I
Many years after the incursion of the pale man onto West African soil, Mary Ogene in Omahia, pregnant and ravenously hungry went missing for three days and did not return the same. In the extended absence of her husband, she had been seeking the crunch of kaolin against her molars and the subsequent stillness of her rumbling stomach after.
II
Mary Ogene had walked out of her homestead, through a rapidly changing world, past men building a bungalow for the new Warrant Chief Nwankwo, who had started walking around telling the women of Omahia that they would have to pay something called market tax based on how much of the new money they were making off exchanges at their market stalls.
Some of the women in Mary Ogene’s neighbourhood said that the Warrant Chief had wanted to enter into their huts and count their clothes to gauge how much they were worth, before he threatened that his boy-boys would return to collect the money that they owed to the Governor-General, or else.
No husbands were found to defend them from the harsh demands of the New State, through the Warrant Chief and his lap dogs. Their men were the ones clamouring for work under these new gods, pale as weathered bones, with their gifts of a salvation, its Bible, mirrors and starched-cotton servant uniforms. Mary Ogene’s husband, Jude, had found work serving as a gardener for a Chancellor, deeper in the heart of Aba.
He was barely home.
The simmering unrest across the East of the yet-to-be-amalgamated country rose gradually as the pale man and his domineering ways seeped into the body of their old world, which had been crafted and handed down through mouth, divination and craft from Mary Ogene’s ancestors.
In the old world, women were left to work the engines of both home and society without any questioning or control from the men they shared the world with. There was no creed or suggestion about only doing certain specific things in the world (like staying out of community affairs to man kitchens and market stalls) because one was born physically as a woman, or a man. There was a freedom to continuously attempt tasting life anew, regardless of what one carried between their legs.
Now, the invaders with their moustaches like yet-to-be-roasted caterpillars had come into their midst with holy words of submission and their men had changed, become hollow tools and violent mouthpieces. They were trying with caged fury to take away the freedom and power the women wielded under the old world in the name of the god of the new world.
In the name of his Son.
This unease in the air was why Mary Ogene went to look for ancient riverbeds, their banks rich with white deposits of chalk. The world was changing too fast. It made her baby seem to tangle itself up inside her. The men and their adoration of these new visitors was turning trusted tradition upside down. Left seemed to have become right now, and right, left.
She walked behind the market, avoiding her friends and her relatives, hiding her face. Mary Ogene quickened her steps once she was out of Omahia, past the seized farmlands filled with men in strange cloth, digging for something they would never find.
She walked deeper into the forests that fringed the town.
Her child was only faintly beginning to do the swim and kick, and it felt like the unborn one knew something was coming. Mary Ogene’s heart would occasionally fly into rhythms unknown, her stomach would tighten and her spittle dry, as she sat in gatherings with women who could see ahead, to a heavier curtailing of their old freedoms.
They complained of the shortening of market days, and the curfews that had trickled in until they were no longer allowed to move at night or before dawn which was when they most needed to rise and greet the work of the day.
The women were then reminded of the guns and the rock-faced men carrying them under authority of the Governor-General. Someone offered, “We should carry our own weapons!” and was met with fiery debate.
Mary Ogene was silent during these meetings, gazing into nothing, hand on her belly wondering if Jesus Christ, the saviour whom her namesake had birthed, would want such conquests done under the cover of his blood.
After she was out of reach of the sounds of the town, she turned left off the path that would lead to the next community and began to trample forward, pushing down the undergrowth quick with her bare feet.
She used trees that could as well be friends, and bushes ripe with flower to find her way to the hidden chalk rivers that her great-grandmothers had dug kaolin from.
She knew where to dig and reach into the warm heart of the earth to exhume chunks of this pure chalk, sometimes streaked with red or with sky blue. It was good to eat for the upset stomach, and for thin blood, and for when there was too much heat in the face and it felt like one’s head might fall off.
As she picked across the riverbed, Mary Ogene stood to her full height and looked downriver to find herself standing exposed before a strange sight.
Her body trembled as she grasped her belly and bent down to hide behind a wild berry bush, heady with a too-sweet fragrance.
Spit pooled in her mouth.
