Читать книгу Indaba, My Children: African Tribal History, Legends, Customs And Religious Beliefs - Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa - Страница 23

THE COMING OF THE STRANGE ONES

Lumbedu, the witchdoctor, had not slept well at all the previous night; in fact, for him the night had been one long hideous, screaming nightmare in which he had been alternately chased, strangled, mauled and torn apart by no fewer than ten different kinds of monsters, from giant crocodiles to bright red monkeys with ten eyes apiece.

The cause of all these unpleasant nocturnal visitations from the Demon World was not far to seek at all: it was nothing more than the fact that the rather overweight Lumbedu had stuffed his capacious belly well-nigh to bursting during the feast held in his honour on the previous day. This feast had been held by one of his patients he had cured of a bad fever by forcing down claypots-full, one after the other, of a strong purgative into the luckless man’s stomach, with the result that although the poor fellow had been quickly cured of his fever, his stomach and intestines had been almost purged out of existence.

During the feast Lumbedu had brought forth loud shouts of amazement and admiration from the rest of the guests by excelling himself in his elephantine appetite. He had eaten the large half of a goat – haunch, ribs, shoulder, neck and head – pushing the smaller portion across to a starveling who had been staring at him with bright astonished eyes and a wet, drooling mouth. Then he had attacked a great bowl of boiled ox intestines and a pile of hot corn cakes, flavoured with kaffirbeer, with the ferocity of an invading conquerer. He had concluded this most royal repast with an almighty draught of two full claypots of bubbling cornbeer.

The midsummer sun was going down and the distant forests were now veiled by a smoky, mistlike haze, which made them look farther away than they really were. Wisps of smoke rose into the windless pale blue sky from great kraals and villages, while loud in the ears were the lowing of cows and the hollow bellowing of bulls as large herds of cattle were driven homewards from the forest-fringed pastures.

The rays of the slowly departing God of Light shone on the sweat-drenched face of the panting boy who was running through the forest as if Watamaraka, the Queen of Evil herself, was after his blood. He was a very frightened boy indeed – anyone could tell from his eyes. What had he seen?

Follow the boy, my children – dark-brown, thin, naked, swift as a wild eagle of the hills. Follow the boy to whom the breath of fear has given the strength of a thousand men and the endurance of a wild buffalo. His toes and feet are bleeding – his left thigh is red with blood where a cruel thorn from a meva bush is deeply buried in his flesh. But he runs on heedless of pain and tiredness.

What has he seen? Guess, my children, guess!

Lo, he bursts through the forest and before him rears the stockade of a big kraal, a kraal consisting of sixteen huts surrounded by a stockade of pointed poles interwoven with thorny creepers. It is the kraal of his father, Lumbedu the witchdoctor, and the boy runs into the kraal as if he were the Seventh Wind itself.

‘Father, father,’ he cries shrilly.

Ojoyo, his mother, sees him and comes waddling fatly to investigate the reason for her son’s fright.

‘My son, what is the matter?’ Her fat greasy arms encircle the frightened boy and he collapses. She carries him away like a baby to her hut and there, after removing the thorn from his thigh and washing his many wounds, she makes him drink a bowl of sleep-causing luika water, and he falls fast asleep.

‘I think he must have seen an animal in the forest,’ says Vunakwe, the third wife, to Ojoyo later.

‘My son is no coward,’ snaps Ojoyo. ‘I still insist he must have been frightened by an evil spirit in the forest, Oh Vunakwe; he saw one of the demons which afflicted his father only this morning. Dare you try to contradict me?’

‘I do not wish to argue with you Ojoyo,’ says the peace-loving Vunakwe. ‘It is best that we ask the child himself if he awakes . . .’

‘If he awakes?’ Ojoyo explodes. ‘If he awakes? Do you wish my son not to wake up then Vunakwe? Do you want him to die?’

‘No, no!’ cries Vunakwe, cringing from the advancing Ojoyo. ‘My tongue slipped; I meant to say when he awakes, believe me.’

‘You witch, you know very well that you meant what you said. I am going to . . .’

But she gets no further as her attention is claimed by another of the wives of Lumbedu.

The sun was high in the silver skies when the boy Mulumbi, who had come running into the kraal on the previous evening, crawled painfully into Lumbedu’s hut and knelt near the low entrance, facing his many parents who regarded him with bloodshot eyes and blank expressions on their haggard faces.

‘Father,’ said Mulumbi at last, ‘I have something to tell you and I only ask you, please, to believe me.’

‘What is it?’ snapped Lumbedu, who was as bad a parent as he was cowardly and selfish. ‘Speak up and then get out!’

‘Father,’ said the boy, ‘we were out hunting wild cats with the other boys from Songozo’s village yesterday afternoon; we went farther and farther into the forest until we reached the Zambezi and then started to follow the river eastwards. We did not find any wild cats but we did find a young buck which we speared and roasted and shared. We were still eating when Mbimba stood up and gave a loud shout of great fear. We all threw down our meat and grabbed our spears and bows thinking that some animal was about to attack us. “Look over there – what is it?” cried Mbimba. We all looked and saw something terrible coming up the Zambezi. Believe me, my parents, it was something terrible!’

‘What was it?’ chorused Lumbedu and Ojoyo together.

‘It was a canoe, a very big canoe, father. It looked like a terrible serpent of the waters. Along its side ran two rows of long paddles and a great sheet of what looked like a skin was stretched on a long stick that hung on many ropes across a tall pole that stood in the centre of the giant canoe. There were three great knives attached to the front end and a carving shaped like a man, with hair as shaggy as a lion’s mane. The other boys fled, my father, but I decided to hide in the grass to see what the canoe would do next. It came nearer and nearer . . .’

‘My brave little son,’ murmured Ojoyo. ‘Go on, what happened next?’

‘To my surprise, the canoe came closer and closer to the river bank and then it stopped. I saw men running on its top and the long rows of paddles being drawn up. Great metal vessels were lowered to scoop up water – lowered on ropes down the side of the great canoe. So near was it that I could see the many men on it quite clearly and they were the strangest looking men you ever saw. They had pink skins – they were pink all over; they had hair like the mane of lions – hair that fell to their shoulders. Some had hair as black and shiny as that of a panther, some red as fire. But one had hair the colour of corn in autumn. It was terrible – I was so afraid I just lay in the grass, all strength gone from me. I saw some of the men leap over the sides of the great canoe; they leapt naked and with their long hair flowing behind their heads. They leapt into the water and started swimming and splashing in the Zambezi like so many pink fish. Some were wrestling and laughing and some just swam about, leisurely, enjoying the cool water.

‘Then a group of them ran out of the water on to the bank and started coming to where I lay in the long grass, too terrified to move. I closed my eyes and lay quite still. I heard their footsteps coming nearer and their voices grew louder. Then I heard a shout as the foremost of them had seen me. I felt a wet hand seize me roughly by the wrist and haul me to my feet in one movement. I found myself looking deep into the green eyes of one of the strange ones, my parents . . .’

‘Iaia-eeee! – no human being can ever have green eyes,’ said Lumbedu. ‘No human being can ever have long hair like that of a lion, and a pink skin. This brat is lying!’

‘Be quiet Lumbedu,’ screamed Ojoyo. ‘I know my children more than anybody else does and I know when they tell lies and when they tell the truth. Mulumbi is not lying.’

By this time the boy Mulumbi was bathed in sweat, his hands shook like leaves in the wind and a look of wild fear distorted his young boyish features. It was Lulinda who first noticed this. Worry clouded her beautiful face and she whispered to Lumbedu: ‘Be careful, husband, please be careful; he has had a great shock; he is a very frightened child.’

‘I have never seen this boy like this,’ spoke Vunakwe. ‘He is not a child who is easy to frighten and I know he tells the truth.’

