The Big Canoe.
The river does not only flow down to the thick mist hanging afar. It also encircles this tiny island that holds our village, like a mother cradling her child.
Today, I’m swimming inside the river with my best friend, Jalungo, when I look up and see a thing drifting in from the other side flanked by rocks towering above each other.
The thing, alien to me, is big and menacing, and yet it floats so gracefully. I tap Jalungo on the shoulder, pointing him down the river. He traces the direction of my finger, and seeing the thing, he turns back at me with a wide look in his eyes.
“Let’s go!” he yells, and we quickly wade out of the water. And once we swaddle our loincloths around our waists, we race upwind towards the forest and to the wilting bushes of the low grasslands.
As we near the grasslands, Jalungo tugs me to a halt. He tells me he’s going to climb one of the big mountains towering above the village. I nod, understanding that he wants to hit the thunder drum stowed up there, which is used to reach our people far and wide during ceremonies and in events of war, loss, or trespassing wildlife.
As he darts into the overhanging bushes skirting the mountains, I continue the race to the village.
The drum has begun thumping even before I reach the village. As I approach, the crowd that has converged parts to admit the paramount chief. He is a lean man with cloudy eyes, his face shrivelled as a sucked orange.
The colourful beads on his neck make little jangling noise as he moves towards me. He stops at arm’s length, and rumbles like an overhead thunder, “Nekapcha madelewa? What is it?”
I tell him what we have seen, but even after I’m done, it still doesn’t seem like he understands. Maybe it’s because I lack the right words to describe the thing. To my relief, Jalungo returns from the mountains and gives shape to the thing. It resembles a canoe but it’s much bigger, he says, gesturing, with his long arms, its gigantic nature.
After Jalungo is done speaking, the chief points afar to a tree, a giant baobab with a swollen trunk and boughs spreading widely in all directions.
“Is the thing as large as this tree?” he asks, and voices rise when Jalungo says it is even larger.
“Gajika! Gajika!” the chief bellows over and over again to quieten the restless crowd. When at last the murmuring quenches, he points out ten men, and asks them to stay back in the village with the women and children. “My son, Manga, will lead the others to the river to check the thing,” he says.
The rest of us men quickly gather up our weapons and set out for the river at a jog. As we are leaving the village, Manga comes up to me.
“Stay back,” he says. “This could be dangerous.”
Maybe he thinks I’m too young, and although I know he’s right, I shake my head in resistance, looking at the ground so I won’t have to meet his eyes. He looks at me for a moment, then he does the most surprising thing. He grabs my spear, handing me his much sharper one, then he moves up before I can utter my thanks.
The pathways are strewn with rotting twigs that we avoid as we tread through the forest so we don’t elicit any cracking noise from stepping on them.
Nearing the edge of the forest, we draw up our spears and arrows in readiness. Manga signals a halt, and we crouch down and, very quietly, part the bushes curtaining the forest from the shore.
The big canoe, as I have come to call the thing, is even more gigantic on land. Painted the murky colour of dry blood, its width is ample enough to fit in about five of our huts. A handful of poles towers from it, holding up sheets secured to ropes running up from its sides. Despite these features, the big canoe does not fascinate me like the men offloading burdens from it do.
The men are unlike any man I have seen. Their skin is white like chalk, and their hair is pale, drifting down to their shoulders. If not for the dirt-coloured clothes they’re donned on, I fear the whiteness of their skin might cause them to vanish should the sun hit them at a perfect angle. Only one man among them looks like us; dark with short thick hair.
“Lakaduna mapunda,” Manga says, breaking the trance the sight of these white-like-chalk men hold over us. Words crawl up my throat, urging me to beg him not to confront the strangers like he just said he would.
I force myself to swallow them, then watch him walk out of the forest into the open. The dark man spots him immediately and taps another man by his side—a white-like-chalk man wearing a wide hat—pointing him to Manga. The rest of the white-like-chalk men stop whatever they’re unloading to stare.
Manga tramps on fearlessly, my spear firm in his hand. He does not stop walking even when the white-like-chalk man and the dark man start approaching him.
The men lift their hands upwards as they do, in what I believe to be their effort to show they are not concealing any weapon. They let their hands drop to their sides when they eventually meet Manga at the centre of the shore.
From where we are hiding, I cannot see Manga’s face, but from his body language, I can tell that their conversation is amicable. Still air gathers in my stomach like stones, fearing the men might do harm to him. I find consolation in the that he is more muscular than both men and is also a head taller.
