by Kola Boof
Namibia felt her heart stop!
“The burial is today, gracious Queen!”
My baby!...0...Namibia cringed...my sweet baby! And then her body bent into a violent bout of sobbing.
Mother loves you, Bono...my sweet, sweet prince!
••
While the nation wept at the moon baby’s funeral, Shango Ogun went racing to the Sea!
His lustrously muscular body driving into her white magical surf, back flipping and jetting through the clear blue sheets of water, his eyes searching just slightly less than his heart...searching for any signs of the African dolphin goddess.
Kidnap me, said a voice as he swam ever deep inside her.
It was the Sea talking, he thought. But the voice was Ife Ife’s. Admonishing him--My virginity is like a child left by its mother...come back and take me, Shango...it’s the only thing I want.
And like an explosion, the Prince torpedoed upwards, breaking the surface of the deep blue ocean and gasping for breath, his eyes bulging with excitement.
••
“This story is far from over!” Kofi Hoodi shouted at the baby’s burial site. He swung a special club made of iron into the air--the Ajowan pullet of war--the skull crusher.
“Let the totems and the griots and the history say it forever after...that I was the father of the great white miracle child! Not the Moon, but I...the greatest Kofi in the history of Ajowa!” He beat his chest and shouted, almost barking and snarling, “Me...Kofi Hoodi! Let it be agreed...”
And out of fear, the people agreed by cheering, the Spirit Rulers nodding with a nervous gulp, because they would now have to change history into a lie. Hoodi’s army flanked him, a thousand spear-carrying warriors, their painted faces veiled by great mountains of leathery head dress and masks of war, their legion of penis’s bare as a thousand black snakes, hanging dead in the sun.
“That through my mighty talent for war and victory”, continued Kofi Hoodi, “he came into this world to bless the blood of our sons and to mark as the chosen people, the divine ones who must bring a greater, wiser law upon the earth!”
Mother Iyanla glanced at Rain Iyanla as though he had just announced that he was cutting out his own tongue. Rain Iyanla ignored the old woman and set her mind in the hands of her husband.
“We are the mark of the moon child’s dying wish!” he decreed, passionately. “We must save this planet! We must kill the fruit that is rotten and plant a new seed in its place! We must leave the Sea and make kinship...with the Moon!”
There was a deafening silence.
The God people worshipped the Moon, not the Ajowans. So naturally one of the Spirit Rulers stepped forward, on behalf of the nation, to make a calm and heartfelt objection...but immediately...Kofi Hoodi took is pullet club and struck the man down, bashing his head open so that the people saw the blood, bone and brains scatter like chunks of watermelon guts.
Kofi Hoodi proclaimed again, “We must leave the Sea...and make kinship with the Moon!”
Out of fear, the nation cheered him, their heads thrown back in ululation.
“It is...we...who are the Moon’s children. Not those damned dirty Gods! We are the chosen ones who must take our rightful place...even if it means war and death!”
“Wash out your mouth!”came a shrill woman’s voice. The people gasped in shock. It was Mother Iyanla, of course, and by the time Kofi Hoodi’s murderous stare located her, she had already wobbled her way to where he stood.
“This is an abomination!” she cried, the souls of the people immediately filling her with a quickness and a purpose. Everyone was with her. She shook her walking stick in the air and declared, “I gave birth to you in the Sea! Your father was born in the Sea! I was born in the Sea and so was my mother and her mother and all the mothers and fathers that have ever been called Ajowans...we, the children have all been born in the Sea...that is our way!”
With their hearts, in dead silence, the Ajowan people cheered! But Kofi Hoodi was not moved.
His hand bolted...quicker than lightening!
The loud, violent slap across her mouth nearly bringing clouds to the sky. Half the nation, including the men, urinated on themselves and felt their stomachs turn with a desperate, helpless worry.
Mother Iyanla lay on the ground holding her face, her eyes staring up at her son in shocked disbelief.
Rain Iyanla stifled a giggled but smiled evenly.
