A week later he added a front wall of sun-dried bricks and a rough door of woven saplings. Now he had a snug one-roomed dwelling which was invisible from the perimeter of the clearing. It would keep him dry and protect him from predators.
During the months which followed, Ibrahima consolidated his tenure of his stretch of the forest. He devised and set traps for fish and animals and fashioned simple tools and furniture. He made cooking pots of clay and improvised a kiln to fire them in.
He no longer solicited Allah’s help in his prayers, but rather gave thanks for his delivery from bondage into a garden of Eden. He seldom thought of home. His wives had been little more than servants and his relationship with his children had not been close. He had lived in a world of men, ruled only by Allah and by the Fula whom Allah had sent to bring His message to the pagan infidels.
Of necessity he soon abandoned any attempt to follow a halal diet; he even developed a taste for bush pig. And though he continued to share his thoughts with God, he no longer found it essential to pray in the formal manner five times a day.
What he missed most was the millet porridge which was the food of his childhood. He longed to cultivate a garden but he had no seed. Apart from meat and fish, and the fruit the monkeys dropped from the canopy, the only other food he found in the forest was wild yam and palm nut.
With his base assured, he took to wandering further and further each day. He was careful not to make paths which might lead another hunter to his hide-out but he learned to recognise landmarks to guide him back from his explorations. One day, by chance, he came upon the site of the camp from which he had escaped the slave caravan. He determined to lie in wait for a party of traders and to steal from them, while they slept, a basket of corn or perhaps some useful tool. He always carried his gun with him but he had tested it only once, and that, prudently, far away from what was now his home.
He took to camping out at night in the vicinity of the caravan halt. He would go there in the late afternoon and return to his home the next morning. He had long since put his white suit away and now wore a ragged garment which he had fashioned out of animal skins. In the gloom of the forest he was practically invisible.
For several days there was no sign of human life on the road. Then one day at dusk, just as he was beginning to believe that the route had been abandoned, Ibrahima heard drums. As they came closer he heard the familiar clank of the male slaves’ chains. Unobserved, he watched the procession pass into the camp site. For the first time since his escape he saw women. Suddenly he became aware of the loneliness of his life and yearned for company and affection.
By chance, a young woman with a child strapped to her back soon left the clearing and passed along the path which led to an area which the travellers used as a latrine. She was alone. He could not be sure that she was a slave; she might be the wife of one of the guards. There was no way that he could know whether they shared a common language, for the light was too poor for him make out any identifying facial incisions. He had primed and loaded his gun in case of trouble. Now he was determined to take the opportunity which presented itself. The woman raised her cloth and began to shit.
“My sister, do not be afraid,” Ibrahima said quietly in Susu, “I mean you no harm.”
The woman started at the voice and looked around but Ibrahima was well hidden and since it was already quite dark she saw nothing.
“Do you hear me? Nod your head if you do.”
She looked around again and then nodded her head.
“I was once a slave, but I escaped. Are you a slave? Nod your head if it is so.”
She nodded her head again.
“I have built a house in the forest. I am a free man now but I live all by myself. I have food and shelter but I am lonely. If you will come with me, you will live as my wife. If you refuse, tomorrow you will reach the coast and there you will be sold to a white man and sent away over the great water, never to return. Will you come?”
She had finished shitting and was wiping herself with leaves. Her baby woke and began to whimper. At any time a guard might come down the path.
“Let me see your face, first,” she said quietly.
Her eyes opened wide as Ibrahima stepped forward. Clad in his animal skins, with his ragged beard and long hair, his gun at the ready, he was indeed a strange sight.
“Decide,” he said.
“I will come,” she replied.
“I promise that you will not regret your decision. Now return to the camp. Wait until all the guards are sleeping. Then come back along this path. I shall be waiting for you.”
* * *
The woman was a Baga but she spoke fluent Susu. Her child was a boy, whose father had named him Tomba after his own grandfather, a revered Baga chief who had fought the slave trade until he himself had been captured and sold across the sea.
As Tomba learned to speak, Ibrahima taught him to call him ‘Papa.’ When he was four, Tomba’s mother died in childbirth. Ibrahima was stricken with grief and blamed himself, but there was nothing to do but to dig a grave and bury the woman. Tomba cried for days, but Ibrahima soon became both mother and father to him.
So they lived together, Ibrahima and Tomba. Ibrahima taught his son all he had learned of forest lore. As Tomba grew up he quickly surpassed his step-father. He could imitate the sound of every animal and bird. He was an expert trapper and fisherman. There was no stretch of his territory which he had not explored.
One thing, strangely, Ibrahima did not teach Tomba, and that was the knowledge of Allah. He himself continued to pray from time to time, but living outside the community of men, a hermit, he found that he had no need for religious sanctions on his behaviour; the forms of Islamic observance became less and less important to him.
