Saara Kolambasi

Like lightning and thunder, poverty and life in Mpakula Village shared the umbilical cord of fate; talk of life and talk of the tensile phenomenon of poverty in which every soul there started life, to live it to the grave, and even there, leaving adamant poverty behind, intact. Those like Kolambasi who escaped it, and you could count them on the fingers of one hand, did so out of that special favour of Heaven, and no less. The breakthrough had come to Kolambasi late in life, but breakthrough it was all the same. He was over forty when he became a respectable secondary school master of mathematics in the city.

While in form two and eighteen at the time, Kolambasi had almost fell into a spiral of depression. For reasons best known to the headmaster himself, he decided to forgo diplomacy and instead did something that turned Kolambasi’s name and that of his clan into an object of ridicule among the other learners.

“Your guardian had assured was planning to sell a dozen hares to pay your fees but three weeks later, he’s nowhere to be seen. We humbly ask you to vacate these premises, please.” Then he called in Chinyama, a bulky school security guard, to escort him out of the school fence. The savage words stung him badly and the disproportionate act by the guard tore his heart, reducing him to tears.

Later, at twenty-five and that was after all the tears had washed his eyes clean, Kolambasi decided to go for it again. Evening classes would give him time to work on his garlic farm to give him enough to feed himself and pay for the tuition and examinations. Like in a dream, Kolambasi finally got the much-coveted senior school leaving certificate. Now he would apply for a primary school training course in the city. He would not be paying anything; instead, the government would be giving a substantial allowance, enough to keep him going.

Straight from school, now as a primary school teacher of thirty five, Saara Kolambasi decided to get settled. His aunt made things easy for him. “Abiti Makumba has everything an educated man like you would need in life,” she had assured him.

He found marriage fulfilling but he did not allow the bliss to make him sit on his laurels. He went back to class, to improve on his grades to enable him to enrol for a degree in education at a satellite college of the country’s prestigious National University of Sciences and the Arts.

In a move to encourage more self-development among the teachers, the Ministry straight posted him to one of the best learning institutions in the city―Madeleine Girls Academy. Saara Kolambasi was over the moon about it, as MGA stood out.

Another gift from another American to the girl-child, and the giver this time a youthful taekwondo star, Madeleine Lee, Madeleine was New York in Africa. And the girls there ate like tourists―three-course meals, three times a day. In their navy-blue skirts and jackets and white blouses, they looked young lady pilots for some prestigious airliner.

The main campus of the National University of Sciences and the Arts lay only three kilometres to the east of Madeleine, but its infrastructure would never at all compare to the classic design of Madeleine. Madeleine was a design marvel, all things beautiful rolled into one.

Madeleine Girls Academy appeared on government payroll but the teachers there got their salaries straight from Madeleine herself. It was same salary the rest of the teachers in the civil service got but at Madeleine, they received a stipend for soap and shoe polish. One wouldn’t tell which between the two was the stipend.

As an incentive, Madeleine had bought each teacher a motor cycle―the guttural King Lion with the horsepower of a row-crop tractor. This machine was never meant to be returned even when one was moving on to a new school. This was besides the Monday-Friday lunch buffet the teachers enjoyed just for being part of the pace-setting culture of Madeleine. 

It was while in his third or fourth month there that Saara Kolambasi ran across Gondoza, a proud owner of three huge hardware shops there in the city. Gondoza was an old friend from home and he and Saara Kolambasi had spent most of their times as young boys together. But now Gondoza had grown huge with a massive chest, the barrel of a gorilla.

There in the city, Gondoza went by the name Emperor Go. Saara Kolambasi didn’t bother to ask the history behind this funny sobriquet.

Saara Kolambasi remembered that at standard eight, Gondoza just stopped coming to school. His father, the owner of the only maize mill in Kolambasi’s village, had tried every trick under the sun to push him back into school, but Gondoza just disappeared into the city where, now with the help of his defeated father, started a hardware business. Thanks to the high demand of building material amidst lax enforcement of land laws, overnight, Gondoza turned himself a formidable captain there. A primary school dropout with no paper whatsoever, Gondoza made school look useless.

Like Saara Kolambasi and all Ngonis, Emperor Go loved liquor and meat and all other things true Ngonis like. And one Friday evening, the world had been unusually inviting that evening, Emperor Go paid Saara Kolambasi a visit.

“It’s great life at Buffalo Wells,” Emperor Go had told his friend. “I’m meeting Najima, Agostinho and Chipo there; perhaps we go there for the fun, one each for the night.”

