by Dave Mckay
"It's three or four times what we ever got from Friends in America," one young Quaker enthused to the others at the boda-boda stand one morning. Quakers in Kenya had previously relied on their wealthier counterparts in America; consequently, after the fall of America, they had been suffering financially. Now all that was changing. "I'm sure the Lord is using this to bless us," said the young Quaker-turned-super church man. "There is so much good we can do with this money."
"What about tribal practices? Will they stop us from doing our old family customs?" asked another.
"The church never stopped us from doing circumcisions or other practices, not even before," boasted a driver from a zealous Catholic family. "And there are meetings during the week now where you can believe anything you like. It'll be so easy in this new church."
"What about you,Moses? What's your religion?"asked the Quaker driver.
"Me, I don't have a religion," he said. "Just do good and think positive; that's my religion. But I'm happy for you guys."
Talk then turned to General Secretary Xu Dangchao. There was praise from all of them for the charismatic leader. In less than four years he had turned the greatest holocaust in history into a booming success for those who had survived. World peace, prosperity, and religious unity; they had it all. It was like heaven on earth.
Maybe there was a little truth in what Josephat said, Moses thought to himself. "Those who destroyed the earth" had, themselves, been destroyed, and the rest of the world was reaping great benefits as a result. Too bad that Josephat (and Amy, and Rosy) couldn't see that what Dangchao was building was closer to the paradise that they must have been hoping for, than anything that they had now... if, in fact, they were even alive.
The trouble, he thought, was that Josephat had been a fanatic. He had to believe he was right about everything. Josephat had refused to co-operate with other believers, who were uniting under this new enlightened church. His stubbornness had led to insanity. Breakaway groups like his always seemed to turn into cults, with sick beliefs and sicker practices. Each time Moses thought of Rosy, Amy, and Josephat, his anger grew.
As the stories had spread, people came to believe that Amy and the children had been brain washed, hypnotised, and then enticed away to some secret hideaway, where, if they were still alive, they were almost certainly carrying out satanic rituals and suffering a fate worse than death. Most believed that the orphan family never reached Nairobi on that fateful train trip, before Josephat succeeded in having his way with them.
Over the next two years, while unity spread through churches, through banks, and through governments, there was a subtle growth in suspicion about anyone who refused to be a part of this new movement. Moses had been asked countless times to join the new churchhimself, but he had always refused, saying that he had no need of such stuff. The simple fact that he hung onto his independence made many people feel that he was against what they were doing. He had to repeatedly defend their right to believe as they did, in order to reassure them.
It seemed like Moses was only able to get away with maintaining ths position because he was in a class of his own, as the worldwide poster boy for the identity system that was uniting the planet. His celebrity status gave him confidence enough to carry on without religious affiliation, even if it did not make him independent in other ways.
There were others like himself, who claimed to believe in nothing, but the counter-argument was always that there was room for those sort of people in the new world church too. Such people usually joined in the end, just for the feeling of acceptance that it gave them. But more than a few joined out of fear that they would suffer by not being a visible supporter of the new movement.
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Chapter 20. Becoming a Man
In those first heady days of fame and financial success, Moses found himself the center of attention for a lot of attractive females in the village. Although promiscuity was rampant amongst local youth, Moses had, until he was 18, avoided any sexual relationships for two main reasons. One was his total dedication to becoming successful. Women represented a distraction from his long-term goals of financial independence.
But the other reason was probably more significant, and that was that he had never been circumcised. The loss of his parents had come at a time when most boys his age were beng circumcised to prove their manhood. This lapse on his part had gone completely unnoticed. But a sexual relationship would give a woman information that, if spread around, could lead to him being forcibly circumcised in accordance with local custom. He did not want that. Even married men were, at times, dragged into the bloody ritual if people learned that they had been overlooked in previous years.
Who could say how long his hormonal needs would have held out against his fear of adult circumcision? Nevertheless, Moses had found some comfort in the fact that during this time of greater unity, there had also developed a greater tolerance for non-circumcised males.
When he was nearly 19, Jiddy talked him into sleeping with Atamba, a local woman in her mid twenties who worked in the local bar. Jiddy was the only other person on earth who knew Moses' secret about being uncircumcised, and he had faithfully kept it.
"She won't tell anyone," Jiddy promised. "Atamba knows lots of secrets... about me and about a lot of other guys in the village, but she never tells anything. And hey, Stump, she doesn't cost much either."
The time was past when Moses would need to reckon with tribal elders, even if his secret did leak out, thanks to the new religious liberalism. So Moses let Jiddy introduce him to this woman, and he lost his virginity on the floor of Atamba's hut on the opposite side of the village to where he lived, very late one night after the bar closed. Not feeling right about paying for such a favour, he gave her two kilograms of sugar "as a gift" instead, and she seemed happy with that.
"Now you're a man," Jiddy had said the next morning, after Moses timidly let him know that he had "done it". "What do you think, Stump? Was it good?"
"It was okay," he said sheepishly, "but I was worried about someone finding us. Do all the girls do it?"
