Kiru

 It was a moonless Friday night in the month of November when I went to visit Bulungu on “appointment”. The only light came from the stars of the mind-boggling Milky Way Galaxy and the other constellations of the Southern Hemisphere sky.

As I came out of my hut, I looked up and tried to find comfort, companionship, strength and support from among those heavenly bodies that God created. None came. I was on my own. I was alone.

It was the first time I had really paid attention to the heavens. It was a remarkable, ponderous feeling. Was it true that someone, some omnipotent being, was looking at me right now – making judgments about my thoughts and actions? What response was I actually giving back to this being? The questions were not only difficult to answer, but they were discouraging as well, so I ignored them and carried on my way.

I wore a pair of khaki school shorts and a dark-grey, short-sleeved safari shirt. This gave me the camouflage I needed to blend in with the darkness and remain undetected. The night was calm, dark and mystic. I stood just outside my hut door, thinking and listening, and wondering whether every teenager in the village – from time immemorial, even during those dark, misty, ancient times of Africa – went through what I was going through. I was not convinced, but there was that voice. Yes, the voice that argued, But if you don’t do it, what will you tell your friends? And besides, I had two things to prove: the first was that I could be brave and move about in the night alone, and the second was that, as a man, I could keep my promise to Bulungu.

I decided to make a move. I crept noiselessly and inconspicuously out of my compound and cut across the bushes, heading towards Bulungu’s homestead about two kilometres away to the southwest. I had to walk as stealthily as possible. I walked, without shoes, through the shrubs and across the expanse of sun-baked grass, which was straw-coloured in the day. Now, it was dark, and I could not see where my feet were landing. I stepped on dry twigs from time to time, and this scared rodents and sent them scuttling away. They scampered through the grass noisily as they hopped from one path to another and disappeared down the holes not far away from their feeding grounds. I, too, jumped anxiously. Generally walking in the dark was safe, even at this time of the night, save for the reptiles. It was the beginning of the rain season, and they would be out and about searching for rodents of all types to eat. So my movement comprised of jolting starts and jumps, much like a kangaroo.

I started asking myself a number of questions. Was this what it meant to grow up? Traversing thorny shrubs and grass full of scorpions, snakes and rodents of all types on a moonless night, all in the name of satisfying the ego, a sexual fantasy and my testosterone-driven pride? This thing between my legs was surely putting my life in danger. If anything happened to me now, nobody would know why, or how.

I thought that my manhood was giving me false courage and false strength. It was troublesome in the true sense. It would stand up stiff, uncompromisingly, randomly and unpredictably, like a radioactive isotope giving off radiation. It caused discomfort and many times embarrassment. Clearly it needed appeasing, and that would come today. It was long overdue.

I did not have a watch, but I knew it was close to the middle of the night. It was one of those instincts you picked up when you grew up in the village. One way in which to tell was the silence. It was the time of night that human voices ceased to be heard. You could only pick up isolated and intermittent dog barks, but otherwise the night was silent and calm. Under those stars and the arm of the Milky Way galaxy, it seemed as though I was the only soul in the universe, in Africa and in my native land.

Despite all this, my mind was made up to see Bulungu that night. I thought about my bedclothes and wondered what Bulungu’s looked like. I remembered that I left my bed unmade. Not that there was a bed as such, just two blankets spread over sacks of sisal on compressed and smoothened earth. I never washed my blankets for fear they would get torn. Bedding was not easy to come by in those days. I therefore crept in and out of them every day with only slight attention to the dust, smells or stains of all sorts. It was not uncommon for boys of my age to stain their blankets with sperms as a result of wet dreams. We had no underpants. We took off all our clothes when we went to sleep. The tropics in the southern hemisphere could be unbearably hot, especially in the months between September and January. Therefore, one did not need much warm clothing for a good part of the year.

I had been told by friends and elders in the village that when the courage to move at night in search of girls came, there was nothing you could do to stop it. It was a sign yo