She walks the dark of night, among bored
hounds and midnight preachers, a song guiding her tongue lulling ghosts, ghosts
of dreams sleeping broken in shacks and other makeshift abodes. Sky flickers
with a distant thunderbolt and random barking stops, echoes standing on air,
and mesmerized by dizzying shadowy wonders around her, she carries on in song
and a faith in a god who protects women even in dark corners of brutal townships.
That night she sleeps in peace among fighting neighbors, humming hope in her
drying bones, a resonance of blessing she feels coming.
And as the stubborn sun rises slowly
creeping through a familiarly caked horizon, spreading radiance over the
veld-land, a cue for her to wake breezes through nail holes and other cracks in
her wooden shed. Morning prayers beckon her to ready her soul for another brace
through muck and sour souls making their way to towns and other alternative destinations
meant for those who cannot stand the normal. But on this day, fate had mustered
a plan for her to encounter what she had long desired; a love where she could
feel respected.
Sudden was the stun later that dawn while
buying vetkoeks, her crisp black dreadlocks and purple skin glistening, worn
with a pride of one who is used to cruel eyes. A young man stood gazing
uncompromisingly at her, a cigarette bellowing in his slightly parted lips.
Both looking coarse yet electric in the rusty surroundings of fading fences and
shabby houses, she proceeded walking to the beat of her brand of pious
happiness that belonged not in this dead-land.
She might have lived roughly thirty years,
but a darkly frozen exhilaration danced in her pupils, he had thought; and this
was envied by many a witch who nursed monstrous failures gained with jukebox
love and thrills. She was light, a compelling poise of being, and a black woman
standing a couple of feet from the tuck-shop wire-meshed window.
A lunatic bustle of school children buying
junk diet delicacies couldn’t get in his way as he resolved to approach Mobu,
and she could feel the heat of his approach burning through her skin. A second
passed in the eternity of vetkoeks being stuffed into a plastic sachet, and she
turned slightly eyes cast on the dust; yet he remained mute a sheep in an
abattoir planted among flowers. And when her purchase exchanged hands, she left
stunned by the cold fear which was now resonating from his every pore.
***
Men milling around taxi ranks for the last
hours of day, many afraid to go home after work; faces evaporating, blurs of
self-hating persons – everything became a splitter that pieced his enraged
heart. How could he just not speak to her? That was what gnawed his gut the
whole day long, slaving underground where two days ago his friend lost his life
to a rock-fall. He could not mourn his that day, for he thought he had seen
life. Seeing her was close to laying eyes on god before approaching hell – hell
if she weren’t to be there in his bilious primitive existence. Was she a
figment meant as his final truth unborn by words?
***
Mother Of Soil
So it came that one night a jester among
herders formed a legend about a mystic little girl who had found refuge with
stranded caravans over icy mountains in search of grazing pastures. He carved a
tale of her birth happening underground, a fetus that clawed her breathless
path from raw earth’s belly. He claimed she ate the soil around her for
nourishment over years of her stay alone in the wild, after having consumed her
mother’s shriveled body buried with her still unborn.
Mobu’s physical strength had astounded
those among the caravan whose initial encounter with her was unwomanly violent;
many had lived bearing scars and maimed but looked after. As she was eventually
accepted into the band of herders, she grew to become an indispensible nurturer
to both man and animal, injured or sickly. Playing menacing games with hunting
dogs, tackling goats; at one time an elder said Mobu had fed on her mother’s soul.
This led many to fathom stories of her cannibal nature, and her preference for
raw meat become misconstrued for a bad omen. The claimed that from whence she commenced to consume her mother’s
flesh, her organs became hard as mud.
It later came to light that many of the
elders of the caravan knew the sordid face of a woman once was buried with her
unborn child kicking in her belly. Inside of her came not an infant’s cry it
was said, but a harsh growl of a triumphant beast that knew it would defy
death. And Mobu having being born full grown as they had discovered her, was a
mystery in itself; but having not been mothered, there would forever be no
witness to her craning neck and first wails, as she stretched conquering arms
around life.
***
As it is will, all dazzling in mystery, it
was rumored that an insatiable rage consumed her mother, mere hours after a
night of wind-blown rain spent in her father’s hut. It appears the old man
claimed the child wasn’t his seed, a
sordid and proverbial lie fitting for a story to be told in cordial
conversations about errors and consequences. It was said Mobu’s mother was
addicted to eating soil and other soft rocks, a habit common among rural women,
which was later carried to all corners of urban slums.
Also true was that Mobu’s mother lived a
laborious life of all rural beasts of burden, and her pregnancy became a
straining weight, and in final days her sickness had withered her once stern
and bold posture. Mobu’s father had meanwhile convinced the entire village and other
neighboring boroughs that his wife was a which, an adulterous soul that carried
a diabolical affliction that was hereditary.
Mobu’s mother had lost her mind it is said,
when all the men of the village gathered to wrestled her towards the hanging
tree, where she had seen many a cattle-thief surrender their shadows. Her once
vibrant glow that made her the pearl in every eye had faded to an ashen sheen
on her peeling skin as she slid across her homestead. Her lips carrying curses,
torching and coal-black with hate, it is said that her last words neck in a
noose of goat-hide was MOBU.
***
When herders found an infant girl prancing
about on a mound of soil laden with rocks, they thought her an omen or a ghost.
There upon the secret grave of her father’s sweat, Mobu was found already
teething, wild twigs strung to her mane of hair. A brave one eventually coaxed
the wild child and wrapped her naked body with woolen skins of his last kill,
in time she saw a father in him. Tales grew among herders on the countryside,
and the man eventually had to return homeward to his wife and son. There, Mobu
was raised among hills and fields, during springs of hilarious memories and
winters of strife. A prophesy about her was strung, and she observed the cracks
on heels one day, she saw her destiny.
***
A face inured to misfortune, immortal youth
in purple skin untouched by blade nor fire. Her eyes looked like candle-lit
caves in a deaf blindness, yet all-knowing. Absent-mindedly tossing her
dreadlocks could banish regret for any man who loved her; yet she had failed in
love numerous times. A holy spell had banded around her, endless months
creeping before her living among savages who nurtured her strange toil among
the living. But more often than not, a fleeting flame leapt from her eyes,
toward the heart of one she dared hold dear. And daringly she loved him, wild
and new, her adolescent spirit rising within her womanly mane; for a time
forgetting the markings men had branded on her being. For some ambiguous chance
she had managed to slay many a demon in her bosom for his sake, but a shrill
secret she held close and quite - the day of her birth.
Yet it befell, the misfortune that he’d be
hounded by madness unknown. A dreading of day, of others, and of living with
the nightmares – livid and godless –of Mobu consumed by mounds of mud, that
comes in torrents from the bursting molten mountains in a sunless plane. Over a
couple of weeks of their co-habiting her shack, he began to sleep-walk, a
somnambulist in maniac fury at times, riddled in sweat; her in prayer and yet
prudent with reasoning with a man caught in the vices of dreams. All his untraceable urges to hurt her began
to become the stuff of their days, and she began hearing gossip that her
witchery had wrecked a good son. Mobu felt she had become the embodiment of a
lecherous woman of her secret birth, it seemed she had an unfortunate choice of
ancestors.
Images By: Paul Zisiwe
