A CHILD'S CRY IN THE SAVANNAH

A CHILD'S CRY IN THE SAVANNAH A Novel by Omini Nfawa Eyong A father can teach his son to survive an ordinary life, but no father is ever given enough warning, or enough time, to teach him how to survive the night his whole village is asked to end. The village of Dukku woke the way it always woke, to the sound of…

A CHILD'S CRY IN THE SAVANNAH

A Novel by Omini Nfawa Eyong

A father can teach his son to survive an ordinary life, but no father is ever given enough warning, or enough time, to teach him how to survive the night his whole village is asked to end.

The village of Dukku woke the way it always woke, to the sound of Baba clearing his throat before the first prayer and the cockerel behind Malam Sule's compound crowing back late, as if it could not really be bothered. Somewhere further into the compound, a woman's voice called *Sannu* to another, before anyone had properly opened their eyes.

I was thirteen that dry season, old enough to fetch water without being told twice, too young, Baba said, to know when a woman was joking with him and when she wasn't.

Hassan was nine, and he still asked why the sky was the colour it was, as though somebody somewhere had painted it on purpose.

Our compound sat at the edge of the village, close enough to the mosque that we heard the muezzin before anyone had to wake us, but far enough from the market that the smell of morning fires reached us light and sweet, not heavy with smoke.

Baba's Qur'anic school was not much to look at. A cleared yard. A row of woven mats beneath the neem tree. Each boy with his *allo* propped against his knees, the wooden slate worn smooth where ink had been washed off it a hundred times to make room for the next verse.

People spoke of Mallam Umar the way they spoke of the rains, as something Dukku could depend on.

Boys came to him from villages I had never heard of, sent by fathers who could not feed them and mothers who wept at the motor park and told their sons to be good, to learn well, to make something of the little that had been given them.

Baba fed those boys before his own sons ate.

He never explained this.

It was simply what a Mallam who deserved the name did.

I did not think of us as poor, not then, though I understood poverty well enough by sight. I understood it in the way Malam Sule's cockerel was thinner every year, in the way our store of *gero* had to be watched more carefully by March than it had by January, in the way Hassan's trousers were let down at the hem twice before they were finally handed to a smaller boy whose own trousers had given up entirely.

There were things I noticed without having words for them yet.

There was the clinic, a low, square government building just past the market, its whitewashed paint faded to the colour of old teeth, its door chained shut since before I could remember.

There was the government school behind its wire fence, where I sometimes stopped to watch children carrying exercise books I had never owned.

And there was the road.

Most days, nothing happened on that road.

That morning, it was only dust.

By evening, it would carry men with guns.

---

I do not remember the first sound of the attack.

I remember the fire.

I remember Hassan's hand in mine.

I remember Baba turning towards us.

Then I remember losing my brother.

The night Dukku burned, everything I had believed about the world became too small to hold what was happening.

People ran without knowing where they were going. Women shouted names into the smoke. Somewhere behind us, a roof came down with a sound like thunder. The air smelled of burning thatch, petrol and something else I did not want to name.

Baba pushed me towards the darkness.

"Run, Abdul."

I did not want to.

I held Hassan's hand harder.

Then someone pulled him away.

I heard him shout my name.

I turned.

For one second, through the smoke and the orange light, I saw my father standing between us.

Then a gunshot cracked through the night.

I ran.

Not because I was brave.

Because I was thirteen, because I was afraid, and because there are moments when a child discovers that survival is not a choice made once. It is something the body does before the mind has caught up.

The huts thinned. The noise thinned. Then the fields disappeared behind me, and the Savannah opened up in front of me, vast and indifferent and, that night, the only direction left to run in.

I did not know where I was going.

I only knew I could not stop.

And somewhere behind me, my brother was still calling my name.