Some time later, Manga whistles and three of our strongest men crawl out of the forest and out to the shore to meet him. He says something to them and they face the white-like-chalk man, thumping their spears against the earth. The white-like-chalk man recoils at first as if frightened, but probably realizing that they are saluting him, he emits a crooked smile.
As the strangers and our men converse, Manga returns to us, saying the strangest things, that the strangers are white men; that they are from a faraway place called Brutan; that they have come in search of special stones to heal their ailing queen; that they speak a language different from ours; that only the dark one among them can speak our language.
In the end, Manga asks most of the men to return; he says the rest will stay to help transport the white men’s loads to the village.
While the rest leave, we walk out of the forest to watch the white men who have started unloading again. The one wearing a hat is the only one not unloading, but barks and points things to his comrades. Manga tells us he is their Kaaptin, some sort of chief figure among them.
The sun has started turning red by the time the white men are done unloading their boxes. We mount the loads on our heads and begin the long journey home.
Back in the village, the chief comes up to us donning a hat adorned with feathers as bright as his eyes turn upon seeing the white men.
He clears a cough and salutes the men. Then he starts to address them through their dark interpreter while everyone else in the village observes in silence.
“Welcome to our great village!” he says, “We will not lie that we were expecting you, but it’s not in our blood to chase people away provided they cause no trouble.”
He pauses, and his eyes scan the faces of the white men. “Provided they cause no trouble,” he emphasizes. He clears a cough again, then continues, “I was told that your queen is ill; you have my permission to search for those stones you seek here...anything to save a human’s life.”
He offers some huts to the men, and to show appreciation, their Kaaptin presents him with gifts retrieved from their loads. One of them is a brown, glossy container which he uncaps and sips from to show that it is not poisoned.
Inching forward, the dark man tells us that the liquid in the container is akuhul. “It’s a gin much stronger than your ukumpi,” he says, patting his chest and laughing, the deep-belly kind that makes his shoulders rumble.
“Good for the body.” He laughs again.
Everyone in the village watches him.
I slink out of our hut very early the next morning before my mother and my brother rouse, and take the trails wending up to the mountains.
The white men should be on their lowlands, as they had informed the chief at night that they will start their search for the stones today. But although I do not know where they are, I will know once I stand atop the high mountains overlooking the village.
As I reach the mountains, I choose one of the tallest ones and then begin climbing. By the time I reach its peak, I’m breathing so hard I can hear every inhale and exhale I make over the sound of the wind rushing by.
From where I am standing on the mountain, it is not difficult to find the white men as you can see the whole landscape sitting on the depression below.
They are gathered on a terrain a spear throw away from the village, all nineteen of them, including their dark interpreter. There, they dig the earth with long hoe-like tools with some people who had come from the village to aid them.
As I watch them, I cannot help but marvel at how it seems as though the white men had plucked the hue of the cloud above and laid them over their skin.
How are their eyes the colour of the sky? Do they see as we do, or is their vision hazy blue? How did they orient the big canoe from the part of the river with the most angry of the angry waves?
I notice one of the white men sitting away from the rest on the lee of a fallen tree. Unlike the others, he is not working but instead is peering into a white thing in his hands.
His attention is completely focused on the thing, and as moments go by, I find that I can hardly pull my eyes away from him, maybe because he is the only one among them who is about my age.
Suddenly, the dark man calls the workers to rest. But even as I watch them retreat under the shades of nearby trees, I find my gaze drifting back to the white boy. The Kaaptin saunters out from under the tree where he has been standing, sighing out smoke rings from a smouldering stick, and begins to share some containers among those from the village. The containers are identical to the one he gave the chief yesterday but for their smaller size.
He pulls them from a sack and tosses them at the excited villagers. My stomach growls, pulling me back to time. Looking up, the sun has intensified. I start to make my way down the mountain.
Akuhul is all that everyone in the village talks about these days, from the men steering their canoes out of raging waves to the women straddling their young through the shadows between the mountains. It’s better and stronger than ukumpi, they say.
My mother tells me one day during breakfast that akuhul is unlike anything she has taken. She says it burned in her throat and, for a long period, made her head feel bloated, like a sack pumped full of air.
On my way to see Jalungo that day, I pass the chief’s hut and find the elders seated there with the white men, their teeth bared in laughter as they raise their drinking horns for a refill of the akuhul the Kaaptin holds.
