Difference between revisions of "I am King"

• • • Below, the first three chapters.

I am King

Dedication This book is for my mother, Rosemary Nekete, who is the greatest love of my life.

PART I

I am King~1

The word spread throughout the sleepy and rustic and dainty town—fast, like the proverbial wild veldt fire. The word was passed from by mouth from one person to another so that by the end of that Tuesday, everybody, from those that dwelled on the western approaches of the town in Amaveni Township, to those poor wretched souls that eked out a precarious existence out by the highway that went to Harare in the north panning for the yellow shiny metal in the earth, and across to those over the desert dune-like granite pebble mounts of the chrome maker ZIMASCO in Mbizo Township by the railway, in fact, the whole town knew. Even those who lived a little out of the town in nearby Redcliff, their voice hoarse from the smoke spewed by the steel maker ZISCO, they knew that very same day, for the word that Chief Supt. Mawere had died had reached them, borne on the swift but sure morning wind.

In his life time, when his heart had pulsed and crimson blood had coursed through his veins, the people in the small town had either loved or loathed him. As one would expect, news of his death was received with both fierce ululations of approval and growls of anger with just as equal passion. “Good riddance!” those who celebrated his death behind closed doors and curtains said with vengeance and malice, their hatred for him preserved intact even in his death. They toasted his death by the corners of the town furtively for ethos dictated that it was folly and imprudent to celebrate death. “It was long overdue, this should have happened a long time ago” businessmen, street vendors, and gold panners retorted with rancour in their boardrooms, by their makeshift stalls and deep within their subterranean burrows respectively. Out across the street from town hall, “Cheated: A hero dies” the Kwekwe Expositor declared in an erubescent front-page headline. As everybody in the town knew, the newspaper was among the few of those who had viewed Chief Supt. Mawere as an angel, a messiah sent by go to preside over the small mining town.

Those new to the town of Kwekwe, and therefore unaware of CS Mawere, might have asked: “Who was this man? Why does his death provoke so much emotion?” Depending on who they happened to ask, they would have evinced a number of varied yet ardent answers. “He was the boss of the town...you know like a strongman? Or is it an iron man? Aish, I forget” a long time resident would have said, with a face contorted in a gesture of deep thought, a hand scratching the back of his head. “He was corrupt, ruthless and a maniac” another would have said, or, “You couldn’t do anything in this town for the past two and half decades without going through him or one of his cronies,” or, “Hi bo, the man was a Catholic, a God fearing man who fought to make sure the people live a better life. Didn’t he build the people homes? Authorized seizure of nearby land?” No matter how these purportedly informed residents defined CS Mawere, what was understood and accepted was that he had been the paragon of unadulterated power used for personal aggrandizement. Those who supported him either owned him and so eulogized him to escape and temporarily forestall his wrath or had benefited from one of his populist mechanizations.

What similarly made the death of CS Mawere fodder for the motor-mouths, those shadowy gossip peddlers, was not only the power he had wielded over the town when he was alive but the timing of his death. He was pronounced dead a day before magistrate W.H. Mudzingwa was to read out the verdict on whether he had found CS Mawere guilty as charged. “Thank God the country used the common law justice system for if a jury was to have sentenced the man, their impartiality would have been anybody’s guess” or something to that extent the residents in the city had said when the trial began. The charges CS Mawere faced were many and serious and multicoloured like an imported Persian carpet and read long like one expected of the Italian Mafia: corruption, racketeering, money laundering, kidnapping, trading in precious metals, hoarding basic commodities and selling them on the black market, selling the scarce government fuel at inflated prices on the street, directing an army of illegal black marker money-changers, murder—the only charge missing was that of possession and marketing of illicit drugs.

