Dead Hills

Photo: Kamloops Hills/

The graves lay side by side. The scorching drought consumed all she would with reckless abandon. Kweke river never dried; it possessed a strong will to live through out the shrivelling drought. Its waters however abundant, betide dysfunction. Salty, soil-brown and now, a gravesite for cattle shells.

Oscar is unfazed. He has seen this before. Forced to drop out of carpentry class, the thirteen-year-old boy morphed to a digger for the rest of his life. His dead-end career begun when the pale men arrived in Kweke and claimed the fertile green-lands. As part of their conquest, they demanded that all the teenage boys, young and middle-aged men join in efforts to dig trenches around the village. Though Oscar hoped to follow his father’s footsteps as Kweke’s reliable carpenter, unburying the earth became his hand-picked occupation by the colonial marauders.

Joining in the daily rhythm of life, Oscar was a nomad. Hardly seeing his mother Truphena whom he dearly loved, she became a housemaid in a greenland mansion. She sent letters through her fellow house-worker and only friend Kaveke whose husband was a foreman in the trenches. Reluctant to pass messages to his juniors, Kaveke guilt-tripped Nguva, her cynical yet obliging husband. Kaveke stood by the kitchen, her voice like a creaky door.

“How I wish our son would read the many letters I write him,”

“Kaveke,” Nguva said, calmly. “I don’t have time for this. I am tired. Only once a week.”

Oscar savoured the letters from his mother. He would read them twice during his break after digging trenches for hours. He found out that his mother was fluent in sentiments, a hopeful dreamer to be treasured in times of detriment and looming despair. 

“Thank you, Mr. Foreman,” Oscar said with a slight tremor in his breaking voice.

“Boy” Nguva spoke slowly, “Have you been to the hills past Kweke?”

“No. My father said they are full of graves,” Oscar answered quickly as if trying to repay a debt.

A long silence ensued. What Oscar heard next was the familiar sound made by Nguva. The break was over and it was time to resume digging the trenches. Oscar’s eyes looked away from Nguva and up to the hills. Little did he know that in Nguva’s question lay his future in the dead hills.

Job was the first man Oscar buried. A young boy, he never thought that his father would be his first example of death. Job died from a mysterious disease. Oscar recalls his mother comforting him mid-sobbing, “Curse the thief of my father’s land!”. He had never seen his mother that angry and inconsolable. From her murmurs through out the burial, Oscar blamed the white man for bringing blight to his family. He knew that he had to take matters into his own hands, and try to fill his father’s space. Truphena never spoke again after the burial. Oscar understood her gestures and subtle body language. He never asked much of his mother. Just that she would eat the bread he sent home. After Job’s death, Truphena stopped writing letters to the trenches. Oscar understood.

In between dredging up the earth, the men asked each other what the trenches were for. They were wider and more extensive than those for a dam. Deeper and downwards than those of a gravesite. The trench was long and propagated around Kweke like a manmade snake shelter. When it was time to go home, the villagers had questions that the diggers did not have answers to. Since the pale man settled in, mystery beset in Kweke. Many men died in the trenches because of the tough conditions: falling rocks, exhaustion and dehydration. The white foreman commanded the men to bury the dead by the gully. The men tried to protest but were damned by the white soldiers who manned the offices with unforgiving beatings and withdrawn breaks. It was concluded that all the curses that preceded that day were justified and well-deserved. 

The people shall find a new respect for the village gravedigger. There are corpses everywhere. Their garments are dancers to the wind. The grass grows no more where blood has impregnated the earth. Vultures and wild dogs loiter the burial site as Oscar does his best to dig fast. His hands are stained, eyes wide filled with tears, crowned with a perpetual frown on his dry lips. One by one he dumps bodies in a shallow barrow. Having to work fast, he broke the gravedigger’s protocol and stacked bodies in one barrow before the bodies decomposed under the charring sun.

Men, women and children of Kweke have passed on since a strange skin disease rampaged the  village. The elders believe that when the pale men conducted a mandatory immunisation campaign in Kweke, the death toll drastically increased. When the trench-workers arrived home, a pale doctor, two nurses and a police officer knocked on the doors of each villager. Questions were left unanswered when the nurses administered a yellow pill to every adult in the homestead. Those who protested against taking the pill faced the officer’s baton. Eventually, all villagers ingested the pill with or without force. Those who dared to pass up the pill compared baton marks at work the next day.

Cry, eat and go. 

Eat and go. 

Go.

One by one, the villagers of Kweke were swept away into the hills beyond their village, hulls of their former selves. Was the yellow pill the cause of the recondite disease? Was the white man the grim reaper? It sure seemed so as the villagers paid their final respects to their loved ones in the gravesite more populated than the village itself.

