by Vamba Sherif
She left and returned with my father, who knelt before me, caressed my throat, shook his head and sent for the herbalist.
The man came, gazed into my eyes, felt my throat with a puzzled look on his face, and then said, ‘Your son is a bearer of misfortune.’
‘You shouldn’t say that,’ my father said.
‘It is true. The likes of him are rare.’
‘But this is temporary.’
‘It lies in your deeds. Search your past and you will find that you’ve wronged someone who’s returned to visit this evil upon you.’
‘We’ve always been good,’ my mother said. ‘Kollie, tell him how good we’ve been to others. This cannot be true.’
‘I cannot treat him,’ the herbalist said.
My parents, including our hosts, decided to treat me themselves. Every day, the three came up with crude prescriptions, snatching them from their own experiences and from quack herbalists.
‘We will not return home until he’s well, Siah,’ my father said. ‘When he is, I will fight the elders to keep him from being initiated.’
The next day news reached us that some khaki-uniformed strangers, armed to the teeth, had replaced my father with his rival Mambu.
‘I will not leave you and your mother, Halay. Don’t you worry, when we return I will set things right,’ he said.
Meanwhile, the herbalist had become a permanent presence. One day, I heard him telling my father, ‘Last night, I cast the cowries. I am afraid to tell you what they revealed.’
‘Please, tell us,’ my mother said.
‘They told me the child came to wreak havoc upon you.’
‘But how?’ my father said.
‘I will answer your question with another. When did you last have peace of mind since he came to the world? Let the child go.’
‘But he is our only child.’
‘You will have another.’
‘He will be cured,’ my father said.
‘I’ve warned you. He will strip you of your powers.’
‘We will keep him,’ my mother said.
My parents spent the night conversing in low voices that rose into shouts as the night crawled on towards dawn. The two were fighting.
The silence that lingered in the hut as the two attended to me was as sharp as a hunter’s knife. At one point, when my father knelt in front of me, his eyes blood red, perhaps from lack of sleep or perhaps steaming with rage at what I had become, I thought he would slap me. I closed my eyes, waited for the inevitable, but the slap did not land.
My mother fed me the leftovers of rice we had had the other night, and then while holding me in her arms she became hysterical.
She shoved me away from her.
‘Where is my child?’ she said.
She turned to me with a strange look on her face.
‘You are not my child.’
She scooped up dust outside the hut and began to consume it. Loosening her plaited hair, she sprinkled it with dust, and let out a scream that attracted a crowd to the house.
My father came running, grabbed her, cuddled her in his arms, and whispered soothing words to her.
‘Leave,’ my father growled at the crowd. ‘He will be cured, Siah. I swear it. Halay will be as well as before.’
‘Father,’ I said, and when the two turned, I snapped my fingers three times, vowing to combat whatever was wrong with me.
I fought the masked beings by blocking their presence from my existence, and I fought the weakness in my legs and denied the jagged feeling in my throat. Soon I could afford to sleep with the presence of the masked beings confined to the far margins of my consciousness. My progress was like that of a child in the process of moving beyond the crawling stage to walking and running. A few weeks later I was running around the compound. My mother would take me with her to the outskirts of town and we would pick fruits and she would tell me about her people, about her life as the eldest daughter of her father, a king, and about the war my father had fought and how it had affected her.
‘Never fight in a war, no matter what happens, Halay,’ she said. ‘War changes everything. It makes orphans of people.’
My father now worried about the next challenge before us: my initiation. But Chief Kiazulu would not budge.
‘We will pick him up soon,’ he told my father, who returned with his mind made up.
‘We leave tonight, Siah,’ he told my mother.
We escaped that night with Tamba as our guide. He took a less-known path, which he thought was safe. ‘If the elders were to discover you were gone, they will send people after you,’ he said.
‘What will happen to you?’ my father said.
‘Don’t worry about me,’ he said.
And he was gone.
5
Back in our land, in our town, we found my father embarked on the precarious task of recovering his power. The task proved formidable from the outset. In our absence, when his attention had been focused solely on me, some of his people had sided with his rival Mambu and were determined to make him ruler. Mambu claimed he had the support of the English in distant Sierra Leone and of the Liberians who hoped to hold sway over our part of the world one day. On our arrival, my father summoned a gathering in his compound. I remember that it was a dry seasonal day, the heat demanding complete surrender to it, but the town seethed with defiance. Thousands of people from surrounding villages and hamlets had poured in, thousands from places as far as the borders.
My father suggested employing peaceful means to end the dispute.
‘Despite our differences, we are the same people,’ he said.
His words were thrown back in his face.
‘Restoring you to power is not up to you alone,’ the smith Koilor said. ‘No, it’s not about you alone. It never has been.’
I had always thought that the smith was timid and that he fabricated stories of valour for my own pleasure as much as his own. But at the gathering, arrayed in leopard skin, he whirled his rifle around as though he was the one most wronged.
‘We made you what you are, Kollie,’ the smith said. ‘Power does not belong to you alone. It’s ours too.’
