7

STUMP SPEECHES

I.

“Can you all hear me okay? How about at the back?” The speaker didn’t get much in the way of response, so he shrugged and leaned over to his cousin to confirm that Bokarie was ready to address the recruits.

The twitchy crowd, which had been gathered across the tee-off strip of the ruined driving range, knew these space-filling sounds. They were usually made before the meal packs and medicine bags came out at the aid centres and AIDS clinics they frequented in the capital as much to break up their days as for the goodies to be had there. So the young men didn’t bother responding and kept instead at their afternoon lazing, reclining on each other’s shoulders, cadging cigarettes, trading evidence of girlfriends, tattoos, knife wounds. Making predictions of how much this thing they’d agreed to do was going to pay.

Official representatives were moving among them rechecking tribal affiliations before the training session began. This last-minute, extra vetting was a necessity for those leading the General’s growing movement, what with the number of informants, false friends, black BBC reporters and other tricky cockroaches clattering around the capital these days.

And so, in response to these very important presences mixing with the crowd, a few strategically earnest types, looking for pay and position bump-ups, blared that they weren’t here for the money. They were going Upriver to sink a few of those roundy waists for their family’s sunken bellies. Because they were optimistic that an important ear or two might cock at such principled, focused rage. But their voices were laughed at and shouted down by others mimicking toothpaste rhymes and condom jingles, which underscored the pointlessness, the indignity, of such apish pleading. Everyone there knew the sink a roundy waist for a sunken belly slogan. In recent weeks it had been a constant on radio stations that broadcast to select bars and slums in the capital. Hotel workers had cleaned pools to it, children jumped rope to it.

Meanwhile, another handful of the recruits styled themselves the cognoscenti among the young and hungry crowd. Showy and knowy, they trafficked in rumours about the fellow who was going to address them. The hard long man who was moving to the centre position in front of them. He was wearing the standard African Big Man sunglasses necessary to ward off the wedged throb of late afternoon sun and conceal bloodshot and leer. But he had something else going on, they sensed, a wide-edged smile and a sharp-cut frame and also a jaunt, even a rhythm in his walk. These were the indicators, weren’t they, that this was that new warlord, that Bokarie?

There were always ant lines moving between the northern province and the capital city—refugees and rebels, rustics and random revolutionaries, and with them their assorted wives and goats and children and broken-down elders. Among these travellers, reports had been recently passing back and forth of a dynamo from an outlying village near the Upriver region. Among other things, he was reported to be well spoken and a killer dancer.

He was smiling.

His lips opened.

“Greetings, my new brothers, and on behalf of the General, whose trucks picked you out of your banlieues and boroughs to bring you here today, I offer hearty congratulations on your deciding to join this most worthy mission of ours. Can you guess why we have chosen this place as our training grounds? Look around you. See the flat dead land with the little holes drilled into it everywhere. Once, this was a place thick with huts, trees, animals, fruits. With life! But then someone—and we shall use no names today, in strict obedience to the slander laws that the National Assembly recently appended to the Permanent Emergency Measures—but someone, let us say a certain self-appointed President-for-life who shall go unnamed, had this whole area cut down. Yes, cut down and flattened. And what about those who had lived here? Who had been born and given life and then died on this ground since a time well before even the hungry whites came in their boats and boots? The peoples of this land were swept out like so many husks and feathers, their glories forgotten, my brothers, and for what purpose? For the pinhead Japanese and the loudmouth Mickey Mouses and the blue-haired UNs that the President is always inviting to his palace for his famous trade and aid summits. This was his gift to them. So that, after a long day of getting their feedbags heavy with our treasure, they could drop their little white balls where they pleased.

“This latest pack of outsiders is gone for now. They’ve been scared off, terrified like our old French masters of trying to hunt anything that can run in two directions. Because they’ve heard that the men of this nation have found a great light, that they—that we—are taking courage because we have been granted a new leader, a good and brave and ready man. I have met him, my brothers. The General. He has told me himself that he shall right every wrong, every imprisonment, every evacuation, every marble statue that the great soft sow, our beloved and swollen-bellied President, has birthed in the name of what he calls National Progress!

