THE Myth Of The Ethiope

Forty years ago, a peculiar hermit lived here amongst us. You see that clump of treetops over there, to the east, just by the last bend to the river, he lived there forty years ago, when I was still a child running about in bante pants. Even now as I walk this earth, after such a long time, I am filled with awe at the happenings of then, at the sublimity of the things that I would have called the illusions of wine had I not been there to see and be with my own eyes and being. I will tell you about it. Among your own people too, there is a similar legend, I have read of it, this legend of Arthur. It is said, is it not, that on the grave of Arthur is written the words, Hic Iacet Authorus, Rex Quondam, Rexque Futurus ; Here Lies Arthur, the Once And Future King? Just over the Treetops there, just by the last bend to the riverside, something equally mysterious happened forty years ago when I was still a child.

Jesse is still a sleepy little town of self-effacing people who still make their livelihood from the bounty of the river. The river Ethiope is central to the lives of my people and it has always been so, our great grand father met long accustomed rivereine folk here when he took their land away by means of trickery. The river Ethiope resembles a large letter “U”, for Universe, and at the center of its crook lies the village of Jesse. We are unlike those poor folks to the south whose waters are ruined from their foolishness of collecting money from strangers to settle among them, men whose ways they did not know. Anyway, we in Jesse knew better, we are cultured, we are no fools; only fools still plod towards ruin after the warnings of commonsense. The river Ethiope is freshwater and the land of Jesse is a rich type of russet brown alluvial, so fertile that one has to be careful. The story is often told of a foolish farmer who absent-mindedly left some yam shoots behind his house, after a two year journey, he returned to find only the ruins of his homestead, ruined by enormous tubers of yam.

Jesse is the center of the Universe and my people have long been used to the condition of having open arms to diverse peoples from less equidistant places. That is how the hermit came to live with us about a decade before I was born. He was welcomed and became one with us. As you know, the priestesses of the river always begin their oracle with the age old invocation;
The Mother of the River says Do you
Know where I am going, child, Do you
Know where I have been?

No matter what hardship there was in other lands, which caused their inhabitants to turn away the wayfarer or accept his money, in Jesse he was always freely welcome. The only demand we made was that he make efforts to be as cultured as we saw ourselves. That was how the hermit, Mustrema, came into our little village lying just by the bend of the river, bringing with him the stimulant of the amazing things that were to happen – his slim ivory flute from which he was never parted.

Mustrema came from the north, as it is said amongst us, “the land where the hamartan winds come from”. The farthest north the most intrepid of us had been was Idah on the banks of the Great River, seat of the Attah and his ferocious Igala nation. We used to trade in ivory with them, a commodity of which the Igala are fond and they sent us palm oil and such merchandise. But Mustrema was not from Igalaland; he was from even further north than that. It was the widow, old Duzia, who accepted him into Jesse as her guest; for the rest of us, he was merely another ambassador of another people from some vague place else. Mustrema was a very quiet person and apart from me, he had only one other close friend. He was of a deeper complexion than the average native, whose complexions so confused Richard Lander that he thought us Ethiopian and renamed our river – Ethiope. Mustrema was a slim, tall man and the most striking things about him were his eyes which were full of kind and open understanding, and his teeth when he smiled which were shiny and milky white. He had thin eyebrows, a flat nose and never grew a beard or even a moustache; he had a little black mole over his left eye. When old Duzia, the widow, died about five years after his arrival, Mustrema moved from her old compound to a secluded dwelling along the path that led to the riverside.

The people of Jesse are sober and collected in all ways except in our music and dance of which we are infamous because of its being very rhythmic and heavy. We love to sing and we love to dance, our dance having started as worship to the ever-generous River. That was how we all got to know of Mustrema and his ivory flute. Our music comes from five drums which together are called icholo; they are differentiated in pitch as left, younger left, middle, younger right and right. Between the five drums and the three drummers it took to beat them, there could be replicated a rhythm that called every cell in the human body to its feet. The dance came from deep within your soul, you heard the harmony and you obeyed or at least you wanted to. Even now, as I am an old man, even now after all that happened, even now as I talk to you I can still hear the rhythm of the icholo drums in my ear. One night, during the week of the full moon dedicated to dances, during the interlude of drums and just before the writhing and winding of waists and torsos could be brought under control, we heard the first, plaintive, divine notes of Mustrema’s ivory flute. It was in that sound, the tune he fluted that night, that a seal was put on the events of forty years ago.

Can you imagine how it is to hear the flute for the first time? Try to imagine then what makes a child cry when he takes his first breath of air! We had danced so long to the percussion of the icholo drums and here was this new seduction of woodwind. The tired drummers and dancers lost their tiredness and the drummer of right and younger right felt his fingers rise; then left and younger left; then center but then, there was still heard the happy notes of his ivory flute, its song winding and riffling through the heavy notes of the drums like a crest riding ripples at the riverfront. And there, at the center of it all, was the hermit, Mustrema, his eyes closed, giving a strange and enchanted life to the drums. The dance was so sublime that watching it that night, remembering it now, still brings tears to my eyes.

When Mustrema played, the notes of a flute was a sound like one that wakes up blossoms every morning, that music which tells the riverside waves how to dance to the teasing of the wind. When Mustrema played with the icholo drums, it recreated a walkway of ecstasy and with each crescendo there was a climax of the physical motions of something divine; with each interlude it seemed that we stacked orgasm after orgasm together towards a final breaking into a fluorescence so violent it would precede a long night of lovemaking and nirvanas of a green and blue and russet brown heaven. All these things, when Mustrema played. The women all loved him, their daughters all loved him and desired him. The affections of the womenfolk of Jesse were plentiful yet the hermit managed not to reciprocate them and yet remained on good terms with both besotted mother and daughter. He was a true hermit. He lived in his little out of the way house, looking after himself and sometimes fluting in the evenings. The only persons who Mustrema could not keep away from his person and dwellings were Kenu, the wine-taper and rascal and myself, on account of old Duzia; my grandmother.

