WHEN DROUGHT STRUCK

It did not rain. We were at the mercy of nature. Each day we woke up we gazed at the sky for a long time hoping that clouds would rent it. We longed for its special breeze, that breeze that normally heralds the coming of the rain and we reminisced its glad tidings. Each night we count the number of the stars in the sky, hoping that each successive night would have a lesser number of stars than the previous night. So, we continued to examine the sky looking for any clue that the clouds might gather and then pour some rain for us. No luck.

We slept each night while gazing at the sky. And we looked up to the sky, first thing when we woke up, not to pray, but to look for signs that the day would be better than the previous day. It took a long time before we were able to reconcile with the reality that drought had indeed struck us. It was already late, but we could still do something. Our young agro experts advised that we could irrigate our farms or manually wet the plants. Our old plants were withering and the new others were not even growing. To make matters worse, we had no alternative water supply. Our well and stream had dried as they normally did at this season when we collected rain water. This season of the year, rain is our only source of water and it usually poured in abundance. It has never, before now, disappointed us and the oldest amongst us told the tales of how their generation had solely relied on it without ever thinking of a possibility of its refusal to release its water. Well, it happened that rain refused to cooperate with our village and we were badly stranded. Those that suggested irrigation knew that their suggestion was out of tune. Also, those who advised that we should sprinkle water on the plants simply failed to understand that there was no spare water to splash on the plants. Our children first, then our livestock. These are moving creatures that collapse on duty for not having enough water to drink. The little water we had was for the living creatures that we could see moving up and down.

A section of our people stated that the gods were angry and that we should appease them. Some blamed the king and reasoned that he might not truly belong to the clan that produced the king, or that it might not be the turn of his clan to produce the king. Several permutations and excuses trailed the unfortunate drought and then, it got worse and worse. Certainly, the enemies of the king took advantage of the growing unhappiness in the land to simulate a revolt against the king. But they were seriously warned about the consequence of their not-well-thought-out plans. First, if the king was able to consolidate his reign, the rebels would, by the tradition of our land, be put to death and their bodies would be dumped in the forest as a cleansing of our land from the traitors. Secondly, even if they succeeded there would be a curse of the gods on them for sacking their deputy in a manner that was strange to our custom. Thirdly, the anger of the gods would bring about a more bitter experience than the one we were currently battling.

But the hunger and the thirst and the unhappiness continued to grow. In the midst of this, our neighbouring villages strayed into our farmlands with their livestock and pounced on the little green plants that managed to grow on our land. When we resisted their invasion they fought us hard and subdued us. We were only able to maintain our status, in part, because we still had a brave youth who were already disenchanted about life and were ready to die for their land. With all these, the calls for appeasing the gods became bigger and louder that it already became a nuisance to the ears. It became so irritating that even the many sections calling for appeasement of the gods did not agree amongst themselves on which of the gods needed to be appeased: is it the one for rain? Or the one for earth? Or the one for war? Or the one for health? We were all confused, no doubt. We all knew what the problems were, we only did not know the best solution that addresses them all. At the same time, we did not even know which of the problems we should give priority to: is it food? Water? Security? Health? And the problems hit different section of our village differently. But they all had the problems.

Our king managed to obtain food concession from some other villages with whom we had an alliance. We shared a very long historical ties with some of these other villages and they took pity on us. They agreed to supply us with water, food and some herbs to attend to our health issues. We thanked them. They offered to help us fight our enemies too, but we declined. We assured them that we could secure our lands without any external help. We also promised that we would compensate them with some of our produce when they began to grow after we would have used the water they supplied us to wet the plants. This provided us with a temporary relief and our hope was rekindled. We set our youths back to work: of course, under the guidance of our elders. We worked hard and we saw the progress we were making. Our land was becoming green again.

Then, rain season went by and the well and the stream began producing their water again. Then, a new spell fell upon us. Our women had become accustomed to the water we continued to receive from the neighbouring villages that they no longer knew the way to the stream. The younger generation of our girls were not taught how to wrap their clothes to support the water pot they should place on their head on their way home from the stream. To them, it looked like a fairy tale. They could not see why it should be part of their chores to wake up in the morning and head towards the stream for the early-morning clean water. They did not understand how to fetch water from the well for their domestic use. We have all become so accustomed to the water we received from the outside that we did not even understand why we should continue to fetch the water in our own village. Our king and his cabinet members always admonished us about the importance of fetching water from the well and the stream in order to return our farms to self-sufficiency. But the admonitions were never taken seriously because the king’s household and farms never looked at where the stream was, nor did they draw any water from the well, even though both the well and the stream were close to the king’s palace. The king simply felt he deserved the water from the outside, notwithstanding its implication but the rest of us should revive the water from within in order to save our farm produce from being shared with our kind neighbours. So, we continued to grow in population and we continued to import water for our domestic use. In return, we used to share our farm produce with our kind neighbours.

