Power of the African root

 Mwenye, the chief, had never had an idea, not in the slightest, that a white man could be so difficult and irritating. He had always believed that all white men followed a strict code of morality like Father Rikado, the Parish Priest at the mission centre. Father Rikado had lived like the original Adam in Eden. But in the forty years plus that Ambewe had lived among them in their village, he, the chief, had come to learn that foolery spares no land or race. He had, however, taught himself to bear with the white man, and that for one reason: you can never sell a human being! But lately, after the white man’s latest unmentionable act, the chief had begun to blame himself for leaving it too late.

“How can a man, a white man at that, resort to stripping naked before a village woman, all because the woman has asked him for her money?” wondered the chief. “I can’t understand this man. Is that the way you respond to someone asking you for their money? We all borrow money from friends but is that the way we respond to them when they come to ask for their money?”

Previously, almost digging a moat around Ambewe, the chief vehemently defended the white man whenever the village elders had complained about his strange swilling habit. The elders always expressed strong sentiments over the fact that they had accepted his request for a hand in marriage to a daughter of the village, arguing that, by endorsing that betrayal, the culture had done itself a great disservice.

As a white man, Ambewe had a slight urge over many in the village. On important occasions, he represented the chief in the city. Chief Mwenye only spoke a patois of Yao, and this was a great handicap during meetings in the city where delegates spoke in English. Besides, Ambewe was the only one who could juggle roles to perfection and in time. Until his recent scandal following which the chief and the elders had agreed to strip him of some of the responsibilities in the village, Ambewe had been a nakanga, chief instructor at the initiation of young boys at the river, and a dzukulu or the chief gravedigger at the village cemetery.

The chief referred to him as ‘one of us’. To him, a white man who knew all the rituals including the secret sexual cleansing due to a widow or widower three days after the burial of a loved one, never deserved the name ‘stranger’. His recent exploits, however, had convinced him that the village was going to spare itself great embarrassment if it found some way to help Ambewe return to Amereka to lead a normal life of a white man the remainder of his life.

Ambewe, a white man in and out, had come to this country only a year after independence. Today it was only the colour of his skin that distinguished him from the rest of the villagers, but he was an African every bit. He knew every single root in the area and the ailment it healed. He spoke that original Yao and with that unadulterated singing accent. As for taste, he drank and staggered like them, and his favourite meal was nsima served with marsh rodents, tree maggots and white ants. He was also an excellent composer and dancer. It was Malabic that composed the popular tune Nambewe ndinyamule! Amereka yandilephera! In the song, a dedication to Nambewe, Malabic's invoking Nambewe to lift his heart more, a special treatment Amereka had failed to give him.

At Beni, a popular traditional dance in Matiya, Malabic performed by popular demand. Trousers rolled up to his knee, a yellow sash around his waist, he always gave a life-time performance, savagely twerking his ductile loins as though he was standing only on a thin spine of plastic. Malabic’s performance, ever-mesmerising, always whipped the women folk in Matiya into a frenzy.

Three years before coming to Africa, Malabic, a young civil engineer then, had tied the knot with Marylyn, a high school teacher and former Miss Virginia. Malabic was among the five white men the government had engaged from Amereka to supervise the construction of a bridge, Matiya Bridge, the bridge on which he now walked on foot or on his savagely decorated Raleigh, often with a bleating goat or a grunting pig brutally pinioned along the handles, going to or coming from the produce market. The produce market fell on weekdays.

When they arrived in Africa, Malabic and Marylyn found life fascinating. Goods were cheap, the people generous, friendly and smiling, a picture which contrasted sharply with what newspapers in Amereka reported about Africa. The newspapers there had always painted a life all-doom and gloom with witchcraft so widespread that anyone would buy it with loose change on roadsides, sometimes from children as young as five. Their greatest concern had been on their two-year-old son, Gabriel. They would both be going to work, and Gabriel would be left in the hands of someone and what if that someone would turn out to be a witch. Their fear was that Gabriel could very easily learn the skill and grow into a white witch himself. The reality however proved them wrong.

The couple took in Nambewe, a young girl, to mind Gabriel when both of them were at work. Their security guard, Chingota, had recommended Nambewe to them: “I can’t give you a problem. The whole village knows that Nambewe had graduated first class from the initiation ceremony. She may be short in stature, but the other qualities she possesses more than compensate for this. She’ll make a perfect nanny, believe you me. I can bet you’ll find her so good you’ll take her with you to Amereka.”

