Still, he thought he could instill fear in the soldiers. They would surely be talking about the mysterious attack for a long time, and they would attribute it to ghosts and spirits. He could stress the point, and play on their beliefs, and then maybe it would stop them from harming civilians.
He vaporised the three-storied building, hoping the warlord was inside. The soldiers watched in horror as the building vanished from their sight. He left only one wall standing, on which he wrote, ‘Stop Hurting Our People’, in Swahili. A small crowd quickly gathered to read the message.
Only then did he remember the mission. Karama. He turned back to the prison. He could not remember where Karama’s cage had been. The prison had turned into a mess. There were many unopened cages. Kera cut them loose as he continued to search for his brother. He tried to work as fast as he could. His wrist hurt, his thumb ached. He ejected and loaded more batteries. He hoped Karama was among those who had already made it to the forest, but he had to be sure, so after he had opened every cage he searched the dead and those too wounded to move.
He found Karama. A large part of his head was missing.
5
He thought grief would rip him apart. He thought he would disintegrate. But the death of his brother only left him with a sense of disappointment. They had not been close. With five years between them, they never had much in common. They did not share friends or play games together. They did not even share the same roof, for as long as Kera could remember, Karama had lived in the little building out in the backyard. He could not remember ever having a one-on-one conversation with Karama. They had never even fought before.
For nearly ten minutes, Kera watched blood flow from Karama’s head. He had uncles, aunts, and cousins who he could look to for family support, but none lived in the town. They had not seen or heard from any of them since the war broke out.
His vision blurred. He wiped tears away, and forced his eyes away from the carnage. Soldiers still ran about in their barracks, in utter confusion. Some had jumped into vehicles and were speeding away. Hopefully they would spread word of the terror that had befallen their barracks. The prisoners had all escaped. Kera was glad to see some reading a sign he had etched on a tree trunk, and it warmed his heart to see them heading eastwards, toward Katong.
Salvation, Kera thought. He had failed to save Karama, but he could still bring sanity back to the world. He needed the flash gun. He could not let Baba destroy it.
Kera believed human beings were a cross between the alien hissing creature and apes, that human consciousness and intelligence came from these aliens. Maybe, seeing how humans used this intelligence to ruin the world, they forbade Baba from revealing any knowledge other than what was necessary to protect the valley. But Baba, or the human bit of him still left, had created a supergun to rescue his son.
Kera had failed him. Now, Baba would want to destroy the gun. He would argue that the world was better off without it.
Yet Kera had experienced its magic. He had saved four women from rape, and possibly death. He had destroyed a warlord’s barracks, and saved thousands of people from being turned into zombies ready to kill, rape, and maim, all for the love of minerals and the illusion of power. With the flash gun he was Kibuuka and Luanda Magere, he could impart fear in the warlords and bring back peace.
He spent the day in the skies, floating, mourning, letting the chill kiss his skin, feeling the wind in his wings, feeling the weight of grief in his heart. When hungry, he ate roasted potatoes and chicken, which Baba had wrapped in banana leaves. He did not zoom in on the details on the ground, for that would make him more miserable. He instead kept the goggles at their widest angle, giving him panoramic views of hills, of rivers flowing through the green, of red dirt roads and grey tarmac roads cutting through the lush vegetation. He stayed up there until the sun started to descend.
He could not keep the gun in the cave. He feared that Baba might communicate with the hissing creatures and that they would creep out at night and destroy it. So he took it to an island in the eastern swamp, and hid it in the reeds.
He knew the futility of his actions, for Baba simply had to read his mind to know where the gun was, but it was worth a try. He then flew the bruka to the cave and walked back home.
He reached the eastern gate well after dark. The fire-ditch threw flames twenty feet up. Beyond the flames, the wall soared into the darkness, glowing in the lights from the ditch. Two watchmen were in a tower.
“Stop!” one shouted. “Who are you?”
“It’s me. Kera.”
“Baba Chuma’s son? What are you doing out at this time?”
“I went to fish.”
