When this next short fiction was first published, the nomadic Fulani herdsmen/cattle rearers and the settlers/farmers in the Jos-Plateau axis were having relational challenges. This was back in 1999. Several years down the line, what has changed?
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| Cattle rearer with herd. Photo credit: theeagleonline.com |
"A POISONED HIDE"
Copyright Kenneth N Okafor
♠ ♠ ♠
The
night black Raven in full flight/
Is
a shroud of dark death in sight/
A
stern warning to the hearts of men/
Of
dread, a foreboding, an ill omen/
Whosoever
defies the embrace of the grave/
His
sliver of mortal soul would save/
In
that day would come/
The
Reawakening Age!
...A
Verse of the Raven Legend
“US$250 Million Lost to
Consumption of Cowhide!”
The stranger who clutched the
newspapers in grubby hands spat out the lead caption like an offensive
expletive. He sat up front, close-up to the bald driver who was chewing goro and spiting rust-coloured phlegm,
two rows away from me. When in a gravely voice, he translated the headline
verbatim to our mother tongue, his indignation aroused immediate attention
inside the cramped cauldron of a ramshackle bus in which we travelled.
“How can they wish to do this
wickedness? Take away the meat of the masses! This is a conspiracy to deprive
our palates of our beloved cowhide. We have lost all exotic poultry, goat, then
ram to their whims and rapacious appetites and they are now after the cowhide.
Madness! Appalling and galling madness!!” He bemoaned the calamity of it all
with appropriate theatrics and infectious angst. He persuaded us he was
championing the cause of the underdogs, the masses. His ardour was completely
believable, totally sincere, and by the time he explained how vast the sum of
money involved was, the whole passengers were in mourning with him.
How could government be losing
such resources because poor people are happy? How could government determine that
there were holes in their common purse because of ordinary kanda which we eat? My young
mind was baffled endlessly as I became infuriated. It sounded more like a
brutal fabrication, a white lie, a concoction from the fatal edge of vile
tongue.
“I hope all of you have eaten
your last meals. We should prepare to die if they succeed. These are indeed the
terrible last days!” The newspaper owner proceeded to theorise that this
madness was the latest ploy of an insensitive government to drive happiness
from the lips of the masses and starve them and eradicate them from the country
for the rich to inherit the whole land. Shame on all schemers in all places
they be found. Absolute shame to them! The man’s voice carried deep conviction.
I believed the man because my father had once told me government was not to be
trusted since the made promises only to breach them. They always voted with
their feet when it concerned the followers. Why did government, social guardian
and law enforcer, hate me so?
Then I remembered they were not
the first to poison the cowhide. The nomads were first!
♠ ♠ ♠
They came to our secluded,
bucolic community like a thief in the night. They came with a pressing need;
they were in search of pasture for their livestock. An eclectic bunch of dark-faced
herdsmen, the Wayfarers, and their herds of cattle of various hues – white,
brown and some mottled. In peace, they converged, like visitors of peace.
A whiff of mystery surrounded
their arrival. The community woke up to an invasion of messes of animal
droppings. Anybody who set out for the farms early, through the bush trails,
apart from the dew of dawn upon the blades of elephant grass which could cause
debilitating cold, had to contend with stepping into the litters of dung as
well as the foul pungency that hung heavily the crisp morning draught. “What
sort of animal dropped its dung along the footpaths while we slept?” people
puzzled. “Was it the bush gorilla?” someone queried, alarmed. “How can it be?
Would there be this many gorillas and the naked eye of the master hunters and
the latecomers from the farm would not have seen them? Ini Quenti always
returned only after the Cockerel has gone to roost, you know that well. He has
never reported any sightings of gorillas.” “I hope that we are not about to
witness another invasion of elephants, the calamity which befell us twelve
seasons back?” “Elephants again? Heavens forbid. Fear not! You see as big as
the elephant is so is its droppings. Onoko the inveterate master hunter who
sees in the dark with cat eyes ever came across one and presumed he was staring at an anthill.”
And so speculations grew rife.
Several days thereafter, the unknown animal, which owned the droppings,
remained an elusive phenomenon. Until the herdsmen decided to stay beyond their
fleeting, nocturnal visits. Their arrival turned out to be an unexpected boon
to our crop yield because of the subsequent discovery that the messy droppings
incorporated into the vegetable beds could produce a fat yield. (Till this day
precisely who made the discovery remained fiercely disputed.) Cattle dung soon became the scarcest farm
ingredient. With little preamble the
nomads they settled into our lives, though they grazed on the fringe, in the
farmlands and the bushes, they were part and parcel of us. We coexisted in delightful symbiosis. And they introduced us to the pleasure that
up until then was not a common fare in the general menu: red meat and cowhide.
It was Toti, the son of Ini
Quenti, my bosom friend, who turned up at his father’s farmland to discover the
herdsmen in distress, wailing that one of their treasured cattle had died
overnight from a cause which they could not fathom. Toti fled back home to
summon Ini Quenti. The distraught nomads waited for their generous host, Ini
Quenti, who had quartered them in his vast land, to come and showed to him the
carcass which they had already slit the throat to drain the life blood. He
commiserated with them over the irreparable loss and he got the carcass free in
return for his generosity. Again, being a man with a large heart, Ini Quenti
invited the whole clan to share. What great news. People came in their droves.