So, we got a population boom that our local food produce could no longer serve our domestic needs. Yet, we were determined not to become ungrateful to our kind neighbours who came to our rescue at the time of death. Well, it now goes beyond coming to our rescue. It is now our contract that they continued to supply us with water in exchange for some of our farm produce. And to make it worse, their share on our farm produce is a first-line charge. This means, whatever we were able to produce in any harvesting period, the share to our kind neighbours should not decline by a reason of a low harvest. Their share is fixed and it is for us to manage whatever it is that was left. We ran into deficit and we began to default.

We were still defaulting. It is inevitable that we would default because we had to attend to many urgent domestic issues ranging from food to health. When our children were growing in malnutrition and our elders were dying in droves for lack of adequate healthcare, our neighbours understood that it was because of shortage of our farm produce which we had to share with them. They knew we were short of food plants and herbs. Again, they offered to help us. They renegotiated their agreement with us and proposed to adjust their quantity of water supply for a reduction of the farm produce we gave to them. Our negotiators objected and stated that the water they currently supplied us was not even enough, due to our population boom. Instead, we wanted more water for less share of our farm produce. Our kind neighbours argued that this was an unfair proposal and they rejected it too. So, we were on a deadlock and our negotiators returned home. For barely 24-hours, our palace ran out of water. The king sent a different delegation to the neighbouring village for a separate tiny water contract that would supply only the palace. Our neighbouring village was smart to realise that the palace was in dire need of water and knew that signing an exclusivist deal with the palace would reduce what they used to receive from our farm produce, so they insisted that they would not sign the deal. The palace had to bring with it the entire village to the deal. Our king had no choice and he signed the deal. We now got less water in exchange for a less farm produce. The less water we got reduced significantly our farm produce leaving no share for an outsider. Yet, we had to give the share to our contracting neighbor. We were in a political and economic mess.

The suffering forced us to look inwards. We wanted to go back to our well and stream. We were afraid they had dried up in anger when we did not fetch from them. Indeed, some men of gods had prophesied that the well and the stream would dry up because the gods would be angry if we neglected their bounties on us while we begged outsiders for water. Lo! They had not dried up. Those men of gods were notorious for such prophecies of doom. They were those who predicted that we would not survive the drought period. They also predicted that there would be a bloody overthrow of our king for his refusal to listen to them to appease the gods. None of these prophecies came to pass. Yet, some of their hypnotized followers trusted them and they still had enormous influence on our people. Once in a while, their prediction coincided with what eventually happened, but in general they had not been helpful with their guess works. So, we eventually went back to our stream and well and they had not dried up. The men of gods reminded us that it was their secret sacrifices that calmed the gods. We thanked them for that: we knew they would always want to be relevant in the scheme of things.

As we began to deal with our water, a fierce campaign came from our supposedly friendly neighbours who had helped us in the past. They sent town criers through our village and the neighbouring villages that they should warn us to be careful with our waters because they were contaminated and had become so poisonous that they were not even good for animals. Truly, the waters were smelling and indeed looked dirty. But that was because of long abandonment and neglect. All we should have done would have been to steer them and they would become clean again. But our young girls did not understand this. These waters looked strangely different from the clean waters they had grown to know. They thought that water should always be clean and that if the surface of the water was unclean, then it would affect the entire body of the water. Our king and the palace men swiftly stopped the town criers, though, the deed had been done! It had already achieved the objective of creating a distrust and confusion among our people and their king. What was more, our people did not know whether the king truly believed that the well and the stream were indeed good as they were not sure that the king ever fetched from the well nor from the stream despite that both were very close to the palace.

We were still trying to recover from this and the other issues when we learnt that our king had died. It was a taboo to announce the death of a king recklessly lest we invited the wrath of the gods who would always like to be deified and would not want the announcement of the death of their deputy to drag them into disrepute or earn them a disrespect. So, we had to be careful with the manner in which we announced the death of the deputy of the gods. We had to hire the eldest amongst us who conducted the rites and then, announced the departure of our king to the great beyond. Our people did not know whether to be happy or be sad. One thing was clear, the king was patriotic. But another thing was clear too, he was ignorantly self-centered.

The stool should not be left in a vacuum. We had to replace him as soon as possible. We were looking for some qualified candidates that should be able to address many of our challenges, from amongst the eligible princes. Do we know what these challenges were? Yes. Do we know what qualities our next king should have? Yes. But then, how do we identify the qualities? Another problem began.

The men of gods suddenly came again. They wanted relevance by all means and they argued that the next king should be one who should know how to appease their gods. To them, not knowing how to appease their gods was a flat rejection of any candidate. Now, it happened that the princes were from different clans with different deities, each clan promoting its own deities. Soon, each clan began to promote its own candidate along with its own deities, claiming that with their deity supporting the new king, nothing would go wrong again. Some of us began to wonder whether the late king had no deities at all. Besides, we began to question whether a king was no longer supposed to be a deputy to all the deities of the land. We could not understand the reason for promoting a deity over the other. The men of gods too did not understand. But they understood one thing: that they were as self-centered as the late king. They wanted the new king, at all cost, to come from one of their own in order to satisfy their ego and expand their safe. One thing was also clear here, the men of gods were never patriotic although they claim that they had the authority of the gods of the land.

We were still calculating who would be the best candidate to succeed our late king and face our challenges heads-on when the clock ticked to remind us that the next raining season would soon be here and it might be a drought again!