The Price of Diamonds

The third son of a poor man has little chance as an African tribesman unless he is born with the love of his people, his extended family as it is called today. Back when Ali N’Borobo was born all they called it was love. No one else had anything either, so what difference did it make? His village was set on the flat dry savannah of Central Africa just west of a low-lying mountain range. His home had been built five years before by his father with the help of every other man in Boulouba just a month before Ali’s oldest brother was born. Made of the red clay that every other house in the village was made from, it consisted of one open room, the same red clay on the floor as on the walls, all rubbed smooth by the skilled hands of the workers. No wooden forms, no fancy tools for leveling or sanding. A hole was dug, the extracted clay beaten into powder. Water carried from the village well was poured into the hole and the powdered clay mixed back into it.

Buckets of mud, the proper consistency assured by years of experience, were carefully poured and formed. Slowly a house took shape, one door, no windows, a peaked thatch palm frond roof. It was done. A joyous occasion. A new young man had taken a wife and she had conceived. The village grew. Everyone rejoiced. Women brought new gourds fashioned into pots, some brought store-bought items purchased from distant towns, some could only help. It was just as it had always been.

The same red clay dust covered the ground, the trees, and the road that ran through the center of the village. Trucks flying past kicked up red fantails, sent them flying high in the air to settle back down again. They breathed it, lived in it, wore it embedded in their clothes, slept in it. It made their thick black hair shine with a red brilliance in the hot sun. There was no escaping it. Crops wouldn’t grow in it, not even grass. In the rainy season it turned to mud, deep sticky mud, so sticky it could suck shoes off their feet.

So no one wore them.

But the rains also fed the jungle. Life sprang up around watering holes and rivers flowed freely. Animals reappeared; birds flew in numbers that eclipsed the sun. Trees blossomed filling the air with the sweetest of scents, bushes flowered with a heavy aroma that could be enjoyed from a hundred meters. Bees swarmed and made their honey, thick rich golden nectar more sweet than any sugar. Mango, papaya, peanuts, manioc. Food for the taking was in limitless abundance. These were the good months. These were the bad months. For when the rains came so did the mosquitos, the flies, the diseases.

Ali’s oldest brother, the eldest son, died of malaria before his first birthday. Geslain, the next, made it almost that long before he was taken, but he had always been weak. No one had expected he would live. His cleft palate had malformed his little face terribly.

Now it was Ali’s turn, the third son and no daughters, a good sign, a strong sign. Everyone hoped he would make it and he had. By the time he reached two he was running around the village. Laughter fell easily from his full lips and he pleased the tribal elders with his good looks and loving nature. By three he was gathering fruits and berries. He showed no fear of the bees and developed a talent for gathering the best comb. Even the bees seemed to like him.

In his seventh rainy season his father, N’Beli, had traveled across the savannah to the nearby foothills of the Massif du Tandou mountains with his cousin on some secret mission Ali had only heard whispers about Only the cousin, Calistan, had returned.

He told tales of a struggle with a lioness, how N’Beli had sacrificed himself to save him. Ali was now head of his family, his mother and two young sisters. Ali grew up strong.

A smiling, quiet boy full of adventurous spirit, he could climb any tree. He had no fear of any animal other than the lion.

Ali had always worshiped his grandfather, his ‘da’. The old man had always treated him well. Each time he had gone away, whether for a moon or for a dry season he always came back with something special for Ali. Twice it had been coloring books, paper and pretty pencils. With them Ali had learned to draw. Many times it had been cloth for making the fine short pants his mother made for him. In his ninth dry season was the most special of all. Da brought him three gifts, a new hammock to sleep in, a pair of elephant hide sandals with rubber tire soles, and a shovel. A real shovel. The message was clear.

Da had decided that the boy was old enough to work in the mine. His mother was pleased that the old man thought him ready. Each dry season before when the men and older boys of Boulouba left he had cried for them. Now it was his turn to go, his mother’s turn to cry.

