Children of The Moon

Children of the Moon by George McBean

Preview

Some of Kaka Damu’s most regular clients are miners. Numerous riverbeds and mountain ranges across Tanzania are known to contain precious minerals and stones as well as gold. Ever since the spread of the mobile phone into rural Africa, the locations where these riches can be found are no longer secret. There has been an abundance of local information shared in local languages across stretches of countryside on a scale never before experienced. As a result, it is not only the large mining corporations that pour in money and workers to exploit the wealth of the land, there are thousands of free-lance miners coming to small anonymous sites to do the same. In these nomadic mining communities luck plays a large, if not the largest, part in finding these riches.
Juma awakens Kaka Damu, in the middle of the night. There is a mother some four miles away who has given birth to an albino boy and the father has called on Kaka Damu to remove the child from the family. Kaka Damu is annoyed. Why does he have to go now in the middle of his sleep!
‘The father wants the child taken before daylight. He does not want to touch the child, he thinks it is ‘zero-zero’!’(Worthless)
‘Are you sure this can’t wait?’
‘I would not be waking you if this were not true. The father is outside waiting for us to go with him.’
Kaka Damu sits up in his wooden bed and stretches. He flips aside the mosquito net that swings from the wooden beams of his house. He walks over to a single tap located high on the wall in his adjacent washroom. This is a new addition to the house he is still in the process of constructing. He turns on the tap and tepid water rushes out. He shakes his head and his naked body underneath. Kaka is in his early forties and is beginning to show a belly as a result of his wealth and affluence. The regularity of his feastings and the lack of real physical work are beginning to shape him.
He dries himself quickly and pulls on a patterned square shirt with a keyhole-embroidered neck. He slips into long light grey trousers, rolled up at the bottom. He also has a selection of football shirts from England that he now wears for such occasions. It is only rarely that he puts on the old tribal outfits of his father. He hears Juma call ‘Harakisha, ’ for Kaka to hurry up and he groans a complaint in reply. As the three men leave the compound, Kaka stops suddenly. He curses his forgetfulness and tells the others to wait for him. Kaka jogs back to his house. He has forgotten his lion headband, along with his charms and good luck attachments. He also gathers his leather pouch of human knucklebones from a beaded basket hanging in his living room. He then goes to his kitchen, searches around for his butcher’s cleaver, scrapes it up and down his sharpening stone a few times then leaves.
Everything is silent in the house of the newborn albino child. The teenage mother sobs noiselessly, muting her shock and pain. She is delusional and distraught at the discovery of her unusual child and the conduct of her husband. It is her first born and the village mid-wife, a woman in her fifties, accompanies her. The mid-wife tries to assure the mother that what is about to happen is for the best. That this child will not have a normal life; that she can have other children, proper black children. That if she gives the child away without touching it, her luck will change.
The mid-wife has already buried the umbilical cord and the placenta outside. She has wrapped the child tightly in a white cloth and placed it onto the rush matting on the floor, exactly where it was born. The child is constrained like the bound roots of a banana plant, ready for re-planting. It is making all the facial movements of a baby seeking its mother’s breast, but it is silent.
When Kaka Damu arrives he enters the house chanting softly. He circles the sobbing mother as the quiet baby lies sedately on the floor. The mother has little strength to argue with her husband. He is adamant that the child is taken away immediately. He does not seek any payment for the child although he knows its value. Kaka Damu also knows its value. He instructs the parents to follow his instructions carefully.
In order not to arouse suspicion in the village, the couple must conduct a mock funeral the next day. Their story to neighbours and their families must be that their child was still born. They can say that Kaka Damu was called in to help save the mother but unfortunately the child passed away. Kaku Damu repeats this story in the local language of the mid-wife and gives her a threatening glance to see if she understands. She nods a confirmation, and recoils slightly. She’d thought the husband was simply giving the child away. On seeing Kaka Damu, the full severity of what will now happen is slowly dawning on her.
Kaka Damu leaves, carefully carrying the newborn in his arms. Juma is at his side with a shoulder bag inside which he’s pre-packed some plastic bags. A few hundred yards from the village Kaka looks around, to make sure no one is looking. When he sees they are alone, he lies the silent child down on a fallen tree trunk and with no thought of human rights and little respect for life itself, he hacks it into pieces, valuable pieces. Kaka Damu knows that he will now, at last, be able to finish building his house.