When the Tiger Roars
Page 1
WHEN THE TIGER
ROARS
WHEN THE TIGER
ROARS
Graeme C. Cann
© 2019 Graeme C. Cann
When The Tiger Roars
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Publisher’s Note: This novel is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. All characters are fictional, and any similarity to people living or dead is purely coincidental.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018967664
ISBN 978-1-400324996 (Paperback)
ISBN 978-1-400325009 (Hardbound)
ISBN 978-1-400325016 (eBook)
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CONTENTS
Forword
Introduction
BOOK ONE: THE WAY OF THE COVENANT
Chapter One: Sampa In The Days Of Kaluba
Chapter Two: Alofa
Chapter Three: The First Of The Four Great Sampian Stories:
Abele And The Covenant
Chapter Four: The Second Great Sampian Story:
Galildra The Great
Chapter Five: Galildra’s Story Continues
Chapter Six: A New Pathway Emerges
BOOK TWO: THE PATHWAY OF FEAR
Introduction
Chapter One: The Third Great Sampian Story:
“She Who Sees As No One Else Sees”
Chapter Two: Marita’s Story Continues
Chapter Three: The Gathering Darkness
Chapter Four: The Fourth Great Sampian Story:
The Covenant Breaker
Chapter Five: The Covenant Renewed
Chapter Six: The Last Days Of Sampa
Chapter Seven: The Exodus
BOOK THREE: THE PATHWAY TO HEALING
Introduction
Chapter One: Misha’s Story
Chapter Two: The Foundations Of A New Community
Chapter Three: Damon: A Father To Wounded Men
Chapter Four: Damon’s Greatest Achievement
Chapter Five: Mishka: Mother To The Abused
Chapter Six: The White Tigress
Chapter Seven: The Mother Who Heals
Chapter Eight: Angry Resistance
Chapter Nine: Mishka’s Revelation
Chapter Ten: The Healing Begins
Chapter Eleven: The Great Gathering
Chapter Twelve: The Secret Of Healing
Chapter Thirteen: Wholeness Is A Choice
FORWORD
Why this book ?
This book is not intended as a self-help book. It is true that for more than forty years I have had the priceless privilege of sitting with literally hundreds of people who at that particular time in their lives were faced with a crisis that was impacting on their relational or emotional or psychological health. It takes great courage at such a time to seek help from a Counselor , Psychiatrist or Psychologist and a high level of trust to allow a stranger into the deepest and sometimes secret places in their lives. I have never taken this privilege for granted nor have I forgotten how much I have learnt from so many people who in the face of a huge personal challenge have demonstrated amazing determination and fortitude.
However the inspiration from this book came from my awareness of the growing phenomena of violence at all levels of society and the seemingly unanswerable question that arises for both the victims of violence and for those who seek to engage in primary prevention programs aimed at reducing the prevalence of violence in our societies; “What gives some people permission to exact violence on another?”
In telling the story of Sampa I am inviting, you, the reader, to explore with me the possibility that the cases of individual aggression and the anger we often see lived out in families and communities may have at their root something that can be identified and addressed.
INTRODUCTION
“Fear imprisons but faith liberates; fear paralyses but faith empowers; fear disheartens but faith encourages; fear sickens but faith heals; fear makes useless but faith makes serviceable.”
Harry Emerson Fosdick
For centuries Sampa had been an idyllic place in which to live. The beautiful valley was home to a people who had embraced a set of core values which meant that they lived without fear. They did not fear the people in the mountain villages on the north side of the river, nor did they fear the animals that lived in the rainforest that formed their southern boundary. Then nearly two hundred years ago, that all came to an end.
The leaders of Sampa were overthrown in a bloody coup, an army was established for the first time in Sampian history, and covenants with neighbours were broken. The core values of love and equality gradually gave way to fear and distrust, and their survival as a people now depended on the might of the military and the paranoia of the governing council.
Sampa was no longer an idyllic place to live. Children feared their parents because their misbehaviours were met with cruel and harsh discipline. Wives feared their husbands, who frequently used violence to affirm their superiority to women. The people as a whole feared their authoritarian and reactive leaders, and the leaders feared their enemies in the mountain and in the forest.
In the midst of all this fear, one man believed that the only road back to the peace the Sampians had once known was to return to the beliefs and values of the past.
BOOK ONE
THE WAY OF THE COVENANT
CHAPTER ONE
SAMPA IN THE DAYS OF KALUBA
“It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.”