Some wielding cutlasses, some others brandishing cooking knives. A man and his
household were adventurous enough to try a hoe. Some without implement trailed
behind neighbours to borrow from them. Pa Gromyko earned himself the nom de guerre of “Longer
Throat” when he and his boys appeared on the scene hefting a tree-felling
hacksaw.
Soon the aroma of roast beef
hung tantalizingly in the air as hearths blazed.
♠ ♠ ♠
For me personally the coming of
the herdsmen turned my world right side up. I approached them to get
acquainted. They answered my gesture with the language of silence because we
were not of the same tongue. But they spoke comprehensively to their thronging
animals. I marvelled at the feat. Also I observed how egrets came in their
wake, cavorting, the white fragile looking birds, trailing the cattle
everywhere, picking ticks from their shivering bodies. My learning by observation was the least of my
benefits.
Ini Quenti paid Ini Alesa a
very strange and unusual visit – Ini Quenti was not a man who visited, people
trooped to his compound to pay homage equal to his clout and his standing in
the clan. But he visited Ini Alesa.
“The coming of the nomads has
been quite fortuitous for my household. Like a man gleaning ears of corn, I have
learned much from their symbols and their deeds. Both little and great things.
I have learned for instance how they are able to make their livestock trek long
distances without appreciable drop in weight. But I consider the best I have
yet learned is how the people ruling us from the land beyond our horizon
attempt to educate them in the ways and knowledge of the Whiteman even while
they graze cattle.”
The revelation caused quite a
stir in me more than in Ini Alesa, my second father, I could tell, tucked away
but within hearing distance. Few things can really inspire the man I have come
to despise. However Ini Alesa was gracious enough to feign interest and show
appropriate incredulity. “How can this thing you speak of be?”
“Do not wear a mask of
astonishment, Ini Alesa. Beyond our borders lies a world growing in directions
that our own generation, yours and mine, cannot fully comprehend. I, myself, do
not see it clearly yet my inner knowing nudges me it exists. The spirits which
guard the whole of creation whisper mysteries to me in confirmation. We have a
saying that wisdom is a handbag and each man carries his own according to size.
Wisdom tells me this is opportunity to seize for the coming generation.
Therefore, I have made the decision that if enlightenment is necessary for the
nomads, then it must be of immense value for my children. In the light of this
thought, I have decided that my eye and the first frits of my loins – Toti will
be sent to the City to acquire such knowledge. Odezi, your ward son, I have
observed, as my son’s steadfast playmate and confidante, is a conscientious boy
that kith and kin praise for enterprise and diligence. As I am assured of your
desire for a better life for him other than this back-breaking undertaking of
farming, I counsel you, in my wisdom, to send Odezi along with Toti. If they
are successful, heaven forbid that they will not be, others will tread their
footprints.”
That very peculiar visit of Ini
Quenti to our home formally marked the beginning, in earnest, the cumbersome
venture for my education. Unfortunately, there were no facilities nearby at the
time to afford us the possibility and access. That discovery brought much disappointment
in its wake. The nomads had also disclosed to Ini Quenti that they were
provided with special teachers who are to trail after them to the grazing
fields and their bush camps. Why could we not have teachers trailing after us about
the vast farm lands as well to impart to us this precious knowledge? Or had the
snail and its shell become separate entities?
We languished in despair until
a clansman related to Ini Quenti who had long ago fled the community to the
City on self imposed exile showed up unannounced. At the expiration of his
tumultuous homecoming, he suggested that Toti and I migrate in his custody. My
joy was boundless.
♠ ♠ ♠
The rumble of disquiet began
imperceptibly, unobserved, but gradually fermenting. Ini Quenti started to have
minor misunderstandings with the herdsmen which no amount of apology seemed to
be able to reconcile. A little tiff, a heated argument there and a once cordial
relationship began to crack up. Animosities reached a head when the Farmers’
Friends Society came from the City with the amazing white powder they explained
to the villagers was the Whiteman’s manure – fertiliser, I would later come to know
it. The Farmers’ Friends Society members put the powder to the test to
demonstrate its efficacy. Ini Quenti was confronted with the dawning
realisation that he did not need the nomads any longer: the Whiteman’s manure
gave better yield than that of cattle dung. All said and done, when the moment
came for the nomads to vacate the farm land Ini Quenti acceded to them, they
chose to ignore his vacation order. This war of attrition festered until a very
unfortunate incidence.
Udu bolted into her father’s compound
forecourt one day, dishevelled and disconsolate, raving that the nomads had
groped her while she mulched vegetable beds on her mother’s plot. Udu—as fair
and as radiant as the eye of the morning sun, a gazelle; provocative Udu, with
the jutting nubile breasts—was one of Toti’s siblings. What followed was a
shock: nothing happened.
