The Last of Her Kind – Mame Bougouma Diene

To the villagers of Mkumbi, Mpondoland South Africa and all the cannabis, coca and opium farmers worldwide fighting for their rights.

The nutrients from my last meal flow from my mouth and into my veins as its body flows downstream, slowly disintegrating back into nature, and for a moment my old eyes gleam again with the vigour of youth, penetrating and bold yet somehow wiser than they used to be. More alert. Each drop of fluid holds a truth, an emotion, an overwhelming desire for life and death, eternity and oblivion. I am able to commune again. To feel time stop and multiply, to remember it all, every sensation, every pain and every pleasure in my life.

   Yet already the vibrancy fades, consumed by the fire inside me that never ceases to burn, and my ravenous hunger, and again the memories drift away, always a heartbeat ahead of me they disappear in the waters that are my world.

   Days and nights do not have the same meaning when you are as old as I am. Yet I know there was a time when the next meal and the last were not a question lost in a fog. I cannot remember my last meal neither can I remember being young, back when the river was mine, and all the rivers of our corner of the world belonged to my people.

***

The waters are dark and empty around me, only the reflection of the night sun gleaming down, round and alive from the sky provides any light, turning the black, stony waters into fractals of shining, oily pearls that rub against my belly and back as I swim and spin.

   Night is the most peaceful time. The noises of the day do not break through the waters tonight – I do not miss the cacophony of the human engines, the splashing of their oars, the laughter and tears of their children playing and fighting on the riverbanks.

   The humans believe the river is theirs. They believe the whole world is theirs and maybe they are right about that, but they are wrong about the river. The river is mine.

   Tiny salmon swim next to me now, completing their run upstream to spawn on the gravel beds that line the river, the night sun illuminating their bluish-grey scales as they nibble off little bits of dead skin from my body, cleaning me, tickling me, loving me.

   I suppose it is love that I miss the most.

   The humans will not let me prey anymore. Eons ago they did. There were days long ago when they let me roam free, another creature of the world whose wonders they embraced with the gleefulness of any young species or beast, just as I had loved discovering new bends along my river, rapids and rocks, algae and fish.

   Not so anymore.

   They do not remember those days, any more than my famished self remembers my life. They do not live long enough. They believe that the world is theirs and that their thoughts are their own.

   They cannot remember when I whispered my name into their minds.

   Mzintlava.

   They believe they named the river on their own, and gave my name a meaning of their own, and then forgot it. But they did not name it. It was I. I and my sisters, dwelling in the other streams and rivers, and communing with them. Letting them know that different though we are, we all share the same mind. Their language came from us. Their own names came from the dreams we planted in their minds at night, back when I was not so lonely. Before they replaced us with gods. Back when I still had sisters.

#

I might just eat tonight; I can smell the warm scent of prey on the current.

   It is swimming ahead peacefully. I can sense its mind, yet unaware of my presence, unaware of the role it is about to play in the cycle of life. How its flesh and blood but also its thoughts, memories and feelings will ever be part of a greater whole. Me. The one creature connecting it to a past it has forgotten.

   It is closer now. I can feel its panic as I awaken something primal buried deep inside of it. The depths that existed before it was sentient, before it knew itself as distinct from the world. But it need not fear. It need not fear eternity.

#

The day sun shines overhead now. It brings life to the water and the whole world. Although I am almost blind, the day sun allows me a glimmer of my youth, the different shades of small plants, the glorious colours of the fish that have multiplied in their tininess while giants such as myself have dwindled and died.

   But for now I am fed, for now I am strong, I can remember everything, and my body swerves easily towards the waterfall that marks the end of my territory and the grounds of my dead sister. Where our two rivers collide, mine feeding into hers in harmony.

   I want to raise my head out of the waters, just as freely as I had done in the past.

   Even then, times were not always the same. We grew fewer as the humans grew many, and the drunkenness of conquest made them look only ahead, never to pause, never to look behind and remember.

   They would sling rocks at me at first, then with time wooden spears that would soon have pointed stones on their tips, sometimes flames and soon metal. Some would brave the water, clad in the fur of other creatures they killed in the world they own. Loincloths and knives. They would wait for signs of me, and then howl at the night sky, then attack me. The smarter ones would run. Who knew what the price of their shame was? I do not understand that emotion. I retreat if I must, attack when best suited and do not care for the feelings of the world.

   Those knives and spears became bullets. They would bounce off my skin as I reared my head and roared, diving and appearing again, mocking their puny greed, but somehow feeling sorry for them. Pity is an emotion I know too well. Pity for myself, and my amnesic loneliness.

   But today I feel strong. Today I feel defiant. Today I feel that maybe my loneliness will end, that somewhere in another river, one of mine is making its way for me.