The trial had dragged on for more than two months, “too slow” the residents of the town felt. One wished for those days of old when the small town resembled a wild-west mining town when justice was dispensed to the accused fairly and by the people and swiftly. For the town of Kwekwe, whose name was conjured up by an old gold prosper, out by the banks of the swift Munyati River, from tree frogs that disturbed his dreams of striking it rich by crying ‘que!’ ‘que!’ ‘que!’ during the wee hours of the dark after a storm, had once been a town where mob justice reigned. At first CS Mawere had staunchly professed his innocence, as one would expect of one so charged with so many a crime. The Kwekwe Expositor’s Ms. Vimbai Mangwiro had quoted CS Mawere as saying: “I’m innocent. What I want all to know is that I demand my day in court to clear my tarnished name,” a day after the honourably DA, Energy Tivafire, had served him with the court papers. An acidic and vitrolitic columnist of the Expositor suggested, however, that a dark and sinister and faceless force was behind the smear campaign against CS Mawere, the man who had recognized the housing shortage in the town among the poor and built them decent houses out in Mbizo Section 4, using his own hard earned money. “They want to bring him down” he lamented, “and smearing him with these baseless and slanderous charges is the path of least resistance they have chosen.”

“How?” people in the town started asking the hard hitting questions once the shock or the glee evoked at hearing the news that CS Mawere had died had waned. The people bought the Expositor like buns the morning of Wednesday following his death hoping to find answers in the obituary they knew the newspaper would unquestionably carry. They were disappointed. Immersed in fine print on page four, among messages of R.I.P from companies around the town that read like birthday wishes, the closest the intrepid chief political reporter Ms. Vimbai Mangwiro came to reveal the truth about the cause of death was when she wrote: “CS Mawere was discovered in his bedroom during the early hours of Tuesday.” She left it to the imagination of her captive readers to answer questions like: “Who discovered the lifeless and cold body?” and: “What had caused the death?” Where there are blanks about the life of one such as famous, people in the small town were known to fill in the blanks with whatever they could think of, complete with twists like a Jane Austen murder mystery. “CS Mawere hung himself to escape hearing the verdict from his trial” some suggested, and: “The net was closing in so he used his police service pistol to shoot himself in the mouth...you know, like what police officers are usually depicted doing when they are cornered in Hollywood movies? Yeah, just like that.” Those with an active imagination claimed he had eaten rat poison, but the good doctor’s efforts to pump the poison of his body had been a futile and desperate exercise and so the man had died.

Of course, as with any suspicious death that plays out as a mystery, especially for one so prominent, there were people who would have provided the vital answers to all the questions the people of the tiny town had. Elizabeth Mawere, wife of the dead man, could have solved the mystery once and for all. The people had seen her by her husband’s side everyday as he walked into court, although they knew very little about her. What little they knew didn’t put her in their graces—it made them look at her with unbridled scorn instead. “Wasn’t she the one who kicked out the old white lady out by the Munyati River from her farm?” they said in passing. “Didn’t she make countless shopping trips overseas using money meant for the improvement of the town?” or, “Didn’t she build that thirty roomed house, large as a medium-sized hotel, above the kopje three miles out on the eastern periphery of the town?” They also knew her as the one who dressed in Gucci dresses and hid her face from them behind dark celebrity sunglasses. Of course, the fact that she was thirty years junior to her husband was an open secret. So was the fact that her former husband, a Dr. Chihota, was now a pauper making a living by panning the shiny yellow metal out of the earth out by the highway to Harare.

But I digress; I hope the reader will forgive me. So, Elizabeth was the person best placed to give answers to questions the people had, but alas, right after her husband was commuted to earth, the police had declared her a person they were not keen to interview regarding the death of her husband. As many people expected, her driver drove her to Harare in the dark of the night together with her young children. Some said she took a flight out of the country while others claimed she changed her identity and was now living, incognito, in some town in the hazy east of the country. Whatever was the truth, the fact remained that she was not there to provide answers.

I am King~2

Somewhere in a isolated and bucolic village sited in a valley close to the hushed banks of the perennial mighty Mwenezi River, as the pioneer white community that had not only forsaken their familiar comforts in the Cape Colony but also those found in the dead and dark continent of their forefathers somewhere up in the cold and feverish and bleak northern hemisphere voted to reject amalgamation of what they considered virgin land, the rich land between the two rivers, the lower Zambezi and the Limpopo, with the Union of South Africa, a boy was born of a lowly wife of a polygamous man.

