The old fortune teller
My father had a geologist friend who knew my interest in crystals and attractive colored mineral pieces. I was going to go on a day trip up the bush with an old water fortune teller to locate a new mine. My father asked me if I could go with him. I did not like the geologist, I felt that he considered me a burden, but I wanted to go into the bush. I wanted to see wild animals and find wonderful crystals. Most of all, he wanted to see a hyena. The beginning of the trip was exciting, it was my kind of bush, thick woods and open vleis (seeps), but the dense forest soon faded away. Village charcoal burners had cut down the forests to produce charcoal and sell it across the border in the Congo. On the way, I was sitting up straight, looking for wildlife, but I didn’t see anything. The area had been hunted long before. No crystals were found either, and the geologist said sarcastically: “Elephants and crystals don’t grow on trees, son, this bush is dead anyway.”
Only a prude like you would say something like that, I thought. He had learned the word prudish from a Somerset Maugham story about an arrogant manager of a rubber plantation in Malaya. I liked both its sound and its meaning. I could name a few prudes in Luanshya. The geologist was added to my list of prudes. The day was tedious and uneventful. On the way back he was tired. We had been away for nine hours. I flopped back in my seat about to drag my reflections into a funk hole; They told me he was very good at it. The old water fortune teller, an Afrikaner who had grown up in the Karoo desert, the driest part of South Africa, must have felt my sadness because he started telling me stories.
He told me that he could find water with two copper rods, but that he could also guess with two green sticks. The geologist, who was actually doing the groundwork for a modern hydrological study, respected the water fortune teller and his methods. They often return interesting results and had attracted you “out of interest,” he said.
The fortune teller went on to tell me that contrary to what you see and think you know, Africa does not always offer what you expected. Even if you had prior knowledge of what should happen, it may not happen. He said he used this way of thinking when he was guessing to get water. Groundwater was never a given: Africa had many dry rivers both above and below ground. Then he fell into a worried silence as he fumbled for his tobacco in a duffel bag under his seat. What was this wrinkled old man with tobacco stains on his teeth and fingers telling me? I figured it was going to be interesting. Then he looked at me and cleared his tarry throat; it was as if he was about to give a wedding speech. His pupils gleamed like black diamonds in the wrinkled hollows of his eye sockets as my curiosity got the best of me.
Out of earshot of the prude driving his noisy Land Rover, the soothsayer told me that in Africa, physical things could appear suddenly and then disappear just as quickly. “But they didn’t do anything of the sort,” he said with a confident snort. “ It was the way we looked at them that made these weird things happen. Everything had an energy of its own that could never be lost; it just altered its shape in time and space. ” Nodding in brooding self-agreement, then he was quiet for a long time. “The energies are like hyenas,” he finally uttered. Wow! Now it really was all ears. He really wished he had a grandfather like him. He continued with slow, forceful words: “An area could not have hyenas; then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, one would appear.” If someone in a remote village had been cursed; That night, without a single pug mark on the sandy ground of the village clearing, a hyena would appear on his doorstep, even though hyenas had not been seen or heard of in the area for a long time. “This was because the hyena had always been there,” he said with a smug air of all-weather confidence.
True to form, the prude seemed oblivious to our important conversation, his mind stubbornly fixed on the bumpy road that was tearing his vehicle apart. Once again, he was sitting upright searching for hyenas in what was left of the once thick Miombo woods as the old fortune teller spoke. His ears were pricked, his eyes were open, and his skin was prickly; my bony little butt barely indented on the green backseat tarp. Out there, in the fading forest light, he was hypersensitive to everything real and imaginary. He knew that hyenas were tribal omens of very important things in Africa, which is why the Nyau and Makishi only used effigies of hyenas in their most serious rituals. There was no logical reason why a hyena should not reappear in the ‘dead’ brush, in the immediate here and now of our journey home in the prude’s rattlesnake carriage.
The soothsayer continued: ‘Hyenas are a mystery to their fellow beasts. They can expel an aardvark, aardvark, or even a grumpy honey badger from their burrow in an anthill, command it, and with the connivance of termites; do the strangest things. Now the hair on the back of her neck was upright and alert! My mind went wild, throwing my thoughts all over the back seat and floor of the vehicle as I made my way down that remote dirt road. The light was fading fast and Mr ‘Cool’ the geologist put his foot on the accelerator of his ‘Landy’. The fortune teller fell into another of his tobacco-chewing silences and I began to brood over things; it took me the time it took for him to suck on the nicotine: spitting out used tobacco and brushing the soaked shreds from his chapped lips. Whatever it was that slipped through his experienced mind was worth waiting for.
“Lions, in particular,” he said, “despise hyenas, they will hunt and kill them, sometimes killing cruel hyenas in the den to curb the number of hyenas in their territory.” When chased by a lion, he explained, a hyena would disappear into a burrow in an anthill and never come out. The lion would give a blood-curdling howl of frustrated annoyance, but no matter how long a lion waited; even if a pride of lions took turns to be on guard for a month, the hyena would never come out, this was because the hyena was no longer there. “When a hyena takes over a burrow in an anthill,” he said, “its intention is for its mind and body to be melted by a sea of termites.” This was very different from a dead animal eaten by fire ants. It was the transformation of the hyena into an ethereal life force that parasitically attached itself to all members of the Termite Queendom. After a strange gulp of breath, he explained more; termite mind is a collective mind, it thinks as a single mind that spreads and shares its synaptic thought processes among queens throughout subterranean Africa. Because the hyena had craftily embedded its spirit in this infinite, termitic mind, its “everywhere” and its consequent awareness of all happenings in the bushes had inevitably become its own due to its own wicked machinations. With the same voluntary intention, he would then merge his virtual spirit self outside the termite world and return to his physical reality: to resurface wherever he felt his real presence was necessary, or not, as in the case of the lion.
And with that, the old fortune teller returned to his tobacco pouch, leaving me to digest his astonishing words.
What could have been a tedious journey home flew by. The long edges of the evening shadows melted into a deep velvet of forest darkness; there to be seeded overnight with fine strands of wood smoke from the village’s charcoal burners along the road. Soon we would be back in Luanshya with its cheerful electric light windows and warm asphalt roads. Once home, I asked my father to offer the old fortune teller a beer and take him home, which he graciously accepted; luckily the prude was in a hurry to come back and write his report. For me it was an inadvertent quick bath with Dettol, a ready-made fish finger sandwich and ketchup, and the bed. I didn’t really object.
Hyenas danced cunningly on the silver screen of my fading consciousness. I knew they had been there in the bush, they were everywhere, even in my room, but you couldn’t really see each other.