Najima was an ambassador’s daughter, and Chipo, her friend, was a daughter to the ruling party’s treasurer-general, Makwale. Agostinho, Portuguese and Chipo’s husband, was in the road haulage industry. In fact, the Agostinhos held a monopoly over all petroleum products in the country.

Gondoza was about to turn on the ignition when Abiti Makumba burst out of the house like hell.

“A minute please,” she said, sounding anxious.

Whatever she had told Kolambasi out there might have had a strange effect upon him, for the school teacher doubled over with laughter like a small girl. “No, Chitekwe was a fool,” he said in between stitches, “Chitekwe had flown too close to the sun.”

Chitekwe, an old school teacher at the primary school Kolambasi was teaching before upgrading, had transformed himself into an item of shame, grabbing the headlines for all the wrong reasons when he circulated on the social media with nothing on his skin.  Chitekwe had been invited to a three-week-script-marking exercise for primary school national examinations at the lake when this happened. The last day, Chitekwe is said to have gone to bed early, set to leave for home early the following morning. But, whether the devil or hunger, Chitekwe went out at night and brought with him a person, and the rest is history.

Kolambasi likened what had befallen Chitekwe to Icarus in Greek Mythology. Icarus, a fool who could never take instructions from his wise father, Daedulus, ended up flying too close to the sun with his wings of feathers and beewax. For ignoring those instructions, Icarus had sealed his fate, plunging himself unto dishonourable end, burying himself in a watery grave.

Back in the vehicle, Kolambasi explained to his friend his wife’s fears.

“She could be right,” was his comment, eyes ahead.    

Buffalo Wells, standing guard on the outskirts of the city, was a deceptively inviting serene site. A tall white neon hoarding carrying large flirtatious inscriptions, the colour of blood, beckoned her patrons: “Welcome to Buffalo Wells”. And a kind of byline in grey, like Ba-Maguje, that Hausa spirit of drunkenness, declared the unique place of Buffalo Wells in the world of leisure and pleasure: “This is where bulls drink themselves happy”.

Except the ground labourers working on its expansive lawns and carparks, Buffalo Wells looked hauntingly deserted during the day, a quiet village burial plot. At night, however, Buffalo Wells always claimed back its life in arrears when, even in times of serious loadshedding, pleasure ran itself like a factory, beast gensets chomping on diesel, fanning it. Lap dancing went on dusk to dawn at Buffalo Wells, men tossing coins like hell, stoking the furnace.

“You know what, Kolambasi, here girls punish fools,” Emperor Go had warned his friend after he had caught him stealing furtive glances at a shy girl sitting all by herself on a high-backed basket chair on a lawn of grass. The girl, she seemed to have all the time in the world, was sipping some yellow stuff through a white straw.

When Emperor Go trotted towards the car park to answer another call, Saara Kolambasi decided to give the girl a greeting. She stood out like a sore thumb and everyone seemed to avoid her. In short, natural hair, a blue dress with white polka dots going all the way to the ankles, she could pass for an ambassador’s daughter, this.

Saara Kolambasi was learning it too late that Gondoza was bad company, living like someone running a secret cult, spending half the time on phone away in his vehicle. He always seemed to argue with the one on the other end, sometimes as though issuing threats, sometimes issuing orders. Kolambasi noted that his friend called senior politicians by their first names.

Just as Saara Kolambasi was about to strike a conversation, the girl schemingly put her finger across her mouth. “Excuse me, sir,” whispered she expertly, “a minute as I pick this call from a friend.”

Saara Kolambasi, as eager as a smile, gestured in return, for her to go ahead.

Ever observant, Saara Kolambasi read a twang in her English. “I’m sure she’s from the National University of Sciences and the Arts,” he thought naïvely.

“I’m not on campus, but you can google that,” she was talking into her phone loud enough for Kolambasi to pick. “Let me see ... well, spell that for me … Oh, I see ‘cultural relativism’. Try Haralambos and Holborn, eighth edition. If no right definitions, then Ondine is at your disposal, babe. Get you in an hour’s time.”

Saara Kolambasi had used that giant reference for sociology of education at third year. He knew straight away he was dealing with a university student.

“From the National University, I can guess,” he said jovially. “And Ondine is the name, right?”

“Second semester, third year,” replied Ondine, delightedly.

“I was at the eastern satellite of this very university, in the sciences,” boasted the bloating ego in him. “Professor Jackson taking us for calculus, know her?”

“I’m pure social sciences―sociology and psychology. Professor Zakzak, Nigerian, know him?” She shifted a little in the chair.

