by Kola Boof
Shango’s father, the Kofi (King) of Ajowa, Hoodi, emerged from the cone hut like a great giant polar bear dipped and rolled in black oil. His hair was braided up in a hundred thumb-sized plats and his beard was white with chalk, his flesh taut and mealy as he dug his staff into the floor and sat upon his throne. He instructed Namibia to go and stand next to the Prince, which annoyed Shango instantly, because it was becoming clearer and clearer that they were somehow connecting this strange girl with the baby to him.
Shango’s eyes shot against his father’s face, demanding an explanation, but Kofi Hoodi casually took a drink of the palm wine offered by one of his concubines and ignored Shango’s stare as he flipped ground nuts in his mouth and leaned on his right side once or twice to let out a loud, pungent fart. No one dared say a word. On the right of him sat Rain Iyanla and Mother Iyanla, their hands in their laps as Shango’s virgins stood behind the Queen and grandmother, tall and straight. To the left of Kofi Hoodi were his concubines and the children, most of them grown, that he had fathered in all sundry.
Kofi Hoodi looked down at his son and the poverty stricken cassava girl. He said to the girl, “Show my son the miracle.”
Namibia turned towards Shango and pulled back the kente cloth that protected her baby from the hot rays of the sun. Shango looked down at the bundle, barely interested, but once he saw the baby’s face--he winced and twisted up his own face, considering the child to be deformed. It had white flesh, white as ivory, and its eyes were blue like the secret part of the ocean and its hair was straight like a wild pig’s.
“What is that!?” spat Shango with disgust.
“It’s a baby”, laughed Kofi Hoodi. “A white baby--sent to us from the next world!”
Shango looked to the line of plum black Spirit Rulers and they nodded in agreement with the Kofi. One of them said, “It is a miracle greater than any we’ve ever known, dear Prince. The child was pulled from Namibia’s womb just three days ago. We have asked the Creators for knowledge and guidance and they have told us through dreams that the child’s name is Bono.”
“But...how can a human be white? There’s no such thing.”
“That’s why it’s a miracle!”, thundered Kofi Hoodi. “This child is the living dead! Not among the God tribe but among us--the Ajowans! This child anoints us.”
“Where is the child’s father?”, Shango asked the girl, but she only stared at him as though she feared for her life. Kofi Hoodi laughed and told the girl, “Tell him...tell my son who the father is.”
Trembling and tearful, Namibia said, “I was raped...by the moon.”
Then she handed the baby to one of Hoodi’s concubines and showed to Shango the marks on her body that had been made by the moon. On both her breasts there were bright splotches where her copper black skin had turned completely white and seemed to be glowing from within. Shango was shocked as he saw the same glowing splotches on her belly, her right wrist and the “glow” of others hidden between her legs. She came to tears and said, “It happened two weeks ago.”
“But no one has ever been born in just two weeks!”
“Isn’t it a miracle!?” Rain Iyanla enthused. “The moon has raped this child and anointed our people with a symbol of greatness!”
At that precise moment, the baby began to heave and cry, his little white hand balled up into a fist and swinging around as though demanding to be fed immediately. Shango looked closely at the back of the child’s hand and noticed that there was hair growing from it like a monkey.
“He grows at an alarming rate”, muttered Namibia, her eyes lowered in shame as she tried to place her nipple in the baby’s screaming mouth, only to have him push the nipple away and holler louder. She knew what he wanted, but was too embarrassed for people to see.
“Give him the monkey bones!” cheered Kofi Hoodi with a boisterous laugh. “He’s a growing hunter, his hunger is like that of a lion cub’s.”
Shango was about to object, to suggest that a newborn baby had not the teeth nor the strength to chew cooked meat let alone something so dangerous, splintery and hard as a monkey bone, but before he could say it, his father’s concubine handed a bunch of thick monkey bones to Namibia--the baby literally grabbing the bones from the concubine before Namibia could pass them to his impatient clutch.
