THE BROKEN CALABASH

3. THE BROKEN CALABASH

The white men came not with thunder-sticks at first, but with smiles and shining things. They called themselves friends of the great Queen across the water, who wished only to know the mighty chiefs of our land. My father, Chief Akambo of the Ufara, with his leopards-tooth necklace and eyes that could quiet a storm, welcomed them to the compound. They brought gifts: a mirror that stole your reflection, a bottle of fire-water that burned a path to your soul, and soft, impossible cloth the colour of a poisoned flower.

I, Adimu, his second son, watched from the shade of the Iroko tree. I saw how their eyes, the colour of a shallow sky, did not meet ours directly, but took inventory of everything, the strong arms of the hunters, the straight backs of the young women grinding cassava, the number of healthy children.

The palaver was long. Under the council tree, the white man, Captain Thorne, spoke through a mouthpiece, a man from a coastal tribe whose words came out twisted and oily. Thorne spoke of a "great work" across the ocean. A "partnership." He showed a paper with marks on it, a "treaty," he called it. He promised rifles that would make our hunters gods, barrels of fire-water, mountains of salt, and a chest of silver shillings that sang when shaken.

My father and the elders were wary. The ancestors whispered in the wind. But the promises were like sweet, rotting fruit, you could not ignore the scent. The white men spoke of a journey to a place where our strong men would learn great skills and return wealthy, where our people would be "protected" under the Queen's great shadow. They used words like "honour" and "progress," which the mouthpiece translated as "greatness" and "future."

The bribe was not crude. It was a slow poison. They flattered my father's wisdom. They gave him a tall hat and a coat with brass buttons that made him sweat like a sinner. They toasted him with their fire-water until his eyes grew cloudy and his laughter too loud. They whispered of rival chiefs already signing, already gaining advantage.

The morning the treaty was sealed, they sacrificed a white bull. The blood was supposed to bind the agreement to the earth. But I saw a vulture, not a hawk, circle overhead.

They asked for a show of good faith, strong young men and women to help with the first phase of the "great work," to be honoured guests on their great canoe. A gesture of trust. My father, his vision clouded by promises and pride, called for volunteers. Fifty of our best stepped forward, their faces bright with curiosity and pride. My own brother, Kofi, was among them, flexing his arms and laughing.

I watched them walk down the path to the river, following the white men and the chest of singing silver. Kofi turned and waved, his smile a slash of white in his dark face. They did not walk like captives. They walked like ambassadors. That was the most profound deception of all.

The great canoe was not a canoe. It was a monstrous thing of wood and stink, a floating house with a belly like a cave. From the high river bluff, I saw our people led into that belly. I saw the last of them disappear, and then the great mouth of the hold was closed with a sound like a tomb sealing.

They never came back.

Other canoes came. The singing silver was paid. The rifles arrived, ten of them, with little powder. The fire-water flowed, and fights broke out. The white men’s demands grew. They spoke of "quotas" and "contracts." When my father, sober and horrified, finally refused more of his people, the men with the thunder-sticks appeared from the forest. They were not Captain Thorne’s men. They were hard-faced strangers from another tribe, armed with the very rifles we had been given. They had been bought, too.

The horror was not in the chains that came later, though their cold bite is a ghost on my wrists even now. The horror was in the moment of understanding that bloomed in my father’s eyes before a musket butt shattered his temple. The horror was the realization that we had not been conquered by force, but dismantled by a trick. Our trust was the lever, our chiefs the unwitting hands that broke the world. The white men did not steal us from our tribes. They purchased us with our own hopes, and our leaders delivered us into the hold.

Now, in the suffocating darkness of this ship’s belly, pressed between the weeping and the dying, the true curse settles upon my soul. It is not the lash, nor the thirst, nor the reek of despair. It is the memory of my brother’s trusting wave. It is the sight of my father, splendid in his ridiculous brass-buttoned coat, selling his children for a chest of lies and a taste of a world that wanted only to consume us. They did not just take our bodies. They made our own hearts complicit in the theft, and that betrayal is a poison no ocean can dilute. Our home is not lost behind us. It is shattered within us, broken by the very hands that were meant to hold it safe.