Glittering Gallows

Chapter 32

197 C Chapter 32 atherine breathed heavily beside him, lost in sleep in their matrimonial bed. Moagi gazed at a dimly-lit chandelier, recalling the turkey and the horse anomaly. The foiled attacks were evil omens. Something was wrong and the attempted bestiality was the sign. His wife had demanded a logical explanation. He didn’t have any except that the animals were somehow mentally deranged. If the problem had gone unresolved the remnants of the Makgunda lineage would’ve perished, and he too would eventually follow suit. He had blamed the abnormality on the Sicilian, Mr Scott Randall, for taking far too long to deliver the British girl he promised. The premier recalled his clandestine trip to a forest shrine in Nigeria. He remembered staring in awe at a Yorùbá diviner; a nuance of delight rising within him. It had appeared he was at the last port of call for his misery, and the babalawo before him, Babalawo Arugogo, would prove a blessing incarnate. The recollection was picturesque: Babalawo Arugogo was completely naked except for a dirty loincloth barely covering his private parts. The diviner wasn’t in the customary garb Moagi Makgunda had seen South African seers and traditional herbalists in. If Moagi’s feelings were anything to go by, it appeared this was a momentous afternoon under a canopy of the Equatorial Rain Forest, a day that would revamp his desperate life. The diviner’s face was so smeared in red and white ochre that it appeared like a nyau zoomorphic mask. Sitting on a low hewn stool under a towering iroko tree in a forest to the west of Òyótúnji Village in Oyo State, Nigeria, the man chanted divinatory incantations. Because he pointed at the heavens, the forest and the trunk of the sacred iroko tree behind him, Moagi guessed he was evoking Yorùbá gods to join them. “Are you material for the reception of kola-nuts and palm oil?” The Yorùbá Ifá hermit asked his visitor in English. “The leaves of the cocoyam spread to welcome the harvest that ruins them.” K 198 “I come in peace, if that’s what you want to know.” The seer raised a silencing hand. “That isn’t for a mortal to say; the gods will tell me.” The seer-cum-medicine man sat amid nondescript paraphernalia comprising, among other things, tortoise and cowry shells in clusters, concoctions in dirty bottles, mummified hands and feet of baboons and gorillas, beaded gourds of various sizes, a dozen wooden idols with grotesque countenances. As he chanted, resigned to the spirits and almost incognisant of Moagi, his voice delusional and pitched, he rearranged the idols near him and wiped their faces as if the action was of vital essence to summoning the gods. Still chanting ordinarily and in melodies, he picked a circular wooden tray, archaic and engraved with human and animal figures, and placed it between them. With a pointed tapper decorated with the same engravings as the tray, he tapped the latter rhythmically. Having silenced the cello-like orchestra of twitting sparrows, cooing doves, chirping cicadas, and the cheerful cock-a-doodling of distant guinea fowls, the man’s chants travelled far in every direction. Though the wind whizzing through the lofty canopy reeked of humus, the occasional wafts that left the diviner in Moagi’s direction smelled of urine, odorous armpits and faeces. Layers of dirt discoloured the diviner’s torso. His greying hair grew in unsightly logs cascading like sisal strips of carpets to his chest and shoulders. Despite the juju and charms and spirits at his disposal, the man, sere and wrinkled, was withered past rejuvenation, real or cosmetic. The diviner suddenly fell silent, catching his breath. His face pallid, he picked a piece of white chalk from the ground and drew a circle around his left eye. Moagi shifted his weight on the reed mat a pace from the hermit. “How did a mortal find me?” the seer began, switching from Yorùbá to perfect English again, his eyes boring into his visitor. “I speak many languages; Orunmila is an ominous linguist.” “A sangoma in KwaZulu-Natal referred me. She tried to assist me for three years before she recommended you two months ago.” The diviner dipped a hand in a clay pot and drew a handful of cowries. “Sacred sixteen cowries,” he said in reference to the handful. “We call them owo mfrindinlogun.” He cast them on the tray at...