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Extract from "We meet the Great Chief Hungwe, some Arabs and a Djinn"
It was a summer's day in 1390 AD. In the burying place on the hill in South Africa which later generations would call Mapwe , the Great Chief gazed down on the herds below. Their Sanga, their cattle, grazed peacefully in the lands, herded by the !Kung , the little apricot-skinned people with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes who did the manual work for his people. They made good herders because they seemed themselves to have no desire to own cattle, but a great feeling for the beasts in their charge. They had always lived here, even before his ancestors had come down the river in their canoes and seen this hill and built this town with its great stone walls.
Further off he could see the fields of millet and sorghum and cotton which his people cultivated. The cotton was a recent discovery. It came not like so much else that was new in their lives from the Swahili traders, who paddled their great canoes up against the current to reach his town, but from upstream. It came from peoples like his own who had brought the skills down the Great River with them when fleeing from their enemies. His women now produced cloth which although not as fine as the traders' cloth, was much more supple than the skins and furs they were wont to use.............
........The Chief had just buried his father. It was a sombre time, this time of burying, but not a sad one. For his father had gone to join his ancestors and would be happy now. He had been accompanied by his tools and his weapons and his favourite gold covered ornament, his little rhinoceros. Beautifully made by the tribe's best goldsmith, the rhinoceros symbolised the power and the might of the Chieftaincy, and would ensure that he was recognised and honoured by the ancestors. It was the Swahili traders who had made the yellow metal popular for decoration, because it never tarnished and was pliable and easy to work.
The burying place was on the top of this high hill, the highest for miles around. His people always buried their dead in the highest place available so as to be nearer their ancestors in the sky and so shorten their journey. Before they came here, in the days of his ancestors, they had left their dead out on a raised wooden platform for the birds of the air to devour, so taking them closer to their ancestors in the sky, but now they buried them. Lying prone for commoners, standing upright as was only fitting for the Chiefs.
He was a tall man, the Chief. Well over six feet tall in a time when the average was nearer five feet. It ran in his family, and was one of the reasons he was revered as the Chief. Gazing down in his reverie, considering all the implications of his new position, his eye was distracted by an unexpected sight. He saw the messenger trotting up the path to the burial place. He would not have been disturbed as he bid goodbye to his father without good reason. He stared intently at the rivers, the cattle, the houses, the market place looking for signs of trouble, but saw nothing. The messenger approached. Keeping his eyes respectfully on the ground, the exhausted man panted:
"I seek the Fish Eagle". He had clearly run a long way to come here, probably from Bamba Hill, a full day's march across the Great River.
"N'di Hungwe" the Chief responded, looking down on the prone man. "I am the Fish Eagle. Rise, and speak".