III
The white-skinned people and their workers (who were once brothers to Mary Ogene, though she now found them as untranslatable as their masters) were gathered around a large area that couldn’t be where Mary Ogene had come to so many times, she could find it in her sleep.
It couldn’t be.
The very earth looked to have been in a great battle with something that possessed no grace. Watery mud mixed with raw chalk, blood in pap. The narrow white river had been blown wide by hoes and pick-axes and a structure that towered yellow and clawed behind the small men who stood around it.
Mary Ogene had always known the deposits were deep and rich, because sometimes the women came with large baskets and left only after they had overflow of kaolin, without disturbing the way the river looked.
Before, this.
Now she saw how they had been blessed beyond her imagining. How Ani had indeed given them a gift to be used for generations. A gift now plundered.
The structure carried a heap of white chalk in its claw, which hung high over the men and their hard bowl hats. There was another person moving in the middle of the men, carrying blue water that gleamed with sunlight in a glass.
The glass was odd – like everything that had followed the pale people into Igboland. The person shook the glass, raised it to the sun and shook it some more. The diggers were resting, glistening ebony in the sun, their backs against mounds of exhumed kaolin.
Mary Ogene decided to approach quietly. She needed the kaolin more than the ways of this new world could scare her. She crawled downhill until she was close enough to see that there was a man inside the structure with the claw. He had pale skin too.
She could now hear the voices of the pale men, excited and hungry, like they had just found gold. She moved closer. Someone said something something Queen. Mary Ogene knew that word because they always said it whenever they came around to talk to the people of the land about accepting Jesus Christ.
She moved closer and then, at her feet, some kaolin flung far by their plundering. This one seemed to glitter and had the most vibrant blue, yellow and red streaks, clean mineral lines in the center of all the dusky white. She could feel it against her tongue, almost. The crumble as the chalk fell apart in her mouth and dissolved into a muddy mess at the back of her throat and then all the way down to her troubled stomach, to soothe her unborn’s dreams of strange, fiery tomorrows.
Mary Ogene grabbed at the kaolin lump quickly. Too quick. Her motion made the bushes around her rustle aloud and then all her once-brothers were alert, bloodthirsty and awake from their sleep; hungry for some bush meat, while ready to fight any intruders.
The white men stopped all their motions and the woman who had been carrying the blue water in her hand, hair like cornsilk all the way to her back, who wore a shirt and shorts like the men, shouted up, tearing the air.
The men moved quicker then, as if prodded with hot irons, gathering into a pack to surround and attack the infiltrator, but the small dark woman in the blue-green wrapper with hair woven down from her temples to her shoulder was no more there.
IV
Mary Ogene didn’t know how her feet flew so fast.
The foliage of the forest blurred in her periphery, into something like water, until she felt she was swimming.
Wind rushed fast past her ears and cold through her wrapper. She was sure she could hear her brothers’ voices barking behind her. Jide ya! Jide ya!
The kaolin in her fist was the size of a very large snail and she didn’t let it go.
Not when she stumbled and her entire body flew forward, still running so quick, nearly shattering her jaw on the rough trunk of a mango tree. Not when she slowed down, righted her body and continued to run pathless in the green, thorns and branches nicking her calves. Not when she saw them surrounding her, slipping out of the blurring forest like free fish.
They were many. Their lithe backs surrounding her, spotted yellow and black. Their streaming bodies were lean and quick as they ran alongside her small tiring body.
The leopards seemed to be guiding her and in her fevered daze she followed. She didn’t want to stop, or try to escape them. She followed, excited and mesmerized by this delirium that seemed to have been born of her fear.
Sweat was slipping under her lids when the path she ran through with the leopards ended in a dark copse. The ones ahead of her didn’t stop running. They slipped between two dead trees, sheathed in curtains and excitations of moss.
Mary Ogene’s heart was beating too fast and she could feel the exertion begin to bear on her body. Her gut lifted. Was that burn in her sternum a sign that her baby was about to come up through her throat?
She didn’t stop running.
She could feel their heat close to her pumping thighs. Three leopards on either side of her. The kaolin in her sweating fist. Woman and feline all rushed through the gate between the trees, before Mary Ogene’s body fell slack and all turned night.