‘Continue son, tell us the rest, then you can go and lie down in your hut,’ said Taundi. ‘You are not looking well.’

‘The strange ones have strange eyes, Oh my parents,’ continued Mulumbi, very slowly and weakly now. ‘Some have blue eyes, some brown, and the one who was holding me had green eyes. But those eyes seem to see through and through you; they make you feel naked and unhuman. I cried and struggled in the strange one’s grasp, and he laughed and put me down. Then he gave me something small and shiny and round, something that was metal. But I must have dropped it as I turned and ran and ran with the alien laughter of the strange ones loud in my ears. I ran on and on without even looking behind me.’

Suddenly he fell heavily to one side and lay still. His audience leapt to their feet, but it was Lulinda who reached him first and threw her arms about him. ‘He . . . he is dead . . . dead,’ she choked.

A heavy silence fell inside the hut, a silence as heavy as the veil of time that conceals the future from our eyes. Then Ojoyo began to sob softly.

The story spread like wildfire through the land and within a few days nearly everybody knew about the strange pink human beings in a great canoe that had come splashing up the timeless Zambezi. The boys from Songozo’s village who had watched Mulumbi’s adventure with the Strange Ones from a distant hill, swore he had told the truth.

The barbed claws of the vulture of fear slowly closed their grip on the frightened land and soon people began to be so scared about what they had heard that they no longer ventured outside the stockades of their villages and kraals except in groups of tens and twenties.

Warriors armed with long bone-tipped war spears and stone axes escorted women whenever they went to the stream to get water or to the cornfields to reap corn. Drums beat out long warnings that were relayed to the farthest villages, telling people to look out for strangers with pink skins and long hair. Soon all the villages along the banks of the Zambezi were empty of life, having been evacuated by the inhabitants.

Everyone began to live in fear, everybody that is, except two people who were carrying on a secret and adulterous love affair.

Night had fallen upon the earth like a panther-skin kaross, powdered with silver shining stars, and an ugly brooding silence lay heavily upon the fear-haunted land. Deep shadows, black and forbidding, lay like crouching demons under the trees – shadows that concealed prowling night-hunting animals such as leopards, hyaenas and jackals. Only a madman dared walk into the forest in the middle of the night; only a madman – or a man on fire with passion and desire for another man’s woman and who was willing to risk his life by keeping an adulterous appointment in an abandoned village on the bank of the Zambezi.

Chikongo, the son of Mburu, was the name of this man. He was actually risking his young life to keep an appointment with another man’s wife – and that wife was Lulinda, the youngest wife of Lumbedu, the most feared witchdoctor in the land.

The heart of Chikongo pounded like a mad thing within him. He reached the abandoned village deep in the forest, the village which he and Lulinda had been using as a ‘place of secret appointment’ for one month now. He stood waiting just outside the fallen gate, his stone axe firmly gripped in his right hand, ready to deal with any animal that might emerge from the village to attack him. He stood thus for a long time until just as the moon rose above the trees in the east a low call sounded from the bushes close at hand. Lulinda! His stolen Lulinda had come . . . she had come!

Chikongo threw down his axe and jumped into the bushes with his hungry arms outstretched before him. Lulinda met him with a ferocity only a shade greater than his own and the love-demented pair went sprawling into the prickly embrace of a thornbush.

Chikongo picked himself up ruefully and helped Lulinda to her feet. Once more the lovers sought each other’s arms, though in a more dignified and less violent way. Lulinda pressed herself fiercely against her lover’s muscular frame, her nails digging deep and painfully into Chikongo’s broad back, drawing blood. She kissed his pulsing neck, his ears, his forehead and his chest. Then she rubbed her nose fiercely against his. Then she broke free from his iron clutches and danced away with a low husky and musical laugh. The moonlight danced in her great big eyes like a silver ghost over a stream.

‘Oh, my stolen one,’ sighed Chikongo, ‘I thought you were not coming.’

‘I very nearly did not come. I think that bloated female crocodile Ojoyo is getting suspicious. She kept on peeping into my hut to see if I was there, but I tricked her. I do think that this should be our last appointment.’

His arm about her slender waist, they walked into the deserted village, unaware that many eyes were now watching them. Cautiously Lulinda and Chikongo entered the largest of the huts which happened to have a big hole in its grass roof, through which moonlight streamed, making a big splash of silver light on the pitted mud floor of the hut. It was here that the young man did an incredibly foolish thing – he did not explore the great hut first to see if it was really as empty as it seemed . . .

* * *

Lulinda woke very slowly and found to her surprise and horror that she had slept so long that dawn was breaking. The sky was red in the east, and soon the sun would rise in all its glory, bringing with it a new day. Her heart beating faster than usual, Lulinda tried to sit up, but found to her great astonishment that she was securely bound hand and foot – and so was Chikongo, who was still fast asleep beside her. Nor was that all . . .

Standing around them in a semicircle were six of the fantastic pink men whom the dead boy Mulumbi had seen and now they were in full battle dress. Tall and handsome in an unimaginably alien and fantastic way, the terrible Strange Ones towered above the frightened girl and her sleeping partner like colossal statues of pink flesh and shining bronze armour.

Each of them now wore a cuirass of heavy bronze scales and a helmet with one or three crests and what was obviously the hair of some animal. Two of them wore shining bronze leggings, and all of them carried shields either of leather studded with iron or bronze, or of iron with bronze bosses. All carried heavy iron-headed spears and all wore at their sides what were obviously deadly swords.

‘Now I am dead,’ thought Lulinda. ‘Now we are both as good as dead.’

It was just then that Chikongo woke up and an expression of great surprise spread across his face. His mouth dropped open and his eyes widened. He looked as surprised as a fish that had just discovered its parents were a frog and a lizard!

The Strange Ones roared with laughter at this and Lulinda was astonished to discover just how human their laughter was, and how warm and genuine it sounded. This was not the hollow laughter of Evil Spirits, but that of very amused men, differing in colour, features, hair and form of dress from Chikongo’s and Lulinda’s race – yes, but human beings none the less. Then the one who seemed to be the leader of the Strange Ones put a question to Chikongo in a strange language that reminded Lulinda of a clear stream murmuring in the cool depths of a forest.

But they could not understand one another and eventually the voices of the red-headed Strange One and Chikongo became aggressive in tone.

It was the youngest of the Strange Ones who saved the situation. He came forward and looked down at Lulinda and beckoned her to look at him, which she at last managed to do. He pointed to himself, then to his companions – and then he pointed to his own mouth and stomach. Then, from his leather pouch he took out a piece of meat and glared at it in a most menacing way, bit off a piece and then spat it out in great disgust. Again he pointed to himself and the rest of his companions, then eastward once more. He then counted his fingers and toes and raised his hands with all fingers extended to indicate ‘ten times twenty’.

A smile budded and burst into flower on Lulinda’s lovely face and she nodded vigorously to show she understood. Then the brown-haired, blue-eyed Strange One counted fifty times on his fingers. He indicated on his bronze-scaled chest the breasts of a female and he counted twenty-three on his fingers and made a gesture showing ‘little person’. Again Lulinda smiled and nodded rapidly.

‘What are you both here grinning about?’ Chikongo demanded. ‘You seem to be getting quite friendly with this dangerous beast, Lulinda.’

‘I understand what they want; he says there are two hundred of them in the east down the river and fifty of them are females and twenty-three of them are children. He says they are tired of eating meat and are hungry for other food. I think they are human beings of a sort – I am quite sure they are human.’

‘Listen, Lulinda,’ growled Chikongo, ‘these things here are no more human than I am the son of a web-footed rhinoceros with seven tails. I am positive they are some form of evil spirit come to destroy our people. Do not let them get you under their spell.’