His pink mouth yawned to reveal large sharp white canine-like teeth and a red sticky cat-like tongue. Crunch, crunch. His powerful jaws began devouring the bones as though they were as soft as swamp weeds. His large egg-shaped head rising out from the kente clothe like a full moon and his giant blue eyes bulging, the glassy flatness of them terrifying Shango as the child looked him square in the face and chomped down the bones, simultaneously.
Horror-struck, Shango looked to his grandmother for input, but she seemed to be as smitten with the baby as everyone else was.
“This is the secret weapon we’ve always prayed for”, said Kofi Hoodi with a menacing raised fist. “Never before have we been able to defeat the God tribe in war. Peace and brotherhood have been our only options.” Mother Iyanla looked away from the Kofi at that moment, her soul sickened by her son’s lifelong desire for conquest. She thought of all the dead people’s skulls that hung around the walls of the royal huts as though they were nothing more than seashells. Her son saying, “But now...now we have a warrior who will possess the strength of ten men and surely the magic of the moon and stars! This royal child will lead us to victory and domination!”
“Royal child?”, Shango asked his father.
“But, of course, Shango. Bono is to be your son.”
Shango’s mouth fell open. His eyes opened wide with dismay. My son? He looked pleadingly to his grandmother, his stare insisting that she intervene on his behalf, but all she said was, “It has been brought to your father by the Spirit Rulers...word from the creators, Shango...that our people must keep this child and raise him as an Ajowan. He is a gift to us.”
Shango began to shake his head. “No.”
“You are blessed!”, thundered Kofi Hoodi. “You are to be the future Kofi of Ajowa. You must take Namibia as your bride and future Rain Iyanla and you must welcome this child as an Ajowan. It has been ordained by the creators!”
The lead Spirit Ruler held up a totem that had been painted just that morning and said, “It is already done, dear Prince. You are legally married to Princess Namibia.”
Shango looked to Soraya again. She wept quietly and bowed her head so that he could not see her eyes.
“Tonight”, Rain Iyanla said to her son, sweetly. “We will have a huge celebration feast. You will undo the virginity of each of your concubines and then you will take to the bed of Namibia as your wife. We will plan a formal wedding, of course, a royal wedding for all the tribes to attend, but...”
“NO!” shouted Shango Ogun, furiously. He dashed off through the crowd and exited through the royal gate. The citizens gasped in disbelief and the soldiers were instructed by Kofi Hoodi to go after Shango and drag him back, but then Mother Iyanla stood up quickly and imitated the sound of a hawk, her old black face commanding, “Let him go! My grandson is a young man of high ideals and great passion. He needs time to think this over and I am sure that he will return to us in agreement. This whole miracle has been a shocking event for all of us. We need time to become one with it.”
“Got-Baggah, mother!” Kofi Hoodi cursed furiously. “If he doesn’t return, you will bear the blame for it, I may even chop off your head! You have spoiled that boy since the day he was born.”
“No, Hoodi”, said Mother Iyanla with a solemnly raised chin and hurt feelings. “It was you that I spoiled as a baby. That is why you harbor this greed to take over the world and make senseless war against the God tribe. It is you whose heart...is not a heart, my spoiled rotten son.”
“He had better return!” Kofi Hoodi warned as his infuriated gaze burned across his mother’s face. He stomped his bare foot and curse-roared again, “Got-Baggah!”
••
Shan
go ran. His heart beating with a wildness, his eyes, hair and skin craving the open sea. But if he went there, they would find him easily, so he went the opposite way.
Into the jungled hills of Batubba. Up them and over them.
He ran and ran until the lack of a planned destination turned the bright moon into an all-seeing glowing pearl that he imagined was chasing him, or leading him, he couldn’t tell which, to the ends of the earth. He stared at it often, his brow heavy with confusion, his heart pregnant with a passion that only the moon could understand, and eventually, from staring at it so often, the madness and longing in its white glow began to seep beneath the membrane of his mind.
