it all evoked not deep soul searching but a surprising listlessness. Maybe it was the swiftness at which it all transpired.
We brought chaos to this village at dawn, the men just waking up to the reality of our invasion, bewildered and shocked by it. Roofs caught fire and it made huts look like they had worn red fiery hats that were smoking into the slowly yielding darkness. Naked women ran out of these huts, clutching their babies against their bosoms. Men, caught on the wrong foot, scrambled desperately for their weapons, often meeting their death before they could raise them. Blood curdling screams rent the air. We kicked in doors made of sticks, dragged little boys outside and impaled them to the ground. We dragged women out by their hair as they begged in a language, that though we didn’t understand, we knew in our hearts, now filled with the soot of savagery.
It was well choreographed mayhem. The warriors in charge of driving out the cattle herded them out. Hundreds upon hundreds of them, stampeded from their kraal in a cloud of dust. The rest herded the women and girls in a different direction. A rendezvous had been planned many kilometres from this village where we would all gather to briefly lick our wounds but also take stock. Even though the sun had risen sufficiently for one to see the marks on one’s palms, the sky was quickly getting black from the smoke of the burning grass thatched houses. To mean, it felt like dusk again.
I foolishly hoped that I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone. The spear suddenly felt heavy in my hands as we marauded and screamed that war cry, our veins now popping out of our necks with adrenaline, fear and madness. We were now possessed by blood and death. We felt it crawl in our veins. Our hearts were no longer the hearts of sons, of brothers, of uncles, of the boys our mothers served yams and dried meat. We had become barbarians.
I cornered him at sunrise. He was darting between two huts, one hand holding the hand of one of his daughters, the other holding a short knife they called the Bamana. It was a lethal weapon that they could throw with precision at your throat. These men never missed. Legend has it that when a boy was born, his grandfather placed a Bamana in his tiny hands and he grew with it like you would your own limb. If they plunged it through your heart, you’d be dead before you hit the ground. It was a formidable weapon, and an even more lethal one in their hands.
But there we were at the crossroads of life and death. I didn’t give him a chance to fully register my presence, or to react to it, when he finally saw me, approaching to his left side, the side that had his daughter who must have been six years old – my own sister’s age. This immediately presented a conundrum for him because he would have to turn his daughter away from me in order to use his knife. Which meant I had more time and luck than him. He twisted but it was too late. I drove my Bakuba through him. He – about my age – looked shocked, even disbelieving. I saw fresh blood sip between his teeth, then he was falling, still holding his daughter’s hand, dragging her down with him.
Then I was standing over them, his daughter screaming in terror. I momentarily looked into his eyes as they became blank, like the glassy eyes of a slaughtered goat. “If you stand you die,” I remembered Rege’s words and I cast one quick look at his daughter and off I ran towards one of our own who was wrestling with one of their own. After that, I drove my spear into many bodies, boys not any older than me.
*** The first time I saw her she was walking towards the stoop of a hill, a long-necked pot of water balanced on her head. Following behind her was a mangy sad-looking dog with a brown coat and a white strip around its eyes. It was just after the locust invasion, I recall because the farmland was still gnarled and bereft from that calamity. The landscape looked regretful, like it had used a bad barber. She had the smallest waist I had ever seen on a torso. It seemed unnatural how her breasts refused to move even when she was in motion – they were defiant breasts.
“Forget it,” Yar, my friend told me, following my eyes. “She’s beyond you.”
“Who is she?” I asked him.
“Nomvula.” Yar said, a blade of grass sticking out from the corner of his mouth.
“Nomvula,” I repeated. “After the rain, like a rainbow.”
Yar groaned and looked at the cattle grazing in the field below, heads bowed, snatching at grass with their lips.
“Never seen her before,” I said.
“Because when was the last time you saw a diamond?”
“Before today, you mean?”
I watched her disappear behind the hill.
“She’s the daughter of Shango,” Yar said.
I turned to look at him. “The Griot?”
Yar nodded. “Uh huh.”
I gave a low slow whistle.
Our griot was called Shango. Skinny with a white mane and wooden face. He had two wives and four daughters, three who had been married off at some ridiculous amount of 18 heads of cattle, several goats, palm oil and – rumor had it – copper. Shango was revered in my village as griots were in other villages. They were the keepers of oral history of the village, the respected village storytellers and entertainers. They had great memories, transferring lore from one generation to the next, through stories, poems and songs. They often played kora while telling these stories. As we say, ‘when a griot dies, it’s like an entire library is burning to the ground.’
“You see why you don’t stand a chance?” Yar pressed on. “You are merely the son of a blacksmith.”
The following evening I told my father about this girl because she had stuck on my mind like a tick on an udder. Of course he knew her but being a blacksmith his ambition and vision wasn’t any far from his own shadow. He had settled for his trade. He was comfortable living his small life, dreaming his small dreams and making knives and yokes.
He looked at me and shook his head sadly. “A fish and a bird may fall in love but the two cannot build a home together,” he said as we sat around a dinner of bowls of groundnut sauce and steamed cassava. “She is the daughter of a griot. You will have to go to ten raids to marry her, besides her suitors wind all the way down to River Ar.” I stared into the crackling fire, refusing to look up into the resignation in his eyes. “Besides, Rege – the chief’s son – has shown interest in her.”
“He has?” I said looking up. His cheeks looked sunken in the half-light of the fire. He suddenly looked older. He nodded.
“But Rege already has two wives,” I said, hating how whiny I sounded.
“He’s our chief warrior,” he said. “He can have as many wives as he desires.”
When he saw how dejected I looked he added, “My son, love is like rice; plant it elsewhere and it grows.”
Silence filled the room only broken by the sound of chewing mouths. My siblings sat in the corner eating in silence.
“Your father is right,” mother eventually spoke up. “To love one who never loves you is like rain falling in the forest.”
“I will go for the next raid,” I eventually declared after a long pause. “And I will get my share of cattle. Then I will marry her.”
My father just shook his head.
“How will you do that?” mother asked. “We aren’t born in the family of warriors. We are blacksmiths”
“We can be many things, besides,” I added, “warriors are made, they are not born.”
***
And there, at the raid dwindled in our favour, the bodies of our enemy, as of some of our own, strewn all over, huts no longer huts but charred structures, I saw Rege. He was walking past a half-burning granary. He was holding, half dragging one of our injured warriors. I knew this was my chance, if I could ever get a chance with Nomvula.
So, I shifted by Bakuba on the other hand, and I approached Rege from his blindside…
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