“We haven’t offended him, have we?” I asked Josef anxiously.
“Not at all,” he assured me. “It’s quite customary that he arrange his daughters’ marriages and that he be paid a large dowry for them.”
“Well—umm-—this isn’t exactly a marriage.”
“Perhaps not by your standards.” Josef shrugged. “But that’s a fine distinction, a Western world distinction. He doesn’t require a marriage license for his daughter. Nor does he care that she will be one of many in the service of the Sheikh.”
“Then what is bothering him?”
“I suspect he’s mulling over the matter of intermarriage. Pygmies are a proud people, and traditionally they like their women to couple only with other Pygmies. This is especially true in the case of a Pygmy girl of royal blood.”
At this point the Chief once again spoke. He talked slowly and earnestly, pausing frequently so that Josef might translate for me. His honesty was refreshing.
He had several daughters, he said, all beautiful and of the blood royal. All had the agreeable temperaments so desirable in a female—all but one. This one, the eldest, was the only one he was willing to part with. The reason, he stated frankly, was that she had become a great burden and trouble to himself and to the tribe.
“What sort of trouble?” I was leery.
It seems the Pygmy princess in question, Aleka, the Chief s daughter, had been taken to England by a white missionary while she was in her teens. Here she had been educated for several years and then, by her own choice, had returned to her people. With her she had brought a Ph.D. in psychology from Oxford! I couldn’t understand the Chief’s words when he told Josef this, but I didn’t miss the emotional tone of what he was saying. It was a combination of pride and rue.
“Do you understand what a Napoleonic complex is?” the Chief asked me through Josef.
I said I did.
“She accuses all the men of our tribe, particularly me, her father, the Chief, of having this because of our size,” the Chief sighed.
“A little knowledge . . .” I shrugged.
“Not a little. A lot. We are happy with our customs and traditions, and now she comes back and tells us we’re all neurotic, that she must express hostility to me, her father, the Chief, because she’s working through her Electra complex. And she encourages all the children to be disrespectful to their parents; she says it is necessary to their growth. She convinced one young man that his fear of the black inamba was nothing but a Laocoon complex, and he perished of snakebite. The entire tribe has been in a turmoil since she came back from England. What sort of land is it, anyway? The Western world must live in constant fear of its young people!”
“Tell him that’s absolutely correct,” I told Josef. “Tell him he’s fortunate she hasn’t organized a local chapter of SDS31 . Tell him that nevertheless I accept his offer and will be glad to take his daughter off his hands.”
After a bit more palaver back and forth, Aleka was summoned. Shrink Diahann Carroll32 down to just under four feet tall, and that was Aleka. With the honey-brown skin typical of the Negrillo, lighter in color than most full-size Africans, a thirty-four inch bosom that stood out from her tiny figure like twin missiles dwarfing their launching pad, the face of a mischievous Mona Lisa, Aleka was a pint-sized package of vivacious pulchritude. Despite the childlike proportions of her body, she was all woman in her curves, her demeanor, and her personality. She wore the colorful one-piece straight-line frock affected by the women of her tribe. Large golden earrings dangled from her earlobes. Horn-rimmed glasses that magnified her large brown eyes were the only jarring note in the overall picture.
Aleka spoke English perfectly. I expected her to give us trouble when the situation was explained to her, but she didn’t. “The psychological manifestations of a harem situation sound most intriguing,” she opined. “I’m sure I shall garner information for a most interesting paper which will further my reputation among my colleagues in Gestalt psychology.”
The Chief breathed a sigh of relief. Like myself, he’d expected his daughter to create obstacles. Her passive acceptance was a relief. However, as it turned out, it wasn’t quite that easy.
I’d forgotten about the Russians. Now they saw to it that they were remembered. While we were all busy finalizing the arrangements, they quietly strolled into the Pygmy village-—nodding and smiling to the inhabitants who nodded and smiled back-entered the Chiefs hut, pointed guns at the lot of us, and took Aleka prisoner. They were about halfway across the village compound, well on their way to escape with her, when the bombs started to fall on the village.
The bombs were being dropped by mercenary pilots flying planes leased by the Nigerian government. The reason they were being dropped was that a Biafran artillery unit had evidently dug in somewhere in the immediate vicinity. We became aware of that when they started firing shells over the village. The artillery fire rousted out a company of Nigerian infantry who had evidently been encamped on the other side of the village. Also, inadvertently, either the bombs or the shells -- I never did determine for sure which it was—-had landed in the midst of a native hunting party. Later we would learn that they were cannibals. Now, the hunter-warriors came smack up against the Nigerian infantry in the Pygmy village and the battle was joined.
Everything clear?
Well, not to me!
Crouching in the Chief’s hut, all I could see from the entrance was a fantastic release of hostilities that seemed to have neither rhyme nor reason. The planes were sweeping in over the village and dropping their bombs and strafing indiscriminately. Most of the shells passed overhead, but occasionally one fell short and exploded among the huts. The Nigerian infantry, in uniform, had formed an old-fashioned British square and were firing their rifles in unison, shooting down Pygmies, cannibals, and anybody else who got in their way. The cannibals were charging them with spears from one side. The Pygmies were sniping at them with poison darts from blowguns.
The party of Russians, now with Aleka in tow, had been trapped in the middle of all this. Now they were in a hut where they had set up a machinegun. They strafed Pygmies bent on rescuing their Princess, cannibals throwing spears at anything that moved, retreating Nigerian infantrymen, and the Chief’s hut in which my party was seeking refuge. Fortunately their bullets fell just short of the hut.
Beside me, as I observed the Russians, Josef Dorembi was pumping his rifle at the retreating square of Nigerian infantry. Of all of us, he seemed the only one with a clear idea of who the enemy was. He was an Ibo, and the Nigerians had been slaughtering his people; that was enough for him. He kept up a constant fire which did at least as much to decimate the Nigerian ranks as the spears of the cannibals, the darts of the Pygmies, or the machinegun of the Russians.
“There’s altogether too much violence in the world today!” The Chief’s words were translated for me by Josef as he continued killing Nigerians.
I could only nod agreement.
It seemed to go on for hours. Finally, though, the planes flew away and the Biafran artillery stopped its barrage. The few Nigerian troops left fled into the jungle. The Pygmies and the cannibal tribe seemed to have reached an unspoken—if somewhat wary—truce. They kept their distance from each other, spears and blowguns at the ready, but refrained from battling. Only the Russian machinegun occasionally shattered the dusk with a volley aimed at anyone who came too close to their haven.
It was getting darker now. I figured that under cover of night the Russians would probably try to slip away with my Pygmy princess in tow. I discussed this possibility with Josef and the Chief.