The Cape Cod Bicycle War. Billy Kahora

Kijana had learned in school. Places that the maps in school never mentioned. Words that did not exist in Kiswahili or Mbakomo. Stories of men who could summon crocodiles and send them to their enemies. Of spirits in the hills and in the forest.

      Komora Kijana came to understand that these things that his grandfather told him would be lost forever if they were not written down. At times his grandfather called one or two of the old men of Gasa, Mzee Jorabashora and the oldest man in the village, whose name was never said aloud, and they added things from their own memories and so the book grew.

      Komora Kijana remembered one of those first evenings when his grandfather put the Book aside and reached up into the rafters of his hut and some ancient-looking scrolls fell from it. The old man handed them over to Komora Kijana and asked him to rewrite the words in the Book. The parchments had a kind of writing that the boy had not seen before but after looking closely he made out the words:

      Imperial Majesty of Britain.

      The Territory Ozi will serve as agent of the Imperial Majesty of Britain against the German Territory of Witu.

      ‘Do you know what this is? This document shows that this village was given Madaraka by the Queen of England a long time ago. That Ozi was the first agent of England in the place we now call Kenya.’

      And that was when Komora Kijana realised the importance of the Book.

      A few days after the river began rising Chief Mpango’s aides started going around the village with loudspeakers warning everybody that the coming floods were just days away. The whole village laughed and abused the aides. Serikali was always late. A week ago a messenger from the Malajuu had come with a missive from the Gasa of Baomo to warn them of the heavy rains that had already started upriver. The Gasa had sent him back with a young man from Ozi but this emissary was yet to return with news of how strong the Tsana was. Nature had already given its signs the day before when a large snake had appeared, sunning itself on the path to the swamp. Those who rose early missed the snake. And so it was Ukonto who had almost trod on the snake. When he saw it the heavy something that had sat on his chest all his life lifted away – he felt his mouth open and take in the morning air with such ease that he felt as if he was floating on air. The snake slowly slid into the grass and Ukonto saw it make its way into the Tsana and head towards the sea. Later, when the elders of Gasa listened to Ukonto’s tale, several observed that a snake of that size had not been spotted in Ozi since the ’97 Great El Niño War of Tsana and Indian Ocean. By the next day news of the snake was all over Ozi.

      When Kerekani brought food for Komora Mzee Wito the next day she squealed at Komora Kijana Wito, ‘My husband is healed. He asks when he can come and see Mzee Wito for his blessing?’

      ‘I will ask him.’ Komora Kijana knew that his grandfather would only bless Ukonto when he had cleared his land of bush.

      The next morning before the sun was up the Tsana started swelling. For the next few days the villagers of Ozi village walked with tight backs and drum chests, breaths held, as they watched Indian Ocean fight the Tsana. As if connected to a huge river in the sky the Tsana pushed the ocean tides, the sea foam and its ancient salt back. The wind blanketed Ozi village with warmth during the day and when this was flung away at night, as if by an invisible giant hand, the cold deflated the people of Ozi. As the Tsana grew the air thickened and the people of Ozi walked up and down as if asleep. The children ran around trees faster and faster like twirling tops, as if mad, before collapsing to the ground. Babies’ cries were picked by the spiralling wind and flung across the village. They refused to sleep at night, unheeding of even the famous Pokomo lullaby that forty-four years ago had become the tune of the Kenyan anthem.

      Two days later the rain reached Ozi. It started in the afternoon, becalmed the children. Babies slumped on their mothers’ chafing shoulders and only woke up to eat banana pulp with fish, their evening meal. Then suddenly the rain stopped, and another blanket of warmth covered Ozi village.