   I push my head out of the water, eager for the yellow warmth of the day sun against my flesh.

   Some things never change.

   The rich green and brown mountains still witness my comings and goings as they have before. The valleys are still lush, the skies are still blue and streaked with clouds thin and writhing like eels. There are huts too now, small circular and domed. Pink, blue and green, dotting the grass and slopes like pimples on the noses of giants.

   And around the bend, the waterfall pouring from the mountains to become my sister’s river.

   Mzimvubu.

   How I miss you. How I miss finding you at the end of my realm and the onset of yours. Our fights, heads raising from the waters, thundering like the waterfall, and necks intertwining in a playful dance just as our rivers become one. I never wanted your river and you never wanted mine. Both of us guarded something sacred, something that now, among the stones and the fish lays littered with human refuse.

   Why rule the world if only to treat it so?

   Your limits were the ocean, Mzimvubu. The glorious expanse you would sing to me about, planting ambitions in the sleeping human minds. We thought the world was for everyone to share. How naïve we were.

   They absorbed your name and gave it new meaning as they did with everything else. Calling it the home of the hippopotamus, which were so many and worshipped you. Until they killed them all.

   Just as they have killed you.

   I can hear their children laughing, their joy bouncing from the plateaued stones of the waterfall and ripping through the valleys and paths to their homes.

   The taste of the air so fresh. The breeze of the wind so cool.

   I see them running towards the banks now, rifles in hand, kneeling and pointing their barrels towards me.

   My skin is no longer as impenetrable as it used to be. If they aim true I will bleed. If I bleed, I will die.

   I should dive back. Plunge and disappear as the coward I have become. But what does it matter? How much time must I spend alone? Hunted. Famished. Afraid. Forgetting. I have lived like this for so long. Far too long.

   Perhaps that is what shame feels like. Perhaps I can show them one last time the glory they have forgotten. It may not be much, but it might tickle their mind.

   I have only one last jump in me. One last leap. May it count for something.

   I push my body out of the waters – every drop falling away, a fragment of my soul – and open my mouth.

   I will eat and commune one last time, and let them destroy all that is left of a time when things were better.

   My body twists through the air; the mountains, valleys and trees spin in a whirlwind of burning life under the day sun.

   The first of their bullets roar, but I cannot hear them, the thunder of their hatred is drowned by the immortal rumble of the waterfall. Splashes of my blood ripple through the air and mix with the colours, streaks of such a long life yet so miniscule, each drop a lifetime, each bite of rusty metal searing my flesh alive.

   It feels good. Good to be dying as strong as I will ever be.

   I can hear their screams now as my jaw closes in on one of their heads and I bite; the flood of who that person was connecting me to their life one last time.  A little girl climbing a mountain every morning to go to school morphing into an adolescent slapping a young boy’s hand away, then a married woman working the bright green dagga fields and singing, thinking about the teenage boy, and what had never been. Their ancestors’ memories, bubbling through every fiber of their being, weaving a timeless tapestry. The sum of who they are, all the way back to when we were all free.

   And through it all I think I can hear you, sister. You and me, united once more as the two rivers that bear our names meet to feed into the ocean.

***

Johan Villiers reporting from Mkumbi village for the Mpondoland Sun.

   It is a beautiful day this afternoon in Mkumbi.

   All the more beautiful as local villagers have finally managed to capture and kill the elusive Mamlambo.

   While many believed it to be a mythical creature, a remnant from old legends such as the Scottish Loch Ness monster, I can confirm with my own eyes that the Mamlambo is very real indeed.

   The creature is an amazing seventy feet in length, with what appears to be the tail of a large fish, the body of a lizard, the long neck of a snake and a head that is equine in shape and features, except for its overlapping layers of sharp fangs, that undoubtedly caused the alarm in recent months.

   Named the Goddess of the River by the Zulu, it has a more infamous name in the region: Brain Sucker.

   Indeed, while locals have spoken of the Mamlambo for generations, it was yet to be sighted, and local knowledge was dismissed as superstitious rumors.

   In the past year three villagers – excluding this morning’s victim, as residents rushed to attack the creature – were found dead, near or in the water, their skulls open and brains sucked out. Local police assumed that they had drowned and had been feasted on by crabs, but it is now clear that they were wrong.

   The reason the Mamlambo fed on people’s brains, and the reason for its recent re-emergence will remain a mystery. While local residents refuse to turn over their catch to local ANC representatives, no sightings of the creature have been claimed in other rivers and streams of the country in the past year, decade, or century.

   I think we can say for certain today, that whatever its motivations were, whatever its existence was like, the fabled Mamlambo is no more.