The trench around the village was completed with barely any workers to its duty roster. As soon as the men had completed their final shift, they were assembled in the village square for an announcement. As they left the trenches, a dozen lorries driven my pale drivers drove towards the gully.

Never since the pale man arrived in Kweke had they heard directly from the pale chief. Kweke was the only village in the northern side of the valley without a clear leadership hierarchy. The father was the head of the home and that worked out well for decades. Until the pale man arrived, the villagers of Kweke had never felt the impact of government. Worse for Kweke, this was a government that they did not choose or put in place.

“Villagers of Kweke,” the voice of a pale men roared out of a megaphone, “I, Colonel James Winthrop, am your new mayor!” The pale soldiers on his side thunderously clapped in unison as if a jerk reaction. Oscar was unpleased. The words that followed the Mayor’s speech were a long caterwaul in his ears. They took away his dream, his father, his mother’s utterance and now his village.

“None of you is allowed past this village!”, commanded the Mayor. 

“If any villager tries to escape, they will be consumed alive in the trenches.”

Their freedom of movement was controlled and monitored. After the speech, the villagers with faces blanched into dullness were required to queue and acquire numbered tags with their designated occupations. That day marked the invasion and indisposed surrender of Kweke into the hands of the pale men. Having lost many of their parents and elders, Kweke was a port in a storm of juvenility and oblivious youth. All they know was impulsive obedience. It was Oscar’s turn in the queue. His first personal encounter with a pale man was dismissive. To his chagrin, his new identity was a disenchanting number: 1957. His new occupation: gravedigger.

The Mayor has a plan. More pale folk have settled in Kweke and are visibly thriving off the rich land and free labour afforded to them. According to the assumptions of the villagers, he plans to evacuate Kweke of the remaining indigenous people and build one of those cities their fathers visited in their journeys past the hills. The youth do just as they are told. The consequences seem greater than a revolution. Twisting his mouth is disgust, Oscar boards the lorry that takes him to his new workplace far into the hills. The lorry was their main source of transport to work. This is his only chance to engage with any live being before he is dropped at the cemetery. He takes advantage.

Pindo leans in to make banter with Oscar as the lorry bumps past the rough roads past Kweke.

“How is it burying our dead,” he says, earnestly with concern. “You know they chose you for a reason?”

Oscar feels his head sink into his neck. His throat burns in potent contempt which he summarises by launching a blob of saliva onto the foot of a disinterested preoccupied man.

“The people shall find a new respect for the gravedigger,” Oscar said slowly. “Their lives are endorsed in my cold dirty rough palms. If they chose me for this, I chose them for carrion.”

Pindo eyes turned soft.

From the times past, the people of Kweke buried only their own. Oscar lives this narrative for a living. As he digs graves of people he once knew, touched, talked to, he acted like he had no ears, keeping his fingers locked like a convulsion around his hoe. Though his elders frowned upon having any bad thoughts for the living, Oscar wished to feed the bodies of the pale men to the prowling vultures at the gravesite. He even called upon the bad fortune that would fall upon him as a consequences of his thoughts. Maybe, irrevocably, the gods may side with him.

Oscar wants to rise and and save the people in their hour of need. His mind is roving wondering whether it is too late to save a Kweke. What has he done except consign to the grave a past that he wishes to breathe again. He starts wishing that he would learn all the wisdom, secrets and fallbacks of the white man - without treading on the heels of their iniquity. He wants an opportunity to express his mind but his active audience is lifeless. As the lorry approaches the hills at the end of his shift, Oscar limps on into the dusty sundown, descending the poignant road away from the gravesite. He claps his hands as dust folded into his palm cracks. Returning to the road, he looked back. Wishing only that the answers to the questions raised at the top of the hills dwell at their foot.

He paces back. He wrenches back with his heart full of contempt and wonder and ran up the hill. A few metres way before the pale driver threatens to live Oscar behind, he reaches the top and pulls away his hand, tipping away his thumb into the wind.

“Father, may your soul awake just to make my convictions clear,” he said, his voice weighed,

“If you wish that there are actions I need to take to stand against this vile pilferer, show me a sign.”

Oscar has a patient will. He knows that the dead need some time to regulate. He knows how brisk the smell of decompositions is deliberately sluggish. He waits. He waits. Still he waits. The lorry roared at the foot of the hill awaiting Oscar to advance into the back. Not only did he get a sign, but a relentless ponderous wind suddenly encroached the hill and the regions around. Oscar has never been this ecstatic to feel the wind on his dark-brown parched skin. His father hears him. His slain elders are attentive to his claim. 

The wind is not gentle, meteorically unbuttoning the rails covering the boot of the lorry. Oscar sees his fellow men get out of the lorry and run frantically towards the hill. The pale driver is shouting, trying to get out of his seat - the door is unreservedly shut. It cannot open. Oscar sees this in real time.