Chingota had been right; only days on the job, Nambewe had ticked all the right boxes. The couple was at a loss for words over her warm-heartedness. She had taken Gabriel like her own child. On some afternoons she would take Gabriel to Matiya Village for him to chat with black children. There, the black children would sing for him gunya sasenda, mocking him for that ‘absence of skin’. In turn, Gabriel, never disappointing, would give his best of steps to it. Matiya was two kilometres from the city where Marylyn and Malabic lived. When knocking off, Nambe always made sure Gabriel was not around, otherwise, the young boy would cry uncontrollably for her, his friend.

Nambe’s good-naturedness quickly won over her bosses’ hearts. In the five months she had been with them, her salary had witnessed a three-fold increase. But still Marylyn felt that they hadn’t done her enough, that her heart needed something beyond merely a handsome pay. That is how the decision to do something special for her came about. They wanted to do for her this so that it should always remind her of them even years after they had left Africa. A house would be a good idea. They had heard that in Africa, food, a house that does not leak when it rains, and a few clothes are what define life. It had to be decent, that they agreed.

And that Saturday afternoon, Malabic in his latest make of Austin, drove to Matiya to monitor the progress of the project.

There, the nanny prepared him a meal served in a cracked plate. She had collected the English stone plate in a litter bin where Marylyn had thrown it after the fidgety Gabriel had hurled it against a stereo stand. Malabic never despised the generosity and with bare hands, he did eat it on a brown reed mat in her small house. It was sensational.

After the meal, he was shown a grass hut, her bathroom, to clean the sweat.

Malabic returned, a man light and transformed.

That evening, his palate yearned only one thing: the transforming African plate. He wanted more of that experience and generosity.

The following morning, Nambewe never went to work on Saturdays and Sundays, Malabic arrived in Matiya again, on foot, carrying only a few papers. He walked straight to his nanny’s house.

Events unfolded so quickly. Malabic refused to leave his nanny’s house; Malabic refused to go to work, as work would deprive him of the much-needed closeness to her. And in an attempt to identify himself with her more, Malabic changed his name. He wanted a name that should sound like his new wife’s, and all the while, all aware of the the legal implications of that unilateral decision, love having found a way out. 

Malabic was not a fool, and so when his four workmates paid him a visit there, Johnnie Walker in their hands, Malabic read their intention a mile off, refusing them welcome. And his face red with rage, he cursed them from the small verandah of his wife’s house, sending them a deluge of vernacular expletives he had recently acquired. He called the leader of the delegation shameless Judas.

It was now time for the American Embassy to intervene. Ambassador James Desmond began to talk to her directly, assuring her he would do whatever it would take to help her man recover his sanity.

In keeping with his words, the Ambassador quickly enlisted the services of a well-known British psychologist, Dr Barnet. The Ambassador wanted Dr Barnet to help Malabic see that his love to Nambewe was a mere infatuation, a fruitless obsession bound to wane with time. He had witnessed similar incidents, something he attributed to cultural shock, when white husbands fell straight for black women. Almost in all cases, it was merely transient.

Malabic sent the Ambassador a message, warning Dr Barnet’s body would fly back to England with no head on if he would dare approach him. Scared, the Ambassador dropped his plan, and instead, approached Mwenye; he wanted Mwenye to reason with Malabic, to remind him of his responsibility as a husband and father.

When the chief explained the issue to him, Malabic puckered his face and wept like a baby. The chief wondered what form of root Nambewe had given Malabic. In all his life as a chief, he had never seen anything like that.

Three months passed and Marylyn heard nothing from her man, not even a greeting to his son, his own son, Gabriel. It now became clear to her that Malabic was a man and soul lost, lost for good. There was only one way out now, to sell all their property including the car, and return to Virginia with her son.

The other time he had placed himself on red alert, walking about with a rope in hand for over two weeks, threatening to use it to end his own life rather than give in to the senseless wishes of Ambassador Desmond. Malabic had come to this after Nambewe had told him she had heard that the Ambassador had met the chief and the elders in a devious plot to abduct him and bundle him into a waiting plane to Amereka. After that, nobody ever talked openly about ‘helping’ him return to Amereka. Time was their only hope. And to the contrary, with each passing day, Ambewe seemed to be getting more of the baptism of Nambewe’s love.

