Blood Diamond Chapter 7

When he thought back on it, Daniel was surprised at how the months flew by. It was not enjoyable exactly – seldom did he wake of a morning with a smile on his lips and a song in his heart – but he was folded into the Annuba tribe with an instant acceptance and was welcomed into the daily rituals and customs of the people with such ease and grace, that soon it felt as though he had long been there, years and years, like the weathered old translator, Tregoning.

On that first day he had been taken to an empty shelter and given to understand, through gestures and grunts, that this was to be his home – his bed a pile of sewn-together beast skins. He was free to come and go, to roam about and greet those he met. As a guest he was expected to do no labour – he did not have to join one of the innumerable battle-parties that departed on regular sorties to scour the area for enemies, and to claim agricultural products from nearby villages and communities as a kind of tribute or tax. He was not asked to help with the herding and corralling of the tribe’s herd, or to assist with manual labour or menial tasks. His days were perfectly at his leisure.

After a couple of weeks, during which time Daniel had regained his strength and recovered from a slight fever, no doubt brought on by the long night in the sea followed by the waterless march, Daniel was surprised to discover that the Annuba people were a nomadic tribe. One day, acting on unheard instructions from above, the people of the settlement began dismantling the lean-to shelters, storing them away and packing up and preparing to move onwards. It had not occurred to Daniel that this vast encampment of perhaps 600 people was a mobile caravan. He sought out Tregoning to ask him about it.

Daniel had not seen as much of Tregoning as he would have anticipated. The old man was kept in constant attendance on the Princess – Kamelka was her name – and such meetings as he and Daniel had were, in the main, fleeting and accidental. Still, with the clarity of leisure, Daniel had noticed that Tregoning was even older than he had first seemed. He was bent and hunched from age, and he walked with a pronounced limp, dragging his left leg, which was bent and slightly splayed. His bones seemed fragile, and his skin appeared to have been thinned and dried by the tropical sun.

“Oh yes,” said Tregoning when Daniel found him. “We are ever on the move. Sometimes we move with the rains, and with the movement of the animals. Sometimes it is at the King’s whim. Sometimes we move to be at sacred places for the Annuba’s religious rituals.”

“Who are the Annuba exactly?” asked Daniel. 

“Ah, now there is a question,” Tregoning muttered. “The people themselves are from these parts, or perhaps a little north up the coastline, but their ruling caste - the royal family – no-one knows from exactly where they hail. You can see for yourself they have different features, different skin from the rest of the people. Annuba legend has it the royals descended from some vast kingdom in the distant north, that they were born on the banks of a mighty river and were brought to their people by gods, as a gift. They summoned together the tribe and set off on a long journey into the country and, since those days, the people have roamed without a kingdom, from one place to the other, never permanently at rest. That is why they have developed into such an exquisite fighting force. Being without land, they are vulnerable to the predations of the peoples through whose territories they roam but, although their army is small, there are few tribes who will stand against them in pitched battle.”

Daniel nodded thoughtfully. He had already seen the evidence of their fighting prowess, strewn across the grassy clearing beside the sea.

And so, when the settlement was dismantled and the Annuba took to the trackless hinterland, Daniel went with them. They did not travel in one enormous mass, but split into innumerable smaller groups, each accompanied by a phalanx of warriors for protection. Daniel noticed, to both his annoyance and his slight relief that, within the Annuba community he was regarded at the level of one of the women and children, to be protected by the men with their battle-axes.

For weeks they moved in their small groups, rising at dawn, eating a meal of thick porridge ground and prepared by the women over small fires, then walking at an easy pace through the hot days, resting for three hours when the sun was at its hottest, continuing until the falling light made them pause and pull in thorn bushes and branches as a kind of make-shift defence against the beasts and predatory creatures of that wild place. Daniel could hear them all day and sometimes see them – small horned creatures that grazed at grass and leaves; unearthly creatures such as he had seen in pictures, spotted, with small heads perched on necks the length of two men; horned and armoured monsters that lumbered across the plains or snorted from the shade of trees. But it was another, the one the Annuba called dalovu and that we call elephant, which gave Daniel his first taste of the true adventure of that wild land.

