The Sleeping Baobab Tree

In
a side pocket of my rucksack I have a small red notebook. It’s where we (i.e. Madillo my twin sister, Fred our neighbour and me, of course) note down what happens at school. Or more specifically what happens in Sister Leonisa’s class. She’s our religion teacher. There are three columns on each page:
GOD, STORY, WORK.
It’s different from my small black notebook, where I write down the things that I think about. That belongs to just me.

In the
GOD
column we fill in how often Sister mentions God, and most days we write “zero”. Sister Leonisa says that talking about God all the time can get boring.

In the
STORY
column we put a tick if she tells us a story and a sad face if she doesn’t. Well, Madillo puts a sad face, I just put an X. I’m not big on sad or smiley faces.

Most of that column is ticked.

The
WORK
column is the emptiest – if we ever get to do any work in her class she never takes it in anyway, so it doesn’t really count.

I decided that we should start the book because I like keeping records of things. You never know when you might need something as evidence. I’d hate to be called as a witness before a judge and have to look down in an embarrassed kind of way and say, “Sorry, Your Honour, I can’t remember anything.”

Madillo says it’s not strictly necessary, because Sister Leonisa hasn’t committed a crime so we don’t need evidence. “Not yet,” I tell her. “There’s plenty of time.”

As soon as Sister walked into the classroom today I knew we could tick the
STORY
column, leave the
WORK
one blank and put a big zero underneath
GOD.
She said just two words as she stepped through the door: “Zebras down!”

The Zebras are the blinds she made from old sheets. She said we could use them because the rest of the nuns had outgrown them.

As if an adult can outgrow a sheet.

I asked Sister how this was possible and she said, “There are many things you don’t know about nuns, Bul-Boo.” Which is no kind of answer at all. What’s not to know about nuns? That they grow mysteriously in the night and then reshape themselves back to normal size in the morning?

Sister Leonisa never says, “I don’t know.” She hates admitting to not knowing something, so instead she makes up answers.

Madillo (who also likes having an answer for everything) says it must be because the nuns eat so much that they are all getting fat, but one look at Sister Leonisa would tell you that’s not true. She looks just like one of the matchstick drawings she does on the blackboard.

Anyway, the blinds are called Zebras because Sister got us to paint black stripes on them before she hung them up. She said the sun would be hurt if we shut it out completely – that’s why we left the strips of white. She talks about things like the sun as if they have feelings.

In Sister’s world, the sun is a woman. An angry woman if you put up blinds to shut her out. So we have stripy ones which let in half the light and don’t work very well if we are watching a DVD but do work for stories.

So we rolled them down.

Once they were down she started.

“Ng’ombe Ilede … Ng’ombe Ilede,” she said, her voice deep and rumbling. “The Place of the Sleeping Cow. The place of death.”

That’s another category I should have put into the notebook:
STORIES THAT HAVE DEATH IN THEM.
That column would be ticked all the way down. We never tell Mum and Dad her stories any more, because they say she’s morbid. They may be right but we’re used to her. I think if she told us a story about pink fairies we’d all leave the room.

“Ng’ombe Ilede is a town crawling with ghosts,” Sister said, making crawling movements with her hands. “They sit up in the trees, swim in the warm waters of the Kariba Dam, wait behind old walls. They are everywhere, and they’re watching.”

There is something about the way Sister Leonisa speaks that makes you believe what she’s telling you, even if you don’t want to, and even if you know that nearly all of it is exaggerated.

“One of these ghosts is called Bukoko,” she continued. “Do you know how she got that name?”

We all shook our heads. By now we know that the only person Sister wants an answer from is herself.

“Because that’s what you call a child whose mother drinks too much beer when she’s pregnant. Poor little child, sitting there in her mother’s stomach, drinking gallons of beer, burping away from all the bubbles. When a baby burps in its mother’s stomach the air has nowhere to go, so the poor child gets squashed. This happened to Bukoko and by the time she came out she was tiny, a small beer-pickled baby. Bukoko the Little Tick Child is what they all called her, because her belly was full and round, like a tick after a good drink of cow’s blood.”

Along with death, Sister manages to add the gross factor to every story she tells. I sometimes think that if she wanted to tell a story that wasn’t gross already she’d just add in a string of disgusting words at the end to satisfy herself.

I put my hand up. “I’ve never heard of a baby burping inside its mother’s stomach. I don’t think that’s scientifically proven.”

I saw Madillo scrunching up her face. She hates it when I use the phrase “scientifically proven”, especially in Sister’s class.

“Just because some of us have mothers and fathers who are doctors,” Sister said, “we think we know everything. But we don’t. There are some things that doctors and scientists will never know because they close their minds to them. Now, if I can carry on?

“Poor little Tick grew only one centimetre each year. She grew so slowly that her mother despaired of her. Nothing would work. Every morning after milking the cow her mother would set aside the cream off the top of the milk especially for Bukoko so that she could grow up into a big strong woman.”

Sister rolled her eyes. “Even a man whose eyes had been gouged out by an eagle could have seen that this was never going to happen. But Bukoko was a happy child, her round belly was filled with creamy milk and her little legs were strong. They were able to carry her far and wide, and during the day when her mother wasn’t looking she would run off into the nearby forest to play with the Little People.”

Surely Sister Leonisa was muddled about this. She’s always adding in bits of other stories. Everyone knows that the Little People are from Ireland, not Zambia. Unless there are some who migrated here. Like the Red Legs in Jamaica. Mum told us once that Oliver Cromwell (who seemed to spend his time either killing people, burning down their houses or turning them into slaves) sent some Irish people to Barbados (yup, as slaves) and their descendants stayed there. They became known as Red Legs because they get burnt by the sun, which the Barbadians don’t. I think that must be true, because Mum doesn’t like the sun, and if by accident she sits in it for too long her legs go red. Anyway, to give Sister the benefit of the doubt, maybe Oliver Cromwell enslaved the Little People from Ireland and sent them all to Zambia. But I’m seriously doubtful.

“Every day Bukoko played happily with her little friends, until one day,” Sister lowered her voice to a ghostly whisper, “one day, the day of her thirteenth birthday, she went into the forest and didn’t come back. All the villagers were helpless, weeping and wailing about the loss of their little tick girl. Weeping and wailing never did anyone any good at all. You remember that, girls and boys,” Sister added. “Especially if it’s fake. Then all it is is a lot of irritating noise.

“Night fell and the darkness crept around the houses in the village. Then the moon rose, bright and full in the sky, and the weepers and wailers went to bed, leaving the poor mother alone outside, calling and calling to her daughter. No sign of Bukoko. But, as midnight struck, the mother heard a little voice she recognized, ‘Mama! Mama!’ It was her child, Bukoko. But where was the voice coming from?”

Sister looked at us and Madillo, as usual, forgot she wasn’t supposed to answer.

“From the forest?” she said.

Sister shook her head. “No, Madillo, how do you think the little tick child could climb a tree on her tiny legs?”

Which was a bit unfair as Madillo hadn’t actually said in a
tree
in the forest. But Sister didn’t give her a chance to reply.

“The voice came from the sky. The mother looked up and, by the light of the moon, she saw Bukoko sitting cross legged on a small soft cloud.

“‘Come down, my child,’ she squawked. ‘Right this minute. We are looking for you.’

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