There was something inside him, he realized, that he wanted to bring out of him and behold with the naked eye, not the inner one. It was like a thirst, of which languages had no adequate name for, but it kept him running--towards a different kind of sea, a different kind of water.
In trees he slept at night and kept a makeshift torch to ward off any hungry animals that might pick up his scent despite the camphor and ash he kept slathered between the crack of his ass, under his arms and on his feet. From his tree branch he stared at the moon’s mysterious glow every night and wondered as lions and apes had wondered--how can I pull it from the sky?
And then, too, he became filled with the moon’s loneliness and its obsession with earth. His stare beholding it until he could see that it was not beautiful and magical, but cold and stony, and even still, Shango could not let it go, its spiritual glare calling him by generations of names.
“Leave me alone!” he shouted, leaping from a tree one early morning.
He waded deeper and deeper into the jungle, his eyes suddenly falling upon a group of fifty traveling Sula women--the renegade women and runaways of all the different tribes who lived their lives in protest of the male dominated societies of Africa. The Ajowans called them “fire witches”, but they called themselves after the legendary disobedient wife, Sula, a Fulani woman who had been stoned to death for refusing to allow that her daughters be properly cut (vaginally circumcised) as the men required for marriage.
When Shango ran into them, he had come to a panther’s halt, because the Sula women were greatly adept at using the poison-tipped spears they brandished and were known to kill, skin and make carrying bags out of any men they came across, but to his surprise, they only smiled at Shango and gave him a sack cloth full of food and wine. He informed them that he was the Prince of Ajowa, fully expecting them to get in line, kneel and kiss his feet, but they received the news of his royalty as though it were nothing more than old stale wind.
The lead Sula boasted, proudly, “I set my husband on fire and drowned my sons. My daughter and I have never been happier. We have a good life now.”
Around her neck hung the shrunken heads of her husband and sons. She took Shango by the hand and led him to a large fallen tree where a herd of giraffes stretched their long necks in the distance. There she sat him down and then motioned for one of the girls to kneel between his legs and suck his penis until it jerked inside her mouth. The girl gave Shango much pleasure and after it was over the Sula women clapped and nodded.
“Now we must go”, the Sula leader said while patting Shango on the head. “Enjoy the food we’ve given you and be very careful on your journeys. Here--take one of our poisoned spears, brother. This will be a good weapon to have.”
“Thank you my sisters”, intoned Shango as the marching sheen of outlaw women and girls departed into the jungle like a pretty black snake eating yellow fruit and singing, “I don’t wish to be a wife...I prefer to live my life!”
••
The food they’d given Shango was not the fresh Ajowan seafood he was used to. It was inland food--ground nut paste, antelope meat in a fruit jelly, termites rolled in thin sheets of lizard skin, peppered wheat chips, Fulani rice cakes. Delicious as it all was, it caused a cramp in Shango’s belly by nightfall, and just as he was crossing a shallow, narrow waterbed in the Okebo river, he bent over in delirium, his vision blurring and his senses overcharged as though he’d been smoking from the hemp pipe on prayer ritual day.
“I’m high”, he said to himself in amazement.
Then...a voice whispered in his ear, very gently, “Shango”.
It frightened the Prince and he dashed out of the riverbed, his knees falling against pebbles as he reached the other side. He heard the voice again, for it said to him--”look at me”, and when he looked up at the purple sky...he saw not one, but two moons.
Two full moons, the brightness of which generated a serene, quiet warmth that he had never before felt at nighttime. It was like being underwater. Their white shining beauty more harmonious than birds. The voice of them speaking as one, both male and female, the voice admonishing, “I am the dolphin girl. I am love...don’t let me be lonely.”
Dolphin girl? Shango’s face filled with wonder, because he had seen her as a child, but people had convinced him that he had been hallucinating...imaging things. “You’re no better than Beeni and the make believe elves that live under her breasts”, they used to say. “There’s no such thing as a girl with a dolphin’s tail.”
