TSibosiso propped himself up in bed with a pillow and tried each second not to think about his misfortunes, especially his floundering relationship with Kovo, the girl who had promised to love him to the end. All his efforts failed. He stared into the street from the window of his dingy room on the second floor and took in its stretching emptiness. Not even the crows whose philological sessions he liked to indulge as he sat on this windowsill every morning were there. Tired of seeing nothing interesting in the street, he removed his sight and instead trained it on the pack of drugs on the table close to the toilet door, the horrible events of the past weeks playing in his head.

“The worst thing that can happen to a black man in this country is to lose his girlfriend to a white man. They have taken not only our lands and rights … it’s everything!” was what Alexis, his photojournalist friend, had told him a few days ago on his opening up in the hope of healing. It hurt him that he was the object of pity, but the recollection of all that had happened hurt him more than anything else. Why did he even bother to go to Sharpeville without first telling his girlfriend that he was coming? He had gone all the way from Pretoria to surprise her but got a rather hefty surprise in return. He paused at the door on hearing sounds suggestive of two adults in the middle of soulful coitus. When he knocked and said, “It is me, Kovo,” the sensual noises quieted, and hurried movements followed. He heard someone roll out of bed and try to put on clothes. When she finally opened the door by a crack and stood in his way, a film of sweat on her temples and between her clavicles and larynx, he knew she had made up her mind. He tried to look past her into the room to no avail. Luckily, at the moment he made to walk off, a white man appeared behind Kovo, towering over her. His eyes locked with those of his adversary. For a moment he thought of pouncing on him, depriving him of all his teeth, but he swallowed hard and left, giving up his three-year-old relationship.

In the PUTCO heading home, he put himself side by side with the white man he had seen in Kovo’s room. The man had nothing over him. Was it height? Strength? Handsomeness? Education? Then there was a prick in his brain and he remembered  that the man was indeed superior to him in one thing: race. He should have known that to be white was to be the numero uno. Perhaps the man was working in an elitist company and got dressed in European suits on workdays, not in a struggling news house like Afrika Magazine, where people like him wore creased baggy dresses and often missed a belt loop when they tucked in their cheap shirts.

He had wanted to work at Daily Mail or Drum, but the bureaucratic hurdles of the National Party had frustrated his efforts of getting a passbook in time, without which he could not be employed or allowed to move about or live in an urban area. After the frustrating queues and filling many-page forms, he was handed a stamped dompas. That night he and Kovo had made love nonstop and painted their forms with glorious streaks and in a future they both imagined. The job hunt lasted for months before Afrika Magazine gave him a chance. He moved from Sharpeville to Pretoria, leaving his former room for his live-in girlfriend. With Kovo working in an eatery and him in the news house, paltry as their take-home pay was, life was a bit rosy compared to their past. But soon Kovo began to fuss about everything. He no longer had enough time to visit her. And whenever he did, she complained he didn’t stay for long. There had to be something else than the work he said was putting him down, eating his time. One evening she said, “I will leave you one day for someone who doesn’t prioritise work over love,” and he’d laughed. Now he hated himself for laughing at such a thing. But how could she expect him not to prioritise a job that was sustaining them, paying their rent, and footing their daily bills? How could she even be swift in dumping him like it had been her long-term goal? His anger was, first, that he bought the bed onto which she allowed another man to hump her; second, that he was the one paying sixty percent of Kovo’s house rent, all from the money of the job she said was not healthy for their relationship. The thoughts infested his mind so much that he failed to realise he was in transit and ought to watch out for his stop. At the last bus stop, the driver asked him to alight. He set down and blended with the night. To take another PUTCO back home was as much the best option as it was the worst. Sleep would refuse to come and relieve him, and the puppies of anguish in his mind would bully him to the ends of the world. It was better he found a spot to drink, listen to good music, and forget about his sorrows. 

At Belele Bar, he mixed with different people who, like him, had issues but pretended to be happy, pretended that apartheid was not as fatal to them as it really was. The music was loud and appealing to his spirit until the police ruined everything at once when they stormed the place to remind the subdued majority finding solace in bottles of liquor that the freedom of merriment was not their prerogative. 

“Who is the owner of this place?” a white senior officer asked, striking his baton on one of the  tables.

“I am the one,” a tall man said, and turned off the music.

The other officers pushed him into the light, towards the centre of the bar.

“Do you have the licence to run this place?”

“I have,” he said.

“Bring it.”

He went behind the counter and returned with a thin sheet. The senior officer looked at it for a while before he said, “This has expired.”

“I have made payment for renewal, but it is not ready yet. It is not my fault. Some of your colleagues were here yesterday, and I told them the same thing. I even gave them money.”

“You bribed them,” the white senior officer said and smirked. “This is a shebeen. Your operation is against the laws of this country and must—”

“It is not his fault, please,” Sibosiso said from his corner table. “He has explained everything to you. How is that too hard for you to understand, officers?”

“Are you talking to me?” the senior officer asked, approaching Sibosiso.

Sibosiso struggled to his feet and tried to take a step. That was the biggest mistake of his life. He bumped into the table, and the bottles atop it crashed onto the floor, breaking into shreds. The other officers behind the senior officer misread the accident for an attempted assault on their superior and closed in on poor Sibosiso. The next day he awoke in a narrow, dark cell full of black people, the condemned tribe. There was a signature window, if it could be called that: a slit cut high into the wall, crossed with rusted bars. Light came through it without warmth. It was this light Sibosiso first saw when he regained consciousness. Later he would try to peep through the bars of the opening up in the wall to know the location of the cell. The floor was rough concrete that remained damp and cold even in the heat of the day. Rats knew the cell well. They scratched behind its damp walls and sometimes showed themselves, bold and quick, bodies sleek from feeding on scraps and traversing broken sewage pipes. Sound travelled in zany ways. A sorrowful cough from a neighbouring cell sounded so close to you. Footsteps in the long corridor, flanked by cells, grew heavy before they arrived. Keys announced themselves long before the guard appeared, and when the door opened or closed, it was never for anything good.

Their offences varied. There were those who were apprehended in shebeens. Some didn’t have a passbook but were found moving about. Others did nothing at all; for instance, an aged man named Siyabonga was captured right on his verandah, where he was sleeping, since the heat in the room was choking. The police had claimed to suspect he was targeting a suitable hour to go out and rob. A boy in the cell told Sibosiso that he was arrested for reporting his white employer who had tried to sodomise him. The police charged him with slandering a man of high estate. Sibosiso himself was charged with assaulting an officer on duty and attempting to obstruct the rule of law.

Day after day, the population in the cell reduced. People who bribed the officers to go into town and inform their relatives to come and bail them out were the early leavers. Sibosiso was unaware of this method, so he was in detention incommunicado for five days. On the morning of the sixth day, one of the officers in charge of the bucket toilet had pity on him.

“They will not allow you to use the telephone,” the officer told him. “But if you have anyone in town I could meet, tell me.”

Sibosiso almost started writing a letter to Kovo before the realisation hit his heart: they were no more. A year ago while he was still at the university, it was to her he had written when a bus knocked him down in the street. She had come to the hospital posthaste, with bloodshot eyes, feeling she was going to lose him to death. She spoon-fed him pap and massaged his aching heels and forehead. All that was in the past now. He wrote a note to his only family in Pretoria, Alexis, including Alexis’s home and office addresses. By evening, Alexis showed up. But the officer in charge said he was late. The next morning, Sibosiso was bailed out with plenty of shillings. He also signed an undertaking to be law abiding going forward. When he reported to work, his boss handed him a sack letter, accusing him of shirking his duties. The explanation he gave was slammed. Which serious sub-editor left his job to be drinking in shebeens? As far as the boss was concerned, Sibosiso had feigned incarceration and sought out a soft landing with his sentimental story. It pained Sibosiso that his truth was illegitimate. It reminded him of a similar verdict from a sadistic lecturer at Fort Hare, when he resumed school late because of the death of his parents and sister in an auto crash. 

A rat raced up in the ceiling, bringing Sibosiso back to his present. He stepped out of bed and headed to the bathroom. Today was his first day of work after his tentative reinstatement at work. His boss, after he caved in from the incessant pleadings of Alexis and other workers, promised to dismiss him permanently should he do wrong again. He now had the responsibility to protect his job and the confidence of the sureties, and he was ready to do that. Had life not been miserable for him in the past two weeks that he had been jobless? He almost slipped into the fjord of depression, since he always thought of Kovo and the humiliation her actions led him into. The worst was that he nearly got “endorsed out” by the authorities, after an officer searched him one evening and found neither work ID nor passbook on him. What saved him was the explanation that he had forgotten both items at work, when in fact the work ID had been confiscated by his employer and the passbook misplaced about his room.

He poured water on his head and, for a fleeting moment, he felt some peace.

---

On his way to work, Sibosiso noticed that something was amiss. There were plenty of buses and trucks heading towards Sharpeville. They were loaded with supporters of the Pan-Africanist Congress, all singing songs of freedom, shouting “Down with pass laws” and cursing the policies of the National Party. The convoy’s mouthpiece, speaking into a megaphone, was encouraging all Blacks to shun work and head to Sharpeville. He said, “It is a shame for a Black man to ignore this cause” often. Sibosiso had a foreknowledge of this demonstration: he had heard and seen PAC top members herald its notice from house to house in Sharpeville, Johannesburg, and even Pretoria. But he did not know it would be this serious.

He got to work and settled down at his desk to do whatever it was that would impress his boss. His colleagues who hadn’t gone out yet to cover the demonstrations welcomed him back with jokes about missing his pedantic editing, saying he was even more strict than the chief editor. At ten, there was news that someone had been shot at Sharpeville, and it was in connection with the PAC demonstration against the pass law, which the Black people considered the tool for the devaluation of their humanity. It was a good story to follow up on, especially now that he was not on good terms with his boss. But he hated the name Sharpeville. That place reminded him of the squeaking bed, the sweat on Kovo’s temples, and the hooked nose of the man who had snatched his lover because of his skin colour. How could he return to the place and remain in one piece?

Well, his boss thought differently. “Since there is nothing much at the office, Sibosiso and Alexis will rush down to Sharpeville and see things as they are. I do not think anything special will happen there, but staying off amounts to nothing either,” he said, and focused his eyes on Sibosiso. Sibosiso nodded and packed his bag. In a few minutes, they were out, driving down to Sharpeville. They did not talk much on the drive. Alexis handled the wheel, his eyes fixed ahead as though the road might shift if he looked away. Sibosiso sat beside him, one elbow on the door, fingers grazing his lips, watching the road stretch itself thin over the land. The road grew busier the closer they got. Buses. Trucks. People hung by the doors, clung to the rails, and sat on roofs like bundles tied for market. Everywhere, there were songs of freedom and redemption. At some point less than two kilometres away from Sharpeville, the police barricaded the road, stopping cars from entering into the township. The influx was getting out of hand, and public peace was at risk. Sibosiso took the wheel at this point so that Alexis could take sensitive pictures. Knowing the terrain well, he took a bush path and entered Sharpeville behind a grey police car and three Alvis Saracen vehicles. As they drove through the fringes of the township, many people shouted the Pan-Africanist slogan “Izwe Lethu” or gave the thumbs-up “freedom” salute and shouted “No dompas!” at the top of their lungs. The string of police cars ignored the duo, since they kept an amiable distance and appeared to be the harmless newshounds they were. There was no way they could hide their identity. The Afrika Magazine inscription on the sides of the Ford Consul was conspicuous. 

On arrival at the Sharpeville police station, Sibosiso thought it was a festival of the defeated majority. There was pressure, but nothing violent was happening. The protesters were singing and laughing and even exchanging trite jokes with some police officers. They drove and parked at a distance, easing into an open patch of ground on the side of the police station, away from the dense knot of bodies gathered at the front gate. The space there was bare and uneven, a stretch of compacted earth worn down by tyres and footsteps rather than purposefully marked for parking. It lay slightly off the main approach road, screened from the thickest part of the crowd but still within view of the compound’s fence. From that angle, the station appeared quieter, almost detached from the pressure building at the entrance. The main gate, where the protesters had gathered, was not directly in front of them. Instead, the side of the building showed its plain walls, the fence running its length, and the yard inside where officers formed small groups, brainstorming on how to handle the situation. The distance gave them a clearer line of sight, but also a sense of separation, as though they had arrived at the edge of something already in motion. 

Suddenly, the mood changed. More Saracens and truckloads of police officers arrived within a short time. Above the heads of protesters, planes hovered, low and high. Alexis grabbed his 35mm camera and started running towards the crowd to beat the other news agents, and avoid missing anything sensitive and important. Every now and then he slowed down to capture a moment. Soon, Sibosiso caught up with him.

“What’s going on?”

“A lot,” Alexis said, lifting the camera to his right eye and squinting the other eye.

Children and women were, in jolly manners, hurling pebbles and articles of clothing at the low-hanging planes. The people continued to chant against the pass laws, moving closer to the gate of the police station, where a local PAC leader was having a conversation with the senior officer. While the tension heightened, the senior police officer retracted and was seen conversing with other officers. Thereafter, the officers were seen loading their guns and mounting the Saracens in combat style and putting the tanks in the direction of the crowd.

Sibosiso excused himself to urinate. He had taken a diuretic antidepressant that morning before he hit the road to the office. He did it quickly, close to the spot their car was parked, and started to walk back towards the crowd. Some cops were now standing on top of their armoured cars, waving Sten guns, and when he was fifty yards away from where Alexis was standing, the police opened fire into the crowd. He could not say for sure that nobody lobbed a stone at the police or brandished a weapon, but he did not believe a threatening situation had built up in the time it took him to walk away and back. People started running in different directions. For a moment, he thought the officers were shooting blank rounds to disperse the crowd. But when he saw people fall and not stir, he ran back to the car and returned to the open field only when the shooting had stopped. There were over sixty corpses of children and adults strewn on the ground, most of them shot in the back. The injured were crying as they remained on the ground, crawling. Sibosiso sidestepped the corpse of a boy about the age of fifteen and reached for Alexis, shot in the left arm. They trudged to the car and drove off.