Jalungo tells me he has tasted akuhul. That it is clear like water and made him sleep till he almost wet himself. The Kaaptin had given it to his brother as a token for helping them with digging, he says.
So one day I go to the site, and although a part of me is there to get some akuhul, the other part—the bigger one—is there for the white boy. I want to see him again. And not like in my dreams where he comes to me in a cloud of fog, but in solid flesh, where he cannot swirl away from my grip.
I am the youngest at the site, but despite this, the dark man points me to the digging tools. Shooval, he calls them.
I’m soon exhausted from all the digging. My muscles ache, and my throat is so parched I would cry just for a drop of water. I start considering going home when the white boy arrives.
In the past days, I have learned he’s the son of the Kaaptin, so I’m not surprised when he does not join us at the site, but plants himself on the favoured lee, peering into his hands as he did the last time.
My attention is divided in that instant. As I work, I keep sneaking glances at the white boy. I’m amused at how he turns up his nose when he looks afar, like he has sniffed something bad in the air.
When the dark man calls for a brief rest, I shuffle towards the lee. I am nearly startled when the white boy suddenly turns and speaks to me. “Nekapcha zukande? What’s your name, mate?”
I’m astonished to hear our language tumble from his lips, so for a moment, I can only gaze at him in silence.
He smiles, his face even more beautiful with the red sunburns on his cheeks, and repeats the question. “Lebotha,” I answer.
“Le–bo–tha.” He laughs as he mouths the name and then looks right at me, “Williams!”
Because my gaze is steady on him, I see the moment he realizes I do not understand what he means.
He points at himself.”Ni Williams!” Pokes his chest. “Ni Williams!”
It is only then that I realize he’s telling me his name just like I have told him mine. I want to repeat the name, but my tongue feels bloated, too heavy to roll up words. “Williams!” he says again, extending his hand towards me.
Seeing as I don’t take the hand, he drops it, then taps the unoccupied space on the lee, asking me to sit. I make myself comfortable beside him, and turn my gaze towards the site. It is so beautiful.
I’m wandering through the forest one afternoon when I suddenly stumble upon the white boy smoking under a tree with a stick similar to the one the Kaaptin had used the other day. My presence startles him, but recognizing me, he scampers over.
“Lebotha!” he says.
I’m surprised but happy to know he still remembers my name.
“Weelam,” I mutter, like his name is some sort of secret that should be protected from the world’s listening ears.
He smiles and tells me he lost his way to the site, and I nod, although I do not believe him.
“Sie?” He holds out the stick to me, his eyes brightly expectant. It is difficult to refuse him, so I take the stick and pull as I have seen him doing. Smoke fills my lungs, and I start coughing, my eyes watering.
“Easy, mate. Go slower. Yes! Slower!” he says in his language, the words soothing me even though I have no single idea what they mean.
He takes the stick and makes me watch him. He pulls from the stick, never stopping until the tip is sweltering a harsh auburn, then he puffs out smoke, very slowly. I try again, still my chest quavers.
The white boy erupts laughter as he watches me, the sound high and sparkly like music borrowed from the throats of the proudest birds and softens my heart like when I’m with Manga.
Like the evening I pulled him into my arms under the village acacia trees, snagging a kiss from him before he shoved me away. Like before he blurted out to me that he was getting betrothed to one of the elders’ daughter; and before the stones that had been gathering in my chest became a weight I could scarcely carry, so I let them fall through my eyes.
“Know the forest well, mate?” the white boy says in between laughter.
“Kada.”
“Mind showing me around then?”
I look at him through the haze of smoke surrounding us. The smile in his eyes as he waits for me to answer is so perfect it makes me want to kiss him hard—like I had kissed Manga—like I’m offering my soul to him.
Earlier today, I took the white boy to the age-old cave situated in the bowel of the forest, its walls carved deep with engravings depicting our beginning. He lumbered about, stroking the engravings with the same enthusiasm he had towards everything else I had shown him.
In the past days, I have taken the white boy around the forest, down the canyons, and up mountains that overlook sceneries so beautiful it makes me want to cry every time I gaze at them.
I have shown him our lands and pointed to him the parts of the forest where the most dangerous animals lurk. But I have learned from him as well, like the fact that their dark interpreter is called Ahfrad and that it was the man who taught him our language.
He explained after I poured out to him the questions that had been twisting up my head, that the thing he often peers at is a Buk; that it is crammed with tales so arresting it takes him places he has never been; that the sticks they smoke are not sticks but Sigarets; that the big canoe is not a canoe but a Shep, a large vessel built to carry many things at once.
