by Paul Twivy
When the dancing had finished and the applause had died away, they were all called around the firepit for stories. This was the moment Selima always loved.
Faces glowed, eyes became coals, mouths fell open.
The first storyteller began.
‘There was a legendary bushman called Mantis. He was named after the praying creature of the same name. His wife was Dassie, a rock badger and his adopted daughter was a porcupine.
Mantis, like all bushmen, lived without fire, and endured the darkness of long nights and eating meat raw. Until one day he saw the Ostrich take fire from under its wing and dip its food into the flames. The ungainly bird carefully tucked the fire back under its wing after eating, to hide it from the other animals.
The Mantis knew that Ostrich would not give him any fire and so he tricked it into eating from a plum tree, urging it to eat the sweetest fruits from the very top. As the ostrich stretched up on tiptoe, it spread its wings to balance and Mantis stole the fire from underneath.’
‘And that,’ concluded the storyteller, ‘is how we come to have fire to cook our meat.’
Applause rippled through the forward-leaning crowd.
‘Now, please tell us if you would like to hear stories on any particular subject,’ the storyteller invited. ‘We have stories about nearly everything. And when we don’t, we invent them.’
There was a short silence which Hannah decided to break.
‘Can you tell us a story about the Fairy Circles?’
Selima smiled to herself in anticipation of the reaction.
The Herero fell quiet. The quietness was infectious. It spread like a contagion to the students, and from the students to the teachers, and from the teachers to the animals, until the only sound was the crackling of the logs in the fire-pit.
All faces turned to the oldest of the tribesmen present. His face was as craggy as Fish Rock Canyon and his movements were deliberate like a reptile. He replied slowly and with caution.
‘Well, there is more than one story about the Fairy Circles.’
No one was sure whether this was a polite refusal or an invitation for others to tell their stories first.
‘Great. Let’s have more than one. We have time, don’t we?’ Joe said, looking at Jacob Ubuntu for approval. Ubuntu’s face was facing decisively downwards, however not wishing to engage. Joe feared that he had spoken disrespectfully.
‘I mean the night is ours,’ he added.
‘The night is never ours...’ the Elder replied, ‘it is always shared with the ancestors.’
‘They don’t understand such talk,’ Ubuntu intervened, worried about the rising discomfort of his simply curious students. ‘Why don’t you tell them about the Golden Leopard?’
‘Very well.’
The Elder drew his seated self, up to its full half-height, and looked for suitable reverence from the young people’s up-turned faces. He continued, once he had found it.
‘Leopards are sacred to us. They represent the “oba”: the power of kings. In fact, they are kings themselves, in their own territories. Kings of the forest, where they haul their prey up into the trees and hang them like trophies. Kings of the desert where they prowl under moonlight.’
He paused as an animal pelt was passed up the line of storytellers and wrapped around his shoulders. The pelt partly covered two bands around his neck. The upper band was made of rings of veld-grass woven through with makalani palm. The lower band was a metal necklace, from which hung, flattened arrowheads. The jewellery glowed with the light of the fire.
Ubuntu leant into the excited audience of his pupils and in a loud whisper said, ‘The Chiefs wear the pard’s pelt. Especially, when they speak of him.’
‘Pard?’ Joe whispered in Selima’s ear.
‘Short for leopard,’ she whispered back.
The Elder resumed.
‘Leopards are notoriously hard to find. They hunt from dusk until dawn. They retreat just as humans rise with the sun. They are masters of camouflage when they are still, fast as the wind when they run. They live alone, except when they are breeding. They are all rare, but none is rarer than the Golden Leopard.’
He paused to drink from a wooden cup. They watched his Adam’s Apple twitch, then rest. Throat cleared, he continued…
‘One day a Golden Leopard stalked a Kudu so stealthily that he could pounce on it from just five feet away. He snapped its throat like a twig.’
Hannah winced. A log jolted and fell off the fire, dislodging others. Half the audience jumped.