Hubert H Humphrey
It was a black night and the rain beat loudly on the roof of the hastily erected shelter. It had been built on the verge of the rainforest at the edge of the valley. Perched high in a tree nearby, a young boy of about twelve years of age was keeping watch, although the driving rain made it almost impossible to see more than a few metres into the night. He was watching for the pin pricks of light that would alert him to the approach of lamp-carrying men. Inside the shelter, eleven earnest young men were listening intently to the man they called Alofa. In his early twenties, he was strongly built with broad shoulders and had the appearance of a superbly conditioned athlete. Like the others, his skin was black and his dark hair was long. It was his eyes that differentiated him from his companions. They were the intense, penetrating eyes of a radical reformer. His whole demeanour radiated an urgent energy that captivated and empowered his followers. For more than an hour they had shared stories of their activities, encouraging each other to maintain their rage against what they saw as the corrupt governance of the Elders, and in particu
lar the leadership of Kaluba, the chief of the Elders.
“Thank you for coming together at such short notice,” Alofa said quietly. “We are all risking our lives by being here tonight. These are dangerous times, and Kaluba has vowed to execute any who defy the Elders. For fourteen days I have been tortured in the prison because I would not give up your names. I believe that I have only been released now so that I would warn you of the consequences of continuing to oppose Kaluba’s leadership. I know that you are all as passionate as I am about the suffering of the people of Sampa, but tonight you must each decide whether you are going to continue to endanger your own lives and the lives of your loved ones by maintaining your opposition to the Elders.
“We have fought a long fight. We have maintained for many years that the only thing that will save Sampa from destruction is for the Elders and Kaluba to return to the ways of our fathers. They lived securely under the covenant that Abele, our first Mother-Father, made with the Great One of the Forest hundreds of years ago. For asserting that, we have all paid a high price. It may yet cost us the right to live in this valley where each of us here have grown up. So consider well whether you want to continue the fight. As for me and my wife Misha, we are ready to die for what we believe is the truth.”
“Kaluba is convinced that we are the ones who threaten to destroy Sampa as we know it, and it is possible that some or even all of us will die for our part in what he is calling a bloody revolution.” His words were still hanging in the air when there was an urgent shout from the boy who was keeping watch. “Men approaching! Fast, on horseback! They have lights and dogs!
“I will be in touch” Alofa said quickly. “But for now we must split up. I will take the boy; the rest of you must follow our usual plan of escape.” The “usual plan” simply involved gathering up anything that they had brought with them and, under the cover of darkness, running deeper into the forest. They knew that the men would not follow them there. When their pursuers were gone, they would carefully make their way back to their homes.
***
Sampa was set in a beautiful fertile valley situated between soaring mountains on one side and a dense and somewhat foreboding rainforest on the other. When Alofa was a young man, Sampa was already a very backward village in a rapidly changing world. Although it had traditionally been a prosperous and safe place in which to live, it was no longer, and though it had once been led by great far-seeing men and women, who dearly loved the people and Sampa, its current leaders were not like them at all. It had, in fact, become increasingly entrenched in primitive ideas, attitudes and beliefs, even when the towns and villages around it had found it necessary to change. The government of Sampa had in the past one hundred years been given to a group of Elders who had made and enforced all the laws that applied to village life. New Elders were added to the Council from time to time by the Elders themselves. Alofa was fond of saying that there were three criteria that new Elders must meet. One, they must be male; two, they must be very old; and three, they must be relied on to defend Sampa against any new ideas.
A consequence of the Elders’ continual rejection of new ideas, as well as the refusal to return to the core values of the past, was that the people of Sampa had been caught in a painful, soul-destroying time warp. The men had become almost solely hunters and miners. The manufacture of goods, the growing of crops, and the farming of animals, for so long the heart of Sampa’s economy and activity, were now the occupations of a very few. The culture had become entirely patriarchal, an evil that had been exposed and rejected by the Sampians hundreds of years before. Women had no standing in the society other than as child-bearers and home keepers. The gardens and fields they had once so happily laboured in were now owned by the powerful among them, and were mostly neglected and unproductive. Many of the men hunted and trapped every day; others worked, several days’ journey away in the rainforest, where they mined for gold. Once a month some of the men would take cartloads of animal pelts to Towin, their local trading centre, a day’s journey from Sampa, and then return with essentials like flour, grain, salt, and sugar. The women and children never ventured outside Sampa, and the more isolated they continued to be, the more fearful of the outside world they became.