It is getting dark when the white boy and I start making our way back to the village. But despite our best efforts, the sun has fully sunk below the mountains by the time we reach the village.
We bid each other good night, and I start to walk down the paths leading to our hut. I’m rounding a bend down the paths when something burst out from the side bushes ahead. My stomach drops, terrified it’s a leopard, but then I see Manga. His form is unquestionable even in the low light; it’s black and divine, a towering mass of solid muscle.
“Lebotha,” he acknowledges me.
“Manga.”
“Suka tiketara?”
It’s not unusual for him to ask where I’m going or coming from, so I tell him how I had just bid Weelam good night. I do not bother to return the question; I already know he patrols the forest each night before he retires to sleep.
“Again?” he frowns, his eyes filling with disapproval or suspicion, or maybe both. It’s that same look in his eyes whenever the white boy and I chanced upon him in the village.
I pull my eyes away from his and focus on his cheek instead. A crescent-shaped scar dents the flesh there down to his upper lip. It strangely makes him look more handsome. I focus on this scar and imagine that it is all in my head, that he doesn’t really look jealous.
“What do you mean?” I say.
“You’re always with that white boy like you know him,” he says.
“I know he’s nice,” I say.
He looks away. When he starts to speak again, his voice is mellow, yet somehow, it sounds embittered, like that of a child whose favourite plaything has been taken.
“I didn’t say he’s not nice, Lebotha. I’m saying you should be careful.”
I scoff, “Of what?”
He watches me for a while like he has something more to say.
“Just be careful,” he finally says. Then he eases past me down the trail I had come from, disappearing into the darkness.
Today, our village wakes up to the news that the stones have been discovered. And although we see nothing on the site but the gritty stones littered across it, the Kaaptin assures us that they are what their queen needs for her ailment.
“We just have to drop them in her drinking water, and all is done,” he says, grinning.
By evening, the news has circulated the village, and with it word that the white men will depart tomorrow at sunset. I’m overcome with sadness hearing this. It weighs me down like armour when I sit in the village clearing during the night party the chief has called in honour of the white men’s departure.
In the middle of the clearing, the chief and the elders are cluttered among the white men, their laughter high like the moon above us. The rest of us ring them, some sitting while others stand, drinking as we watch the performing dancers.
But not even the akuhul that the Kaaptin has brought to intensify the party relieves me. And there is so much of the akuhul now as the white men are not drinking; they say it will be unwise for them to sail in the morning with unclear eyes.
I rove my gaze over the drinking throng in search of the white boy whom I haven’t seen since the party began. I find him seated between the Kaaptin and a dozing elder.
Like the other white men, he’s not drinking but instead is looking around as if searching for something. Or someone. And that someone must be me, I think, because seeing me, his glum expression softens into a smile, and then he starts walking over towards me.
“Where have you been, mate?”
“Here and about.”
He looks back at the clearing and then back to me. “What do you say, mate? Let’s tour the forest one last time, yeah?”
“Tonight?” I can’t help but smile, maybe because he’s smiling. Or maybe because he wants to spend his last night here with me.
“Tonight!”
“Sure?” The smile on our faces is getting bigger.
“Sure!”
The white boy and I blunder through the forest in the dark. For some reason, I feel like crying, so I laugh at whatever he says, even the ones I don’t understand, so that he doesn’t see his departure makes me sad.
I am thankful to whatever spirit that made me bring akuhul with me because it muddles my mind from pondering too much about the departure.
Purely by chance, we find ourselves in front of the cave. In the darkness, its hollowing looks like an open mouth waiting to swallow a sacrifice. We are sitting on the cold floor of the cave’s entrance when the white boy stops midway through his chatter.
“Sure you’re okay, mate?”
I turn to look at him to find that he is already looking at me. It feels as though he is peering beneath my face, past the thickness of my flesh and into my soul for an answer. An answer I do not know myself. A sigh leaves me, and I let my head drop.
“I don’t know.”
He nods, looking away, and I suddenly fill up with the need to beg him not to leave, to stay with me and never go. But guessing his reply, I drown the plea from my tongue with another swig of the akuhul, then I stare ahead at the trees clustered so tightly that light can barely slip between them. My eyes start drooping, and I find myself shaking my head to keep them open. My limbs feel heavy, and I’m sore at every corner.