I suppose one could say the village was serene and dainty and idyllic, even though the locals were under siege by CJ Rhodes’ company. The village was located someway off the gorge the river made through the mountains on its way to the distant ocean in the east beyond the blue hazy mountains. During the mild winters, the valley in which the village sat was dry and low and windswept with the tall elephant grass up the mountains sides and the savannah land all around blond coloured. In the long wet, summer season, the land was transformed with green foliage, teaming with game, the air all around heated and humid. The only blemish to life in this remote village was the mosquitoes that bred by the millions (billions perhaps?) out by the river, but fortunately deaths from malaria were rare. That didn’t stop the Native Commissioner, Mr. Humphreys, two decades later to his men, clad in yellow overalls and black gumboots and carrying white tanks on their backs, to spray the village huts with white mist that made the eyes and the skin itchy in the night when the villagers slept on reed mats under voluminous karroses. This baby boy was born decades before the government sent in the cunning and ingenious Chinese, tall as a bushman and squinty eyed, with their earth defiling and moving and tearing contraptions to put a high wall across Maungira Gorge and stop the water in the mighty river from flowing east-south, an act that many believed angered the Mulimo, leading to an irrevocable change in the way of life the villagers had known and embraced for millennia.

Then there were the mountains. Mountains were everywhere one looked. The bald and grey and dome shaped mountains that soared high into the expansive blue sky above the flatness of the village. There were many mountains all around, 1 2 3 4...more than ten I suppose—I don’t remember precisely—with countless similarly dome shaped kopjes scattered in between them. The area between the mountains and the kopjes was occupied by the village fields where they drew their sustenance from one year to another. The air around the village was of a special kind: Every morning throughout the year, cool and clean and crisp air, seared off the placid river waters, blew from the river up the mountains and down into the valley where the village sprawled among the forests of Mopane and tall elephant grass that the villagers used to thatch their little round dagga and pole huts.

During those now hazy far-off days, polygamy was widely practised in the semi-arid and fertile and well watered Mwenezi River Valley, the reason why the father of the baby boy had five wives. Chinjikai, the father of the baby-boy, had been told by his uncle Chizivano years before, once he had reached that listless age when a man spends sleepless night aching and yearning for the comfort of a woman’s supple flesh during the night that: “Three wives are what a man needs for complete and uninhibited gratification.” Uncle Chizivano had then easily reached for the gourd filled with thick and pungent and sweet sorghum beer that the two of them were sharing and took a long and hungry and thirsty draught. Chizivano was a man of strong will who was quiet, settled yet with sharp and calculating eyes. He had sat down the gourd carefully and wiped the beer suds from the grey whiskers about his thick-lipped mouth and quickly but fastidiously added: “The reason why three wives is the basic number is that they are so busy competing with one another for their husband’s favour that a man can relax.” Chinjikai had watched the old man sitting on the cured and tanned leopard skin opposite him keen eyed, desperately trying to gleam from him wisdom his advanced age had endowed on him.

“Eh, uncle Chizivano, why? Why three? Why not say...ah, one for instance?” he had asked him with the innocence that usually clouds the feeble minds of the young. Uncle Chizivano had drawn in sharp breath and a look instantly came over him, a look of unmistakable utter contempt. Chinjikai had involuntarily fed dry twigs onto the fire on which they warmed themselves against the night chill—in the late of the night, the cool breeze seared by the river would reach the village, turning the night bitter—in a vain attempt to break his uncle’s palpable displeasure. The light from fire had lit up uncle Chizivano’s wiry face on which a brief look of incredulity settled. His shoulders had relaxed and he had spat into the smoky fire and his yellow and thick phlegm had sizzled and exploded in a little puff of steam and said, with a solemn voice: “A single wife, a one and only wife, one wife, can sour the food in your belly and frost your hair with silver. Never marry a single wife son, if you want a life of luxury free from worry.” Years later, the advice Chinjikai had received from his now long dead uncle had proved sagacious and infallible.

The baby-boy’s Karanga parents, Chinjikai and Tariro, had christened the boy Chenjerai Mawere, although Father O’Brien was to baptize him years later when he had come of age and give him another name, a Christian name, a civilized name, that of Solomon. Father O’Brien, although he toiled among them, had a low opinion of the natives and when he came to know of the boy’s parents, he dismissed them as “worshipers of the devil” or something of that extent, he confidently declared to a visiting elephant hunter of his prospective converts, with a proud and all knowing expression on his pale withered face while seated in a rickety chair, his elbows resting comfortably on his stinkwood desk in a corner of his chapel, The boy’s father was a man of stature in the village who was likeable and accommodating but with a predilection for being impulsive and obstinate.

