MmaMobu

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