For as long as anyone could remember and as far back as legends lived, the dry season had yielded a living for the village. It was hard work. Dirty work. But somehow they made it fun. At the first of the season the village split into two groups. The smaller group stayed in the village with the younger children, the old and the infirmed, some of the women left to care for them. What crops could be grown were tended to, fruits and berries were gathered from the abundance of trees. Roots and peanuts were dug, the tubers and manioc some called cassava. The few livestock they had were cared for. The home fires were kept burning.

The rest of the village, all the eligible men, those wives who did not have small children to worry about and the older women headed for the Kotto river. As they had no transportation, they walked. Almost two hundred kilometers north, far north of Brea, way up into the veldt away from the open savannah, deep into the double and triple canopy jungle where the air felt heavier, where colors faded into hues of grey and the light played tricks on your eyes, where great and deadly snakes like the black mamba live, where gorillas, baboons and the tiny giraffe called the ‘okapi’ call home. Wild pigs hide in thick undergrowth and goliath frogs crank out their deep mating calls at night.

Finally they would reach the same spot where their ancestors had gone before them, to the dangerous and fast flowing waters of the Kotto whose bed occasionally gave up those pretty rocks called diamonds. It was not easy to get them, not easy to find them.

They were not laying around on the ground. That would be too easy. No. They lay buried deep in the bed of the river, resting there for a million years or more, diamonds that had been spit out by some unknown volcano, some trick of nature that had brought together just the right amount of heat with the right amount of carbon under just the right amount of pressure.

The volcano spit them out into the air, casting them possibly hundreds of miles from where they had left the earth, spewing out hundreds, maybe thousands at a time, throwing them on hillsides, on plains, anywhere and everywhere. There they had lain as the years passed by, maybe trod upon by mastodons and dinosaurs, through endless dry seasons, endless wet seasons. As time passed, as a million or more years went by, slowly but surely they washed down the hills, down the slopes, into the streams that lead into the rivers. As the eons slipped by, they built up a layer of their special kind of silt on the river beds. In places it grew two to three meters thick, a layer of volcanic rock and ash, crushed and ground fine through the washing and moving, a dark fine volcanic mud mixed with these special, incredibly hard and durable stones. Then something happened. Maybe it was about the time the dinosaurs all died. Who knows? But it was something cataclysmic.

A layer of black sticky mud was laid down, scarcely two or three inches, maybe 5 mm thick, marking a line between the diamondiferous layer below it and two or three meters or more of rounded, ground down rock above it.

For several generations Ali’s tribe, a small band of Mondjombo, had gathered at these same two river meanders to dig. In generations past the digging had been much harder. Little production was found but each precious stone had brought tremendous wealth with it. One stone could bring enough to buy cloth and thread for a season for the entire village, a few knives, maybe a gun if it was large enough. It was always a cause for celebration. They were a happy people. Buyers had come to Bangui, several hundred kilometers south, where the elders would go to sell the stones they found and to buy what was needed. For three years now white men even came to the digs, men who brought better shovels with edges that didn’t dull so quickly, men who watched the black men work, who wore big hats and carried heavy weapons, who could not speak the dialects but who had learned Songho, the language of commerce. Times had changed.

It was in this third year of the white man that Ali first went to the mine. He quickly learned that the dry season village was not like the one he had grown up in. There was no red clay here. There was no road running through the village, no children outside playing. There was a footpath, a trail. On either side of it were the traditional round huts but these were made of lodge pole saplings lashed together with palm fronds, roofs thatched the way all roofs are made. Here the smells were different, sounds were different, even air was different. It was heavier, harder to breathe unless you were near the river. The noises attracted his attention the most. Muffled noises. The deep rumble calls of the giant frogs, the incessant mating barks of the tree frogs and crickets, the warbling cries of the hornbills, the kingfishers, the cree-cree caw, yip, yip, yip . . . Unremitting, loud, annoying noises that went on for hours, stopping as if on a cue then suddenly resuming even louder than before as if they were all talking at once about whatever had made them pause for a moment, complaining to each other.