They had moved north, so far as Daniel could judge by monitoring the position of the sun, and had come to a landscape of massive trees and small scrub that stretched between high hills. One of Daniel’s travelling companions, a young man named Changa, took him up onto a low rise to show him the land beyond. It stretched away, green and lovely to the northern horizon. Changa pointed to the north-west. 

“Zamba,” he said. Daniel didn’t follow.

Changa mimed what Daniel understood to be a vast river, with cataracts and rapids, and pointed again to the north-west. Daniel nodded. Then Changa slapped Daniel’s shoulder, and nodded with an expression of some inscrutable meaning, and they wandered back to the camp.

It was the next day that Daniel understood. Soon after sunrise, while Daniel stood warming his hands at the campfire, yawning and blinking in the pearl-gold light, three Annuba warriors arrived in camp. They beckoned to him. Daniel looked at Changa in slight apprehension but Changa, with an inclination of the head, signalled he should do as they said. So, trusting to his stars that had brought him thus far unscathed, Daniel went with them.

They turned and set off into the bush, and he fell in behind them, following them in their now-familiar silent half-running cross-country gait. Already in the short time he had been with the tribe Daniel had grown stronger – the soles of his feet were hardened for running over the turf and rocks and thorns, and his limbs were leaner. He had little difficulty keeping up with them, and after an hour they arrived at the Royal Camp, where the King and the Princess and Tregoning were, accompanied by a large guard of the Annuba’s finest warriors. As they approached the camp, the warriors sounded their arrival by blowing on a horn and Tregoning came out to greet him.

Tregoning took Daniel aside, gave him a drink of water, and walked with him to a tree, where they picked and ate small red berries while he talked.

“Whenever the Annuba come in the vicinity of the Zamba,” Tregoning said, “which is the mighty river upon whose flood plain we are now on the verge, the Annuba hold a ritual Hunt of the Dalovu, led by the King himself. Ten of the tribe’s young men, who are just coming to maturity, are led by the King, on foot, using only spears, to slay one of the dalovu that roam across these plains. They are representative of all the tribe’s young men of their age. It is, needless to say, no easy undertaking. Seldom has a hunt been concluded without the death of at least one of the initiates. On one occasion, many years ago, the King returned with only one of the young men. The rest all lay dead and broken.”

“Does the king ever get hurt?”

“The Annuba believe the King is divine, immortal and infallible. He can only die when he chooses to, and when he wills it. No King has ever returned from the hunt with so much as a scratch upon him. And always the dalovu is killed. Afterward the surviving young men are marked with its blood, and are welcomed into manhood at a great feast of the dalovu’s flesh. The tribe rejoices in the knowledge that a new generation has been symbolically ushered into manhood to defend the tribe and the great Bird.”

“The great Bird?” said Daniel. “What’s that?”

Tregoning looked as though he wished he had said nothing.

“It is … just a tradition. Now you must prepare.”

“Prepare for what?”

Tregoning looked at Daniel, with just the faintest hint of a gleam in his eye. “Why,” he said, “for the hunt. As honoured guest, naturally you must accompany the King on the Royal Hunt of the Dalovu.”

Copyright Rannulph Moore

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Ranulph Moore describes himself as an explorer, who became a writer to purge himself of the adventures that were crowding his life. He says he has seen it all, in a life spent observing the lives of others.
He will travel anywhere – as long as he can make a decent cup of tea and launder a linen jacket. He describes Africa as one of his great loves. He has spent time in every country on the continent.
If he can’t find a good champagne, he has been known to resort to gin. He has homes in Paris, Jura and Cape Town. At present, he lives in Madagascar, where he is researching his latest book.
Read an interview with Rannulph Moore.