---

A day after the shooting at the police station, Sibosiso was at work, polishing an in-depth account of the ugly event. On the day of the shooting, he and his colleagues had put together a few features and a brief photo essay that upped the status of Afrika Magazine. A while later, Alexis, shot hand in a cast, walked in with a file full of printed photographs at the scene of the shooting. “I decided to print all of them,” he said, throwing them onto the desk. The file landed with a dull slap, its edges splayed from long-time usage. Sibosiso looked up, nodded once, then returned to the paragraph he was polishing. He worked through it for about an hour before he was satisfied. He set his pen down and drew the file closer. The first photograph showed a wide view of the crowd, faces turned in one direction, as though pulled by a single thread. The next showed a police officer on a Saracen behind a mounted gun, its muzzle pointed at the crowd. There was one taken from the angle they had parked their car. It showed the fenced compound of the police station underneath a clear sky. Such serenity had no need being part of the story of a massacre. The rest that followed held gory depictions. People running. Bloodied corpses on the ground. He dropped the last one before feeling like he had missed something. One of the corpses looked like someone he knew. It lay face down, but the angle of the face was enough for him to know who was there. He turned the photograph sideways. Then upright. The face did not change, no matter how the mind tried to refuse what the eyes had accepted. It was Kovo, shot in the back of her head, so that the bullet erupted at the centre of her forehead, or had been shot in her forehead and the bullet came out the other way. He dropped the photograph and reached for the car key on the key rack beside his desk.

---

The township of Sharpeville was quieter than it had the right to be. He drove down the main street and turned into the boulevard on which Kovo lived. A neighbour who survived the shooting, standing by a low fence, told him without ceremony that Kovo had been buried in a mass grave west of the township. She had not wanted to go out for the demonstration, but the PAC members had forced them out of their homes. He drove out there and stayed by the graveside for a long time, saying nothing. At sundown, he returned to his flat in Pretoria. He burnt his dompas in the sink and swallowed more antidepressants than he should have. Then he sat on the windowsill, staring into the gathering darkness, contemplating a free fall.

---

Ornguze Nashima Nathaniel is a Nigerian writer and editor. He is a major in mathematics and loves writing speculative fiction through “Acheyinka,” his coined literary style that blends the clarity of Achebe and Wole Soyinka’s lyrical, strange ways of depiction.

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

I

The rain returned the year Benedicta returned to Gorongosa, as though the earth had been waiting for her specifically.

She had been gone eleven years. She did not come back for the land, or for any of the things they say a person comes home for. She came because her mother had sent word through a cousin, through another cousin, through a woman selling tomatoes at the market in Chimoio, that the old man next door, Tomas, the one with the clicking knee, had finally died, and that he had left behind a mango tree that nobody was trimming and so it was dropping fruits on his roof and the noise it made at night frightened her.

Still, she almost did not come.

The bus from Chimoio took four hours on a road that had not decided yet what it wanted to be. Potholes that swallowed a wheel to the axle. A driver who smoked with one hand and prayed with the other. Benedita sat by the window with a bag of clothes on her lap and watched the bush open up as they moved north, the flat green land spreading out in every direction like something relieved to see her, and she thought: I should not have left my daughter with the neighbour. I don’t know why I did. I should have brought her.

The truth was, she had not wanted her daughter to see her face when the bus crossed the Gorongosa turnoff.

II

Her mother was smaller than she remembered. This always happens: the person you are returning to has shrunk in the years you were not watching. Dona Celeste was standing in the doorway in a capulana Benedita did not recognise. The colours were too bright, the kind of cloth you buy when you are trying to feel festive. She was holding a broom even though the yard looked already swept.

“You look thin,” her mother said.

“You look old,” Benedita said.

They held each other for a long time on the step.

Later, her mother made rice with dried fish, and they sat at the small table near the window. Outside, the mango tree leaned over the roof of old Tomas’s house, abandoned now—the door open on nothing—and a bird Benedita could not name sat in its upper branches making a sound like a question asked twice. The evening was warm. The smell of cook-fire drifted in from somewhere nearby. Everything was so ordinary, indifferent to her grand entrance, that Benedita felt something in her chest pull tight, that pull of a thread when you have not noticed it is still attached to something.

“You can stay,” her mother said.

“I have work.”

“What work?”

“Cleaning at the hotel. And sometimes the school needs people to wash the windows.”

Dona Celeste looked at her rice. “You have a certificate. You could teach.”

“Ma”

“I am just saying.”

Benedita looked out at the mango tree. One fruit fell while she was watching, hit the roof of Tomas’s house, and rolled off. The sound it made in the quiet was enormous.

“I know why you left,” Benedita’s mother said finally. Not as an accusation; just something she seemed to have been carrying and needed to put down.

Benedita did not respond. She did not know yet which answer was true.

III

She was nine years old when her father disappeared. This was not unusual. It was, in fact, so common in the Gorongosa district that it no longer sounded like news. Men disappeared in the Mozambican civil war the way water disappears: absorbed, evaporated, gone into the ground, into the air, away from everything that needed them. Some men were taken by RENAMO; some by FRELIMO; others just walked into the bush and never came back because there was nowhere to return to.

Benedita’s father’s name was Artur. He had hands that smelled like diesel from the pump station where he worked, and a way of laughing that started in his nose before it reached his mouth. He used to bring her a single hard candy every Friday, the kind that came in wrappers with a picture of a fruit that bore no resemblance to any actual fruit. The last Friday she remembered, he brought her two. She did not ask why. She ate them both that night and felt sick and did not know, for a long time, how to stop feeling guilty about it.

Her mother said he was taken. Her uncle said he ran. Her aunt said he was found dead near the Pungwe River, and that someone had seen him. Her aunt’s husband said the someone who had seen him was a drunk and a liar, so there was a fight, and then her aunt’s husband stopped coming to the house.

Benedita grew up in the shape of that gap.

When the war ended in 1992, when the peace accord was signed far away in Rome by men in suits who had not heard the sound a mango makes falling on a roof at three in the morning, nobody came to Gorongosa to explain what had happened or who had done what to whom. There was an amnesty. There was an election. There was an incomplete list, too, of the dead that was almost more insulting than no list at all.

And then there was just the next day. And the day after.

IV

On her second day, in the morning, Benedita walked to the park. She had planned instead to go to the market for her mother, to find someone who trimmed trees so they could deal with the mango, and then maybe to the primary school to see if what her mother said about teaching was real or just a mother hoping. But she walked north instead of east, past the secondary school with the newly painted gate, past the health post where a line of women with infants waited on a bench in the early shade, and then the road opened up to the park.

Gorongosa National Park had been, once, the most-talked-about place in Mozambique. A jewel, people called it. Before the war, tourists came from everywhere: white people, mostly in khaki, with expensive cameras and the particular look of people who had come to see something they believed they owned by looking at it. Her father used to tell her about the herds, how you could stand at the edge of the floodplain and watch ten thousand animals move like the land itself was breathing.

During the war, those animals were eaten. Soldiers on both sides were hungry. The park became a battlefield. She heard that by the time the guns stopped, ninety per cent of the large mammals were gone.

But now.

A ranger stood at the gate in a green uniform that fit properly, which felt significant. She did not go inside. You needed a fee, and she hadn’t brought money anyway. But she stood at the fence and looked out at the long flat grass beyond it, grass so green in the morning light it looked like the park was showing off.

An elephant crossed the open ground, maybe four hundred meters away. Just one, young, she thought, from the size, walking with certainty, unhurried.  She watched until it disappeared into the tree line.

She had not cried yet since arriving. But she stood at the fence of Gorongosa National Park and cried.

V

There was a woman at the park gate selling groundnuts from a tin. Her name was Fatima, which Benedita only learned later. She was maybe sixty, seventy, with a face that had settled deeply into itself. She had a grandchild fastened to her back, who stayed asleep despite the noise from all around.

“You’re from here,” she said.

Benedita wiped her face. “Does it show?”

“The way you were looking at the elephant.” Fatima held out the tin. “You want groundnuts?”

Benedita bought a small paper cone. They stood together for a while without speaking, which in Gorongosa has always been a form of communication.

“My son works there now,” Fatima said, nodding toward the park. “Ranger. Youngest one they have.”

“That’s good.”

“He was born during the war. I had him in the bush during the relocation. His father didn’t live to see him.” She said this without a particular emphasis, the way you mention rain in a place that gets a lot of rain. “He applied three times before they took him. The third time, they asked why he wanted the job. He told them that the animals came back when the people needed something to believe in.” She looked out at the grass. “I told him that was too fancy. But they gave him the job.”

Benedita thought about the elephant she had seen, its unhurried walk, the ease of something simply existing without having to justify itself.

“Is it true?” she asked. “That they came back?”

“Some things come back. Some things you have to bring. My son says the difference matters, but I think the result is the same. Either way, you wake up one morning, and the thing that was gone is there.”

VI

Three days before she was supposed to return to Chimoio, her mother showed her a box.

It was a tin box, the kind that once held biscuits, rusted shut at the seam. Dona Celeste set it on the table between them, as if it were something she had cooked but was unsure about.

“I have been keeping this,” she said.

Inside was a photograph Benedita had never seen, a folded letter, a piece of cloth, and a small stone. The photograph was of her father standing outside the pump station. He was laughing. The laughter had come out of his mouth in this one and moved all the way up into his eyes. She had forgotten that he could look like that. The letter, in his handwriting, was addressed to her mother and dated 1988. She did not read it. She folded it back in the way she had found it.

“He wrote this from near Sofala,” her mother said. “A man brought it. He had been walking for three days just to bring it. I never told you because…” She stopped. “I didn’t know how to tell you. I was still telling myself a story in which he came back.”

Benedita looked at the stone. It was smooth and flat, the kind you find at the edge of rivers. She picked it up.

“He used to carry one,” her mother said. “For luck.”

“I know,” Benedita said. And she did know. She had forgotten until, again, in this moment, she knew completely.

She held the stone in her palm for a long time. The evening pushed through the window. The mango tree dropped a fruit on Tomas’s roof, and the sound rang out and faded.

“I’m going to call about the teaching post,” she said.

Her mother did not say anything, but she got up and went to the kitchen, and Benedita could hear her in there moving things, filling water, beginning the sounds of a meal that assumed someone would be there to eat it.

VII

Before she called, she went back to the park.

It was early morning, that hour when the light was yet to fully commit. She brought money this time, paid her entrance fee, and walked along the edge of the floodplain until she found a place to sit on the ground, with the grass on one side and the open land on the other.

She sat for a long time.

Impalas moved through the middle distance, alert and angular, their ears rotating like small satellites. Somewhere behind her, a hornbill called. The light came down fully, and the park turned gold, and then the gold soon faded into something quieter: the ordinary green of a morning that did not know it would persist in memory. 

She thought about her father’s stone in her pocket. She thought about Fatima’s son, born in the bush during a forced march, who had applied three times to be a ranger. She thought about ninety per cent of the animals gone, and then not gone, and what the work of that returning must have looked like from the inside, all the mornings when the numbers were still terrible, when you woke up and counted, and the count was still not enough, and you went out anyway.

She did not know whether it was forgiveness or just survival. She was not sure she knew the difference yet. Perhaps it was like the elephant she had seen her first morning, that unhurried certainty. You do not rush toward the thing you are becoming. You just walk. You cross the open ground. You enter the trees.

She put her hand in the grass and pressed her palm flat against the soil, the way her father used to do. He said the ground was always a little warmer than you expected. She felt it now, the faint warmth, the smell of it, the deep unaltered patience of something that has held everything—bones and seeds and rain and thirty years of fighting and forgetting—and still hasn’t said enough.

Her daughter’s name was Artur. Benedita had given her that name the day she was born, three months after she arrived in Chimoio, in a hospital that smelled of disinfectant and was understaffed but wonderful in the specific way things are when they are just sufficient.

She had never told her daughter what the name meant. She thought now that she would.

She stood up from the grass. She brushed the red soil from her palms. She walked back out through the gate, nodded at the young ranger on duty, and headed down the road toward her mother’s house, past the health post and the school with the newly painted gate. The morning opened up around her, ordinary and at the same time grand, the way mornings do when you have decided something, even something small, even just to stay.

---

Eze Victor Christian is a writer based in Enugu, Nigeria. He is a writer who writes on themes of memory, economy, and everyday Nigerian life. His work is concerned with the stories that live inside ordinary households, the ones that national history tends to leave out.

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

“Pow! Pow, Pow, Pow, Pow, Pow, Pow…”

I was standing on a kigoda, peeking outside, watching. I lost count of how many, and just stood there staring as, one by one, they fell to the ground. I wasn’t shaking; there was no ounce of fear in my bones. My husband was pleading in whispers, pulling the sides of my skirt, begging me to get down.

It was hard to tell if they were park rangers, like the ones from Mikumi National Park, or military men from the way they held their guns. I’m sure they were all men, though. The way they turned and walked away, so coldly, so carefree after killing our cows in that manner. Who does that to a cow and just walks away? They look down on us and say we live like our animals; I’d rather live among animals than with the likes of them.

I stepped down from the kigoda I was standing on and ran outside, slipping through my husband’s grip. I ran straight to where they all lay. I did not care if those monsters were still near and could hear me. I stretched my hands and hugged her, the one I milked every morning. Her fur, brown as the soil and the houses at what was once home. She was my last reminder of home. I sat on my legs and let out a loud cry. Slowly, my people began to emerge from their bomas and join the scene. A bloody one indeed.

---

I was born right after Tanganyika’s independence. It was right before the beginning of a new year. My father named me Udamugh, datooga for waiting to heal. My mother said my father had picked that name for me because he had hopes that once and for all, we were finally going to be free, after long years of suffering that we had endured the entire time the white man ruled our country.

“The first white men killed a lot of us because we dared to resist their rule. We became weak, so we secluded ourselves to recover. Then, the second white man placed an alien tribe’s men to rule over us because we were marked ‘difficult’. Apparently, our many cows didn’t fit right with the white man’s big farms. Our ways didn’t align with the white men’s labour system. So, when independence came to our country, your father hoped that things would finally turn around for us. Hence why he named you Udamugh,” my mother said.

Unlike my father’s positive hopes, things did not turn around for us. I was a pre-teen, the same exact age as my ‘independent’ country, when my father handed me, my mother, and our cows over to my uncle because we needed to run for our dear life. A lot of my people were running as well, from Hanang, in all directions within our country. As one of the finest blacksmiths in our community, my father was required to stay behind and fight for what remained of our lands. My uncle grabbed us tightly and led the way out of Hanang, alongside some of our people. I still believe he was crying that night, or perhaps the tears in my eyes were too much that everything I could stare at looked wet and blurry. There was pain in my chest. It probed and hurt harder with every step I took. I didn’t care that my mother’s hand was pinchy through the tight grip she held on to me. I kept looking back wondering if I would ever see my father again. Today, I carry so much resentment for that little girl whose innocence was cut short that night, because I knew that was my last glance at my father’s face.

