KING OF THE ARENA
o one who knew Kamukwa
can deny the startling fact that the man was neither one of smartest nor the
strongest men in our village. However, his actions on that fateful day where way
over the top even for a gentleman who had such a startling gift of stupidity. I
have to admit that some people are born with an inconceivable or rather
incomprehensible gift of stupidity. I am using stupidity here loosely to refer
to that inherent tendency to make wrong decisions.
Kamukwa had retired to Morpheus
arms dog tired the previous night after long day of back breaking work tilling
his small shamba. Compared to other successful men in the village, his was not
much of a piece of land. There were other hard working men who had managed to
clear large tracts of land and could afford the large workforce of wives and
children needed to till the land. This is a fact that his wife never forgot to
remind him of. When it came to marrying, he did not have of a choice but he had
to settle on the first thing that looked like, walked like and perhaps spoke
with even the least semblance of a woman.
He found himself
cornered in his small hut with the greatest regrets of his life. She was a
vicious woman who had the tendency to barter him at will and at any slightest provocation.
The provocations ranged from simply dozing off while she spoke to him, or any
attempt to move too close to her without her invitation as they slept on their
shared cow skin pallet. She was most definitely the devil send to finish of
what little manhood he had been awarded by the malicious being that created
with so many inadequacies.
He slowly bulldozed his
tiny frame out the ‘bed’ careful not to awaken the sleeping buffalo that was
snoring with a rising crescendo of mating bullfrog next to him. Doing so was a perilous
matter that would see him attacked with the viciousness of a bull goring a
matador. The sun was peering shyly from the hills on the east sending reddish
rays from the horizon for it had not risen fully over the horizon. He stood up,
stretched, yawned and rubbed his eyes as he got accustomed to the semi darkness
in the room. He looked at his sleeping wife loathingly with the morning fire
burning his loins. The torture of unquenched desire, a feeling he had to
smother for days now was breaking him. He looked at his example of a wife
sleeping soundly like a bull, yearned to get close to her; yet previous
experiences had taught him to wait for a formal invitation which apparently had
happened twice in the previous year.
Kamukwa wore his badly
calico patched pants, took one last glance at his wife and clicked under his
breath. Lest she was pretending to be deep asleep and heard him click at her.
He walked to the corner of the mud walled grassed that house and picked his
jembe and panga. He felt still tired from the previous day’s work and the
constant tossing and turning he had to endure the previous night as the
unquenchable fire razed through his entire body. It was well past the first
cock crow that he managed to doze off. He opened the rickety door as quietly as
possible afraid that the creaking hinges might awaken the she devil he shared
his life with.
As soon as he stepped
out of the hut, the cold dewy grass stung the soles of his feet. It was cold
and his threadbare shirt did nothing to counter it but only to remind him of
his cycle of woes. He whistled softly, trying to convince himself that a man
who had a wife to feed had no option but to break his back working the land. A
jembe slung over his shoulder, a panga tightly clung in his hand a forced good
humour to boot trickling through his body, and he headed for the shamba.
He emerged out of
nowhere, black skinned, dirty and foul mouthed to boot. The sorry apology of a
man, Kamukwa’s mortal enemy and evil neighbour just happened out of nowhere.
Katio, for that was his name, walked confidently towards Kamukwa loudly and
derisively chanting. It was a chant Kamukwa had come to hate since the day at
the arena. It went something like
Kamukwa kamundu katheke ta Katheko
Kaendie kiwanzani, kamukwa
Kayenda kutwaa ndumi
Mwitu mutune ta mwei
Ndumi kyeloelwa
Kamukwa kakomana na katio
Ing’andaa nzangume
Ngundi imwe kakoma
Kamukwa , skinny like a rope
Kamukwa went the arena
He wanted to mar Ndumi
A girl as beautiful/light as the
moon
Ndumi who everybody admired
Kamukwa challenged katio
A giant of a man
It was a one blow knock out
They had had several
tussles over land and unsettled debts. It did not help matters that, a little
bird had told Kamukwa that Katio had managed to tame his buffalo of a wife. They
had been seen on numerous occasions emerging from a banana plantation with
Kamukwa’s wife giggling and her face
glowing with satisfaction. This was most definitely a run in one too many. Believe
you me, fury grabbed Kamukwa, choking his senses and bubbling over into insanity
unchained.