‘Do not bother your great and all-knowing brain on my account, beloved one,’ smiled Lulinda. ‘The only spell I have fallen under is the spell of understanding. I think we should take these people to our Chief Chungwe.’

‘You mean you should take these people to him, Oh pleasure of my veins,’ smiled Chikongo. ‘You forget that if I go with you, people will start asking a lot of embarrassing questions, my love. They will want to know just what we were doing in the forest at night to begin with and, as you know, our tribe has a very unpleasant way of dealing with boys and girls who commit adultery and I have no wish to be shorn of my manhood and flung to the nearest crocodile, you know.’

‘I know,’ said Lulinda. ‘I do not need you to remind me of that.’

Meanwhile the Strange Ones were also engaged in animated conversation amongst themselves, a conversation in which the giant red-bearded leader and the brown-haired youth talked loudest. Once or twice the tall red giant took a step forward and half-drew his sword, snarling threateningly at the younger man, who only threw up his arms and laughed impudently at the infuriated giant.

At last the red-bearded one seemed to yield to whatever the young man had suggested and it was not long before the bonds on Lulinda’s and Chikongo’s wrists and ankles were cut. Then the brown-haired blue-eyed one cocked his curly head to one side and looked questioningly at her. She and Chikongo led the way through the forest towards the village of Lumbedu the witchdoctor.

It was one of the strangest and most fantastic processions of all time that wound its way through the great forest that morning. First came Lulinda, walking proudly in front. Then came Chikongo, whose nerves seemed to grow more and more taut with each step. Beads of perspiration stood out on his forehead like morning dew on a leaf, and he was as tense and as agitated as a kudu bull which has just caught the faint scent of a marauding lion.

Behind him came the shining company of the Strange Ones – twenty in all, some of whom had been in the other huts of the village during the long discussion between the Strange Ones and Lulinda. Their tall crested helmets hid half of their finely carved features, except their eyes, noses, firm thin-lipped mouths and square chins. Only three of them wore beards, besides the heavily armoured full-bearded giant who was their leader. They moved through the forest like a serpent of living, shimmering bronze, each as alert as an angry lion, cold deep-set eyes scanning the forest with the lofty contemptuousness of gods – as if they were ready for anything that might try to attack them, and all too happy to strike it down.

There was one man in whom Lulinda and Chikongo had become very interested indeed; this was the one at the very end of the glittering line of armed men. He obviously belonged to a race totally different from the Strange Ones, whom he resembled only very slightly. His skin was much darker and even his dress was totally different from that of his companions.

While the Strange Ones wore under their armour short tunics of what looked like cloth, this man wore nothing save a green and black striped loin-cloth. While the Strange Ones had long flowing hair, this man’s head was clean-shaven and he wore a tight-fitting green leather cap on his head. He was totally unarmed; the only item he carried was a big leather bag containing rolls of what seemed like calfskin, small clay jars of medicine of different colours, ranging from white to deep blue. He also carried many pointed reeds and strange sticks with tiny tufts of animal hair at one end. This odd man walked with a slow step and an expression of unfathomable bitterness on his face and Lulinda wondered about him greatly; was he one of the Strange Ones or was he a captive, or slave? But she was to find out very soon.

Lulinda saw the village of Lumbedu in the distance, sitting like a circular scar on the domed forehead of an ancient hill. Chikongo, who had also seen the kraal at the same time, drew Lulinda to him, swiftly kissed her forehead and nose, and vanished in the forest. But the two young culprits knew nothing of the fact that a pair of eyes had seen them from the bush, the eyes of the last person on earth whom Lulinda would have wanted to discover her secret love affair. They were the eyes of Ojoyo, the First Wife of Lumbedu no less, and that boded ill for the lovers.

Lumbedu, the witchdoctor, was lying on a pile of leopard skins in his hut, pretending as usual to be very sick. He groaned and whined and writhed whenever one of his many wives entered his hut, but laughed and chortled and patted his greasy stomach when he was alone. It was while his Third Wife, Vunakwe, was holding a bowl of milk to his spatulate and blubbery lips that Ojoyo’s strident voice crashed through the hut, edged with great fear and urgency.

‘Hide the children; take them out of the kraal into the forest. Lulinda is coming – she is bringing the Strange Ones with her,’ she cried. ‘The Strange Ones are coming!’

Tumult, and confusion twice confused, burst like a violet poisonous flower through the kraal; screams, bawls, shrieks and the yapping of dogs tore the astonished skies apart. Women and howling children ran hither and thither like frightened goats among the huts. The fat ebony-black Second Wife, Taundi, grew so wild with fear that she threw her youngest child into a great bowl of ground corn and ran squealing fatly out of the kraal. She ran like a woman gone mad, down the hill and straight into Lulinda and her glittering companions.

The astonished Strange Ones saw a black mountain of a woman come tearing down the footpath and then leap high into the air with an unearthly, smothered shriek, and fall like a great female hippopotamus into a very prickly thornbush, as unconscious as the dreams of yester-year.

Lulinda paused and placed her small hand on her unconscious rival’s fat chest. On finding her alive, she beckoned to her foreign companions to follow her. As they passed into the distance, Taundi slowly recovered consciousness and staggered to her feet, to start running again, faster than before, farther away from her husband’s kraal, deeper and deeper into the dark forest.

Midday found her still running, sobbing hoarsely and bathed in sweat – but still running. She ran until she burst through into a clearing in the centre of which stood a village whose gate and stockade were lavishly decorated with human skulls, ribs and thigh-bones. Taundi recognised the village as that of Dimo, the Dreaded One, King of the Cannibals. With a loud scream she turned and stumbled back into the forest, but it was too late.

A crowd of slim and very beautiful female cannibals came running out of the village with Dimo himself bringing up the rear. With loud squeaks and giggles of unspeakable joy they chased the panic-stricken Taundi through the forest until she dropped from sheer exhaustion. They seized her and frog-marched her back into the village with loud shrieks of laughter. They took her to a roofless hut where three great pots were already filled with water at the boil. The last thing Taundi saw on this earth was an incredibly beautiful young cannibal woman with filed teeth and heavy copper ornaments that blazed in the sun. A wicked-looking copper knife was clutched in the young cannibal’s small hand.

‘We see you, oh breakfast,’ said the cannibal girl quite sweetly. ‘We see you and are thankful for your having come to feed us.’

Lulinda entered Lumbedu’s silent kraal with the Strange Ones close behind her. She raised her voice and called out, but nobody came. Then she began a systematic search through the kraal, finding nothing but broken pots and calabashes, spilt sourmilk and a sick dog lying behind a hut. She was about to give up her search when a muffled sneeze exploded within one of the great round sisulu granaries. She looked into the basket and there, crouching fat and monstrous and terribly afraid, was the great witchdoctor himself, bathed in sweat and quaking like a bowlful of sour porridge. ‘Don’t tell them,’ he whispered. ‘Please don’t tell them I’m here!’

Like the disloyal and disobedient wife she was, Lulinda went to the gate of the kraal and beckoned to the Strange Ones to follow her. She calmly indicated the basket in which her fat lord was hiding. Lumbedu let out a loud scream of fear as he saw three bronze helmeted and pink-faced heads looking down into his basket. He uttered a loud scream as the basket was hacked to pieces by the giant leader of the Strange Ones, who then sheathed his big sword and hauled Lumbedu out by one arm.

Lumbedu wetted his loinskin and the Strange Ones roared with laughter. While the red-bearded giant and the brown-haired young man held the quaking witchdoctor forcibly erect, Lulinda explained the situation to him and when she had finished the young Strange One turned and snapped a few words to the odd man with the green striped loincloth and skull cap and concluded by kicking him soundly in the buttocks.

