Then the Red Eye came. You have to understand, AO. The disaster saved us. Years ago, when the Red Eye was born and began to spin, the farming communities who lived on the border fled their villages and towns. These were thriving communities of just about every ethnic group in the country. Their farms had irrigation systems. Capture stations cemented into the ground provided all the water the farm needed. These people were terrified by the Red Eye. It is understandable if you have seen it. The sight of it, looming. Yes, it is understandable. They left, but they could not bring their cemented irrigation systems, so those stayed. And continued watering the abandoned farmland.
Over the years, those lands continued growing, spreading, grasses joined the crops that kept coming back. And herdsmen had places to graze their cattle away from people. When I set out with my steer, I was only fifteen and those lands were their buffet. Still are. There are more of us but still so few of us. The beef we provide is the finest.
The cattle of the Fulani herdsman represents and holds the heart of the community, even those who have forsaken the traditional life. They are our relatives, my brothers and sisters. We name them, we care for them, we respect them, we love them. You can’t understand it because you are not one of us, we are few now, only a few hundred live my culture, but you must understand these things to understand what I am about to tell you. To . . . to understand me.
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We shouldn’t have passed through that the town of Matazu yesterday. The warning was nothing definite or true. It was . . . a smell. The place didn’t smell right. We understand how things have happened in the past. So usually we leave our cattle outside town with a few of us guarding them when we go in to buy supplies, but times have gotten strange, and dangerous. So we brought them with. We brought a parade of steer, yes. Maybe 100, all together. This farming community didn’t like it, but we were only passing through. All we wanted were some bottles of soda and water, cooking oil, sacks of groundnuts and dates, new toothbrushes, things. And we did not allow our cattle near any of their farms.
After my father died, my mother joined one of the female-led nomad groups living in the far north, and that’s where she had me, months later. She taught me that wherever we went, to always take two minutes to stop and feel a place. My mother hated wearing shoes, so, to her, this meant placing her feet firmly on the ground of wherever she was, closing her eyes and letting her being spread around the place like dust. Imagine every breathing thing, human, cattle, insect, plant, pulled into you, floating into every crevice, over every surface and then taking a general pulse, temperature, blood pressure. She said to do this even when you only planned to be in a place for a minute.
It’s the deepest Nomad Code. So deep that most nomads have forgotten it. It makes you a part of wherever you go, so you are never alone, you always have a place. I still do that to this day. I did it to this town and that’s what saved my life. I’d stopped just at the place where the small town began, my cattle around me. The others went into the town ahead of me. Ibrahim and Aminu were both annoyed with me for taking so long. They too had a bad feeling about this place and wanted to get in and out quickly.
We don’t always pay attention to the news. We shut our phones off. Especially when we are with our cattle and on the move. You have to watch your people when you move. You have to use all your eyes. We’d met up two days earlier. We herdsman go it alone except for a few days every three months where we meet with our closest comrades and catch up. My comrades Aminu and Ibrahim had wives, so they were with us, too. Ibrahim has two children, but both happened to be with their grandparents . . . and that was good on this day. We were all so happy to sit and catch up that we didn’t check our phones or windows. We’d been on the move since before sun-up. And so we hadn’t heard about the incident at the church in this town two days ago. Four armed men calling themselves “herdsmen” had set upon a church and shot six people before making off with cell phones, tablets, windows, and passwords.
They were dressed like herdsmen, but witnesses said they’d arrived in the town by bus. Where were their cattle? If I had to guess, I’d say they were probably men hired by the Ultimate Corporation to cause problems with farmers, to smear the herdsman reputation. They had charged up Liquid Swords and they used them to electrocute and slice up seven people, five of those people died. This was the town we strolled into with our 100 cattle, ignorant of what had transpired so recently.
It didn’t take long, AO. It didn’t take more than a few minutes. I saw it about to happen right before my eyes. Up the road, just where the town began. As I stood and took my moment, trying to pull in and take the pulse of my surroundings, as my mother had taught me, I smelled it first. It smelled alkali and mildewy. Old for its age. Sad.