He dropped his tools
and swung a left at what at that moment was an embodiment of the devil
incarnate-Katio. Poor him, oh poor him, had he been wiser, he would have
realized the futility of attacking that rock of a man. It was a grave mistake.
Challenging a 6’4’’ man under whose 120 kilogrammes of weight the earth groaned
was record breaking folly and stupidity.
Kamukwa’s blow landed
squarely on Katio’s chest (for that was his maximum reach) and sounded faintly
like a far off thud of stool dropping in a 30 foot pit latrine. The demons
in Katio erupted in a volcanic rage. Kamukwa’s emaciated 60
kilogramme 5’4’’ frame was no match to the fury fuelled mountain of a man Katio
was. Before he could curse his stupid ego and little wit, Katio grabbed him by
the neck and hoisted him to his eye level. In that fleeting moment, kamukwa
most definitely saw the devil stoking the fires of hell’s kiln through Katio’s
eyes. Blood shot eyes , a twitching moustache and a frothy mouth spelt doom as
he gasped for breath. Katio stammered word after word as anger gleefully
swallowed each word he intended to say.
Kamukwa’s life flashed
right past his eyes in a few seconds as he embraced the arms of death. He had
never forgiven Katio for ‘taking’ the love of his life. She had been the
village beauty- Ndumi, of the famous chant he hated and loathed. A truer picture
of God’s grace and mastery of creation had never existed. Unfortunately, the
arena and prize women where never for
the weak and the faint hearted.
************************************************************
Kamukwa had always
vividly remembered and sipped the
venomous memories of the wrestling day. Wrestling for Ndumi. Just like his
father and other before him had to wrestle for the girl of their dreams, he had
vowed to wrestle, even if it killed him, for the love of his dreams. Ndumi, she
who was like the moon, ndumi whose eyes
twinkled brighter that the stars, Ndumi, whose laughter was medicine to hurting
souls. Ndumi, Ndumi, Ndumi the girl of his dreams.
As he stepped into the arena, Ndumi’s star like eyes and luscious
lips enchanted him and fantasies of consummating his lifelong desires fanned
his courage-courage that honestly could only be equated to a chicken’s! As he
stood face to face with Katio, he dreamt of her swaying hips as she balanced
her water pot on her head, he thought of that supple back, he rode to
fantasy land as he dreamt of the
timbre of her mellow voice as she crooned lullabies to the many children he
would sire with her.
He was this reverie
,when Katio landed a jab on his chin. It was a canon of a blow that etched his
name permanently in the village’s annals of history as the fasted knock out
ever. It also earned him a special spot in every village musicians name as the
weakest man the village ever saw for every time they sang katio’s praises, they
had to sing of the coward, weakling he fell with one blow, kamukwa. By the time
he came to, katio was already spreading his leopard skins to deflower his jewel
as village youngsters, bare chested boys and girls with round firms breast
danced in the arena. Danced, singing dirty suggestive songs of what might
happen that night. He crawled quietly from under the banana grove where he had
be placed to recover, shoulders hunched, head bowed, ego bruised and with an
aching jaw, carried his broken fantasies home.
*************************************************************
Their chance meeting that morning was the rematch he had dreamt of and
conjured up in his brain many a time. Being the opportunist he was, he had
hoped that the element of surprise would play to his advantage. Yes, his feeble
blow took Katio by surprise, but it gave him a solid reason to finish off what
he had started in the Arena that fateful evening. As Kamukwa looked at katio,
he could feel warm urine trickling down his thighs. Katio flung the skinny man
against a huge rock. The devil of a rock embraced Kamukwa as needles of excruciating
pain stitched through his shattered ribs. A torrent of horrendous pain gushed
through every inch of his body. Black out
******************************************
As he lay on his
pallet, his devil of a wife maybe somewhere in a banana grove smiling and
giggling with Katio.He tried to sip the sour tasting porridge she had left next
to him. Every sip felt like a fight for life itself. It had been days of
insurmountable agony. Every sip of porridge bitter in his mouth was like
swallowing a capsule of hurt and trepidations. He made one resolve, resolute and unyielding.