The trees grew tall and eerie, strong vines hung down, huge trees with layers of branches and leaves reaching up to the sky. Ali wanted to climb them all, climb the hairy vines, shinny up the buttressed trunks, the prop roots, see what he could see from the tops so far above him. Surely he could see forever from up there, maybe even his village where his mother was. But his first task was gathering new palm fronds for roof mending, the chore that began each season.

Calistan was the village chief and would be until he died. He’d won the job by attrition and was doing a good job of leading so no one was interested in a change. Besides, there wasn’t that much leading to do. Everyone knew his job and did it as they always had.

Arrival at the veldt village was reason for celebration. A new fire burned in the ashes of the old, a tradition that showed the continuity of the people and the continuation of their good fortune. A feeling of anticipation filled the air. Ali watched his Da check over the hut, pulling off last years ruined thatch, expertly weaving in new branches. Abuduo and Jodik, his uncle and cousin, worked alongside, each secretly making certain the spot above where they would be sleeping was especially well done. Jodik had been there for two seasons already and was happy that Ali came along this year. Ali was almost as tall as he was and could run almost as fast though Jodik had been born three dry seasons before him. Jodie’s arms were thicker and stronger as he had been using the pick and shovel for two seasons. He’d learned how to wash the gravels, how to spot the stones with his sharp young eyes. He liked the thought of teaching his cousin and the job would fall to him.

By the time Ali returned from gathering the last of the palm fronds, which he had carefully cut from the fattest palms he could find, the sun was beginning to wane. The temperature dropped slightly, the mosquitoes came out for their evening meal. Bigger, more ferocious ones here than back on the open savannah, but a quick, easy and fun solution to this problem was at hand.

“Ali, come!” his grandfather called to him. “You will learn something.” Taking him by the hand, they walked together to the river bank where a well-worn wallow was already being wetted down with river water. The women were stomping in it, mixing the mud into a fine texture. Fascinated, Ali watched. Were they making clay for a new house? Would this grey mud work like their red clay back home?

One by one, they lay in it. They rolled in it. They covered their bodies with the fine grey mud, laughing merrily as they rolled. Da followed suit. Joyously, Ali did the same.

What fun! Screw the mosquitoes. They would not bother them now. Within a few weeks scissor plants, the local cousin of the aloe, would bloom which would provide better protection by simply rubbing their freshly broken succulent and fleshy leaves across the body, the moisture of the exposed meat containing a natural insect repellant. While some experienced allergic reactions from the plant and couldn’t use it, most found that using it two to three times a week provided all the protection they needed. For the others, there was always mud. Ali quickly learned that the mosquito feeding time lasts only a couple of hours. A cool, refreshing swim in the river just before the evening feast was ready and everyone returned to looking normal, feeling refreshed and clean. The pesky mosquitoes could be forgotten until tomorrow.

Ali thought of this as a work camp since this wasn’t really his home. Things were different here. He had to work. He had always helped around the village picking mangoes from the trees, papaya, digging tubers, manioc and peanuts, gathering honey, carrying water from the village well. He’d willingly done that all his life but it was different here.

There was no one but Da to see he was fed, no one to wash his clothes. No one cared if he was clean or dirty. In fact, if it weren’t for the mosquitoes he might never have bathed at all.

That part he liked.

On the fifth day at camp, he saw the second white man he had ever seen in his life.

The only other one he had seen just a few months earlier driving a truck through his village.

But he could really see this one. He was very ugly. His face was all red, his hair a dull brown fitting tightly against his skull. A small nose, so small Ali wondered if he could breathe through it. His eyes sort of bulged out if you looked straight at him for he wore something tinted green on his tiny nose which circled his bulging eyes. Whatever it was, it ran back to reach halfway around his protruding ears. He looked very strange indeed.