The odd man picked himself up out of the dust and sat down on one of Ojoyo’s grindstones. He then opened his bag and, spreading its contents on the ground before him, he selected one of the rolled sheets of what looked like calf-skin and one of his pointed reeds. This reed he dipped into a small jar containing a black fluid and began tracing patterns and what looked like human figures on the roll of skin. Before the astonished eyes of Lumbedu and Lulinda, the odd man was making a long series of drawings on the calfskin roll – he was telling the story of the Strange Ones. He was telling in clear, unmistakable and beautiful pictures why the Strange Ones left their country and came to the Country of the Black Men.

First he showed a savage battle between the Strange Ones and another race with long flowing beards and hair. Then he showed the Strange Ones being routed in a charge by foot soldiers and warriors riding on fantastic vehicles drawn by strange beasts with long flowing tails and manes, like zebras without stripes. After this he showed a number of canoes with long poles in the middle and he drew figures representing the Strange Ones fleeing towards these canoes in wild panic.

He showed the males of the Strange Ones fighting a brave rearguard battle while figures, obviously female and young, clambered aboard the canoes. The canoes were then represented in full sail over what was obviously water with fish and crabs swimming below the surface. He drew a circle representing the sun and made a hundred strokes under it.

‘A hundred days,’ breathed Lulinda.

Silently, ignoring the interruption, the odd man showed battles between Strange Ones and wild beasts, lions and elephants and leopards, battles that the Strange Ones, with their superior metal weapons always won. He dropped the now full calfskin and took out a second one.

Lulinda screamed when the odd man finished the first picture on the second sheet. The picture showed two black figures, male and female, embracing under a full moon near an old and dilapidated cluster of huts, and those two figures represented Chikongo and herself.

Unknowingly, unwittingly, the odd man was betraying Lulinda to Lumbedu, her husband. And soon, on the silent sheet of calfskin, the whole nocturnal adventure was exposed, up to the time when Chikongo kissed Lulinda for the last time and fled into the forest. There, on the silent parchment, the trembling Lumbedu not only read the story of the Strange Ones, but also that of Lulinda and her secret partner. All was set out in clear lines and many colours as plain as daylight. The adulterous love affair of his youngest and favourite wife stood out for all to see.

The odd man then started to explain in pictures that the Strange Ones were more than willing to trade some of their weapons for any foodstuffs, except meat. Then, after that, the red-bearded leader and the younger brown-haired man dropped Lumbedu contemptuously on the ground and started, together with the other Strange Ones, carrying off some of Lumbedu’s full corn baskets. But for every basket they took they left a spear, an axe, or a knife behind – all superb weapons of gleaming steel or bronze.

While this was going on, Lulinda saw the odd man with the green striped loincloth leap over Lumbedu’s kraal stockade with two stolen swords in his hand and vanish into the forest.

The Strange Ones left after drinking every drop of milk in the kraal and after the ever-smiling young man with the brown hair had stood over the prostrate and still badly scared Lumbedu taunting him cruelly in sign language for his great cowardice. It became plain to Lulinda that the Strange Ones had not yet noticed the odd man’s escape.

Ojoyo and the rest of Lumbedu’s wives and children did not return to the kraal until well after sunset. They found Lumbedu staring in blank fascination at the pile of weapons the Strange Ones had left in exchange for the corn. The first thing Ojoyo did on coming into the kraal was to root out Lulinda and call her an adultress to her face, describing in vivid language how she had seen her being kissed by Chikongo in the forest.

Lumbedu was still suffering from the after-effects of his great fright and could not think or talk straight, so his wives took the law into their own hands and bound Lulinda securely hand and foot in preparation for her ceremonial execution on the day to follow. They beat the helpless woman with their skin skirts, burned her thighs with hot stones, spat on her and blew their noses at her. They seized her breasts and pulled them until she shrieked with pain and, before they left her, they forced her to drink the entire contents from Lumbedu’s clay urinal.

They were not being cruel; they were only doing exactly what the law and the customs of the tribes of the Dark Land say should be done to adultresses before they are executed. Then on the following morning, Ojoyo sent her eldest son Gumbu to the kraal of the Tribal Avengers with the request for the arrest of Chikongo as an adulterer.

Now, the Tribal Avengers were a group of men over whom no chief had any power and who had no tribal loyalty. They were men dedicated to the destruction of all those who broke tribal customs and, being members of no particular tribe, their assistance could be enlisted by anybody from any tribe. Even the chiefs lived in fear of the fanatically dedicated Avengers and many, in our land’s strange history, are the chiefs who fell victims to the spears of this secret group of men who had chosen to be shorn of their powers of fatherhood and who could kill a woman with the same pitilessness with which they killed a man.

They led loveless, joyless lives, these strange men, living only for the enforcement of the centuries-old customs of the Black Race. Very often nobody knew just who they were because they always wore heavy woven bark masks whenever they emerged from their isolated kraal during daytime.

Thus it was that by midday on that cloudy day, a strange figure was seen coming up the hill on which Mburu’s tiny kraal was perched like a lost bird on a rock. Mburu was the father of Chikongo, who was an only son amongst many daughters.

‘Look, what is that coming up the path?’ said one of the girls to Manjanja, the First Wife.

Manjanja’s eyes were fast losing their sight although she was only four-and-forty years old, and they groped blindly in an effort to see what the girl was pointing at. ‘I see nothing, child,’ she said. ‘Tell me what you see.’

‘It is a man, but he is wearing a chinyau mask on his head and he is clothed from ankle to neck in leopard skin. He is carrying in one hand a big club shaped like a man, a carved club with a big head and ugly face. He has an axe that looks terrible.’

The half-blind woman leapt to her feet with a choking cry; she knew very well who and what the masked man was. She called urgently for her husband and to Chwenyana, the Second Wife.

‘Oh my fathers,’ cried Mburu, ‘an Avenger!’ The Tribal Avenger paused outside Mburu’s kraal and called out harshly: ‘You in there . . . you, Mburu, the son of Timburu, the son of Chumba, son of Kondo . . . come out and stand outside the gate of your kraal, which I will not defile my feet by entering. Come on out and hear what I have to say.’

Mburu came out, a proud, brave man who had once been a leopard hunter until a leopard mauled his right arm, paralysing it forever. He stood facing the dreaded Avenger without fear and without expression on his strong, bearded face.

‘Speak, Avenger, I listen.’

‘Your miserable son, whom I shall not defile my mouth by mentioning by name,’ said the Avenger, ‘has slept more than once with one Lulinda, who is the youngest of the females of one Lumbedu who pretends to be a witchdoctor. Your wretched son knew very well what he was doing and he knew that stealing another man’s love-mat from under him is a breach of custom, punishable by any kind of slow death that the insulted man may choose for the offender. And since Lumbedu has sent a complaint to us, we are positive that your son is guilty and we have already sentenced him to death. So your son is now bound by law to go to Lumbedu’s kraal and receive the death he so richly deserves. Do you have any questions to ask?’

‘No, Avenger, we have none,’ Mburu replied, choking back a sob. ‘If you say my son is guilty then he is guilty.’

‘Now I shall make a trail of cowrie shells from here to Lumbedu’s kraal,’ said the Avenger, ‘and your son must come out naked and follow that trail – he must be at Lumbedu’s kraal before sunset, and he must be dead by evening.’

As Chikongo dropped his loinskin and took leave of his parents, his mother Manjanja clung desperately to him, her only son, crying bitterly and saying: ‘Oh, Oh light of my fading eyes, my child, why . . . why did you do it?’

‘I do not know, mother,’ whispered Chikongo. ‘Goodbye now, mother.’