“We say enough with progress. We say it is time for repairs. The General has decided the hour has come, at last, to do something about the sorry state of our beloved Atwenty. Our country is the sickest man in Africa, or so the Western papers are cawing. And do you know what the General says to this? He says, fine, let’s get a little sicker, let’s hurt a little more. Because he knows, like we all do, my brothers, that you need to bleed a wound before it can heal.”

A voice cried out, raw, blood-lusty and confirming. Almost immediately the rest joined in, their eyes only for a passing moment searching each other’s for affirmation that, yes, this was the right response, what was wanted. So they gave back to the man standing before them, their heads swirling with possibilities, their mouths going wider and blacker with want and rage. Like open graves.

It had been a plant, one of Bokarie’s brothers, standing in the middle of the now-yawping audience, who had yelled on cue and so brought out of the rest their pledges to the General’s National Restitution Campaign. Their howling sounds were taken as positive signs by the men in charge; they also made Bokarie strut some, so he let them rev a little longer. Stalking around, he noticed Charles, the General’s chief aide-de-camp, nodding. The man who had discovered Bokarie back in Uncle’s beer bar was pleased with himself, with his eye for such talent. He was also impressed at how quick a study the young man, from the outer rim no less, had proven of the rhetoric and premises necessary to get the Upriver mission under way. These had only been shared with him a few days earlier, upon his coming to the capital city in place of the former new warlord of his village, Foday. He must have been blessed this way, Charles thought, a natural at tongue-twisting men to his purposes.

Bokarie was giving this speech as part of his responsibilities to and from the General. Upon reaching the capital city and meeting him, Bokarie had been informed that it would be in the best interests of various parties, the Nation and the People included, were there something along the lines of a sanitation program implemented in the Upriver lands, since that was where the filth-bathing President hailed from. Such an undertaking would limit the President’s support in advance of a coup d’état c’est moi that the General, ever hedgy, was considering considering, as he explained to Bokarie in the loud confessional mode he preferred. And then, dangling more sweets before the child’s open mouth, the General told the young man that were it a successful cleanup, as new President he would need loyal and capable governors for the nation’s various provinces, including the crucial one to the north.

Hearing this offer, Bokarie gorged on what it could mean were he to empty out the Upriver lands of their rutting residents. The possibility became his prime mover, and he focused on it with especial hardness after a little heartbreak came his way. The General had invited his girl Elizabeth—his dance partner, whom Bokarie had brought with him to the capital for a view of the greatness coming his way after his disco beat-job on the old warlord Foday—to be his new policy adviser on women’s health and welfare issues. And she accepted.

After telling his cousin and brothers this news over swigs, Bokarie observed that he had every right to go after the General. Cradling his courage and peeling away at its label, he mused openly that he might even do it with a little of his famous bottle work, an idea that was well received.

Swelled as usual from his words, Bokarie’s brothers and cousin promised to hold down the General’s aides while Bokarie had at the big man. They had added incentive: two were themselves recently abandoned by Marigold, the girl they had long shared, whom Bokarie had saved from Foday but then avoided, because that’s what a hard man like Bokarie did. She had also accompanied them, only to start working for some foreign big shot known as Ngo, who, from the name, as far as Bokarie’s brother and cousin could figure, was either Kenyan or Japanese. The boys knew they would never have lost Marigold to a bigger man had the General left them all to their beer bar fun back home. They had grudges to work from as well.