I was still a child, barely fifteen when these things happened. You see, Kenu was a tapper of palm wine and when he was not doing that, he busied himself being the village rascal and wag. That such a personality would be drawn to another so contrary as Mustrema perhaps indicates some kindred missing link in both; while I was close to the hermit, I was not close to his friend. All three of us were together, each unknown to the other, I unknown to both, when we found out why Mustrema could not have returned the affections of the womenfolk of Jesse.

Mystery has an aura like a woman that marks out a man, on first sight, as her very own. And so like a woman, there is always a type of jealousy entwined with mystery and usually it is not so straightforward as the talk of it. There are always triangles and other such like shapes involved in such relationships. I say a type of jealousy because unlike the usual envy that must be accounted for when things like love and desire are all out in the open, people caught in the thrall of mystery only amble about in clouds of their imagining, unsure what roles they are to play thus abandoned to a chancy destiny.

The girl who came to visit Mustrema was the sort who left confusion in her wake for she seemed to be the materialization of every conceivable perfection. She came to see him one night while he sat in front of his little house, trying to cook a late meal of porridge. It was a dark night and most of the villagers were asleep already, only owls and other creatures of night kept company in the warm breeze that blew from the surface of the river. He was stripped to his waist and mingled his whistling with the chimes of the million grasshoppers, both sounds concealing the lightness of her step. A single kerosene lantern lay to his left as he bent over to stir the pot of porridge, unaware of her approach until the last moment when he looked up and saw her.

Kenu was one of those people who believed that life was best lived by seeking and savoring every little happiness and laughter he could find. He had gotten a reputation as a rascal in spite of his more responsible job as a one of the most adroit palm wine-tappers in Jesse. Whenever Kenu was around, it did not take long before his good humor and wit brought laughter or at least an uplifting smile, even from the terminally ill. Kenu also had that bent of being, those times he was serious, of being a stickler to particular issues and principles. All these made his relationship with the hermit seem a strange one to any who saw them. Yet they were always together and those times when the hermit left his little house, it was to visit Kenu and go round with him, listening to the palaver and banter that seemed to follow behind Kenu as doggedly as a shadow. In the time of their friendship, the popularity of the hermit as a player of the ivory flute during the monthly dances continued to rise, especially among the womenfolk of Jesse and their daughters, yet, in the same period, it seemed that his quietude and seclusion from them had further tightened its noose around him. On one occasion, a girl had threatened to kill herself if Mustrema did not marry her. The matter ended when Mustrema, in company of Kenu and I, came and played his flute to her for an hour, telling her that marrying her would be the death of him and that he would kill himself if she did same; but he would please her by fluting for her anytime she wanted. She became one of the most envied girls in Jesse; she was Kenu’s younger sister.

The next morning Mustrema paid attention to the remains of his late dinner porridge burnt into an unsightly black, even the pot, he knew, would never regain their shine no matter how much he washed and scoured. Lucky thing that the fire had contented itself to the porridge before burning itself out. He poured some water in the pot in his first attempt at cleaning and thought of the unusual events of the night before.

People like Mustrema live their lives in contemplation of some personal ideal or the other, sometimes that ideal has a name, and many times, it does not. The difference between Mustrema and the rest of us was his solitude. The solitude of a hermit can only be understood against the screen of such a one’s search for an ideal that we dared not set out to seek but which yet we despair ourselves wondering about. Mustrema sought his own perfection in the harmony of sound. He had glimpsed it on occasion in little snatches before it slipped away from him. Yet, that penultimate night, he had held that harmony in his hands. He knew that his ideal was real and not some haunting will-o-the-wisp. When he had looked up and seen her she was barely three yards away from him. He had stared for a brief second and felt a sense of deja vu, he did not know when he dropped the ladle and erased the few steps that denied them the power of touch, a power far above words. His hands were already tugging at the jigida beads on her waist even as his lips found her lips.

Later he had sat down looking at her for a long time wondering what spell he could say to break the flowing lines of perfect silence, to leave his mark here and grant authenticity to the moment.
“What is your name?”
“Duzia”, she replied.
A long loaded silence followed; the hermit closed his eyes awhile and tried to remember the girl who lay beside him. Her skin was a peculiar color of light brown chocolate whipped with crème, a distinct finely pored brown. Her hair was like those times when he felt a perfect refrain flow from him through his flute; her hair was the color of the finest sound he had ever created, that cry on the day of his birth. Her long hair framed the unusual blossom that was her face, her face was the blossom of a flower long imagined and never seen. Even with his eyes closed, he still traced along her stomach finding the place where her breasts parted and then moving left and over a mound, the very feel of which aroused him again. Duzia, her name is Duzia, he thought, opening his eyes again and meeting the calm whiteness of her eyes looking at him.
“Who are you?” he asked.
“I am a mermaid,” she said.
He smiled and ran his fingers through his hair. There was no need for further question; there would be no need for words. Whether he would see her again? What use that question when the music of her was here with him now, was not the answer obvious?

The relationship between Mustrema and the mermaid continued for about five years before he disappeared on that fateful night. Kenu’s sister had refused to marry. The doomed flutist and his rivereine muse met at his house frequently while the people of Jesse slept under her deep spell. Yet he still played his flute to Kenu’s unmarrying sister. The mermaid, Duzia, resented these affections. But Mustrema had told