Land of My Fathers

by Vamba Sherif

  The sun had broken on the world, and the smith was sweating as he knelt beside me, his gaze intent. ‘The child needs some water,’ he said, and someone went to draw water from the pot before our hut.

  By now I was sitting up on the dusty ground, with the smith holding me in his embrace. ‘Tell me what you saw, Halay.’

  ‘I saw a masked being with the face of a crocodile.’

  ‘Describe him fully to me.’

  The smith listened as I delved into my dream.

  ‘What did he tell you?’

  ‘He told me nothing. He talked in signs.’

  ‘What signs?’

  ‘I saw fire in his eyes, I saw images. Stories were told in those eyes.’

  ‘What stories?’

  ‘I saw a man. He was standing on a hill. I saw seven long white forms pointed at him. The forms looked like spears.’

  ‘Spears? White forms?’

  ‘The forms shone and dripped dark blood.’

  ‘Dark blood?’

  ‘I think they were tears, Uncle Koilor.’

  The smith shook his head. My father broke into a litany of curses directed at enemies he believed had cast an evil eye on his son. He hit everything within reach – the walls, the ground, and the roofs – with his bare hands until they bled. His voice turned into a wail. ‘Yes, they are out to get me. I know that for a fact now. They are out to hurt my son.’

  The smith sucked his teeth, saying, ‘Enough, Kollie.’ The smith mashed some herbs he had brought with him in a tiny mortar until they turned pulpy. ‘Get better soon, Halay, and I will teach you smithery.’

  ‘Can I make the things that I see?’

  ‘Yes. Get better first.’

  The smith took a handful of the mashed herbs. ‘Open your mouth, Halay,’ he said, and squeezed the concoction into my mouth.

  The liquid plunged me into a fit of dizziness. My father’s rival, Mambu, entered the compound and rushed up to me.

  ‘Tie the child up to prevent him from hurting himself.’

  The man approached me, his gaze tinged with mockery. The compound was quiet. My father had by then regained his composure. The smith, on the other hand, stupefied at my reaction to herbs intended to cure me, looked on helpless as Mambu touched my forehead and rubbed my shoulders and legs. ‘Tie him up, I say. Bring me a rope.’

  Mambu’s words were directed at no one in particular.

  ‘You are meddling in our affairs, Mambu,’ my father said.

  ‘We are relatives,’ he said.

  ‘You are not related to us.’

  ‘The child is mine, too. I am his uncle.’

  ‘You are corrupting our past. We are not the same people.’

  ‘Our stories have been told by the wise elders from time immemorial. You cannot shun a relative.’

  Mambu’s words were meant to tease my father, to work him up into anger, and it worked. My father now bundled up all his grief and pain into a fistful of rage directed at his rival.

  ‘Leave my house now, Mambu,’ he said.

  He was about to hit him, but Koilor intervened.

  ‘If ever I see you in this house again, the land will know once and for all who its ruler really is. I will kill you, Mambu.’

  But Mambu ignored my father and went to my mother, who seemed to have come out of her stupor.

  ‘Your husband, my brother, is angry with me. If you need me, let me know,’ he said.

  My mother nodded, her strength depleted. She would have stood up to Mambu and defended her husband in the past, but now she accepted the rival’s mockery as though it was normal. My old life seemed like a shelter being scorched by the fire of the day’s event.

  The old midwife entered the compound. Since my birth, she had ceased to interfere in our lives, but everyone in the town listened to her. ‘Why don’t you take the child to the great herbalist across the river, Kollie? He will know what to do,’ she said.

  ‘Which herbalist?’ my father asked.

  ‘The one who cures the sick without touching them.’

  ‘I will take my son to see him.’

  ‘No, you must stay,’ the old lady said.

  ‘I want to be with my son.’

  ‘You will be leaving for an uncertain length of time. Never underestimate an enemy such as Mambu. Because his father was once our ruler, he thinks he has the right to be king.’

  ‘I must see to it that my son is better.’

  My father told her that he would leave the affairs of the land to his best friend, Koilor. But the old lady said, ‘He is incapable of ruling, Kollie. You must stay.’