At the age of six, this polygamous and eminent father, who had made his small fortune down south burrowing in the dirty of the earth for diamonds for the enrichment of the white man, singled Chenjerai out for special treatment among his countless sons. Chinjikai had judged the boy correctly as reserved yet amiable and slow to act yet of a mind that was clear and lucid with a face that was always graced with an easy smile. Indeed it had been an intervention of the Mulimo, the mighty being, which had led him to give the boy the name Chenjerai, for the name meant the clever one, the very nature the young boy was slowly mutating into as the years rolled into another. To show his favour on the boy he selected and gave Chenje, as they called him with the shorter version of his name, a kid goat from among his many flocks. Tariro, his mother, who was acclaimed and known throughout the small village for her valiant mastery of the dark arts and her undisputed power to heal the sick and the insane and to exorcise the cursed, was pleased indeed. The special treatment that had been showered upon her son by her husband was a genuine sign and a veritable omen that the potent charm her son furtively wore around his bony and narrow waist each time he was in the presence of his father was working. She had always suspected that the charm was effective for hadn’t she guaranteed its efficaciousness by adding small pieces of the heart of an infant who had died when the moon had waxed full? The design of the charm the child wore had, of course, been passed down Tariro’s long family line of witchdoctors.

Once the boy had been delivered and she was still indisposed, unable to leave the reed mat where she lay recovering from the birthing, she had summoned and paid Gwisai Shoko, one of the intrepid village hunters, with two of her beloved scrawny and egg-laying chickens and instructed him thus: “Go out to the forests and bring me a buckhorn. Scale even the mountains, swim up and across the river, I don’t care how you do it, but bring a small buckhorn.” Gwisai, the hunter, had delivered. She had cleaned special horn’s honeycomb interior with care. Then it had taken her all the long six years of the boy’s life to carefully assemble the contents that she had packed inside the small horn. From Chinjikai, father of the boy, she had taken locks of his hair, the wax from his ears, clippings of his nails, his tears and eyelashes, and the mucous from his nose. To this she had carefully added dried skin from the soles of Chinjikai’s feet, snips of his beard, crushed skull of a Dendera, ground hornbill, grounded bits of a hyena incisor, and powerful tender leaves of herbs she gathered along the banks of the river. The ultimate addition had been the pieces of the heart of the village infant, whose soul was innocent, a factor that transformed the finished product into a potent charm. It would be a toll order to reveal how she procured these things, these items, suffice to say that the powers of a village witchdoctor worked in mysterious yet stupefying ways.

Chenje had preceded showered love upon the spotted goat kid. He had named it Mabhare, on account of its white spots on a rusty coat. He had played with it in the eves of his mother’s hut, keeping Mabhare at home for the baboons that came down the mountain loved to lunch on the flesh of goat kids, for it was tender and easy on their stomachs. In the cool of the morning, he used to bring Mabhare sweet and tender and juicy grass that Tariro plucked from the river when she went there to fetch water for cooking and washing. It was the first time in his life when he had become responsible for something living, breathing. Duty filled with joy. One day, Mabhare, now fully grown, had inevitably wondered off and joined the other village herds and in the afternoon, in the heat of the day, the herds had followed a path down to the river in search of water to quench their thirst. Chenje never saw Mabhare again from that day. He cried for days. No amount of crooning and cooing from Tariro could console him. Years later, when he was a grown man, he wondered: “Had Mabhare been devoured by a crocodile as he drank from the river? A troop of marauding baboons, perhaps? He could never decide.

The Karanga were avid tillers of the earth and like other Nguni tribes scattered across Southern Africa, they adored and cherished cattle. Cattle herding duty was the primary responsibility of the young men of the village. All duties in the close knit village were still assigned according to gender. When Chenje was about the age of eight, he was weaned from the company of the ladies and placed under the care and guidance of the fleet footed cattle guards that looked after the few cattle the villagers owned. That is when he discovered that the world was not as perfect as he had been led to believe while playing by the flattering skirts of his mother in the village tending after Mabhare.