Through darkness till the next darkness, till next darkness, we kept running – out of Hanang and away, as far as ours and our cows’  legs could take us. I don’t remember how many days it took us. I only remember heading south, and my mother’s grip on my hand the whole walk – how tight and strong she held on to my hand, as if her sanity depended on her feeling my physical presence through her hands. When we passed the home for wild animals, we knew we had arrived. But they called it Mikumi National Park and said it was ‘protected’ land. Protected! From whom? We did not understand. So we walked a little bit north from Mikumi and arrived in Kilosa. The lands were strange to us, but it was all empty wildness of healthy and rich grasslands. Our cows’ bellies could be full quickly. So, we chose to settle there.

My uncle told me that a new white man had arrived in Hanang, blessed by the very people claiming to have ‘fought’ for our country’s independence, “Our own people had sold our lands to the white man,” my uncle said. I did not understand. He said that our own government had turned on us and was helping the white man to evict us. This white man owned all of Hanang, apparently. All of our homes. The home to the spirits that have protected us since the times when we could speak to northern stars. My uncle said that this white man was going to turn all of Hanang into a big farm. He was going to plough out all of our Bung’edas, the graves of our most honoured ancestors! He was going to plant wheat, a food not even our neighbouring farming tribes knew of.  

Life in Kilosa settled quickly, and so was the dark cloud which had followed us all the way from Hanang. My mother never spoke of my father, but kept going into the forests looking for the ‘right plants’ to make fermented milk. I knew the exact plants she was looking for. She used to put it in my father’s milk. She never found those plants in all of Kilosa’s wilderness, but kept looking for them until her legs gave up walking. My uncle, on the other hand, would disappear for days. And every time he was back, I said a prayer to our ancestors that he give up trying to go back – I knew. We all barely talked about those we left in Hanang – out of pain, yes, but also, a Datooga doesn’t accept victimhood from anyone. I never saw my father again, nor many of my uncles and aunties, who remained to fight for our lands. However, the dark cloud that followed us from Hanang never left. Because, after nearly three decades in Kilosa, the second eviction came. This time, I did not have my uncle to lead the way or my mother’s tight grip on my hand. They had both already transcended into the spirits’ world. We all fled from Kilosa, once again, and settled in Kilombero. Ever since, all I have held on, is the cow I milked every morning because she came from the loins of my father’s herd. She came from the cows that both my mother and my uncle bestowed upon me on the day I became a wife to my husband. She was the one last thing that, till today, forty years later, connected me to my beloved home, Hanang.

---

We buried our cows and said a ritual prayer to call upon our ancestors to come and see what had befallen us. In our glory days, this was worth a sacrificial ritual to punish whoever wronged us like this. But not even the right to seek vengeance was within our reach. What a pity we have become! We cried to our saints and said their names. To come and give us wisdom, and perhaps warmth from the anguish in our hearts. The entire community was at a wake, mourning, which was unusual because we are not people who mourn death. We are people who celebrate death by slaughtering the bravest cows and making Gesuda beverages, then gathering to rejoice in a life worthy of remembrance. We are people who do not look at the aftermath of death with sadness. Instead, we happily accept a new spirit to be bound to our land and to protect us. But on this day, we were all mourning death with immense sadness in our hearts. Because cows add and complete a Datooga’s life cycle. Cows are not to be killed for nothing. Even an enemy becomes an enemy for something. But our cows were murdered, for what? What do you say to a Datooga who has lost all of their herds? Nothing! You either give them some of yours or join in to avenge.

“The grass is green everywhere. We do not disturb nature.” My husband held my hand, or, rather, tried to calm me down. 

I looked away from him and stared into the greenery all around us. We are not allowed to make trouble when it is green everywhere, according to the rule of our ancestors. One has to wait until it is brown and dry, and herding is far from home, to avoid putting our cows in danger. But out here in these foreign lands, it is green every day, all year round. Was I disappointed or understanding of my husband? I felt conflicted. I know my father would not have let anything like this fly. My husband, on the other hand, is the complete opposite of my father. Many men of my tribe are completely opposite on this side, far, far away from home. For starters, there are no longer any active blacksmiths within our communities. Maybe that is how we have managed to stay alive, I don’t know. All I know is that, with every land we lose and every eviction we face, so do the parts of who we are. Perhaps we are slowly getting erased.

None of our neighbours came to console us. Not even the women I helped conceive. Perhaps the gunshot sounds scared them, too. Perhaps they were rejoicing at the death of our cows—their farms were ‘safer’ with our cows gone, I assume. They have always loved what we could offer: our products and knowledge. Always coming to us for help to solve what they did not know how to. But we all know they complain about our presence behind our backs. They believe we are invaders here, the ones who ‘don’t belong’. 

When the burial of our cows was completed, my husband and the few elders of our community went to open a case with the police. When they came back, they said they were told there would be an investigation. My husband said that the police laughed as they said the word ‘investigation’. We all understood that no government official was going to waste their time over some animals. A few days later, a letter arrived, summoning my husband to the government offices. He left immediately, leaving all of us anxiously waiting. When he returned, his head was hanging. We all rallied up, enclosing him in a semi-circle, outside the home of our eldest member.

“They are going to build a dam. They say they need all these lands for agriculture,” my husband announced. 

All of our faces fell. Not that we had hopes, but we did not expect the news to be that bad. People let out all kinds of sounds. From asking where we would go next to outright crying. Some stood up and left the meeting. It was angrily frustrating because, as much as we knew it was unfair, we also knew that it was happening again, for the third time!

This is how it always starts; the government declaring our lands theirs, and our existence a criminal offence. When we were in Kilosa, we learned of our ‘criminal-existence’ through a radio as our president announced boldly on national outlets, “Our people must change from being nomadic cattle herders to being settled modern livestock keepers! …” With that statement, he declared our ways of life incomprehensible and unwelcomed – thus unallowed. It condemned us to a life of having to justify our existence everywhere. And within just two years, the statement was on full implementation. We were told we needed to make room for rice farms, a food of no value to us. Some of my people said that, even those white men who began this war against our existence, were now on our side. So, we began hoping that perhaps we would be able to have a claim without being criminalised. After all, who else was to fight our own government and win if not the white men? We prepared to claim just part of Kilosa lands as ours. We resisted fiercely, and as a result, our government officials showed up at our houses unannounced. They burned down our houses. They badly beat our people. They shot our cows like a sport, to teach us a lesson. They raped us women to hurt my community at our core. And they killed our best fighters who dared to stand up for our community. A lot of my people disappeared in that scuffle, and no one has ever heard from them again. It became the Hanang evictions of the 70s happening all over again, in the 2000s. We were evicted from Kilosa. Just like Hanang, we left Kilosa running for our dear lives. It has only been four years since our arrival in the Kilombero valley. We have not yet recovered from the loss we incurred in Kilosa. And now what?

---

A Datooga’s way of life has to be one with nature. That is why we cannot even begin to explain the anguish of having such a bond forcefully cut out of our lives, over and over and over. For instance, my uncle never agreed to leave Hanag. He’d wanted to stay and fight. His choice was to face death, but my father, being his eldest and only brother, forced him to leave. Even after all the years he lived in Kilosa, he never let go of Hanang. So much so that when death came knocking at his door, he requested to be buried back home. He said he wanted to be among his people. This was in the 1980s. So, right after his spirit left his body, the men of my community organised a sneak-in into Hanang. They took my uncle’s body, wrapped him in the skin of a strong black bull, and travelled with him to where our former burial lands were at – Bassotu, Hanang. According to these men, they arrived at Hanang early in the morning, and had time to make some Gesuda, our sacred beverage. Who knows if they really did all that or wished so badly they believed they did! They told us that they waited till midnight to sneak in so that they could bury him and give respect to our elders buried there, perhaps asking for wisdom and blessings as well. However, the white man’s security guards caught them and handed them to government officials. Our men were put in jail for trespassing. I don’t know how one can trespass on their own land, but my people went to jail for wanting to pray and bury their loved one on our own burial lands. 

When we heard the news, we were so shocked that we went numb. We had to organise, sell our cows, bail our people out, and bring them back to Kilosa. The devastating, cruel act left us all in the community, paralysed! It is one thing to forcefully take our land, kill us, kill our animals, and violently evict us. It is another thing to deny us a chance to even pray on where our shrines still stand –  our holiest space, Bung’edinga, the graves of our saints. We had to have an emergency meeting to discuss what to do. What does one do when they are denied even their rights to spiritual connection? No one has ever talked about what ended up happening to my uncle’s dead body. I would like to think his spirit now lives in parts; here with me as my protector, and there with our people in eternal joy.

When my mother’s time was near, she insisted that she should not be taken back to Bassotu, Hanang. Not because she did not want to go back home, no. She was just too tired and resigned. She did not want to bother anyone. So, we buried her in Kilosa. We buried her in a land foreign to her spirit, hoping perhaps, after two decades of living there, we could make a home out of that land. Several of my people also opted to bury their loved ones in Kilosa, hoping to plant new spirits on a land we thought could be ours. However, when the eviction from Kilosa came, and we were once again forced to flee, we left some of the spirits we had planted on that land. I left my mother in what is now a farm. If I go back today, I won’t even recognise the plants which have parts of my mother’s bones. She has become a spirit with no life to protect. 

Four decades have passed since our eviction from Hanang, Manyara. My people still continue to try to sneak into Bassotu for prayers and burials, because that was where we laid all of our beloved saints. We now guess locations because our Bung’edas have been destroyed. A lot of people from my community, from different places within our country, still meet at Bassotu-Hanang when we go for prayers and rituals. Here in Kilombero, we are just as lonely as my mother’s spirit in Kilosa. For the past four years that we have been inhabiting this valley, we have not buried a single body of our people here. And as we stand here today, in 2013, on a land with no spirits of our ancestors to consult, my people are in anguish. We have nowhere to go. We don’t know what to do. And no one is coming to our rescue.

---

My father used to say that a Datooga’s way is to live in constant movement across the same lands, because a Datooga is one with nature. And that, while a Datooga woman holds the power to bless both the land’s and the animals’ fertility, a Datooga man marks all of his land with spirit protectors because Datoogas do not live on a land with no spirits of their own. That’s why we are people who build homes for our most honoured elders when they die, and plant the tree of peace. We call that home, Bung’eda. We are people who turn our beloved into our saints who protect us. We don’t discard our dead; we live among them. They become our markers on land for when we come back, so that we can know where we are protected. So that we can know where home is.

Hanang was and still is our home. No matter how much the government turns a blind eye, no matter how much the white man destroys it. That’s the keeper of our spirits, and that’s where we belong. Our ancestors had already marked that land long ago. Long, when they arrived after that biggest exodus from Serengeti, where they fought the Maasai for grazing lands. No matter what happens, the spirits of our land are bound to return us home. I long for that day when I can sleep peacefully knowing that the spirits of our people are watching over us. To my people, Hanang wasn’t just a piece of land to factorise from. Hanang was alive, and it was our duty to nurture it, to keep it healthy, to keep it alive. That’s why we moved every time we felt the land was beginning to feel overwhelmed, only to come back when it had calmed down.

Out here, the nights are cold with absence. We don’t feel connected to these strange lands. According to my husband, this time they are calling it ‘Operation Save Kilombero Valley.’ Once again, we are standing right where my father stood the last time I saw him. We are right back when I was, forty years ago, just a pre-teen girl saying goodbye to my father. Once again, we don’t belong. We have to leave. To where? I don’t know.

 We are the Datooga of Tanzania. Our name means a community. We are what you all call us: Barabaig, Mang’ati, and Taturu. Just because our way of life doesn’t align nor conform to the national identity does not mean we do not exist. We have been here, and we are still here, despite the silent erasure of our communities and the consistent alienation from our lands. As I stand here today, watching my people lose their minds over a new land that would welcome us, it’s been more than fifty years – yes! – of watching my people doing the same exact thing: pack and leave; not knowing where to settle. We are now dispersed everywhere across Tanzania, with no one place to belong. With every breaking of our community is the breaking of our identity. But we know where our home is because we marked those lands a long time ago. Our spirits still dwell in them. Every now and then, we go back to visit them. As our ways require us to move, we are still moving, and one day, we will arrive home—the land with our spirits.

---

Halima Geuya is a writer, educator, and researcher from Tanzania whose work moves between stories, memory, and refusal. She is drawn to the quiet and the unfinished work of decolonisation. Through fiction and nonfiction narratives, she explores how history lives in bodies, landscapes, and language. Her current research traces women’s participation and presence in the history-making of Tanzania, guided by feminist and indigenous ways of knowing. Her creative practice often returns to the question of: what do we inherit, and what do we refuse? Her practice is grounded in her commitment to feminism and decolonial ways of knowing.

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

Nzalambi: such a beautiful name for hunger. Such a full name for yearning. I was head over heels in love with her. Not in a reckless, crazed, fixated manner, no. It was more akin to waking up each day, reflecting on each moment, and choosing to be with her. It was deliberate. I wanted to be with only her, my marvellous hunger. To hold, to cuddle, to lie down with, to wake up to only her.

We were introduced when I was at my least flattering, on the most extreme of blind dates. My friend and former roommate, Edu, happened to be the happy bridge. He and I were watching a football match while we took tea. We’d agreed to meet for the game after some furious banter we’d been engaged in on social media. Edu wished my team a loss after we had beaten them the previous weekend. Holding up my end of the teasing, I punctuated every sentence I spoke with, ‘It’s lonely at the top.’ As we caught up, he asked about my girlfriend.

‘Ha, brathe! I haven’t seen her since last October,’ I informed, stirring the contents of my cup.

‘Wah, ngori. That’s serious. You take tea with sugar?’ he changed the subject.

‘Of course. I haven’t grown rich enough to not afford to,’ I went along.

‘Imagine. I don’t.’

‘Man, those are rich people’s problems. You know, ‘how do you pronounce bourgeoisie?’ problems.’

Edu chuckled and then grew pensive. ‘Yo, there’s someone I want you to meet.’

‘When?’

‘Right now.’

‘Where are they?’

‘On their way.’

We’d waited until the game ended. The elephant still refused to come down the tree. It was to be another week of it being lonely at the top. Then we waited a while longer. I’d begun to thank the stars, had even paid our bill, and was bidding him farewell as we headed out. Two girls then walked through the lobby. We were forced to go back inside, and Edu made us exchange names. In spite of my misgivings, it had been a pleasant evening. I confessed as much as we stood on the stage, waiting for my transport home.