‘My son,’ said his father, ‘do not be afraid. Just show that fat bloated dog of a Lumbedu how Timburu’s grandson can die. Die like a warrior, my son; die with a smile on your lips as your warrior grandfather died.’

As Chikongo took the last cowrie-strewn journey of his young life, Mburu drew his weeping wives into his hut and took an Oath of Vengeance in which he swore to kill the witchdoctor Lumbedu one day, even if it took him years of waiting.

It was in the afternoon when Chikongo came through the gate of Lumbedu’s kraal and to his own great surprise he felt utterly unafraid; in fact, he felt very angry and actually wanted to die. As he entered the kraal he saw Ojoyo and the rest of Lumbedu’s wives standing in a scowling semicircle, leering, with bone or copper knives in their hands. Beyond them he saw the tall Avenger standing with folded arms next to Lumbedu and his son Gumbu, who was now armed with one of the metal spears the Strange Ones had left.

‘Come on, you foul bitches,’ cried Chikongo. ‘Come on and get it over with?’

‘No, my boy,’ said Ojoyo, with a nasty smile, ‘we shall come on, but we shall not get it over with in a hurry. You shall suffer a lot before you die. I would like to hear you scream for mercy before we despatch you.’

‘You shall never make me whine, you dirty slut,’ snarled Chikongo. ‘I am not your husband who squeals like a pig when you so much as point a finger at him. Come on, do your worst.’

And do their worst they did. But never once did the brave young man cry out, even when his entire lower abdomen had become one bloody mess of spurting blood and tattered flesh. They held him down, but he never so much as attempted to struggle and at long last he opened his mouth and gave one long shuddering gasp.

‘Now you are going to squeal, my bush-pig. Come on, let us hear you squeal,’ Ojoyo cried.

‘No, you foul she-hyaena,’ gasped Chikongo. ‘I shall not cry out. But I am feeling very sorry for you all. Today you kill me, but tomorrow, or a few moons from now, you . . . you too shall be dying. You have fallen like trapped flies into the web of Death and soon he shall come and consume you all.’

With that, the son of Mburu, son of Timburu, died. He died as his valiant father had told him to die; he died as his grandfather Timburu had died so long ago – bravely, without a murmur.

‘He cursed us . . . he cursed us with his last breath,’ sobbed Vunakwe, who had taken no part in the ghastly execution. ‘We are all cursed.’

‘Be silent, you weak-bellied bitch,’ snarled Ojoyo. ‘Some of you bring out Lulinda quickly.’

Lulinda was dragged out of her hut and flung brutally upon her dead lover’s body and all eyes turned towards the tall masked form of the Tribal Avenger for further instructions.

‘Did you make the raft?’ snapped the Tribal Avenger to Gumbu, the son of Lumbedu.

‘Yes, Mighty One, we did.’

‘Then drag this adultress and this dead dog out of here to the riverside and tie them together face to face. Roll them on to the raft and tie them firmly to it. Then push the raft into the river – the scaly crocodiles shall deal with both dead and living. I have spoken.’

How long Lulinda drifted down the Zambezi she did not know; it seemed like aeons and aeons. Her body was numb and her brain was fast approaching the valley of madness. She kept her eyes tightly shut all the time because whenever she opened them she stared into the wide-open eyes of her dead Chikongo. The cruel leather thongs that tied her to the raft were biting into her flesh like red-hot copper knives, and the wake of blood – Chikongo’s blood – that the raft was leaving behind, was attracting whole tribes of ravaging crocodiles. Something huge, scaly and long-snouted clambered on to the raft and fastened its teeth on the dead man’s leg, towing the raft nearer to the south bank of the river. But just when Lulinda had given herself up for dead, she saw a canoe creep into her limited field of vision, a canoe that turned its prow and bore down upon her raft and the swarming crocodiles clustering about it. Lulinda saw that there was only one man in the canoe – she could see him clearly silhouetted against the last glow of the dying sun.

The darting canoe rammed the raft and tore it out of the crowd of crocodiles swimming around it. Then Lulinda felt a weapon of unbelievable sharpness cutting her bonds to pieces. She felt strong hands snatch her out of the very jaws of a crocodile. She had a glimpse of a smiling thin-lipped mouth, a straight nose and a pair of bright black eyes. She saw a face handsome in a strange alien way – a face she had seen before. It was the face of the odd man who had escaped from the Strange Ones at Lumbedu’s kraal. Lulinda passed into the vale of unconsciousness in the arms of the light brown-skinned foreigner.

The legends say the odd man took Lulinda away to the safety of the great forests in the south of what was in later years to be known as the land of the Varozwi people. There the odd man gathered all the small tribes and clans and welded them into one mighty tribe to which he tried to impart some of the arts and the knowledge of his faraway native land. Even today the tribe this tawny-skinned foreigner founded is known throughout the land of the Black Tribes as the only one that practises the strange art of fortune-telling by gazing at the stars. The Varozwi is the only tribe practising mummification of its chiefs. Before a young Varozwi prince can assume the headdress and kaross of chief, he is forced to spend four nights in a cave in which are the mummified bodies of his father and ancestors. He must pray to each of these desiccated corpses for strength and wisdom and demand from each a blessing and a spiritual light to show him the road of life.

But, apart from the fact that the odd man founded the Varozwi Tribe, no clear details of his adventures and eventual death have reached us from across the gulf of time and his is one of the few stories in the land of the tribes where the story-teller must speak but a few words and be silent, because there is no more left to tell, for Time, that devouring monster, has devoured the rest.

Gumbu, the rascally son of a rascally father, knelt before his fat parents Lumbedu and Ojoyo and gave them advice – advice that was to affect thousands of lives and change the history of the whole southern part of the land of the tribes; advice that was to lead Lumbedu along the downward path to the valley of undoing and a miserable death.

Gumbu told his parents that since they were the only people who knew what the Strange Ones wanted, they should be the only people to trade big baskets full of corn, yams and pots full of milk for the superior iron and bronze weapons of the Strange Ones. With these weapons, Lumbedu could easily seize power and rule the whole land as a High Chief. Gumbu pointed out with jackal-like cunning that a few men armed with these metal weapons could easily rout a whole army armed with bone-tipped spears and stone axes, as was the case with all the armies of the tribal chiefs at this time. It must be remembered that at this time the only metal that Black people knew was copper, with which they made ornaments and knives for stabbing only.

The selfish, ambitious old charlatan Lumbedu fell down on his hands and knees and actually kissed his son’s feet like a beggarly slave for the suggestion he had made and the next few days saw a brisk trade between Lumbedu and the ships of the Strange Ones, which came crawling like many-legged sea serpents up the Zambezi river. Lumbedu’s wives and daughters would put full baskets of corn or yams in a particular place on the bank of the Zambezi and then beat a tattoo on a big drum before retiring into the forest. The ship of the Strange Ones would then edge nearer to the bank and its occupants would pick up the baskets, leaving a pile of spears in exchange. Within five days, the witchdoctor had enough weapons to arm close to two hundred men and it was then that Gumbu gathered together a small army of ruffianly cut-throats and armed them with the deadly metal spears and swords. In one short, savage battle he overthrew the High Chief of the land, Chungwe, and slew him on the doorstep of his own Royal Hut.

Lumbedu became a High Chief in one day. The gross, whining and utterly selfish wretch suddenly found himself waddling like an overfed vulture at the head of twenty thousand subjects and the heady fumes of the mead of power and ambition made him drunk as yesterday’s nightmare. He wanted to conquer until he ruled the whole world and traded and pleaded with the Strange Ones for more weapons and still more.

