The Drums of Shame

Two young graduates, Muuka and Bupe are set apart by  many indifferences. Tribe, family background, dreams and love.  But when Muuka finds himself standing in a shallow grave, and Bupe gets to know her father’s past secrets, the players of their drums of shame are laid bare in the open.

“You can easily steal a drum young man, but the problem is, where will you play it from?”

 First published in 2022

Won a Ngoma Award in 2022

Most Outstanding Prose

 

1

 

 “This is your place Muuka. You belong here, in this Dumba village. I told you as a child that no matter how far you go with your education, the village will still be the stool you will rest your bottom on. Here you are, with this knowledge, what do you call it…degree? The cattle always come home to the kraal after a day’s grazing,” Chityaba mocked.

“You told me that before uncle. I came to tell you that I am going now. I am sorry for waking you up,” Muuka apologized.

“Look at the moon. It rose at the time the sun was sinking in the west. It’s now shining at the tip of your head. It’s just past daybreak. Go back to sleep.”

“I am leaving uncle.”

“Leaving to where child of the bush? From your childhood, you have never known any relative’s home. Your life has existed in the breadth and width of this village.”

“That shouldn’t worry you, uncle. Every path leads

somewhere. Isn’t that what you have been telling me all this while?”

“I see. I fed you, educated you, and now you boast about your newfound wisdom? Who do you think will be looking after my cattle? Your path starts from here, goes around the village, and ends here.”

Muuka cleared his throat and gazed at the bright moon shining over his head from the clear sky. An owl swoop from behind Chityaba’s hut and rested on one of the stumps that made a kraal for cattle. He turned his head towards it and looked in that direction for a while.

“A bird that lays its eggs in a grave is now resting on my kraal? Tell me about it,” Chityaba said, stepping towards Muuka.

“What is there to talk about uncle?”

“Ears were made to pick on conversations, Muuka. You see, you are still a child who wipes his running nose with the back of his palm. I am not such a fool that I would miss out on obvious things happening in this village. That bird has been seen around you all the time while you herd cattle in the bush. What are you up to; to cast a spell of poverty on me?”

“If I was a bird, I would probably have had a better answer to your worries uncle. But I can’t dictate that owl’s life. I am just a man like you who is so ignorant about the ways of nature.”

“I am not like you. Do you think I am called Chityaba for nothing? Look at you. Have you ever asked yourself how you came to this village?”

“I guess it matters less now uncle.”

“It matters less indeed. They say it’s better to rescue your enemy from pangs of hunger, than a hungry relative, for he will bite you when his tummy is full. Go back to your hut and sleep. We have more work to do when the sun rises,” Chityaba commanded and walked back into his hut. Muuka turned and walked towards his hut too. When he reached it, he stopped and stared in the mirages of the night before walking past it, following a path that headed north. On his right shoulder, he carried a small bundle that wrapped a few of his clothes; a pack of boiled maize grain they called magwaza, and his most prized merchandise – a khaki envelope in which was his university degree paper. On his left hand, his fingers clutched a container of water, and he disappeared in the night.

*

Muuka came back to the village three months ago after graduating from university. He hoped to see his life’s desires come to fruition for attaining that most revered level of education. It had always been his desire to acquire the knowledge he was so many times told, would make him the darling of the village. The man every woman would admire and fantasize about. The man who would come home driving expensive cars with his pockets packed with money. He imagined how he would feed the villagers and outshine the most beautiful girls that mocked him as a herd’s boy long before he left for the city. He could visualize how he would walk like a King and show them what it meant to have read so many books.

