A Dancer In the Dust Read Free

last journey up Tumasi Road, the thugs, usually paramilitary gangs armed by Mafumi’s Revolutionary Army of Lubanda, had called their stops “border inspections,” but the only border was a chain stretched across the road, motionless as a puff adder, until a vehicle neared. Then, two “customs inspectors” would lift the chain waist high and wait, either grim-faced or with sinister smiles, as the car approached.
    “That’s dangerous travel, Ray,” Bill said. “Why’d you go back?”
    “To visit the scene of the crime,” I answered flatly. “I thought it might be good for my soul.”
    “I see,” Bill said quietly. He was clearly reluctant to venture further into the moral minefield of this subject. “Anyway, it was dangerous in Lubanda when you made that trip.”
    Indeed it had been dangerous, though I’d had only one tense moment on the road. It had occurred at one of those thirteen criminal customs stops. This time a couple of burning tires had been dragged into the road, and there’d been ten or so “inspectors” whose ages had ranged from early to late teens, years when simmering maleness easily boils into sudden, annihilating violence.
    “Where you from,bwana?” the Kalashnikov-wielding leader of this band asked me as he peered about the interior of the Jeep I’d rented in the capital.
    The malignant glimmer in his eyes made it clear that the “bwana” was meant as mockery. In Ethiopia it might have been farangi and in Kenya it might have been mukiwa, but universally it meant you were the pale-faced enemy, the destroyer of some idealized precolonial paradise that had never in the least existed. By this reckoning, you and you alone were responsible for the derelict world whose mad contortions were now so extreme they could only be addressed by swinging clubs and hacking pangas.
    “New York,” I answered.
    His grin revealed teeth sharpened to a point. The Wagogo in Tanzania did this, and the Congolese pygmies; others too, perhaps, but I’d never seen it in Lubanda, and so I assumed it to be some new badge of terror, man merged with crocodile.
    “You see Lion King , bwana?” he asked.
    From a few feet away, a knot of boy-men laughed and the skinniest of them slapped his panga against what had clearly once been a much larger man’s boots.
    “No,” I answered.
    “Where you going, bwana?”
    “Up Tumasi Road,” I answered.
    “How far up?”
    “To the end.”
    He looked surprised, and a little suspicious. “There’s nothing up Tumasi Road,” he said.
    “There once was,” I told him.
    This was true, for Tumasi had once been a thriving village, its market stocked with locally grown produce. I’d seen mounds of sweet potatoes and jars of honey, along with stalls selling various local grains and cured meats and pots fashioned from the local clay. There’d been wooden carvings for sale, and kindling gathered from the savanna, and everywhere, stacks of cassava. Such had been Tumasi from time immemorial, its fundamental needs met by fundamental means.
    “It is a long drive to Tumasi, bwana,” the man said. “Bad road. Hard on the body.” He pronounced bad “bahd,” and body was “buddy.” He nodded toward a pile of pillows and blankets, some of which were stained with various body fluids. “We sell cheap. Make you more comfortable for the bad road.”
    I shook my head. “No, thanks.”
    “You sure, bwana?”
    He wore desert-camouflage pants and a bright tie-dyed T-shirt of the kind you might have bought on Venice Beach thirty years before. His cap said “Red Sox,” and as he watched me, he took out a long cigarette holder, inserted a hand-wrapped cigarette taken from a crumpled Gauloises box and lit it. “Many bad people on the way to Tumasi.” He waved out the match and tossed it to the side. “Maybe you like a paper for safe passage.” He grinned. “I give you special price.”
    “I don’t need a paper from you,” I told him stiffly, because I knew there would be no end