“I couldn’t. If you talk sciences, oh, yes.”

A casual observer would have concluded the two shared a history.

They discussed topics of common interest, from politics to entertainment and life in general. She told him she had found herself there to ease herself of the twin pressures of books and assignments.

“You must be a lucky man, boy,” said Ondine caringly. “Honestly, I don’t like talking to men here; some do not come with good intentions. And some women come here for the same game too, I hate to say.”

Saara Kolambasi was squat with a very big head of the invasive ant. His eyes and ears very small, he missed the proportionality that defines handsomeness. Despite this, wherever beauty was concerned, Saara Kolambasi boasted a very high sense of judgement. Saara Kolambasi simply liked beautiful things. Perhaps it explained why he had felt so much at home in Ondine’s company that night. Of course, Ondine had other good things besides, intelligence and a good sense of humour, for example.

Three days later, he wasn’t exactly sure what he had done there and was wondering whether it would be wisdom to give it another go. And that morning, while searching the web for a nice diagram for his mid-morning class, a WhatsApp message popped up: “It’s Ondine here; was asking for some K50,000 to meet emergency.”

He gave a sudden jerk of his head, startled. He had never given Ondine his number; he didn’t know how on earth she had come to get hold of it. He texted back, clarifying politely that he had not meant the encounter to last forever.

Ondine always took her time, never in a hurry, and this is what she was.

Ten minutes later, a fusillade of photos of a smiling man in brown boxer shorts with nothing else on his skin rained into Saara Kolambasi’s gallery. He rubbed his eyes in an attempt to jolt his memory for some clue. But when he remembered that he was wearing brown boxers, it dawned on him the extent to which Ondine had betrayed his trust. The mouth that resembled the brim of a pail, those thick lips in the photos, there was no mistaking what he had come up against. He quickly put the phone on his worktable and looked about him as though a thief about to strike. He was alone, literally and metaphorically, as those who didn’t have mid-morning classes were outside sharing jokes in the weak June sun.

When minutes later the phone twittered again, he witnessed something of an earthquake, a violent thud, his heart reacting to the danger at hand. He picked it up and straight went to the new thread, hoping this time she was going to tell him laughter is the season of life.

“There you are in boxer shorts, boy” she wrote of the photos. “I can assure you this: that is nothing near what I have in those I keep for the best day. I hope that best day won’t come.”

“‘Best day’?” Saara Kolambasi repeated defeatedly. He knew what it meant, and it dawned on him that the smiling university girl, Ondine, had placed her pawns like a professional, so expertly set, the execution of which followed a well-oiled set pattern.

When his girls stood to greet him, he quickly motioned with his hand for them to take back their seats. Then dazed, he dashed off something on the whiteboard, muttering something under his breath, perhaps giving them some instructions to break into groups and discuss the topic—Functions and Inequalities. “I’m back shortly,” he cried before dismissing with a wave of his hand a forest of hands raised to seek clarification.

It surprised him that he had given himself in different poses. In another photo he appeared eating something like green leaves, cabbage perhaps.

“Did I tell her I was hungry, that I needed some food and she gave me something like a goat?” he asked himself, surprised at the same why he was asking himself that at all. Saara Kolambasi was sure of one thing, though: in each one of those photos, he was smiling broadly, a fool acting with consent.

“She must have cast her spell on me,” he said faintly. He couldn’t understand how a grown-up could give themselves to such silly stunts. “She must have bewitched me, that I don’t doubt.”

“Have over fifty such photos … Tell you where I will sell this deal—to your wife, your workplace, the whole world. Perhaps you know what this means,” she wrote again, warning. “But it’s not my intention to destroy anybody,” she added, perhaps aware anything beyond that would send one to the extreme.

Saara Kolambasi never returned to the staff room that day. Graph papers in his hands, he had forgotten to leave them behind for his girls, he took the long street home, on hot feet. You would think the graph papers had been placed in a drizzle overnight.

His own body in the photos scared him; it had never occurred to him he looked that miserable in boxers—legs like logs and the stomach bloating, a spider. For the first time, he understood his headmistress’ cryptic message whenever she said male teachers too needed to think seriously about the subject of physical exercise and cholesterol. The Saara Kolambasi in the photos badly needed some bodily exercise.

One thought after another raced through him. The idea to take the road to the police station sounded attractive, but he quickly countered it, counselling himself against it. “Once in the hands of the police,” he warned himself, “the whole world will laugh at a school teacher who posed consented in a girl’s quarters. That’ll be suicide.”