When he heard that crazy fate had paired up Dr Barnet and Marylyn, and that Marylyn had now moved to London, Malabic felt like a mountain had been lifted off his shoulders. From the bottom of his heart, one Nambewe had branded with many a love bite, Malabic wished them paradise on earth, saying he hoped Marylyn would find true happiness in it, perhaps alluding to the alchemy of happiness he himself had, by a stroke of luck, found under the summoning blue of the African sky.

An hour away from Nambewe always made him feel lost and restless, an eternity in hell. So, even to a meeting for men only, Malabic took her with him on his Raleigh and found her a shade to wait for him as he attended the meeting. Every now and then he would sneak out with some snacks for her but also to ensure she was not in any danger and that no man ever greeted her longer than usual.

Forty-something years later, their love was as green as spring, as fresh as it had been the day Malabic first tasted the simple African plate. The two had now become inseparable, attached at the hip for life, and what with the five children (they should have been eight, thanks to malicious death)!

His head had now grown grey, his chin lowered almost to his knees and his skin hanging on him like a loose silk shirt, yet on no day was he ever heard uttering a word of regret over his choice of Africa. For him, Africa had given him what even America itself, with all her tall buildings, could never offer, and he now often confessed his greatest wish—to be buried next to his wife, whoever would go first—he wanted to keep visiting her even in the grave.

The chief wanted to try something on him, something novel. He wanted to send the village elders to Bimbi, the goddess of the waters, to ask for a reverse root to give Ambewe. He felt Ambewe had had enough of Africa and needed to go back to his senses for him to return to Amereka to lead the rest of his life normal and die there, among his other people in his other homeland. The most recent complaint about his latest act before one woman beer seller had emboldened this proposition.

The woman, also a usury dealer, had asked Ambewe to give back the cash he had borrowed from her over a year ago. Then the two had agreed that Ambewe was going to pay back at double the interest once his fellow white men gave him something, and that was going to be within a month. That was not to be. And it was now over a year, and her patience had worn thin, and all she wanted now was the principal, her original sum, even if it meant with no interest attached. And when she asked him again this time, he gave her the usual insipid response: “I’m still waiting for friends from America.” Then he forced a laugh.

This time Abiti Basolomiyo did not buy it. She started cursing, calling him all sorts of names.

Ambewe, a man not in any hurry, never said anything. Instead, he whipped his crooked back a little backwards before giving a twitch to his face as if a fly was bothering him. When satisfied she had said enough, he decided to do before her something, to let her know it never pays disrespecting elders.

She saw him unbutton his shirt before shrugging it off as though preparing to plunge into a dam. As though in a dream, she saw him, like a small boy, soon moulding the shirt into a ball. Then he did it—with all the energy in him, he hurled the ‘ball’ at her, screaming hell in her at the same: “I’m not made of money! Check whether there’s any money in there!”

The woman unconsciously grabbed it as does a goalkeeper in a competitive match! When she realised she was carrying a white man’s shirt, she threw it back to him with a vengeance. Malabic parried it with both his hands forward. The ‘ball’, now open, flew to the ground, Ambewe looking at it as though it had never ever belonged to him.

His overgrown chest bare, he was now undoing his trousers. That’s when Abiti Basolomiyo broke into a mad run, shouting for help!

A day after the incident, Abiti Basolomiyo’s niece died without any sickness. Many said it had been a bad omen, a white man stripping naked before her, a black village woman!

“You don’t have to remove everything on you to prove to your creditor you don’t have anything to pay them!” the chief screamed, disappointed. Never in his wildest dreams had he expected anyone to so behave on an issue so straightforward.

When Ambewe heard that the chief was fomenting treachery, he vowed, openly, to throw himself at Matiya Bridge. “Better die; you can never force me, a citizen of Matiya, to America!”

The chief had to apologise for the ‘bad joke’.

Ambewe and Nambewe died some five years ago and were buried next to each other. Gabriel, a very big man, an army officer serving in Afghanistan, had asked for leave to attend his father’s burial in Matiya, Africa. It had taken a bit of time to forgive, but Malabic was his father.

Today, two of their children work for the District Commissioner, and three of their elder sons have their own children, some look like Malabic, a good crop for Matiya village, for Africa. And in Matiya village a story is told today, a story about a root that makes even a white man forget his home, about the wonder-working magic of the African root, the root that works on anything bar AIDS.