“The bumbangi, the official and provider of food. Also stealer. See him in his mweelu mask of sprouting feathers and a giant hornbill beak. Look beside him, the makala, master of charms and spells,” Kava said.
The new men lined up shoulder-to-shoulder. All wore skirts of fine cloths, which I had only seen on my uncle, and all now wore clay buns with ostrich feathers and flowers. Then they jumped, up and down, higher and higher, so high that they stayed in the air before stomping the ground. Stomping the ground so hard the earth shook. And they kept jumping to bodom, bodom, bodom, bodom. There were no children. Maybe they were like the moonlight boy and me, hiding in the bush. Then the new women came to the clearing. Two women walked right up to the men and started to jump with them, bodom, bodom, bodom. Man and woman jumping closer and closer, moving in until skin touched skin, chest touched chest, nose touched nose. The moonlight boy was still holding my hand. I let him hold it. The people joined in and the clearing was a cloud of dust from jumping and stomping and older women now doing a dance in and out of the crowd, possessed by divine smoke.
The bumbangi sang again and again:
Men with a penis
Women with a vagina
You do not know each other
So build no house yet
The boy pulled me off into thicker, colder bush. I smelled them as soon as he heard them. Sweat funk rising and spreading on wind. The woman squatted down on the man, then up, then down, up and down. I blinked until I had night eyes. Her breasts jiggled. They both made sound. In my father’s room only he made sound. The man did not move. In my father’s room, only he moved. I saw ten things this woman did for the one thing the man did. The woman hopped up and down, jiggled, whispered, panted, bawled, grunted, screamed, squeezed her own breast, opened and closed herself. The moonlight boy had moved his hand between my legs, pulling my skin back and forth to match her up and down. The spirit struck me, made me spurt and made me shout. The woman screamed and the man jumped up, pushing her away. We ran off.
My father said he left his place of birth because a wise man showed him that he was among backward people who never created anything, never knew how to put words down on paper, and fucked only to breed. But my beloved uncle told me different. Listen to the tree where you live now, for your blood is there. I listened to branch upon branch and leaf upon leaf, and heard nothing from the ancestral fathers. A night later I heard my grandfather’s voice outside, mistaking me for his son. I went out and looked up in the branches and saw nothing but dark.
“When will you avenge your father’s killer? Restless sleep rules me, it waits for justice,” he said. He also said, “With Ayodele slayed, you are eldest son and brother. That defiles the plan of the gods and must be avenged. My heat has not gone cold, my weak son.”
“I am not your son,” I said.
“Your brother Ayodele, who is eldest, is here with me, also in troubled sleep. We await the sweet smell of enemy blood,” Grandfather said, still mistaking who I was.
“No son of yours am I.”
Did I look so much as my father? Before I had hair, his was gray, and I have never seen myself in him. Except for stubbornness.
“The quarrel runs fresh.”
“I have no quarrel with crocodile, no quarrel with hippopotamus, no quarrel with man.”
“The man who killed your brother also killed his goats,” my grandfather said.
“My father left because killing was the old way, the way of small people with small gods.”
“The man who killed your brother still lives,” my grandfather said. “Oh how big the shame when that man in your house left the village. I shall not speak his name. Oh what a shameful way, more weak than the bird, more cowardly than the meerkat. It was the cows who told me first. The day he saw that I would not rest until he took revenge, he left the cows in the bush and fled. The cows took their own way back to the hut. He has forgotten his name, he has forgotten his life, his people, hunting with bow and arrow, guarding the sorghum field against birds, caring for the herds, staying away from mud left by flood for that was where the crocodile sleeps to keep cool. And you. Shall you be the only boy in a hundred moons that the crocodile hates?”
“I am not your son,” I said.
“When will you avenge your brother?” he asked.
I went around the back and found my uncle drawing snuff from an antelope horn, like rich men in the city. I wanted to know why he left for the city, like my father, and why he returned, unlike my father. He was coming back from a meeting with a fetish priest, who had just returned from reading the future at the mouth of the river. I couldn’t read on his face if the priest foretold more cows, a new wife, or famine and sickness coming from a petty god. I smelled it on him, the dagga he was chewing for second sight, meaning he didn’t trust the priest with his news and wanted to make sure for himself. This sounded like something my uncle would do. My father was an intelligent man, but he was never as smart as Uncle. He pointed to the white line on his forehead.
“Powder from lion’s heart. The priest mix it with woman’s moon blood and mahogany bark, then chew it to tell the future.”
“And you wear it?”
“Which would you choose, to eat the lion’s heart or to wear it?”
I did not answer.
“Grandfather’s ghost is a mad spirit,” I said. “He asks, over and over, when shall I kill my brother’s killer. I have no brother. He also thinks I am my father.”
Uncle laughed. “Your father is not your father,” he said.
“What?”
“You are the son of a brave man but the grandson of a coward.”
“My father was as old and frail as the elders.”
“Your father is your grandfather.”
He did not even see how he shook me. Silence grew so thick I could hear the breeze shake leaves.
“When you were only a few years, though we do not count in years, the Gangatom tribe across the river killed your brother. Right after he came back from the Zareba rite of manhood. On a hunt in the free lands, owned by no tribe, he came across a group of Gangatom. It was agreed by all, there should be no killing in the free lands, but they chopped him to death with sharp hatchet and ax. Your true father, my brother, was the most skilled bow and arrow man in the village. A man must know the name of the man on whom he is taking revenge, or he runs the risk of attacking a god. Your father listened to no man, not even his father. He said that the blood that runs in him, a lion’s blood, must have come from his mother, who had always cried for revenge. Her cries for revenge drove her out of her husband’s house. She stopped painting her face and never groomed her hair again. Some think it foolish to avenge the death of one son with the killing of another son, but it was the time of foolishness. He avenged the death, but they also killed him. Your father took up his bow and six arrows. He set his aim across the river and vowed to kill six living souls he saw. Before noon, he killed two women, three men, and one child, each from a different family. Now six families were against us. Six new families now meant us death. They killed your father in the free lands, when a man living there said the skins he bought from him fell apart after two moons. Your father went to see about the complaint and defend his good name. But the man had betrayed him to three Gangatom warriors two moons before. A boy took aim with his bow and struck him in the back, right through the heart. The story of the bad skins came from the Gangatom, as this man had no art in him to come up with a clever deception. That is what he told me before I cut his throat.”
Also this, my uncle told me. My grandfather grew tired of killing and took my mother and me from the village. He was the one who left the cows. This is why from when I was young, my father was old, old as the elders here with humps on their backs. Running made him thin, with skin and bone. He always looked ready to flee. I wanted to run from my uncle to my father. Grandfather. The ground was right now not the ground, and the sky was not the sky, and lie was truth and truth was a shifting, slithering thing. Truth was making me sick.