style="font-size:15px;"> ‘Yes, the gods have spoken, and they have not spoken for us.’
‘Tell me, what did they say? When?’
‘You know Samboa, our diviner far away in Nchusa village, the— ’
‘Yes, yes, I know him. What?’
‘I went to see him to ask him to look into the future and tell me if my harvest would be good. You know that problems have been following me these past years –’ At the intense look in Temkeu’s face, she returned to the story. ‘Yes, I went to see him to ask if my harvest would be good. Hm! The kind of thing that he told me made me to start running from Nchusa right to Mumba. Hm!’
‘Hm what? Talk! What did he tell you?’
‘He told me about my grandchild whom the gods sent back to life. He said that death might again steal her soon. He said that …’
Temkeu turned around, fished Fatti out, grasped her wrist and pulled her all the way back to Tchafo’s shrine. Thrusting her forward and watching as she rubbed her sore wrist, he voiced his desire: ‘I do not know what the gods want from this child, but all I ask is that you protect her. Keep her in this world.’
‘A one-year-old spotless white duck,’ Tchafo, who was sitting with his legs folded in, said without looking up. It seemed he had not moved from where Temkeu had last seen him. ‘What I need to appease the gods and call on their protection is a one-year-old spotless white duck.’
When Temkeu returned an hour later with the token, Tchafo pulled Fatti forward and asked her to revert to her birth attire. One clothing-piece over her head and nudity appeared. Tchafo took his place in front of her. Using a blade dug out from one of his many clay pots, he branded her chaste skin with three small lacerations on the outer parts of her wrists, her elbows, the sides of her ribs, the back of her neck, the split of her buttocks, the outer sides of her knees and her ankles. Then, while chanting an incantation, he massaged some black herbal mélange into the cuts. Fatti’s flinching and slight groans went unnoticed as he continued to send the mélange home with all his force. As if to justify the application of pressure, he explained that the medicine had to merge with her blood in order to form the scars which were to protect her from any evil spirits on her trail.
‘You shall not bathe for three days.’ That was the only effort Fatti had to contribute towards the success of the operation. ‘Take this and swallow.’ Tchafo handed her a bowl of gloop. ‘It tastes like Aloe Vera and earwax combined, but it is accurate like the predictions of the gods and efficient like Tchafo.’
‘Since you are not to bathe for three days –’ Temkeu said to Fatti on their way home ‘– you can stay away from the farm for three days.’
‘Thank you, Papa.’
As soon as he walked into his hut, Temkeu approached his skulls, words of supplication tumbling from his mouth: ‘This matter now lies in your hands. I have done what is in my power to appease the gods to act in my favour. I count on you to do the rest. You know that I need this child here with me in the land of the living – that is why you sent her back to me. Please do not take her again before … before … Please just give me more time with her.’
That night Temkeu retired over a jug of palm wine and later on Achile’s body. The night was not so good for Nkem who got out of bed with the puffy eyes of one who had not seen sleep at all. It had taken a brawl for Mefo to allow Fatti to spend the night with her. Standing by the bed, she looked down at Fatti lying on the hay mattress. The cuts on Fatti’s bare torso looked up at her. She sighed and walked outside.
Just as the bells alerting Christians that they had thirty more minutes before the start of 6 00 a.m Mass rang, Nkem rushed back into her hut and to the bed. ‘Fatti, wake up. Fatti.’ She shook the child out of slumber. ‘Wake up, Fatti.’
‘Mama?’
‘Yes, wake up and let us go for Mass.’
Rubbing her eyes and scratching her stomach, Fatti got up and aimed for the door, but before she had taken two steps, she tripped over a gourd and kicked the mortar.
‘Come, I will help you. Where is your chewing stick?’
Five minutes later, as they wiped off the dew from the grass with their bare feet, Fatti asked, ‘Is something happening in church, Mama?’
‘I just want Father to pray for you.’
‘Okay, Mama.’
The fierce cold made them billow steam with each word. It turned their skins to a bed of taut goose pimples and increased the hardness of the calluses on their soles and palms. Nevertheless, they hurried on, letting nothing prevent them from catching up with the appointment with God. They left behind women with cainjas strapped on their backs and young men strolling lazily, chewing sticks sticking out of their mouth. Aside from the whistling of the cold wind, the air also bore the sound of dry corn grains bouncing against the iron walls of a corn mill and that of exploding gunpowder. When the distinct cry of the juju gong commanding all women to opt for blindness met up with them, they immediately halted, turned their heads to the bush and waited until the sound of the juju, which was returning from or heading to a burial or death celebration, faded in the distance.
Almost thirty minutes after they set out, Nkem and Fatti finally arrived at the church door and crossed the boundary into serenity. Though the church had existed only for about a year, Nkem and a handful of other women, like Suum’s mother, had made it the most regular place they visited, second only to their farms – and it was only after daily morning Mass that many of these new converts set out with hoes and cainjas. Such swift attachment to so alien a culture had not gone unnoticed by other villagers. Of the many rumours circulating on their account, the most prominent was that the white man had charmed them. But how? Some villagers had taken it upon themselves to dig out the truth. They had returned from spy missions to the white man’s haven with the theory that the charm was put in the wafer: ‘The white man eats a large piece, prepared differently, but gives our people very small slices.’
Even before the village had time to digest the charm theory, others had moved on to analyse the wafer-size evidence: ‘Our people, in other parts of the country, labour hard in the fields to grow the wheat and produce the flour. Our women, in the convents, prepare the bread. The white man comes and all he does is say a few words over it; yet he eats the greater share!’
The more they speculated, the more theories they devised. At the end of the day, the white man was not only considered as a lazy glutton but also an egoist who drank alone while the natives ate and swallowed saliva.
As time passed, the villagers’ concerns had moved from the rapid adhesion of the women to the priest’s lifestyle: ‘We need at least three women before we feel there is a piece of manhood in us. But look at this man who survives without even a quarter of a woman? He is not normal!’ A few words but repeated over and over by many mouths.
The Christians did not give in without a fight, ‘Our priest, our man of God, is a special man. God did not use a woman’s rib to make him. God used his own rib. So a woman kills our priest like salt kills an earthworm.’ Even these many words from Fr. Maxworth Cain’s few supporters did not prevent the sceptics from growing in number and propagating their theory further. Everyone in the quarter knew the songs that had been composed to describe him.
What inspired Nkem and the other adherents to follow the new faith? Was it some deficiencies of their own traditional
