Long and long ago, we were a fierce pride that followed no tenets and no laws but those of the land. Of predator and prey, of wet season and dry, of the coming and going of the locusts.
And our first king they say was called Fahari, and his son Mshindi, because victory and conquest is born from pride.
Yet from pride is also born selfishness and cloying sycophancy, and so it was that Mtamu was the second son, the selfish lion.
The meek and the feeble one with eyes like a doomed gazelle.
And one day Fahari called his sons, and he said to them, "It is time now to divide my land between you, that you may each rule one-half of my domain when I die."
And he gave to Mshindi the cracked ground and dying trees, and to Mtamu the plentiful prey and fertile earth.
And Mshindi, because victory is what it is, challenged his brother.
"We will fight, and he who wins will claim the land and the lionesses of which he is most worthy."
And Mtamu said to him: "We will not fight." He did not even stir from the tree under which he was lying. "You may take the land that you covet, and as for the womenfolk, let them choose their own path."
And so it was that they did not fight, and they went their separate ways, and Juhudi was the wife of Mtamu and Ngawira the wife of Mshindi.
Yet the following spring, the dead land blossomed with flowers and trees, and the living land had died. Sorcery!
Yet when Mshindi went to the agreed-upon place of meeting, Mtamu was not there.
So he went to Ngawira, who told him: "Our cub's cub will not have revenge, and his cub also. Much time will pass before we can have justice. For now we must learn to live here."
And so many seasons passed, and many generations, until they found the descendants of Mtamu. And they attacked these thieves and sinners, and ruled over them mightily, and held them as slaves for long and long. And they chased them through the land when they fled, and every blow they struck was justice for the years of hardship and suffering they gave them. And in that time those lionesses born of the seed of a king in the Place Where The Sky Is Stone struck their blows with the children of Mshindi, for they knew what dispossession was, and bitterness and hunger. And this was the beginning of alliance, and the beginning of the time from which we have divined what is to come by their practices.
But the war came one day to a waterfall at the edge of the earth, and there the descendants of Mtamu, by the trickery and witchcraft they had from their snake-ancestress Juhudi, defeated the rightful owners of the land.
And the sons and daughters of Mshindi were forced back, and they would bide their time until the strongest of all lions was born to them, that they may eradicate their foes.
And soon their descendants stepped forward. With the law at their paws which said that life was theirs to take because of their strength, they vowed to claim for themselves the heaven on earth that they were owed, and to write the proof of it in the blood of those who dwelt at the waterfall.
Will this be the legacy into which the new king steps? Or will, instead of spilling, two bloods unite as one?
Mon Nov 28, 2016 12:57 am