“Great men have a responsibility to greatness”, spat Kofi Hoodi, his hands on his hips as he stared down upon her. “Only weaklings are ordered about by their fat mothers.”
And that was when everyone knew...that the world had changed forever.
••
Slave trading, the idea of it, wiggled beneath Kofi Hoodi’s paw like a fat, seductive mouse.
“Slaves?” Hoodi had asked with a raised eyebrow while hosting the Berber known as Vidalla just months before.
“Yes...slaves”, said Vidalla as he downed an entire bowl of palm wine and tossed dried salted scorpions in his mouth. “It’s the fastest way to raise the riches you’ll need to build your master army. At this very moment, I need five hundred heads for the King of the Moors and another thousand for my Arabian brothers. Blacks make superior slaves, because they don’t like their lives complicated with thought and it’s a concept that’s very normal to them. We browns, tans and yellows have always appreciated that.”
“But slavery amongst blacks means something completely different than what you’re suggesting”, said Kofi Hoodi. “We blacks, we punish our criminals by giving them five to seven year slavery debts on behalf of dead loved ones who did something evil in their lives and can’t rest in the next world until someone pays for their sin. Sometimes girls who are orphaned and unmarried make slave contracts with rich men. There are several African Queens and warrior chiefs who started out as slaves. But in the black Kingdoms, slavery is a transitory lifestyle, not a permanent condition. We even marry our slaves into our own families. Your tanned slavery is different.”
Vidalla yawned.
He told Kofi Hoodi that the happiest blacks he’d ever seen were the ones who were slaves for life, but his casual attitude appalled Kofi Hoodi, because the Berbers were well known for their hatred of blacks, they themselves being a mixed race tribe made up of long ago Moors and the offspring of various other desert dwelling tribesmen and slave women who had found themselves compromised by foreign interests along the Mediterranean. It was law that the Berbers guarded and treasured their “Arabic-Latin Christ-Germanic Bolshi blood” and separated themselves, by suicide if necessary, from intermingling or even socializing with the black negroid and nilotic tribes, in other words, the true Africans. Hoodi stared at Vidalla’s baked orange complexion, wavy Spanish hair and short stubby fingers. He noticed the small yellow corn nibblet shaped teeth and the hair growing in the man’s ears!
Hardly an African, thought Hoodi. How can I trust selling my kinfolk to his kind? He wears shoes on his feet!
“Slavery is a good business”, Vidalla told him, vigorously. “Our Arab brethren can be quite generous when you’re selling young beeba girls.”
Hoodi was speechless, because the word “beeba” was a Mediterranean slang meaning “monkey pussy”. Its male alternative was the word “beebo” which meant “trained worker monkey”.
“For a thousand beeba virgins, I could get you two hundred and fifty Arabian majesty swords.”
Now that raised Kofi Hoodi’s brow.
“They’d have to be young virgins, of course. The Arabs are like Ethiopians, they prefer girls just arriving to be nine, ten, eleven. Not older than thirteen. It’s a life of luxury. The girls don’t do hard labor until the men have tired of fucking them and moved on to new ones--but you know what rich societies the Arabs have. The girls become grateful and happy to be slaves!”
“Only a thousand you say?”
“And if you make it two thousand, I can get you five hundred swords! Don’t forget--Katanga not only has
swords, but a fleet of ostriches to carry his warriors into battle.”
King Katanga, however, had never sold slaves to build his nation or even permitted any form of slavery to be practiced among the God tribe. The Gods were an arrogant people, truly believing that even their poorest citizens were too good to suffer.
“Believe me, Hoodi. Without better weaponry, there’s no way you’ll ever get past Sumboo the Great and his death defying throat eaters. They’re the reason that Katanga’s regular army hardly ever sees any action. Not even the Arabs, the Ashanti or the Fulani have ever defeated Katanga. The Gods are unbeatable.”
Kofi Hoodi looked Vidalla in the eye, raised his right hand and flashed a huge grin.