Impulsively, I handed her my blue water bottle. She hesitated a moment, as if deciding what to give back, then shrugged off her polished brown leather backpack. She pulled out a hardcover novel, The Prince of Fire. She held it close to her chest, her eyes shut. Maybe it was a parting hug, maybe a way of saying, ‘with all my love, even as young as this bud is, believe me, it shoots off of a giant oak stump…’ Maybe it was nothing, but I liked it very much. She stretched the book towards me, even as I commented, ‘For a moment I thought you were going to hand me a Bible.’

We laughed. It started as a chuckle, soft, then bubbled into earnest giggling. It was not long until we were howling with mirth, doubled over at the bus station. Two security guards, tired from working all day and impatient to close their shifts, stared, their drawn faces sporting lackadaisical smiles. The driver revved the engine. We stood staring into each other’s eyes. Then she gave me her left hand.

‘Now that we’ve been hugging so much today, take this as code for hugging.’

We had not hugged once, but I let it go. I took her hand in mine.

‘Come with me.’

‘Where do you want to take me, home to mum?’

‘I have a mind to take you to church.’ I answered.

‘Go,’ she persuaded, ‘before night makes your seducing even more compelling.’

And she should have kissed me then because time, nonchalant as ever, chose to bypass every promise I made.

---

On the eve of the day when Gen Z led the country in protest of a punitive finance bill, I went to watch a play at the city theatre. Nzalambi had starred in Edu’s play, Esese, and quite a spark she had been as she crackled amidst an orchestra of cellos and drums. For an hour and a half, she had been a ten-year-old, hawking plums on the yellow line of a superhighway; a teenager in a day school, writing rhymes and dreaming of rapping; a college girl, dazed in the lights of county government SUVs and their preying occupants; and a chips-selling graduate, now aware that Shakespeare’s stage wasn’t a place for dreams. It was her best performance yet. After the admirers had taken pictures with the performers, we strolled by a nearby street, waiting for our ordered ride.

‘So, how was it?’

‘Beautiful.’

‘And…?’

‘And?’

‘Come on. You always have a different meaning for that word.’

‘There may be a part of the crowd that comes to you to escape from reality.’

‘Tell me, Yi,’ she says after a pregnant pause. ‘Do you think this world is meant for people like us?’

I pulled her into my arms and whispered that I didn’t know.

---

The city sighed from the exhaustion of day. A car roared away from the street lined with buildings that were adjacent to where we stood. Street lights blanketed us, indulgent of the late-night company. They looked like coconut trees with their crowns ablaze with white flames. A drizzle fluttered in the luminescence and onto our trench coats. We swayed in a comforting dance, a shed of solace floating on a lake of drowning stars. And so I had held her, a metaphor of a city, sobbing onto my breast.

On the way home, we talked about the vacancies advertised by the Ministry of Youth, Sports, and Culture. Nzalambi let me know that Edu had applied for one. ‘Though it’s obvious that the positions have already been filled,’ she said.

‘A preserve for people who know people?’

‘Right. And those with enough money and brazen audacity to afford it. Corruption, you know, as Wandia, my prof says, is not so much immorality as it is cruelty.’

‘Yes?’

‘Yes. So Edu goes to the public service offices to apply for a certificate of good conduct and guess what?’

‘What?’

‘They tell him that it will take two to three months.’

‘And the deadline for application is in four days?’

‘Three days.’ She checked her wristwatch. ‘Twenty-two hours, and fifteen minutes.’

‘Wueh, noma—tough!’

‘So this young lady tells him he can go home with it if he gives her two thousand shillings.’

‘And he gave her the money?’

‘You bet. But if you ask him how he got the certificate, he says, ‘Ni God, manze!’’

That cracked us up. We were cackling like hyenas in the car as her stop came up, just by the city stadium. It was what everyone who became successful through unscrupulous means said these days when asked how they made it. ‘It’s God, my guy.’ 

When the vehicle pulled over, she pulled out her phone and paid the driver. ‘You see the irony, right? That we live in a world where you have to commit a crime to get a certificate confirming that you’re not a criminal?’

We said our good nights, and the driver resumed my own stretch of the journey. Next up on our way was The Junction. It was really a roundabout under a bypass that had been titled The Junction for the traffic jams it had been famous for causing before the superhighway came to pass over it. Home would have been in our sights if we had turned a simple left, but the driver ignored the tangent and went around the curve. Alarms immediately went off in my head. 

I had always joked that I would die laughing if I sat at the front of a vehicle that had a head-on collision. Humour was exactly my first reaction, as I remembered a nerdy pickup line about Toby, a mathematician, wanting to lie tangent to a woman’s curves. A comment to which someone had intoned that Toby just wanted to make love to his calculator. I called out, though, that we had missed our turn. The driver replied, ‘We’re just fine, Yi-zhou,’ and I knew I had been reached, as they say in Kiswahili.

We made our way out of the flat-stacked estate, where the working class lived. We took a detour for the scenic view of the slum with its carton-box-walled shacks. At a road bump, light filled the car from behind. I turned only to have my eyes bathed in the glare of an SUV. We had company, our very own escort, I speculated. It was not long before we left the misery behind and cruised along tree-lined streets. Glass buildings whizzed past until we slowed and crawled into the underbelly of one. The elephant that had been trailing us through the modern jungle stopped by the entrance, its lights beaming into the night. We alighted. The driver knotted a pair of handcuffs on my wrists, tight enough to make me wince. The lights behind us flashed twice, then the car reversed and drove off.

‘I must say, you did admirably well,’ the woman spoke into the darkness.

‘Huh?’

She pulled out a flashlight and leaned into the small of my back.

‘Walk.’

We headed towards a metal door about five feet wide. She knocked twice, and the door popped out of its frame and slid away along the wall. We stepped into a lift that went down instead of up. The lift opened into a musty hallway lined with doors on either side. They had paint peeling off of them like dead synthetic skin. A single halogen bulb hung halfway down a corridor roughly fifty metres long. Perhaps it was longer; I was not sure. There was no more light ahead, and I did not see a wall. We went past two doors and stopped at the third on the left. The driver pulled the phone from my pocket and nudged me into the door. It creaked open even as I stumbled into a cloud of disturbed dust, making me cough and sputter. I heard her bolt it from outside and patter away. The inside was pitch black. I pawed my way awkwardly through the absolute unknown until at last I touched a wall. With my back to it, I slid down slowly onto a powdery, dry blanket of what must have been silt.

It was a long, painful night. There were moments when I dozed off. At some point, I woke up to a grumbling stomach, a dry nose, and the side of my face on the floor. Someone had come in earlier and taken off the handcuffs. I had thanked them even as I remembered an analogy a politician had once given of how a man plucks a chicken alive, then gives it food for which it is grateful. When at last another man got me out, I was faint and pliable. I had grown accustomed to the darkness and the quiet. I tuned out whatever it was he was muttering, only wanting to sleep. I wanted to lash out at any inkling of noise, yet found I really could not summon the willpower to be concerned about things of the world. Outside, I squinted at the light and hissed. The man bundled me into a car—a police car, I noted, and chuckled. The saloon car then drove slowly out into the gentle serein and the aftermath of chaos.

Flags the size of face towels flapped in the air. The Kenyan flag was a symbol for many things: black for the people, white for peace, green for the land, and red for blood. It could have implied anything. Unity, strength, pride. That day, it stood for defiance. It was a red rag to a charging bull. A target for the shots that rang into the cloud of tear gas and spray of pink-dyed water. Folded into a triangle, it served as a mask for the nose and mouth. As with all masks, it served protection and disguise. But underneath the righteous upheaval that swarmed the alleyways of Nairobi, something sinister lurked. 

Pink water filled potholes and dripped off walls and lampposts. The air was choked with the smell of pepper. A high-pitched, disorienting ringing nagged in the city air. Tankers patrolled the roads, huffing and puffing in a choir of sirens. Near Parliament, a body lay on the cobblestones, wrapped in the flag. Blood seeped out of the cloth and into a rivulet. I heard someone sob. Shops gaped at the streets through jaded, jagged glass. Loot reached out from them and onto the pavements like outstretched hands caught between safety and terror. Mismatched shoes lingered in the middle of the tarmac, lost and forlorn. As night settled in, shots sounded far into the horizon, a gun salute for the setting sun, or maybe something more sinister. I had little will to care, even as we entered a police station beset by a huddle of lawyers and activists.

We spent the night in the cells, chanting patriotic songs. There were close to thirty of us, most of whom were mere university students. We sat on the floor, barefoot and starving. We had been stuffed together, both men and women. When our chants would fall into a lull, we would hear the lawyers, camped outside, urging us not to sleep: ‘bado mapambano’. The struggle was still on; they would exhort. At about two o’clock at night, someone brought us bottles of water. They recorded some of us cheering while others wailed. The president of the law society urged us to let whatever was within us out. ‘Speak,’ he said, ‘cry, hio kitu iwatoke,’ and pent-up as we were, we made a mourning ground of the station. A rumour went round shortly after that Yizhou had been missing for twenty-four hours. Someone said his girlfriend mentioned that Yizhou had dropped her off at home at night, the last time she had seen him. To that, we chanted ‘Free Yizhou’ until morning came. 

We were let go at around ten, disgruntled and dishevelled. Drained out as I was, I worried for Nzalambi. I borrowed a phone and tried to reach her. She did not pick up. I tried to log into my social media account, but I could not. The phone’s owner let me use their account. My pictures were plastered all over the internet with a hashtag that echoed #FreeYizhou through the hive. In the midst of all the noise, I read posts from my account thanking everyone for their concern and reassuring them that I was safe at home. Some people demanded that I post a video while holding the day’s newspaper. The account posted that everyone needed to calm down, that the government meant well for all of us. I was shaking, even as I saw the back-and-forth play before my eyes. Someone commented that I was a traitor; another continued to refute that I was not the one posting. What took my remaining breath away was the new hashtag that rose to the top of the trends, just above #StopAbductingUs.

#FreeNzalambi.

I do not remember much of the past weeks. A reel keeps playing, mute, inside my head, which feels like it is stuffed with cotton wool. I know all the lines by heart, except that I cannot hear the voices. We are at the community hall. A break between rehearsals. I stand in the aisle, holding her hand. She remarks on how ‘cavernous’ the ‘auditorium’ is, marking the air with quotation marks using the index and middle fingers of her other hand. I say she reminds me of a story I’ve read.

A stampede flooded the town like streams in a swamp. Protesters danced and posted live clips for their social media accounts. At the OTC bus station, a gang of vandals broke into a supermarket. River Road swelled with a surge upstream towards Moi Avenue. Two girls wept at the statue of Tom Mboya. Further, at the junction of Kimathi and Mama Ngina Streets, a man bent the ear of Dedan Kimathi. He shook his fist at the monument of the freedom fighter, reporting. His voice hoarse with feeling, he listed ways he had been wronged.

A refrain echoed again and again from the other side of town, to the west.

‘Drain the swamp! Drain the swamp!’

It rose from Uhuru Park and past the Kenyatta International Convention Centre. The cavernous walls of the Holy Family Basilica hummed with the din. From here to the All Saints’ Cathedral, the avenue heaved with the indignant masses. Victims wept over their wounds. The faithful, heart in mouth, prayed. A doctor was shot next to a Red Cross van as she bent over a bleeding man by the gate of the cathedral. The Jamia Mosque opened its doors to the flood in a gesture of sanctuary.

A Somali mother muttered over and over again, doubling over her son’s body. Her lips were miming a loop of Alhamdulillah. A pair was seen in the kitchen of parliament, gorging on remains of pilau and chicken. The legislators fled, leaving a man in a wheelchair behind. The youth pushed him out of the building, cheering. They ushered him into his vehicle and made way for it as it sped away. A man took hold of the mace and danced around with it, wearing the speaker’s gown. A mercenary took aim and shot. A manhunt descended upon a slum with the wings of terror. Gunshots rang out the whole night in Githurai. There was wailing in Misri when morning came. Amidst it all, a voice whimpered, ‘Free Nzalambi.’ She would be reported found a fortnight later, in a murky dam, bobbing gently in a buoyant dance. 

The stench of betrayal reeked for days on end all over the country. Comrades who had been taken hostage came back with placating speeches. Some switched sides overnight and without shame. More youth were given up for torture and murder by friends. On social media, the hashtags trended. Some people suspected that phones were being tracked by network providers. Had the company sold the youth out? How was it that easy for the DCI to track down people who used pseudo-accounts to post on social media? They suggested a boycott. Others claimed that influencers were given millions to spread misinformation or stop posting.

The protests were marked with cruelty and double crosses. Youth sold out their friends for money and government positions. What was idealism in the face of fear, in the face of hunger? Philosophical hunger could wait. After being abducted and tortured, most changed their stance. For some of us, our abductions were faked to misdirect. We trended as heroes and freedom fighters. It was a masquerade. What had me gagging with the nausea of self-loathing was the report that more than sixty people turned up dead. Seventy-two went missing for their radical takes on social media. A man was taken because his brother made and circulated satirical graphics on Twitter. Orders were given on live television that protesters should be shot in the foot. A politician was alleged to have said that he would kill five thousand Gen Zs in a day.

The whole year would see people hunted down and abducted. The reels from eye witnesses and CCTV footage could only be described as surreal. Was it a year? Was it a day? It all blurred into a single event. One clip showed a man clad in administration police fatigues and a balaclava shooting a boy vending blue surgical masks, five feet away in the head. The hawker survived and was carried to the Kenyatta National Hospital on the shoulders of wailing men. He died there. A multitude chanted as they escorted a water cannon truck. When the army came, the people broke into a cheering frenzy. They wore face masks, bandanas and toothpaste for eyeliner. They danced around the military tanks and took selfies. After the successful occupation of parliament, a new hashtag trended. #OccupyStateHouse.

The dawn after the day of burial was shrouded in a mist that clung to the skin. Now, the sun flared like it was owed. A mirage flooded the forlorn stretch, burning the tender sisal thorns into brittle spines. The bus droned on, determined to make Kibwezi in a couple of hours. Lulled into a wavering trance, I rocked in the involuntary dance. My new phone vibrated with the excitement of a text. I glanced at it and sighed.

‘Confirmed. Your account has been credited…’

---

Isaac Kilibwa is a writer from Kenya. His works span from fiction and creative non-fiction to poetry. They have been hosted by Brittle Paper, The Hooghly Review, the International Human Rights Art Movement, Spelt, and elsewhere. When not writing, he teaches in Vihiga.

