Baobab sitting

The sun is high in the cloudless sky. The heat is killing, shrinking shadows to a mere spot on the dusty ground. No rain for weeks and the elders have called up a meeting. The shade of the baobab is the center of the village and the chosen point for all discussions. Sitting on their ankles African-style, the men start to talk. Some have ideas, some just sit and listen. Most of them are over seventy, with more then one wife and a dozen grown-up sons and daughters, myriads of grand-children. Their salt-and-pepper beards are a sign of wisdom, their shaved head one of devotion. But the gods haven’t been good to them this year. The crops are dying of dehydration and the cows and goats have gone missing or are scarily thin.

Children are running around, sending dust towards the baobab. No one rises to keep them quiet, no voice arises from the crouching assembly. Their mothers are out in the bush collecting what they can find of berries and roots and eatable leaves and twigs. Their fathers have been gone for more than a month with the cattle, trying to find a spot with water and green vegetation. Everything around the huts seems burnt down, as if the fearful hand of God had set fire to this part of earth. The burning sun provides the younger ones with the miracle of mirages. They imagine far away on the horizon an endless sea with flamingos and swimming goats and cows, wading in those waters until their skin wrinkles and shrink.

But the clouds are coming, in vast numbers. That’s what the elders come to as a conclusion of their day under the huge tree. The weather will get better by the end of the month. If not they might have to sacrifice a cow or two but they hope they won’t have to come up to that. They can’t see this far but indeed, far East, from the coast pf the Indian Ocean, huge black clouds are forming, assembling under not a baobab but a clear blue sky. Soon they will enter the land of the elders and pour down their awaited-for water. Wait under the baobab, sitting on your feet, chin tucked in between your knees, salvation is near.