••
Dark of night rolled across the sea like a threat. The moon not just omnipresent in its glaring whiteness, but actually sparkling as an unusual fog crept out of the surf and floated over the landscape draping itself like a veil against the mud huts, totem temples and dirt roads of Banjula City.
This was the night that Prince Shango Ogun, at last, was to take the virginity of his five future concubines--Soraya, Anat, Beeni, Tandi and Keisha. As was tradition, the prince’s wife and mother, Namibia and Rain Iyanla, carefully bathed and oiled each round young virgin before propping them up in separate sleeping quarters, their naked bodies supine and supple against the richest furs, their legs slightly parted and their young bosoms heaving with fear.
“I can’t do it”, Shango had said to his grandmother, completely unaware that she had been slapped by his father during the burial that day. Mother Iyanla had forbid anyone tell him, because she knew that when it came to her, Shango would be willing to die. She listened as he said, “I’m in love and I wish to touch no other woman but Ife Ife. She is my one, grandmother. She is my Sea.”
“Here then”, said Mother Iyanla as she handed him a very strong liquor. “Get very drunk. But don’t alert your father’s evil attention by leaving them as virgins.”
Room by room, Shango went in and slid over each girl drunkenly. He kissed at the tender necks and poked inside the warm, tightly resistant openings, his penis abandoning each one as she showed blood...and going to the other. But when he reached the room of Soraya, the pear shaped light honey colored one that his grandmother liked so much--she was gone. Escaped from the compound leaving a tender scratch in the dirt floor that read: “I will always love you, Shango. But my life is my own. I am not a concubine.”
Somehow, her gesture impressed him greatly, because it sobered him completely and made him think of women in a new way. Obviously, she would end up as a renegade Sula woman. There was no other end to such an endeavor. He decided to tell no one for as long as possible and whispered, “Good luck, Soraya...wherever you are.”
But it wasn’t just Soraya that lurked in dead of night beneath the bright pearl moon.
Princess Namibia had gone to the burial site and dug her son out of the ground.
She raised him up, his white neck still splotchy with purple and blue bruises from where he had choked to death attempting to eat an elephant bone that someone left laying in the courtyard. Against her hot flesh she held the cold, dead baby...and carried it all the way to the ocean.
To the Sea she would give him. Her instincts demanded it. She went to the crashing waves, her body struggling with the weight of the dead child. Carefully, she set him down and then, with a small sharp stone, cut one of her wrists. She smeared her blood on the white baby’s body.
She lifted the child again, arching her back as to toss him into the tide, but first she looked up at the Moon and chanted the mother’s prayer, “coobis mawii...tangoba fadubula.”
Niso Niso
Unaballa
Coobis tagala.
With all the love in her heart, she ended by saying the words that African parents always whisper into the ear of a dead or dying child--”return to me”. And with that she tossed the dead white baby into the moonlit sea and watched him as he was consumed by the flickering black waters just as though his white flesh were returning to the dark velvet of her womb.
“Until we meet again”, she murmured with a wave of the hand, and then began the long, arduous walk back to the royal compound. She had calculated that it would take her until just before daybreak to reach the royal gates, and as she braced herself moving swiftly, she was right. But what Namibia had not expected was that the angry God man--Nkrumah--would be just arriving that morning as well.
His intention, originally, that he would make an excuse for visiting Shango, so as to watch Namibia, but upon finding his good fortune--that she was out in the night alone, coming down the road--he grabbed her!
Put his hand over her mouth and forced her wiggling body into his strong chest, his piercing eyes staring down into her horrified confusion, gazing with a brutish command until she resisted no more, and became docile, hypnotized by his stare. He said to her in a hushed tone, “I’m taking you away...to the land of the Bambara people. To be my wife. To be my woman, to have my babies. To be loved and cherished. He stole Ife Ife’s heart...now I will steal yours.”
And as Nkrumah carried her up into the hills, Namibia made no objection to losing her title as “princess”, nor asked to recover any trinket or clothing from her sleeping chamber or even attempted...to look back.