  But my father would not listen to her. She left, shaking her head. ‘You will regret this, Kollie,’ she said, ‘but by then it will be too late.’

  That night, we prepared for the journey. My mother packed a sack of dried meat and rice, a tin of oil and some vegetables in one bundle, and in the other she deftly laid out our clothes, then she bundled up the two into one. No relative was accompanying us. ‘This has to be done by the two of us, Siah,’ my father said, and my mother agreed.

  3

  The townspeople came to bid us farewell, a large crowd which spread across the road like ants. It was a solemn affair. The wind whistled a mournful tone as though it were sweeping across a deserted place. Turning to look at the town, I wondered whether I would ever see its mountains and its many paths again, its trees under which elders rested at midday. At the main junction where the road forked into four paths that formed the main thoroughfares, I saw the blind Tellewoyan being led by a relative. Behind him walked the smith, avoiding me perhaps because he thought he had failed me. ‘Halay, don’t forget your lessons,’ the blind man said. ‘Return good and well and we will resume.’ Some of the boys with whom I had played in the moonlight or had swum in the rivers were also present. So were the Muslim cleric and his students. Moving past the courtyard, the smith’s workshop, on our way towards the river, we came to Mambu’s large compound, with its many huts and granaries. Mambu was standing in front of his home, wearing a white tunic and exuding an air of importance.

  He waved to me and I waved back. My father refrained from berating me and simply ignored his rival.

  We parted from the crowd at the great river. We exchanged hugs and muttered wishes in quavering voices. On stepping into the river, which was flanked by trees that threw a large canopy of shadow over it, the mild water climbed to my chest, but I waded through it with little effort. Would anyone, including my parents, understand that all that troubled me was the presence of the masked beings? I wondered. Or was this perceived as illness? Would the herbalist exorcise their presence and relegate them to a realm where they would never haunt me again?

  The crowd vanished around the bend, and all I could see was a vast stretch of forest, with trees overlapping one another, here and there blocking out the sunlight. My father seemed lost in thought, and when I held his sweaty hand, he clasped his tight around mine. Under a huge bundle of our belongings, my mother looked as lean as a cane, her gaze fixed before her, her lips moving as though she were conversing with the masked beings who tormented me.

  At a shack along the road, we encountered a group of men dressed in what I would later learn was khaki clothing. Their leader, a tall black man with a pipe in his hand and wearing spectacles, stretched out his hand to greet my father. Through an interpreter, the leader said that he had been dispatched by the newly founded republic of Liberia on a journey far into the interior to look at the possibility of including more people in the new black republic. It was an ambitious project. I noticed my father’s unease, as if the message did not go down well with him, and I was too young to understand then, but I know now that he was keen on protecting his land from anyone bent on usurping it. The language the leader spoke was the same one that Tellewoyan had been teaching me. My curiosity as to what kind of people the Liberians were was aroused.

  We continued our journey. The heady fragrance of the forest sometimes threw me into a fit of sneezing.
Every so often a bird would chirp a note, and whenever we thought it had abandoned us, it would make its presence known with a flurry in a nearby bush. Then, suddenly, the bird was gone and we were confronted with the silence of the forest, with its shadows, which at times felt like large cloaks covering us, intent on stifling the life out of us.

  The first village came into view, hewn out of the forest as if by accident, or as if it were a mark left by romping elephants. There was no sign of people. At a place marked with a line of white clay, my parents removed their sandals and beckoned to me to do the same, and we followed a tiny path that led through the village. We stopped to rest beside a spring and to shower in its cold water. My father assembled a bed of leaves as a sleeping mat for mother and me, and he erected a temporary shelter, which we rested under and waited for night. ‘Don’t be afraid of what you encounter in your dreams, Halay,’ he said. I had a bite of the dried meat my mother carried in the bundle, and I lay awake, listening to the forest and awaiting the return of the masked beings. My mother sang me to sleep. I awoke at dawn to find myself bouncing off my father’s back as he hurried to reach our destination. He carried me all day long.

