It was the elders visiting for the third time this week that alerted me. The elders and the whispered words that blew across the yard, chilling my spine. “Ten cows.” “Wedding.” “Kutairi” (the cutting).
No-one speaks of my big sister, Amidah. But I remember. I remember the fifty-year-old man to whom she was promised, for a dowry of nine cows. The Ngarida (cutter). The rusty blade. The way they held her down and told her not to scream. The blood spreading over her white dress.
And afterwards, how her body was thrown into the Bush, where the wild things are. My beautiful sister. Fourteen years old to my seven. To escape the Lawalawa curse, there was to be no burial. No mention of her name.
I stopped speaking.
“Answer your Papa, Kafil!” Mama demanded. “Speak, boy!” But even when they tried to beat it out of me, I remained silent. Like Amidah during the cutting. Like Amidah now. My voice was out there with her, lost.
My little sister, Zahra, was born a year later. For the last fourteen years I have spoken only to her.
And now they’re coming for Zahra.
I shake her awake. “Zahra! We have to leave. Now.”
We creep outside. “The Ngarida is coming. There’s a safe house, I’ll take you.”
Papa stomps across the yard, fists clenched. He’s heard me clunking about. I push Zahra into the shadows and gesture to indicate a problem with one of the cows. He goes to get his things, growling under his breath.
“Run!” I whisper to Zahra. “Follow the long, winding road South, to Mugumu. It’s an hour away.”
She stares, wide-eyed and trembling, then disappears, swallowed by the night. The moon morphs into sinister shapes as the Nightjars churr a distant warning.
Images of my sister stumbling, pursued by hyenas, haunt me while Papa and I check the cattle. There’s no sign of injury. He grunts and plods back to bed.
In the morning, Papa appears, eyes wild. “Where is she?”
I square my shoulders and hold his gaze. He’s an old man now. I tower over him.
We’re interrupted by two women arriving, and relief ripples over me like a breeze when I realise they’re from the safe house. She made it!
I listen like only the silent can. My parents don’t agree to abandon the cutting ritual. Zahra will remain at the safe house, be educated there.
The view across the plains looks different today, the winding road a shimmering lifeline. Beyond the wildnerness, orderly rows of sweet potato crops signal an end to danger.
*
Zahra dances alongside her class-mates, kicking up cinnamon-dust in robes the colour of the blood they didn’t shed. This rite of passage into womanhood celebrates academic achievements, not butchering.
Below us stretches the Serengeti, where the sun nestles among acacia trees. Where Amidah’s body and so many others were strewn. At dusk, we sing, lulling their souls out of exile.
My voice rings out the loudest, free at last.