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

M’Mwenda shifted his weight onto his cane to lessen his discomfort. At barely fifty, he had become accustomed to the shuffle that made him seem several decades older. He suspected that the excessive throbbing in his lower left leg was a psychosomatic reaction to the airport grounds. His female relatives fussed about noisily, embracing busyness as a defence against the inevitable goodbyes. It wasn’t working. Emotion enveloped the women in colourful shukas as they milled around Gakenia and her two suitcases. 

The terminal bustled with families congregating around loved ones, loud prayers and weeping sounds reverberating. Porters worked valiantly to shepherd tourists, still decked out in khaki safari gear and outdated pith helmets, towards the check-in counters. From her new handbag, Gakenia drew out her ticket and dark blue British passport, stamped with its royal coat of arms and St Edward’s crown. At the bottom of the cover was the qualifier: Colony and Protectorate of Kenya. M’Mwenda gave the small hardcover book a cursory glance, his spirit recoiling at its unspoken inference. A pass by any name is still a pass, whether a kipande or a passport. The yoke of any identifying document issued by the colonial government was an ever-present reminder of station in the protectorate.  

Briefly, he contemplated how his daughter would return to Kenya after she graduated. Just a few months earlier, internal self-rule had been declared, and the colony now waited with collective bated breath for full independence. Tanganyika and Uganda had already achieved theirs the year before, but M’Mwenda thought it was foolish to rely on promises until they were fulfilled. With an excited smile, the budding university student asked her brother to carry her luggage to the check-in counters. Wailing from the womenfolk began but died quickly when she promised to return once the formalities were complete. 

As excited as he was for his daughter when she was selected for the Mboya-Kennedy airlifts, sponsoring bright students to America for university studies, M’Mwenda knew that coming back to this place would be difficult. His whole body knew it; that’s why the pain in his leg was so intense. It carried memory within. Time had done nothing to release him from the horror of its grip.

He shuffled over to a chair and slowly eased himself into it as he recalled his first encounter with aeroplanes. Though over forty years ago, the memory remained vivid. He had been busy trying to move his father’s goats away from a millet field. From experience, he knew that if even one goat got close to the grains, his whole morning would become a tireless exercise trying to extricate the herd from the sweet-tasting stalks. He was so fixated on corralling the goats that he didn’t notice the rumbling noise from the sky until it was almost upon him. When he looked up, he was enthralled. Above him was a machine making its way through the clouds, descending as its wings dipped, then straightened. Frightened by the noise, the goats had fled in all directions, including into the millet, but M’Mwenda didn’t care; his eyes remained locked on the aircraft. Curiosity conquering duty, he took off in the direction of the plane, mundane thoughts of livestock abandoned.

It landed bumpily, then slowly came to a halt in the grassy field that offered a rural runway. To M’Mwenda’s surprise, a man jumped out of the machine, landing squarely on the ground before ripping off a layer of his headgear and carelessly throwing it aside. M’Mwenda watched the man kick the ground several times before finally squatting on his haunches, hands running vigorously through his hair of maize silk. From his vantage point, the man’s frustration was evident. After a while, the strange man rose and moved to the front of the machine, where he opened its nose. M’Mwenda, inexorably drawn to the peculiar machine, inched closer to the unfolding spectacle. The man eventually noticed M’Mwenda and called out to him in a strange mixture of dialects, not quite kiMeru, but M’Mwenda discerned that he was being asked about their location. “Igembe,” he shouted, and when asked where the mission station was, he pointed west towards Kaaga. The man pulled his thick leather gloves off and stuck them into the back of his trousers while explaining, once again in his mutilated dialect, that M’Mwenda should stay and watch his plane and not let anyone near it. The boy nodded solemnly, his excitement mounting at the realisation that he could explore the wondrous machine unchecked.

He watched the man walk away and waited until he was out of sight before edging closer.  Slowly, he circled the machine, examining its various components—wheels, wings, and propeller. Its fat body and spindly wings reminded him of the flying termites that rose from the ground when the rains fell, their homing senses drawing them unwittingly towards the homestead fires. Invariably, they would fly in too close and burn their wings in the flames, providing a tasty treat once roasted. Driven by his curiosity and unaware that he was mimicking the alates, M’Mwenda reached out to touch the plane’s nose. The still-hot metal seared his hand, causing him to howl and squeeze the singed appendage between his legs, desperately trying to soothe the burn as he jumped up and down in pain.

---

M’Mwenda lifted his hand from the cane and turned it over, eyes lingering on the grooves left by the biplane decades earlier. Imprinted for life. It was always pain; this long-running twisted affair between him and the world of machines of the sky. The first encounter should have warned him. But how was he to know that it was not to be an isolated incident? His fascination with machinery was cemented that day, and as soon as his younger brother was old enough to tend the goats by himself, M’Mwenda sought a machine apprenticeship. Providence brought him into the orbit of Manga Khan, a Punjabi who ran a mill and the only garage services between Maua and Fort Hall. For fifteen years, M’Mwenda honed his craft, his ears becoming attuned to the whims of a misfiring engine, while his fingers would coax life out of inanimate devices, making them purposeful once again. In time, he became the unofficial head of all mechanical services housed under Khan’s growing enterprise and baptised ‘the magical hands of Meru’. For M’Mwenda, life was simple and gratifying in its evolution. During the day, he would spend hours unlocking the mysteries of mechanical contraptions, while his evenings were devoted to listening to tales from his daughter Gakenia. At only eleven, her aptitude and inquisitiveness had earned her a place in intermediate school. Like M’Mwenda, she thirsted for understanding, even if her curiosity would often be mistaken for insolence within the walls of the District Education Board classroom.

His work meant he would occasionally be dispatched to Nairobi to search for spare parts for machines that had broken down all over the region and had found their way to the workshop in Meru. The end of April was always a tricky time to travel. The seasonal long, heavy rains rendered lorries stuck in muddy tracks on the roads from the highlands to the capital. A simple four-hour journey would often take a whole day. It was no different this year. When M’Mwenda arrived in Nairobi after a gruelling seventeen-hour journey, he was exhausted. This trip to Nairobi in 1954 is what brought him his second encounter with pain. 

M’Mwenda thought he would only be in Nairobi for a few days, waiting for the delivery from the port in Mombasa, but the goods train had broken down on account of the heavy rains. The mood in the capital was grim. Whispered accounts of Mau Mau collaborators disappearing daily were spread in hushed tones across eateries and bars that dotted the African estates. Life was markedly different from Meru, where such stories were received as news clips, distant reports of the happenings from the capital. Here it seeped into daily life. Nairobi was dotted with checkpoints where Africans were required to present their kipande with the requisite stamp authorising them to be in the capital. The curfew that curtailed movement from dusk to dawn was a constant reminder of unusual times. By the end of the week, he was reluctant to spend yet another day hanging around the social halls of Bahati Estate, where his fellow machine enthusiast Wanjau had offered him a place to stay. After another futile trip to the train station, M’Mwenda decided to walk to the Nairobi Aerodrome. Knowing full well he would not be allowed in without a work pass, he secured a viewing spot outside the fence where he could watch the planes. Lying on the grass, he settled into a comfortable position to enjoy watching the small planes take off and land from the single murram runway.

The following morning, he rose early and made his way to the water stand in the courtyard at the back of Wanjau’s house for his morning ablutions. The dawn rays had just begun to light up the sky as M’Mwenda undressed and folded his clothes into a neat pile. He was standing in his underpants, cupped hands full of tepid water to wash his torso, when the sirens started blaring. The wash area at the centre of the small houses burst into a flurry of activity as men in singlets and women still wrapping shukas around their bodies poured out of the tiny homes and into the small, open wet area. M’Mwenda was confused, wondering whether this was a regular occurrence, a drill perhaps, but the petrified looks on the faces of the block residents suggested otherwise. He reached for his shirt, pulling it onto his still wet body as he scrambled back inside the house to try and find his shoes. Wanjau was struggling to light a fire, hurriedly throwing papers into it, fanning it, and then fuelling it with sheaves of pamphlets. M’Mwenda didn’t pause; instead, he scrambled around looking desperately for his kipande, the government pass that conferred legitimacy to every African in their homeland. He was still searching when the door was knocked down, and two askaris marched inside, shoving batons in their faces, screaming for the two men to get out. 

Dazed, he stumbled outside, his hands held above his head. He was faced with an armada of land rovers, lorries, and loyalists. All along, the bullhorn blared repeatedly, commanding everybody to exit the houses. He stumbled towards a group of residents, women in tears and men trying hard to rein in their anger and helplessness, faces stoic yet wary. Sjamboks rained down on the hapless residents who were forced to squat and await direction or, worse, judgment. M’Mwenda looked at Wanjau, but his friend refused to meet the mechanic’s gaze, perhaps all too aware of the question in his eyes. Noise from the ransacking of houses pealed through the estate. M’Mwenda watched one askari come out of Wanjau’s house holding charred pieces of paper, remnants of pamphlets, half-burnt. The askari who had chased them from the house scanned the crowd before his eyes settled on Wanjau. He strode over to him and hoisted him to his feet. M’Mwenda recoiled in horror when hands reached out to yank him up as well. The two men were separated from the crowd and flung into a smaller group. Operation Anvil was just getting started. 

By noon, all the residents of Bahati, Ziwani, and Makongeni had been flushed out of their homes, assumed guilty of insurgency, of collaboration, or of just plain insolence. Forty-eight hours after the dawn raid, more than 50,000 people had been forcibly removed from their homes, beaten, questioned, and detained.

On the march from Bahati to the detention site at Langata, he passed the aerodrome. Once again, he watched the planes take off one after another, heading to the native reserves to drop pamphlets that urged residents to denounce collaborators. This time, M’Mwenda’s pain would be long and sustained. On the first day at the camp, the manacles of his accursed timing became clear. During his first round of screening at Langata camp, the lack of a kipande branded him as questionable. By the second round, weeks later, he had been judged a courier of the rebel movement between Nairobi and Meru. M’Mwenda was labelled ‘Black’ and sentenced to the camps for interrogation and hard labour. If the degrading conditions of the labour camp at Embakasi were not enough to crush a man’s spirit, months of back-breaking toil of quarrying and ferrying ballast in the Lukenya Hills were more than enough to shatter a man’s frame. In time, it dawned on M’Mwende that more men arrived each morning than departed each evening. The labour camps collected their tolls, and the bodies of broken men were bequeathed daily to the earth they were condemned to quarry.  

M’Mwenda’s mind remained fixed on the only things that could keep him from going mad. He ached to see Gakenia’s dimpled smile and wondered whether his wife, Kagwiria, had given him up for dead, for who goes one day to Nairobi and simply doesn’t return? He had thought of sending her a letter to let her know he had not abandoned her, but decided against it. A message meant to offer hope might demand too high a price, for social ostracisation of suspected Mau Mau sympathisers was much worse than the emotional pain of widowhood. As a widow, sympathy and care would flow from the community, whereas kindness to a collaborator’s wife was as good as placing a target on one’s back.

These were thoughts that tormented him as he pushed through endless days of hard labour building a road to nowhere. Perhaps the thoughts of his family were what caused him to lose his balance on his way down from the quarry that day in 1957. The massive rock he had balanced precariously on the sackcloth on his shoulder slipped and fell onto his leg before landing on his foot. He screamed and reached for his foot, which remained firmly wedged under the stone. Fellow detainees scrambled around him, moving together to roll the rock off his leg. M’Mwenda lost most of the use of his left foot that day. All that remained after a makeshift procedure that hovered between first aid and assembly line was a mutilated stump of flesh and bone that offered little in the way of stability. His recovery took weeks, downtime he was grateful for even as he screamed through debilitating pain and fear that the camp “doctor” would one day decide to take the remains of his lower leg off altogether. Once he gained enough strength for a modicum of mobility, he sought to make himself useful, afraid that the cruelty that governed the camps would see him sent back to the worksite. Fixing lighting, loose wiring, typewriters, or water pumps, he shambled from one project to another. Within a year, he was considered a reformed ‘black’ and promoted up the pipeline to Mbeu Rehabilitation Camp.  

While strict, Mbeu had a much lighter routine, offering M’Mwenda a glimmer of respite after the horrors of Embakasi. The daily work schedule of planting and harvesting would be finished by mid-afternoon before a final session focused on stuffing as much anti-Mau Mau propaganda into detainee heads broke the workday. As the detainees chanted the pro-colonial verses with vigour, it was presumed that thoughts of collaboration and independence were erased from the depths of their consciousness. For M’Mwenda, who had lived a simple life in search of nothing but purpose for his hands and joy for his heart, the years in detention exposed him to new ideas, to men willing to die for freedom, and to brutality on a scale that he had never thought imaginable. His mind repeatedly returned to one question: what was this idea of a Kenya that was so powerful that one side was determined to never relinquish it, and the other could not imagine a future where they were not finally in control of it? He continued to try to make sense of the never-ending tug-of-war right up to an ordinary day in 1959, when the British camp commander did the inconceivable and abruptly told everyone to pack up and go home. The Emergency, with its terror, was over.

---

As Gakenia walked back from the counter, her father watched the women fret around her with amusement. His daughter was going far beyond what he ever had, in deed, in wisdom, and in distance. She was going to find a place in the world where her curiosity and inquisitive mind could carve out a path to her future. As he stood from the chair and hobbled towards Gakenia, his foot dragged behind him. The one mangled in the process of building a road to nowhere now throbbed in pain, a visceral reaction to returning to the site of its demise. The one sacrificed to welcome the mother of an English queen who never left Britannia to inaugurate the glorious Embakasi civil works purchased with the blood of thousands of African men, now forgotten, forever unnamed, wasted bodies dead and buried under a smooth layer of tarmac, eerily lit up night after night by landing lights of aircraft on approach. M’Mwenda looked up at Gakenia’s smile and thought of the road to nowhere anew, a runway of promise for the queen of his heart. Memoried pain, now a road to emancipation.

“Let me assure you that no single group that arrived at Embakasi left with the same number; many of them had to die; that was the order of the place… The work and the beatings at Embakasi were incomparable to anything I had witnessed before or ever since.” 

Hunja Njuki, Former Detainee Embakasi Mau Mau Prison

Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya

---

mwĩhaki k.m has been published in the Kalahari Review; was longlisted for the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2022; was shortlisted for the Afritondo Short Story Prize in 2024, and subsequently published in the anthology Travelling Men Don’t Die. She is based in her hometown of Nairobi, where she plays house with her husband and three offspring, bringing her own African story to life. She is working on her first collection of historical fiction short stories, inspired by her work at Paukwa and her windows into Kenya’s past. 