His wild, undisciplined armies tore like wildfire across the shocked land and chief after chief fell before the new weapons of metal, and tribe after tribe was enslaved. Gumbu’s savage hordes swept southward into the land of the ancient people known as the Ba-Tswana who, blessed by the Great Spirit itself centuries earlier, had been living in peace for generations. Here, in this land, Gumbu demanded that the defeated tribal chief, Mulaba, should give him his daughter Temana as a wife and as a hostage, and he took this lovely maiden back home with him to Lumbedu’s kraal after leaving governors to hold the land in his father’s name.

On the way back, however, Gumbu was stricken by the eye disease called karkatchi and became totally blind in less than six weeks. Then one night Temana led the blind Gumbu to the very edge of a great cliff and pushed him over before leaping to her own death. The legends say that where Temana fell at the base of the cliff a cluster of tiny sweet-smelling red wild flowers soon grew, the origin of the letemana flowers which still grow there among the rocks to this day.

Meanwhile Lumbedu had become the undisputed chief of the biggest empire the tribes had ever seen – an empire that sprawled from the Inyangani mountains to the shores of the western ocean. What is so amusing about Lumbedu’s empire and reign is that it lasted only one full year and eight moons.

While Lumbedu bathed in the sunshine of power and drank deep from his beer-pot; while his woman Ojoyo bedecked herself with hundreds of gleaming ornaments and had numerous slaves to obey her every wish and the land trembled at the mention of Lumbedu’s name, a strange conference was taking place in the great grass village the Strange Ones had built for themselves at the mouth of the Zambezi river.

Four men sat around a wooden table inside a great four-cornered grass hut. One of these men was a tall bearded red-haired giant with the scars of many battles on his massive body and the other was an old man with long hair and a flowing beard that was as white as mountain snow. This old man wore broad circlets of gold, studded with precious stones, around his head and he wore a long tunic of purple cloth, over which he had thrown a flaming red cloak. The third man was of the same race as the odd man who had saved Lulinda and he had a white loincloth painted with strange and mysterious signs in red and black. On his head he wore a headdress of blue and red striped cloth and a yellow cobra reared menacingly above his forehead from the golden band around his head.

The fourth member of the council was a happy-looking brown-haired young man with blue eyes who entered the council hut long after the first three had been sitting. He had entered the hut with mischief dancing in his bright eyes and had then proceeded to make faces at the red-bearded giant before giving his big broken nose a playful tweak.

‘You are late, my son,’ said the old Strange One.

‘That I am, my father, is your fault. You gave me a wife at my tender age and now half my nights are without sleep. You see . . .’

‘Be quiet, the King awaits your report and not details of what you do at night with your wife,’ roared the red-haired giant.

‘My son,’ said the white-haired King gravely, ‘we are here to discuss a serious matter and not to jest. All we want to know is whether our plan is working properly – the plan of supplying the fat Lumbedu with weapons under the pretence of trade and then letting him conquer his own fellow people for us. We would like to know whether he is still unaware of our intent to come in once he has finished and to take over from him.’

‘Our plan is working well, beyond our wildest dreams, my father,’ said the young man. ‘Even now our bloated greasy friend has added yet another tribe to his empire and it will not be long before a great empire, with thousands of slaves, falls into our hands like ripe fruit.’

‘We cannot afford to wait much longer – we must strike now. Where we had a hundred separate tribes to conquer, we now have only one fat son of a vile hippopotamus to strike down and all his empire shall be in our hands,’ said the man with the loincloth.

‘I agree,’ said the King. ‘We have waited far too long. Tonight we must attack that dog’s village.’

Lumbedu was feeling on top of the very stars, let alone on top of the world, and he was as happy as a starveling beggar’s stomach which has just digested a stolen fowl. He was as happy as a lion with a million teeth and a thousand mouths.

Now if Lumbedu was as proud of his being a chief as a lion with many mouths, his First Wife Ojoyo was as proud of her suddenly finding herself a queen, as a vulture with many gizzards. Every morning she was carried in an elaborately carved litter to the riverside by a veritable bevy of beauties from her husband’s harem and there she was bathed, smeared with crushed tambuti leaves all over until she smelt like a big fat sweet-scented flower. Then she was bedecked with copper necklaces and bracelets. She feasted all day long on wild honey, corn cakes, very fatty meat, and greasy yam stew.

She was shrill and cruel to the rest of the wives of Lumbedu and she could kill any one of them on the slightest provocation. She was, however, a woman with two guilty secrets lying heavy on her rotten soul and both these secrets would have earned her a slow and miserable death at the hands of the Tribal Avengers, had they become known. Firstly, she had poisoned the kind-hearted Vunakwe who had been Lumbedu’s Second Wife and had buried her secretly in the hut where she, Ojoyo, always slept. And she had lied to Lumbedu by saying that Vunakwe had fallen into the Zambezi.

Secondly, Ojoyo had a secret lover whom she kept imprisoned in a cave in the forest and whom she always visited whenever the flame of desire burnt within her. This secret lover was a young boy of eighteen years and Ojoyo knew that seducing a person of that age who had not been initiated into adulthood according to custom was an offence punishable by death. No persons under twenty-five are allowed to so much as kiss, or be kissed by, members of the opposite sex.

Ojoyo had never asked her prisoner lover who his parents were and all she knew about the youth was that his name was Kadimo. Kadimo had been captured by Lumbedu’s warriors while wandering aimlessly in the forest and, being a member of an unknown tribe, he had been brought into Lumbedu’s kraal for questioning and execution. Kadimo, however, could not speak the language of Lumbedu’s tribe and his only answer to the harsh questioning by the warriors as to the name and whereabouts of his tribe, had been nothing but a series of pathetic head-shakings. Ojoyo had suddenly felt herself drawn to the godlike youth Kadimo and had asked Lumbedu to give her the captive ostensibly for torture and killing, but in reality to imprison him in a cave and use him as a secret source of pleasure.

On the fateful day when the Strange Ones had finally decided to attack Lumbedu’s village during the coming night, Lumbedu and Ojoyo had been feasting in their great hut from early morning to late afternoon. They had been celebrating twenty-five years of marriage according to tribal custom; they had eaten together a whole raw flamingo and then drunk a bowl of milk mixed with honey. They continued their gigantic feast with fowls and roasted meat washed down with pots full of cornbeer – till they passed into the valley of unconsciousness together. Now nobody else in Lumbedu’s kraal had been invited to this private feast, because only the man and his wife should be present during the ceremony of the ‘Eating of the Flamingo’. The result of this was that, although Lumbedu and Ojoyo were lying drunk and insensible in their hut, everyone else in the Great Kraal was as sober as the morning breeze.

A man came running into the kraal at about midnight – he had been running through the forest for he knew not how long – and he had come to warn Lumbedu that the Strange Ones were advancing up the southern bank of the Zambezi in full force and that their intentions were definitely not friendly, as the now dead villagers whose headman this man had been, had found out. The man found sentries at the gate of Lumbedu’s kraal and to them he whispered his story before he collapsed at their feet.

‘I am the headman of the village of Lumoja – quickly, warn the High Chief that the Strange Ones are coming. They mean war – they have killed all the people in my village and will soon be here.’

While two of the guards ran to warn everybody in the kraal, one stopped to help the fallen man to his feet. But he discovered that the man’s back was covered in blood and that there was a long deep wound under his left shoulder-blade. Only sheer willpower and great courage had kept this brave man running for so long, while badly wounded.

Panic reigned supreme in Lumbedu’s kraal that dark and star-spangled night. People fled naked out of the threatened kraal into the doubtful safety of the forests. Screams tore the night as some were pounced upon by leopards and night-hunting lions. Instead of standing and preparing to fight to the death in the kraal of their High Chief, the undisciplined and disloyal warriors of Lumbedu launched their fleet of battle canoes and escaped into the night carrying off Lumbedu’s many wives and concubines with them to safety across the Zambezi.