      The younger generations of Nyuki and Moto spread out on the river’s banks till mji Kau to cheer the heavy wind-swept victory as the swollen Tsana slowly pushed the sea back, past their village. The tea-brown waters from Mbakomo soils lapped steadily over the foreign metallic-grey liquid sea and Nyuki and Moto raced along the banks waving their arms, flinging their thin bodies into the air. The more foolhardy jumped and washed in the meeting of Tsana and Indian Ocean. Some young men even followed the victorious river past the Island of Kiundani where absent rich men of Ozi who had moved to Malindi owned rice fields; they skipped over the channel of Suez to Kilunguni where Mbakomo weddings were held. They saw how the river churned the prawns from the beds in Chala Chala and they waved at the tourists’ white faces peering from the tops of Polikani Hills where the German Meinherztgen had said he was building a hotel for the community but then kept all the profits for himself. It was whispered that the German still came in the dead of the night to give the money he owed to the old woman, Mama Mamkaze Witu, who had now been dead for five years, long after she had approved the building of the hotel. The German, it was said, left the money where her hut still stood every fifth day of every month, when all were asleep, to pay for the profits that he had kept for himself to stop Mamkaze Witu from haunting the hotel. That was strong medicine no longer seen in these days.

      More young men jumped into boats and were buoyed by the climbing river. They eased past Camp Ya Tiro, where Mbakomo fishing tents were moored but now destroyed, past Bashwani, where they kept their sisal nets – now lost after being pushed out to the sea. Their boats passed Pajero, named after the richest Giriama man who had drowned himself because of debt. In Kivunjeni, they stopped and sang above the fish-breeding grounds where millions of eggs were planted by the Mbakomo gods to become fish and where their forefathers had harvested turtle eggs. When they came to Mlangoni, the door of the sea, they fell silent.

      Hundreds of Mswahilis stood there, facing the sea, waving long white cloths calling for their beloved Indian Ocean to return and conquer the ‘Tana’, as they called it in their language. Low in the sky where they could almost touch it, hung a pale-brown, desiccated moon above the young foolish Mbakomos – a fearful sight they all looked askance at. They realised that their joy was the sorrow of others and they rowed back home. But once they reached the home shores of Ozi they forgot all they had seen and started dancing when their feet touched the ground at the victory of the Tsana over the Indian Ocean.

      As the War raged the Wazee wa Gasa sat in the ancient hut at the top of the village. Their night talk swept the decades aside: they remembered even older Wars between Tsana and Indian Ocean, before El Niño ’97. They remembered the Wars of ’37, told to them by the grandfathers, and ’67 – the other great El Niños. They talked of how God helped the Indian Ocean every nine years to climb upriver and then the Tsana fought back every tenth year to overcome the sea. They remembered how, in their lifetimes, the Indian Ocean had increasingly become stronger than the Tsana. How it had pushed the people of Ozi and the other villages back from its door, almost to the lands of the Ormah who lived behind the Mbakomo, away from the river grazing their cattle. Before this new swelling, the Wazee lamented the Tsana’s nine-year cowardice, and how it had failed to protect them or to give them all the good things it should have brought: the soil from the mountains in Meru to grow bananas, rice, millet, mangos, watermelon and sim sim; the fish it allowed to breed and thrive with crocodile and hippo, whose meat they loved so much. They remembered how the Indian Ocean had won the small and big battles in those nine years to bring drought every three years. They now worried about the Tsana’s rage – once it conquered the Indian Ocean and the moon and the land it would come for Ozi. They instructed the celebrating villagers to abandon their homes and move to higher land in the forest. Many, however, were too drunk with river joy to listen and laughed, drunk on maize beer at the elder’s emissaries. So, the Wazee waited for the flood even as everybody celebrated.

      Then, just like that, the Tsana stopped raging against the Indian Ocean; the moon shrunk to an even smaller and paler hole in the sky, unable to help the sea, and the tides came back up the Tsana to Ozi. Those in Ozi with shambas near the mangroves stopped dancing first because the Tsana had now come into their homes. They were the ones who had lived with the salt that burned their land and rejoiced when sea-water was swept from their banana plantations and rice fields. Over the last few days, they had harvested salty catfish suffocated