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

TThe rumour sweeping Kantin Kwari was that Mai Tatsine and his followers had ambushed a police van, beaten the officers to death, and set their bodies ablaze. Now, they were supposedly targeting anyone in uniform. Garba had been glued to his radio all day, but he’d heard nothing of the sort—only static and the usual broadcasts.

Around midday, a dark plume of smoke bloomed somewhere far in the distance, and a siren rang continuously like an ice cream jingle. There was tension in the air now, wafting down like soot. Garba watched as stalls closed and shops shuttered down. He switched channels on the radio; no one was saying anything new. All day there’d been a kind of muted terror on the streets and avenues of Kantin Kwari, and the shops closing off seemed like a confirmation, a death knell. The market was closing down, as was usual during periods of unrest. People trotted past briskly, some almost breaking into a run. A woman screamed at the dan-dako hauling her load. A man struggled to extricate his wheelbarrow from mud. 

The two brothers who owned the shop next to Garba slammed shut their door. Both had round, jiggling bellies. Both grunted as they knelt to lock the door frames. 

“They’ll call in the military,” said one, with a short laugh. “I tell you the police can’t handle this.”

The other brother straightened, and he turned, as if addressing Garba. “The world is coming to an end,” he said with a solemn nod. He descended down the short steps and, looking up at Garba, without a hint of mirth, indeed with genuine concern, said, “It’s the end of the world.” 

Garba watched them dawdle into the crowd. The acrid smell of something burning filled the air. And as he locked his door, he saw there were now three plumes of smoke in the distance. 

---

The road to Dan Maliki teemed with vehicles, most of them empty but armed with branches whose leaves fluttered out of doors and atop lamps, bobbing over exhausts like flags of parley. A convoy of buses were packed under the large poster of a bespectacled Shehu Shagari smiling down benignly, these too sporting branches and leaves. Garba wondered if the greenery somehow bestowed immunity upon the vehicles and their occupants. Were passersby also going to hold branches above their heads or perhaps tuck them into the sides of their caps? Even the traffic warden’s shed at the roundabout sported two thick branches on either side, thick leaves swaying in the hot breeze. The warden was not there. Perhaps there was some truth in the rumours, and every uniformed officer was in trouble. 

The mood on Garba’s street was the same. Neighbours emerged from their homes, crowding in small groups and muttering amongst themselves with the expression of people who knew something was afoot but couldn’t find evidence of it. Some of the men who would normally be away at work, like himself, were at home. They were all repeating the story about the policemen; a few were off pointing at the columns of smoke. 

Garba thought the blind panic was ridiculous, and it all annoyed him. It wasn’t just because he’d had to walk all the way home. If something was really afoot, surely there’d be something regarding it on the radio. And how incompetent could the police be that they’d be overpowered by Mai Tatsine and his followers? Garba had heard of the preacher, his fiery sermons, and his cursing. His followers had had brushes with the law over the years, but attacking a van full of policemen seemed a far stretch. After all, the police had guns and Mai Tatsine’s followers did not. 

Garba salaamed to Mallam Abdu, who sat behind his counter, counting notes from his money bag with such concentration that he could only give Garba a bob of his head. Even now a customer entered the shop, walked over to the shelves, and took a bar of soap. ‘Level-headed people,’ thought Garba. 

Mariya was pacing the yard when he arrived. “What’s happening?” she asked on sight.

Garba waved his hand in annoyance. “Rumours. Upsetting the whole town. Just rumours.” He shrugged off his soaked kaftan and opened the door. Mariya remained outside, face tinged with worry, eyes peering at the distance. Garba stared forward. “The smoke could be from anything. Don’t worry yourself over rumours.”

“Umar has gone out to play,” she said. 

“He should be with one of those friends of his. He’ll be home soon enough.”

“But it has been some hours and —”

“Leave me be, woman! The boy will find his way home.”

 Garba ducked inside to the slightly cooler air of the house. There was a bucket of water in the bathroom. The heat was oppressive, and his singlet was soaked through with sweat. He took off his battered wristwatch. It was only a few minutes past four.  

---

Garba was pulled into wakefulness by a hand tugging his knee. He groggily sat up on the sofa. It was almost nightfall, and somewhere a radio blared static. He’d been having a bizarre dream, the details of which were fading even as he tried to remember them. He remembered he’d been at his shop. There’d been a woman and a bale of clothes, and when it was time to pay, she’d simply transformed into a large bird and took off with the goods under her claws. 

“Baba Umar,” said Mariya.

Garba turned. “What happened?” he mumbled. 

“I can’t find Umar.”

The words took a moment to sink in, and when they did, a chill ran through Garba’s bones. He jumped to his feet, snatching the shirt lying on the back of the sofa. The boy would most likely be at the home of one of his friends, he thought. But why did he feel dread? 

“Have you been to Danladi?” he asked.

“Yes. They haven’t seen him all day.” 

“Maybe he’s with that classmate of his. The one he’s always together with. What’s his name—”

“I’ve gone there. Inusa hasn’t seen Umar since they returned from school.”

It seemed that, for every moment he stood there, in the darkening light of the living room, the feeling of terror spread. Garba could no longer see Mariya’s face, only the whites of her eyes. He charged outside, feeling terribly guilty that he’d dismissed her concerns earlier. Somewhere, the first Maghrib adhan was ringing across rooftops. He burst out into the street, looking left and right, feeling so utterly lost. Where would he begin his search from? He heard Mariya behind him and told her to stay back in case the boy returned. 

Garba went around to the houses of the boys Umar played with. The Danladis’ boy said they’d returned from school together. The butcher’s boy was down with malaria and hadn’t been out in days. With each home Garba headed to, each door he knocked on, his fears were being confirmed. At the Danejos’, their son claimed to have parted ways with Umar shortly after noon, and at Mama Bode’s house, the woman poked her head out to tell him, in heavily accented Hausa, that her son, Bode, knew nothing about Umar’s whereabouts. She wouldn’t let Garba speak with Bode. 

Garba walked all the way to the bus stop, where he crossed the main road, keeping to the side lit irregularly by the sickly glow of street lights as darkness twisted down. He realised only a few minutes later that he was sweeping the streets for Umar, hoping to find him seated at some corner, waiting for his Baba to come get him. The heat streamed over his face as he crossed into the old district, which the rest of the town had expanded out of, and the outskirts of which one could still find chunks of Kano’s old walls. There were people out and about: children playing Langa in the sand, young men loitering around fruit stalls, and old men sitting on mats outside a mosque. Garba scrutinised the face of every child he saw, turning at every cry and shriek. He went around the suburbs, looping back on a dozen streets. It seemed like hours had passed when he suddenly found himself in an alley. There was the rumble of a huge vehicle ahead, and when he exited the alley, he found soldiers sharing cigarettes behind a van. One of them jabbed a finger in his direction and swung his rifle around. “Kai! Stop there. So you don’t know there’s a curfew?” 

Garba ducked back into the alley, running, the patter of his feet echoing. He retraced his steps, sprinting all the way back. Now, he found no one in the streets. To his relief, the soldiers weren’t in pursuit, but he didn’t stop running until he got to Dan Maliki. On arrival, Mariya rushed up to meet him. 

“Where is my son?” she wailed. She stamped her feet, let her scarf loose, and sat flat on the ground. She raised her hands wide, as if in invocation. “Wayyo Allah. Where is my son?”

Mariya’s agony was being surveilled by faces behind windows and by the eyes of the beggars with their bowls. Garba wanted to yell at them to go away. Somewhere in the distance, a siren blared. Garba grabbed Mariya by the armpit and brought her to her feet. 

---

For the next two days, Garba and Mariya took turns circling the neighbourhood and beyond, knocking on doors within the 7 am to 8 pm curfew. The police stations in Dan Maliki had been barricaded shut, and policemen were nowhere to be seen. Soldiers patrolled the streets in vans and tanks. The mood was that of a brood of chicks frozen under the shadow of a hawk, unsure whether the great terror was passing by or alighting. 

On Thursday, Garba took pictures of Umar to Kanawa Radio, where he was shocked to find that an entire ten-minute segment had been dedicated to children who had gone missing since the start of the crisis. He then made a stop at the printers and, armed with dozens of posters and a bowl of koko, went round the neighbourhood pasting them on walls. ‘Have you seen me?’ they read. There was a picture of Umar from his last birthday, and underneath was a number to the landline, which Garba had reconnected earlier. 

When he got home, he found Mariya barricaded in the bedroom. She’d refused to rise or eat all day. He felt awful for shouting at her the other evening, and even more awful that he’d dismissed her concerns. Now, he wanted nothing more than for her to scream at him, to beat his chest, to blame him for their son being missing. Mariya did none of that. She wouldn’t even look at him. Garba turned on the radio in the bedroom corner and tuned in to the channel. He waited for the segment to roll past, and when it did, he found himself nodding — they’d got the descriptions right. His mind drifted to the telephone sitting on the table in the living room. His ears strained for the shrill ring, his whole body hoped for good news. He sat beside Mariya on the bed and patted her feet. “We’ll find him,” he said. “I promise.”

---

On Friday, they received the ransom note. 

It’d been slipped in through the louvres, and it sat on the window’s metal frame: a square of paper folded into a white envelope, the very thin edge poking into the living room. Garba had been on his way back from the mosque, where the imam, after the morning prayers, had led the congregation in a prayer for Umar. Then he’d shuffled home, his head buzzing from lack of sleep, and when he saw the paper, his first thought had been to ask Mariya if the previous month’s NEPA bill hadn’t been delivered already. The dawn light was bright enough to read with, but Garba couldn’t digest the note until he’d shone a torchlight on the printed words.  

‘We have Umar. Tomorrow, come to the river at Dotsa with ₦9000. No games.’

Garba sat flat on the floor, half relieved and half stunned. How did Umar get kidnapped? And how would he gather that amount of money within a day? The only way was to sell everything they owned. He thought about the rows of atampa, lace, and brocade in his shop. There was no question as to what needed to be done. Mariya, wet from her ablutions, found him there. He handed her the note. She went to the bedroom and came out moments later with three jewellery boxes containing all the jewellery she owned, some of them her wedding gifts. She snapped them open with trembling hands, the velvet inner linings spilling necklaces, rings, bangles, and a handful of precious stones, falling out and bouncing on the floor in a coruscating kaleidoscope of colours. Dawn had suffused the air with a soft orange light, and the living room lit up—the lacquered centre table, the radio, the sturdy television, the pressing iron, and even the red carpet worn through to a brown gauze.

---

“They burned someone here yesterday,” said the man seated next to him.

Garba stared at the mound of ash as it loomed closer. It looked like any other spread of ash you could find beneath a Mai Shayi’s cauldron or in the kitchen or cooking space of a random home. Around the ash was a dark, vague outline. It couldn’t possibly be a human being, Garba thought. He peered closer and gleaned what seemed to be a tooth, glistening sharp like a shard of ceramic. Bile rose up his throat. He blinked rapidly and averted his eyes. The idea of a human being reduced to a mound of ash seemed too unsettling to contemplate, so he cast his thoughts on the journey ahead.

The bus conductor was quiet, his demeanour at odds with his appearance. He rubbed his pigtails as if trying to flatten them and pursed his cigarette-charred lips as he collected the fares. There were no arguments regarding change; no wanton displays of thuggery. They drove on morosely, sometimes the only vehicle on what was usually a very busy road. They went past the police headquarters, where the windows were covered with newspapers and the front doors were barricaded with sandbags. At a checkpoint on the city’s outskirts, three sweating soldiers held up gloved palms, and the bus slowed as the driver navigated the barrels placed on the road. The soldiers began a search of the bus. A few meters off the side of the road, their van, complete with a gun turret, wavered in the heat. They peered into the bus, barking questions about their destination, about where they were coming from. One of them, stone-faced, demanded they all come down to be searched properly. The driver exchanged a few words with him, including a quick handshake, and was waved on. 

A battered sign flashed past, saying Dotsa was five kilometres away. The road wound around tilled farmlands. The first rain had fallen only a few days ago, and the farmers must have planted their seeds already. A herdsman flashed past with a herd of cattle. Settlements were scattered about, some of them no larger than a collection of thatched huts. A range of hills stood in the distance.

The driver switched on the radio and flitted through channels. A grave show host announced that the authorities were searching for Mai Tatsine. Anyone with information as to his whereabouts was implored to forward it. And was the federal government going to declare a state of emergency in Kano now that soldiers were already all over the streets?

All at once, the bus was drowned in noise. Passengers speculated and recycled rumours. One woman at the back said her mother-in-law’s cousin, a policeman, no longer wore his uniform outside. A man at the front said he was returning to his village with his family. Another wondered if anyone could be safe when the police themselves were targets. All Garba could think of was getting Umar back. Besides, there was nowhere he could run to. He’d lived all his life in the city. 

A few moments later, the river flashed, glistening blue and brown, and Garba alighted. As the bus zoomed off, he felt for the comfortable weight of the thick envelope in his pocket. He fished out the paper, just to be sure, squinting his eyes at the spelling of Dotsa. Down the dirt path near the river, the heat was prodigious, but cool air blew in from the river. Canoes lay by the bank, half in the water. Some were upturned by the side, apparently discarded. 

A metal shack shimmered and glinted down at the end of the path, and halfway down, he heard a succession of whistles, which he determined had come out of the shack, and he went on, the path twisting around trees and shrubs, dry grass crumbling under his feet, with the riverbank always in sight. The shack was all rusty zinc supported with slabs of wood. Garba looked around, wondering if he was being watched. There was no one in sight, and he didn’t hear any sounds apart from leaves rustling slightly from the breeze and a frog croaking nearby. He knocked at the door, shouting a salam. The heat wafting off the corrugated metal was enough to sting his knuckles. He hoped the kidnappers had Umar inside. A quick exchange and he’ll be gone with his son; the entire nightmare over. Garba said a short prayer.

He bunched his sleeves around his palms and pushed the door. It wouldn’t open all the way, and it was utterly dark inside. The shaft of sunlight he’d let in only illumined two or three strides, and all he saw were rotten planks on the ground. 

A voice bid him to close the door. 

The air was stifling, and the heat tyrannical. The smell was of damp earth, but so close-up that it nauseated him. Garba cast his eyes around, and though they soon adjusted to the darkness, all he could see were vague shapes: tables, perhaps, or bricks stacked upon each other. The only light was the pinpricks stabbing in from the sides of the door. 

“I have the money here,” Garba croaked. “Where is my son?”

