few days the villagers of Ozi village walked with tight backs and drum chests, breaths held, as they watched Indian Ocean fight the Tsana. As if connected to a huge river in the sky the Tsana pushed the ocean tides, the sea foam and its ancient salt back. The wind blanketed Ozi village with warmth during the day and when this was flung away at night, as if by an invisible giant hand, the cold deflated the people of Ozi. As the Tsana grew the air thickened and the people of Ozi walked up and down as if asleep. The children ran around trees faster and faster like twirling tops, as if mad, before collapsing to the ground. Babies’ cries were picked by the spiralling wind and flung across the village. They refused to sleep at night, unheeding of even the famous Pokomo lullaby that forty-four years ago had become the tune of the Kenyan anthem.
Two days later the rain reached Ozi. It started in the afternoon, becalmed the children. Babies slumped on their mothers’ chafing shoulders and only woke up to eat banana pulp with fish, their evening meal. Then suddenly the rain stopped, and another blanket of warmth covered Ozi village.
The younger generations of Nyuki and Moto spread out on the river’s banks till mji Kau to cheer the heavy wind-swept victory as the swollen Tsana slowly pushed the sea back, past their village. The tea-brown waters from Mbakomo soils lapped steadily over the foreign metallic-grey liquid sea and Nyuki and Moto raced along the banks waving their arms, flinging their thin bodies into the air. The more foolhardy jumped and washed in the meeting of Tsana and Indian Ocean. Some young men even followed the victorious river past the Island of Kiundani where absent rich men of Ozi who had moved to Malindi owned rice fields; they skipped over the channel of Suez to Kilunguni where Mbakomo weddings were held. They saw how the river churned the prawns from the beds in Chala Chala and they waved at the tourists’ white faces peering from the tops of Polikani Hills where the German Meinherztgen had said he was building a hotel for the community but then kept all the profits for himself. It was whispered that the German still came in the dead of the night to give the money he owed to the old woman, Mama Mamkaze Witu, who had now been dead for five years, long after she had approved the building of the hotel. The German, it was said, left the money where her hut still stood every fifth day of every month, when all were asleep, to pay for the profits that he had kept for himself to stop Mamkaze Witu from haunting the hotel. That was strong medicine no longer seen in these days.
More young men jumped into boats and were buoyed by the climbing river. They eased past Camp Ya Tiro, where Mbakomo fishing tents were moored but now destroyed, past Bashwani, where they kept their sisal nets – now lost after being pushed out to the sea. Their boats passed Pajero, named after the richest Giriama man who had drowned himself because of debt. In Kivunjeni, they stopped and sang above the fish-breeding grounds where millions of eggs were planted by the Mbakomo gods to become fish and where their forefathers had harvested turtle eggs. When they came to Mlangoni, the door of the sea, they fell silent.
Hundreds of Mswahilis stood there, facing the sea, waving long white cloths calling for their beloved Indian Ocean to return and conquer the ‘Tana’, as they called it in their language. Low in the sky where they could almost touch it, hung a pale-brown, desiccated moon above the young foolish Mbakomos – a fearful sight they all looked askance at. They realised that their joy was the sorrow of others and they rowed back home. But once they reached the home shores of Ozi they forgot all they had seen and started dancing when their feet touched the ground at the victory of the Tsana over the Indian Ocean.
As the War raged the Wazee wa Gasa sat in the ancient hut at the top of the village. Their night talk swept the decades aside: they remembered even older Wars between Tsana and Indian Ocean, before El Niño ’97. They remembered the Wars of ’37, told to them by the grandfathers, and ’67 – the other great El Niños. They talked of how God helped the Indian Ocean every nine years to climb upriver and then the Tsana fought back every tenth year to overcome the sea. They remembered how, in their lifetimes, the Indian Ocean had increasingly become stronger than the Tsana. How it had pushed the people of Ozi and the other villages back from its door, almost to the lands of the Ormah who lived behind the Mbakomo, away from the river grazing their cattle. Before this new swelling, the Wazee lamented the Tsana’s nine-year cowardice, and how it had failed to protect them or to give them all the good things it should have brought: the soil from the mountains in Meru to grow bananas, rice, millet, mangos, watermelon and sim sim; the fish it allowed to breed and thrive with crocodile and hippo, whose meat they loved so much. They remembered how the Indian Ocean had won the small and big battles in those nine years to bring drought every three years. They now worried about the Tsana’s rage – once it conquered the Indian Ocean and the moon and the land it would come for Ozi. They instructed the celebrating villagers to abandon their homes and move to higher land in the forest. Many, however, were too drunk with river joy to listen and laughed, drunk on maize beer at the elder’s emissaries. So, the Wazee waited for the flood even as everybody celebrated.
Then, just like that, the Tsana stopped raging against the Indian Ocean; the moon shrunk to an even smaller and paler hole in the sky, unable to help the sea, and the tides came back up the Tsana to Ozi. Those in Ozi with shambas near the mangroves stopped dancing first because the Tsana had now come into their homes. They were the ones who had lived with the salt that burned their land and rejoiced when sea-water was swept from their banana plantations and rice fields. Over the last few days, they had harvested salty catfish suffocated by the Tsana’s fresh water. And so they were the first to tell that the river was coming into their shambas.
Now the air stilled and the rain poured all day in a slow, steady drizzle, picking up at night in a furious torrent. And it came up the banks, further and further, till even those who were cursed by distance from the Tsana’s providence beheld a sight unseen in all their lives. Something they only knew in the tales of their grandparents from the War of ’67 – there was water on their doorsteps. And so the village paused in its drinking and dancing and watched the Tsana. When the water reached their feet they still laughed, stopped what they were doing and danced away nervously till it followed them. Then, they saw the crocodile snouts, their gaping jaws beyond the old banks and they fled and rushed into their homes to pack their belongings and drive their goats and cattle to the swamp, to high land beyond the river. And so, the Tsana, as if pleased, lazily at first, crawled into Ozi land through furrows and channels. It then overflowed the channels and overcame more land. It now licked the furthest houses from its banks and even there, it woke the people up in their beds the next morning. These people who had been cursed to live at a distance from the river but had rejoiced at their temporary fortune only a few days ago also started moving like others but, because there were already numbers at the edges of the forest, they were forced to crawl beneath poisonous vines and enter the undergrowth; and there their children and babies trembled when the elephants trumpeted and the buffaloes bellowed not too far away.
As always, since the Malachini settled in Ozi the water stopped rising when it reached the ancient hut, where the Gasa sat inside. The hut was protected by old knowledge of the river and its ways, built in between its natural channels and history’s study of the land’s contours.
Komora Kijana was seated outside the hut of Gasa waiting for his grandfather when the old man called him. He went to the doorway and stood there because no one but the elders was allowed to enter. His grandfather appeared and came out into the daylight and handed him the Book. ‘Bring your stool here.’ And this is what he wrote as his grandfather addressed the Gasa:
My First Journey
When I was born the river was not where we, the Malachini – or us the people of Ozi, live. The River was at Shisrikisho when I was born. It was the British who brought it here. I am sure that the river will be elsewhere when you die and your grandchildren grow up.
I have travelled up the river. And it is these things I want to tell you. The British brought the sea to us – the river never came this way. Ungwana Bay is where the river went to that time long ago. When I was a boy we would watch the big pelican boat of the white man pass by our village – it made a loud noise that we had never heard before. Louder than thunder or