One of the elders in the gathering said, ‘Don’t forget that we witnessed your mother’s birth and watched her grow up into a beautiful young woman. We attended her initiation ceremony. Some of us held you in our arms when you were a child. We made you.’
‘You owe us, Kollie,’ a third remarked. ‘Having power gives us the assurance that we matter and will continue to do so.’
‘We’ve all been challenged, and a true man must never waver before a challenge,’ another said.
The smith fired his rifle in the air and burst into a war cry, ‘Seyenga yor yor,’ and the gathering responded, ‘Yor,’ and repeated this until the clamour rose as though war was imminent.
The old midwife who had presided over my birth entered the compound, and the gathering lapsed into silence. Her cheeks were sunken, her chest flat, and her legs as slender as poles, but her eyes were clear and full of wisdom. She told the gathering in a feeble but steady voice about the men and women who, fleeing war and drought, crossed difficult lands in search of home. The children of our founder, the twins, she told us, had ended up fighting each other. ‘It was because both hungered for power and wanted to be ruler. But there can be only one ruler.’
The gathering was silent.
‘I can tell you with certainty who first peopled our land.’
‘Tell us, guidance of our heritage.’
‘Here is one of them, our chief.’
She pointed at my father. The crowd broke into war cries, tapping the ground with their feet until dust rose and covered the compound.
‘Mambu’s story is based on a lie. His people came here not a hundred moons ago. They are strangers here. They do not belong.’
The crowd got to its feet, and a wave of people burst out of our compound and poured onto the road, intent on confronting Mambu’s people. Never had war been a
s imminent as at that moment.
I sneaked out and went to see Mambu in Old Town, choosing a route along the outskirts to avoid confrontation. I found him in his compound surrounded by men armed to the teeth with rifles, cutlasses, spears, daggers, hooks and hoes.
‘What are you doing here, child?’ he asked when he saw me; the crowd around him parted and I went up to him.
One of his daughters was with him, a strikingly beautiful girl about my age who was gazing intently at me. I could not bear her gaze.
‘You are well now, I see,’ he said. ‘I should have come to visit you when you returned. How’s your mother?’
I told him she was well, and he reached out to pat me on the shoulders, smiling. ‘She’s a wonderful woman, isn’t she? I am the only one who seems to see that she should not be what she is – a prisoner.’
‘My mother is not a prisoner,’ I said.
‘Then why doesn’t your father let her visit her people?’
I had not anticipated the question. Mambu laughed.
‘My daughter Miatta takes to you,’ he said, and the girl gazed down, and I began to sweat, trying to take hold of myself.
‘Uncle Mambu, the people chose my father as ruler.’
‘Not all of them, child. These people you see here and thousands of others believe I am the rightful ruler of the land. Look around you.’
‘Your father usurped power,’ one of them said.
‘He’s a crook.’
‘What are you doing here by the way?’
‘We will make sure your father never becomes ruler.’
Mambu raised a hand to silence them and said, ‘Come with me, Halay. I want to show you something.’
He led me to the largest hut in the compound, where he slept and received his wives. It smelt of musk. A mat made of colourful cloth covered the floor, and several rifles were leaning against the wall. Mambu reached for something concealed behind a sheet of cloth.
It was a mask, with a slit for lips and tiny flat nose but with eyes so large they seemed to burst out of their sockets.
‘I am not making false claims to power,’ he said. ‘This mask is a symbol of our power. I inherited it from a line of rulers going back to our founder. Your father is a brave man, but that does not make him a ruler. If I don’t fight him now and hold on to what is mine, when the time comes he will choose you to succeed him.’
It became evident to me that whatever I said would not alter the course of events, but I had to say it anyway.
‘I don’t want to become a ruler, Uncle Mambu.’
He seemed surprised by my words.
‘You are a child now,’ he said. ‘As adult you might change your mind. Or others might change your mind.’
‘I will never become a ruler.’
‘I wish you were your father.’
Mambu led me out of the compound, through a throng of his men who glared in disapproval, and before leaving said, ‘I have to see this through, Halay. Tell your mother that I will come and see her. She doesn’t need to fear a thing. I will not hurt her.’
The roads teemed with Mambu’s men, but seeing me in his company they refrained from bothering me. The moment I was out of his sight and on the main road, a group of his men blocked my way.
They were all armed with cutlasses and rifles.
‘Look, Kollie’s son,’ one of them said.
‘How dare he come here?’
One of them raised his cutlass and swung it, as if he was going to cut me in half. As I felt the cutlass sweep very close to me, instead of breaking down with fear or bursting into tears, I gazed into his eyes. He caught my gaze and hesitated, letting the cutlass drop.
‘I swear he’s like his mother,’ he said.
‘The child of a woman lusted by evil spirits,’ another said.
‘One has to be careful with such a child,’ a third said.
They let me go, staring at me in awe. I could not explain where my courage had come from, except that a strange calmness had descended on me as the man raised the cutlass.