Cattle herding was fun. Much fun than he had ever imagined. He loved it when the baobab trees were in fruit during the dry fall before the rains. He loved it when he had visited, with Ranganai and Smart and the other cattle herders, Chomupata, a baobab tree that grew on a raised pass between two mountains north of the village—yes the baobab trees in the areas the cattle herders operated had names. Chomupata was reverently known for the sweet fruit that she bore every year, for not all baobab trees bear fruit. She was also bitterly known as stingy, only half-heartedly giving up her fruit after long-suffering goading and caressing and, kissing. When the herders reached her that day, she heavy with fruit and the herders got to work straight away: they cut piles of arm-length Mopane sticks. These finely balanced sticks they huffed and puffed and swore, hurling them into the loft root-like branches of Chomupata. “Come on, don’t be a tart lady, give up your cherry pot, I want to eat it,” Chenje heard Ranganai goading her, taunting Chomupata with a hoarse voice. “I will be your faithful lover, faithful even in times of peril!” Chitobi, the joker, bellowed sweat glistening on his bared chest. He pranced about a little, threw a few punches in the air, ran and hugged Chomupata and kissed her. The herders about laughed with amusement at his antics.

It was strenuous work. Only the sturdy and thick limped like Ranganai and Samuel and others with superb hand and eye coordination could dare challenge Chomupata and hope to woe her and win her heart. Courting her was difficult and tiring, for Chomupata considered herself a princess, only prepared to give her love to the few, the brave, the caring. Chenje hurried about under her all the time when they were there, gathering the sticks from under the bushes and on the grass where they had fallen for Ranganai to re-use. Chomupata grudgingly gave Ranganai her sacred fruit which he tied sorted into two piles. He took those from one pile and tied them with a string of Mopane bark and wound them around his waist like a skirt to make it easy to carry. Once that was done, he said: “Here Chenje,” he pointed to a little pile of the baobab fruit with his finger, “those are for you and your mother.” Ranganai was rewarding him for helping rob Chomupata of her chastity.

They had driven the cattle to the river so they could quench their rambunctious thirst. They had made holes on the sides of some of Chomupata’s fruit through which they squirted warm sweet milk from the heavy udder of Maduve, one of the horn-less black cows who, unlike the other normal cows, gave birth in the wrong season like a fool, the dry season when the baobab trees were in fruit and grass was scarce. They then used twigs to stir and mix the milk with the dry pulp of the fruit to a porridge. “How do you like it?” Ranganai had asked Chenje.

“I like it. It’s great,” he said, eyes ablaze with contentment and hastily added: “It’s a long lingering and delightful yet truly satisfying tonguee taste.”

While the cattle lowed, munching on the juicy reeds in the river and the other herders swam in the pool, Chenje suddenly asked: “Why are the village cattle herds small?” Ranganai, the head cattle guard, had regarded him with a frosty look that noon day and Chenje had realized that anger mingled with helplessness was rising in the lithe man sitting across him under the shade thrown up by the luxuriant leaves of the Mopane tree. Ranganai had continued plaiting the cattle whip he was working on as if he hadn’t heard his question. After what seemed like an eternity he had suddenly looked up and told him thus: “There are people around us who lust and hunger for our cattle. In the past, there were the Matabele, who sent their blood yearning Impis who marched through the pass in the mountain and butchered the defenceless villagers.” He paused momentarily and looked toward him but Chenje saw that the man was looking past him, across the tinkling river below, out toward the nearest mountain. There was a look of sorrow, dreamy-like, on his smooth face. The Matabele, ever since they had crossed the Limpopo River, river of crocodiles, had been a constant menace to the Shona, even the Lozi on the north shores of the Zambezi River. When John Moffat, son of the famous Robert Moffat, visited Inyati, the Ndebele capital, for the first time, he correctly observed that: “The Matabele are a people so warlike and predatory in their habits that no one can live near them in peace.” Ranganai sighed and added: “But most importantly, what they had come for, those Ndebele Impis, all the way from Thabas Indunas, was to steal our cattle. They took them. Since then, the white men’s government has replaced them, for it now forces us to pay tax for each head of cattle that we own. Most of the villagers can’t afford to pay and so they are left with small herds and...” Ranganai had continued narrating with a passion, an air of one deeply wronged and Chenje had listened wide eyed with fascination as his elder told him about the world he was born in.