Years passed. As Tomba began to change from a boy into a man he became restless. He would go off and not return for days at a time. He would hide in the bush on the outskirts of some small coastal village, observing the inhabitants but too shy and fearful to present himself. At night he would walk along the sea-shore picking up shells in the moonlight and wondering at the never ending pounding of the waves. He had learned to swim in a creek near their home but he was scared to enter the sea alone and there was no one to encourage him. Sometimes he would creep into a dark village and steal what he could find: a discarded fishing net, a broody hen, mangoes, a hoe; or some other useful tool.
Then, when he was already a young man, he returned from one such expedition to find that Ibrahima had died in his absence. Dimly recalling that Ibrahima had buried his dead mother, he dug a shallow grave and laid his father in it. Now he was on his own.
* * *
It was not until he woke the next day that Tomba realised the depth of his dependence upon Ibrahima.
Though they had never spoken much there had been a close bond between the man and the boy. It had never occurred to Tomba that Ibrahima was not his natural father. He felt guilty that the old man had died all alone while he, Tomba, had been gallivanting around the countryside.
He had no difficulty maintaining himself. The supply of fish and game in the forest was inexhaustible. He knew where to find wild yams and cocoyams; and when the rains came he would feast on snails.
He suffered from loneliness: there had always been Ibrahima to come home to; now there was no one. Lacking experience, he did not understand what it was that afflicted him. He took to spending longer and longer periods away from the little house in the forest which was all he had ever known as home. He would haunt the coastal villages and the slave caravans which continued, year in, year out, to make their dreary way down to the sea.
Ibrahima had tried to explain to him the nature of slavery. Reflecting on his past, the old man had developed a deep hatred for the institution. But Tomba had grown up in complete freedom and he could not imagine any other state; Ibrahima’s explanations had meant little to him. There were many mysteries in life but it was not in his youthful nature to waste time on contemplating them.
The slave caravans came and went. He would watch them pass. Sometimes he would steal from them while the guards slept. He looked at the chained slaves with curiosity; but he lacked the capacity to recognise their predicament. He was free but he was in no way devoted to freedom: he knew nothing else.
So a year passed, and then another year.
Then he fell in love.
The object on his attentions lived in a village set on higher ground near the mouth of a river. There was an abundance of fish in these waters. The villagers smoked the fish and harvested salt from a tidal pan in their territory. These commodities they exchanged for slaves whom the Mandingas brought down from the hinterland. From time to time a ship would anchor offshore — a sandbar blocked access to the river — and they would barter the slaves for cloth and guns, rum and a miscellany of cheap baubles. They were prosperous and content.
The only disadvantage of the village’s location was that the river was saline for some distance upstream, even at low tide; and the ground water was brackish. The men could have fetched water by canoe; but the fetching of water was women’s work and it suited the men to let the young girls of the village make several journeys a day to the nearest source.
It was one of these girls, returning from the distant stream, straight-backed, balancing a heavy calabash on her head, who had awoken such strange emotions in Tomba. He must have this girl. Yet, while he hungered for her company, he had no idea what he would say or do once she was his. His solitary life with Ibrahima had left him without social graces. It was not that he was selfish, just that he had never had a chance to absorb the subtle rules concerning acceptable behaviour that children learn while growing up within a community of adults.
Tomba’s experience as a hunter had taught him patience and self-discipline: one unplanned move and the prey would be alerted and flee. So from his refuge in the bush he watched and waited.
One day the object of his desire was returning to her village in the company of her friends, gossiping and laughing merrily. Suddenly she realised that she had forgotten to retrieve a favourite bangle which she had removed from her wrist before wading into the stream to fill her gourd.
“Wait. Wait for me. Please don’t move a step until I catch up with you. I shall only be a moment,” she told them as a friend helped her to put down her calabash.
She had no warning. She heard nothing. She felt only a strong arm pinioning hers. An instant later a hand stifled her scream. Then she felt the fur of his jacket against her skin. For a moment she thought that she had been captured by some strange, unheard-of animal. Then she knew that she had been panyarred.
* * *
Sami learned to love and value Tomba and the carefree, independent, self-reliant life they lived.
He was a real man. Stripped of his deerskin garments he had the body of a hero. His muscles bulged. His skin was dark, smooth and unmarked. He had no facial incisions and she could not make out what nation he belonged to but she guessed, from his complexion and his height that he must be a Baga. Yet he knew no word of the Baga tongue. He was a man of mystery and her life with him was a great adventure.
She had learned a little Susu from the Mandinga traders so from the start they could communicate. Tomba cherished her. He treated her better, she knew, than any husband from her own people would have done. Ashamed of his ignorance of the outside world, he questioned her endlessly about her village. Sami, in turn, was fascinated with his knowledge of the forest, which she had been taught to fear as the abode of wild animals and malevolent spirits, a place where only the bravest of hunters ventured alone.
After a year a girl-child was born to them. Tomba fell into a great panic when Sami went into labour but he survived the shock and grew to love his baby daughter above all else.