"Most, if you're nice to them," Jiddy promised. He was pretending to be more expert than he really was, although he had enjoyed the company of three or four local women in the five years that had passed since his first encounter at the age of 16.
The experience had opened Moses' eyes to what he had been missing, and so after that, he frequently obliged various women who threw themselves at him because of his fame. But he always practiced safe sex (unlike some others in the village), and he did not let it interfere with his greater desire to succeed financially.
Jiddy benefited from his friendship with Moses, often inheriting a friend of someone whom Moses was bringing back to the house. He did not have the same dedication to his job that Moses had, so he was not worried about taking time off work during the day to engage in sex.
Girls lost interest in Jiddy much more quickly than they did with Moses, but the younger man was always able to use his fame to find Jiddy a new playmate.
"Be nice to them. You said it yourself," Moses lectured one night after seeing his friend's latest girlfriend storm out of the house as he was cycling up to it. "What do you do to make them so mad? She looked like she had been hit."
"They don't know what they want," Jiddy grizzled. "Even they like it rough too sometimes, but then they change when I'm having fun."
Just as Moses had suspected. Jiddy was hitting them and getting turned on by it. No wonder the girls left him after a few dates! He tried reasoning with Jiddy, explaining that his own approach was more successful.
"Yeah, you can say that, Stump," Jiddy argued, "because you're famous. But I know better than you, because I've had a lot more girls."
Moses did not bother to say the obvious. There was no point in rubbing Jiddy's nose in his numerous failures. Instead, Moses resolved to look for ways to subtly influence his friend. What would often happen is that th
e girls Jiddy upset came to Moses for comfort. He had strict rules about not taking advantage of any of them, however. He valued Jiddy's friendship too much to do that.
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Chapter 21. Josephat Spotted
Moses never gave up looking for Rosy, Amy, and the children, but all of his efforts were fruitless. He had travelled to Nairobi and made enquiries there twice, once shortly after they disappeared, and again a year later. He hired a private investigator to search for them, but there were no recordsof the children in any of the schools, and the only Amy Walkers found in document searches all turned out to be someone else. Josephat, too, had not been seen, either locally or in Nairobi. It was like they had all disappeared off the face of the earth.
Locals were easily convinced thatAmy and the children had been killed, and that Josephat had fled to another country; whereas Moses was not so quick to write them off completely.
Then, two months after he turned 20, in early February, there was a report that someone matching Josephat's description had traded a box full of used postage stamps for some pain killers at a chemist shop in Kakamega. Attempts to trace where he had come from, or where he had gone afterwards led nowhere; but it was enough to convince Moses that Rosy and the others were still alive, and that they had returned to the area from Nairobi. The stamps must have been the same ones that he himself had donated to Amy when she was still living in the village. Moses made this known to others in Shinyalu, and, because it was widely believed by now that the family had been killed, this even aroused the interest of the local police, who started making enquiries of their own, both in Shinyalu and in Kakamega.
Talk of drinking blood and worshipping devils resumed, as well as theories about the children being abused, tortured, and killed. People became convinced that others in Kakamega were conspiring to hide and protect Josephat. One of the people fruitlessly interviewed by the police, lived on the road between Shinyalu and Kakamega, and so a group of boda-boda drivers decided to surround the man's house and set fire to it, as punishment for supposedly withholding information.
Moses protested weakly, stating that they did not have enough evidence to act, but their anger over-ruled. Luhya teaching is that if you kill anyone, the ghost will return to haunt you. Even burning someone's home is considered taboo; but all that was changing now. Moses felt obliged to pedal with the brigade to the man's house, but he refrained from actually starting the fire. The victim's wife and daughter escaped into a field (He himself was at work in town.), but all that they owned went up in smoke.
The simmering hatred that people felt toward Josephat for having spoken out against the new government, and against the implant, was threatening to boil over in other ways as well. It was getting harder and harder for people like Obadiah to maintain the veneer of tolerance that had been a part of the superchurch platform. There was, indeed, plenty of tolerance within the new structure, but those who teach tolerance most loudly often become themselves the most intolerant toward people outside their control. This powerful new association had equally powerful negative feelings toward dissidents. Such "incompatibility" was quickly becoming the ultimate sin.
In Shinyalu, Josephat symbolised all who dared to question the way the world was going. There was an almost utopian paradise forming on one hand, and deep insecurity on the other. Hate for Josephat became the focus that helped many to overcome their insecurities.
Then, five months after the stamps turned up in Kakamega, tragedy struck. Secretary General Xu Dangchao, the architect of the new world order, had been attacked and killed during an appearance in Jerusalem. A crazed assassin had shot him in the head and in the heart, before being killed himself. Dangchao had died on the way to hospital. The world was in shock, as people realised how much they had depended on Dangchao to turn the economy around. Now he was gone.
In the midst of the shock, Moses recalled something that Josephat had said almost exactly three years earlier. He had said that Dangchao was going to die, and that Satan was going to resurrect him. It was like the fall of America; but this time he had named Dangchao. Moses didn't care if it was Satan or not; he still wished for a miracle... something to bring back the man who had almost single-handedly made poverty a thing of the past.