My eyes droop again, and the white boy sees. “Sleep, mate,” he says, “I’ll wake you when I’m ready to return.” So when my eyes sag again, I do not resist sleep.
I don’t know if it’s the cawing birds above or the bright sunbeams filtering into the cave that wakes me up this morning. But the first thing I notice is that the white boy is gone.
Outside, the forest is alive. Trees sway. The wind rustles. And squirrels swing frantically between branches. I think to myself as I sit on a half-buried stone in front of the cave that the white boy has gone to pee or something, that he will return.
But soon unable to shrug off the thought that he had left after he couldn’t wake me up last night, I start towards the village.
I have not reached the baobab tree up the village when I see the body. It lies supine in a not-so-far distance.
My heart stops for a second, and when it restarts, it doubles its beat. I start to move forward with slow, shallow steps and have crossed some distance when, suddenly, the body moves. The person is still alive and, by the looks of it, is struggling to sit up.
I dash through the rest of the way to assist them, but upon reaching them, my heart falls into my palms seeing it is Manga. He is piteously wounded, his hair and body caked with mud. There is a gouge on his left shoulder, the blood coming from it trickling over his muscled stomach and down his lower torso, soaking up his loincloth.
I crouch before Manga to help him up, but then I see a corpse in the cluster of bushes behind him. Although the corpse’s head is riddled with bloodied holes, I recognize it as one of the dancers from last night.
My skin starts to crawl, a feeling of nauseousness overwhelms me. Had Manga and the dancer gotten into a brawl? Were they attacked, perhaps by a trespassing leopard?
Almost as though he can hear the thoughts straying inside my head, Manga looks up at me, his eyes red and wet.
“It—it’s the white men.”
“Nekapcha madelewa?” I ask, confused.
He points a shaky finger in the direction of the river. “The—they took everyone in the village; my father, the wome—”
“What are you saying?” I cut through his words which do not make sense. Why will the white men take everyone? It won’t be possible even if they tried, will it?
My eyes fall to his face. “What do you mean?”
He opens his mouth to speak, but he starts coughing. He straightens his back, and I clasp his arms to keep him up. He takes in a breath, deeper than his wound, and exhales with a sigh.
“Last night, the white men went from hut to hut, shackling everyone after the akuhul had weakened them,” he says in a clearer voice. “I think that is their plan to be— begin with, to drown us with akuhul and then overcome us. I had been patrolling in the forest all night. It was while I was returning that I saw them herding our people out of the village. I tried to put up a fight bu—but the Kaaptin pulled something from his waist, pointed it at me, and—boom!—I fell like an iroko, a kind of pain I’ve never felt searing inside my shoulder. Maybe they left thinking I’d die.”
He nods at the body, “I suppose they did the same to him.”
Although I cannot see my face, I know that it’s turned pale like the colour of the above clouds, that a crease has appeared between my eyebrows like whenever I’m upset.
“How ma—many—” I start to say, but words are a hard lump in my throat. Fortunately, Manga understands.
“Everyone,” he says. “They took everyone. I even thought they took you.”
“Tell me,” I say, hysteria in my voice. “Please, tell me they didn’t take my mother.” I start to shake him like a dummy as if to force the answer out of him right before it slips out of his lips.
“Tell me they didn’t take my mother. Did they, eh? Kepunda elali maemae?”
He nods, and my heart stills. Something inside me cracks and from it spews tears. I have never felt this lost before; this turned up from inside out, outside in, and scattered about. Will I see my mother again? What will happen to her? What will become of Jalungo and the others who were taken? Who will run the village now that it has been emptied?
I look down at the corpse again, and I’m suddenly angry at its holed head, at the flies swarming it. The anger is like hot water in my heart; it boils until it consolidates into resentment for the white boy, for deceiving me. For not telling me their cataclysmic plan but instead luring me away in what I suppose to be an act of kindness.
“Lebotha—” Manga starts to say for whatever reason, but I nudge him away, rising up. The tears come even harder now that I’m standing.
“Leboth—” Manga starts to say again, getting up himself, a hand placed tentatively on his injured shoulder.
“No!” I cut through whatever it is that he’s saying.
And then, without even thinking, I turn and sprint into the forest path leading to the river.
Manga calls to me, begging and screaming for me to return. And although the dew-damp grass of the forest whips against my face, although their sharp blades nick my skin, I keep running, hoping to catch up with everyone. Hoping by a small chance that the big canoe is still by the riverside.
