Ama (42 page)

So a year passed, and then another year.

Then he fell in love.

The object on his attentions lived in a village set on higher ground near the mouth of a river. There was an abundance of fish in these waters. The villagers smoked the fish and harvested salt from a tidal pan in their territory. These commodities they exchanged for slaves whom the Mandingas brought down from the hinterland. From time to time a ship would anchor offshore — a sandbar blocked access to the river — and they would barter the slaves for cloth and guns, rum and a miscellany of cheap baubles. They were prosperous and content.

The only disadvantage of the village's location was that the river was saline for some distance upstream, even at low tide; and the ground water was brackish. The men could have fetched water by canoe; but the fetching of water was women's work and it suited the men to let the young girls of the village make several journeys a day to the nearest source.

It was one of these girls, returning from the distant stream, straight-backed, balancing a heavy calabash on her head, who had awoken such strange emotions in Tomba. He must have this girl. Yet, while he hungered for her company, he had no idea what he would say or do once she was his. His solitary life with Ibrahima had left him without social graces. It was not that he was selfish, just that he had never had a chance to absorb the subtle rules concerning acceptable behaviour that children learn while growing up within a community of adults.

Tomba's experience as a hunter had taught him patience and self-discipline: one unplanned move and the prey would be alerted and flee. So from his refuge in the bush he watched and waited.

One day the object of his desire was returning to her village in the company of her friends, gossiping and laughing merrily. Suddenly she realised that she had forgotten to retrieve a favourite bangle which she had removed from her wrist before wading into the stream to fill her gourd.

“Wait. Wait for me. Please don't move a step until I catch up with you. I shall only be a moment,” she told them as a friend helped her to put down her calabash.

She had no warning. She heard nothing. She felt only a strong arm pinioning hers. An instant later a hand stifled her scream. Then she felt the fur of his jacket against her skin. For a moment she thought that she had been captured by some strange, unheard-of animal. Then she knew that she had been panyarred.

* * *

Sami learned to love and value Tomba and the carefree, independent, self-reliant life they lived.

He was a real man. Stripped of his deerskin garments he had the body of a hero. His muscles bulged. His skin was dark, smooth and unmarked. He had no facial incisions and she could not make out what nation he belonged to but she guessed, from his complexion and his height that he must be a Baga. Yet he knew no word of the Baga tongue. He was a man of mystery and her life with him was a great adventure.

She had learned a little Susu from the Mandinga traders so from the start they could communicate. Tomba cherished her. He treated her better, she knew, than any husband from her own people would have done. Ashamed of his ignorance of the outside world, he questioned her endlessly about her village. Sami, in turn, was fascinated with his knowledge of the forest, which she had been taught to fear as the abode of wild animals and malevolent spirits, a place where only the bravest of hunters ventured alone.

After a year a girl-child was born to them. Tomba fell into a great panic when Sami went into labour but he survived the shock and grew to love his baby daughter above all else.

The cloth which Sami was wearing when she was captured was now threadbare; and there was nothing for the baby to wear. Tomba made them both new clothes of deer-skin, but he realised that Sami hankered for finer stuff. One night he set off on an expedition. He had little concept of private property. The villages and caravans were a resource for him, just as the forest was a resource. He avoided Sami's village and chose the next one down the coast. The dogs were howling their praises to the full moon as he approached. Bribing them with bones, he entered the sleeping hamlet. Some careless woman had left a new cloth out to dry and forgotten to retrieve it. She had nothing to fear: theft within the village was virtually unknown and, in any event, impossible to conceal. Tomba took possession of the garment. But tonight he was unlucky: a young man returning from a secret assignation with his lover saw in the light of the full moon the apparition of a strange and frightening creature. Though it walked upright on two legs it had the hairy skin of a four-legged animal. It had wrapped a piece of cloth around its waist. The lover fell back into the shade of a wall, his heart pumping with fear. Perhaps this creature had murdered some innocent in her sleep to steal her cloth; but what was it, man or beast or evil spirit? He waited until it loped off into the forest. Then, as soon as it was out of sight, he gave the alarm. Soon torches lit up the village. The chief called the elders into an emergency session of the village council. No one in the village had been harmed and though it was true that there had been some mysterious disappearances of various items in the past, on this occasion all that was missing was the cloth of a careless woman.