But to their surprise Bokarie decided against the move. Instead, he vowed never again to let a woman matter for anything except that fur below her fangs, which was a statement he dragged and pushed off his tongue after taking another swallow at his bottle for ache and numb and guts. Then, drawing his blood men close, he explained that having taken over his girl, the General would be forced to grant Bokarie more power, this being the standard recompense for more flesh. Bokarie invoked the great King David as his historical precedent, noting that after he had bedded Bathsheba, David granted her husband Uriah pride of place in battle. At least, in his rummy swirl and heap of self-pity, that was how Bokarie chose to remember the moral of the story. Because beneath his bravura words and despite more throat-bulging swigs, there was something hurt here, from how she had smiled at him from down below the orphanage wall a few years earlier and pulled him out of that life and been warm and firm to sleep beside afterwards. All of which was enough to make Bokarie want to go against him. But then again, the General had mostly gold teeth and they weren’t going to be knocked out so easily and there were those other possibilities to consider, to take as consolation.

The next morning, after cleaning some vomit from his shoes and draining a few coconuts to soothe his head, he presented himself with hot readiness, spotlessly ignoring his old girl setting the tea service while he volunteered, declared to the General that he was the man to lead the first recruitment drive for the National Restitution Campaign. He would supervise the gathering up and training of the gaggles of young men to be found around the capital city, would play a little soccer to bend them his way. His fine words would tempt them away from their roughshod blank lives, because he knew how to shine up promises of money and meals and mayhem. And before heading Upriver, he further guaranteed, he would supplement these forces by grabbing extra fighters. Not just the men he had recently come to rule in his old village, but also boys waiting to be liberated from a nearby orphanage. He knew how to scale the wall, if necessary, or to sweet-talk the good Father.

Listening to this pitch, the General decided to be only partway convinced. He was a bit bitter at Bokarie because the previous night the girl he’d picked off the young man’s arm hadn’t brought him to nearly as much release as he had expected. He crossed arms and went silent at Bokarie’s opening volley. His teeth a little grit, Bokarie bent forward and gave more. He tried out the speech he was planning to give to the recruits, at least what he was going to say to them about the wonder-leader, the peace hawk, the man coming soon who held the nation’s salvation in his hands.

Satisfied and reminding Bokarie once more not to use his actual name because of complicated issues best not delved into just yet, the General happily signalled his assent with a kingly flick of his ringed fingers, and then, remembering he wasn’t there yet, not yet, gave the boy an immoderate embrace. He awarded Bokarie full command over the Upriver operation, which was to begin immediately with a discreet, hush-hush recruitment drive in the capital. The General also promised to send missives to the other warlords in the northern province, directing them to answer to Bokarie alone. At this further expansion of his power, the young man swooned. While Bokarie sucked away at a sugar cube and marvelled at himself, the General enjoyed the absolution he’d just won in giving the young man this commission. Such a statesman’s decision, he thought—the boy was like an overgrown fingernail, something useful for digging out ear and nose dirt, which could be clipped and tossed away. This new girl, the General decided as he slurped up the spillage from his saucer and concluded the meeting, was about the same. A tea bag not worth a second dipping.

II.

Their yelling died down to a happy angry buzz, by which time Bokarie had returned to his front-and-centre position before the recruits. He was ready to continue his address, this time with a prop, a nervous chicken fluttering in a crate at his feet. The rest of the recruiting team, arrayed across the driving range in front of the crowd, were also, to a man, standing before nervous chickens in crates. They’d decided to use chickens as part of training exercises and morale building when, earlier that day, Bokarie’s cousin had recalled a popular bachelor’s sport from their village wedding feasts and applied its logic to their present purposes. Persuaded, Bokarie waved his arm at his brothers and fowl were liberated from a passing truck on its way to market. Unharmed, the driver was indifferent at the loss. It was just another gunpoint intervention by patriots looking after the greater good, the People, etc.

“But the General can’t save our nation alone,” Bokarie continued, “or, as yet, with the army he commands, since many of its officers are fellow tribesmen of the President himself. Like a grub-filled slab of meat, the army crawls with so many greedy little beasts that would only try to take away what belongs to us, and this is why, he has told me, the General cannot look there for support. But to bring our cause to its proper end, for now, he needs to be seen as supporting the government and the rule of law. For now. On this, brothers, we must believe him.”

