Cry of the witch

But the next morning was beautiful; the last beautiful sunrise. Little white butterflies, like an invading force, drifted about, fascinating the children with their flights and flapping their papery-soft wings in people’s faces. They flew like little angels until they got tired and fell to the ground or in uncovered water pots. The sun burned […]

But the next morning was beautiful; the last beautiful sunrise. Little white butterflies, like an invading force, drifted about, fascinating the children with their flights and flapping their papery-soft wings in people’s faces. They flew like little angels until they got tired and fell to the ground or in uncovered water pots. The sun burned mildly in the clear azure sky and the ground was strewn with the white and flushed yellow frangipani blossoms. The trees rustled, humming out soft melodies in a duet with the cryptic breeze.

“Curse that witch! I feared the world would end,” shouted a man, basking in the euphoria of the beautiful morning.

“Nothing will happen,” someone else said.

“Stupid witch! She just hollered and gave people a sleepless night.”

“Shut up and go about your businesses!” an elderly woman shouted, breaking up the anti-witch cult that was sure to grow.

The palpable air of excitement was however dispelled when, by evening, a strange thing happened. It rained. It had never rained in December. The rain fell in torrents and washed away little chicks and ducklings. After the rains, an army of winged termites flew in, their soft, translucent wings breaking off. Some daring children ran out to collect the chinges, immersing them in bowls of water to make them lose their wings before frying them. It was a delicacy. But frightened parents held back their excited children from going out to collect chinges because they felt uneasy.

For a week people spoke of the cry of the witch, the white butterflies, the winged termites and the strange rains, trying to make sense of the unusual occurrences. They talked so much that the import of the phenomena became lost on them, almost slipping into the idyllic legends of Mazade—until people started dying.

It started with the pretty little girl that lived next to the giant atili tree. Her parents said a mole grew on her cheek and by evening the moles had appeared all over her body. Her breathing became laboured, her tongue swollen and her eyes puffy. For three days, she laboured in her pains and there was no known treatment for her rare ailment. On the third day, she started bleeding from every orifice and by evening, she died. And then a mole grew on the old man who lived behind the school. When he saw it, he started wailing like a child. By the third day, he too was dead. And so for weeks moles grew on people’s faces and they started crying. In a strange reversal of fate, people lived long enough to host the mourning period of their own deaths, for the mourning started the moment the first mole appeared and by the evening of the third day it would be over. Only the notorious Kaniki had lived five days after the first mole appeared but he too eventually died. Even in dying he had rebelled.

The plague fed and grew on the corpses of the people of Mazade and by the second week, people started fleeing the village as there seemed to be no cure for the dreaded moles of death. Death swooped like an eagle, plucking from one household to the other, reaping from the young and the old and leaving grief and terror in its wake. It swept without a pattern, like the dance of a mad woman.

Kudu sat under the avocado tree outside his shed looking at the peacock butterfly that had settled on a rock just out of his reach. The butterfly had flown around the tree and then perched on the rock, opening its wings to him like a book, displaying the eyespots on the carroty wings. The unblinking false eyes stared at him and he stared back. He wondered if the opened wings were actually some kind of book from which he could read some secrets. He needed a breakthrough. He had tried everything he could to cure the moles but had failed. His frustration bloated as Mazade thinned.

“We live in doomed times, my friend.” Kaneni’s voice broke through his reverie in butterfly book.

“Not doomed but challenging,” he said.

They shook hands and Kaneni sat down next to him. “You will not find the answer in that butterfly,” he said.

“I know.” Kudu grimaced and scratched his chin.

“We are obsessed with finding the cure.”

“I have almost given up, my friend.”

“Not you, I know. The whole world would give up but not you.”

“I wonder what our fathers would have done,” Kudu said into space.

Kaneni put a hand on his shoulder. “They taught us well, sometimes I think too well. They would have envied what we have become. We have cured every disease that Mazade had known before but this. We cured even ailments they could only suppress. Damn modesty but I think we are the best medicine men this parts have ever known…”

“And yet these moles defy us.”

“Not even our fathers have heard the witch cry.”

“That is true.”

In the silence that followed, the peacock butterfly closed up its book and took to the sky, darting first this way then that, its orange wing flapping in the morning sun before disappearing into the greying grassland.