V
There were voices outside the oily night she was suspended in. She still felt the kaolin in her loose hand.
They spoke Igbo as they lifted her onto a softer land;
“Where did she come from?” “Nwaikwu, look at her belly!” “Chineke!”
“What is happening to our land? What could have brought someone like her running through here so fast? Without fear.”
“Fear is blind to itself.”
Clean water fell over her face and chest. Sweet smoke swam into her nostrils as a quiet soothing susurration filled the air, like song from the throat of an unusually large bird of paradise.
Mary Ogene sensed a parting as the voices faded away.
“The rest of us at least got to wait at the gate, to decide and gather courage to pierce the veil.” Warm bodies lowered themselves around her, their velvet fur soothing and comforting.
“You can open your eyes.” A bigger voice spoke above those whispering to themselves.
Mary Ogene did as she heard. There was a very tall woman draped in white lengths of silk crouched beside her head. She was beautiful among the women and leopards who stood around looking on toward Mary Ogene, like a bird of paradise is beautiful among the trees, her skin refined as new earth. She put a cool palm behind Mary Ogene’s head and pulled her up to sit.
Mary Ogene remembered her unborn as she felt the fullness of her belly again.
“What led you here?” The tall woman asked. Mary Ogene looked around at her sisters from Omahia, who looked to her, clothed in a regular array of patterned wrappers and blouses. Some had their coin purses tight beneath their armpits still. She saw now that they had no black in their eyes yet the tall woman’s eyes were normal and spring-clear.
“I went to the river to get some fresh kaolin. There were some people there. The pale man and some of our brothers… they destroyed the river. The brothers gave chase when they heard me moving through the bushes, and then I ran, without looking back, and then…” Mary Ogene gazed at the leopards, who looked to her with what seemed like certainty. “…I am here.”
“I got chased from the river too.” A woman standing with a child fastened to her hip said. Mary Ogene couldn’t tell if she was looking at her as she spoke. “They’ve been there many moons now, seeking hard for what is already before them. Mmiri says they’re trying to steal the medicine inside the kaolin and so they broke the river open in search of the purest crumb.”
The tall woman stood, and Mary Ogene feared her head would break against the branches of the trees that formed the grove. She was a half-giant. The chunk of kaolin that had filled Mary Ogene’s palm was carefully held between three of her fingers.
“We are Mmiri. Preparing with your sisters for war. The visitor has just begun to take from the land. They will continue to seek more power, more medicine, more fuel, more bodies, until the land is emptied like an eaten snail.” She said, “Rise to your feet and see what we do.”
Mary Ogene felt her body flood with strength as Mmiri spoke, a warm prickling rushing into her back from her toes and fingers. She rose up, resting her elbows on the silent leopards’ sides, who also stood as soon as she did.
The grove stretched far into a faint-lit night. The low light came from fires burning at the ends of staves, held by more women from the villages in and around Aba. There were more than twenty of them and around their feet, by the light of the held lamps, even more women knelt, working firmly at something in the earth. They beat and ground and threw water and fire against these pits that they knelt by. Into the earth, their arms disappeared to the elbow, coming out sluiced and wet, slipping in over and over again.
Mmiri was ahead, walking in some other grace, almost at where the women worked the earth. They stopped moving. Mary Ogene realized they were standing so that she could catch up with them.
She pushed herself forward, after the women and leopards behind Mmiri, rustling the bushes of the grove.
Within the pits, Mary Ogene could see nothing but swirling reflections of firelight on breaking water as the women worked with silent grunts. She walked faster until she stopped where Mmiri stood sentinel over a pit, worked at by four young women. They had stopped pushing into the thickening waters and knelt back, to observe it coagulate, gurgle and swirl in on itself.
Their eyes remained clear of human sight, but they watched the contents of the pit as one would watch a waking child.
Before Mary Ogene’s eyes, the pit erupted with brilliance and a grown leopard leapt out. Fiery fur slick with the shine of its earthwomb. It had its head lowered in tension, slipping on its paws as it looked around at its new surroundings.