On his feet were heavy boots that appeared to have been made from cheap leather.

He could tell they weren’t elephant-hide. They extended from the tips of his toes up to mid-calf and were bound together by leather straps. They looked most impractical and uncomfortable. But the shorts he wore were fantastic. Ali marveled at the number of pockets and how they were made to expand when you put your hands into them, which the man seldom did. They were a solid sand color so they were not very pretty. Even as hot as it was, the man wore two chest coverings, one atop the other. The inner shirt appeared to be a net just like the one Da used to catch their fish from the river. Ali figured this was a clever way to carry netting and thought he might try it someday.

The outer covering was made from the same patternless and unattractive material as the man’s shorts and sported a goodly number of pockets, also, most of which bulged with things which Ali didn’t understand and found mysterious and fascinating. There was a large pocket in the lower part of the back of it. A wide, heavy belt was fastened in front by an intricate metal arrangement he had never seen before. It was festooned with fascinating and unfathomable things which hung down making clanging and clinking noises as the man walked. One was so long it banged the side of the man’s knee with each stride.

Around his neck hung a long blue finely braided cord which ended in his upper left breast pocket. On his head sat the most elaborate hat Ali had ever seen. Of matching sand color, it seemed off center to the man’s head, one side cocked up and stuck to the crown, the other drooping downward slightly.

Rephe, the white Frenchman, thought he looked terrific. He especially liked his new Aussie hat. He had no idea how strange he looked to the boy standing there looking at him.

In fact, he never even noticed the boy. His sunglasses cast iridescence to the sea of greenness surrounding him. All Rephe saw was his chance to renew his contact with Calistan, the man who controlled the output of these few natives who would spend the next six months sweating and digging in the mud and gravel with their primitive straight picks and flat shovels, moving tons of rock by hand, hauling buckets of water by the thousands of gallons as they painstakingly searched for the elusive little stones that women around the world adored so much, wanted so badly and paid such good money for.

Rephe had done his job in securing Calistan who was so much more cooperative and manageable than his troublesome cousin had been. Calistan was now his ‘collector’, a title given by the state. But not the right title. It should have been ‘Puppet’, for each man holding it was or quickly became a puppet for some white man with money. Rephe was a Puppet Master.

Calistan stepped forward to greet the man; others ran to gather chairs, taking them to the bluff under the shade of the trees by the river where the air was fresh. A fire was quickly prepared. Tea was put on to brew. The men gathered around. Ali watched wide eyed as he squatted flat footed on the bare sandy ground beside Da’s rickety chair, half hiding himself. He could not follow the conversation, the white skinned man made sounds which made no sense to him. The elders seemed to understand although they did not speak.

Da would shake his head, too, as if he understood. Calistan spoke a few words which the man seemed to like.

They drank tea, each man receiving a small portion. From one of his pockets the white man extracted a round lens which pivoted out of a leather covering. He gave it to Calistan and showed him what it would do, making Calistan’s hand look very large as he gazed through it. Calistan passed it around, each man taking a turn gazing through it.

Da took his turn. The tea cups were filled again.

Long after the white man left, Ali sat near his Da in the warm night lit by the half moon and the myriads of bright stars peeking through the leaves of the tall trees, stars so numerous that they formed a solid white curtain in the clear night sky. Jodik, Abuduo, Ali and dozens of others gathered close as Calistan began the legend that all but the new ones like Ali had heard each year before, a legend told only here at this place. No one ever tired of hearing it. It was their secret story. But for little Ali it was more than he could comprehend. It seemed a story about himself from a long time in the past. A story never heard which stirred memories of ancient dreams dreamed before. A story of when he had lived in the time of the ancients of the tribe, awakening spirits within him. His blue-black skin glistened in the moonlight. Chicken flesh covered his bare arms.

His mind swam with Calistan’s words. How could this story have been kept from him for so long? It was his tale. His story. His life. His legend. His destiny.