The cloth which Sami was wearing when she was captured was now threadbare; and there was nothing for the baby to wear. Tomba made them both new clothes of deer-skin, but he realised that Sami hankered for finer stuff. One night he set off on an expedition. He had little concept of private property. The villages and caravans were a resource for him, just as the forest was a resource. He avoided Sami’s village and chose the next one down the coast. The dogs were howling their praises to the full moon as he approached. Bribing them with bones, he entered the sleeping hamlet. Some careless woman had left a new cloth out to dry and forgotten to retrieve it. She had nothing to fear: theft within the village was virtually unknown and, in any event, impossible to conceal. Tomba took possession of the garment. But tonight he was unlucky: a young man returning from a secret assignation with his lover saw in the light of the full moon the apparition of a strange and frightening creature. Though it walked upright on two legs it had the hairy skin of a four-legged animal. It had wrapped a piece of cloth around its waist. The lover fell back into the shade of a wall, his heart pumping with fear. Perhaps this creature had murdered some innocent in her sleep to steal her cloth; but what was it, man or beast or evil spirit? He waited until it loped off into the forest. Then, as soon as it was out of sight, he gave the alarm. Soon torches lit up the village. The chief called the elders into an emergency session of the village council. No one in the village had been harmed and though it was true that there had been some mysterious disappearances of various items in the past, on this occasion all that was missing was the cloth of a careless woman.
Some doubted the lover's story and asked what he had been doing wandering the village at that hour. Perhaps he had stolen the cloth and invented this story to cover his tracks? He told them he had gone to empty his bladder.
Others recalled the mysterious disappearance of a young woman from the next village up the coast. The young men proposed pursuit, but wiser counsels prevailed and in the end they all went back to their sleeping mats.
But in this way the legend of the wild man of the forest was born.
Sami became more demanding and Tomba’s raids became more frequent and more daring. He was cunning. He travelled considerable distances so as to spread his activities amongst several villages. Slave caravans were a favourite target, especially when they made camp in the forest.
News spread from village to village and the myth grew. Then Tomba was seen again by a vigilant caravan guard who slashed at him with a cutlass. He was lucky to escape unscathed.
The child was now beginning to talk, Mende to her mother, Susu to Tomba. She was a constant delight to him. He could spend hours playing with her.
Sami’s family feared that their daughter had been panyarred and sold into slavery. They despaired of ever seeing her again. But when they heard the stories which spread along the coast, their hopes were revived. Her father set about organising an armed expedition to rescue her.
* * *
Returning one day from a round of his traps, Tomba saw that the undergrowth had been slashed to make a path into his redoubt. His house had been demolished and his crops destroyed. Broken pots lay around. Nothing of any value remained, not a cutlass, not a knife, not a calabash of water. Even the puppy he had stolen for his baby was gone.
He paid scant attention to all this. Sami and the little girl were uppermost in his mind and they were nowhere to be found. He sat down on the bare ground and, in a state of utter despair, buried his head between his knees. He had no idea how long he sat, his mind a complete blank, unwilling, unable to face up to the reality of this new situation.
Then he heard a sound in the bush. He sprang to his feet and grabbed his gun. But it was only a hen which must have scurried off into the undergrowth to escape the assassin’s knife. His dog whined. It was time for his meal and he was hungry. Tomba kicked it and it ran for cover, its tail between its legs. Then he was sorry. He took a knife from his bag, cut a leg off one of the hares he had trapped and threw it to the tyke. Then he sat down again and tried to think.
* * *
The tracks led to Sami’s village but in spite of keeping watch for long hours over many days, Tomba never caught a glimpse of her.
He was consum
ed by a deep, incurable anger. He resolved to avenge himself, to punish the perpetrators of the crime. His first task was to establish a new base. The place he chose was on a steep hill, well-wooded and riddled with caves. A leopard claimed the territory. Tomba shot him. After a year he was ready. He took two pistols and a musket and lay in wait for a caravan of slaves. When he judged that the guards were all asleep, he walked calmly into the tent where the master, too, was sleeping and put a hand on his mouth and a pistol to his temple. This is too easy, he thought.
“One false move and you are dead meat,” he told the man. “I see you understand me well. Now get up.”
Soon the party’s arms lay piled on the ground and the guards and other free men stood cowering some distance away. The master lay on the ground before him.
“Order your men to unlock the shackles and release the slaves,” Tomba instructed him.
When this was done, Tomba addressed the slaves. He had never spoken to more than one person before, but he spoke now without hesitation.
“I am the son of an escaped slave. I have come to free you from these criminals. I live in this forest. I am inviting you to join me. If you are prepared to work, you will not be short of food. I shall be your leader but not your owner. You will be free men and women. Those who refuse my offer will surely be sold to the white men and sent across the sea, never to return. Now who will join me?”
There was a moment of hesitation and Tomba had a fleeting sense that his enterprise had failed. Then one lad spoke up; and another. Soon they were all cheering and shouting Tomba’s praise. He smiled.
Ama Page 32