A man, from Europe it seemed, appeared in an African village riding an iron horse—a shiny, red motorcycle. He rode along a dry, dusty red gravel road. On either side of the road was nothing like the road itself. There were many bushes. The vegetation along the road was plush, green and interspersed with some freshly cut grass. Some banana and plantain trees emerged from scattered clearings along the road. Some others were fenced with palm branches within compound homes at other intervals. The rider settled down in the middle of the road kicking nothing but red dust in his wake. The branches of ferns that managed to escape several years of weeding and trimming seemed to have scattered from above the road, a prominent arched canopy over certain pockets, and they offered the casual visitor a gallant welcome to the village. The little shade cast by the leaning ferns were also, at necessary points along the road, where villagers, every now and then, chose to cross the road to other parts of the village.
The dusty red road was the artery through the village and served the same purpose along the way in many other villages that chose to develop some presence along major roads such as these in order to alleviate some of their logistical obstacles to modern transportation. Rows of mud houses, often with old and patchy cement plastering, unpainted, some roofed with thatch and others with iron sheets, usually standing not more than seven feet tall, dotted the landscape and were spread through the thick and thin of the brushes that demarcated one family home from the other. Around the yard, between the houses belonging to the same compound were clean, bare earth spaces that had taken several years of constant tidying, wetting and sweeping to compact the ground underneath making them perfect surfaces for carrying out household chores like cooking and weaving, and also making these surfaces suitable for the children to play.
The four-stroke engine of the motorcycle petered out as it ducked under the arched ferns into the village proper, and towards a little kid and a bigger brother, who stood by the road together, and who seemed hesitant to cross the road at first, but decided to wait out the passing of the motorcycle. Behind the pair, a large grassy gutter, with soil embankments on either side lining the entire stretch of the road. Such a site could only have been left behind by a private feeder-road contractor who had managed to scrape off the bushes off some areas of the land for a proper road construction, but who, assisted in tow by his government collaborators it would now seem, had absconded mid-project with the rest of the road funding to some European country. Such large open gutters, often weedy and without any proper sanitation or drainage, were common features of the villages that had funded and paid for many of their sons to be educated in Europe and America and who were expected to return to transform and industrialize their villages, yet had decided to live the rest of their newly-found European lives in little pockets of average wealth in large urban centers in Europe and America or in African neoliberal colonial governments.
The pair, the little child and the big brother, were the example of those left behind in the village who now spent both their time and their lives probably working the fields of the village with great effort for little gratitude, fishing the streams of the gutters to little effect and traipsing the dusty red roads of the country side in an entirely degraded manner than their ancestors had managed only some two hundred years ago, no matter the advent, everywhere else in the world, of the modern technologies of the twenty-first century. The pair, the little child and the big brother stood alone, along the village road and painted the picture of an ancient world once great but which was now made so naïve by its intransigent adherence to impractical philosophies like oral culture, and which now stood duped by the lip-service of its saints and the promises made to it by their wayward sons in central and federal governments, and which now stuck up like a sore thumb, swindled out of everything it once held dear by the imperial collaborators in Europe and America.
No wonder, the European rider on his shiny, red motorcycle—the iron horse of the twentieth century—swayed right, and inched closer and closer to the village pair who stood by the road securing their steps under the shady canopy of fern branches. The big brother took the side of the road to shield his little sibling from the on-coming, un-invited strange, iron-horse rider. His eyes and shoulders now squared with the incoming traffic. His surge of pent-up defense erected around his little sibling exposed his nervousness. His apprehension revealed the threat he perceived of a European man on a loud, throttling iron-horse, making a beeline towards them. The big brother turned himself and his little sibling outside in, and around in a lightning-fast about-turn as the iron-horse finally reached them. The little sibling seemed to be wearing a checkered, red dress—the kind of dress on which the lose buttons seldom held together what they were meant to fasten, but which villagers could only afford out of the village seamstress’ office for a little girl. Out across from the rider’s motorcycle, over the flat-screen cell phone fixed to the handle-bars of the bike, one could not tell if the little sibling was actually a girl. It was not uncommon for poor village parents to put on a child whatever clothing and whatever dressing–for boys or girls—was available.
The cell phone revealed the kind of stranger the rider was. It was not uncommon to find strangers without proper authorization use cell phones as navigation instruments to travel through African villages in V8 SUVs and BMW motorcycles often under the cover of tourism or under the guise of bringing to the African village the spoils of European civilization—the good-old, well-intentioned NGO-outreach, which invariably remained the ruse for spreading western liberal domination right through the village. What’s more, the rider having realized that he could not count on the naiveté of the big brother quickly reached into a saddle and brandished from out of his bosom a clear-plastic wrapped, green toffee in his right hand. While still on his bike, he called out the little girl for it. The little girl, some two and half feet tall and only about a couple of years young, was struggling to keep pace with her much bigger brother as they attempted to run over the embankment along the dusty red road, through the grassy gutter and up over the other embankment to reach their mud house and escape becoming another statistic. As the rider called out the little girl, she begun to stall in her stride. At one point, having reached the ditch, inside the gutter, she stopped, turned around and cat walked towards the rider, reaching back over the hill she had overcome in her flight and fright.
The leather-gloved hand of the rider was still up, toffee in hand. At this point the entire attempt of the big brother to get his sister away from the stranger to the safety of the mud house had taken a toll on the little girl. As she approached the scary rider, she cried out the entire dose of the adrenaline she had pumped into her veins to escape to her own safety. But before she could stretch out a hand towards the toffee, the big brother had recovered from the other side of the gutter having realized that his little sister had not followed him out of the ditch to the safe embankment. He turned around and saw his sister’s hand stretched and moving towards the outstretched toffee-hand of the iron-horse rider. The big brother swooped in like a panther, collected his little sister’s hand, turned her fast around and pulled her through to safety, to the other side of the gutter and off the weedy embankments into the mud house. The rider laughed at the whole scene—the cry of the little girl and the big brother’s ordeal to get his little sister to safety. The iron-horse rider paced his machine once again, inch by inch, giggling as he gathered momentum and rode away, scanning the roadside for another little girl, and onto the next village. Only, we will never know for sure if there were big brothers in the other villages for every little sibling to ensure their safety and sanity from this strange rider who attempted to seduce one with a candy.
Very scary story for the possibility of an impending tragedy. But it is wonderful to witness the big brother being a savior of his little sister and himself. He is a true hero!
I can hear the feminists now… why can’t the story be about a big sister helping her little brother? Let’s just stick to the truth of the story and be proud that there are still great big brothers (real men) around to protect our communities from outside threats. Let’s hope that African cities and villages have real men who are willing to do so each day.