Which they did, feeling the fresh tug on the heart and trill in the blood that comes from a touch, a promise, a chance to be part of something finer, greater, firmer, fuller than one’s cracked little self. This General the speaker was describing was undoubtedly a Great Man. He would be, at last, a proper father for the nation, for each and for all of them. Or so they were expecting, needing, hoping. Because this audience was young enough, sons left fatherless by war and disease and indifference, to still want a good man to watch over them, and also too young, as citizens of a status quo African country stuck with the bruises and bust-ups of its post-independence life, to know any better.

He was persuasive, he knew, but he wanted to be sure they would have no other possibilities to tempt them. He also wanted to let his tongue keep at its business a little longer. So he kept at them.

“As for bringing about some kind of good change for ourselves through ‘blessed are the peacemakers and their peacekeepers,’ we should know by now that this will never come. What we render to all those Caesars that feed on us just makes them want more. And from the outside? The Americans only look our way when their cars need gas or when they want to find the Mohammeds and Alis who steal their planes. And the rest of the world? Any money they send just goes to more brass toilets and German washing machines for the People’s Palace.

“As for the inside, do I really need to explain this? You already know about the men we have chosen from our own villages and families to take our case to the capital, how they leave us promising to battle the evildoers and then become their perfume merchants and diamond jockeys. Who never return home, only hole up in the capital and come out to pose for pictures with the rock gods and beg for adoption by the tit-flaring movie stars that jet in every other week. They have not helped you yet, and they never will. And they won’t help the General either, to pick that scab off the People’s throne. Because what if then they lose their airplane vouchers and hot plates and their daily rations of whoreflesh? But they don’t matter. Their support isn’t wanted anyway, nor does the General need it. But he needs you, he needs all of us, because what must be done to bring healing and peace to our nation only ends with a justice done in the palace! It begins, everything begins, my brothers, Upriver!”

No plant was needed to get them roaring this time. Bokarie let them go on awhile, enjoying it, enjoying what it let him forget and who it let him replace as the grounds for his goodness, his greatness. He bent down to the box and took the chicken by its wing joints, bending them backwards enough to keep the bird from moving but without snapping its breastbone. He had learned this hold as a boy, had watched others do it, others who had talked and laughed and read together from a book at night while he was lying beside them, officially sleeping. They were gone now. Had been for a long while. But this was no time to be thinking of back then. He brought the good hard rage around him back under his spell and readied it for action.

“No doubt you’ve noticed the chicken I have here. And you’ve seen the others with them up and down the line. In a few moments we’re going to release these onto the plain behind me, and as your first act of training and a taste of your future rewards, you will try to catch them and kill them. I needn’t tell you which of our beloved national leaders this chicken most resembles, but we couldn’t find pigs fat and wheezy enough to do the part, so this is the next best thing!”

By this point the young men had gone delirious with the wreck and wildness they were soon to make, and Bokarie was himself inebriated with the sound of so many cheering and gnashing at his words.

“All of you, in some way or another, have suffered under the President’s rule because you were not fated, thank your stars, to be born into his pig trough of a tribe. And this is why you were chosen to come here today. Like your fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers, you have all gone hungry on this our native land because of the chicken cock that sits high and mighty above us, a man who has let his own tribe, for oh so very long, peck away on maize and fatten up on mealy soil while we’ve dug at dry dirt and found only vipers and dead seed. And so”—here he gave a signal to his men to get ready with their birds—“as a flavour of what’s to come, my brothers, go after these chickens. Any man who returns with one of them limp in his hands will be toasted for glory and honour and praise by myself and his mates. He will also get the bird, all of it, roasted for his dinner. My brothers, my patriots, this begins your mission to the nation! Catch them, kill them, catch them and kill them, catch them kill them, catchthemkillthem catchthemkillthem catchthemkillthem catchthemcatchthemkillthemcatchthemkillthem!”

They chanted along and sprinted past him, their stomachs and throats growling as they poured out across the abandoned golf course. The chickens squawked in terror and darted around in confusion, losing a few feathers with their every duck and dive, and then a few more, and then a few more, with each pass under all the mad hungry hands.