“Maybe there is something we keep missing. Maybe we should go out to the forest again,” Kudu said.

“How many times have we been there already? We have tried everything there is to try and still we have come out short.” Kaneni cast a glance in Kudu’s direction. “Well, everything but one.”

Kudu turned to look at his friend and did not miss the devious gleam in his eyes. “What have we not tried?”

“The green blood of the witch. They say it can cure almost anything.”

“Kaneni, you should know better than that.”

“What is wrong with giving it a try?”

“Surely you don’t mean we should kill the witch to get her blood?”

“If it will save the people, why not?”

“How can you believe in such rumours, that the witch sheds green blood and that such blood cures everything? Ridiculous!”

“Is the witch your mother or your concubine? Besides, she brought this curse upon us!”

“My father said he grew up and met that witch the way she has always been and so had his father before him. Our children…”

“What children when the whole of Mazade is dying? We are dying, can’t you see?” Kaneni erupted then paused. “Think about it, Kudu. We can stop this suffering and death before it gets to us. If we find the cure, we could become gods in Mazade, we will become greater than we have been all our lives…”

“Is it the glory you want or do you have the interest of the people at heart?”

“The glory, Kudu, the glory, and the people too. And you have always wanted it too. I can see it in your eyes.”

Kudu drew close to him such that they were eye to eye. “Then you do not know me, my friend,” he whispered.

Kaneni drew back and laughed. “The other day I saw Dada,” he began grimly as if he had not been shouting just now. “He looked at me and looked away. Then he marched past as if I did not exist. This is the man whose life I saved with my herbs, this is the man who knelt to greet me, to thank me for saving his wretched life but now he sees me and turns away because that wretched witch cried and we can do nothing about it. Very soon the few people left will turn against us…”

Somewhere, in the distance, they heard the mournful tunes of a funeral procession. The dirge grew louder as the procession came closer. As they turned round the bend, Kudu stood up reverentially, his hands folded up on his stomach, his head bent and his face gloomy. Kaneni stood up and joined him.

A woman led the procession with her wailing and theatrics. Some men and women tried to hold her but found the task daunting. Sometimes it seemed as if they deliberately gave her a rather long leash to express herself in the wildest forms she could conjure. She was the wife of the dead man. The two medicine men raised their hands in salute and shouted their condolences. That was when Kudu noticed that the woman had a mole by the side of her neck.  

“She too is going to die,” he whispered to Kaneni.

“Aren’t we all?” Kaneni shot back coldly.

The woman impulsively veered off her track and rushed towards the two men. She threw herself at their feet, wailing.

“Are you going to let me die like this? You must help me, you must not let me die. I don’t want to die…”

“Stop this,” Kudu said, reaching out to grab and pull her up. “You must be strong.”

“How can I be strong?” She trashed and wriggled out of his grasp. “I am going to die.” She lay in the dust and wept. Another woman came out of the procession, her head draped with a black veil, and touched the afflicted woman. She too had the mole, Kudu noticed. She looked up and her eyes met his. He was shocked by her strength and her grace even in the face of impending death.

“You can do nothing but watch,” she said, her eyes gleaming with resentment. She helped the wailing woman up, saying, “Come on, these men are as helpless as we are, we must be strong for ourselves.”

“Kill the witch!” someone in the procession shouted.

“Quiet!” the strong woman ordered sharply. The entire procession hushed. She led the other woman back to the procession and they continued their march. She turned and cast an indefinable glance at the two medicine men of Mazade. Kudu knew he would dream of her, of her determined eyes and the mole beneath her lip.

No one said anything to them but they could see in the eyes of the hopeless people that they had been trusted with a duty by fate and somehow, they had failed. They could see in those frightened, helpless eyes that their days of glory had come to an end. A bird in the tree twittered out a sombre dirge for them, infuriating Kaneni further. He picked up a stone and threw it angrily into the tree, sending the bird flying out in a flurry of wings and shrill cries.

“They are wrong, you know,” Kudu said.

“About what?”

To be continued

Abubakar Adam Ibrahim is the winner of the 2007 BBC African Performance Playwriting Competition and the Amatu Braide Prize for Prose in 2008