The university gave him the mantle to grow his brain. He drunk the knowledge from the books of the Whiteman’s thinking so as to battle out his village life. He was told so many times before, that it was the only way he would be able to embrace the life of the city. He knew so well where he would be staying after leaving the tormenting years of campus – Kabulonga, driving the latest models of cars befitting graduates of his caliber, as symbols of educated men in town. ‘Start low, for you to reach higher’. Those were so often the words from campus motivation speakers who earned themselves a living for telling them bubbles of things themselves couldn’t follow so as to enter university too. The words nevertheless sounded angelic then, and Muuka crammed his books with the best level-headedness he could master. It paid off – he graduated with grades that raised his collars in bars. Cocktails of alcohol could even smell the scent of his hot brains. When he stared at them, their price tags cheapened out like a baby’s nappies. They were not just vipers of finely distilled water with additives, but more of status budges. Who wouldn’t celebrate life after four agonizing years of teaching oneself how to earn a place in the ghetto records of ‘some of us’? More so from a place where, earning such a paper was a privilege thrust upon someone by tutors who were hell bent to make sure one never became like them?

Well, he made it to the other side with proud broad smiles of self-satisfaction. When he was settled, he would marry his long-time queen and school mate, Bupe, and together they would create heaven in Lusaka. For that to happen, he rented a one- room apartment in Kalingalinga township and joined a gang of other new and old graduates in a hunting spree for that which took them four years sticking books in their brains at the highest learning institution of the country – jobs. With the vibrancy of a graduate propelled with the eagerness of youthfulness, he ran from one office to the other, clinching short time assignments here and there. He earned himself bits of cash to pay rentals, importantly so, to maintain his lady, daughter of Hon Kangwa, Minister of Political Affairs. He knew that she came from a home that overflowed with honey and milk. However so, what would the gents and ladies of the city speculate about him, if he didn’t do what every city man should have been doing for his lady? He wouldn’t risk carrying those stories on his back, because he knew how Lusaka men acted on beautiful, charming young ladies like Bupe. They would sale their houses just so they could prove how capable they were, of owning anything they desired. So, he fought battles with himself to provide for the cherry maze that propelled his heart to keep going.

They were both university graduates; learned young souls in the definition of how society that devised their moral compass looked at them. Though so, nothing scared him from loving her to the bone marrow of his heart. What was status anyway, if not just a mental sarcasm of those who belabored to find humor in ignorance? The fact that Dumba village was his nest since he saw the first streaks of light from his mother’s womb, it would not threaten his guts to fall for a lady whose father was a Minister. Wasn’t he severally told that education was the equalizer of society? That those who drunk from the same cup of edification carried the same budge of honor regardless of their social status? The hierarchal sensation, used to make him have sleepless nights as a boy in the village. He would wake up earlier than everyone. With a book in his hand, he would drive the animals to the bush to graze. While the animals enjoyed their meal, he would sit under a tree and study. Often times the animals would stray into someone’s maize field and grazed every stalk they came across. Covered with chocking fury, the owner would whip his legs till they blistered with blood, yet he would take the animals back home in the evening with a bright smile on his face to hide his day’s miseries. At night he would sit round the fire with his cousins, and they would tell folk tales.

Now he could speak admirable English and the university erased all his village manners. He was a civilized intellectual and nothing would vaporize his adoration for Bupe.  

Six months after graduation, the figments of his imaginations on life after university begun to shade dull colors in his mind. The zeal that magnetized his mental abilities started to lose its potency, in the process weakening his energy for the fight. He begun to feel let down by the very energy that removed him from the village to the city. As they however did say that weak souls always threw the sponge on their attempted hopes just before the palm trees appeared in the horizons of the desert; before a light ton of brick fell on his head as well, a stroke of luck appeared. Lazing around Arcades Shopping Mall, admiring pieces of clothes and pairs of shoes that suited a graduate, his mobile phone rang. He didn’t recognize the caller’s number and almost cut the line. Wrong number-callers had recently been a bother to his already lacerated mood. What once used to make his heart jump at the sound of his ring tone, had begun to irritate his picked-up anxiety for settling down to enjoy life. He answered the call anyway and instantly congratulated himself for making that decision. It was such calls any desperate new graduate would have needed to receive. How the caller got his number was no longer an issue he would spend his precious time.......