III.

“When a dog has gone and shat where he’s not supposed to, what’s to be done with the stupid beast?”

The phone connection was shot through with static, so Bokarie asked the speaker to repeat himself. He refused to believe that this was how the General was advising him after receiving news of the first raid. Their opening incursion into the Upriver region, to take a border village, had been a poor showing. The boys had enthusiastically, straightforwardly applied their on-the-links training, which meant that they raided the village’s chicken coops and copped and groped for grabs of its women and girls until their men came at them swinging rifle butts and drove them off. This choice of defence cut Bokarie to the marrow—that this first group of Upriver men were so little scared of his fighters that they didn’t even bother wasting bullets on what they regarded as a bunch of teeny bashers. Only one straggler, who turned up a day later at their makeshift camp downriver, returned with harder evidence of the lesson the rest were meant to have about challenging the mighty Upriver people. His ears were a little dog-chewed and his foot had been clubbed against a cinder block. Also, an arm had been machete-dropped into a burlap bag and hung round his bashful neck.

“I don’t know, Monsieur le Général, do you give the dog a kick in the ribs?”

On the other end the General laughed, his tongue rich with rue and, it being late in the afternoon, maybe a daub of rum. The static of the poor connection syncopated the sound into something like a song, one that Bokarie might have been dancing to these days, had he kept his elbows to himself. He clenched at this warm gurring, wondering whether the General was laughing at him for being such a dunce as to not know how to deal with a dog, let alone a collection of men, or laughing at himself for believing that Bokarie was capable of the duties and capacities he’d been granted.

“If you kick a dog in the ribs, my boy, the dog will slink away, but that doesn’t tell it where it’s supposed to shit or why. So it’ll do it again and again, shitting the wrong way, because it can only learn from what you put in front of it. Which is why, when a dog has gone and shat, as I said, you don’t just kick the dog and hope it does better next time. You bag the shit and shove its face in it and then it’ll know, it’ll learn, it’ll feel, what it means to make such a mistake. Men are the same way, Bokarie. When they dirty something, shove their faces in it, roll their noses around in it for a while, make them smell and touch their wrong. And I tell you, it won’t happen a second time. Do you understand my meaning now? Yes? Then get to work. Chop-chop!”

Of course he understood the General’s meaning, though he jumped a little at the General’s bark. Or at least Bokarie told him he understood, at which point he was floridly reassured of the General’s absolute faith in him and his men. Then Bokarie was reminded, once more, of the roles to be had in the future, were present events to go as originally planned. The General wished him luck and Godspeed in advance of the next progress report he was to give, which was to occur after they had another go at the first village and then, immediately afterwards, a push farther north along the river. It was vital to keep to schedule, Bokarie was reminded. The General had deadlines of his own in mind.

Thinking of which, he cut Bokarie off, midway through a striving rehearsal of the remarks he was planning to give to any survivors of their next, their sure to be more successful second effort to take the border village. Looking too far ahead in our country usually gets your head cut off, the General warned. Bokarie just needed to get his dogs shitting in the right places and leave it at that for now. “Because,” the General said, draining his tumbler, “then all would be right as rain, good as gold, red as red as red can be.”

He then thanked Bokarie once more for his support and guaranteed the young man that he still had much confidence in him. He clicked the receiver down and harrumphed, looking out his window across the stumpy baobabs and over at the paint-peeled grandeur of the People’s Palace. All of his plans were as straw, the General thought, if this jitterbugging butcher boy turned out to be nothing more than a one-hit wonder.

IV.

“For now at least, your name will be Jesse, is that understood?”