Men of the village were valiant cattle breeders, fierce warriors, great craftsmen and artisans who whiled the time away before the farming season came forging hoes and spears from iron. On the other hand, women expertly turned cattle hides into tanned karosses and clothes, and molded clay pots. In addition, the womenfolk of the village spent the better part of their days mixing dung and clay and using it to plaster their household earthen hut floors, fetching water from the mighty Mwenezi River, looking for firewood in the shadow of the mountains that the surrounded the village on all sides, sweeping and tiding familial compounds, washing pots and utensils, preparing meals and looking to the general needs of their husbands and children. Girls assisted their mothers while boys, like Chenje, herded calves and cattle, milked the cows and scared the yield depleting quela birds and baboons away from the ripening crops.

The women of the village spent hours out by the river where they drew water everyday, an average of three times a day. When they were not hauling their net in the river for fish, one usually saw the women with arms crossed about their chests, heads lolling, their brats hanging to their skirts, gossiping and chatting and laughing. Indeed their laughter was infectious for it tinkled like the water in the river flowing over the rapids out down by the gorge. Their laughter echoed in the mountains, for sure village gossip was juicy and electrifying. The women spent whole afternoons laughing. And when the sun was below the tree line but still above Manyanga Mountain in the west, they quickly watered their gardens of spinach and veggies. Then with dusk fast approaching, they sluiced their brown and supple frames with the warm and cleansing and soothing mineral leaden waters of the river. Once this was done, they filled their clay pots, rusted tins, and hurried back to the village to cook meals for their husbands for a hungry husband was an angry tongue lashing husband.

But Tariro, Chenje’s mother, was nothing like other women of the village who were amiable and chatty like monkeys. Yes, she was beautiful and fair but she was also cranky and reclusive and quick to take offence. These traits were compounded by her swift and sharp and asinine tongue. It was no wonder people avoided her, though they respected and feared her because of her powerful witchcraft. As Chenje grew older, it was from her that he leant not to trust anybody. He grew up among many other siblings, sisters and brothers, but he became different from them thanks to his mother. He was outstripped his sisters and brothers by far not only in intelligence, but also in stubbornness akin to that of a mule. He inherited from his mother his mother a predilection for reclusion. Soon, he began taking on duties and pursuits that kept him apart from other village kids. When he was herding cattle, he walked off to isolated grazing perches, away from the others. He stopped scrapping with the other boys, even refusing to go hunting with them, a pastime for many village kids.

He kept to himself even when the rest of the village kids played in the night after super had been taken under a full and bright moon, whose history was written on its face like the river valley. The jackals howled out in the forests and the hyena laughed determined to find chinks in the amour of protection that kept the village stocks secure. Chenje heard these sounds together with those of the village kids playing. He head them signing. He heard the ground on which he slept shook as they kids danced the night away. He even found the stories that Ambuya Shumba, Chinjikai’s mother, dull and uninteresting even though they were vivid enough to regale the rest of his siblings.

Once he started school, he became bookish, a swot and grew very close to his Tariro, who also alienated herself from the villagers, especially thy other wives at Chinjikai’s kraal whom she fingered as gossips. The senior wives where predictably rich, better off that Tariro and Chenje knew this. Chenje began behaving like an outsider, learning to bottle up his conflicting emotions between the well off kids of the senior wives in his family and his sometimes poor mother. He resolved to work hard and make a name for himself, to be better than anybody else in the village. It riled him to be laughed at by the other kids when his couldn’t afford to buy him new clothes at Christmas. Although he was always angry at his condition, he maintained a settled expression. He grew very close to his mother, banded together by their fate. They were so close that years later, when he was in a position of power out in Kwekwe, when faced with a difficult decision, he would surprise his underlings by suddenly declaring: “Yes! I will consult mother and then make a decision.”

Then one day, as Chenje penned the cattle with the other cattle herders, they heard the village announcer shouting from the top of a kopje in the center of the village: “An important meeting on the morrow, Saturday. All to attend.” That was the time when the crops were heavy with yield, and the village headman, VaJuwere, finished the meeting the following day by saying: “It is time we drive them out, out to Gonda Mountain, across the river.” The gathered villagers agreed with his decision. The cyclic and vicious war against the baboons would start the following day, at dawn like it always did. Outsiders and animal lovers might have been outraged that a whole village would rise up in arms against baboons to shoot, kill, spear, impale, poison, cudgel, and smoke them in their caves. For the villager, it was actually an honor, a public service to kill a baboon. The battle between man and baboon stretched far into the distant past, like that between the household owner and cockroaches, there was no winner. The two regularly fought, just to remind each other that there were sworn enemies.