  We arrived four days later. The journey was marred with difficulties. It had lasted four days. Whether it had to do with my dreams or not I couldn’t tell but I kept coughing and sneezing. My mother, whose every action came across as solemn, as one about to quake under an unbearable burden, with her face covered in a fine layer of dust, looked like an initiate into the women’s Sande Society. She went on cursing a place that had no river close by where one could wash and put on decent clothes. We met a quiet village, the houses shut.

  My father pulled me tight to his back and my mother covered her face. We waited at the centre of the village, bewildered by the silence. Suddenly, a string of roars sliced through the air and then ebbed away. My father’s grip slackened, and I could not believe that a man I had associated with great strength could quake under any pressure. But that was not all. He broke into a run, with me on his back, and my mother followed suit. We had hardly covered a few metres when another sound crashed around us.

  An enchanting song swelled, dissipating our fears. The song was about a boy, the song was about me. I could not see the singer until he was close to us. It turned out to belong to one of the masked beings from my dreams. My mother fell to her knees and buried her face in the dust. The masked being moved on stilts and was so tall that it gazed down on rooftops. There was another with a woman’s face a beautiful woman, whose ringed neck lengthened until it reached the height of the masked beings on stilts. A third was the most fascinating of all: it had multiple faces, each as ancient as the other, and I could not tell whether the faces were staring at us or not. All the masked beings were adorned around the waist with long threshes of raffia. But a particular masked being with the crocodile face, the one from my dreams, had amulets and tablets inscribed with ancient scripts, which I would later learn were Arabic, dangling from his shoulders. Stitched to his raffia dress, from head to foot, were little mirrors, which reflected the afternoon sunlight. This masked being glided towards us and spoke in riddles. His retainer, a man who deciphered his riddles and interpreted his hodgepodge of languages, held a bell whose tone evoked fear. He had a bulging face, a terrible scar on his right jaw, and when he approached us and circled us, glaring at us, while ringing his bell, he bared a yellowish set of teeth, about to pounce on us. Meanwhile, behind him, the masked beings had squatted in the dust.

  A tense silence settled on us. The masked being on stilts, now reclining over a rooftop and swinging his staff, jabbered a sharp, bird-like tone. The long-necked masked being with the feminine countenance spoke in a language I had never heard before. In a strident voice, it announced through its retainer that we had broken the law of the land. ‘The child has seen beings forbidden for his eyes. Open your doors, good people of this place. The masked beings are about to depart.’

  We were summoned to a gathering of elders. Before ageing men whose speeches were interrupted with coughs, my father was asked to explain himself. Hardly did he begin when a handsome man, the youngest in the gathering, sucked his teeth, saying, ‘You are a clever one indeed.’

  ‘He disrespects the law of the land and tries to come up with an explanation. This is new to us,’ another elder said.

  My eyes swept across the crowd and alighted on a man with the broad forehead and height of my father, and like my father he bit his lips when angry. ‘I will take care of this,’ the man said.

  ‘It’s none of your business, Tamba,’ the handsome man said. And Tamba bit his lips. ‘He comes here and says he is equal to us, doesn’t he?’ The gathering nodded. ‘Then let him explain himself.’

  ‘Leave this to me, Chief Kiazulu,’ Tamba said.

  ‘You heard him,’ Chief Kiazulu said. ‘Let him explain himself.’

  Resolved on playing a part in deciding the fate of the strangers, Tamba said, ‘I am of this place. I need to have a say in this.’

  ‘I am telling you for the last time, Tamba,’ the chief said. ‘You shut up or you will be thrown out of this place.’

  The town elders turned to us, bent on punishing us.

  ‘Well, we are waiting,’ the chief said.

  My father did not speak. Chief Kiazulu shook his head and said, ‘There are families among us whose histories have been corrupted over the ages. They are related to us in many ways. Our daughters are wedded to their sons, our sons to their daughters. Our farms border theirs, and our languages and ways of life have fused. I see a member of one of those families seated before me whose looks tell us more about him than he knows about himself. They tell us that he’s an outsider.’

