boy, all came out to see the fruit of the hunt, but stopped when they saw me. The witchman said a name I did not know. The man with six wives came out and walked right up to me. A tall man, with a big belly. A clay hair bun to the back of his head in gray and yellow, with five ostrich feathers on top. The bun for he was a man, each feather for a major kill. Yellow clay lined his cheekbone and victory scars covered his chest and shoulder. This man had killed many men, and lions and one elephant. Maybe even a hippopotamus. Two of his wives came out, one was the woman at the river.
The witchman said to him, “Father who speaks to the crocodile so that he does not eat us during wet season, hear me.” Then he said something to the man that I did not understand.
The man looked at me from head to toe, and toe to head. He came in closer and said, “Son of Aboyami, brother of Ayodele, this path is your path, these trees are your trees, this house is your house, and I am your beloved uncle.”
I did not know these names. Or maybe these were just names for people who had nothing to do with me. Family was not always family in the bush, and friend was not always friend. Even wife was not always wife.
He took me past the entrance and inside the yard, where children chased chickens. They smelled of clay and pollen and chicken shit underfoot. The house had six halls. Through the window, two wives grinding flour. Beside the grain keep the kitchen let out the sweetness of porridge; beside the kitchen, a wife washed herself under a stream of water pouring through a hole in the wall. Beside that a wall, long and dark, spotted with nipples made of clay. Then an open area under a thatch roof, with stools and rugs, and behind that the longest wall. My uncle’s sleeping room, which had a huge butterfly above the sleeping rugs. He saw me looking and said the circles in the center were rippling pools of water, meaning renewal each wet season, or whenever he dips into the wet of his new wife’s wiwi. Beside his hall was the room for storage, and for the children to sleep.
“This house is your house, these rugs are your rugs. But those wives are mine,” he said, and chuckled. I smiled.
We sat in the open area, me on a rug, him on a chair set back so far that he was lying, not sitting. Cut with a curve to fit his buttocks, firm in the back with three slats carved to look like three lines of eggs. I remember my father sighing as he rubbed his own back against one like it. A headboard curved like a huge headdress of horns. The big back and chubby legs made it look like a bush buffalo. My uncle lying there changed into a powerful animal.
“Your chair. I have seen the like, beloved uncle,” I said.
He sat up. He seemed disturbed that there were two.
“Did your people make this?” I asked.
“The Lobi, wood masters in the city, claimed to have made only one. But city folk lie; that is their nature.”
“You know of city streets?”
“I have walked many.”
“Why did you return?”
“How do you know I left village for the city and not city for the village?”
I couldn’t answer.
“Where did you see this chair?” he asked.
“In my house.”
He nodded and laughed. “Blood still behaves like blood even if separated by the sand,” he said, and slapped me on the shoulder.
“Bring my blood palm wine and tobacco,” he shouted at one of his wives.
The people called themselves and their village Ku. Once they controlled both sides of the river. Then the enemy, the Gangatom, got bigger and stronger and many more joined them, and drove the Ku to the setting-sun side. Ku men had skill with bow and arrow, leading the cattle to fresh fields, drinking milk, and sleeping. The women had skill with pulling grass for thatch roofs, plastering walls with clay or cow shit, building fences to keep in the goats and the children chasing after goats, fetching water, washing the milk skins, milking the cattle, feeding the children, cooking the soup, washing the calabashes, and churning the butter. The men went out in the nearby fields to sow and reap their crops. They dug in water. I