He put me in this dusty, sun-scorched prison because he thinks he can outsmart me. Won’t even accord me the dignity of a mat to shield me from the grit. The young are always far more confident than their abilities allow. And of course, being an arrogant man doesn’t help him much either. What is it that they say—Youth is wasted on the young.
Around here, nothing is more revered than youth. Many an old woman accused of witchcraft is either thrown in prison like me or simply killed. To have the audacity to outlive your peers is considered a great sin, but that is only one of mine. Sin. Such a subjective word. One man’s sin is another man’s pleasure. I prefer to call them special attributes. Tools for survival. Gifts.
It has taken me a long time to hone my gifts and I’ve done it so well that I almost can’t remember a time when I wasn’t this way. The people do not let me forget who I am. Instead of learning my name, they call me the Blind One. Those who gave me my name at birth took it away when they discarded me.
I sometimes wonder if their sacrifice paid off. If, in place of a child that they believed flawed, my parents gained someone more acceptable. I try not to dwell on these thoughts. After all, some may consider me lucky. The fate of other children deemed inadequate is much worse. Whisked away after birth, they are bound in cloth to shield them from the stares of strangers. Left in the bush to either wither away from lack of food or become food themselves, because the kabumba, the potter who moulds us before birth, neglected to give the child enough limbs or was overzealous and gave them teeth too soon.
To exist despite the natural order of things is another sin. Women have had their wombs removed because the kabumba just couldn’t get the baby to fit the mould.
I suppose I was too grown up for them to smuggle me away. By the time the darkness came, I was a pubescent girl awaiting her betrothal. Old enough to be useful to my mother.
I lost my sight over many moons. My vision turning blurry, fading, and then becoming non-existent. My mother grew tired of me stumbling around her hut. She took me to a diviner who advised my parents to take me to the malende of our mzimu—the revered shrine of our ancestors. The mzimu, he said, would know what to do with me. Well, it turned out the ancestors were also at a loss. I stayed at the shrine for many days, distinguishing the passage of time by the heat of the sun on my skin. Unable and unwilling to explore my surroundings, I fell into a deep depression. Drifting in and out of sleep, weak from lack of food and water, I woke up one night by the wet nuzzle of a curious duiker. Shaking with desperation, I reached up, placed my hands around its warm neck and snapped it. I don’t know where the strength came from. Some might say it was the mzimu willing me to live. If it was, I am yet to discover their purpose for me.
****
My will to survive my parent’s sacrifice was another of my sins.
I lived in the bush and learnt to feel the silence of my surroundings. To co-exist with the trees, the animals, and the ever-changing weather. I scrambled about on the ground collecting sticks and stones, making tools and fire to cook, stay warm, and protect myself from predators. I walked with my arms outstretched, feeling for caves to shelter in when it rained. Using sound and scent, I started first by hunting little rodents. The morsels of meat kept me hungry, and I began to target bigger animals. The bigger the animal, the more hide to clothe myself. So I became adept at separating flesh from skin. Above all, I stayed hidden. Knowing that my survival lay in remaining invisible. Three cycles of rainfall went by before I started to do more than feel. I started to see.
“See?” you ask. “If you started to see, why didn’t you return to your people?”
You are young. You have much to learn. There is more than one way to see. The darkness allowed me to see so much more than you ever will.
I killed that first duiker too quickly to notice the shift in me. Indeed, even if I had noticed it, I would not then have been able to tell what I was experiencing.
As the seasons passed and I became a better hunter, I started to see flickers. I would pierce a warthog with the sharpened stick I used as a spear and as I placed my hand on it, dots of light appeared behind the hoods of my eyes. Then heat would begin in my palm and move up through the veins in my arm until it took over my whole body. It was like the flashes you see after closing your eyes from staring at the sun, only these flashes were hot. I would see blades of grass and blurry roots tugged from their place in the earth. Sometimes, I would see the limbs of other animals whizzing past. A warthog doesn’t live a very exciting life and I resolved to find more interesting memories to watch.
By now, I could tell the shape and size of an animal by the pocket of atmosphere it took up. I could hear not only their cries but also their hooves grazing the ground. I could track them in silence and knew which leaves to rub against my skin to render myself undetectable. I learnt to avoid killing the animals too fast so that I could savour their memories. After countless hunting expeditions over many moons, the visions had grown steadier. Where before I had seen flashes, I now saw entire snapshots.
I, of course, had my preferences. The wildebeests proved quite rewarding. They travelled far and wide, showing me so much more than a trotting little warthog ever could. The monkeys were always involved in some sort of family drama. But the most satisfying was the elephant. Its visions were so vivid and meaningful. The death of an elephant would leave me bereft. A spiritual experience that led me to seek out more of them to kill.
