A Fledgling Abiba

A Note on Language

This is a brief note to help the reader become familiar with some of the non-English words used in this book. I speak many languages, some are in Luo language groups and others are in Bantu language groups. I preferred to use the non-English word to stay true to the original meaning of the world. The way English translates many languages is a bit colonialist and distorts the true meaning of the word. A good example is ‘witchdoctor’, which is wrongly used to describe many kinds of professions. Words like ‘witch’ and ‘wizard’, while used in popular culture, have negative connotations in the cultures in which I grew up, often because Christianity and Islam demonize ancestral spirit worship, so I had to avoid them.

I was careful to make it easy for the reader who is not familiar with the said languages to derive its meaning from context, and for the reader who might know the languages not to get bogged down by glossary-type definitions.

This being a work of fantasy, I created many of the words, but those who understand the languages from which I borrowed the words would have no problem figuring out their meaning, and for those who would not know the language, I used a simple trick. The story is told through the eyes of a naïve girl who encounters these words for the first time and has to translate them for herself, hence benefitting the reader.

Prefixes denote plural and singular terms. Since I have borrowed words from both Bantu and Luo languages, I’ll start with the Bantu languages. For people, in those languages that I know, ‘Mu-’ is used to denote singular. Sometimes, it’s just the ‘M-’, especially in Swahili. For plural, the prefix is ‘Ba-’ or ‘Aba-’ or ‘Wa’. Thus, a Muganda is a person from Buganda, and Baganda are people from Buganda. Abaganda could also be used, but it is more commonly used to mean brothers and sisters. Swahili speakers would say Waganda. For consistency, I mostly used the ‘Ba-’ prefix with words of Bantu origin, mostly to refer to entire ethnic groups, while I used ‘Aba-’ on specific kinds of people or professions.

Nouns that don’t refer to people, or that describe non-living things normally don’t have a prefix for the singular, and will use ‘ma-’ prefix for plural. Like plural for cow/cattle, ngombe, is mangombe. I have used this only when referring to the evil spirit called kifaro, hence makifaro.

Among the Luo languages I know, the ‘ja-’ prefix denotes singular and the ‘jo-’ prefix denotes plural. So a Jaluo is a person from the Luo ethnic group in Kenya while Joluo refers to the whole group.

Many nouns stay the same in both plural and singular forms. In this book, the most common are abiba and kwaro. Technically, the singular for kwaro, which is a word for grandparents, is kwaran, which would translate to ‘my grandparent’. But in this book, I have used kwaro to denote ancestral spirits so it is always in the plural form. Whenever it makes sense, I have used the English articles ‘a’ or ‘an’ before such a word so the reader would quickly understand it’s a singular, and ‘the’ for plural, but in most cases, reading it with the English article ‘the’ or ‘a’ or ‘an’ makes no sense, so I have left it as it is.

Chapter 1

Kuri stood at the top of the staircase on the second floor alcove, watching a storm as it tried to drown the city. When the sky was blue, the buildings looked like brightly colored mushrooms, with cylindrical bodies and cone shaped roofs. Now, they were vague and shapeless, cowering like chicken in the storm. This rain, her maa would have said, did not come from the sky. Someone, or something, sent it. Kuri could feel it in the chill, hear it in the howl of the wind, something angry, something that wanted to destroy Muwaawa city.

Was it the same thing that had killed her mother?

Her fingers clenched the window sill. Her face pressed against the wooden bars. A chill kissed her, soothing the lava bubbling in her stomach. The thing was still out there, still hunting for her, and she was just a weak child hiding in the home of a deplorable aunt. She found no comfort in the city being a whole moon’s journey from her home. Every time a whirlwind stirred up dust, every time a leaf fell off a tree, or a strange cloud sailed in the sky, or a strange cat sat on the roadside, she froze, afraid that the thing had found her.

Her father could protect her, but Maa had refused to tell her anything about him, not where he lived or what he looked like, not even his names. Once, Maa had said that he was a Muchwezi, but Bachwezi were mythical demigods who only existed in folk tales. Maybe Maa had said it to allude to his powers, maybe she would be safe with him, if only she could find him.

What are you doing there?

Kuri jumped away from the window, like a bird startled off a tree, and pirouetted to face Aunty, who stood in the first floor alcove, in a long silky dress with an elaborate head piece from Abyssinia, as though she were going to a party at the palace.

You haven’t washed the pots! Aunty hissed. Thunder could not overshadow her voice. Do you want me to get my stick?