VaJuwere’s standing orders were to the effect that one should kill a baboon on sight. Even the villagers, with their sickly sentimentality and empathy for the living and breathing fairy animals, had realized that there was no place for a baboon in the valley. Didn’t they eat their crops? And lunch on their goat kids and chickens? There were even wild rumors of Hombiro, old and cunning and wily lone-ranger baboons, descending down the mountains and infiltrating into the village under cover of darkness to snatch women and make them concubines. Hombiro lived solitary live, making it possible for them to sneak into a granary and dine on stored maize even when the villagers were below sitting the eves of the granary. If it was not because of one of the lone-ranger baboon, where did Chenai, nubile, vanish off to? “The Hombiro are worse than animals. They have the cunning of man without being a man” Gwisai, the hunter, was wont to say.

Every morning at sunrise, the ground hornbills’ haunting dawn cry echoed off the mountain passes as the sun climbed inexorably above Ndarumwa Mountain in the east of the village. That day, as the ground hornbill cried, it found the villagers in the shadow of the mountains that rose beside their fields. Everybody was there, even Tariro and Chenje, no villager shirked from the duty of chasing the baboons across the river to Gonda, away from the village fields. Young Chenje took part in the purge of the baboons reluctantly. It had become his nature to shirk from work, participating only when it concerned his very life or that of his mother. Yes he understood the need for the extermination of the marauding baboons, yet if his brothers had given him a chance, he would have stayed at home in his mother’s hut roasting maize cobs by a smoky fire. He had also become a dreamer, preferring to devote his energies and imagination and mind to deciphering the tales that the authors of the books he read spun.

The old baboon looked down on the village people who taunted him with their skull-sized knobkerries and yawned exposing saber canine teeth and scratched his armpits. He knew instinctively that the war had begun. He knew the menace they posed of course, for he had survived numerous hunts like these in the past. He saw the stabbing spears, glinting in the sun, which the people carried. He saw the dogs, tails waging, which stood by their shins. There was only one way to escape the wrath of the people. He barked, that shot bark, a warning and the whole troop fell in line behind him, scurrying up and down the mountains with the people pursuing behind.

Special traps were sat in between the mountain passes, and some baboons fell by the wayside, snared, screaming and yelling in agony. The villagers came in behind and swiftly cudgeled the snared baboons to death by crushing their skulls. The villager were natural competitors and today hunters like Gwisai vied for the “Man of the Year” title, awarded based on one’s performance during village activities be it dancing, singing or killing baboons.

The old baboon shepherded the survivors across the last barrier before troop’s escape to the safety of Gonda Mountain. But suddenly a boy with a dog by his side surprised him. Chenje had seen the line of approaching baboons and he struggled to keep Tinker on his leash. The baboons running for their lives veered off to avoid the threatening figure of Chenje who ran toward them avoiding tree branches and jumping over logs that lay in his path with agility. He swung is Kerrie at a straggling baboon hitting it square of the shoulders. The baboon fell with a yell of agony and then it took to running away again. When tried to retrieve is Kerrie, there was a piercing cry from underneath the grass. Apparently the baboon he had kit was a nursing female and the melee she had dropped her infant. Timothy posed, two meters away from the baboon infant. He was excited, his heart pumping from all the adrenaline. “I can raise it as a pet” he thought but before he could move, there was a commotion in the thicket ahead and Tinker wailed from a beating. Before he realized what was happening, the baboon troop burst from the undergrowth and in a flash in skidded to a halt in front of Chenje. It posed and its cat like eyes looked square at Chenje. There was fear in the eyes and rage and lust for revenge in the baboon’s eyes. Chenje froze with fear, knowing full well that if he dared move, the baboon would finish him off. The baboon retrieved the crying infant and turned tail and followed the rest of the troop. Chenjerai realized that he was sweating and his legs gave in under him with fear. That night he couldn’t sleep as images of his confrontation with the male baboon kept playing in his eyes.