All the women around who saw its birth, went down on a knee and bowed softly to it. The other leopards walked over and began to lick and paw at their sibling.
In the near distance, other women continued to work at their own pits without breaking concentration.
“Join us, Ogene.” Mary Ogene looked up and her breath went small in her chest. Mmiri now stood in triplicate, a sudden monument amongst the leopard pits. Each half-giant had slight variations when looked at with more intent, but Mary Ogene didn’t have the clarity at that moment to look with intention.
“Your sisters woke us up for a reason. Something is coming and its power will be blind.” Mary Ogene found herself flush with heat, flustered by all that seemed unreal continuously revealing itself to her. She wanted to go back to where she was before all this began. Back to the dry stall, the empty house without Jude for days. Always cooking and eating pots of food alone. At least, she was invisible under the roof of a husband, forgotten, except when the women were returning home in the evenings and came to offer greetings to the unborn one she carried.
“Build leopards with us. We are many and will be more. Give to us of your weaving.”
Mary Ogene considered going against herself and her place in the world as a wife and soon-to-be mother. One of Mmiri broke from where they three stood tall and white amongst the women building leopards and the women carrying light.
Her hair was liquid coal and flowed pure as waterfall from a knife’s edge. Her serpent twined left arm lifted. Up to brush her fingers against Mary Ogene’s cheek. To bring Mary Ogene to see.
VI
Nwakaego and Ogechi had lived together since both of their husbands died in the same hunting accident. They watched over each other’s child and provided care and food for their little family by pooling together the resources they got from sales at their individual stalls in the night market. They had united in home and hearth, in a bid to prevent their brothers-in-law from attempting to marry them, to inherit them via family, as material property.
No one cast a wary glance towards them, when Ogechi moved her daughter, Somto, and their belongings from the small hut they had shared with her hunter-husband into Nwakaego’s larger house.
They mourned and comforted each other at midnight, in silence and warm embrace.
Warrant Chief Nwankwo had always looked askance at the widows and their open affection for one another. He believed they should be under men who could handle them, not pretending to live in a world without a need for their virility.
Thrice, he and his boy-boys had accosted Ogechi on her way back from the night market, way past the hour that splits the day. They had threatened her with imprisonment all three times, and she had stopped arguing to spit on the floor and look into their drunken eyes till they could feel a bitterness stain the roofs of their mouths.
They had let her go.
Each time Ogechi walked away from him, Nwankwo decided it was better to treat the issue at its tough root, than to bruise its dangerous fruit.
He began to send his boy-boys to ruffle Nwakaego’s feathers. They yelled at her to pay her market tax, from the doorway where the four of them stood when she refused to answer to their knocks.
They did this for three days then stopped.
The last time they came to visit Nwakaego – who was no longer able to walk to the market and back because her right leg had finally decided it would only work when it wanted to – they lit a battle spark.
Instead of knocking or calling names, the boy-boys, teenagers with a broadening taste for power, force and violence, broke through the door.
Nwakaego was asleep, and the home was being watched by Somto, and Nwakaego’s younger son, Chinedu. They were playing a game of hide and seek when the door broke to pieces and three shadows rushed in after the sudden daylight.
Somto, stunned, stayed where she was. All she thought of was how Chinedu’s curiosity would lead him out to see what was happening.
“Show us your property. All your items! Clothes, shoes, farm tools, kitchen tools.” They spoke the Queen’s English, heavy with the drag of mother tongue. Nwakaego was slowly sitting up from her rest in the hosting room when one of the warrant officers grabbed her by the arm and jerked her to her feet.
She groaned, “What do you want?”
“The Warrant Chief demands you pay your market tax today. Last day or else you will go to the new prison. We are to take you there ourselves.”
“I do not belong to your market tax group, because I closed my stall and ceased market visits several moons ago. Soon after your tax began.”
“Well, let us count what you have and we will tell you what we want in return.” Nwakaego watched as her and Ogechi’s belongings were thrown around in heaps.
Old clothes, and hiding clothes that were supposed to be surprises, and underclothes and eye paint and unsolved bead clusters. Nwakaego’s flat wooden carvings flew through the air to land on the hard mud in front of the house with a sharp sound.