‘Then he dragged his kill, its neck clamped in his jaws, back to his favourite acacia tree. But prowling at the base of the tree, waiting for him to return, was a large lion. Anger inflamed the leopard’s eyes and seized his brain. The arrogance of this lordly lion who presumed he could just snatch the leopard’s hard-earned prey! As he approached the tree, the leopard let the kudu fall to the ground, but with no intention of surrendering it. His stomach was as empty as a cave.
Lions will nearly always defeat a leopard. They will even, when they have a mind to, pull a leopard’s prey out of its tree, from under its very tail. Such arrogance! But the Golden Leopard was cunning. He retreated several paces from the kudu, pretending to grant access. The lion stepped forward and sank his teeth into the prey. But, as he did so, the golden leopard ran forward and jumped on to the lion’s back and sank his teeth deep into the muscled nape of the lion’s neck.
The lion roared in pain. A roar that shook the ground where they stood and alerted the pride nearby. Undaunted and agile, the leopard grabbed one hoof of the kudu and pulled its leg across the throat of the lion. The lion struggled to breathe. The lion, however, was too strong for the leopard to strangle him. So, after forcing its way free, the lion limped away panting, vowing in its mind to return with the rest of the pride and kill the leopard.
After a while, when the shock had subsided and hunger had risen again to the fore, the leopard dragged the kudu up the acacia and strung it up. After he had feasted and rested, a chill fell across his heart as the moon rose.
The leopard knew that the lion would soon come to wreak revenge, to re-establish his power. A plan formed in his mind. He bounded down the tree and, belly full of meat, eyes defiant, he set out into the Namib desert alone. At first, he prowled, wary of lions. Then he ran. He ran so hard that the unforgiving sand hurt his paws and the wind turned his eyes to a stream of tears. And as he ran, he shook. He rotated his belly, arched his back and shook and shook and shook, until he could feel it in every sinew and tendon of his body.
As he shook, the splashy spots of his coat flew through the moonlit air like sparks from a fire. The leopard ran for a hundred miles, shaking, until all his spots were gone. Where each spot landed, a fairy circle grew. Finally, exhausted, he stopped and looked back at his tracks. There, pulsing under the moonlight, were a thousand glowing circles. It was as if raindrops had splashed from a giant’s face, lacerating the sand.
The leopard found shelter by some rocks and slept. He slept for two whole days and nights without waking. When he finally rose, he smelt out a rockpool and drank. Then, looking at his reflection, he saw what he had hoped for. His body was free of all its spots and his fur was pure gold. He looked for all the world like a lioness, and that indeed was how he made himself safe from any more lions.
And, to this very day, the Golden Leopard with no spots, roams the Fairy Circles by night.’
For what seemed like the first time in minutes, Hannah breathed out. The Boma was held in a trance. Even the fire had grown silent under the spell.
Later, when they were lying in their tent, Joe turned to Freddie.
‘You know what? The more they tell stories about the fairy circles, the more I want to get to the truth.’
4
African Studies
Jacob Ubuntu taught them African Studies on a Wednes
day. It was a passion and a mission for him. His international pupils had rapidly changing lives. They jumped like a bolt of electricity from one country to the next, every two years. He wanted to soak them in his own deep and unfolding culture.
Today’s lesson was about the paintings and engravings at Twyfelfontein.
The lesson was held in one of the more modern classrooms, well-equipped for presentations. Ubuntu’s eyes were wide and glistening, and they carried within them the bright colours of his reflected PowerPoint slides. Drawings of rhinoceroses, giraffes, ostriches and elephants patrolled across his forehead like silent, ghostly herds.
‘We used to think these engravings were made by our ancestors to teach their children how to hunt. Now we think these drawings had a deeper meaning.’
Another slide came up. It was of a lion but no ordinary lion. It had human feet and toes and an unusually long tail which suddenly and impossibly defied gravity by shooting up at right angles and ended in something like a paw. It was child-like in the way it was drawn, but somehow adult in its meaning.