He showed them a couple of tilapia that he had found on his hooks. The government had started a fish farming project several years back. When war broke out, the market for the fish died, so tilapia spawned wanton in the swamps and streams. It was an easy alibi.
The watchman pressed a button, turning down the flames in the road section of the fire-ditch. The other lowered a drawbridge. By the time Kera reached the gate, he felt singed.
“Only two fish?” one said.
“There are only two of us at home,” Kera said.
“Tomorrow, bring more so I can eat too.”
“No worry,” Kera said. “Baba is waiting for me.”
“Refugees came,” the other said. “They appeared this evening. Maybe Teacher was right all along. You see they talk of spirits fighting soldiers and telling them to come to our town.”
“Oh,” Kera said. He had not thought about Teacher.
“Go see them if you want,” the man continued. “They are at the police station.”
As he hurried to the station, Kera thought he was in a strange town. Even before the war, perpetual darkness had engulfed the town for it did not have streetlights. When war broke out, the electricity supply became erratic, so much so that it would be a miracle for the lights to come on. Baba must have created a generator, for hundreds of bulbs turned the night orange. His machines had repaired the buildings, giving them fresh paint and leaving no signs of the attack. A new police station, three stories high, stood in place of the old colonial structure that had been bombed out during the attack. Kera gaped. The building had gone up in just one day. He could stomach a flying machine, and a flash gun, for these he had seen in a myriad of sci-fi movies, but a three-storied building that appears out of the blue?
About thirty refugees sat on the lawn, bathed in orange lights, eating supper. Steam rose from their bowls, filling the night with the aroma of goat stew and millet bread. Some had bandages. Kera recognised a few faces. When he saw the four women, a smile nearly broke out. The one whose dress the soldier ripped off now wore a green gomesi with yellow flowers and spoon fed her baby.
About a hundred of the townsfolk had gathered, some sat in the middle of the road, others sat on the pavement, and others stood. Many of them wore clothing made out of bark cloth.
Teacher stood on the steps of the police station, dressed in a bark cloth robe and shoes cut from wood. “I’ve been telling you that our ancestors are behind these miracles and you’ve not listened to me,” he was saying. “Now listen to these people. Hear them. I tell you it’s the god Kibuuka. He has returned to save us from the puppets of the mzungu. Ma-” he started to say Martin, but caught himself, cleared his throat and said, “I’ll never mention those kizungu names again. Asimwe, tell us what you saw.”
A young man stood up, his hand bandaged, his lips torn, one eye swollen shut. He spoke with a lisp, for several teeth were broken. He was not Luo, but had lived in the town for so long that he knew the language, though he spoke with a heavy accent. “It came from the sky,” he said. “I saw the cage burning from the top downwards, which means that the source of heat was up there. The spirit shot the soldiers in the head. Many had holes right on the top of their heads, here.” He touched his pate. “I tell you, the spirit was in the sky.”
Asimwe sat down.
Teac
her grinned. “Kibuuka, the god of war. He can fly. He can hide up there in the clouds and rain arrows upon his enemies. Those soldiers are merely puppets of the mzungu. They care for nothing but minerals. They kill us and rape us and turn our land into ashes for the sake of these useless stones. Now Kibuuka has woken up. He is fighting for us. Maybe soon we’ll see Luanda Magere and Aiwel Longar and Jok Olal Oteng.
“Our town is blessed. It sits right beside the home of our ancestors.” He pointed toward the valley. “They live there. This is a revival. If the spirits are to grow stronger, we must worship them the right way. They get weak when we use kizungu things, like clothes and kizungu names and kizungu religion. So from today, we must discard everything kizungu. Everything.”
Each sentence deepened Kera’s frown. He wanted to shout that there was no god or spirit, only people who look like charcoal drawings and lived inside rocks, who had no supernatural powers for they needed a machine to mend a hole in their home. He wanted to tell them he was behind it all, and that he had no problem with wazungu. But a lump formed in his throat. The hissing creatures might not be supernatural, but there still could be a spiritual force involved. What else could explain the dreams in which he journeyed to another world to train as a superhero, or his mother’s voice in the sky? Maybe there were ancestral spirits involved, and maybe they had possessed Teacher, or maybe it was evil spirits.
