Bosambo of the River

"Have no fear, lord," said Gala sagely; "I will lie to him."

"If you tell me I lie, I will beat you to death, old monkey," said the wrathful Tobolaka. "This is true that I tell you."

The old man was dazed.

"A white woman," he said, incredulously. "Lord, that is shame."

Tobolaka gasped. For here was a sycophant of sycophants surprised to an expression of opinion opposed to his master's.

"Lord," stammered Cala, throwing a lifetime's discretion to the winds, "Sandi would not have this – nor we, your people. If you be black and she be white, what of the children of your lordship? By Death! they would be neither black nor white, but a people apart!"

Tobolaka's fine philosophy went by the board.

He was speechless with rage. He, a Bachelor of Arts, the favoured of Ministers, the Latinist, the wearer of white man's clothing, to be openly criticised by a barbarian, a savage, a wearer of no clothes, and, moreover, a worshipper of devils.

At a word, Cala was seized and flogged. He was flogged with strips of raw hide, and, being an old man, he died.

Tobolaka, who had never seen a man die of violence, found an extraordinary pleasure in the sight. There stirred within his heart sharp exultation, fierce joys which he had never experienced before. Dormant weeds of unreasoning hate and cruelty germinated in a second to life. He found himself loosening the collar of his white drill jacket as the bleeding figure pegged to the ground writhed and moaned.

Then, obeying some inner command, he stripped first the coat and then the silk vest beneath from his body. He tugged and tore at them, and threw them, a ragged little bundle, into the hut behind him.

Thus he stood, bareheaded, naked to the waist.

His headmen were eyeing him fearfully. Tobolaka felt his heart leap with the happiness of a new-found power. Never before had they looked at him thus.

He beckoned a man to him.

"Go you," he said haughtily, "to Bosambo of the Ochori and bid him, on his life, come to me. Take him presents, but give them proudly."

"I am your dog," said the man, and knelt at his feet.

Tobolaka kicked him away and went into the hut of his women to flog a girl of the Akasava, who, in the mastery of a moment, had mocked him that morning because of his white man's ways.

Bosambo was delivering judgment when the messenger of the king was announced.

"Lord, there comes an Isisi canoe full of arrogance," said the messenger.

"Bring me the headman," said Bosambo.

They escorted the messenger, and Bosambo saw, by the magnificence of his garb, by the four red feathers which stood out of his hair at varying angles, that the matter was important.

"I come from the king of all this land," said the messenger; "from Tobolaka, the unquenchable drinker of rivers, the destroyer of the evil and the undutiful."

"Man," said Bosambo, "you tire my ears."

"Thus says my king," the messenger went on: "'Let Bosambo come to me by sundown that he may do homage to me and to the woman I take to wife, for I am not to be thwarted, nor am I to be mocked. And those who thwart me and mock me I will come up against with fire and spear.'"

Bosambo was amused.

"Look around, Kilimini," he said, "and see my soldiers, and this city of the Ochori, and beyond by those little hills the fields where all things grow well; especially do you look well at those fields by the little hills."

"Lord, I see these," said the messenger.

"Go back to Tobolaka, the black man, and tell him you saw those fields which are more abundant than any fields in the world – and for a reason."

He smiled at the messenger, who was a little out of his depth.

"This is the reason, Kilimini," said Bosambo. "In those fields we buried many hundreds of the Isisi who came against my city in their folly – this was in the year of the Elephants. Tell your king this: that I have other fields to manure. The palaver is finished."

Then out of the sky in wide circles dropped a bird, all blue and white.

Raising his eyes, Bosambo saw it narrowing the orbit of its flight till it dropped wearily upon a ledge that fronted a roughly-made dovecot behind Bosambo's house.

"Let this man have food," said Bosambo, and hastened to examine the bird.

It was drinking greedily from a little trough of baked clay. Bosambo disturbed his tiny servant only long enough to take from its red legs a paper that was twice the size, but of the same substance, as a cigarette-paper.

He was no great Arabic scholar, but he read this readily, because Sanders wrote beautiful characters.

"To the servant of God, Bosambo.

"Peace be upon your house. Take canoe and go quickly down-river. Here is to be met the canoe of Tobolaka, the king of Isisi, and a white woman travels therein. You shall take the white woman, though she will not go with you; nevertheless you shall take her, and hold her for me and my king. Let none harm her, on your head. Sanders, of the River and the People, your friend, writes this.

"Obey in the name of God."

Bosambo came back to the king's messenger.

"Tell me, Kilimini," he said, "what palaver is this that the king your master has?"

"Lord, it is a marrying palaver;" said the man, "and he sends you presents."

"These I accept," said Bosambo; "but tell me, who is this woman he marries?"

The man hesitated.

"Lord," he said reluctantly, "they speak of a white woman whom my lord loved when he was learning white men's ways."

"May he roast in hell!" said Bosambo, shocked to profanity. "But what manner of dog is your master that he does so shameful a thing? For between night and day is twilight, and twilight is the light of evil, being neither one thing nor the other; and between men there is this same. Black is black and white is white, and all that is between is foul and horrible; for if the moon mated with the sun we should have neither day nor night, but a day that was too dark for work and a night that was too light for sleep."

Here there was a subject which touched the Monrovian deeply, pierced his armour of superficial cynicism, overset his pinnacle of self-interest.

"I tell you, Kilimini," he said, "I know white folk, having once been on ship to go to the edge of the world. Also, I have seen nations where white and black are mingled, and these people are without shame, with no pride, for the half of them that is proud is swallowed by the half of them that is shameful, and there is nothing of them but white man's clothing and black man's thoughts."

"Lord," said Kilimini timidly, "this I know, though I fear to say such things, for my king is lately very terrible. Now we Isisi have great sorrow because he is foolish."

Bosambo turned abruptly.

"Go now, Kilimini," he said. "Later I shall see you."