They came in their thousands. They came from the coast people, their skin as pale as caramel because they were descended from the Arab slavers and the Somali who had drifted south over the centuries, or from the mysterious Austronesian seafarers borne across the ocean by the trade wind some two millennia ago. Darker-skinned dancers came from the highland forests in the west of the country, shorter, stockily built girls with black eyes, big breasts and lips like pincushions; and more came from the open savanna lands, tall girls with loose limbs, finely sculpted, Nilotic faces and fancy decorations which weighed down their earlobes. They came because they were commanded, because it was the tradition, because their mothers and grandmothers and sisters had come before them, women stretching back over long generations. They came in friendship groups, in circumcision groups, in age groups; they came by village and by town and by city district, smaller and larger groups depending on the region and population. Each year they came and, when they were summoned, they danced before their king.
For this dance, the Dunguntemba, the great Elephant Dance, they went naked but for a short, soft leather skirt dyed ox-blood red, and ankle straps – but the ankle straps had taken months to prepare. So the coast girls wore rare cowries from the deep-water channels through the reef, tiny shells which rattled as they danced; and the girls from the Lowabengwa river province had threaded semi-precious stones, agates and obsidians and onyx polished to a shine, while the girls from the grassland plains wore garishly painted seed pods which hissed like angry snakes as they stamped their feet to the thunder of a hundred drums. Leila and her friends, slender girls with high cheek-bones and almond-shaped eyes, wore beads, thousands of trade beads, each little bigger than a pinhead, which had been intricately worked into patterns that were the custom of her people: chevrons and diamonds, zig-zags and swirls, representations of the tribe’s traditions and gods and the wild animals that wandered the bush lands of their home. And in Leila’s year something quite new happened: two white girls danced, daughters of the contract managers in the diamond mines, but their ankle straps, set with precious stones, had been hand-crafted at Chanel.
Each also carried a fly-whisk. These consisted of a short handle wonderfully carved by their father or by their nearest male next of kin, made from a precious wood like ebony or, in the case of the coast girls, a rare dark wood which has sat buried for millennia in the mud of the deltas where it is turned as hard as stone. This handle, sometimes set with semi-precious stones, was a symbol that her guardian had given permission for his daughter to dance the elephant dance. Usually the whisk itself was made of the tail-hairs of a bull, often the father’s finest bull, but, again, choice reflected the girl’s regional tradition. Thus the girls from the savanna lands flicked the mane-hairs of a lion, perhaps a splendid black-maned beast a brother had killed with his spear, and the girls of the forest-lands whirled whisks of black and white tail-hairs plucked from a colobus monkey, and some of the more modern girls from the capital carried human hair dyed into a thousand colours, imported from Taiwan.
Black and brown and white together danced bare-breasted and proud, as custom and the King demanded, and their massed ranks, parading around the stock compound enclosed within the king’s traditional palace at Gonwangombe, kicked up a dust which rose in mighty clouds thicker than the smoke from dry-season bushfires and, as they passed, the people who watched from grandstands specially built for the day raised a great roaring, like the rumble of distant thunder just before the rains break.
They came because it was the tradition, but they came also because one of their thousands, the one who found favour in the king’s eyes and in the eyes of the Umkamkali, his senior mother, the one they call the Elephant Queen, would win a prize beyond all imagining. The mothers and grandmothers and sisters who had danced in years before had all seen a girl win this prize, had seen the King take her whisk and flick it in her face, had seen her seized by his courtiers and carried away shoulder-high to be dressed in cloth so soft and rich it flowed like water around the curves of her body. And they heard later how the King had lavished on her gifts beyond belief, jewellery in platinum and gold, a ring of Sandawana emeralds, a tiara designed by Asprey in London, an internet bank account with Credit Suisse, a 6 series BMW coupé, and a palace of her own with servants and a chauffeur and a fridge stocked with delicacies imported directly from Fortnum and Mason. In due time, they had watched her wed the King on television, on big plasma screens in the city bars and cafés, or on the older sets which flickered in those small town squares that had electricity; or they listened to the great ceremony on the radio, sitting round village fires that glowed like eyes amid the dark silences of forest and bush; or they heard it by the traditional manner, by whispered word of mouth, the story and the splendour exaggerated a hundred times in the telling. So they learned how the bride had been dressed in white silk for her wedding, had worn a veil of finest tulle and shoes from Jimmy Choo, and how she had been conveyed to the King in a great, silent white car called a Silver Phantom.
Of course, not all could win this prize but other fine prizes were promised, greater and smaller ones, many sponsored by local businesses. Some were as delicate and beautiful as a bracelet of Indian Ocean pearls, some as practical as a Timex Ladies watch or as impractical – as far as most of the village girls were concerned – as a Bosch electronic washing machine. Leila won a prize, but her prize, a very precious prize, was to work for the King, so she did not return to her village after the festivities but moved to the capital. That’s where she met my brother Mark.
Other girls won other prizes of a different type of work and they didn’t return to their villages because they found themselves in the service industries of Berlin or London or Rome.
And others still won prizes but didn’t make it to any such exotic destination because their skulls were smashed with a knobkerrie and their brains beaten out across a white-tiled floor before any promise could be fulfilled.
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The Elephant Dance
The first section of 'Black Mongoose'