Hyenas from Ntcheu

Monday mornings would begin with Baba whispering his name. Out of the corridor, yellow light would pounce into the boy’s bedroom to chase away the darkness. Sleep, too, would scatter, taking with it his dreams. As he yawned and stretched he would listen to the dogs’ good mornings, each bark a balm, for their district was plagued by man-eating hyenas. It was in all the newspapers: Bloodshed in Jeki Deki; Villagers Dismembered; Entrails Disgorged. Afisi a ku Ntcheu! Hyenas from Ntcheu. The phenomenon fevered the nation. Local musicians with their stick-and-tin guitars made popular songs about it. Was it the work of Satan? Shape-shifters? Or medicine men in search of souls? Only the victims could tell.

The attacks happened at night, so an 8:00 p.m. curfew was enforced by the police. When the boy didn’t hear their vehicles patrolling the area, he would beg the night watchman to stand guard at his bedroom window. “Just ’til I fall asleep,” he would say. The old man was initiated into witchcraft and so had no fear of hyenas. But after a short while the guard would say, “I’ll just check the back of the house, young bwana,” and then disappear into the maize shed for a nap. If the boy’s hollering persisted, he would saunter up to the window and whisper: “Young bwana, please. Don’t wake Baba and Mama. I told you no fisi can enter here. Haven’t I shown you my calabash filled with mphinjira? The herbs I’ve sprinkled along this fence are like a thousand thunderbolts to evil spirits!”

The boy believed him but insisted that he cross his heart and promise to stand by the window anyway. If hyenas attacked the compound, at least they would get to maul the guard first. For the rest of the night, old Ngozo would lean against the wall outside his bedroom—panga knife at his breast like a pillow—trying not to snore too loudly.

“Up you get, Son,” Baba would say at dawn, parting the boy’s mosquito net like a newfound path in the jungle.

“Yes, Baba,” the boy would reply.

How did you sleep? Are you ready for school? Did you forget anything? Those were questions for later.

Once Baba was out of the room, the boy would zigzag to the dressing table where Mama had laid out his school uniform like delicate wares at a market store. Taking a bath in the morning (before school) would have slowed them down. So the night before, his mother would have scrubbed him up so stubbornly that liquorice-black lines formed around the bathtub.

He and his friends spent hours building clay armies: tanks, ships, submarines, and even nuclear bombs. The losing “General” would not only have to bear the shame of defeat but respond to the label of “refugee,” like those entering Malawi from Mozambique. “Boys, war is nothing to play with,” Ngozo scolded them. What’s not to like? they would wonder, considering how fun it was to pretend a mine had gone off and blown their guts to pieces.

After dressing, the boy would enter the living room, where Baba—briefcase in hand—would be raking his afro with a pick comb. Even behind a bushy beard, his face of forty had preserved the plumpness of youth. He was like the BFG with a briefcase that puked out papers.

They ate breakfast in silence, their fridge droning in the background like a mechanical shaman. Every Monday, the boy would be dropped off at St. Anthony’s boarding school in Blantyre, where he would spend the week. On Friday afternoons Baba would pick him up for the weekend.

“Mwadzuka bwanji, bwana?” Good morning boss, Ngozo would say on the veranda with a stern salute to his forehead. The morning sun would be yawning and the roosters singing.

The boy would flash a coy smile at Ngozo (the snorer!).

“I hope you slept well, young bwana,” the guard would say (as if they hadn’t listened to each other’s snores throughout the night), and then chuck the boy’s bag into the backseat of their Datsun.

Ngozo was heaped in so many layers of clothes that he looked like an obese Egyptian mummy. When the boy asked him why he wore so many layers, his mouth split into a rictus: “Not even the devil likes the cold!” He just kept piling shirts upon shirts, coats upon coats, gloves upon gloves, and even wrapped belts around belts. After Baba gave him a three-quarter jacket from Canada, Ngozo still cloaked himself in sacks from ADMARC (saving his precious jacket for churches, doctors, and funerals).

“Usiku unali bwino,” the night was good, he would assure Baba, recalling everything the dog had done.

Baba would BEEP-BEEP! the car horn to remind Ngozo the gate needed opening.

Mama said Ngozo wasn’t very bright but whatever he lacked in wits he made up for in personality. To the boy, he was a playmate, a nanny, and a guard, all in one. He had been with the family before the boy was even born. They knew each other so intimately that gloom shaded their faces whenever they waved goodbye.

Their drive would begin without talking but somewhere along Nsipe Bridge, Baba would ask about school. “Your mathematics needs improvement,” he would say, or “Nobody can become a scientist without knowing Pythagoras.” Sometimes he would trick the boy into doing better. “Son, if you get an ‘A’ in mathematics then that Nintendo Mario can be yours!”

As the M1 unravelled its path into Blantyre, the village of Ntcheu would once again become erased. As it had been, every Monday. Left in their rear view were the villagers who believed that men could morph into hyenas, sleep beneath the earth in graveyards, or shrink into wicker baskets that drifted in the night sky like alien ships. The wild stories of neighbours poisoning neighbours blew away like thatch in a thunderstorm. Gone were cassavas, sugarcanes, pumpkins, fermented barley, the stinky fish of usipa, and the gleaming foreheads by roadside hawking skewered mice. With every song Baba’s radio played came the muting of local guitarists cursing low wages and bad wives. Gone were the chopped-off heads of snakes bouncing, the squishing of spiders, the plucking of chickens, the whipping of cows, the banter of goats, and the ululations of women in chitenje. Gone were the boy’s Chichewa-speaking friends who exploded popcorn in cow dung fires. Gone, too, was the boy’s mother, with her soap and foamy face cloth. Gone were all the good things the boy knew. The only things that remained were the hyenas lurking in the shadows of his mind.