It was inevitable. I had to know how it would feel. Wouldn’t you? I mean, you may say curiosity got the better of me, but it was more than just curiosity. It was the innate human desire to see what I was missing out on.
I started with easy prey. Girls singing as they collected firewood a little too far away from the village. Inexperienced hunters taking so long to stalk their targets that they themselves became targets. Hunting people is so much easier than hunting wild animals. People believe they have the right to exist. They generally don’t spend too much of their time looking over their shoulders.
You clutch your chest in horror, but I know you’re more than a little intrigued. In my defence, I was still learning. As I said, I was honing my gifts. Back then, I believed that the memories would only appear at the point of death, so I had no choice. I had to kill them. I’ll spare you the gory details, but I will say that there was nothing more thrilling than touching the strong, skipping, pulse at the base of the neck, feeling it slow down, and then stop as I saw the climax of their memories. I found that if I placed my fingers at just the right spot, my pulse would mirror theirs and increase the pleasure.
I wept as I saw visions of what my life could have been had it not been snatched away from me. Once or twice, I thought I caught a glimpse of my mother. The violence of my rage at the sight of her scared me. I wanted to be able to replay the memories, but I also never wanted to see her again, so I decided to move as far away from the malende as I could, far away from those who had decided that I was not worthy of their family.
In the early days, stealing from a person left me sated. I didn’t have to hunt for memories more than once during each lunar cycle. The memories also sapped me of energy, so I hunted less and less for food. I no longer needed the animals for their visions and compartmentalised the killing. Food versus memories. As I said, not sin, survival. Seeing made me feel whole again. I needed it to keep going.
I know I keep saying it. I don’t want you to believe that I’m an ageist, but there’s something not quite satisfying about the memories of young people. Particularly the sorts of gullible young people who were easy for me to capture. It always feels like something is missing from them. A certain level of depth only attainable with time – like the need for the ever-increasing potency of a lengthily steeped brew. That need for depth drew me out. It made me careless. I either needed more and more memories or memories with greater substance. To achieve this, I had to keep moving. Too many lives lost in any one community risked me turning from hunter to hunted. I spent lots of nights hiding away from baying crowds. The crowds did not know or understand what they hunted and, in the end, this is what saved me.
My way of life became unsustainable. I was running out of hunting ground and wasn’t as sprightly as before. I decided to attach myself to one village and target those who were already close to death. The obvious advantage being that they would be both old and weak. So, for the first time in many seasons, I removed the veil of invisibility and revealed myself to others.
In the end, it was easy. People are fallible. Many would never imagine that someone like me could actually be capable, let alone able to cause harm. I listened out for a group of women who often collected firewood nearby. Waiting until they sat in one area, I stumbled towards them, making sure to look lost and confused. After much debate, they offered to take me to their local mung’anga.
Now, someone like you might take offence at being led straight to a diviner. You’d probably expect a wholesome welcome into a family home. But your life is different from mine. I don’t assume an entitlement to basic human kindness. And anyway, it made sense. If I was lost, then the best person to tell me how to get back to where I belonged was surely a mung’anga. I did not know it then, but that single act was my salvation. It led me to this very moment.
I was honest with the mung’anga. Well, as honest as it was safe to be. I told him how my parents drove me from home, leaving me to roam about in the wilderness until the villagers found me. It was a likely story. Believable. But I think there was more to his invitation for me to stay on as his apprentice. He could sense my abilities. Ultimately, he underestimated them, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Being back in society was a major adjustment. I had spent many harvests alone. Naturally, I wanted to withdraw and hide away from the stares and murmurs.
My work kept me busy. In the bush, I had, through trial and error, mixed potions for health and hunting. This meant I already knew many medicinal trees, plants, and bones, but the mung’anga taught me how to combine them to achieve greater potency. I learnt something else too. I learnt that I did not have to kill to see the memories.
When I got to the village and was living among so many people, my senses heightened. All the memories around me meant that, even without touch my mind was bursting with visions. I may have always been able to steal memories without killing, but I’d never have known because my main goal while in the bush had been to capture my prey before they could escape. I now saw as many memories as I heard voices and had no way of filtering them. It was too overwhelming to be enjoyable. I began to despair of ever again achieving the clarity of that first stolen memory.
I did away with the need to target the elderly, opting instead to snatch memories as I sat in on the mung’anga’s consultations. I would crouch in the corner of his hut and listen as a patient told their story. I found that if I kept my breath steady and focused, I could achieve intense visions.
As the seasons passed, I built up a sizeable library of memories and could cross reference them in order to resolve our patients’ ailments. I could, for example, use one woman’s memories to deduce that her discomfort was not due to some mysterious spell but to the fact that her wayward husband, who had also come in for a consultation, was sowing his seeds in many different fields. I, of course, kept much of this to myself because it did not serve my master. He was, after all, a diviner, not a healer. If he gave solutions to every problem that walked through his door, he would soon be out of business. And anyway, the people liked the mystery of spells and charms. I’m not saying these things don’t exist. What I’m saying is that divining and healing are different, and, in my day, there was clear regulation. But I digress.
Now, where was I?
The mung’anga knew I had abilities but even he couldn’t imagine my strength because let’s face it, I can’t see. At least not in a natural way. He believed, rightly, that the heightened sensitivity of my other senses improved my intuition. He thought that, like all good mung’anga’s, I was putting together a puzzle, being attentive to a patient’s voice and using doubt or concern to figure out their thoughts. He began to ask my opinion on particularly difficult cases. At first, he asked so he could teach me and later; he asked in order to consider my point of view.
I dare say the clinic was much better for our partnership. He, being a man, did not see it as a partnership. He hid me behind a curtain in his hut and made me diagnose his patients while he took all the credit. He knew full well that if the people discovered how useful I was to him then they would seek me out. I was, to be fair, much more of a novelty than him. I did not have to wear special looking trinkets or utter indecipherable incantations for them to believe that I was powerful.
Two things combined to increase the level of my ambition. The first was self-serving, well, if I’m honest with you, both of them were, but the first was a little pettier. I was sick and tired of the mung’anga keeping me further away from the patients than I would have preferred. His need for accolades hampered me. I longed to touch the patients. To feel their breath against my fingers as I traced the outline of their faces. Feeling a person’s pulse was still the best method of seeing memories and the mung’anga was just always in the way. He became a nuisance. It took everything in me not to scream at him to move. The second, is the reason I am in this prison.
The mung’anga was a revered man. Many came from far and wide to seek his services. But these were, by and large, common folk. People who didn’t offer much in return for his work. His real income came from well-to-do patients – prolific hunters and fishermen, wealthy widows and chiefs.
This last group, the leaders of men, were the most vulnerable and sought the rarest treatments. They also required the most secrecy and would pay whatever was necessary to gain it. They could not be seen to be visiting a mung’anga so, the mung’anga went to them. He would leave under cover of darkness and return at dawn, saying nothing of the night’s events. I was patient, biding my time. He would soon recognise that he needed me so that he could be more effective.
You see, the practice of being a mung’anga is competitive. The higher up the ladder you go, the more vulnerable you are. At any moment some youngster can come along and usurp you. That’s if you’re lucky. If you’re unlucky, you could wind up dead.
When you become the chosen diviner of a chief, the stakes rise considerably. You have no choice but to be successful. For instance, if you give a chief an amulet to defeat an enemy and he doesn’t succeed, then either you or the chief will die. There are only two reasons why a charm may not work, your fallibility or the patient’s inability to follow directions, and you don’t want to be the one to tell a chief that he is wrong. Well, you could, that is, if you had built up a certain level of trust. But my master couldn’t tap into what a patient’s real needs were. Truth be told, he was completely unsuited to serving a powerful leader.
When he finally did ask me to go with him to visit his most important patient, it was because he was at the sharp end of a spear.
You may have become weary of my diversions, but they are necessary to tell the whole story. Please indulge me once more while I explain the complicated political landscape in which we live.
The man who had employed my master is not the Chief, he only seeks to be. This was my master’s first mistake. You can’t align yourself to an unpredictable, power-hungry, social climber. There is no common purpose there. A man who wants to take power at all costs will always need more than you can ever provide. This man, the same one who has decided to throw me in prison, is a great hunter. His name is Kayambila, and he has become such a great hunter that he no longer holds a spear in his own hands. Instead, he is a commander of hunters who has built alliances across many nations, and gained great wealth. He has earned the respect of not only his peers but also that of people of far greater standing than him. Despite all this, he remains a mere foot soldier in the Mwene’s army. Well, he is far more than a foot soldier. As a general, he has led her army to famous victories, allowing her to conquer many of the villages that surround us. But, of course, as long as he is not the Chief, he regards himself as a mere foot soldier. The fact that the actual Chief, the Mwene, is also his sister only adds insult to injury.
Kayambila’s frustration has grown alongside the Mwene’s kingdom. He cannot understand why a woman, who does not yield a spear, should or could even lead a nation.
My master was at a crossroads. It was no longer enough to give Kayambila charms and medicine to win in battle. He now had to convince him that he was the right mung’anga to enable him to overthrow his sister. This was the reason why he finally decided that it was time to take me with him.
One of the benefits of being engulfed in darkness is that I am not intimidated by those around me. I didn’t lose sight of my purpose as I was led into Kayambila’s hut. I had done my homework. I knew the politics. His soldiers and advisors had visited us and I had learnt a lot from watching their memories. I’m sure I don’t have to mention it, but, by now, I was also able to tap into my master’s mind. The mung’anga’s delay in bringing me along didn’t hinder me.
As he sat listening to my master’s incessant chanting, I tapped into Kayambila’s memories.
Normally, when I stole memories, I was a mere spectator but with Kayambila it was like he was telling me the story. He was the most powerful person whose memories I had stolen and I had to steady my shaking hands. From my corner in the hut, I saw him in battle defeating many armies, I saw him in discussions with key players in our region, I saw his arguments with his sister and when I finally saw what I needed, I waited.
At last, my master finished with his potions, powders, charms, and chanting. During the reverential silence that tends to follow such proceedings, I spoke up,
“You’re going to need guns to defeat your sister.” I said, “You can only get them from the zelo – the ghosts from the North – and they will only give you guns if you hand over prisoners of war. You need to give them slaves.”
Now, I have to admit. This was not a particularly insightful thing to say. Everybody had heard about the zelo’s insatiable need for slaves, but I was banking on the element of surprise. I had rendered myself invisible and they had all forgotten I was there, this increased the gravitas of my words when I eventually did speak up, that, and the fact that most people, including my master, wouldn’t dare to tell Kayambila what they thought.
When I was sure they were all listening to me, I continued, “You will not win this war on the battlefield,” I said. “It will take time and strategy.”
“Go on,” he said after a while, but I stayed quiet. Hesitated for just enough time before I continued. “With respect,” I said, “strategy requires discretion.”
I didn’t need to say any more. Kayambila understood the need to have only one man in charge. I do not know what became of my master.
****
Over the many seasons that passed, Kayambila and I went on to fight many battles together, both on and off the field. He knew that proximity improved my abilities as a seer, so he took me everywhere with him. Soon enough, he became reliant on me and didn’t bother to pay special attention to friends or foes. He knew that I would translate their words for him. It was almost as if he preferred our quiet moments, my fingers on his wrists or crowning his forehead.
In time, I became as infamous as him. Although they did not understand what exactly it was that I did, people knew to expect me wherever he was. The only downside was that, because of the amount of time we spent together, I began to see myself in his memories. To see how I went from smooth-faced to wrinkly, from a full head of thick, tight, curly hair to wispy grey. I saw glimpses of him through other people’s memories and although he aged with time; he did not wither like me and instead became more dignified in stature.
But, as I said, you cannot form a partnership with a man like Kayambila. The process of taking power became too slow for him. I could not give any more excuses. He wanted to know why his sister was still the Mwene.
I grew tired of his constant complaints. Watching his memories became boring. I began to believe that his sister may just be better than him. She surrounded herself with powerful advisers, but, more than that, she had the people on her side. They knew that she would not sell them to the zelo, whom she refused to do business with. Given the chance, Kayambila would be happy to work with the zelo and everybody knew that.
I was stalling, I said, for his own good. If he tried to take over the nation now, the people would rise against him. I told him how her calm confidence spoke louder than his antsy desperation, that his son was more likely to become chief before he would ever even be considered, and, just to drive my point home, I told him that the Mwene’s memories had far more depth than his ever would. That did it. He threw me in this prison and left me here like a common criminal. He could have killed me, but I’m far too valuable.
On the advice of a mung’anga, he has decided to sacrifice his son, Sitondo, to the mzimu to prevent a claim to the throne. He thinks that this will make him more powerful, but it won’t.
Listen to them, scampering about looking for him.
Kayambila has forgotten that strategy requires discretion. My sense of sight is far more sophisticated than his. Indeed, my gifts have surpassed even my own expectations. I knew that he would lock me up here long before it was even a glimmer in his mind.
I have already whispered to Sitondo. He is on his way to the royal court to seek refuge. I have given him strict instructions for what he must say and when he does, the Mwene will have no choice but to send for me. And then I can be rid of this irritant and take my rightful place beside the Mwene. I can’t wait to finally be able to work with another woman who understands what it takes to stay at the top. Someone with some real vision.
END
Mwanabibi Sikamo is a Zambian storyteller and filmmaker exploring the real and imagined lives of Africans both past and present. Her fiction is steeped in the magical tradition of indigenous folk lore. She has been published by Olongo Africa, AFREADA and Iskanchi Magazine. She is currently writing her first novel.