She flinched. Everything ached and Ogechi was nowhere to be found.
“And you will pay us a husband tax, or else you will explain why you have been living alone with another woman since two New Yam Festivals ago.”
Chinedu screamed; play or fear, Nwakaego did not know. She found herself out of the loose grasp of the warrant officer, and the intimidating circle of two that they had formed around her, walking before her feet moved.
As Nwakaego walked towards the front of the house, Somto appeared out of the nowhere she had hidden in and ran out of the door to leap at the warrant officer who was holding Chinedu’s wrist too tight and dragging him low across the rough earth.
The day was clear, slowly tipping into evening.
Nwakaego joined her friend’s daughter and they rained their fists hard on the officer’s neck and stomach and back, pressured his fragile bones until he slid to his knees and began to bleat.
Chinedu broke free and ran off, away from the suffocating grip of the officer, zipping away in his yellow shorts and big singlet into the open field of forest-swallowed huts and farms that lay beyond Nwakaego’s town-border house.
Nwakaego shattered a piece of rotting firewood across the officer’s shoulder and he fell instantly, and began dialing up the volume of his shout. At the sound of the officer’s cries, the other two officer boy-boys emerged from the mild destructions that they had been tasked with inside the house.
Nwakaego and Somto had their colleague down on his face. He was barely awake, slowed down by the agony in his shoulder. The girl sat on his back, now hitting him half-heartedly as she came to notice the absence of Chinedu. Nwakaego hit him some more and screamed furious curses at the men who approached gallantly to save their injured colleague. She limped backwards, throwing the remains of the firewood in their faces with one arm, and with the other tried to shield Somto from their fuming bodies.
The boy-boys fell on them.
She wasn’t fast enough. A kick sent all the air out of her ribs and made a sharp current of pain rise up her spine. She found herself prone with no memory of falling. From where she lay on the ground, she watched an officer kick Somto hard, square in the stomach. She flew briefly through the air to land on her back.
The boy-boys moved around their colleague, slowly trying to lift him up.
The girl tried to move but was clearly dazed. As Nwakaego watched the daughter she was learning to call her own struggle against hurt, Chinedu emerged from within the dying villages, to kneel beside her.
After him came Ogechi. She moved careful as always, like her back ached. Her shoulders were burnished by the sun and her thighs guided creatures that made Nwakaego sit up and try to run back into the house.
Some of the leopards that lurked around Ogechi’s knees as she walked towards Nwakaego broke into brisk runs, sling-shoting their bodies and dragging the retreating warrant officers to the dust, in the time it took Chinedu to help Somto back to her feet. Somto remained hunched over and he led her to lean against a tree.
Ogechi pulled Nwakaego to her feet and held her close, dusting her back and hair of sand.
A crowd more than leopards had followed her.
Other women walked towards them, emergent shadows in the foliage, guiding more felines across the open ground with their hands and legs. The beasts barely rustled the undergrowth as they poured from within the deeper forest herded by the women who had made them, sometimes disappearing where light and shadow made a pact with their fur.
Nwakaego gasped as the first half-giant broke into sight ahead; a dense wraith, pure silken body taut in the wind. She leaned away briefly from Ogechi’s hold, to look into her eyes.
The procession continued as the other two aspects of Mmiri came into view mere meters behind the first. The leopards continued to slip through and beneath the overgrowth like strange gulps of hot water. The women walked proudly among them, eyes emptied.
“What is happening?”
“Nwankwo has declared war. He sent his boys as far as they could reach and his damage is done. Now, we’re taking it back to their masters all the way in Aba, but first we need to gather strength.”
Nwakaego looked stunned. Somto, still holding her stomach tenderly, held Chinedu’s hand beside them and watched as the leopards, the women and Mmiri filled their compound and spilled onto the overgrown fields that had been thriving parts of the town, before they came hungry for power that was not theirs.
“We’re going to sit on him, Nwakaego. Come with us.” One part of the tall spirit, Mmiri spoke. The nearest woman approached Nwakaego and Ogechi with a calabash filled with thick white paste, kaolin crushed and wet with saltwater.