The man shrugged and asked for more pills and then clutched once more at the scabrous knob where his arm had recently been. Phantom pain. What was left felt like an avocado seed, hard and slippery smooth and dangling some pulpy bits of blacked-up meat. A long day after his chat with the General, Bokarie hit upon a plan to prepare his men for a second putsch, which he drew in part from Foday and Father Alvaro, in addition to the Almighty. His arm-twisting tactics and stump-pumping word spinning proved successful, though they seeded doubt in his cousin and brothers, for the very first time, about their head man. Who, since the time he had had them line the orphanage wall’s trench for his bottle-shard thrusts, was always, if nothing else, a dazzling original. They had basked, by devoted association, in his singular talents. But with the first raid a failure and now Bokarie stealing material from others, they questioned their loyalty and his ability to get them the DVDs and local virgins he kept promising once the General named him governor. But was he even worthy of such a title? In time, because one of them was responsible for communications operations, they started sharing these concerns, via a static phone connection, with a generous would-be benefactor in the capital city. Quietly of course. Very hush-hush.

At present, though, they followed Bokarie’s order and reassembled the recruits so something could be said about their recent showing. The boys were almost all still there, nervous and bored, moping and limping around the temporary camp they’d struck. They remained because the General had only given Bokarie one big juicy rainbow bundle of cash to wave in front of the eye-wide audience, back at the golf range, as an indication of the promised payment. None of them understood inflation. And regardless, the promised remainder of the first instalment had yet to arrive in camp. Supply line problems, some thought; a hijacked courier, others had heard; just a miscommunication about location, the optimists predicted. But they were all starting to feel it in their bones. No money was coming for what they were doing, but for now it was all they could cite as a reason to stay, it being a many days’ walk from here to the capital city, with more whack-happy Upriver types to face along the route.

Of the two fighters who had deserted, one was an ex-orphan of the former Father Alvaro’s. Knowing no alternative, he headed towards his old village, but his bearings were off and he went in the opposite direction, reaching another Upriver village around the time Bokarie’s force was hitting its stride. The village elder stuffed his ears against the man’s explanations and disavowals, and an hour later the remains were tossed near the chipped beef tins that collected behind the local canteen for area scavengers to take care of. This was done in case the Grin Reaper, as Bokarie came to be known around Upriver because of how he brought them death and destruction with a smile, found evidence that one of his men had died in the village, which might inspire his men to seek more than just their vengeant brands of peace and justice and redistribution. The other deserter wasn’t heard from for some time, but when he turned up again, he was well received, mostly for the fancy company he brought with him.

The rest were grouped together as they had been on the driving range, but this time the mood was glum and low and the faces long with callow. They were a band of sour teenagers little different from any other, showing in their looks the expectation of punishment for their versions of broken curfews and busted tail lights, and not wanting to grant their fathers the pleasure of their mea culpas. Bokarie stalked out in front of them, hoping he could summon the right passage when the time came and that his words would rally the listeners to the cause of a carved-up comrade. Shaking his head, he began to pace and bop before their down-turned faces. He kept at this for a long while, building enough tension to make the whole lot jump when he barked his first words.

“Chop-chop!” he opened. “Do you know what this means, any of you? Chop-chop!” They jumped again, their birdcage chests pounding with the possibilities being laid out for them. “Do you know that the General said this to me when I spoke with him by phone yesterday, when I had to tell him what happened on our first mission? He said this because he wanted me to make an example of one of you, to teach the others what happens to patriots when they don’t conduct themselves honourably while on their country’s business. Because he was ashamed, as was I, as should you be, at what happened. After all the trust placed in us, in you, this is the result? Going after chickens and women and then running and screaming like chickens and women when the Upriver pigs come at you waving their sticks? So, to remind you of the bravery and honour you’ve agreed to, the General ordered me—chop-chop!” This third time they heard the words, they turned in to each other a little, quivering.

Bokarie let up a moment and motioned for his cousin to bring him the burlap bag. Then he beckoned the man he was calling Jesse to join him. Various shudders and whispers went through the crowd. Some knew this had happened to the boy in the border village. Others wondered, with the altruism of private relief, if this poor sap had already received punishment on behalf of the rest.