Meanwhile Lumbedu and Ojoyo still lay in drunken stupor inside their hut where they had defied the best efforts of their subjects and children to wake them up. An hour before dawn something must have warned Ojoyo because she stirred uneasily and woke up. A few moments later she crawled out of the hut, urged by a strange sense of uneasiness that suddenly burst into flower in her soul. She called out to the night guards at the gate, but no one answered. The whole kraal was mysteriously deserted.

This stunning fact penetrated deep into Ojoyo’s drunken brain and a terrible fear tore through her, leaving her as sober as the morning dew.

Then somewhere in the forest she heard the steady sounds of marching feet and the clash of metal on metal coming nearer and nearer. She sensed the murderous purpose behind those sounds and the dead man at the gate confirmed her worst suspicions. Ojoyo screamed in terror.

She ran back to the Royal Hut and tried to waken Lumbedu by shaking him violently and calling his name repeatedly. But he only turned over on his back and snored louder than ever.

An alien war-cry shattered the starry night like a blow from a knobkierie as the Strange Ones burst into the kraal like a horde of mad bronze-clad demons from hell itself. Ojoyo crawled out of the Great Hut like a scalded snake and made her escape through one of the small emergency gates in the stockade, leaving the drunken Lumbedu to his fate.

First one and then the other of the two guard-huts flanking the gate burst into flame as the attackers set them on fire. Soon the whole lower portion of the kraal near the main gate was a mass of flames and redly glowing clouds of billowing smoke. The Strange Ones began to ransack the empty huts and to remove hundreds of sourmilk calabashes and dozens of baskets full of corn and yams. These they placed in the centre of the vast clearing before they set the huts on fire.

It was then that Lumbedu awoke and crawled drunkenly out of his hut and stood swaying on the raised clay doorstep.

‘You . . . why are you burning my kraal?’ he cried thickly.

A group of Strange Ones came running towards him, brandishing swords and gleaming bronze spears, but Lumbedu was far too intoxicated to be scared and stared blearily at them, standing his ground.

One of the Strange Ones aimed a sword blow at Lumbedu’s head, a blow that was not intended to kill or to injure, but which passed harmlessly over his shiny bald pate. Lumbedu balled his fists and stood his ground, not even blinking.

One of the Strange Ones said to the King’s brown-haired son: ‘Behold, how brave this fat barbarian is; he has chosen to remain behind while the rest of his people escape. I did not know these black pigs could be so brave.’

Suddenly Lumbedu began to dance, urged by nothing less than the fumes of the strong beer he had drunk in such quantities. He stamped and capered like a mad gorilla up and down the firelit clearing in the centre of his burning kraal. He puffed and stamped and grunted and shook until his fat feet stirred up clouds of dust around them. Then, for a reason which even he could not understand, he snatched a spear from the hands of one of the astonished Strange Ones and ran himself through with it.

The young prince of the Strange Ones stood over the body of the dead Lumbedu and for once he was not smiling. He shook his helmeted head and said: ‘He was a very brave man. He chose death instead of slavery – just as we would do.’

‘Let us take what we can and leave here,’ said the prince a while later. ‘I’m sure that my father will be pleased to hear that he is now the Emperor of a great land full of thousands of black, thieving dirty-skinned barbarians!’

The traitor Lumbedu who had played into the hands of the Strange Ones and had betrayed hundreds of thousands of his people into slavery, was dead, but of his woman, Ojoyo, a story remains to be told.

Ojoyo paused once in her wild flight through the forest and, looking behind her, saw the two huts near the main gate in flames. That blood-chilling sight caused yet another spurt of speed and she ran even faster than before. In the course of her flight she heard the sounds of a wild animal in the forest and stopped dead in her tracks with her heart in her mouth, until the beast had gone past. At last she came to a familiar stream which she knew flowed past the cave where she was keeping the youth Kadimo a prisoner. As the grey light of dawn touched the sky, Ojoyo found the well-worn path that led up to Kadimo’s cave and followed it slowly and wearily as it twisted and turned past great rocks and boulders. As she approached the cave, a squat ugly figure detached itself from the rock behind which it had been hiding and barred her way.

‘Ho! Who you?’ growled the ugly one. ‘You go back or you die.’

‘It is I, Ojoyo, my trustworthy Zozo,’ said she with a smile at the hunch-backed and unbelievably ugly idiot whom she had placed to guard the youth Kadimo day and night.

‘Zozo see you, Queen,’ said the idiot, dropping on his knee.

‘Open the cave for me, Zozo, and then you can go into your own cave and sleep,’ Ojoyo commanded.

The powerful hunchback rolled aside the boulder that stood in the entrance of the cave and then fled into his own cave. Ojoyo entered the prison cave and felt around in the darkness for her youthful captive.

‘Wake up, Kadimo,’ said she, ‘wake up, my love.’

For a long time after that Ojoyo and Kadimo sat side by side in a dark recess of the cave conversing in low voices. Ojoyo told the youth about what had happened in Lumbedu’s kraal that night and concluded by saying she feared Lumbedu had been killed.

‘Now you . . . belong . . . Kadimo, . . . all his,’ said the youth who could by then speak a few words of the language of Ojoyo’s tribe.

‘Yes, Kadimo.’

‘When dawn comes, we . . . go away . . . back to my village. You come . . . back with me.’

‘And Zozo too?’ asked Ojoyo.

‘No, Kadimo hates Zozo . . . Kadimo wants Ojoyo . . . alone.’

‘As you say, Kadimo.’

By midday of the day that followed Ojoyo and Kadimo were far away from the burnt-out kraal which Ojoyo had ruled with cruelty and insolence only the day before.

Ojoyo was beginning to become very afraid of Kadimo as his attitude rapidly changed from one of respect to insolence. He had now stopped calling her Queen and addressed her as ‘you’. He even threatened to beat her up if she tried to sit down and rest. But the greatest surprise was yet to come.

‘I’m tired, I want you to carry me on your back, you fat cow,’ he indicated in a broken tongue.

‘Fat . . . fat cow!’ gasped Ojoyo. ‘Did I hear you call me a fat cow?’

‘Yes . . . you fat cow,’ said the youth. ‘Now bend down . . . and carry me.’

‘Never!’

Kadimo’s great knobkierie thudded solidly against Ojoyo’s royal ribs many times. She screamed and writhed and rolled on the ground as Kadimo gave her the greatest beating of her life. At long last the pain became such that Ojoyo began to whimper like a child and to beg Kadimo not to hit her again.

‘Why are you so cruel to me?’ she sobbed. ‘I am your Queen.’

‘You are my supper . . . you are my edible queen!’

‘What, you mean that you are a cannibal!’

‘I am Kadimo . . . son of Dimo . . . son of Sodimo . . . my father . . . King of the Cannibals.’

‘But you can’t eat me, beloved one,’ pleaded Ojoyo. ‘I love you and I am still beautiful . . .’

‘You . . . more beautiful . . . in stewpot. Tonight . . . we come to father’s village. Come . . . carry me!’

How long Ojoyo carried the youth she did not know – it seemed like hundreds of years. When she stumbled and fell, throwing Kadimo, he always got up to beat her cruelly before getting on her back again. On and on she stumbled until the skies became as black as midnight and bolts of bluish lightning began to scourge the tortured heavens, while peal after peal of thunder shook the very roots of the earth. Kadimo prodded his human steed to the shelter of the forest where they found a small cave and in this cave Ojoyo found a chance to rest.

‘Not far from . . . father’s village. When arrive . . . Kadimo shall have . . . nice slice . . . for supper.’

‘Kadimo . . . I beg you . . .’

