Opened Vistas

It was in the year of 1633, and Africa flourished with purity and power. The land was beautiful, young, and green. Magic winds that are called zephyrs raced along Burkina Faso’s sweltering summer banks and over the deep Black, Red, and White Volta Rivers. Burkina Faso is in the Sahel, an agricultural region between the Sahara Desert and Africa’s western coastal rain forests. Elephants, lions, hippos, monkeys, warthogs, antelopes, and thousands of other wild creatures trampled loudly and freely across the land when, suddenly, a hush spread throughout the jungle like a blazing fire. For days, the Voltaic Mossi, Gurunsi, Senufo, Lobi, Bobo, Mande, and Fulani people in Ouagadougou, the main center in Burkina Faso, were silent. They listened, but the silence continued. All of the eerie silence was because of a child who had been born on the side of the earth where peace was once charmed by the brightest star in the universe. Then on the third day of the full moon, the first cries of Starmist Shinchazi resounded throughout the country like an echo carried by the winds. The silence frightened Star’s parents. They feared that she would fall into the hands of the other tribes that often preyed on innocent girl children. They would change the physical characteristics of the baby girls. The town leaders would force them to work long and hard. After the children became subteens, if they played near the jungles, people from other tribes would sneak throughout the forests and take them away from their families against their wills, which is called kidnapping. The tribes feared that the baby girls would have magical powers, and they wanted to find them so that the powers would be theirs. At the same time, Starmist’s parents were proud that each night a beam of silver light from the moon bowed down like blue crystal over Star’s straw and bamboo crib; it would follow wherever her parents placed her. Starmist was not an only child. She was a child born into a large family of thirteen children. She had five brothers. Their names were Monza, Kwazi, Franswe, Runz, and Timba. The boys were strong, and their powerful arms often sparkled with sweat as they hunted for meat, built grass and adobe houses, and worked in the one hundred ten degree weather beside their father whose name was Ashanti. The townspeople spoke loudly about Starmist’s seven sisters, Quin, Shaza, Mandi, Riita, Minz, Swuana, and Zimba. They bragged about how their skin glowed like black silk. They said that the girls’ thick, kinky hair was beautiful like packs of purple grapes. Starmist’s older sisters cooked, cleaned, gathered berries, and wore the finest dresses made of yellow, green, brown, and red plaid Kinte cloths that their father worked hard to afford. Like her sisters, Starmist also had beautiful skin, eyes, and hair; however, there was something very different about her. She could see pictures of people doing things that had not yet happened, and she could sing into the wind and have her songs travel for thousands of miles. The rhythm of Starmist’s songs changed miles of garbage and natural debris into valuable gems, such as diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds, and pearls.