The smith met me on the road. He had been searching for me.
‘Halay, child, we thought our enemy had kidnapped you,’ he said. ‘Never go to the other side of town. Old Town now belongs to Mambu and his followers. Never walk alone. You might get killed.’
I couldn’t tell him that I’d been to see Mambu, for I knew that he would perceive this as betrayal. I followed him home.
‘Your father wants me to prepare you for what lies ahead. You must learn to fight and use weapons, including rifles.’
On seeing us, my mother ran over and, without greeting the smith, pulled me away. ‘I told you to stay put during this time. What were you doing outside? Why can’t you listen to me, Halay? What must I do to make you listen to me! People are talking about killing each other as if death means nothing to them. Why, Halay?’
She led me to the compound and to our hut.
‘You are not to leave this place without my permission. You are my only child. I don’t want to lose you to crazy people. Just listen to them. They’ve all lost their minds. Listen to those war cries.’
Indeed, in the distance, the war cries were rising and falling, as each camp displayed its range of power and capability. Sounds of rifle shots and drums took hold of the air, the ground throbbed, and I thought the situation might turn violent before nightfall.
‘I went to see Uncle Mambu,’ I told my mother.
‘You think he cares about you? He could have killed you or held you to ransom. You are not part of this war. I don’t know what has come over your father. He keeps listening to that warmongering smith.’
‘Uncle Mambu asked why you don’t visit your people.’
‘You are my people now, Halay,’ she said.
My mother was so distressed that she built her world around me, pounding rice within sight of me, all the while making sure that I did not leave the compound.
That same day a group of men with spears, their heads, waists and knees adorned with palm fronds, entered the compound. It was rumoured they carried the secrets of the forest with them, vanishing or turning into trees at will. They filled up the compound and pushed my mother and me to its edge. Under the camouflage of charcoal and chalk, their ferocious eyes glared. Their bodies were painted white. They sang a song and their feet made a trampling sound as they danced. Moving in measured gait, brandishing spears and daggers, the men headed towards my father who sat at the entrance to the compound in full war regalia. They contorted their faces and took up another song. After revealing the extent of their prowess as dancers, the men stood around in front of my father and fell into a silence.
No one stirred for a long while.
‘We’ve come to bring you power beyond that of any rifle or weapon. We’ve come to bring you the ancestral power. You are our ruler, Kollie, our one and only Masangi – our king,’ one of them said.
‘You’ve heard them, Kollie,’ the smith said. ‘These are our Zoes – the intermediaries between our world and the ancestral one – and they have approved of you. Mambu stands no chance against you.’
The men left. That night, the town throbbed with war cries, with songs of masked beings, with threats of blood and a never-ending war.
My mother held me close to her, her whispers an attempt to allay my fears, but nothing could rid me of the thought that at any moment, a cauldron of warriors would burst into our hut and cut us down.
‘It is all right now,’ my mother said when I woke up the next morning. ‘Mambu had a dream and was instructed by his father to give up the power that is your father’s. War has been averted. What cannot be defeated in the real world must be confronted in dreams, Halay.’
6
‘It’s not yet over, Halay,’ the smith told me months later, after a period of relative peace in the land. ‘Mambu is bound to change his mind.’ The smith had met me with the blind Tellewoyan who was teaching me English verbs. ‘We have to prepare you for the future. Mambu was heard to ha
ve said that if he cannot be ruler, he will fight your father to the end. You have to be wary of that man. Your father asked me to train you to become a warrior. So when you finish here, come and see me.’
This was happening at a time when I was beginning to appreciate what the blind man had been saying to me, particularly his stories of life in Freetown, where blacks who were once shipped as slaves to lands beyond the seas had found a home, much like the stories of the Liberians. Through him, I came to know about your America, Edward, but not enough to form a clear picture of the land. I was anxious to master his few books, so I approached his lessons with diligence.
My mother, who knew that the lessons kept me away from my father and the warmongering smith, had asked me to come home only if the blind man had told me to. ‘Help him however you can, Halay,’ she had said. And Tellewoyan had many errands for me to run.
Sometimes I would meet him peeling plantain, which I would boil and share with him, or I would fetch firewood, or sweep his hut and its surroundings, and wash his clothes. I had become his student.
‘Halay, listen to me,’ Tellewoyan said after the smith had gone. ‘Your future is here with these books. Not with the smith. The man craves war so much I wonder whether he will not end up inciting one.’
But I could not avoid the smith or my father. Their hold on me had become as hard as metal. The years of childhood drifted by with mornings spent with the blind man and afternoons with the smith.
The smith taught me archery, wrestling, and the use of rifles. He would lead me to the top of a mountain and ask me to charge at him with a spear or cutlass. I would race towards him, but he would stop me. ‘You are not agile enough, Halay. You did not howl. A warrior has to evoke fear in the enemy.’ And we would begin all over again. After the training, the smith would tell me about war. He would choose a moment when the mountains were awash with the light of sunset.
