Babakar had not moved when the others fled. He seemed unaware of anything other than the still form lying in front of him ... until a flying body caught him on the shoulder and bowled him over onto his back. He raised his arms defensively. The gesture was not quick enough; a pair of fore-hooves struck him in the stomach. His breath whooshed out and he doubled over in pain.
It was then that he saw the leaping messengers of death, and heard the cries of their victims. There was a curious absence of fear as he awaited his own demise. But the finishing blow never came.
Clutching his injured abdomen, Babakar looked up into the eyes of a large male gazelle. In those dark orbs, he saw ... recognition? Compassion? Pity? He thought he could detect those things in the glimmer of the gazelle’s eyes, but he knew only that the antelope did not further attack him.
Grunting with the pain the effort caused him, Babakar raised himself on an elbow and looked upon a scene of sad carnage. Falil, Mwiya, Kuya Adowa and all the others lay as dead as the thing that had been his Amma. The huge herd of gazelles stood still now, blood dripping from their horns and caking their hooves. Silver trails glimmered down their narrow muzzles. They were weeping. And Babakar wept with them, for what man could endure the tears of those beautiful killers, tears that mixed with the blood trickling down the graceful spirals of their horns?
The leader of the herd came toward Babakar. The beast bent its head; its tongue flickered from its mouth and licked the blood from the wounds its hooves had made on Babakar’s abdomen. Then the gazelle turned and bounded off to the west. As if on signal, the other antelope followed, and within an eyeblink they were gone, only the fading drum of their hooves attesting that they had been there at all. That ... and the unmoving bodies of Amma’s murderers.
Disregarding the pain that shot from stomach to spine, Babakar iri Sounkalo gathered the broken form of Amma into his arms. He rose. Cradling her close to him, he crooned her name as tears coursed down his ebony cheeks.
A kambu can love, she had said before she died. Were these her own true words, Babakar wondered. Or had she merely repeated the desperate thought that had leaped into his mind at the end?
He would never know the truth. And, knowing that, Babakar wept bitterly.
BY THE TIME THE griot’s tale is ended, a fair-sized crowd congregates at the saffiyeh. For a moment, the people are silent. Then the jeering begins.
“You’ll never make a living in Gau telling tales like that, griot!”
“Whoever heard of gazelles attacking people?”
“And a gazelle turning into a woman? Hah!”
“I come from a village near Gadou, and I never heard of anything like this.”
Already some of the listeners have turned to leave when the griot stands up. He is a tall man – taller than he had appeared in his squatting posture. Old fires kindle in his eyes. With a savage motion he pulls his upper garment over his head. Naked to the waist, his body is spare and gaunt, though stretched over a large frame.
It is not his bare torso, though, that elicits sharp exclamations of surprise from the crowd. It is the two scars that stand out against the dark skin of his abdomen ... scars in the shape of two sharp, narrow hooves – the hooves of a gazelle ...
The coins and quills of the listeners fill the tortoise shell of the griot. But the griot pays no heed to their generosity.
“Amma,” Babakar iri Sounkalo murmurs softly as he plucks at the strings of his ko. “Amma ...”
THE SINGING DRUM
THIS STORY, WHICH WAS based on an East African folktale, was first published in 1977, in a magazine called Windhaven: Toward a Feminist & Humanitarian Fantasy & Science Fiction. The editor, Jessica Amanda Salmonson, liked the story even though she thought it was “damnably sexist.” But she also thought it was “important to have the input of authors from different cultural and racial background.” I didn’t think the story was sexist. Perhaps I was in denial. Or perhaps not. At any rate, a few years later, Dossouye may have leaped out of my mind in response to Jessica’s comment. As for whether “The Singing Drum” is, indeed, sexist, I’ll let you decide.
Near the northeastern shore of the Great Nyanza lay the village of Kigeru. Unlike their cousins to the east, who dwelled in tall, glittering cities that bejeweled the Nyumbani coastline, the Kigerans led a simple life, subsisting by hunting, fishing, farming and collecting shellfish along the shore of the Nyanza, a lake as large as an inland sea.
And they had two wonders that could be boasted by no other country in all the continent of Nyumbani.
One was a man named N’gonjo. N’gonjo was a mganga – a doctor, diviner and sorcerer of great renown among the tribes of the Nyanza. It was said that a physician from faraway Cush one visited N’gonjo’s kibanda on the slopes of the Lion Hill, and it was the Cushite who had come away the wiser.
The other was a young girl named Wambui. She was a singer of songs, and it was said that even the melodious reed-birds envied her voice. It was also said that when she sang to the Nyanza, its blue waves lapped in rhythm with her voice as far as the eye could see. Wambui was the niece of N’gonjo,