‘This is the famous Lion Man,’ Ubuntu continued. ‘This figure shows the transformation of humans into animals.’
An arm shot up with a question.
‘Yes?’ said Ubuntu, faintly annoyed that the spell of his excited narrative had been broken.
‘Excuse me sir, but how is that possible? Humans can’t transform into animals,’ a voice asked from the back of the class.
‘How long have you observed people?’ Ubuntu asked.
‘I can’t honestly say, sir,’ the voice in the darkened audience answered in a shy tremble. ‘Perhaps, I haven’t.’
‘May I suggest that you start observing your fellow humans more carefully. And that you read a book called “Lord of the Flies.” Then you will discover how easily humans can become animals,’ Ubuntu replied. The room noticeably chilled.
Hannah’s arm went up.
‘What is at the end of the lion’s tail sir?’
Freddie couldn’t resist answering out loud ‘Is it an improbable ending sir?’
The class laughed in appreciation.
‘Thank you for your witty interjection, Mr Wilde,’ Ubuntu commented with a withering sarcasm.
‘Sorry to interrupt Headmaster,’ Freddie replied.
‘Interruptions are always welcome when they add something,’ Jacob Ubuntu remarked, leaving it unsaid as to whether Freddie’s remark could be classified as such. ‘I think that Miss Chiang meant T-A-I-L, not T-A-L-E.’
He had already clocked Hannah as a star pupil, an observation confirmed, yet again, by her question. He also knew that if Hannah’s parents were pleased with her schooling, word-of-mouth would work its sweet magic amongst the ever-more-important Chinese community.
‘The answer to that excellent question is what is called a “Pugmark”: in other words, an animal footprint.’
‘Why was a footprint important enough to paint sir?’ Freddie asked.
‘Good question. Does anyone have the answer?’
‘That’s how they managed to kill and eat. They had to track animal footprints to survive.’ Joe’s answer was complete and impressive. He wasn’t about to reveal that he knew this because of many Sunday afternoons learning about it from his father. Animal tracking was one of Ben Kaplan’s keenest interests.
Ubuntu acknowledged the impressive nature of Joe’s response and then continued.
‘But there aren’t just animals engraved on these rocks. There are also strange, geometrical patterns scattered everywhere.’
Another slide came up to illustrate the point. Joe’s attention ratcheted several notches higher. His brain always engaged with geometric shapes, silently but rapidly, sifting their repeatable patterns.
‘No one really knows what these patterns are,’ said Ubuntu, ‘but it is thought they may be maps to water sources.’
‘Sir, could they be linked in any way to the Fairy Circles?’ Joe interjected, forgetting in his excitement to put his hand up.
Ubuntu walked very slowly and solemnly towards Joe, in front of the screen onto which his slides had been projected. As he did so, his face was smeared and distorted by images of the strange geometric shapes from Twyfelfontein. It was as if he had contracted some rare skin disease. Only his stern look prevented another wave of laughter at his sudden ‘rash’.
Ubuntu stood tall over the seated Joe.
‘Why are you so interested in the Fairy Circles?’ the Headmaster asked gravely.
‘I am interested in the patterns sir… whether they are mathematical,’ Joe continued in order to fill the silence, to make it less awkward. ‘I saw them as we flew into from South Africa.’
‘What did you see that so fascinated you?’ Ubuntu enquired.
‘I saw thousands of circles, sir. It was like … I don’t know, like acne on a giant face…’ Joe described.
Half of those present laughed and the other half felt uncomfortable in recognition of their own skin.
‘I thought I started to see patterns in them as we flew over,’ Joe explained and then in a pleading tone added ‘What are they, sir? I heard the story at the Boma, but what do we really know?’
Ubuntu slowly returned to the front of the class, in order to respond with suitable authority. He pulled himself up to his full height.
‘Fairy Circles are one of the greatest, unsolved mysteries of Nature. The circles are circular, bare patches, but with a ring of tall grasses around their edge.’
