Republic of Rats

Chapter 1

“Rat, raat, raaat, raaaat, raaaaat, raaaaaat!” She screamed.

Outside the sun did scorch everything her rays could reach. It had been this way for about eight years now.

The natives woke up to a blue sky, a patch of white clouds here and there, and went to bed under the cover of countless bright stars, or an occasional bright moon. Consequently, the earth had turned dry.

Most plants had slowly dried, and died. Water in the wells had gradually decreased till they could see the bottom of each well in the kingdom, and livestock, having no water and pasture, had turned into packs of gaunt walking ghostly skeletons.

Some people had moved away to farther lands in search of water and greener fields, but most of the natives had decided to stay, condemning themselves to a slow, painful demise every now and then. When a cow, goat, or sheep was close to death, the owner had it slaughtered. 

The meat was then dried in the sun, and hung under the roof of the kitchen where smoke from everyday cooking dried it up further, and it could be right for consumption for years. It wasn’t uncommon for young men to break into the kitchens of people who were known to have had cattle in search of this smoked meat. Those elders who lived alone were particularly vulnerable.

A hungry man is an unpredictable man. There goes the old adage. People made all kind of conclusions about the prolonged drought. Some believed it was a curse for the sins of the people, who had transgressed all moral boundaries. They offered sacrifices to their gods, hoping for some kind of relief, but it never came.

Others blamed Kagwatiro, the old rain maker of the Kingdom. They said his art of holding up the rain on functions or making it fall when he felt he wasn’t treated with as such dignity as he thought befitted him had messed up with the heavens, and he alone could save the village now. The tribal chief had summoned him and tasked him to have the fortunes of the village reversed, but for eight years now,
Kagwatiro hadn’t succeeded. 

Such was the state of affairs in the land.
The girl’s mother stood under a guava plantation, bending over a large papyrus sieve. She held the sieve across with both arms, as though to hug it, winnowing the chaff from millet grain. When she raised the sieve, the mixture of grain and chaff rose into the air. She blew with her mouth, taking away some of the light chaff, then quickly tapping the mixture with the sieve, lest it all fall to the ground, which sadly is what happened when she had her daughter scream.

She was a no-nonsense elderly woman of dignity and a respected community member. Her ‘spare the rod spoil the child’ connotative included almost every neighbour’s child who dared to go against the village’s old norms and acceptable standards of behaviour.

It could either be a young lad lowering his trousers and squatting by the roadside to drop a bit of creamy smelly waste, or a young herdsman praised by his mates for the unusual dirt on his tongue. If such cases came to her, she was sure to pull ears and use a stick to knock some sense into the lad’s head. In the kingdom of Ogada, it was believed that a tree could only be straightened in its early stages of growth, not otherwise. As such the natives appreciated the iron hand she laid on their sons and daughters, and hardly did anyone ever raise a complaint for bruised buttocks or a hurting ear.

Hearing her daughter thus scream therefore, she had feared the worst. That is why she had hurriedly rushed to her help, destroying the family’s only left grain in the process, and was utterly disappointed to find out what trivial a matter it was.

What was wrong with girls of nowadays? She thought; a pair of sharp excuses for breasts, and a useless triangle of hair between her legs! That was all! They had nothing more to show for womanhood. Couldn’t she just hit the small rat on the head and send it sobbing to hell all at once? She looked at her daughter jumping up and down, not quite believing her.

But the poor thing was out of sight before she could process her thoughts. Perhaps it had already found its way out of the kitchen and her daughter was opening that big mouth of hers for no good reason. She looked at the mess in the kitchen once more and felt a motherly pang of disappointment. Would this girl really take care of a man’s home some day?

‘What do you think you are doing standing there wailing over nothing, like woman in labour, eh?’
The young girl did not say anything. She simply pointed to the direction of the kitchen corner just behind the cooking stones, where it was too dark for anyone to see anything.  She pointed with her right hand, holding her mouth with the left.

Her mother couldn’t understand it. What kind of rat was this? Or, was it a snake? Her heart skipped a bit at the thought of this. She dreaded snakes.
Then all of a sudden, both mother and daughter screamed at the same time. So big, long, and loud a scream it was that it scared the birds from their nests to flood the sky in commotion.

The valleys re-echoed their scream until it faded in the far away distances unknown to the ears of men. In a moment, the girl’s father had run to their rescue. He was a muscular weather-beaten man, with rough hands and rock-solid bare feet.

The outline of his body was as hard as the life he had lived, and he bent his head at the entrance of the grass thatched hut which was the kitchen. His thundering roar awoke the two women from a rather bad dream.
‘What’s going on here? Have you all run mad? What will happen to this house if I too start screaming like you are doing? Are you women moaning or what? Tell me!’

The women did not answer. They weren’t even listening. They kept on pointing their hands to one side of the kitchen, skipping all the while as though they had been invaded by the red safari ants.
The head of the family had not asked any further questions when the rat jumped out of its hiding and hit him right in the face, making him fall in confusion. He hit the back of his head on the wall, staggered, and fell, but quickly rose back to his feet and roared more angrily.
‘These things’ He cursed. ‘They will eat even the little food we have left. Today will be your last day on this earth.’ ‘Greedy thing!’

In the blink of an eye, the poor creature had found its way out of the kitchen, father, wife and daughter after it.

Kabunu mpa amaguru
Kabunu mpa amaguru
Kabunu mpa amaguru.

The chase took an entirely new turn as they prayed to their buttocks for fast legs; oh, dear old Africa! It is an old hunters’ saying, borrowed by generations of their descendants whenever they have to borrow the legs of an ostrich.