“You came alone?”

“Yes. I’ve done all you asked.”

“And the money?”

“No,” said Garba. He tried to put as much conviction as he could into his voice. “My son, first.” 

The man chuckled. Garba advanced into the darkness. His sandal caught on something, and he stumbled and fell to his knees. He’d hit his shin on something, and he remained there, willing the pain to go away. Sweat trailed rapidly into his eyes. They stung as he blinked. 

“How do we know the money is not marked? How do we know the police didn’t come behind you?”

“Wallahi, I didn’t go to the police.”

The man chuckled again. His voice was measured, almost soft. He spoke with careful enunciation. “We have followed all your movements. We watched you at the bus stop. We’ve been watching you from the beginning. If you had contacted the police, you would not have met us here.”

Garba closed his eyes and sagged on his haunches. He became aware that the man was pacing. He could hear him breathing somewhere to his left. 

“I just want my son,” said Garba. “His mother is sick with worry.”

“Hmm. Mothers worry about their children. Your boy, Umar, is being taken care of. We had faith in you that you’d deliver. We don’t usually do that. Trust is hard to come by these days. Sometimes we show our seriousness by sending the family an ear or a finger.”

Garba gasped.

“Some are still foolish enough to involve the police. We find that very annoying. A breach of trust. At that point, we take more than ears and fingers. When someone comes to you with a clean conscience, it is only proper to engage with an equally clean conscience, eh?”

“But I’m telling you I haven’t gone to the police,” said Garba, feeling a wave of nausea.

“Throw the money over here.”

 Garba had started to entertain the sickening feeling that the kidnapper—or whoever this man was—did not, in fact, have his son. He considered mustering some defiance, but perhaps they did have Umar after all. Perhaps he was being held outside and would be released at some signal. Garba threw the envelope into the dark. There was the sound of the envelope unfolding, crisp notes crinkling and sliding over each other. 

“Good,” said the man. He paced for a bit. “Now, listen. Let’s consider a boy who is missing. A boy who wandered a little too far from home. He’s playing with his friends, and they lose track of him, perhaps. The boy is a bit challenged, not very vocal. He is unable to communicate the fact that he is lost. He wanders the streets. Night falls and maybe someone notices a boy standing awkwardly by the roadside. He looks clean and well-fed, so he’s definitely not an almajiri. This person tries to get the boy to say where he’s from, but he’s unsuccessful. This person takes the boy in out of the kindness of their heart. There are very few such people these days, you know. The next day they hand over the boy to Mai Unguwa, who, in theory, knows everyone residing in his district. But the district is no longer a collection of huts, you understand?”

Garba swallowed. “Are you saying that—”

“And of course, it’s quite unfortunate that they can’t immediately report him missing because the police are, one might say, occupied. So, the boy is taken to an orphanage. A home for children abandoned, children lost, children forgotten, children far from home.”

Garba’s head throbbed. A rush of white-hot rage rushed through him as the man spoke. He had the impulse to seize the man, choke him, and force out the whereabouts of Umar from him. He didn’t remember lurching forward; he caught a grip of the man’s collar, but the man danced out of his reach. Garba spun. There was a whoosh as something sliced the air, and he was on his back, temple pounding, a noise in his ear like a church bell tolling. 

He must have been out for less than a second because he willed himself to his feet just as a dash of blue flitted out into the sun. Garba hurried towards the door, squinting at the light. He scrambled out and tottered about like a drunk trying desperately to find his balance. A bird sang somewhere in the trees. Garba ran down the path, parting the tall grass and slapping off insects that flew into his face. He stopped at the river; he could see the path stretching all the way to the highway, and it was empty. He drank in the cool breeze that wafted in from the river, a drastic change from the thick heat of the shack. A trio of giggling boys pushed a canoe into the water and jumped in as it cleared the bank. One of them stood, shielding his eyes and gazing into the distance as his companions worked the oars; he turned around as though he could feel Garba’s eyes on him. He was lean, somewhere in that stage between childhood and adolescence. The tails of his blue shirt danced as the canoe ferried them into the distance.

---

Ridwan Badamasi writes from the ancient city of Kano in northern Nigeria. His works have appeared in Praxis Magazine, Kalahari Review, 20.35 Africa, Efiko Magazine, and elsewhere. He’s the co-winner of the 2024 Nigeria NewsDirect Chapbook Series and the winner of the 2025 Awele Creative Trust Short Story Prize.

Cover credit: Ebumnobichukwu Agu.

“Gestation”

An editorial

It has been approximately nine months since our last issue was announced—the gestation period for a human child, and for Lọúnlọún, our fifth issue. Much has happened in the last few months within this project and without. We spent the year focusing on personal essays and memoirs under the title Witnessing, and we received grant funding from the FFAI, which covered our operations, website development, and compensation. In nine months, we have moved from how to secure a budget to how to manage a budget better, and back to how to secure it again, fingers crossed. Such is the beauty of learning for the first time.

Outside the journal, we have watched the literary and archival scene and met new friends and partners along the way. We have engaged institutions that share similar values and different missions, and we have also watched other institutions handle situations that set a precedent for how smaller institutions should or should not manage them. We have entered a world of artificial intelligence, and goodness! did we receive a large amount of AI slop. I was sure I would lose my mind! Especially in the presence of the question: How do you know it is artificially written? Even right now, I can point out three sentences in this short note of mine that look suspiciously artificial.

During this gestation cycle, I have also come to observe how the journal is perceived, having not humanised it in its construction. There are expectations that contributors and readers have of a faceless institution. Sometimes it is the presumption of finances which influences human talent, branding and compensation. It is the presumption of resources and expertise, political standing and even consistency. In modern times, the most efficient way to humanise a brand is to put a face to it, but I give these simple lines: this is an independent passion project operated by a team of volunteers. I wish we could compensate more, ask Oby Ezekwesili to write us a Witnessing piece and then retire the publishing year at Aké Arts & Book Festival. But alas, what we can do is give birth to this fifth issue.

This wooden issue, as with the previous issues, finds itself a theme by (if I may) divine coincidence. With stories set in Nairobi, Kano, Gorongosa, Kilosa, and Sharpeville, the issue predominantly explores state-sanctioned violence and repression and systemic coercion. The characters in these stories either find themselves directly on the receiving end of oppression, like Kovo in Ornguze’s 321, Nzalambi in Kilibwa’s Nzalambi, Udamugh in Geuya’s A Land with No Spirits, or M’Mwenda in mwĩhaki k.m’s Unshackled or indirectly, like Chimoio in Christian’s What the Grass Remembers. Some are on the receiving end of institution-sanctioned violence, like Garba and his family in Badamasi’s In the Shade of the Branch. These stories cut across themes of conflict, identity and hope, and I hope that they will be well received.

The contributors for this issue include Ridwan Badamasi, mwĩhaki k.m, Isaac Kilibwa, Halima Geuya, Eze Victor Christian, and Ornguze Nashima Nathaniel. The cover illustrations are by Ebumnobichukwu Agu, and the stories are edited by Fortune Akande, Angel Lawson, and Victor Ola-Matthew.

Beginning this Monday, August 31st, we will release each story in the issue over the next six weeks. Sign up to receive a newsletter each time we release a story. We don’t spam. We don’t have the human resources yet, but we do have a premium newsletter account to accommodate everyone and accommodate we must. Till we meet again.

Victor Ola-Matthew,

Founding Editor.

My cousin’s name is Dieu Merci, which translates to God, thank you, or Thank God in English, but I’ve always referred to him as God Mercy. I believe God put him on earth for a special duty: to break the spell of death. He is the lotus that grew out of mud. We were brought up together in a blended family and grew up like siblings through phone calls and computer screens, always in proximity to each other. When I confided in him about my sexuality, he mourned my old self with me. When I planned to publish my debut poetry collection, he bled the ink for me. The thought of him ever having to fight for his life never crossed my mind.

During one of the hardest periods of my life, Dieu Merci was there for me in ways our family lacked the words to convey. We connected through the unexpected loss of our relatives and how their deaths reshaped our lives. Ironically, the very same experiences that once brought us together eventually drove us apart, and we would spend the following years without contact. When we found our way back to each other, I learned that Dieu Merci had made a life for himself in Goma. A familiar terror ran down my spine.

Goma, when he spoke about it, sounded far more peaceful than the actual three-headed beast it had come to symbolise throughout my childhood. Growing up in a Congolese household with parents both from Eastern Congo, Goma was the no-go zone, the danger zone, the town you went to but never returned. I learned early on that to be Congolese was to live two separate lives: one in which you roamed the earth in exile, and another where you mourned the dead in your absence. There was no prize to be won in the comfort of a foreign land when you must make peace with death on the opposite side of the world. My father learned this lesson. I still picture him sitting on the edge of his bed, tears falling from his eyes after learning his brother had just passed away, following years of battling his demons at the bottom of a bottle of beer. This was the only time I ever saw my father cry.

Attack on Goma

On January 2, 2025, I chose not to celebrate my birthday. As Prince once said, you’re only born once, and I had long since come to terms with my second life, one in which January 2 no longer marked my birth, but instead recalled the day Colonel Mamadou Ndala was killed in an ambush. Despite the weight of that etched memory, our spirits were full of hope, and we looked forward to a promising year. It must have been a few days later that my family back home and I, God Mercy included, gathered for a meeting to discuss our goals, our dreams, and the future we planned to build for ourselves.

On January 24th 2025, we woke up to the news that M23 rebels had killed the governor of Goma, closing in from Sake; death spread its wings over its first victim. The air thickened again, my chest tightened, but God Mercy tried to reassure me that he could leave the city should the attacks intensify. If we were both honest with ourselves, all of the signs were already there. First, the abandoned tanks from the Congolese army were trailing through the streets just outside of my cousin’s apartment. We cracked jokes to lighten the mood and spoke about how the book launch could show the beauty of Congo instead of its blood, and death laughed quietly in a corner.

The next day, God Mercy called me, gunshots blasting through the phone. God, that awful sound. We both began to panic. The noise was unbearable, microscopic as it may have appeared in my little apartment, far away in Europe. Cancelled flights fell one by one like flies in the heatwave. A power outage meant God Mercy could only call me when necessary. I left messages to anyone, anybody who could shelter my cousin for a night or two, but nobody replied. They were in their own wrestle for survival.

By the morning, Goma had once again claimed its cursed name. I held God Mercy’s last message close to my chest: the gunshots struck so hard he couldn’t hear himself think. They blazed through the ring of the night, just like its trapped citizens, who knew no rest. And then, the silence. A silence so loud that my heart began skipping beats. After a short launch meeting with partners, I collapsed in the middle of the street and let out a scream, tears running down my face. My family back home tried to reassure me that God Mercy was strong, that he had been through many obstacles before, and that he would overcome.

The numbers popping up on my screen were no longer mere body counts  I had become familiar with so many times before; now, any one of them could be God Mercy. A week of full silence felt like an eternity. No message, no calls, no sign of life. My double lives now intertwined as death remained near. Although I had encountered death in the past, its presence felt different. It kept me restless, dissociated from the world, numb, and angry at myself. Perhaps I had now arrived at the final stage: helplessness.

In Vienna, we marched in protest against the killings taking place in Eastern Congo, but it seemed only the birds could hear us. “And what is this supposed to do?” One of my cousins replied to my Instagram story of Austrians marching on the street holding a Congolese flag in the air. In that thread of helplessness, I found myself asking the same question: If we, the Occident, were the ones who led the innocent to their deaths, to whom would a cry for help be directed? To whom were we peacefully marching if we were the ones arming the rebels? A difference in interest.

From Kinshasa to Kisangani, I watched as videos flooded social media, showing bareheaded Congolese running through the streets, marching to a different rhythm. Students, street vendors, merchants, all demanding that the government give them weapons so they could help their brothers and sisters in Eastern Congo. In the same breath, my cousin, with the previous remarks, messaged me to say that he had finally had enough. He must feed his rage, and he was going to join the Congolese army to put an end to our suffering. I argued against it; it was the same army the government had underfunded and left at the mercy of well-equipped rebel groups.

However, did I have the right to end his unrest? Yet again, I am reminded of the different perceptions of reality, the walls of privilege that separate our worlds, the difference between mourning contained by structure versus the mourning slowly transforming into bubbling anger amid chaos, and the intricate dance I perform as the child of once-immigrant parents, moving between them.

God Mercy survived, barely, but Goma did not survive him. Dead bodies lined the streets, ghosts ran in and out of houses, and after a week in hiding, he crossed the border into Rwanda for his first meal and some money. Nearly 3,000 Congolese people were killed in one week as the city fell under the control of the rebels. God Mercy, by the mercy of God, was not one of them.

---

Laurène Southe (b. 2000) is a writer based in Austria of Congolese heritage. Laurène used to attend the Vienna African Writers Club led by the African Studies of the University of Vienna. After a performance at the African Diaspora festival in Klagenfurt, she began taking her practice professionally. In 2022, Laurène took part in a group exhibition titled An Der Schönen Blauen Donau. During the Vienna Design Week in 2023, she performed her second group exhibition, A House is Not a Home. Laurène attended a writer residency at Echo Correspondence until the end of 2023, during which she completed her first full-length poetry collection titled Child of Congo. She has been published by Brittle Paper, The Shallow Tales Review, and the African Migration Report Poetry Anthology. As of late, Laurène exhibited in Graz at the Forum Stadtpark for Space & Time: the Dynamics of Extractivism, and was a guest author at the 48th Solothurn Literature Festival. She self-published her debut chapbook, Bullet Fragments from a Child of Congo, and is a co-founder of the first contemporary Congolese poetry anthology, set to release this year.

Cover credit: Ravanjie

There is an ugba tree at the edge of my grandmother’s compound in Oguta, Imo State, that has never been cut. My grandmother, Mama Chidinma, said it was older than the war. She said it stood through everything: through the sound of federal jets overhead, through the weeks when there was no salt, and through the morning they buried her brother under moonlight because the daytime was too dangerous for the living. She said the tree had seen things she could not speak of. And so, as a child, I would press my palm against its bark and try to listen.

I am the grandchild of Biafra. I did not live through the war; I was born decades after January 1970, when Lieutenant Colonel Ojukwu fled the country and the Republic of Biafra formally surrendered. But the war did not end for our family when the guns went silent. It ended, if ever, in fragments. 

What My Grandmother Carried

Mama Chidinma was seventeen when the war began. She had been living in Enugu, where her father, my great-grandfather, Ichie Nwofor, worked as a primary school headmaster. In May 1967, when Ojukwu declared the Republic of Biafra, there was, she told me, a kind of wild joy in the streets; the relief of a people who had finally named their wounds. 