  Chief Kiazulu turned to us as if what he was about to say only concerned us. ‘Your relative sits before you, strangers. But, alas, he will be of little help to you today. Our law has been broken …’

  I heard my father say, his voice quavering with supressed defiance, ‘My son has not reached the initiation age, and he’s unwell. That’s why we are here. We came to meet the great herbalist.’

  The possibility of me being initiated, which meant coming face to face with those masked beings for months on end – beings who had harangued me in and out of my dreams – troubled me so much that I began to tremble and gasp for air. A child’s fear comes in many layers, and it often takes on exaggerated proportions. I was sweating now, and my eyes were clouded with tears and terror. I gazed at the handsome chief, hoping his verdict would be lenient, but he remained adamant.

  ‘Halay has to be initiated,’ he said.

  An anxiety seizure attacked me.

  4

  ‘The child is too young to be initiated into the Poro Secret Society,’ Tamba told my father, as he led us to his home. ‘He’s not yet even ten, is he?’ he asked, and my father shook his head.

  Tamba’s home consisted of a cluster of huts surrounded by a wall, and the place crackled with buoyant voices, as women and children went about their chores.

  ‘By my ancestors, I will not let it happen,’ my father said. He held my face in his hands. ‘Halay, I will never allow anyone to force you into initiation. No one will take you away from us. Once you are better, we will leave.’ He turned to my mother, who seemed to waste away with every passing moment. She had become so feeble, so withdrawn, that I thought an illness of any sort would be enough to sweep her away. My father looked into her eyes. ‘Siah, believe me, our son will live. If I have to fight the whole town, so be it.’

  The hut that was allocated to us was a simple affair without ornament, but my mother turned to our host and said, ‘You make us feel as if we didn’t leave home,’ and Tamba looked away in embarrassment.

  Our host spoke a variation on our language, which we understood and which my father would later tell me had to do with the same people settling in different places and their language altering over the ages.

  ‘We are leaving to meet the elders again. The herbalist will come to see you late
r on today,’ my father told us, and he left with Tamba.

  The herbalist came strolling in with effortless strides, a huge man with beads dangling from his neck. Cowries were pinned to his short tunic, which had been dyed the colour of munched kola nut. On his forehead was a dark mark, and he had applied a thin layer of pounded herbs to a dent on his bald head. I could not take my eyes off the dent. The herbalist noticed my stare and glared at me. Seated with crossed legs, facing him, I could not bear his smell, which was pungent, but when I moved my head sideways, he forced me to gaze straight in front of me.

  He filled my ears with a litany of incantations, he spat into my face three times, and then he staggered up, stumbled backwards, and darted towards a bush at the rear of the compound. A crowd had already gathered around us, and after a while the herbalist returned with bunches of herbs and leaves, and he asked my mother to fetch a pestle and mortar.

  He spread himself out on the hard ground on his back and rested the mortar on his stomach. ‘Pound the herbs,’ he told my mother.

  But she hesitated.

  ‘I say pound the herbs, woman. It won’t hurt me.’

  ‘But I could end up killing you.’

  ‘You are questioning the powers of the ancestors. A bad thing for a woman who wants her child healed.’

  His words won her over.

  ‘Pound as though you are pounding rice from your husband’s farm. Go on, pound the herbs.’

  My mother drove the pestle hard into the mortar. As the pestle rose and fell, the herbalist hummed a song. Later he fed me the concoction, but instead of making me better, it transformed the world around into different colours: my mother’s eyes were red, and the crowd’s yellow. Then the colours merged into blue. The voices subsided, and a strange calmness settled on me. I was certain now that I had defeated the masked beings. I felt no pain, not in my head or in my body, and I had the sensation of swimming in a stream of lightness. I must have fallen asleep, for on opening my eyes I found myself alone in the hut with an urge to drink. I crawled to the container and filled a calabash with water. But as I drank, I choked. Something thorny seemed to have lodged in my throat, and when I found my voice, I screamed. My mother came rushing in. ‘What is wrong, Halay?’ she asked, but I couldn’t answer her – all I could do was point at my throat.