Cave Man and Cave Girl
The Burning of the Den

Except for the intermittent crowing of the cock, which can start as early as midnight, the savanna is silent at night and only bangs into life at dawn when the sun splashes its way with a red paint in the east and another birth seems to have occurred, in blood. The birds wake up first and then the humans.

 I woke up with a dream in which the unusual had happened: the hundhwe bird had stopped singing and the other birds were asking, ‘Why? Why? Why?’

The sung question transformed into a heated argument over why a boy should not be allowed to show the men where the den of the bearded snakes was. Realizing that it was my mother standing up to the village men, I bounced out of the bed like a ball, dressed, eager to join in the fray. It was not so often that a boy gets into the village limelight and so I was determined to make as much out of this opportunity as possible.

I closed the door of the hut behind me and felt the full breath of the lake breeze on me. For a moment, I longed for the snugness of the bed and hut I had left behind. But the thrill and importance of the event that was unfolding and probably coming to an end this morning propelled me on to the courtyard and I sneaked a look at the arguing adults.

‘If you are really men, you should go and look for the place yourselves. I can’t allow my son to go to that bush.’

The men, being among the most short- tempered men in the village, had already flown into a rage. I joined the group just as my father stepped in front of my mother and said, ‘Firnika, I’ll accompany the boy and make sure nothing bad happens to him.’

My mother walked into her garden behind the hut, still quarreling, but obviously subdued not only by the terror of the deep voices of the men carrying terrible weapons, but also by the authority of the verdict they were to enforce.

The previous night, the elders had presided over and settled a dispute that had threatened to tear the land asunder and attract attention of the dreaded government security agencies. The dispute had been between the storytellers and the militants on whether two village members, Yaye Odiya and his daughter, Ochidanga, should be punished for their abominable activities. The militants were in favor while the storytellers, being not exactly (they were nicknamed ‘the not exactly’ people) against any small action taken, were pushing for more time to be given to the Odiyas to reform.

At last, the elders, with so much regret for their verdict had invoked the authority of custom and unanimously said, “If one of us turns into a hyaena, shall we not drive him out into the bush? Yaye Odiya and his daughter must not live among us anymore.” Y aye Odiya was told not to pack, but simply to go. “Go where we’ll not see you or hear about you!” the elders said. The elders expected him to relay the message to his daughter, Ochidanga, wherever she was or was hidden. And so, the Hono Hill Village woke up and marched on toward the hillside home of Odiya to make sure that he had left with his daughter or, if he had not, expel him and burn up his possessions.

Among the possessions to be burned was the den of the bearded snakes which had given Yaye Odiya the reputation of an incorrigible sorcerer and his daughter the prototype of a precocious witch. I was the only one who had seen the den and discovered that the daughter stayed there.

***

I walked among the group of militant men who had fetched me from my mother’s hut. They were not the only ones who would enforce the customary verdict, but certainly they would throw the first and the last stones, as it were. They were also women, children, the talking storytellers, observers from other villages and even a cameraman to cover the action. All of them occasionally interviewed the militants and me just to get the best picture of what would happen. Presently, the militants got irritated and told them to wait and see (did they not have eyes and ears?). A blind man and a deaf man walked side by side, and after being rebuffed by the militants, happily agreed that they would “see with their own eyes and hear with their own ears”.

I too did not like the numerous questions especially those asked by the cheeky men about Ochidanga’s “breasts that filled the cup of the hand”. Unlike the militants, I could not keep these interviewers away from me with any threat of violence nor with feigned ignorance. I was supposed to have been an expert on the Odiya’s having been to the mysterious den of snakes and survived death there.

What saved me from these people was the sight of Yaye Odiya’s hillside wild grass farm that signaled the beginning of his hillside home. This farm was probably Yaye Odiya’s only decent possession. He kept it and guarded it so the grass could grow for repairing his thatched hut. But now, people trampled on it as they sought for a short cut to his compound. At last, they could hurry and look for the answers there.

The home was on raised ground but was not visible from outside because it was surrounded with wild trees and bushes. The path leading to it was barely visible, covered with tree canopies and, in this weak light, grotesque shadows.

We felt as though we were walking away from the morning light into the night before. “He could have cleared it,” people said as they entered the compound. A lonely hut was the only sign of human habitation there, although it too was surrounded with overgrown bushes.

“Where would the sorcerer’s snakes live?” one woman asked rhetorically.

“And where would the young witch train?” another quipped.

Some militants positioned themselves around the hut. The group that had woken me signaled me to take them to the den. We walked further up the hill through thorny weeds and entertwined trees. It was darker in the bushes and it was difficult tracing the paths snaking round indescribable bushes and dead tree trunks. I got the sensation of crawling like a snake and following the snake to the bottom of its hole, even though we were moving up a hill.

For the first time I felt scared even in the company of these militant, strong men. Then I heard the sounds of the crickets, birds croaking like toads and I knew we were there. I pointed out at a pool of water. “That is the mouth of the cave. The rain brought floods.”