The federal military government’s response to the secession was swift: General Yakubu Gowon ordered what he called a ‘police action’—a phrase that, my grandmother said, was the first lie of the war. By July 1967, federal troops invaded the Biafran territory in what became a full-scale military campaign. Within months, the federal government imposed a naval and land blockade that cut off Biafra from food imports. This was not incidental; the blockade was a deliberate strategy—starvation as a weapon of war.

My grandmother’s family fled Enugu when the city fell in October 1967. They walked. She was responsible for her younger sister, Ada, who was eleven, and her baby brother, Obiora, whom she carried on her back. Ichie Nwofor led them south, towards Oguta, following other families along roads thick with people who had lost the same things. She told me they ate ugwu leaves. She told me Ada’s legs swelled. She told me that when Obiora was very still on her back, she would hum, and when he moved his fingers against her neck, she knew to keep going.

Obiora did not survive the war. He died in 1969 of kwashiorkor, the protein-deficiency disease that became the face of the Biafran famine. His face is in one of the photographs. Eyes too large, belly swollen, the skin of a child who has eaten nothing for too long. My grandmother kept no photograph of him. She kept only his name, which she said aloud every year on the anniversary of his death, alone in her room, when she thought no one could hear.

I want to be precise here, because precision is a form of love: Obiora Nwofor died on a Wednesday. He was two years old. He weighed, my grandmother estimated, as much as a handful of cassava. She buried him with her father’s help in the compound of a stranger who had taken them in. She did not cry at the burial. She had not learned yet what she had lost. That understanding would come later, in waves, for the rest of her life.

Twenty Pounds

My grandfather, Papa Emeka, was twenty-three when the war ended. He had fought with the Biafran army, although he never fully disclosed in what capacity. He spoke instead about the engineers, the improvised armouries, the students who became soldiers in a single afternoon. 

When Biafra fell in January 1970, the federal government announced a policy of reconciliation, reconstruction, and reintegration; the ‘3Rs’, as it became known. General Gowon declared that there was ‘No Victor, No Vanquished.’ My grandfather said this was the second lie of the war. 

The evidence was the money. Every Igbo person who had held Biafran pounds was permitted to exchange them for Nigerian currency, but regardless of how much Biafran currency they held, the government set the exchange rate at a flat 20 Nigerian pounds per person. A trader who had saved 3,000 Biafran pounds received 20 pounds. A farmer who had buried his life’s earnings in a clay pot received twenty pounds. A schoolteacher, a market woman, a carpenter—twenty pounds each.

My grandfather received twenty pounds. He had been, before the war, a tradesman who dealt in dry goods between Onitsha and Port Harcourt. He had savings. He had a bicycle. He had plans. After the exchange, he had twenty pounds, no bicycle—it had been commandeered during the war—and a scar on his left arm from a piece of shrapnel he had dug out himself with a kitchen knife because there was no doctor available. 

This dispossession was not individual. It was collective and it was thorough. The economic devastation of Igboland after 1970 set the community back by at least a generation. Properties that Igbo people had owned in the North and in Lagos had been seized; federal appointments rarely reached them; oil revenues flowed through Port Harcourt to Abuja and back, largely without benefit to the Igbo communities from whose land the oil came. 

My grandfather rebuilt anyway. This is what I mean when I say I am the grandchild of Biafra; not just of the war, but also of the rebuilding. He began again with twenty shillings and what he knew. He bought kerosene in small quantities and resold it at a margin. He saved. He bought a parcel of land. He built a single room, then added a second. He married my grandmother, who was, he told me, ‘the bravest person I had ever met, and I had met soldiers’, and they had seven children, and they sent every one of them to university.

The Language of What Is Not Said

Growing up in my grandparents’ compound, I learned a third language alongside Igbo and English: the language of the unsaid. It was spoken when my grandmother left the room when the television news turned to military matters, or when no one in the family said the word ‘Biafra’ at the dinner table: the word still had weight, and still carried the full mass of everything it meant.

I was twelve when I first heard the full story. My grandmother was sick. Not gravely, but enough to be confined to bed, which meant she had time, and I had proximity. I sat at the foot of her bed for three afternoons in a row. She told me about Enugu. About walking. About Obiora. About the tree in the compound, which she had planted herself from a seedling her father had given her before the bombing began, the last ordinary thing she remembered receiving as a child.

She told me that for years after the war, she could not see a thin child without her heart seizing. She told me she had nightmares in which she was still on the road, still carrying Obiora, and she would wake and reach across to her husband’s side of the bed to assure herself that the walking was over. She told me that she had prayed, truly prayed, only twice in her life: once when Ada’s leg swelling finally went down and once when her first child was born whole and fat and screaming, and she said the screaming was the most beautiful sound she had ever heard, because it meant the child had enough air in its lungs, enough flesh on its bones.

What the Tree Knows

The ugba tree in my grandmother’s compound is still standing. I know this because I was there last harmattan season, and I pressed my palm against it the way I did as a child. It is broader now. Its roots have pushed up through the earth around its base in great knuckled ridges so that, walking near it, you have to watch your step. My grandmother is eighty-one. She moves slowly, but she moves, and on the morning I arrived, she was already in the compound when I woke, sitting in her low chair in the shade of that tree, shelling melon seeds.

We did not talk about the war that morning. We shelled melon seeds together, and she told me about the neighbour’s goat, which had gotten into her garden again, and about the price of palm oil in the market, which she found outrageous. She laughed at something I said, and the laugh was so complete, so effortless, that for a moment I could only look at her.

This woman walked from Enugu. This woman buried Obiora under moonlight. This woman received 20 pounds for her husband’s savings, planted an ugba tree, raised seven children and sat here in the shade of the tree she planted and laughed at her grandchild.

I do not know how to explain what it means to be descended from people like this. There is no adequate word for it in English, and even in Igbo, the vocabulary of survival can sound like an abstraction until it sits across from you in a low chair, shelling melon seeds. The history books will tell you about the Nigeria-Biafra War in geopolitical terms—the Cold War interests of Britain and the Soviet Union, the oil, and the ethnic arithmetic of a postcolonial state that was never designed to be governed peaceably. All of that is true, and all of it matters. But what the history books will not tell you is the precise feeling of Obiora’s fingers against your neck on a road south of Enugu and what it means to carry that feeling for sixty years and still get up in the morning and shell melon seeds and laugh. 

The Ugba Tree Will Remain

My grandmother is eighty-one. She has not, in six decades, received an acknowledgement from Nigeria for what her family lost in the war. Not a formal apology. Not a recognition. Not even a museum exhibit in Oguta that says, ‘Here, in this community, people suffered this, and we remember them.’ She has not asked for these things either. She is, as I said, a woman of great practicality. But I am her grandchild, and I am asking. Not for her sake alone, but for Obiora’s. For all the Obioras who did not live to ask for themselves.

When my grandmother is gone—and I pray God gives her many more harmattan seasons—the ugba tree will remain. It will go on growing in the compound as it has for more than sixty years, its roots deeper in the earth than anyone can see and its shadow wide enough that three people can sit beneath it comfortably. My children, if I have them, will sit under it. I will tell them, ‘Your great-grandmother planted this tree.’ She carried her brother on her back, and he died, and she planted this tree, and it is still here.

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Bill Nwonwu is a passionate young writer, student, and creative thinker from Nigeria. Bill has worked on essays exploring social issues, African democracy, Christian theology, poverty, and early Christian history.

Cover credit: Ifeoluwasé Taiwo

What once felt inseparable from my memory has, in the years since, begun to fade. The more I look inward to remember the details—the scene, atmosphere—the clearer it becomes that time has a way of blurring even the events and things we thought we would never forget. The events of the 2020 End SARS protests shouldn’t be one that I would find difficult to remember, especially its rough edges, but what is life if not the slow fading of memory?

Before my encounter with the protest that would soon have a significance on the lives of Nigerian youths, I had often heard of stories of protests, the civil war, and of ethnic rivalries that spiralled into chaos. These stories came either from elders or were encountered in historical accounts. However, this event would take what once existed as fiction to me and turn it into reality.

I was a student living in Ibadan when the End SARS protests occurred. I was into graphics design, learning the intricacies of, and techniques employed in making compelling visuals. On a not-so-vivid date, afternoon precisely, a few days into the protests, my colleagues and I in the graphics shop heard of the killing of a primary school boy by a police officer at Ojoo. The boy, returning from school after closing, was hit by a stray bullet during a confrontation between the police and protesters. He died instantly. Within a moment of hearing this news, everything stood still. Seconds stretched into minutes; grief and fear held me. Grief for a boy I never knew, and fear for my family members who had businesses in this area.

Instinctively, I borrowed a phone from a colleague to make a call to my mother, who had her shop close to the police station on the street where the boy was killed. For some minutes, she didn’t pick up, and this complicated the troubled emotions inside me. I kept having the wildest imaginations, and a lot of questions kept popping up in my head: Where could she be? Hope she hadn’t fallen victim to the chaos following the boy’s death? Where could she have left her phone? I kept having these thoughts. After about three attempts at calling her, she picked up. Relief washed over me. The several questions disappeared, and all I could ask was why she didn’t pick up early.

She said she wasn’t in the shop when the trouble started. She had been on her way there before she heard gunshots and ‘had to run for her dear life.’ She assured me she was safe. I didn’t inquire further; knowing she was safe returned my peace of mind. I dropped the call and returned the phone. Everyone in the shop was a bit apprehensive. One of my colleagues expressed pity for the boy’s parents, while another prayed that the incident would not escalate. We were wary of what the situation could cause. Already, the nation’s stability was fragile, even with the protests that had so far been considered peaceful. But now everything could, it seemed, go the other way from this incident.

Shortly after, our boss parked in front of the shop. She entered and asked if we had heard the latest news. We answered in affirmation. She was distraught, feeling sympathy for the bereaved family. We resolved into discussion for the rest of the day as customers had reduced in their numbers. Those who had promised to come back for their designs couldn’t do so again. And those who were in the shop before the news hurried home for safety.

Before the unfortunate incident, we had planned to design some t-shirts to show our solidarity for the #EndSARS movement. The inscriptions would read ‘Soro Soke,’ which meant ‘Speak up.’ My creative vision for the design was a microphone with the words booming out of it. A colleague wanted to use the iconic photograph of activist Aishat Yesufu from the protest. Many of us explored different ways to bring these two ideas to life. When we finished, I copied them onto a flash drive to take to Mokola, where the final printing was to take place.

On my way there, I noticed some shops and stall owners closing up. There were only a few people on the road I was walking on. Transport fare had skyrocketed. Yet, this did not dissuade people from boarding cars to take them home. The atmosphere was tense. Some people were still in their shops selling goods, and others went about their normal trade; after all, the chaos was slightly far off from where they were. In this moment, I became conscious of the varying degrees of decisions or options available to humans. While some people were running for their lives, others chose to sit still and go about their normal business like nothing had happened or was happening.

Then it dawned on me that I myself hadn’t thought of how I would get home safely after my Mokola trip. I realised I wasn’t exempt from the situation unfolding in front of my eyes. Maybe I had not considered it because I knew I would have to pass through Ojoo to my destination, and I could have waited till nighttime, when the chaos would have subsided, to catch a bus home. Or maybe it was because there was another road, along Ajibode, that I could have taken to avoid encountering any problems. All these options were available to me, and they explain why I remained calm even though the atmosphere around me suggested I be otherwise.

I got into a cab going to Mokola. There was silence until someone broke it with commentary on the present situation in the country. Other passengers followed suit with their takes, and the conversation broadened. I listened attentively to their opinions, and all were critical of the excesses of the SARS—Special Anti-Robbery Squad—in the country. On a number of occasions, I myself had been waylaid by some SARS officials and, on no grounds of a criminal offence, been told I had to follow them to their station. My ‘offence’ was ‘looking like a yahoo boy’—an internet fraudster—because of the way I was supposedly dressed. There were a number of other horrendous things youths were subjected to, making my co-passengers’ opinions valid. Even if you were trying to do your job and curb the ills of society, it must be done in a sane and orderly manner, someone said, and he couldn’t have been more right.

These early moments are those I can still recall faintly. Dropped the design at the printer, but what the atmosphere felt like, I can not remember anymore. Was it peaceful? Did the situation happening in Ojoo have an effect on people here in Mokola? These memories, I dare say, have escaped my mind. What is more baffling for me is how I have lost track of the sequence of events. There was a protest at the Bodija Market Junction. When this happened, I can not precisely say. Was it the day I came back from Mokola, or was it the following days of the protest? These are memories I would have loved to restore for posterity. Whether the Bodija protesters were made up of youths only, with no older people in attendance, is hard to say. What I can remember, however in fragments, was people moving along the road, some on foot, others in cars, a few perched on car boots holding placards. Most of what was written on them has faded from memory, but phrases like “Enough is Enough,” “Soro Soke,” and “End SARS Brutality” have remained with me. I remember, too, walking behind a group of protesters. On the part of the road they did not occupy, there were burnt tyres, thick smoke rising into the air. Whether the protest was on the verge of being hijacked, I can not clearly say. But I can still hear a voice insisting that it should remain peaceful, pushing back against fears of disruption.

My trip home after returning from Mokola is now hazy in my memory. Whether I later passed through Ojoo or followed another route has become difficult to determine. What I remember was the debate by passengers in the car I boarded on which road to take between the available two. Did I see the burnt police station, the scattered marketplace, and the goods pillaged? The mood in this vicinity—whether weary, tense, or gloomy—I can not recollect. Or maybe we later passed the second road, which might be the reason the images remain difficult to conjure in my mind.

While these are the fragments I can recall of the End SARS protest, what makes the blurring so personal for me is this: I no longer clearly remember the burning of the police station by protesters or when the clashes that led to the burning occurred. What bridges this now is a gap—an absence where something once real was. Today, the station stands reconstructed, wearing a new look, which could make a visitor doubt if a protest or burning ever happened.

And for the dates of the clashes, their disappearance might have been shaped by how prominent the Lekki toll-gate incident, in Lagos, became, taking the spotlight from similar events of the protests in other parts of the country. Even when the End SARS remembrance is observed every year, the protests in Lagos receive the most attention, standing at the forefront of national discourse—however, rightfully so.

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Azeez Adekunle is a Nigerian writer interested in music, culture, and the intersections of memory and social experience.

Cover credit: Victor Ola-Matthew.