The women and the children had good reason to be afraid. Wives were frequently subjected to savage beatings by their husbands, and the Elders afforded them no protection at all. Women who complained of rape were isolated by others in their families, and men boasted of their sexual conquests. Parents had unrealistic expectations of their children when it came to labour. Children of five or six years of age were expected to gather firewood or carry water. Boys of eleven were trained to be hunters and gatherers of food in the forest. Girls of thirteen were frequently forced into marriage with older men. When children were perceived by their parents to have misbehaved or to have disobeyed an order, they were harshly disciplined.
The Elders regarded themselves as Watchmen or Gatekeepers. The enemy that they watched for and fought against valiantly was modernism in the form of change, and their main strategy was to resist any form of education other than that which reenforced their own current culture. They also resisted a return to the values and customs of the past, when Sampa had been a peaceful place to live in. They punished the people who told stories of long ago and banned them from singing songs about the great leaders of past eras.
The Elders zealously enforced all the laws under which the Sampians lived. Punishments for lawbreaking were harsh. People who opposed the tyrannical rule of the Elders, or who were found guilty of following or promoting new ideas, or who encouraged a return to the more peaceful and prosperous days of Sampa, were publically beaten, and on a number of occasions even executed, as these behaviours were regarded by the Elders as rebellious and inflammatory. The contradiction, however, is that they had introduced new “liberal” laws under which the Sampians had never lived. For instance, in a culture that had always been monogamous, it was now lawful for a man, when he had been married for ten years, to take a second wife, and after twenty years of marriage he could take as many other wives as he chose. Although historically Sampa had lived in harmony with its neighbours, the Elders now encouraged raids on some of the small, peaceful villages nearby. The main purpose of these raids was to capture young women and bring them back to be wives to the older men.
There was serious division among the people. There were those who, for their own reasons, strongly supported the Elders. Some secretly longed for change but were generally too afraid to declare it. There were still others who were prepared to risk their lives to bring about change and to free Sampa from the tyranny of the Elders. There was indeed fear everywhere. The Elders were afraid of the outside world and the people were afraid of the Elders. Neighbours were afraid of each other, because the Elders encouraged them to report any treacherous behaviour. Wives were afraid of their husbands and children were afraid of their parents, because the parental style was largely authoritarian, and their mode of punishment was often cruel and violent.
The people were primarily hunters and miners and the law said, “If you do not work you will not eat.” This led to a sort of class culture. Those family groups who had a number of hunters or miners in their households did well and had abundant food, but families who had only one hunter or miner among them, or even worse, none at all, often had little or no food. Some widows, their children and the elderly, were forced to skin the kill and prepare the meat for the more prosperous families in order to earn a portion for themselves. The life of the hunter was hard and the work was dangerous. The rainforest in which they hunted was home to many different game animals and birds, and there was an abundance of edible plants, roots, and fruits, and in that sense the forest was a veritable food bowl. However, the gathering of that food tested the men to their limits. Larger game animals like deer and wild goat had to be stalked and run down in an environment where other predators stalked the hunters. Tigers and wild dogs, poisonous snakes and boa constrictors prese
nted a continuous threat to the hunters. Injuries were frequent and deaths not uncommon, as the men of Sampa ventured deep into the rainforest in their constant struggle to feed their families. Likewise, the miners who worked for and were paid by the mine owners worked under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions, often for little return.
When the daily hunt was over, there were a myriad tasks to be done. Animals had to be skinned, meat had to be prepared, the birds had to be plucked, and the fish cleaned and scaled. Most of this work was done by the women and children, and was often not completed till late in the day. Then food had to be cooked and families had to be fed. There was little joy in the village. There were rarely any special events or celebrations. Singing and dancing was frowned upon by the Elders even in their own families, and socialising between families was a rarity.
So you can see, even though the Elders could not, that such a community was well on its way to destroying itself. Such fear, with the anger and the violence that followed in its wake, can only lead to one consequence: self-destruction.
CHAPTER TWO
ALOFA
“A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.”
Marcus Garvey
Alofa was a seeker after knowledge. On his monthly trips to Towin, he would spend his evenings with an old gentleman who left Sampa as a young lad and never returned. Muralu taught himself to read, and was a voracious reader of history and philosophy, and had also become a student of the Bible. He was the undisputed expert on the history and traditions of Sampa. This old man was frail in body but sharp in mind. His weathered face and large rough hands identified him as a tiller of the soil. He had a shock of grey hair that showed no sign of receding. His eyes were a startling blue, and his smile lit up the whole of his craggy face. He lived alone, for his wife had died many years before. His three sons had become businessmen in Towin, and although they loved him, they wanted nothing to do with their father’s old culture.