Beastly Afrika

She had struggled to fall asleep. Thought she was ready to, when she turned out the light, noting how late it was. She’d determined she would finish reading that book, and she did. Both sorry and glad that it was done with. But was it done with? Skilfully written, evocative of a past she hardly knew existed, gripping in its tale of human fallibility, it lingered with her. How could they? Enslave human beings, consider them to be sub-human because of their skin colour. Race, a different race. Ignorant beyond belief, there is one human race, regardless of the colour of some of the branches of that one race.

Everyone knows about racial discrimination, sure, and everyone is aware - she always mused, dimly or deeply, depending on which side of the divide you’re on - about the scourge of slavery capturing peoples’ lives in misery. But free blacks living in the State of Virginia after the turn of the 18th Century being slave owners themselves? That was a bitter truth she did not want to swallow, despite the authority of the book. That’s what had kept her from falling asleep. Until, exhausted with exploring the bitterness of acceptance, she finally did.

She had been curled up on her side, hard against Calvin, who, when she awoke, was snoring. Nothing could shake his undeniable skill in relaxing, to fall into deep, restorative sleep. Something had awakened her, and she turned over on her back, then winced as she felt sharp, thorn-like prickling in her left buttock. Realizing what it was, she crept her arm down, shifted slightly and gently pushed the little dog’s paw free of her. In a generous display of appreciation, Afrika snarled at her. He never took kindly to having his own deep sleep punctured, nor ‘his’ space interfered with.

And that set Silk off, it always did, as she reacted also to being disturbed. She leaped off the bed, and Aline was not sorry to see her go. Silk had a stupendously irritating habit as dawn sent its pale fingers to part the dark cloak of night, of stealthily sneaking toward the head of the bed and settling herself down near Aline’s head. If Aline did not wake when Silk felt it was the right and proper time for her to be let out for the day, she would slide her sinuous body gradually over Aline’s shoulders toward her head, suffocating her, waking her as from a nightmare.

Silk never did that to Calvin, and she could never figure out why. Calvin provocatively suggested it was because Silk instinctively sought out the subservient figure, not the superior one with authority, earning himself a well-deserved cuff at the head. Leading him to reminisce about his childhood, and his mother Clara’s propensity to cuff her wayward boys.

Neither Clara nor Calvin shared her pessimism about the world and the unwillingness of human beings to see one another as equals. Clara kept going on at her about her ‘grandkids’, and she responded by repeating her rote response to her mother-in-law not to hold out any hopes of grandchildren from her. At first Clara used to roll her expressive eyes to heaven as though beseeching God to put some common sense into this woman her feckless son had chosen from among all the other nubile and fecund women in the world. Now, Clara just assumed a pained look, and her head was downcast - not up to heaven - as though communing sternly with the Devil who had placed such errant negativity into her daughter-in-law’s stubborn head.

She heard Silk on her downward leap, because of the tiny clangour of the bell she had purposefully placed around the cat's pedigreed neck. Not that it did any good. Either Silk exemplified the feline species’ ultimate propensity for morbid carnage, or the local birds were deaf, the chipmunks too slow, the rabbits petrified to death by the violently-assured threat she represented.

She had vowed, when Calvin brought Silk home as an adorable button of a kitten that this would be a strictly-indoors cat. She would not, through her stewardship of this cat, be responsible for adding to the mass murder of songbirds. She sighed, thinking of her naivety and the indomitable determination of cats to elude, evade and ultimately escape limits humans attempted to place on their quotidian nomadic forays into the fearsome jungle of the night.

Before they had even become serious about one another - and that, admittedly, was not all that long after they had met - she had cautioned Calvin that she had no intention of adding to the world’s population of black kids in a world that hadn’t changed all that much in its fixation on the colour black as being inferior to white. That had stopped him in his tracks. For about sixty seconds.

He had grinned, and said their relationship was young, and he was flexible and she was a rational human being and things changed. Well, in the last decade not all that much had changed in the world, other than that they had by then been married for nine years, and Calvin now had a firm understanding of how serious she had been.

And he accepted that. For he did love her, just as she did him. Just as they would passionately and protectively love the children that would come of their union, if they - she, relented. But she had not and would not. For, loving those children would present to her the excruciating pain of witnessing them growing into a world that was so socially imperfect every time she thought of it, she felt like retching.

She hardly knew why she read books like that. Always had. They fed her anger. But they also informed her, and she wanted to remain informed. She sometimes mused about how wonderful it must be to be able to immerse oneself as a creative writer into the history of one’s background, to amass the information required to expound without bias, and to present to the world a piece of creative literature that spoke for itself about the injustices that have changed only by degree.

She could hardly herself credit what history revealed and the present date consolidated. That Arab and European slave traders did not by themselves haunt Africa to assemble the richness of blacks that they could include in caravans and the bleak, dark, dank holds of ships on their ocean-crossing voyages of death and disease. They had the eager assistance of tribal chiefs who traditionally warred on their neighbours, shackled them and placed them in guarded compounds and then led them in sick and straggling processions through their native jungles to where the slavers assembled, paid for and took possession of men, women and children.

What was worse, that this did not just reflect a distant past, but continued to this day. The monsters of black Africa re-invented themselves as tyrannical rulers, brutal dictators, tin-pot princes of their realms whose people were treated no better than slaves, and many of them were slaves, indentured, owned by a heartless ‘elite’. Children abducted and taken into slavery, or used as underage and vicious members of militias, forced to perpetrate upon their own villagers acts of despicable human cruelty to harden them. Girls and women repeatedly raped and tortured. Even in what passed for tribal ‘civil’ society, cultural and traditional and very much accepted rituals that mutilated women and eventually caused their deaths. Rape of innocent girls by men in societies that believed sex with young virgins would render them immune against HIV/AIDS.

When she got into one of her miserable moods of utter hopelessness, Calvin would sit there patiently, calmly, and hear her out. As she repeated ad infinitum rages detailing atrocities he had heard before. He would smile softly, reach out his hand to cup her chin, and remind her that people of good will were busy changing all of that. That the world was steadily becoming a better place. Proof? Lately, he would hold aloft the ultimate triumph: the election in America of a black president.

He still did that, even though she kept responding with her own assessment of that little miracle; that White Supremacists in that very same country would work toward their goal of amending that little aberration and before long they would hear the news that America’s black president had been assassinated.

All these thoughts and more fleeting through her head. As she wondered if Silk could wait until she felt ready to get up. Wondered whether Silk was going to leave her an unwelcome gift to clean up. Throwing up part of a tiny animal or bird she had ingested. She’d have to call Calvin to get up and clean up the mess. She just couldn’t stomach it. She would, if Calvin weren’t around, but it was the week-end, and they were both home.

Afrika was still fast asleep under the duvet. Sensible little animal. He was a perfect specimen, a coal-black, curly-haired toy poodle. True, he had a nasty temper when he was annoyed, but he was also emotionally attached to her, anxious to have her pick him up, baby him, speak to him, snuggle with him. And the fact was, she loved Afrika, that little beast.