“And somebody can live inside?” one militant man asked as he surveyed the entrance to the cave. Some trees had dried and formed a gate at the mouth. Stones shaped like stools were scattered around, giving the feeling that people were wont to recline here before retiring into the cave, if it ever was a home.

The chairman of the elder’s council came along and explained almost nostalgically, “And our ancestors used to worship and hide here away from the tribulations of the earth. That was a long time ago. Then the witches seized the cave and made it a den of fierce snakes. Nobody dares come here, but today we are here because the land is full of evils and we must eliminate them.” He looked around and satisfactorily registered the readiness of the militants who had the terrible weapons to fight the evils.

“Is this where you found her?” the leader of the militants asked.

“Yes, that is where I found Ochidanga,” I said, pointing to a smooth stone by the entrance. I knew I was betraying the only friend that I could have in this compound, but was it not in order? When there was such a uniformity of decision, who was I to frustrate it?

The men approached the cave cautiously with their weapons at the ready. “If anyone is in here, come out!” the leader said. Only the echoes of his voice answered back. He switched on some long torch and directed the beam inside. His men threw stones inside the cave determinedly as though that was the first cleansing ritual for entering the cave. They gradually stopped the activity. There seemed to have been no sign of life in the cave. The group entered the cave, stalking like predators and holding sticks, knobkerries and spears. The leader was the last to enter, covering them with his strong beam of light.

“Stand out there.”

It was my father telling me to remain at the gate of the cave.

I was rather disappointed for being excluded out of the place where I thought the real action would be. I resorted to watching the people milling around, expectant, thrilled and overwhelmed by the pathetic state of a home they hardly ever entered for fear of being bewitched or bitten by bearded snakes. They were also triumphant for being in this hillside home was a symbolic victory over their fears.

“Don’t you enter a beast’s territory only when you have subdued it?” some asked.

There were shouts in the middle of the compound and presently smoke billowed out of the roof of the hut. That could only mean one thing: nobody had been found there and so the militants there could only burn up the place. Many people lost interest in the fire and came to the cave, still hoping that this action would not just end with burning the compound. They were talking their minds loudly without fear for they had given hope on that person who could have been hurt by their talks. ‘Yaye Odiya, being the eccentric he had been, should not just have left that easily. He should have waited to be expelled and put up a fight. After all, he came from a lineage of warriors and had been to the white man’s war. He was also a witch doctor armed with bearded snakes! And that daughter, Ochidanga: the girls and boys should get a chance to whip her, just to show how hateful her behavior had been.

I remembered how weeks earlier when I stumbled upon her by the cave, I too had urged Ochidanga to come out, promising I would ask the boys to protect her. The request had not been so much out of malice as the thirst for the drama that would ensue from her appearance in the village streets.

Splashing sounds came from the cave as the men continued with their search. They shouted out their messages whenever they made an interesting observation and discovery. The cave was dark and as big as a wrestling courtyard. The water was treacherous, some parts being deep enough to drown a girl. How could that young witch have lived here? She must have been truly a witch!

When the militants shouted their voices echoed, bounced from wall to wall so that they were distorted and hardly audible. Moreover, there were also some mysterious noises in the cave? Were they the ghosts or snakes? The darkness of the cave was surely mysterious and horrible. Whatever the case, the militants were ready to die to rid the land of evils.

Then there was silence. A whirring sound came from the cave and some people ran away in panic. The atmosphere was charged with tension as the people reminded themselves that this was no ordinary cave but a den of bearded snakes. I moved a step away from the cave but was held, like everyone else, by curiosity. Were the bearded snakes going to be found? Would they come out? Was Ochidanga inside?

“What’s happening there?” an elder could not stomach the suspense anymore.

“Bats!” a voice answered from within. “We have discovered a den of bats.”

Big bats as had never been seen before in Hono Hill village flitted ominously into the morning light and disappeared in the sky and in the bushes. They were bats that the wise ones said could only live in deep caves, like the den of snakes. There was an instant relief from the crowd outside, but also a feeling of an anticlimax.

Then something happened. A flurry of splashing began and increased in intensity until one militant came out the cave, running and out of breath.

“What is it now?” the chairman of the elders demanded, standing up.

“Yaye Odiya!”

“What?” asked everybody.

“He’s dead!”

“Drowned?” asked the people almost in unison.

“No! Killed by strangulation! His neck is as big as his head.”

“Ooo!” exclaimed everybody as though that was the last thing they had expected.

“Call everybody here!” ordered the chairman of the elders’ council. He had brought a chair along with him and sat on it, making the gate of the cave a makeshift court “And bring the corpse outside,” he shouted at the top of his voice, making everything appear as an emergency over which he had control.

“Extinguish the fire!” shouted an elder. He had been all a long cynical of what was taking place. “Do you know that what we have done is also the same as murder? Custom does not allow us to burn houses. We must cleanse ourselves of this evil.”

“We shall do that later,” said the chairman and motioning the elder to keep quiet. People broke twigs and beat the fires with them, stopping the conflagration that was to become of Yaye Odiya’s compound.