A school teacher, he knew what their code of ethics stipulated on these things. He thought about his job, his family, his reputation and his church where he had recently been elected treasurer. “Those overzealous choristers will compose a shame of a song on me. They did it on the whole pastor, wha-” he drowned in his own fears.

And succumbing was no option either. “I can’t give in,” he declared hollowly. “She might eventually demand my own skin. No, I can’t.” He was shaking his empty head.

“I’m still waiting,” Ondine reminded detachedly. At the blow, Saara Kolambasi changed direction, taking another street, a narrow one this time.

“Please, give me some time, I’m driving,” his tongue fumbled some lie.

An hour later, he was not home yet. As for his motorcycle, he phoned a friend, advising it had developed a mechanical fault. “Please, push it into the staffroom. Will collect it tomorrow.”

“Are you on Airtel Money or TNM Mpamba?” he asked uneasily, saying it while weeping into his phone. He did not have any option. He was a man trapped, a man tied hand and foot.

“Both, buddy; you’ll be sending to both, buddy,” she told him, a response that nearly knocked him unconscious, for it told him this was by no means the last.

A few days of no incident passed; perhaps Ondine had gotten what she had wanted from him. Albeit, Saara Kolambasi was still nursing the trauma the developments had caused him, for within those tumultuous days of chaos, his wife had read so much on his brow. “The glow on your face’s gone, Saara Kolambasi, my man; don’t know why,” she had told him.

“That woman is giving me no rest day,” was his reply, pure buck-passing. “But it’ll be alright. I’ve been through things, and what is this?” he had replied with assumed derision.

“You say the head teacher?” the wife asked as though not buying the explanation.

“Abiti Makumba, who else? I tell you that woman has created hell out of my life. I don’t know why I gave in to that.”

“To what?” she wanted to know.

“Coming to teach at Madeleine.”

Abiti Makumba gave him a long suspicious look. Saara Kolambasi looked away, cracking his fingers like a small boy.

“We need to talk, man. Seriously, we need to talk,” she told him, almost demanding.

No response. Instead, he bit his lower lip hard, a man in agony.

A few days later on his way to school for his morning classes, he walked to work now as he didn’t feel steady enough to negotiate the sharp bends up Madeleine, he received another message.

“Just wanted to say ‘Hi, babe.’” Short as it was, it carried enough poison to kill the spirits. He had to cancel the classes on the pretext of migraine.

At home, come evening, his wife came blunt on him: “You’re carrying a heavy physical burden, Saara Kolambasi. Your face no longer glows, sir.”

He told her he didn’t have any problem but that he had decided to give up drinking. “I’m a Ngoni but this stupid habit of drinking will one day kill me. It’s driving me crazy. Enough of it,” he had said, finding something to put the blame on. “Enough of it,” he had repeated, almost shouting.

But away from her, Saara Kolambasi acknowledged he indeed had a problem, a very big one, Ondine, the girl with an exotic name. At one time he blamed himself, for it was he that had approached her in the first place. Ondine had been sitting there all by herself; but he, out of senseless bravado, had invited himself to her; Ondine had invited no one.

Ondine lived in a township some three kilometres past Madeleine. He had been there once the night he ended up posing in boxers, smiling like a small kid into her high-definition camera. He remembered that they had taken a few more bottles there together, but he could remember nothing more though he was sure she had brought him back to the drinking joint where Emperor Go had been looking for him. He might have given her over K40,000. He had left home with K50,000. He returned with K5,000. He had bought nothing at Buffalo Wells.

The morning following Saara Kolambasi’s visit to Ondine’s babysitter, Emperor Go had expressed fear for him, asking whether he had taken any photo with her while there. Saara Kolambasi told him he could not remember. “If you did, I don’t know,” he had warned him with a shake of his head.

For nearly three weeks following that Airtel Money transaction, Ondine seemed to have forgotten about him, save that ‘Hi’ and Saara Kolambasi was able to pick himself up again. But one evening in the second week of the month of August, on a Mother’s Day, to be precise, Ondine sent him a bomb, a mere call that nearly ripped him apart!

Trepidation personified, he wiped his hands against a canvass table mat, turning it yellow to the disproval of the wife. Even his two young boys looked at each other. A dazed look on his face, he hobbled into their bedroom.

Ondine had changed houses and was informing him of the development.

“I look after two brothers and two sisters and their children and my parents,” he cried into the phone as though in mitigation. “Please, you go to church, Ondine, don’t you? Be kind to other human beings, Ondine, be kind.”

Ondine didn’t say anything, perhaps aware they all cry like this, but they all succumb eventually.

