his son’s feet like a beggarly slave for the suggestion he had made and the next few days saw a brisk trade between Lumbedu and the ships of the Strange Ones, which came crawling like many-legged sea serpents up the Zambezi river. Lumbedu’s wives and daughters would put full baskets of corn or yams in a particular place on the bank of the Zambezi and then beat a tattoo on a big drum before retiring into the forest. The ship of the Strange Ones would then edge nearer to the bank and its occupants would pick up the baskets, leaving a pile of spears in exchange. Within five days, the witchdoctor had enough weapons to arm close to two hundred men and it was then that Gumbu gathered together a small army of ruffianly cut-throats and armed them with the deadly metal spears and swords. In one short, savage battle he overthrew the High Chief of the land, Chungwe, and slew him on the doorstep of his own Royal Hut.
Lumbedu became a High Chief in one day. The gross, whining and utterly selfish wretch suddenly found himself waddling like an overfed vulture at the head of twenty thousand subjects and the heady fumes of the mead of power and ambition made him drunk as yesterday’s nightmare. He wanted to conquer until he ruled the whole world and traded and pleaded with the Strange Ones for more weapons and still more.
His wild, undisciplined armies tore like wildfire across the shocked land and chief after chief fell before the new weapons of metal, and tribe after tribe was enslaved. Gumbu’s savage hordes swept southward into the land of the ancient people known as the Ba-Tswana who, blessed by the Great Spirit itself centuries earlier, had been living in peace for generations. Here, in this land, Gumbu demanded that the defeated tribal chief, Mulaba, should give him his daughter Temana as a wife and as a hostage, and he took this lovely maiden back home with him to Lumbedu’s kraal after leaving governors to hold the land in his father’s name.
On the way back, however, Gumbu was stricken by the eye disease called karkatchi and became totally blind in less than six weeks. Then one night Temana led the blind Gumbu to the very edge of a great cliff and pushed him over before leaping to her own death. The legends say that where Temana fell at the base of the cliff a cluster of tiny sweet-smelling red wild flowers soon grew, the origin of the letemana flowers which still grow there among the rocks to this day.
Meanwhile Lumbedu had become the undisputed chief of the biggest empire the tribes had ever seen – an empire that sprawled from the Inyangani mountains to the shores of the western ocean. What is so amusing about Lumbedu’s empire and reign is that it lasted only one full year and eight moons.
While Lumbedu bathed in the sunshine of power and drank deep from his beer-pot; while his woman Ojoyo bedecked herself with hundreds of gleaming ornaments and had numerous slaves to obey her every wish and the land trembled at the mention of Lumbedu’s name, a strange conference was taking place in the great grass village the Strange Ones had built for themselves at the mouth of the Zambezi river.
Four men sat around a wooden table inside a great four-cornered grass hut. One of these men was a tall bearded red-haired giant with the scars of many battles on his massive body and the other was an old man with long hair and a flowing beard that was as white as mountain snow. This old man wore broad circlets of gold, studded with precious stones, around his head and he wore a long tunic of purple cloth, over which he had thrown a flaming red cloak. The third man was of the same race as the odd man who had saved Lulinda and he had a white loincloth painted with strange and mysterious signs in red and black. On his head he wore a headdress of blue and red striped cloth and a yellow cobra reared menacingly above his forehead from the golden band around his head.
The fourth member of the council was a happy-looking brown-haired young man with blue eyes who entered the council hut long after the first three had been sitting. He had entered the hut with mischief dancing in his bright eyes and had then proceeded to make faces at the red-bearded giant before giving his big broken nose a playful tweak.
‘You are late, my son,’ said the old Strange One.
‘That I am, my father, is your fault. You gave me a wife at my tender age and now half my nights are without sleep. You see . . .’
‘Be quiet, the King awaits your report and not details of what you do at night with your wife,’ roared the red-haired giant.
‘My son,’ said the white-haired King gravely, ‘we are here to discuss a serious matter and not to jest. All we want to know is whether our plan is working properly – the plan of supplying the fat Lumbedu with weapons under the pretence of trade and then letting him conquer his own fellow people for us. We would like to know whether he is still unaware of our intent to come in once he has finished and to take over from him.’
‘Our plan is working well, beyond our wildest dreams, my father,’ said the young man. ‘Even now our bloated greasy friend has added yet another tribe to his empire and it will not be long before a great empire, with thousands of slaves, falls into our hands like ripe fruit.’
‘We cannot afford to wait much longer – we must strike now. Where we had a hundred separate tribes to conquer, we now have only one fat son of a vile hippopotamus to strike down and all his empire shall be in our hands,’ said the man with the loincloth.
‘I agree,’ said the King. ‘We have waited far too long. Tonight we must attack that dog’s village.’
Lumbedu was feeling on top of the very stars, let alone on top of the world, and he was as happy as a starveling beggar’s stomach which has just digested a stolen fowl. He was as happy as a lion with a million teeth and a thousand mouths.
Now if Lumbedu was as proud of his being a chief as a lion with many mouths, his First Wife Ojoyo was as proud of her suddenly finding herself a queen, as a vulture with many gizzards. Every morning she was carried in an elaborately carved litter to the riverside by a veritable bevy of beauties from her husband’s harem and there she was bathed, smeared with crushed tambuti leaves all over until she smelt like a big fat sweet-scented flower. Then she was bedecked with copper necklaces and bracelets. She feasted all day long on wild honey, corn cakes, very fatty meat, and greasy yam stew.
She was shrill and cruel to the rest of the wives of Lumbedu and she could kill any one of them on the slightest provocation. She was, however, a woman with two guilty secrets lying heavy on her rotten soul and both these secrets would have earned her a slow and miserable death at the hands of the Tribal Avengers, had they become known. Firstly, she had poisoned the kind-hearted Vunakwe who had been Lumbedu’s Second Wife and had buried her secretly in the hut where she, Ojoyo, always slept. And she had lied to Lumbedu by saying that Vunakwe had fallen into the Zambezi.
Secondly, Ojoyo had a secret lover whom she kept imprisoned in a cave in the forest and whom she always visited whenever the flame of desire burnt within her. This secret lover was a young boy of eighteen years and Ojoyo knew that seducing a person of that age who had not been initiated into adulthood according to custom was an offence punishable by death. No persons under twenty-five are allowed to so much as kiss, or be kissed by, members of the opposite sex.
Ojoyo had never asked her prisoner lover who his parents were and all she knew about the youth was that his name was Kadimo. Kadimo had been captured by Lumbedu’s warriors while wandering aimlessly in the forest and, being a member of an unknown tribe, he had been brought into Lumbedu’s kraal for questioning and execution. Kadimo, however, could not speak the language of Lumbedu’s tribe and his only answer to the harsh questioning by the warriors as to the name and whereabouts of his tribe, had been nothing but a series of pathetic head-shakings. Ojoyo had suddenly felt herself drawn to the godlike youth Kadimo and had asked Lumbedu to give her the captive ostensibly for torture and killing, but in
