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By Root 1387 0

entire kafo. And when they weren’t being beaten, it seemed to Kunta, they were being wakened roughly in the middle of the night for a long march—always as a punishment for some boy’s wrongdoing. The only thing that kept Kunta and the others from giving that boy a beating of their own was the certain knowledge that they would be beaten for fighting, among the first lessons they had learned in life—long before coming to the jujuo—having been that Mandinkas must never fight among themselves. Finally the boys began to understand that the welfare of the group depended on each of them—just as the welfare of their tribe would depend on each of them one day. Violations of the rule’s slowly dwindled to an occasional lapse, and with the decline in beatings, the fear they felt for the kintango was slowly replaced by a respect they had felt before only for their fathers.

But still hardly a day would pass without something new to make Kunta and his mates feel awkward and ignorant all over again. It amazed them to learn, for example, that a rag folded and hung in certain ways near a man’s hut would inform other Mandinka men when he planned to return, or that sandals crossed in certain ways outside a hut told many things that only other men would understand. But the secret Kunta found the most remarkable of all was sira kango, a kind of men’s talk in which sounds of Mandinka words were changed in such a way that no women or children or non-Mandinkas were permitted to learn. Kunta remembered times when he had heard his father say something very rapidly to another man that Kunta had not understood nor dared to ask explained. Now that he had learned it himself, he and his mates soon spoke nearly everything they said in the secret talk of men.

In every hut as each moon went by, the boys added a new rock to a bowl to mark how long they had been gone from Juffure. Within days after the third rock was dropped in the bowl, the boys were wrestling in the compound one afternoon when suddenly they looked toward the gate of the jujuo, and there stood a group of twenty-five or thirty men. A loud gasp rose from the boys as they recognized their fathers, uncles, and older brothers. Kunta sprang up, unable to believe his eyes, as a bolt of joy shot through him at the first sight of Omoro for three moons. But it was as if some unseen hand held him back and stifled a cry of gladness—even before he saw in his father’s face no sign that he recognized his son.

Only one boy rushed forward, calling out his father’s name, and without a word that father reached for the stick of the nearest kintango’s assistant and beat his son with it, shouting at him harshly for betraying his emotions, for showing that he was still a boy. He added, unnecessarily, as he gave him the last licks, that his son should expect no favors from his father. Then the kintango himself barked a command for the entire kafo to lie on their bellies in a row, and all of the visiting men walked along the row and flailed the upturned backsides with their walking sticks. Kunta’s emotions were in a turmoil; the blows he didn’t mind at all, knowing them to be merely another of the rigors of manhood training, but it pained him not to be able to hug his father or even hear his voice, and it shamed him to know that it wasn’t manly even to wish for such indulgences.

The beating over, the kintango ordered the boys to race, to jump, to dance, to wrestle, to pray as they had been taught, and the fathers, uncles, and older brothers watched it all silently, and then departed with warm compliments to the kintango and his assistants, but not so much as a backward look at the boys, who stood with downcast faces. Within the hour, they got another beating for sulking about the preparation of their evening meal. It hurt all the more because the kintango and his assistants acted as if the visitors had never even been there. But early that night, while the boys were wrestling before bedtime—only halfheartedly now—one of the kintango’s assistants passed by Kunta and said brusquely to him, under his breath, “You