The Fire Within

Prologue

1 Prologue rom a distance Pa Anye, Ndomnjie, Yefon, and her uncle Dr Wirghan could see the smoke rising slowly to about five to six feet before spreading out like a rejected offering. Then what appeared to be a pile of clothes by the side of a makeshift hearth moved slightly. As the group of four approached, the scene became clearer. “He is the one!” exclaimed Ndomnjie. “Yes, he was in the bus as we came up.” He gently nodded his head several times. “It is almost two years now, but I can recall that he was with us.” “Are you serious?” questioned Pa Anye. “He is the one,” Yefon confirmed. The pile of clothes was, in fact, a tall young man in his mid twenties. As Ndomnjie stared on, he noticed the young man’s very black and somewhat overgrown hair, which looked shaggy at the top. It had, at one time, been neatly trimmed low around the upper tips of his ears and below to the back of his neck. Eyes with very clear whites, though partially covered by heavy eyelids like those of a person struggling to stay awake, lighted his long face. His long nose ended in a tip comfortably lodged on a sprouting moustache crowning his upper lips. His broad shoulders and V-shaped chest narrowed to a thin waistline, and the muscular thighs convinced Ndomnjie that his subject of interest had once been much involved in sports. Pa Anye was still wondering about his pair of trousers which, unlike most mentally disturbed men’s, was not threadbare, but had been rubbed all over with something black. “What is he rubbing on his leg like that?” “It’s charcoal,” answered Ndomnjie. Occasionally the young man would look around him with a very confident, if not defiant, smile and then he would sigh, moving his head from side to side. He was lying down on his side, with his left elbow propping the upper half of his body from the hard and cold tar on top of the brickwork, which formed the heart of the Sunshine Chemist roundabout. In a way, the roundabout itself is in the heart of the town of Batemba, the capital of the Savannah Province. As he lay there, the different roads leading out of the roundabout were like the network of a spider’s web. He himself, in the centre of the roundabout, looked F 2 like prey, the surrounding houses and people, spiders of different sizes and shapes, creeping threateningly towards him. The vehicles that zoomed past the roundabout with screeching tyres meant nothing to him. Occasionally a passer-by would briefly catch his attention and he would tail the person with his eyes until distracted by something else. Up in the distance, above the houses on his right, lay the Station Hill from which the roofs of houses in the government residential area glittered. On the cliff where the almost flat top of the Station Hill comes to an abrupt end, dropping down about 60 feet, were many shades of green. The fresh leaves of tall trees that seemed to vie with each other for a greater dose of the sun’s rays were visible from a distance, and so were a few waterfalls running down the slope like tiny silver threads. On his left was another hill, although not as pronounced as the Station Hill. On it stood a mesh of haphazardly constructed houses with footpaths snaking in and out of the different compounds. Occasionally a storey building disrupted the regular nature of the height of the houses. People were all over the place and milling around the streets, without paying any particular attention to the solitary figure that seemed at home in the street. His fireside was much alive as bright red flames leapt up almost engulfing the dirty pot on the hearth. Pa Anye, Ndomnjie, Yefon, and Dr Wirghan approached cautiously, wondering what Pa-pa (as people called him) could be muttering to himself. They were just two paces behind Pa-pa when he burst out laughing and then the clapping of his hands followed the movement of his head from side to side. Then the muttering, but this time his words were audible. “Beauty! Beauty! When they talk of beauty, she had it: ebony black and glittering like a polished carving. A-a-a-a-h! Then when she smiled, ah! But I told you, I denied, yes, I said we should keep it, I...