But she got no further as a squat, hunchbacked and incredibly ugly shape burst into the cave and seized Kadimo by the ankle, dragging him outside into the howling rains. There was a short savage struggle, a loud gurgling scream and silence. Then the bowlegged and hunchbacked monstrosity called Zozo, who had trailed them relentlessly across the plains and through the forests, entered the cave.

‘Zozo!’ cried Ojoyo. ‘You saved me – he was going to eat me!’

‘Yes, I saved you, but not for long. You knew Vunakwe?’ asked the hunchback.

‘Yes, I knew her very well; she fell into the Zambezi and . . .’

‘You lie shamefully . . . you killed Vunakwe, and Zozo is Vunakwe’s brother.’

‘Vunakwe had no brothers, I knew her father, her whole family.’

‘Father of Vunakwe . . . never owned that Zozo was his son, because Zozo a deformed thing. Zozo always lived alone. Now you die.’

‘No Zozo! You saved me . . .’

‘Die Ojoyo!’

A copper knife stabbed down fiercely . . . once . . . twice . . .

* * *

After Lumbedu’s death the Strange Ones came out into the open and took over the astonished land. Soon hundreds of people began to feel the sting of the slave-driver’s whip within the borders of their own native land. Dozens, scores of kraals and villages stood empty, their inhabitants having been forced into the Strange Ones’ ships and taken away across the seas, never to be seen again.

The shocked land saw sights it had never seen before – long lines of men, women and children tied together with chains like living beads on a string, hauling sleds of stones the Strange Ones used to build great forts all over the land as far south as beyond the Herero. The shocked land also saw thousands of its black sons made to dig into the bowels of the earth like so many ants, to bring up iron ore, copper, and the yellow ‘sun metal’. The Sacred Iron Mountain of Taba-Tsipi, or Taba-Zimbi, became a mass of tunnels in which tens of thousands of chained slaves worked and died.

Long trains of oxen and even tamed zebras began to wind their way eastward over mountains and across plains, heavily laden with gold, iron ore and ivory, to be loaded on to ships of the Strange Ones and taken across the sea.

Elephants and hippos – the animals hitherto regarded as sacred by nearly all the tribes – were butchered by the Strange Ones from one corner of the agonised land to the other, the elephants for their ivory and the hippos for their bones and blubber.

Many tribes fled from the wanton destruction and oppression of the Strange Ones and some of these tribes even reached that country which is now Swaziland.

Contrary to those who claim to know about the Black people, the Swazi people did not branch from the Nguni tribes that migrated into the lands south of the Limpopoma about eight hundred years ago. The Swazi and the Bomvana tribes came south of the Limpopoma much earlier than did the Nguni. When the Nguni came, they found the Swazi had degenerated to such an extent that they no longer built villages, but lived in trees like monkeys; hence the popular insult of ‘Tree Dwellers’ the Nguni (from whom the Zulus sprang) applied to the Swazis.

The Swazis adopted the culture and even the language of the Nguni, which they speak with a hissing accent. They even adopted the weapons and the battle tactics of the Nguni. The Swazi are well known for their habit of wearing their hair very long and even dyeing it red with clay and wild root juices. They still imitate the long hair of those long-dead White men who invaded the Black land more than two thousand years ago.

The Strange Ones established great plantations near the Inyangani Mountains and here thousands of slaves also toiled, planting, hoeing and reaping corn and other crops which the Strange Ones had brought from their native lands. Even today, traces of these fantastic plantations that legends say were fertilised with hacked bits of bodies of dead slaves during winter, still survive for all to see and marvel at. These are known today as the terraced plantations of Inyanga. No Black people ever farmed in the terraced style.

In the course of time, more of the Strange Ones came to settle in the land, together with members of that hated race called the Arabi, which was to wreak so much havoc in our land in years that followed. Many of the Strange Ones took wives from the Lawu (Hottentots) and from the Batwa (Bushmen) races and many became the sons and daughters of Strange Ones and Yellow Ones.

Fifty years after Lumbedu’s death the Strange Ones began to build many cities and villages in the land. But the biggest and most important city was on the shores of lake Makarikari – today a vast shallow salt pan.

This city was big enough to contain more than a thousand people, the legends say, and it was surrounded by a strong stockade of wood with stone towers at regular intervals. A deep ditch, filled with water, went completely around the city, rendering it utterly impregnable to attack, and the only entry into the city was over a short wooden bridge across the ditch into a gateway. A great settlement sprang up around the city in the course of time as hundreds of traders, slave-raiders and ordinary settlers built their homes outside the city walls, and there raised their families.

The Strange Ones began to multiply in the land, although fever and all-too-frequent epidemics killed many of them. As a result of their trade with lands beyond the great waters, the Strange Ones amassed fantastic wealth in their homes and cities and they lived their lives in great luxury. Today, one still finds in the possession of Bantu witchdoctors incredibly old and rusted swords with bronze hilts, swords so old that their blades crumble at a light blow with a stone. There are unbelievably old ornaments of gold and silver and bronze – ornaments that are neither Bantu nor Arabi; worn, pitted and even distorted by age – ornaments that are today very jealously guarded by Tribal Historians and High Witchdoctors as the Secret Charms of the tribe. These ornaments are still used today in secret rituals and they still keep the memory of the Strange Ones fresh in Tribal Story-Tellers’ minds.

As time went on, the empire of the Strange Ones, like all things based on murder, oppression and theft, began to take the downward path of decay. The number of ships that crawled up the mouth of the Zambezi began to lessen gradually and many of the sites where gold, iron and copper had been mined were abandoned and forgotten. Gradually the empire of the Strange Ones was isolated from the world outside and the Strange Ones turned more and more of their attention to making their lives as full of luxury and pleasure as possible. Soon the lives of each and every one of them became one long orgy of song, dance, food and drink. They invented new and fantastic ways of entertainment. They had idols before which they performed orgies both revolting and utterly fantastic. The legends say that some of their queens and empresses began mating with beasts in attempts at finding new sources of carnal pleasure. Some even tried to mate their daughters to lions in an attempt at producing a new race of men who were supposed to combine the courage, endurance and ferocity of lions with the intelligence of human beings.

The legends also say that one of the Emperors of the Strange Ones had a young man for a Queen and he used to kill women, both of his own race and of the Bantu race, with great cruelty, as entertainment.

It is said that the Emperors of the Strange Ones called themselves the ‘Children of the Star’, because they claimed to have descended from a star that fell on earth, which took a young woman of the Strange Ones and had sons by her.

The next part of this strange story of the Strange Ones begins with the birth of a man called Mukanda, or Lumukanda, the Destroyer, who was destined to play a major role in the history of the Strange Ones. Lumukanda was born of slave parents in one of the filthy underground stalls where the slaves were kept in the great city on the shores of lake Makarikari.

He grew up a slave who knew no other kind of life except that of a slave. To him, as to all others born in slavery, the word freedom meant absolutely nothing and he lived only to be commanded and to obey. He was nothing but a puppet, dancing and capering at the commands of cruel masters.

By this time, the Black race between the Zambezi and Limpopoma rivers had been all but totally annihilated and the only free people there were the dead ones. At the time when the mighty hero Lumakanda was a youth of sixteen the empire of the Strange Ones was suddenly split violently into two as the result of a war between the White Emperors whose names have come down to us as Kadesi and Karesu. (These are not their true names; the Tribal Chroniclers have corrupted them in the course of time.)

When the story (which custom commands us to tell in Lumakanda’s own words) commences, this war between the quarrelling foreign rulers had just ended in defeat and flight for Kadesi, and victory for the unnatural Karesu who had a male and not a female consort.

And so, my children, now begins the strangest story of all – the second sequel of our great Zima-Mbje Story, the grand epic that is still sung and chanted by many tribes even today, the undying story of the undying man who loved a goddess and who changed the destiny of an empire.