Absolute Power and other stories

The Landing

THE LANDING T he sun-rays penetrate through the enigmatic hill of Nuregoi which stands above the plains of Kaptiony. Against this backdrop, the little village of Sanjun enjoys the beauty of the late afternoon sunlight and the natives find the sunshine conducive to attend to daily chores, like young girls collecting firewood from the nearby bushes, women threshing millet and the under-eighteen boys finding great pleasure in tending goats in the areas around Kew, the salt lick. Kimala, a fourteen-year-old lad stood on a rock situated in front of his mother’s hut gazing up at the wedge like formation of the crows fying in the sky above him. Their noisy caws broke the immense silence that lay like a blanket spread from the mountains of Borbora and Kukwarel in the south to the plains of Kasotwan in the North. Kimala turned slowly, watching the birds disappear to the south, thinking how Cheptumo his younger brother would have liked seeing them. He would have made up something about them like saying that the Pokot had sent the crows to spy on the Marakwet in preparation for a raid. Knowledge of birds migrating to breed was far beyond the villagers’ comprehension as Kimala was after all the highest educated person in the plains with education of class two learning at Absolute Power the far Kapkiamo District Education Board whose only teacher was the class four graduate from the mission Inter - mediate school, Mwalimu Sowe. Gome! Gome! Gome! Came the sound of Tutung, the drum, accompanied by the cry of a man from the far village of Lawan. The beating of the seldom used Tutung meant that the villagers had spotted something unusual. The words of a woman could be faintly heard and Kobilo, Kimala’s mother and other women understood that locusts had been spotted at the farther plains of Kuikui. “Kapluk eeh Kapluk” shouted a man announcing that the locusts had taken a turn towards Kapluk in the West hopefully saving Sanjun an imminent disaster of incalculable magnitude. But that was not to be. The locusts somehow miraculously took a U-turn after spotting the green veld of sorghum and millet in the upper village of Loten which wasn’t far from Sanjun. “Kiwechgei wee bich Kiwechgei.” These words from a woman in Loten announcing that the locusts were seemingly landing sent a chill down the spines of the people of Sanjun. The time was about three thirty in the afternoon but Chelanga, the drunk, thought it was midnight when he was awoken by Chemelil, his eldest son. Anybody else would have thought so because the billions of locusts had formed a dark cloud in the sky above Sanjun causing an eclipse of its own kind. The sound of the locusts’ wings was terror to the young ones like Chebet and Kiptallam who clung to 46 their mothers’ tattered goatskins-skirts. The ghostly locusts landed and the villagers knew that their hard work would in a short while be rendered useless. In a bid to save what could be saved, the old men went to the middle of their millet farms and beat the loudest any object available, the oonly objects available were cow hides. Their efforts were in vain for they soon took cover in the bushes when thousands of locusts landed on them. Kiptui, was to joke weeks later that he took cover when he realized that some locusts had found their way to his ‘balls’ and the excruciating pain he felt made him think that one of the ‘balls’ was already down. It took less than ten minutes for the green vegetation to vanish and the brown earth was exposed as though it was ready for ploughing. Heaps of locustdroppings left by the departing insects was the only benefit accrued from the invasion, for the land would definitely be more fertile come the next planting season. Disasters come in torrents so goes an old adage. This could not be more true for as soon as the locusts took off, came the landing of a perfect predator. Flicking his wings lightly, the martial eagle descends on a nearby Boyotwo tree and scans carefully to see anything edible. Soon, it realizes that the Hares and other rodents have long taken cover. A slow turn of the neck coupled with a little bend, brings the sight of the fifty-pound infamous predator to a...