Then, the next day, it did happen. News came via radio first, with further reports in the papers: Dangchao was alive. They said earlier reports had been a mistake; but over the next three years Dangchao often reminded the world of his 'miraculous resurrection' whenever there were doubts about his authority. Miracle or not, he had survived, with nothing to show for it but a patch over one eye, where a bullet had entered his skull.
There were wild celebrations organised by the new world church. They were held in the village, in Kakamega, in Nairobi, in fact, all over the world when the news of Dangchao's survival reached the masses. In the minds of everyone, Dangchao had been dead, and now he was alive. He had become a living legend... a god.
But the assassination attempt was a warning to the world. They needed to take better care of their gifted leader. The Jews had put up a new Temple in Jerusalem some three years earlier, and it had come to symbolise the new era of peace, prosperity and religious harmony that Dangchao had been so instrumental in bringing about. The Jews graciously agreed to offer use of their Temple as Dangchao's official headquarters (although there were rumours that not all Jews had been so gracious about the offer).
Some people saw deep significance in what was happening in Jerusalem, including a few of the on-going independent believers in the village; but all Moses cared about was that the world was safe... and so was its charismatic leader. He felt proud to have played his part in easing the transition from one economy to another through the advertising campaign for the microchip implant, and so he identified strongly with this new world that had grown out of the destruction of "those who had destroyed the earth".
So what, if Josephat had said that Satan would be the force to bring Dangchao back from the dead! The important thing was that he had come back, and that steps were being taken to make sure that it stayed that way.
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Chapter 22. Amy and the Kids
"What have you got there?" Amy asked, as Karl a neared the summit of the steep hill, hugging an armload of vegetables. The youngest member of the family, now seven years old, had been out harvesting from secret locations scattered around the Kakamega Forest.
"Sweet potatoes," she said. "Jo-Jo has some honey." Ten-year-old Jo-Jo was just coming out of the forest at the base of the hill. He waved his arm in a wide circle above his head, a signal Amy recognised immediately. She gathered her few belongings and called to Karla.
"Inside," was all that she said. Karla glanced briefly back at Jo-Jo, who was climbing the hill in earnest now, before she stepped quickly into the manmade cave. She and Amy moved quietly but unhesitantly toward the chamber that was almost fifty metres into the side of the hill. They instinctively protected their faces from the bats that they knew would be at the twenty metre mark.
Meanwhile, ten-year-old Jo-Jo had been joined half way up the fifty-metre hill by Simon, who, at 12, was the next oldest of the eight children still in Amy's care. Simon had been able to hide the pumpkin he had been carrying under a bush, so he could give Jo-Jo a hand. Together the two were able to carry the bucket of honey more quickly up the hill. Each held one end of a branch extending through the handle of the bucket. It would not do to leave the vessel out where it could be found.
Each person knew what they were to do, and they each acted without saying a word.
When Amy reached the heavy curtain at the back of the cave, which soaked up most of the light from a lantern that burned behind it, she passed the palm of her hand across her face, and 14-year-old Lucy, who had been studying some books, immediately knew that she must blow out the lantern. The pitch blackness was not a handicap to any of them, for they had each learned over the past two years how to navigate every
inch of the cave in total silence and without visual assistance.
The tunnel like cave had been constructed by a mining company many years earlier and had been abandoned shortly after its construction. From the tunnel entrance one could look out over the top of the forest, and either see or hear if anyone was in the area. Because the children had been down below gathering food, they had heard something before Amy did, so she knew they all had plenty of time. There was no sense of panic.
When the two boys arrived at the darkened inner chamber, they placed the bucket of honey to the side of the opening and joined the others on a long couch constructed of boxes that were full of pamphlets.
Everything was relaxed as they waited silently for sufficient time to pass. But then they heard a noise at the mouth of the cave. It sounded like several people were entering the cave. Everyone stiffened.
But then there were three loud claps, and they each breathed a sigh of relief. Lucy struck a match and relit the lantern while the others got up and walked toward the opening.
"Jambo!" said the voice of a young woman.
"Rosy!" Karla whispered loudly as she looked up at Amy in the near darkness of the tunnel.
"Eh, Rosy," Amy responded softly, squeezing the little girl'shand. They never shouted, even when they believed the forest to be empty.
"Jambo!" Amy spoke in response to the 17-year-old.
"Look! Micah!" Karla said, as they neared Rosy. "And Jane!" Karla let go of Amy's hand and raced toward the others. Jane's 16-year-old twin brother, Gene, was there too, hidden behind 18-year-old Micah. At 17, Rosy was not the oldest, but she was the natural leader.
For more than two years the family had lived undisturbed in the cave. Tourists never came to the forest at night, nor did they carry pocket lights with them during the day. Any who reached the hill, separated from the dirt track by half a mile of forest, and who ventured into the mouth of the cave, using only matches, soon turned around when they reached the bats. Amy and the children had come to appreciate the bats, who fed on mosquitoes, deterred visitors, and provided them with protein.
