On the fateful day when the Strange Ones had finally decided to attack Lumbedu’s village during the coming night, Lumbedu and Ojoyo had been feasting in their great hut from early morning to late afternoon. They had been celebrating twenty-five years of marriage according to tribal custom; they had eaten together a whole raw flamingo and then drunk a bowl of milk mixed with honey. They continued their gigantic feast with fowls and roasted meat washed down with pots full of cornbeer – till they passed into the valley of unconsciousness together. Now nobody else in Lumbedu’s kraal had been invited to this private feast, because only the man and his wife should be present during the ceremony of the ‘Eating of the Flamingo’. The result of this was that, although Lumbedu and Ojoyo were lying drunk and insensible in their hut, everyone else in the Great Kraal was as sober as the morning breeze.
A man came running into the kraal at about midnight – he had been running through the forest for he knew not how long – and he had come to warn Lumbedu that the Strange Ones were advancing up the southern bank of the Zambezi in full force and that their intentions were definitely not friendly, as the now dead villagers whose headman this man had been, had found out. The man found sentries at the gate of Lumbedu’s kraal and to them he whispered his story before he collapsed at their feet.
‘I am the headman of the village of Lumoja – quickly, warn the High Chief that the Strange Ones are coming. They mean war – they have killed all the people in my village and will soon be here.’
While two of the guards ran to warn everybody in the kraal, one stopped to help the fallen man to his feet. But he discovered that the man’s back was covered in blood and that there was a long deep wound under his left shoulder-blade. Only sheer willpower and great courage had kept this brave man running for so long, while badly wounded.
Panic reigned supreme in Lumbedu’s kraal that dark and star-spangled night. People fled naked out of the threatened kraal into the doubtful safety of the forests. Screams tore the night as some were pounced upon by leopards and night-hunting lions. Instead of standing and preparing to fight to the death in the kraal of their High Chief, the undisciplined and disloyal warriors of Lumbedu launched their fleet of battle canoes and escaped into the night carrying off Lumbedu’s many wives and concubines with them to safety across the Zambezi.
Meanwhile Lumbedu and Ojoyo still lay in drunken stupor inside their hut where they had defied the best efforts of their subjects and children to wake them up. An hour before dawn something must have warned Ojoyo because she stirred uneasily and woke up. A few moments later she crawled out of the hut, urged by a strange sense of uneasiness that suddenly burst into flower in her soul. She called out to the night guards at the gate, but no one answered. The whole kraal was mysteriously deserted.
This stunning fact penetrated deep into Ojoyo’s drunken brain and a terrible fear tore through her, leaving her as sober as the morning dew.
Then somewhere in the forest she heard the steady sounds of marching feet and the clash of metal on metal coming nearer and nearer. She sensed the murderous purpose behind those sounds and the dead man at the gate confirmed her worst suspicions. Ojoyo screamed in terror.
She ran back to the Royal Hut and tried to waken Lumbedu by shaking him violently and calling his name repeatedly. But he only turned over on his back and snored louder than ever.
An alien war-cry shattered the starry night like a blow from a knobkierie as the Strange Ones burst into the kraal like a horde of mad bronze-clad demons from hell itself. Ojoyo crawled out of the Great Hut like a scalded snake and made her escape through one of the small emergency gates in the stockade, leaving the drunken Lumbedu to his fate.
First one and then the other of the two guard-huts flanking the gate burst into flame as the attackers set them on fire. Soon the whole lower portion of the kraal near the main gate was a mass of flames and redly glowing clouds of billowing smoke. The Strange Ones began to ransack the empty huts and to remove hundreds of sourmilk calabashes and dozens of baskets full of corn and yams. These they placed in the centre of the vast clearing before they set the huts on fire.
It was then that Lumbedu awoke and crawled drunkenly out of his hut and stood swaying on the raised clay doorstep.
‘You . . . why are you burning my kraal?’ he cried thickly.
A group of Strange Ones came running towards him, brandishing swords and gleaming bronze spears, but Lumbedu was far too intoxicated to be scared and stared blearily at them, standing his ground.
One of the Strange Ones aimed a sword blow at Lumbedu’s head, a blow that was not intended to kill or to injure, but which passed harmlessly over his shiny bald pate. Lumbedu balled his fists and stood his ground, not even blinking.
One of the Strange Ones said to the King’s brown-haired son: ‘Behold, how brave this fat barbarian is; he has chosen to remain behind while the rest of his people escape. I did not know these black pigs could be so brave.’
Suddenly Lumbedu began to dance, urged by nothing less than the fumes of the strong beer he had drunk in such quantities. He stamped and capered like a mad gorilla up and down the firelit clearing in the centre of his burning kraal. He puffed and stamped and grunted and shook until his fat feet stirred up clouds of dust around them. Then, for a reason which even he could not understand, he snatched a spear from the hands of one of the astonished Strange Ones and ran himself through with it.
The young prince of the Strange Ones stood over the body of the dead Lumbedu and for once he was not smiling. He shook his helmeted head and said: ‘He was a very brave man. He chose death instead of slavery – just as we would do.’
‘Let us take what we can and leave here,’ said the prince a while later. ‘I’m sure that my father will be pleased to hear that he is now the Emperor of a great land full of thousands of black, thieving dirty-skinned barbarians!’
The traitor Lumbedu who had played into the hands of the Strange Ones and had betrayed hundreds of thousands of his people into slavery, was dead, but of his woman, Ojoyo, a story remains to be told.
Ojoyo paused once in her wild flight through the forest and, looking behind her, saw the two huts near the main gate in flames. That blood-chilling sight caused yet another spurt of speed and she ran even faster than before. In the course of her flight she heard the sounds of a wild animal in the forest and stopped dead in her tracks with her heart in her mouth, until the beast had gone past. At last she came to a familiar stream which she knew flowed past the cave where she was keeping the youth Kadimo a prisoner. As the grey light of dawn touched the sky, Ojoyo found the well-worn path that led up to Kadimo’s cave and followed it slowly and wearily as it twisted and turned past great rocks and boulders. As she approached the cave, a squat ugly figure detached itself from the rock behind which it had been hiding and barred her way.
‘Ho! Who you?’ growled the ugly one. ‘You go back or you die.’
‘It is I, Ojoyo, my trustworthy Zozo,’ said she with a smile at the hunch-backed and unbelievably ugly idiot whom she had placed to guard the youth Kadimo day and night.
‘Zozo see you, Queen,’ said the idiot, dropping on his knee.
‘Open the cave for me, Zozo, and then you can go into your own cave and sleep,’ Ojoyo commanded.
The powerful hunchback rolled aside the boulder that stood in the entrance of the cave and then fled into his own cave.