“The Upriver pigs obeyed the General’s orders before I could,” Bokarie continued, after embracing the cowering boy and then gripping him by his good shoulder. The boy kept reaching, in vain, for the other. “They sent this brother, Jesse is his name, back to us like this, with his arm in this sack, as a warning, as a reminder to us that they are stronger, harder, madder than we are. And so I ask, do you agree?” Bokarie knew a plant wouldn’t work this time; the crowd had grown familiar with his entourage. His stomach fell some as they slouched in tacit answer to his question and then seemed, as lectured teenagers are wont to do, to go away for a while. They were fondly recalling their old easy useless lives in the slums of the capital city. Each to himself, they were sniffing and sniffling that they didn’t care about any fat stack of money or the stupid General or his stupid campaign anymore. They were longing for a return home, but then Bokarie whistled and brought them back, a frustrated coach, job on the line, trying to redeem a failing pep talk.

“So then, yes, you do agree? You’re that weak, that soft, that womanish? If so, then why don’t you give up on the General and suck at the President’s milk bags? Go ahead and leave, there’s no room on this squad for such types. You’re acting like his children anyways.” Bokarie spat out this last line, flung it at them like a skein of phlegm. But the insult was also a gamble, he knew, with the dejected air hanging over the camp since their bashed-up return. If even a few were to break away now, he realized, the rest would follow. And he would be left holding a bag of arm, of shit, of his prospects. But before this could happen to him, Bokarie started smiling, forced confidence turning up the corners of his mouth. Everything he had said, they would see, had been mere preparation. Having scorched them with the righteous flame of his anger, he had some lamb words ready.

“I don’t believe that about any of you. I know you have strength within you, that you need more than the tasks given to you to bring it out. As if running after chickens was enough to suggest your talent! This is why I have Jesse beside me today, whose suffering, my brothers, shall be our inspiration. And so I promise to all of you that when we return to that village tomorrow, the spirit of the Lord will rest upon us, a spirit of strength that will put fear in other men’s hearts, and you, in revenge for our brother and for oh so many others, you shall strike the ruthless you will find with your rods and slay the wicked who lay up there with your knives, and justice shall be wrapped around your waist and patriotism a belt upon your hips. Because”—here he guided the distracted boy forward, who, being actually named Philip and shot through with codeine, had little awareness of or interest in the part he was playing in Bokarie’s speech as it reached its climax—“many shoots shall sprout from the stump of Jesse, my brothers. For our General, our nation, our Jesse!”

On cue, rusty rifles were distributed to the recruits to supplement their machetes. East German surplus that hadn’t arrived in time for the first raid. They would all jam with the first firings.

The reaction, the lack of one, to Bokarie’s rousing address surprised him. He had been expecting, if not a chocolate prize for his fine scriptural elocution and creative memory, at least another rush of voices at his phrases, as had happened on the golf course and, before then, whenever he described how he took down his opponent Foday and, before that, from below the orphanage wall. But the boys hadn’t throated up, as expected, at his grand ending. This was indifference to his words, to him. He didn’t like it. He would work up some new material for next time, he decided, though he was worried that maybe the Bible had outgrown its usefulness.

But even if his speech didn’t get them going, Bokarie noticed with some relief that the timely gun distribution was having a good effect anyway. Most were clamouring after them and then, like children on Christmas morning, sliding around the parts of their new toys and imaging scenarios for their use. As some paired off and exchanged slow-motion re-creations of the rifle butt punishments that the Upriver men had given them, Bokarie accepted that his current prop, the renamed amputee, and his words, the punched-up bit from Isaiah, and even himself—that none of this was so crucial all of a sudden. Next time, yes, he’d do better. For now he had to consider the matter at hand, and he began to think that perhaps the first defeat had been worth something. Because at least his fighters now had some smack of memory to feed from and private desires for future reckonings. Which meant, most importantly, that they were still movable to his plans and the General’s directives.

But still, his tongue felt like a cramped eel. His mouth was crammed full with good writ. He couldn’t resist. He decided the boys needed more convincing. A touch more.