Aunty had just quarreled with Uncle over the cowrie shells she wasted on fancy clothing. The fight had happened in near silence in the bedroom, but Kuri knew. She had developed this gift the day her first teeth fell off, when she had looked into her maa’s eyes and had seen a flash, like a cloud of fire, and she had vaguely known what Maa was thinking about. Maa had said that she was blessed with a rare kind of spirit called lakwopo, a name Kuri loosely interpreted as ‘someone who steals remembrances’. At that time it was weak and Kuri could only glean crumbs from the eyes of other people. When she started to bleed with the moon, lakwopo grew so strong that now a glance into Aunty’s eyes was like reading a book with all of Aunty’s secrets.

Kuri closed the window and hurried down the wooden stairs, pressing herself against the wall to be as far out of Aunty’s reach as possible, struggling to suppress her fears for if she panicked the lava in her stomach would erupt and she would fart flames. Then, Aunty would know that she still had ‘the demons’ and it would be another seven weeks of exorcism torture in a temple. Her tummy felt as if stones were bubbling in a pot. She pressed her palms tight on her bottom, a gesture which Aunty mistook to be a fear of the cane. Aunty only jeered as she passed by, and the fart did not come.

The kitchen was in the inner-courtyard. She got drenched in the ten paces it took to reach it. Four stoves, each with a sun-stone glowing red hot, warmed up the room, making it unbearably muggy. Beside the door, under a stone water drum, in a large stone basin, sat a pile of clay pots and copper utensils. The sight made Kuri very tired. With sixteen children and five adults in the boma, each meal felt like a party. Kuri did all the cooking and cleaning. She had thought of running away, but she was a scrawny little orphan. She did not know anyone in the city. Where could she run to?

If only Maa had told her how to find her father. She thought he was somewhere in the west, around the Mountains of the Moon, but that was a whole world, and she did not even know his name.

She came to live with Aunty after Maa’s death. At that time, she was just old enough to have a proper name, just old enough to start learning household chores, but Aunty had thrown her into the kitchen and forced her to grow up overnight. Now, her palms were calloused, her fingernails broken, her breasts were beginning to develop, and her hips were widening. She bled with every moon and the blood fed her spirits and the spirits ignited the fire in her belly. Maa had prepared her for this manifestation, so she did not panic when her first fire-fart came, so weak it was just a whiff of smoke. As she grew older, she got other manifestations, strange dreams with cryptic messages. Some nights she woke up and thought someone was in her room speaking to her in an ancestral language. She needed a teacher to help her understand what the spirits were saying, but Maa’s death had left her both homeless and without a mentor.

By the time she was done with the dishes, cleaning the kitchen, and peeling potatoes for supper, the storm had ebbed away and darkness had fallen. She lit a tadooba, and the tiny lamp’s oil filled the room with a nauseating smell. She said a prayer that she had stolen from Maa to mask the smell. After cooking, she ate the leftovers alone in the kitchen, and then plunged back into washing pots and plates and cleaning up before going to bed.

She slept in an abandoned rooftop granary. Instead of grains and dried foods, which were stored in a newer and much bigger granary in the courtyard, this room was stuffed with broken furniture, broken pots, moldy mats, old clothing, old toys, every piece of junk that should have ended up in the garbage pit. Cockroaches and rats infested the room, but she had said a prayer that kept them away from the corner in which she made her bed.

Aunty forbade her from sharing a room with other children. You are evil, Aunty said the day Kuri arrived. Your mother was a witch. The demons are in you too. Being a fanatic m’Ondetta, Aunty had her chained in a temple for seven weeks in an exorcism ritual. Kuri nearly starved to death. To save herself, she had put up a show, faking spasms and frothing saliva, and then she had calmed down and sung a ba’Ondetta song. Satisfied, the priest discharged her but advised Aunty to keep her isolated from other children for a few moons to be sure the demons had gone. Aunty set her up in the granary, and it became Kuri’s permanent home.

She could not find sleep that night. Her muscles ached and her bones felt broken. When she finally drifted off, she dreamed of a corpse that had crawled out of a grave and was wandering about in the city. A thin mist hung around it, but the color of the mist was wrong for it was yellowish. The corpse bore no signs of decomposition and looked more like a drunk man in a red bark-cloth kanzu, which she at first mistook for a flowing dress. He had a neat beard and a pungent smell of onions. Was he lost, or going somewhere?

Kuri, the dead man said. Help me.

She jerked out of sleep, her heart pumping crazily at yet another indecipherable message from the ancestors. But then, her dreams were always so confusing that she could not make out what exactly she had experienced. She could not understand if the