Kera walked away in confusion. Teacher’s voice fell behind him, growing fainter, but never quiet fading away completely, as though Teacher had become omnipresent. Just as he turned off Main Street into Kaunda Road, which would take him to Chandi, he met two old women dressed in bark cloth. Kera did not know them. He gave them the two fish.
“Thank you,” one said.
“This is our ancestors at work,” the other said. “We used to share everything freely until mjungu brought money. It spoilt our world.”
“Take off those mjungu clothes,” the first said. “Ladit Okello is giving out bark cloth. He can make you a nice new shirt.”
Like the rest of the town Chandi was bathed in brilliant orange. His neighbourhood had never seen so much light. The houses had always been cramped close together, the walls dirty, the paint peeling off, but now the orange lights made the buildings glow as though it were a scene in an enchanted suburb.
The lights were off at his home. Baba had placed blankets on the window, apparently to keep the tiny bungalow in perfect darkness. At the door, Kera held his nose for a strong smell emanated from the within. He wondered if Baba had died during the day and was already decaying.
“I’m still alive,” Baba said from inside. The voice was his father’s, but it stabbed Kera with a knife of ice. It no longer was gruff. It had a high-pitched tone that could only mean Baba was losing his power of speech. Soon, Baba would hiss like a snake.
Kera pushed the door open. The smell of decomposition hit him like a gust of wind. Baba jumped away from the ray of orange light that fell in from the door. He hid in the shadows, but Kera had seen a glimpse of him. His skin seemed to have peeled off, revealing flesh full of boils that oozed pus. His hair had fallen off, leaving a few strands on his scalp. It looked as though the flesh had been scraped off to expose a skull as white and as rugged as a rock. He no longer wore glasses, for the strange shine had gone out of his eyes. In its place was something even scarier. It made Kera think of smoke whirling inside a bottle.
“It’s not just the sun,” Baba said, “all kinds of light hurt me now.”
Kera took a step back, putting one foot out of the door. He tried to bear the smell out of respect, but he retched, fled from the doorway, and puked in the street. The door banged shut behind him, but the smell lingered, forcing itself up his nose as though it were a living thing.
Destroy the gun, Baba said.
Kera shivered. He had never gotten used to telepathy. It sparked off a throb in his head, but that was better than suffocating in the smell.
“I failed to save him,” Kera said.
I know. Now destroy the gun.
“Did you know he would die?”
I can’t tell the future. I only know things that have already happened. But I know that if you don’t destroy the gun it will create evil.
“No,” Kera said.
You think you are a superhero. You are just a foolish child.
“You can’t foretell the future. How do you know the gun will make the world worse?”
I know human nature.
“We need it to stop the war. We need it to bring peace.”
No. You want glory. You think they’ll whisper your name in the stories for thousands of years the way they whisper Kibuuka and Luanda Magere.
Kera walked away from the house.
Please, destroy that gun.
The smell grew fainter, but the puke left a repulsive taste in his mouth. He struggled to keep his eyes dry, but something cold and wet slipped down his face, and he felt as though his heart had been ripped out of his chest.
“Kera,” Baba said.
Kera turned around in surprise, to see Baba staggering down the street, covered in blankets from head to toe, and using a crutch. Kera wondered if his bones had turned to jelly. He got some satisfaction from that observation, for Baba would not be able to go to the swamp and get the gun, unless he built a machine. To do that, he would have to use the workshop, and Kera intended to spend the night there, to make sure Baba did not get the gun.
“Please, my son, listen to me.”
“Tell me the truth. What are they?”
“You know the answer.”
“Are they humans? Are they animals? Are they aliens? Are they spirits?”