* * *

Friday mornings became alive at dawn, with the bell ringing in the hallway. “Up-up-up!” Mrs. Flint, their matron, would yell. “Two minutes to make your bed and not a second more.” The boy would bounce up like a marionette, for those clinging onto their pillows would get the cane. “Yes, Matron! Sorry, Matron,” they would cry.

Into a tiny shower cubicle without curtains he would jump, only to grimace at the water pelting his face. Knees tucked in and rubbing against the other like sticks before tinder, he would shower quickly. The older boys agreed there was nothing more unmanly than “kissing knees,” so they teased him.

At the breakfast table, lemon-yellow yolks dripped like paint onto burnt tiles of bread. The boy and his companions would pick up their slabs and swallow. If they were too dry, Mrs. Flint would fill their cups with milk so fresh it reeked of udder. “For the food we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful. Amen.” That was their prayer. After eating they would say it again but switch the words to: “For the food we’ve just received . . .”

Even with all the prayers and the high walls of his school campus, the boy was terrified of Afisi a ku Ntcheu. Everyone made fun of him for it. “Village Boy,” he was called. The one who had wet his bed on more than one occasion for lacking the courage to visit the urinals in the night. Dancing shadows. White walls in plum-coloured gore. Creatures of coarse yellowy-black fur slurping on entrails like spaghetti. Such were the preoccupations of his mind. On any full moon, out there, in the middle of the school grounds, he was convinced hyenas held séance. On those terrifying nights, when Ngozo was nowhere to be seen, the boy would scream from his nightmares, waking the entire dorm.

“Do it one more time, dumkop, and I’ll sock you!” one prefect said.

To make the others understand, the boy would tell them about the werehyenas’ latest victim, the state in which their corpse had been found by the police (usually riddled with fang marks and flies).

Werehyenas? They laughed. “You mean, like, werewolves?”

“Yes! It’s true. It’s even in all the newspapers!” he would argue.

“Anyone dumb enough to buy into that crap should go back to the bush!” they agreed.

Every Friday at assembly in the Great Hall, the week’s commendations were awarded by the principal. The boy’s grades were poor because his English was poor. His Chichewa tongue confused his “Rs” and “Ls” to form lions that “lolled” and hyenas that “raphed”. It wasn’t just that. The boy had a different understanding of the world. In a debate about whether it was good for Malawi to embrace so many Mozambican refugees, he said no, because they were bringing witchcraft into the country. He was called into the principal’s office, where he got a hard slap to the cheek. “Drop this witchcraft nonsense—you hear me? Pull your socks up!” The boy got on his haunches, literally about to pull his socks up, when the tall Englishman with blue spider-webbed veins on his cheeks told him to get out of his office.

His peers were astounded by his beliefs. What dunce revered witchcraft in the world of computers, science, and technology? It was the nineties, for goodness’ sake! Even when the most ardent teachers cracked his knuckles with rulers, the boy couldn’t stop seeing or speaking about those wretched hyenas. Sometimes he thought the teachers themselves were hyenas in disguise, the principal being their leader. The thought of living among shape-shifters gave him a lot of anxiety. His mind oscillated between Chichewa and English, superstition and science, poverty and wealth, city life and village life. He didn’t know how to interpret reality. Once in a while he would wish the hyenas would attack his school, so that everyone who had made his life miserable would pay with their dear lives.

When at last the final bell on Friday afternoon would ring, the boy would tuck his books away and sprint to the car park—backpack bouncing like a camel’s hump. He would sink into his Baba’s arms and light an inward smile at the smell of his cologne. The smell of safety and love.

As they arrived in the village of Ntcheu, the town of Blantyre would once again become erased. As it had been, every Friday. Gone were the gold and silver stars, the detentions, the principal, the words and expressions that he didn’t get. Forgotten were the cold showers, stone breads, smelly cheeses, runny eggs, and the chain-smoking matron. Most of all, gone was the feeling of being “less than.” For three years, that was how it was on Mondays and Fridays.

* * *

The civil war ended in 1992 when the apartheid government of South Africa and all its allies could no longer support Mozambique’s socialist party, the Liberation Front or FRELIMO against the anti-communist RENAMO (Mozambican National Resistance). When the boy asked his baba why the people had been fighting in the first place, Baba said: “At first they were fighting against the Portuguese to claim back their land and be independent. But then they started to fight amongst themselves over whether or not to become a one-party communist state like the USSR and China.” When the boy asked, “Why couldn’t they just come up with their own system?” Baba shrugged.

On the map, Malawi is shaped like a seahorse whose tail is dipped in Mozambique. The boy and his father once drove to the border between the countries. “Far beyond, there is war,” Baba said. “But here in Tsangano, someone could buy their daily bread abroad if they wanted to.” Over the years a million refugees or more had poured into Malawi. It was a strain on the economy, and it caused some locals to resent the foreigners.

Talk of Afisi a ku Ntcheu died down around the time the war ended. The police said the gruesome murders had been caused by a rabid pack of African wild dogs that they had recently put down. Some people said it was God’s punishment to the community for being involved with the war. Others, like Ngozo, insisted the lack of murders had to do with foreigners returning to their homeland.

“But how?” the boy asked.

Ngozo replied, “Well, witchcraft always follows its maker.”

Only years later did the boy understand what he meant.

J.G. JESMAN

J. G. Jesman is a Malawian-British author and animator. His debut novel, Chisoni, was published by Penguin Random House South Africa in May 2022. His short stories have appeared on the Fairlight Books website and in The Interpreter’s House, Image Journal, Water~Stone Review, and elsewhere. He has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize.