• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3847 0

respects they were a triumph for Mandiso, since he got himself a strong, beautiful and darling wife; but in another way they were a disaster, for through her he acquired the enmity of the diviner. As to the wedding itself; there was a good deal of marching back and forth between Mandiso's kraal and Xuma's: he had to take a heifer there as proof of his good intentions; she had to bring rushes here as an indication of her willingness to work; he had to go there in his finest ornaments to dance before her family and break two saplings across his knee, thus pledging that he would never beat his wife; she had to come and dance before his cattle kraal to show that she revered the cows and would show them the respect they merited. And through it all, the old witch doctor watched sardonically, aware that no matter what rituals they observed, nothing good could come of this marriage. It was doomed.

But he did not interfere, and even officiated in certain of the hallowed rites, going so far as to protect the new hut against evil. He did this for good reason: he suspected that within a year Mandiso and Xuma would flee the place, after which he could see that one of his nephews gained possession.

To that end, as soon as the young couple moved into the handsome hut, he began asking questions through the community, never directing them at Mandiso, but always at Xuma's father: 'Who do you think it was that caused the fire-bird to fly?' and 'Have you noticed how the mealies at his kraal have grown bigger than any others? Could he be casting spells?'

Week after week these poisonous suspicions were broadcast, never a substantiated charge, only the nagging questions: 'Have you seen how Xuma's cattle become pregnant so quickly? Could her father be weaving a spell there, too?' The assumption in this question was most effective; that her father was casting a spell over the new hut was problematic, but that he had done so at his own was accepted: 'He's bringing this valley into sore trouble.'

During this time Sotopo was preoccupied with the last days of boyhood. Having seen his older brother through the twin ordeals of circumcision and marriage, he returned to those things that gave his own life significance. Beyond the family kraal, at the edge of the river, there was a level place where in the morning the wagtails danced, those delicate little gray-brown birds that bobbed their tail feathers up and down as they paraded. They loved insects, and darted their long bills this way and that, plucking them off dead leaves.

They were the good-omen birds, the ones that made a kraal a place of joy, and Sotopo had always found delight in being with them, he on a log, they on some rock at the edge of the river; he sprawled out on the ground, they dancing back and forth oblivious of him, for they seemed to know that they were protected: 'No one but a man near death from frenzy would disturb a wagtail, for they bring us love.'

He also felt increasingly attached to Old Grandmother, as if, like Mandiso, he must soon move away from her influence. He stayed with her about the house, watching as she prepared the dish he liked the most: mealies well pounded in the stump of a tree, then mixed with pumpkin, baked with shreds of antelope meat, and flavored with the herbs which only she knew how to gather.

'Tell me again,' she said as she worked. 'When you ran away from us, you say you met two boys, one brown, one white?' When her grandson nodded, she asked, 'You say one spoke like us? The other didn't? How could that be?'

She had a dozen questions about this meeting; the men in the family had listened to the story, nodded sagely and forgotten the matter, but not Old Grandmother: 'Tell me again, the brown one was small and old, the white one was young and big. That goes against the rule of nature.'

But when he explained, with increasing detail, for he enjoyed talking with the old woman, she told him what he had heard many times before: 'I didn't see it myself, because it happened before I was born. But men like that boy came to our shore once in a house that