“You ask too many questions, but you’ve already made up the answers. If I tell you our ancestors worshipped them, you’ll say they are indeed supernatural. If I say they are aliens, you’ll say they brought human life to Earth. If I say they are mortal creatures like you and me, you’ll call me a liar and say that I refused to tell you the whole truth. So please don’t ask me any more questions. I just beg you, give me the gun. Let me destroy it.”
Kera shook his head and ran to the workshop.
6
The workshop was empty. Machines and dead cars sat silent in the yard, gleaming in the orange lights that washed in from the streets. Teacher’s voice seemed to float in with the orange rays. Chanting broke out occasionally. Kera kept hearing the word nywol meaning birth, over and over again. He picked up an overcoat, crawled into the van, his favourite dead car, and waited for his father.
He fell asleep waiting. He dreamed of the ancient heroes again, but in this dream he was an invincible anti-hero, he had committed heinous crimes in order to keep a mzungu warlord in power. His weakness was in his eyes, and Kibuuka shot an arrow made of killer-light right into his pupils.
Kera woke up with a yelp. The sun blazed right into his eyes. Screams came from far off. He threw away the overcoat and scrambled out of the car. Sweat drenched him, his shirt stuck to his skin. He wanted a bath, a dip in the cool waters of the swamp. Had Baba come in the night while he was asleep? Had he destroyed the gun? The door was latched and padlocked, but that did not mean it had stayed so the whole night.
The screaming... It came from the street. Had soldiers attacked again?
He hurried out into the backstreet. People were pouring out of their homes, most dressed in bark cloth, some in crude clothing cut from goat skin. One woman wore nothing but the remains of a raffia mat around her waist. It was stiff and he thought it cut into her flesh. She did not seem to mind. She wielded a machete.
“Sadaka!” she screamed, running.
The other people were screaming the same word. They had their backs to him. Like the woman, they all had pangas.
“Sadaka! Sadaka! Sadaka!”
Sacrifice? Kera’s heart stopped. Horror headlines from before the war flashed in his head, photos of children’s mutilated bodies, victims of human sacrifice, victims of some rich man’s quest for wealth. With Teache
r urging the town to worship ancestral spirits, someone might have thought it would please the gods if they sacrificed a child.
Kera followed the screaming maniacs round the corner, into Main Street, where a larger crowd had gathered, all half naked, with bark cloth and animal skin and sisal sacks wrapped around their loins. The men’s potbellies poured over the hems of their skirts, while the breasts of the women sagged onto baggy stomachs. Everyone had a panga. Sunlight bounced off the blades.
“Kera!”
Kera turned. A fat man with a bush on his chest waddled toward him, rotating the machete above his head as though to imitate a helicopter’s propeller. Atim’s father. Atim who gave him his first taste of a woman’s flesh, it seemed a million years ago, yet hardly three months had passed. She had followed him into the valley, as he took goats to graze, and she had teased him until he pulled her into a shrub. When he saw her father charging at him, he believed the fat man wanted to pulp him for what he had done.
“Kera you mzungu lover!”
Before he could digest the phrase, someone grabbed his shirt. “Take off these slave clothes!”
An old woman grabbed his sleeve, and tried to rip off the shirt. He knew her face, but he could not recall her names, or how it was he knew her. Maybe she had been a good friend to his mother. Maybe she was his aunt. Maybe she had once been his teacher. All he saw was a wrinkled face, with white hair, and scrawny hands clawing at his shirt.
“Take it off!” Atim’s father joined the old woman in tearing his clothes. Within a few seconds, a thousand fingers were on him, ripping off his shirt, ripping off his pants, ripping off his underwear. When the last piece of cloth came off the mob threw up a loud cheer and, almost immediately, lost interest in him. They joined the rest of the crowd in screaming “Sadaka! Sadaka! Sadaka!”
Kera seethed in shame, aware of his penis, small and shrivelled, cowering between his thighs. He covered it up with both hands, but no one was looking at him. Their eyes were fixed on the police station, whose walls seemed to glow in the sunlight, as they punched their machetes into the air.
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