Some doubted the lover's story and asked what he had been doing wandering the village at that hour. Perhaps he had stolen the cloth and invented this story to cover his tracks? He told them he had gone to empty his bladder.

Others recalled the mysterious disappearance of a young woman from the next village up the coast. The young men proposed pursuit, but wiser counsels prevailed and in the end they all went back to their sleeping mats.

But in this way the legend of the wild man of the forest was born.

Sami became more demanding and Tomba's raids became more frequent and more daring. He was cunning. He travelled considerable distances so as to spread his activities amongst several villages. Slave caravans were a favourite target, especially when they made camp in the forest.

News spread from village to village and the myth grew. Then Tomba was seen again by a vigilant caravan guard who slashed at him with a cutlass. He was lucky to escape unscathed.

The child was now beginning to talk, Mende to her mother, Susu to Tomba. She was a constant delight to him. He could spend hours playing with her.

Sami's family feared that their daughter had been panyarred and sold into slavery. They despaired of ever seeing her again. But when they heard the stories which spread along the coast, their hopes were revived. Her father set about organising an armed expedition to rescue her.

* * *

Returning one day from a round of his traps, Tomba saw that the undergrowth had been slashed to make a path into his redoubt. His house had been demolished and his crops destroyed. Broken pots lay around. Nothing of any value remained, not a cutlass, not a knife, not a calabash of water. Even the puppy he had stolen for his baby was gone.

He paid scant attention to all this. Sami and the little girl were uppermost in his mind and they were nowhere to be found. He sat down on the bare ground and, in a state of utter despair, buried his head between his knees. He had no idea how long he sat, his mind a complete blank, unwilling, unable to face up to the reality of this new situation.

Then he heard a sound in the bush. He sprang to his feet and grabbed his gun. But it was only a hen which must have scurried off into the undergrowth to escape the assassin's knife. His dog whined. It was time for his meal and he was hungry. Tomba kicked it and it ran for cover, its tail between its legs. Then he was sorry. He took a knife from his bag, cut a leg off one of the hares he had trapped and threw it to the tyke. Then he sat down again and tried to think.

* * *

The tracks led to Sami's village but in spite of keeping watch for long hours over many days, Tomba never caught a glimpse of her.

He was consumed by a deep, incurable anger. He resolved to avenge himself, to punish the perpetrators of the crime. His first task was to establish a new base. The place he chose was on a steep hill, well-wooded and riddled with caves. A leopard claimed the territory. Tomba shot him. After a year he was ready. He took two pistols and a musket and lay in wait for a caravan of slaves. When he judged that the guards were all asleep, he walked calmly into the tent where the master, too, was sleeping and put a hand on his mouth and a pistol to his temple.
This is too easy
, he thought.

“One false move and you are dead meat,” he told the man. “I see you understand me well. Now get up.”

Soon the party's arms lay piled on the ground and the guards and other free men stood cowering some distance away. The master lay on the ground before him.

“Order your men to unlock the shackles and release the slaves,” Tomba instructed him.

When this was done, Tomba addressed the slaves. He had never spoken to more than one person before, but he spoke now without hesitation.

“I am the son of an escaped slave. I have come to free you from these criminals. I live in this forest. I am inviting you to join me. If you are prepared to work, you will not be short of food. I shall be your leader but not your owner. You will be free men and women. Those who refuse my offer will surely be sold to the white men and sent across the sea, never to return. Now who will join me?”

There was a moment of hesitation and Tomba had a fleeting sense that his enterprise had failed. Then one lad spoke up; and another. Soon they were all cheering and shouting Tomba's praise. He smiled.

“Undress the guards and take their clothes,” he told them, “then shackle them and chain them. Run the chains around those trees. But do not harm them.”