A flurry of activity followed in which the people gathered at the gate of the cave and Yaye Odiya’s body was brought out. The women who were there screamed to announce the death and soon, Yaye Odiya’s hillside home was a veritable funeral scene with screams, dirges, mock fights with death and human traffic of mourners arriving.

Despite this semblance of order, there was still a lot of mystery around Odiya’s death and the events leading to it. People tried to make out the events in as confused a manner as there were the storytellers to tell them. The storytellers were probably the only winners in this village tragedy. They had feared that Yaye Odiya and his daughter’s banishment to a place where they could “not be seen or heard” would put a stop to the endless flow of stories in Hono Hill Village and they had agreed to the verdict only reluctantly because the ensuing events would keep them occupied for some time. Now they had got more than they had bargained for.

The mysterious death of Yaye Odiya and the unresolved disappearance of his daughter, Ochidanga, promised to fire their imaginations and fill the air with “words as abundant as the fleece of sheep” for ages to come. She was nowhere to be seen, but her story, spiced by the storytellers’ conjectures, and told by everyone else began to acquire the nature of a cleansing ritual for the defiled village and a key to the mystery of Yaye Odiya’s death. It was told on the village paths and in the homesteads, in the warm morning sun and mild evening sunset, in the cool lake breeze as well as in the stillness of the night.

The hillside ghosts

Ochidanga! Ochidanga!

Never claim an outdoor territory

  among the boys

For yours is the euphorbia-hedged home

   at the hillside.

The chant was reputed to have been first uttered by the hundhwe bird when it saw the dangers that a poor girl would face if she ventured out of her hillside home. It was not surprising that the bird talked - for Hono Hill was a village of unusual happenings - but what happened at the hillside in the cool breeze from the Lake Victoria amidst the cries of the hundhwe bird were most unusual.

A man married a most beautiful woman, loved her deeply but lost her in her first childbirth. The baby girl survived that difficult delivery, helped out of the dying mother by an inexperienced midwife who muttered something about “a chameleon delivery”, meaning that the mother must die so the child could live. (Pregnant chameleons are reputed to burst out and die while the freed baby walks majestically into a new world and life.)

Ochidanga, the baby girl, was not expected to live long. Not because she was cursed for having killed her mother, nor that she was too ugly to live. It was because her father chose to neglect her and instead cry openly for what he direly missed with the demise of his wife, Ny’Omolo. On the first day of the funeral, he had embarrassed the village in the presence of their respected guests, especially the mothers-in-law, when he burst out in a dirge:

Ny’Omolo, you’ve made me to dry,

You’ve made me to dry

Like firewood!

The villagers whistled and called out, “Yaye Odiya!” which meant that they were complaining about the bereaved Odiya. “Yaye Odiya!” they went ahead, “we have respected guests here and we can see more mothers-in-law coming on the plains!” The hillside commanded a good view of the coming mourners who had to cross the plains before reaching home.

Yaye Odiya inserted more words in his dirge tune:

Will those in-laws end the dryness?

Will they end the dryness?

People blocked their ears. The mothers-in-law are the most respected in this part of the world, the ones in whose presence there should be no curses, quarrels, fights or any misbehavior. The mothers-in-law walked into Odiya’s obscenity and wondered. The baby cried and cried. The guests from the deceased’s family quickly consulted and reached a consensus.

“Yaye Odiya, our son-in-law,” their spokesman said, “stop crying. We shall give you another woman.”

And so, Yaye Odiya was given another wife who took care of the baby until she was ten. But Yaye Odiya did not recover from the death of his first wife. He still talked of “dryness”, snapped at his wife, stopped farming and sold most of his land.

People talked of Yaye Odiya as being lazy and foolish. When they saw no baby coming out of the second union, they concluded he was also impotent, though the wise ones pleaded for patience and advised that he take another wife. But Yaye Odiya became more aloof and incorrigibly anti-social. Even the patient, wise ones despaired on rehabilitating him as a forthright son of the land.

“Yaye Odiya - his wife will leave him because he can’t take care of her,” they prophesied on the village paths, in their huts, under the shades of the ober trees and in the hot, bright sunlight. “Yaye Odiya will sell all his land because he doesn’t have a son to inherit it,” they prophesied again, enjoying the breeze from the Lake. Both prophecies came true and Yaye Odiya lost whatever respect he still had in the eyes of the people.

Yaye Odiya did not try to recover the lost glory. He outrageously went ahead to show the villagers his other nature. He became a scavenger on the beaches and made that an occupation, despicable as it was. He vied with the birds and small animals for an occupation they had exclusively held since the Lake began.

Legend has it how Yaye Odiya fought with the dogs and kept the birds at bay as he jostled for a dead fish which the waves had thrown onto the beach and how he didn’t mind the flies on rotten fish thrown away by fishermen. “All I want is good soup,” he was overheard declaring to himself in one rare, cheerful moment as he climbed to his hillside home. Ochidanga, now old enough to cook was at home waiting. The hundhwe bird chanted:

Ochidanga!

Ochidanga!

Never claim an outdoor territory

 among the boys

For yours is the euphorbia- hedged