“Please, Ondine, do you want me to die and leave behind all these people helpless? Do you?”

Ondine just gave out a faint giggle.

An idea came to him to threaten her: “I don’t want to reach the extent of consulting my lawyer on this.” There was nothing to fear now. He was a dead man, a man whose life was hanging by a thread of spider silk.

“I’m sure you heard what befell Superintendent Mwafongo of the City Patrol Division. Mwafongo had wanted to blackmail me through a lawyer, arguing I had given him some soporific drug. Mwafongo lost everything. So, I’d advise you, buddy, go ahead!”

“No, I can’t involve the police. We must resolve this outside⎯” he chocked when he noticed his wife standing in the doorway.

“And you should have told me in advance,” he said, looking away, a fool and his money.

Abiti Makumba pursed her lips and walked back. She knew her man had started a fight, one too big for him to finish.

“I’m not sure how that concerns me,” Ondine replied airily.

“I know it doesn’t; it’s only a suggestion. You must know it, Ondine. You must be humane to ...” There was no life in his voice. He could not finish a sentence, a man finished.

“Was talking to the head teacher,” he told Abiti Makumba.

Her hands waving in protest, she quizzed, detective-like: “Serious? A church treasurer not ashamed of telling a lie? Talking to your head teacher snuffing and in tears? Talking to your head teacher slumped to the floor? No, Kolambasi, you’re a man in tears, Kolambasi, an embarrassment; you can disguise this no longer, man. How do you explain the fact that you now want to involve the police in it?”

“It’s a long story, Namlauzi’s mother,” Kolambasi sighed, avoiding eye contact.

It dawned upon her that something voracious was eating her man from the inside. That instinct switch in a mother flicked itself, naturally, for him, her man. And looking him level in the eye, she asked, “Is it betting?” 

Kolambasi shifted nervously, and with a look of resignation on his face, shrugged the shoulders. 

“So what is it? Is it about city women?” The tone was accommodating this time, her interest now to bear his load, to rescue her man. No one was going to do that for her. “Is some woman giving you some problem, Kolambasi?”

“If you’d understand me,” he slurred, his head lowered, “it’s a long story, my dear wife.”

Now he toyed with the idea to change houses for something affordable but wondered whether Abiti Makumba would buy that nonsense. Abiti Makumba had never been to a classroom, but Abiti Makumba was a proud woman. That he knew.

“No one would be happy facing themselves before something like this, but if someone is ready to take another person’s bullet, that one is Abiti Makumba,” she said determinedly. “You can count on her, Saara Kolambasi.” She was massaging her cheek.

Saara Kolambasi now knew latest release in the world of women fashion, having been dragged there by Ondine, the girl from the university. Ondine had opened his teary eyes to the world of fashion. He could very easily become a competent fashion judge, for she had now developed a habit of sending him a collage of photos of latest dress, skirt, blouse or shoe fashion—box pleats matched with wedge sandals and peplum, or A-line with Chelsea boot, asymmetrical with d’Orsay flat or culottes with moccasin—always asking him to choose for her what would make her more presentable at the next all-ladies party.

Parties in Ondine’s life happened with frequent regularity, and every time she threw one, Saara Kolambasi found himself invited, not to attend, to help her meet the cost. Like a fine baker, Saara Kolambasi now knew all the chief ingredients in cakes.

“I’m sure you’ve now built so much trust in me, you finally deleted all those nasty things about me,” Saara Kolambasi had suggested to her jovially the other day.

“Why asking, buddy?” she had replied cynically.

One day Abiti Makumba decided to take the matter into her own hands. This she did after she had twice found her man all gestures in a serious conversation with himself. It was clear to her his condition was now assuming a downward spiral. Saara Kolambasi, a man in his early forties, now looked like someone past retirement age.

His colleagues and even his learners in form four C had now read on Saara Kolambasi’s face their teacher was a man in an unstable state of mind. The other day he wrote on the whiteboard ‘The Pythagorean Theorem’ but ended up giving the learners examples on Integers.

The week Abiti Makumba paid Gondoza a visit, Ondine never called her man. In fact, she never called him again after that.

“I hope things are fine now,” she beamed.

“Well,” he replied, giving out a sigh, “that I do not know, angel.” Of course, he knew.

“I never told you this, but I visited your friend Gondoza.” Then after some seconds, she added: “If I were you, I’d never trust that man again.”

“But Gondoza had warned me against her,” he thought. “How then could he turn round and point a knife at my nape?”

Now things began to make sense to him; Ondine had not been alone that night.