Ubuntu tapped excitedly at the keys of the classroom computer from which he was projecting. He exited his PowerPoint presentation, brought up Google and searched firstly for a map of Southern Africa, which he rapidly found and then enlarged.
‘The circles, tens of thousands of them, appear in a band, or corridor if you like, that stretches fifteen hundred miles.’
He used his steel, extendable pointer as a kind of wand to indicate on the projected map.
‘All the way from southern Angola up here, through Namibia and down here to the Orange River in the North-western Cape of South Africa. This band is about a hundred miles inland. Most of it is very barren. We are not far from them here, actually.’
He then searched the term ‘Fairy Circles’ under Google Images and brought up some of the most dramatic. There were sharp intakes of breath at the sheer scale of the circles. They had been photographed from hot air balloons and small planes, their silhouettes falling sharp and angular across the intricate patterns.
‘What causes the Fairy Circles, sir?’ another voice piped up from the back.
This question seemed to momentarily paralyse the Headmaster. He visibly slumped and, as he turned to face the questioner, his eyes betrayed anxiety, possibly even fear.
‘The truth is we don’t entirely know what causes them,’ Ubuntu admitted.
Freddie’s hand went up next.
‘What do people living near the circles think caused them, sir? We heard the story of the Golden Leopard but what else do Namibians think?’
Ubuntu cleared his throat before answering. He also sat for the first time, on a high stool stationed at the front of the class. He was happy to stand when talking about Science. Instinctively, he always sat when talking about Religion or Culture.
‘Well, a tribe called the Himba believe their original ancestor, Mukuru, created the circles. Some believe that they are formed from the giant teardrops of the gods…or their footprints.’
Ubuntu’s shadow was cast, vast and dark, upon the back-wall of the class by the light of the projector, as if he too was one of the gods walking upon the Earth, raised up high by his stool.
‘Other tribes believe that the fire from the nostrils of underground dragons, or their poisonous breath, caused them. Many of them think the circles have magical properties.’
‘What do you think, sir?’ Hannah asked.
After a long pause, Ubuntu simply replied ‘I don’t know what to believe. And in that doubt, I am far from alone. They remain a mystery.’
He decided with that wistful phrase to end his lesson.
‘Thank you, boys and girls. Next week, we will discuss the early tribes.’
As they filed out, the hubbub of pupils was almost deafening.
It was the last lesson of the day and Joe, Hannah and Freddie escaped into the fading heat and relative peace of the garden.
Hannah, spun round to face them both, walking backwards as she spoke to them. ‘There’s something extraordinary about the Fairy Circles, something other-worldly. I…’
Hannah’s declamation was stopped mid-flow by a sudden collision. She tripped and fell backwards over a large pair of feet in mud-spattered boots.
‘I am sorry, Miss,’ the feet said.
It was Basarwa, the gardener. He extended both his hands to grasp hers and helped her up. She was mildly grazed but more embarrassed than hurt. Her mother’s repeated advice not to walk backwards whilst engrossed in conversation came back to haunt her.
‘No, it was my fault. I shouldn’t have been walking backwards,’ Hannah reassured him, sorry for his anxiety and pained expression.
‘Are you OK?’ Basarwa asked. ‘No bruises or cuts? I have First Aid in my shed if you need it.’
She noticed that his thin, muscular arms were trembling.
‘No, honestly, I’m fine,’ she reassured as Joe chivalrously checked her legs for any sign of cuts or bruising.
Freddie handed Basarwa back his floppy hat which had fallen to the ground after the collision.
‘Excuse me asking, Miss, but did I hear you talking about the Fairy Circles just now?’ Basarwa asked.
‘Yes, you did. Why?’ Hannah asked.
‘If you don’t mind me saying, you need to be careful. Very careful. Those circles are sacred. Sacred to the San…my people.’
Hannah felt very flummoxed, very Western and very naive, as she gazed into his knowing eyes.
Basarwa continued, gripping her arms more tightly than she would have liked.