I say nothing happened. It was
bizarre. It was unsettling. People heard and insinuated that the man had lost
his manhood. His friends heard and were astonished that Ini Quenti who was so
jealous for his daughters had even been overheard admonishing Udu not to
recount the same story again. Was there something that could happen to a man to
castrate his clout so abruptly and he stopped being a man? At this juncture Ini
Quenti stopped being the principled man I respected.
♠ ♠ ♠
Ini Alesa sat on the superbly
crafted Gourd Seat, the seat of the master music maker, to play his fluted horn
with uncanny skills. Everybody admitted the gods came with pleasure to listen
when he played. The music he made was powerful and evocative. Then I almost
loved him.
It was the withering look my
mother flung at him that stopped the track of my emotion. She was far from
impressed with his dexterity. My second father, I tried to think kindly, was a
good man overall, only that he was – or so my mother sniggered – born under an
unlucky star and his personal god seemed at odds with him: he worked hard with
little to show. I suspected my mother was secretly disappointed due to
miserable fortunes of the man who took over her consent of marriage from a
deceased relative. At the dead of the night I could swear I overheard her
cursing the ignoble African tribal custom which permitted the brother of the
deceased to take his wife.
Ini Alesa played music to
inaugurate the commencement preparation for the Feast of Dances. The air was
electric with anticipation of what revelry and feasting to come.
In the thick of the
preparations, as we returned from the stream one afternoon, Toti told me
something undecipherable, a true enigma. He said:
“Odezi, most trusted one, does
your memory serve you well to remember the last we got a carcass of a cow from
the cattle-rearers, how you exclaimed that it was like the Feast of Dances?” I
answered that I did. Then he added, “My father says that many days hence the
clan will have many Feasts of the Dances before nightfall.” I pondered the
enigma Toti spoke without understanding.
One morning, I awoke to
discover a pitch-black Raven perched on the beam of the yam barn. Instinctively,
I reached for a pebble, to cast at the bird. It flapped its wings, dipped into
a dive and flew away.
The
night black Raven in full flight/
Is
a shroud of dark death in sight/
A
stern warning to the hearts of men/
Of
dread, a foreboding, an ill omen/
Terror
to men!
It was not too longer
afterwards that someone scampered into the bowel of the village yodeling the
improbable news that there were rows upon rows of carcasses of cattle littering
the farm lands. Everywhere erupted with wild jubilation and I saw the vengeful
hands of Ini Quenti. Toti’s hint made sense all of a sudden.
Without any invitation this
time, clansmen trooped to carve meat. Nobody went with small knives or hoes. Pa
Gromyko’s hacksaw was suddenly not big enough. Meanwhile a crisis burst in our
own home which compelled Ini Alesa to decree with the same force as a royal fiat that my mother and I should not go and carve up meat.
Later stories, though without
proof, point to the fact that it was Ini Quenti who had somehow caused the cattle
to die in their multitude—total dead, seventeen. Exactly how
remained unfathomable to this day. (Many alleged that the avenging spirits of
the Earth Oracle had come to fight on behalf of its Chief Priest.) Sadly, the outcome was not several Feasts of
the Dances but a horrific Affliction of Deaths. Not since the famine of ten
full moons ago did so many die in one day. Nobody could count the dead. And
there were no tears to weep. The ground was left fallow to bemoan the demise of
the husband man.
The greatest regret and
wretchedness belonged to the council of elders who sat under the Neem tree to
give their blessings to the settling of the Wayfarers, the cattle-rearers.
♠ ♠ ♠
Toti died. He went with his
dream intact, plucked from the land like a rare mountain Orchid in the dawn of
its bloom, before its petals were fully unfurled; a vanishing mist, escaping
against a clench fist. Toti slept.
Pa Gromyko, Onoko, Ayodo,
Chidem, Eluem, Kataje, Korio, Udu—almost everyone—gone. Ini Alesa perished upon the thighs of his concubine , the death
of a fool, with a mouthful of cowhide, deceived until the very end that my
mother did not know of the unholy liaison he kept; she knew.
The music from the fluted horn
stopped with a sorrowful dirge. The egrets had gone. And all I have left now
was a ravaging memory of delirious anguish. Ini Quenti was never seen again,
spinning further legend.
I tried hard to convince myself
that the death of Toti was not in vain since I would carry on the dream. Now it
was five years post-event and I was finally headed for the City to learn the
knowledge and ways of the Whiteman. It was the same bus in which I was that the
fellow with the newspaper sat reading aloud the outrageous article about
cowhide.
The herdsmen had introduced the
corruption of a potent poison to the flesh of the dead cattle before fleeing,
knowing people could not resist flocking to the carcases to carve up meat — and
now the government was poisoning the cowhide with the Whiteman’s money. US$250
million indeed! When will they stop poisoning our meat?
News Report here
Skirmishes between nomadic Fulani herdsmen and settlers/farmers will continue to be a burning social issue until leadership and innovative solutions are applied: ACT NOW TO STOP THESE SENSELESS KILLINGS.