But Shango had seen her as a boy. She lived under the sea and had hair just like his--dense and wooly black, thick and knotted. Her color had been truer than his, a cooked chocolate African black, her flat, wide nose reminding Shango of the sensual paint and feather women that danced seductively at the men’s fire rituals--why she’d even had their womanish jellyfish shaped mouths--and yet her lower body had been pure silver...whiplashing through the sea, a graceful dolphin’s tail and a fin jetting from her back.
“I saw her!”, Shango testified, his eyes bulging at the realization that it hadn’t been a hallucination, but real...and then he looked back up at the two moons--but now there was only one.
A solitary moon that begged him, “Please...0 Please...I am very lonely this way. I have nothing but misery and no company to share it with. I am very sad.”
“Leave me alone..I have no power to please you!” hollered Shango, angrily. He didn’t like being talked to by the moon, because it made both butterflies in his stomach and a violent hardness in his loins.
“Take the poisoned spear”, the Moon replied, soothingly. “...and lick it with your tongue. Don’t let me be alone. Lick the spear of death, Shango...just as sweetly as the Sula girl licked the spear of life.”
Lick it.
Give me your heart. Go into the ground.
Shango knew then that the Moon had nothing at all to do with the dolphin girl--for the Moon was bitter and cold and too ancient and too wise to take pity on anything that lived.
“Don’t let me be lonely...come to me.”
“No!” shouted Shango, defiantly.
And with that he lifted his powerfully muscular arm...and he vaulted the poisoned spear into the center of the Moon, but of course, anything thrown into the air by humans falls back to earth. So Shango took up running again. His long, sinewy black legs leaping like a cheetah’s across the rugged open plains of the mysterious African landscape.
And the Moon said to him: “I am the Moon...you think you can run from my lonely nights?”
Shango bolted into the jungle, his feet faster than lightning as he navigated plants, snakes, fallen trees and anything else that stood in his way.
“I am everywhere. Over land and sea and in all the caves and upon the backs of all the birds and all the beasts that sojourn in the dark. I am the teardrop that time forgot. I am the Moon!...and my loneliness...is everywhere! I am the separation...”
Shango kept running, his heart beating wildly, his body sucking air, his arms...desperately reaching through jungle for the future.
“...the misery you are born knowing. I am the white diamond that beguiles your vision and inspires motherless blue melodies to fall like rotten teeth from your gilded lips.”
“I am the eye forever watching the sea...hoping against hope that she will leap from it once more,
the dolphin girl for whom time began...to age the wood. I am the eye forever spying...this bitter earth. I am the wreckage of dreams that spin in your heads like doorways to insanity and paradise.”
Shango broke open ground again and continued to bolt forward, his body drenched in sweat.
“I am old...and cold...because I am the Moon, and I am alone with my fate...waiting for daybreak.”
Every night. Every night. Every night.
I am the Moon.
~~
~~
2
•
When Shango Ogun finally came awake, he thought he had been dreaming about a woman. A mysterious woman whose perfectly soft and slender silvery black feet caressed the edge of a teal blue ocean.
His eyes strained to catch the last of her, because her voice had seemed to take the chill off his bones, but instead, he nodded back into the real world and was greeted by a racking physical pain that reverberated throughout his body as though he’d been beaten by apes. He groaned out in agony and turned up his face to wince, his soul struggling to return to the dream world of the woman, but all that was left was the sound of her voice...the sound of very gently falling rain.
“Go get Sumboo”, said one of the men tending him. “He’s awakening.”
“Got-Baggah!” cursed Shango, angrily.
“Don’t try to move”, said one of the warrior men. “You’ve been beaten very badly. Almost to your death.”
Shango opened his eyes. He saw the creed of the men’s faces and jumped hollering!
These were warriors of the God tribe, their charcoal faces accentuated by ritual scars burned very deep into their V-shaped cheekbones. They had eyes and foreheads resembling those of insects and their ears were burned by rubber acid until it was just hanging fat and gristle. Great height, some of them being as tall as seven feet, only added to their menacing auras.