They began to draw lines down their skulls, towards their chi and the chi of those who had walked before them.
VII
To sit on a man, you should know when he will be at home, not lured away by work or palmwine or some young maiden by the water. After you are sure he will be around, visit him at home with your sisters, the one hundred and one leopards they have built with their hands, and the water spirit that brought it all to pass.
Sit.
On the low stools and rocks and buckets you have brought. The best time to sit is at night, because by morning he will wake up full of dreams of your voices and the pressure of your breathing, and visions of his errors that you have slipped into his mind through his nose.
He will come outside and shout. Threaten violence to his sitting wife. He will not see the leopards. You will shout back in rhythm and suddenly switch to the singing. Taunt him until he begins to break things inside his house. Call him his names: worthless, devil, pig, fool, coward. For that is the plight of those who try to rule the world away from the eye of the woman. Those who try to turn blind power against her.
Nwankwo will shoot his gun into the air. Do not scatter. Lean against the leopards as you arrive and join the growing sit. As morning approaches your numbers will have quadrupled.
The women will see the leopards and Mmiri and sit among them, beside you. They will eat kaolin and make masks of their thunderous hearts with its milk.
The officers hearing the distress call of their brother’s bullets will come, bearing more bullets. They will loose their death into the crowd like rain and the bravest of your sisters will drop to the ground, emptied.
The leopards will fly at the men and tear them limb to limb, even as they are beaten back into inexistence by red hot bullets.
You will break down his house, push it down with the crux of your shoulders and trample on the mud walls, until a red cloud rises around you.
VII
The Women’s Rebellion broke across the claimed world of the pale man in an ocean of effervescent anger.
Woman, leopard and water finally breaching the binds to their freedom, devoured everything that came up against them. Sweeping the streets and adding more and more women and waters to their number until their sound across Aba was a virulent roar that set its hearers running for no reason at all.
The pale man sent his soldiers, as the women and their unseen ferocity stood barricade against official vehicular motions on Main Street. Boldly denying order to this new Queensland, and also asking to be free from its demands and unnecessary weights.
No more market tax. Let us be as we are. Free to make and know, to buy and sell and grow.
The women swung clubs made out of fallen tree against coward soldier’s skulls. They threw rocks that were once pieces of the houses of offending men, which exploded in bombs of red dust, and they spat, streams of warm water that became lasers of yellow-red heat, scalding through the hard hats and burning the aiming arms of the soldiers.
Mmiri drowned the woman in sweat, cleansing her sight with salt. They gave her aim wings, and made her rage a river that knew where it was going, a river that seared its banks with fires unseen and cried with the voices of a thousand women aflame.
As their comrades screamed and fell to the slow ammunition of woman and spirit, their scattershot came like rain, gunshots, wounds, rending the afternoon.
VII
Mary Ogene, who had assisted in the birthing of more than two dozen leopards from the pits in the earth, sat in labour on a thick mat of fresh banana leaves, in a circle of kaolin-lined women who breathed as she did. Panting with her. Deep breaths as her spasms seized and returned, pushing hard, increasing undulating pressures around the gravity of her being.
She felt she could split the universe with the grind of her teeth.
They would split the universe together with the grind of their teeth, bring enough pressure to make diamonds into aged kaolin under their gums. Enough pressure to smelt a life.
They could split the universe together.
It was their ordinary work. To shatter blockage and free time. The rooster is birthed first in an egg. They will do it again. They will dissolve their strength into an elixir and give to the one alone.
VIII
Mary Ogene splits the universe, alone. The leopards dwindle in number, melting into strips of sunset. The keen cry of the newborn stretches pure through the air.
IX
After choosing from an offering of knives that the women lay before her chest like sharp tongues, Ogechi cut Agwu free from Mary Ogene and bathed him in water from a dissolving Mmiri’s heart.
He was anointed in kaolin, and promised a world, away from the one which thundered with violence and spite around him as the women and their companions marched onwards, their fury a new blade aiming for the throat of the pale masters whose homes were in the near distance. He would be spared, they prayed, from the death harvest of any future wars, and his only roars would be to cry joy.
