can go and create one for yourself. In this world you will take your place as the insignificant speck that you are and you must conform to the rules as laid down by our forefathers. You must not try to improve on anything that they found good enough. You seem to have forgotten that it was the love for inventing new things that caused the destruction of the First People. Don’t tell me that you have never heard the Seven High Laws of Living, because I know that you have.’
There is something known as hope, and that something has the habit of shining brightest when a man gets most hopelessly lost in the forest of fear and despair. Hope is a false star shining brightest on the darkest night of one’s life. In the words of the High Accuser, the doomed boy Malinge saw a glimmering thread of hope and he seized it and held fast to it. A man about to die loses all fear. He throws all respect and dignity to the Seven Winds and says and does exactly as he pleases, and Malinge did exactly that.
‘You doddering old hypocrites!’ he screamed at the top of his squeaky voice. ‘You are not fit to sit in judgment over a lame and half-dead fly. You say I broke a law by inventing something new. Why then is our Queen Marimba not being accused of inventing all those new instruments with which she makes music?’
Malinge’s hope of revenge on the woman who had brought him to trial was drowned in a flood of laughter that followed immediately on his impudent outburst. The assembly laughed long and loud till the High Accuser had to stand up and roar for silence.
‘You utter fool!’ he bellowed. ‘You miserable, impudent rat! Marimba is an immortal, an appointed servant of the gods on this earth, and what she does is done at the command of the most High Gods. Royal Marimba, pronounce sentence upon this mud-wallowing dog.’
Marimba stood up and her great eyes were bright in the moonlight. There was also a great sadness in those eyes that was beyond human understanding. Her voice was soft and gentle as she said: ‘Malinge, I am not your executioner and I find myself unable to order your death. But I am not going to let you escape lightly. The High Gods tell me that you are an habitual and stubborn law-breaker, who acts thus for the sheer pleasure it gives you. It also gives you pleasure to see innocent animals die in agony. I now order that you be taken away from here and your legs broken with clubs so that you may never walk again, and your hands destroyed by paralysing your fingers.’
Marimba looked down at the ugly snare that Malinge had invented and shuddered. There was no mistaking it – the thing was deadly and only a madman, a monster of cruelty, could have invented this sort of thing. No wonder the old men had overruled her and had thrown Malinge to the crocodiles just before daybreak.
Then Marimba got down on her knees and began to work. She dismantled the long trapdoor consisting of oblong flat pieces of wood tied together with buckskin thongs and gut. She made small alterations to the pieces of wood so that they were no longer of the same length and thickness. She ordered her handmaidens to bring her a number of cusana gourds of different sizes and to open each end, making a big hole in one end and a small one in the side. Her next order was equally peculiar: the gourds were to be put in a large clay bowl at the gate of the village and word spread that all the old women of the village were to pass their morning water into the big bowl for three successive days. This, explained the great princess, was not only to place a permanent blessing upon the instrument; it would also make the gourds resilient and durable.
Afterwards the gourds were boiled in animal fat to make them more resilient and waterproof. With her own delicate hands Marimba assembled the instrument while vast crowds of Wakambi men and women watched in awe and astonishment. She first assembled the hardwood frame with four carved legs, and along a flat piece of wood that connected the two ends of the oblong frame she stuck the gourds by their mouths firmly with tree resin.
She then covered each of the holes in the sides of the gourds with silky laminae which she obtained from the nests of the munyovu wasp, also stuck firmly with tree resin. The gourds were arranged under the central plank in gradually diminishing size. Then came the pieces of wood that formed the trapdoor, also arranged in the same order according to size, each piece directly across a corresponding gourd resonator. The strips of wood were suspended above their resonators by two lengths of thong.
Thus the xylophone – the marimba – was born. Soon this melodious companion of the feast and the dance was sending its notes through the festive air, each note as gentle as a maiden’s promise. The xylophone is a living instrument which can bend its notes to fit the blood-warming melody of a wedding song or harshen its voice and convey to the human mind the clamour and dark horrors of war – or the thrilling excitement and suspense of the hunt. Even without the accompaniment of a human voice one can tell a whole story with the xylophone alone. One can use the voice of this holy instrument to create various moods in one’s audience. While other instruments speak to the ears, the xylophone speaks to the heart and the soul. Indeed it is an instrument worthy of bearing the name of the Goddess of Music.
In building xylophones only hard and well seasoned woods must be used. Great care must be exercised in selecting the wood for the various notes. There must be no pores, or the slightest crack.
Timber from a hardwood tree once struck by lightning is excellent. These sacred instruments must never be built in times of war and famine; neither must they be made by people who are sterile or spiritually perverted, or physically deformed in any way.
‘Great Marimba,’ – the voice of the tremendous woman, a cook, was low and full of great love and respect – ‘it is with great regret that your servants failed to cook your favourite dish of stamped peanuts today, for lo, the old mortar has finally worn through its bottom and is now nothing but a useless hollow log. It is only good for firewood now and we must ask the woodcarvers to fashion us a new one.’
‘Do not burn the old mortar, Oh Mandingwe,’ said the princess with a mysterious smile. ‘The truth is that I have been waiting for something like this to happen for quite some time. I shall transform it into something which will add yet more pleasure to the lives of the people whom the gods have entrusted to me to rule and guide along the paths of peace and wisdom.’
‘Marimba is indeed the mother of wisdom,’ whispered the fat cook.
‘Nobody is the parent of wisdom in this world, Mandingwe. I am nothing but a puppet serving the will of Those-we-do-not-see, and I try to serve as best I can. Now bring me the skin of a newly killed wildebeest, and also send Kamago the woodcarver to me.’
‘As you say, Oh Marimba,’ said the cook respectfully, falling on her face in obeisance and then crawling backwards out of the Royal Hut.
Marimba turned the old nut-grinding mortar into the first drum the world had ever seen and for the first time since the dawn of creation the forests shook to the pulsing beat of a drum. This instrument became so popular with the Wakambi that almost everybody wanted to have a drum in his own hut. The woodcarvers were very busy indeed. The princess Marimba made them of different sizes, each with a different quality of sound, from the loud hollow boom to the gentle pow-pow. The big ones were known as the ‘male drums’; smaller ones were ‘female drums’, and the very small ones that children could carry around were known as ‘sparrow drums’.
The largest drums she ordered to be reserved for purposes of worship only and these had the symbol of the River of Eternity carved into them in a continuous pattern all round, and on many of these drums were also carved symbols representing passages from the great poems of creation and sacred symbols of Spiritual Secret
