Indaba, My Children: African Tribal History, Legends, Customs And Religious Beliefs. Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa
Lumbedu bathed in the sunshine of power and drank deep from his beer-pot; while his woman Ojoyo bedecked herself with hundreds of gleaming ornaments and had numerous slaves to obey her every wish and the land trembled at the mention of Lumbedu’s name, a strange conference was taking place in the great grass village the Strange Ones had built for themselves at the mouth of the Zambezi river.
Four men sat around a wooden table inside a great four-cornered grass hut. One of these men was a tall bearded red-haired giant with the scars of many battles on his massive body and the other was an old man with long hair and a flowing beard that was as white as mountain snow. This old man wore broad circlets of gold, studded with precious stones, around his head and he wore a long tunic of purple cloth, over which he had thrown a flaming red cloak. The third man was of the same race as the odd man who had saved Lulinda and he had a white loincloth painted with strange and mysterious signs in red and black. On his head he wore a headdress of blue and red striped cloth and a yellow cobra reared menacingly above his forehead from the golden band around his head.
The fourth member of the council was a happy-looking brown-haired young man with blue eyes who entered the council hut long after the first three had been sitting. He had entered the hut with mischief dancing in his bright eyes and had then proceeded to make faces at the red-bearded giant before giving his big broken nose a playful tweak.
‘You are late, my son,’ said the old Strange One.
‘That I am, my father, is your fault. You gave me a wife at my tender age and now half my nights are without sleep. You see . . .’
‘Be quiet, the King awaits your report and not details of what you do at night with your wife,’ roared the red-haired giant.
‘My son,’ said the white-haired King gravely, ‘we are here to discuss a serious matter and not to jest. All we want to know is whether our plan is working properly – the plan of supplying the fat Lumbedu with weapons under the pretence of trade and then letting him conquer his own fellow people for us. We would like to know whether he is still unaware of our intent to come in once he has finished and to take over from him.’
‘Our plan is working well, beyond our wildest dreams, my father,’ said the young man. ‘Even now our bloated greasy friend has added yet another tribe to his empire and it will not be long before a great empire, with thousands of slaves, falls into our hands like ripe fruit.’
‘We cannot afford to wait much longer – we must strike now. Where we had a hundred separate tribes to conquer, we now have only one fat son of a vile hippopotamus to strike down and all his empire shall be in our hands,’ said the man with the loincloth.
‘I agree,’ said the King. ‘We have waited far too long. Tonight we must attack that dog’s village.’
Lumbedu was feeling on top of the very stars, let alone on top of the world, and he was as happy as a starveling beggar’s stomach which has just digested a stolen fowl. He was as happy as a lion with a million teeth and a thousand mouths.
Now if Lumbedu was as proud of his being a chief as a lion with many mouths, his First Wife Ojoyo was as proud of her suddenly finding herself a queen, as a vulture with many gizzards. Every morning she was carried in an elaborately carved litter to the riverside by a veritable bevy of beauties from her husband’s harem and there she was bathed, smeared with crushed tambuti leaves all over until she smelt like a big fat sweet-scented flower. Then she was bedecked with copper necklaces and bracelets. She feasted all day long on wild honey, corn cakes, very fatty meat, and greasy yam stew.
She was shrill and cruel to the rest of the wives of Lumbedu and she could kill any one of them on the slightest provocation. She was, however, a woman with two guilty secrets lying heavy on her rotten soul and both these secrets would have earned her a slow and miserable death at the hands of the Tribal Avengers, had they become known. Firstly, she had poisoned the kind-hearted Vunakwe who had been Lumbedu’s Second Wife and had buried her secretly in the hut where she, Ojoyo, always slept. And she had lied to Lumbedu by saying that Vunakwe had fallen into the Zambezi.
Secondly, Ojoyo had a secret lover whom she kept imprisoned in a cave in the forest and whom she always visited whenever the flame of desire burnt within her. This secret lover was a young boy of eighteen years and Ojoyo knew that seducing a person of that age who had not been initiated into adulthood according to custom was an offence punishable by death. No persons under twenty-five are allowed to so much as kiss, or be kissed by, members of the opposite sex.
Ojoyo had never asked her prisoner lover who his parents were and all she knew about the youth was that his name was Kadimo. Kadimo had been captured by Lumbedu’s warriors while wandering aimlessly in the forest and, being a member of an unknown tribe, he had been brought into Lumbedu’s kraal for questioning and execution. Kadimo, however, could not speak the language of Lumbedu’s tribe and his only answer to the harsh questioning by the warriors as to the name and whereabouts of his tribe, had been nothing but a series of pathetic head-shakings. Ojoyo had suddenly felt herself drawn to the godlike youth Kadimo and had asked Lumbedu to give her the captive ostensibly for torture and killing, but in reality to imprison him in a cave and use him as a secret source of pleasure.
On the fateful day when the Strange Ones had finally decided to attack Lumbedu’s village during the coming night, Lumbedu and Ojoyo had been feasting in their great hut from early morning to late afternoon. They had been celebrating twenty-five years of marriage according to tribal custom; they had eaten together a whole raw flamingo and then drunk a bowl of milk mixed with honey. They continued their gigantic feast with fowls and roasted meat washed down with pots full of cornbeer – till they passed into the valley of unconsciousness together. Now nobody else in Lumbedu’s kraal had been invited to this private feast, because only the man and his wife should be present during the ceremony of the ‘Eating of the Flamingo’. The result of this was that, although Lumbedu and Ojoyo were lying drunk and insensible in their hut, everyone else in the Great Kraal was as sober as the morning breeze.
A man came running into the kraal at about midnight – he had been running through the forest for he knew not how long – and he had come to warn Lumbedu that the Strange Ones were advancing up the southern bank of the Zambezi in full force and that their intentions were definitely not friendly, as the now dead villagers whose headman this man had been, had found out. The man found sentries at the gate of Lumbedu’s kraal and to them he whispered his story before he collapsed at their feet.
‘I am the headman of the village of Lumoja – quickly, warn the High Chief that the Strange Ones are coming. They mean war – they have killed all the people in my village and will soon be here.’
While two of the guards ran to warn everybody in the kraal, one stopped to help the fallen man to his feet. But he discovered that the man’s back was covered in blood and that there was a long deep wound under his left shoulder-blade. Only sheer willpower and great courage had kept this brave man running for so long, while badly wounded.
Panic reigned supreme in Lumbedu’s kraal that dark and star-spangled night. People fled naked out of the threatened kraal into the doubtful safety of the forests. Screams tore the night as some were pounced upon by leopards and night-hunting lions. Instead of standing and preparing to fight to the death in the kraal of their High Chief, the undisciplined and disloyal warriors of Lumbedu launched their fleet of battle canoes and escaped into the night carrying off Lumbedu’s many wives and concubines with them to safety across the Zambezi.
Meanwhile Lumbedu and Ojoyo still lay in drunken stupor inside their hut where they had defied the best efforts of their subjects and children to wake them up. An hour before dawn something must have warned Ojoyo because she stirred uneasily and woke up. A few moments later she crawled out of the hut, urged by a strange sense of uneasiness that suddenly burst into flower in her soul. She called out to the night guards at the gate, but no one answered. The whole kraal was mysteriously deserted.
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