When this task had been completed he ordered them to take up their loads, together with whatever weapons and implements they could carry. By dawn they were at the foot of the hill he now thought of as his own.

* * *

It took them time to recover from their ordeal. They were hungry and dirty. Some had been marching for a month. They had festering sores from the manacles. As they convalesced, he interviewed them, one by one, assessing character and identifying useful skills. There were many mouths to feed now, but there was seed and there were farmers. The rains would come soon and in a few months they would celebrate their first harvest. In the meantime, they depended on Tomba's skill as a hunter, trapper and gatherer of the edible vegetable bounty of the forest. The younger and fitter men soon began to help.

He could have taken his pick of the women, but he declined. The men and women soon paired up. Since there were fewer women than men, some women took more than one husband, contrary to all previous custom. They spoke many tongues but most understood Susu and since this was Tomba's only language, Susu became their lingua franca. Tomba allocated sites and on these there rose, at first rough shelters and later, more substantial dwellings with walls of stone and sun-baked bricks.

When they had recovered health and spirits and begun to fall into the routine of their new life, Tomba called the men together. He had not lost his pain and anger at Sami's abduction but he had taught himself to contain his feelings within broader ambitions.

“It is not enough that you have been freed. Every day more slaves are being brought down to the coast to be sold. The people who live by the sea have grown fat on the suffering of others. It is time for this to stop.”

For the second raid Tomba changed his tactics. His men surrounded the camp. He fired the first shot into the air. Immediately afterwards each man with a gun followed suit. The slave traders believed that they were being attacked by a much superior force. Taken completely by surprise, they offered no resistance.

* * *

Tomba's village grew.

There was limited space on the hill so he set up a satellite settlement on a similar hill nearby. The struggle against the slave traders became more intense. News of the raids spread. The caravan masters became more vigilant. In one battle, several of Tomba's men were killed.

The cost of tightening their security reduced the profits of the traders and they began to desert this stretch of the coast. The chiefs of the coastal villages became more and more desperate. They could survive on fishing and a little shifting agriculture on the fringe of the forest, but the luxury of the good old days seemed to have disappeared for good. As the white slavers got to hear of the consequences of Tomba's mischief, fewer and fewer ships dropped anchor offshore.

A meeting was called. Old feuds and territorial conflicts were set aside in the common interest. No single village had resources to match those of the brigands. A deserter who had taken unkindly to Tomba's iron discipline, disclosed the whereabouts of his hidden redoubt. The chiefs decided to dispatch an expeditionary force to destroy the interloper. It took them three days to agree who would lead the battalions. Once they had done so, they all got drunk to celebrate the forthcoming victory.

They underestimated the strength and determination of Tomba's forces. Their general was inexperienced and incompetent. Tomba's men ambushed the war party and killed every man.

At once he dispatched a small force to each village. As soon as the full disc of the rising moon became visible, the raiders slipped quietly into the target villages and fired the thatched roofs. Then they slipped away again, unseen.

The villages had suffered a devastating blow. The chiefs assembled again, this time in more sober mood. Their very survival was at stake. They decided to mobilise every active male.

When their meeting was in its third day a ship, which they recognised by its flag as English, dropped anchor some way offshore. It was the first such ship to stop on that reach of the coast for some considerable time. The chiefs at once dispatched an invitation to the Captain to join their deliberations.

* * *

Tuesday, 10 a.m.
Dropped anchor south of the mouth of the River Nunes. Gave orders for the long-boat to be prepared. Scanned the beach and observed what appeared to be a gathering of local notables. Amongst them the chieftain of the village at the mouth of this river, whom I recognised from my previous visits. A devious rascal if ever there was one. Almost at once a canoe was launched through the breakers. The principal passenger was a shifty-eyed mulatto who gave his name as John Smith. Strong scent of native liquor on his breath. Spoke passable English. Said he bore instructions to invite me to attend a meeting of the most important “Kings” of the region, which was that very day in session. The Negro potentates in question remained assembled on the beach awaiting my reply.