••
And when morning came...a flock of blue chest crows gathered about the cone hut courtyard as Rain Iyanla swept it.
In time they would all be aware that Namibia and Soraya had disappeared in the night--and that other girls, very, very strong ones, were also suddenly and mysteriously vanishing. Their sun blackened parents marching from the jungles and cassava fields to alert authorities in Banjula City, tears and anguished surprise on their faces as they reported these missing children. Missing.
••
Kofi Hoodi pretended not to hear about it. He sat eating and drinking like a great proud baboon, rings of gold upon his feet and expensive snake skins and feathers draped around his fleshy shoulders as he smoked cannabis, hardly looking anyone in the eyes anymore, especially his mother.
But Rain Iyanla came to him wringing her hands and reporting, “Dearest husband...children have begun disappearing. Girls.”
“Not our children”, he retorted.
Kofi Hoodi inhaled the cannabis deeply, placed his big toe into the wet mouth of one of his concubines, and wondered what riches the Berbers would give him for all the criminals taking up space in Banjula City Jail? What could he get if he sent his army to round up the renegade Sula tribes? This thing, slavery, was getting to be a very quick and easy economical advantage.
••
Deep in the jungle, Soraya stood in the circle of Sula women, their markings and hues representing a multitude of tribes, all of them listening intently as a woman named Oni stood atop a fallen tree and admonished them, passionately, “Women must take up the spear of resistance!”
Soraya looked around, her mind overwhelmed as she saw the bare boned hunger of some of the runaways, the cut off ears, the crying babies strapped to the beaten backs, the lost, homeless faces--but all of them defiantly listening--to a woman.
“We’ve been held down by our mothers and grandmothers so that our private place could be cut up and mutilated--for the purpose of man’s pleasure and man’s law. We’ve been used as chattel for sex, virgins, raised in the sleeping chambers of rich men and royal black pigs--our own names withheld from us and our dreams deferred by the expectations of the womb.”
Tears filled Soraya’s young eyes.
“For they kill and beat us if we fail to produce sons! The men have used our wombs to enslave us.” Every African woman knew about that. “Well enough I say! You see this sack of wool!” Oni held it up beside her bush of wild nappy hair and then overturned it so that its contents fell out before them. Soraya stared in shock at the pieces laying about the ground. Oni decreed, “Let the women raise the spear of resistance! We’re not going to take it anymore!”
&nbs
p; The women cheered and ululated. They began to chant the name of the great Fulani woman who had demanded human dignity for her daughters. “Sula!...Sula!...Sula!”
Soraya raised her fist in the air crying uncontrollably and screamed, with an unmatched fury, “...SULA!”
••
“Flesh...and the devil”, said Mother Iyanla to Shango, “are one.”
“What grandmother?”
“It’s those two, you understand, that are one in the same. Flesh...and the devil. You see how us dark ebony brown people ar separated from the charcoal tribes? The young woman’s virginity from the young man’s wandering? The brown wavy haired people from those of us with the one true hair? By flesh, the sight of it frightens humans. It mutes the soul. The flesh.”
Mother Iyanla’s black fingers were pulling his newly grown hair into tight, tiny braids. He said, “You’re not making much sense, grandmother.”
She said, “Count on the Sea to find out women. That is the way of Ajowan men. And listen to these old black tits when I tell you that beauty is a trick. Not a virtue. Anything that men fight over like dogs--is of this world, not the next. Let it wither before you covet it.”
“Huh?”
“Love is an insanity, Shango. You have to pay for it. People have to pay for flesh and the devil. All passion between mankind is adultery. Everything we hate...is only hated because we really love it.” Mother Iyanla told her grandson, “Kodo masar (see without sight)”. As though filled by a holy spirit, she told him, “The two most important things in life--beauty and love--cannot be detected by the naked eye. Kodo masar (see without sight)”.
She patted his head, done braiding it, and looked out over the ocean shaking her head. “I feel it coming...the end of the world. Something’s out there in the sea. A part of the devil we’ve not seen before.”