In the jungle at the top of the great escarpment lived the secretive, mysterious Kyogas. They were slighter, darker. They were not farmers at all, only hunters and explorers, ranging widely through the forests to the north. Their weapons were those of men who need to kill at a distance or at a great height: the bow and arrow. They tipped their arrows with poison prepared by wise women who passed the secret down from generation to generation. Inevitably they began to climb down the great cliffs in the darkness to enjoy the easy, rewarding hunting of the N’Kuru cattle on the plain. They found the N’Kuru women pleasing and would sometimes steal them, too; but no N’Kuru woman was ever told the secret of the poison. If forced to trade, a pastime they tended to look down upon, the Kyogas would part grudgingly with ornaments made of bright copper. But they would never say where the yellow metal came from. For centuries, a lazy rivalry festered, erupting occasionally into warfare as the farmers and traders of the plain were roused by some mighty warlord to defend themselves against the savage, witch-driven hunters of the high jungle.
Such a warlord was the great Mwanga who ruled from the coastal village which was later to bear his name in the year when the first Arab trading dhow came nosing down the coast. The Arab traders had spent the better part of a century exploring the length of this coast, watch by watch, from Tunis. On the far side of the continent, in a world undreamed of by the N’Kuru or even by the most intrepid Kyoga explorer, the sons of Sinbad had struck out into the magic vastness of the Indian Ocean, borne upon the wings of the monsoon. Here there were only winds like the harmattan blowing up and down the coast, and the sea to the west was forbidding and tall. No one who had ventured out upon it had ever returned, so now the captains crept along, never out of sight of the land, camping ashore each night. The Arab traders came seeking rare wood, spices, ivory and slaves. The N’Kuru were glad to trade; it was a profession they had followed since the dawn of time and they were proud of their commercial abilities. They had traded long in all the goods of interest to the strange, light-skinned men. In all except one. The Arabs added to their education in a single, important regard. Even Mwanga himself had only considered killing his enemies; he had never thought to sell them.
But the Arab craft were small, suited only to the shallow coastal waters, and the way from Tangier was long. The Arabs never took many slaves, though the dark seed was sown. The villages, especially those along the coast, began to stockpile goods they knew the traders would want. Mwanga, a practical man, quickly understood that the strongest of his farmer subjects should be made into a warrior class whose task would be to fetch ivory, antlers, pelts and hides, and the fairest, most saleable of the sons and daughters made by the marauding Kyoga on the kidnapped N’Kuru girls.
The English captain John Smith came to the thriving village of Mawanga in the year Europeans called 1560 when the son of Mwanga’s son’s son was a very elderly king. The strange white creature in his boat as big as the great hut of the warriors wanted everything that the Arab traders did but in unimaginably greater quantities. Fortunately he was not too interested in the quality of the goods, and the N’Kuru soon understood — though they could hardly credit the fact — that the white skins were quite content to take even ugly little full-blooded Kyoga men and women.
During the next three centuries, Mawanga grew from a village to a trading port and to a town — almost a city. The English drove the Arabs out and built a stone fort to the seaward side of the village which was designed to protect the anchorage. The fort was a good idea but it was rarely adequately manned and the Arabs took it back with ease whenever they found the energy. As did the English, come to that. The relationship between the northern traders and the natives varied from co-operative peace to outright war. The fort was sacked and the garrison slaughtered on more than one occasion, but the stone walls remained and the traders came back again and again. Mwanga’s dynasty became dissolute and greedy. The white skins and the Arabs connived at its overthrow and replaced it with a series of their own chosen men. Peace came, and a kind of prosperity. Mwanga the great leader passed into shadowy legend. At last only the name remained as the name of the town itself.
A new breed of white skin arrived; men and a few women who were not content to stay on the coast but wished to explore and map and describe what they found. They followed the River Mau up to the great falls and beyond. Sometimes they found a N’Kuru spear, sometimes a Kyoga arrow. And, like the traders, they continued to come. As did the missionaries who set up their churches first and then their schools. They taught about a white-skinned god who loved the world so much that he allowed himself to be nailed to a tree to save it. The N’Kuru, exposed to this first, were far too proud to be influenced by a man who preferred to die rather than to kill. They liked the idea of nailing people to trees, however, and did it to several missionaries. But still they came. The Kyoga reacted differently to religion. Perhaps the missionaries were less arrogant with them, for they had seen what the N’Kuru had done to several of their martyred number and it was common knowledge that the hag-ridden devil worshippers in their jungles atop the mighty ridge were twenty times as deadly. In fact the Kyoga were intelligent and interested. The school did well, though the church never really took hold. And for once the natives seemed resistant to the diseases of civilisation while the missionaries contracted ailments without number which were usually fatal.
The relationship between the N’Kuru and the Kyoga remained the same as it had been before the pale-skinned Arabs and the white-skinned Europeans began to interfere but then, as the twentieth century began to loom, it worsened. And the reason was rubber.
In spite of the persistence of the English slave traders over the years, Mau never fell into the British sphere of influence. Instead it became an outcrop of those territories owned absolutely by the Emperor Leopold. He offered great tracts of the verdant country to his hangers-on at court, but none had the wish or the will to be farmers, even by proxy. One or two settlers arrived in long wagons pulled by oxen modelled on the successful design favoured by the Dutch further south. The N’Kuru wisely slaughtered them and blamed it on the Kyoga. And then, as it had been in the forests around the Congo, rubber was discovered in the jungle atop the escarpment where the Kyoga continued to live. Leopold’s men were quick to understand the contempt with which the N’Kuru viewed their smaller, darker neighbours, and so the rubber growers gave the tall ex-farmers guns, whips and, most importantly, heavy, sharp pangas, and they made them overseers.
This was the darkest hour in all the history of the Kyoga. Their jungle villages were overrun and their people placed in a new and savage bondage. Quotas were dictated in far Brussels by businessmen with no knowledge or understanding of how impossible it would be to fulfil them. Made arrogant by distance and ignorance, they demanded that their local representatives force their workers to greater efforts. The local men, deaf to the protests of the last, sickly missionaries, began to threaten the N’Kuru: if the local tribes were not up to the job, they would import outsiders who were — they had no end of experienced overseers on the black banks of the Congo. The N’Kuru and the Kyoga could work side by side in the jungle. Such threats spurred the N’Kuru to frenzies of cruelty — cruelty imported, like slavery, by the pale skins. For every man, woman and child of the Kyoga nation, a quota was set. At the end of each quota period, the white latex each had collected was weighed and measured. The first failure to meet the quota cost a finger. The second cost a hand. The third a foot. The fourth an eye. The fifth — and there were blessedly few — a testicle or a breast. The missionaries tried to help by searing closed the wounds and bringing the sufferers back to working fitness as quickly as they could. By the time a couple of million men were being slaughtered on the fields of Flanders, a similar number were being disfigured and destroyed in the anonymous western African jungles to supply the white-skin armies with the ton upon ton of rubber they needed to keep the killing going: men and women and children; arms and legs and eyes.