“You are remembering, I can see, what’s been done to you and now you have in your hands the way to return the favour.” They looked up at him, semi-interested. “But we will fail, brothers, if we act each for himself. This is why I want you to feel another memory before we go back to give them some of their own. Tomorrow you will spring and shoot out, victoriously, at the Upriver swine. But first you will know, each man for himself, what’s been done to one of your own, and what’s to be done to them in revenge. Bellies for bellies, yes, and now arms for arms!” This got at least some snorts of agreement. He ordered a line to form and file forward.

They processed past, their rifles low slung, and casually saluted and hailed him. Bokarie tolerated their swaggering because of what was then happening to each when he had them reach into the riper and riper bag to feel and wince at and study the mushy pointlessness of a chopped limb. (Jesse died from infection a few days later, a vague martyr.)

None of the men complained when their rifles failed to fire at pinkish dawn the following morning, because this let them swing away and chop instead. True to newly inspired and recently corrected form, they ignored the chicken coops this time and simply knocked down the women they passed as they went at the village’s men, whose pride in their prior victory left them surprised at how fast and hard this second effort came. They were quickly dispatched, pate-cracked and machete-dealt. Eventually the jouncy leader of these hack-hardy teenagers arrived, having hung back because he felt this was conducive to the image he was rubbing into a fine glow, of a leader above the fray who provided a concluding flourish to the proceedings. So, as the bound-up prisoners and back-slapping victors together watched, Bokarie was driven into the village by one of his brothers. He danced a little victory jig on the jawbone of the ass-sprawled village elder. The man’s dog came out and growled and whimpered and Bokarie loosely shot at it, tearing out the side of its belly. It slumped away. Then he pronounced the area officially claimed as part of the National Restitution Campaign and offered terms for peace and reconciliation to the next eldest survivor.

Judging the evidence around him, the man accepted immediately and Bokarie embraced him, whispering in his ear what would happen if the man didn’t do likewise. They had to demonstrate their healing and friendship before those gathered. As instructed, Bokarie then invited himself to a burial ceremony for the recently passed elder and did likewise with his family there, emphasizing sympathy on behalf of the General and reminding each of the grieving that justice took great pains to get done. The clenched were stunned, as much by the hack and ruin around them as by the audacity of this grinning reaper’s response to what he’d just brought off, his whispering what were to them sweet nothings from the Psalms about bones being crushed so that spirits could be revived. They could do little more than go limp in Bokarie’s arms and wonder where the rest of the bodies were and hope they could make it to a refugee camp before they heard that chanting come up the road again.

Meanwhile, Bokarie’s men cheered lustily at their own success and with his encouragement did a little more dancing and reconciling of their own. They swept through the last of the huts, turning them into private commissaries and, as opportunities kicked and screamed and were forced to present, occasional bordellos. Soon enough, though, the hoarding and humping had emptied out all the huts and groins, but there was still nervous, vicious energy to be spent, as if they knew that to stop now was either to go back to their glum, waiting-around lives or to invite a reckoning with what they’d chosen to do to avoid them. So things intensified. Clay braziers, like the old people slumped around them, were kicked over and cracked. Children were chased down and tossed around like teddy bears while mothers bartered their shrunken paps to retrieve them. Then someone hit upon the idea of tearing up a shirt to pick a lump of coal from a broken brazier and drop it down a woman’s top. They watched her shriek and dance to get it out and chanted and clapped to help her move. There were multiple encores.

Eventually Bokarie broke up the festivities with the promise of more to come. There was a timetable to keep to. He left a few of the squadron leaders in place as constables and sent word to allied neighbouring tribes that there was fertile land newly freed for their use.

Stumps sprouted and limbs sprung across the Upriver lands that spring, and word started moving around. It eventually buzzed down to the capital city’s barracks and an unmarked campaign headquarters and then to the People’s Palace and inevitably into the hotel press rooms.

A BBC man had an early scoop on the developing story. While interviewing a fresh set of migrants headed to the capital, he came across a deserter from some previously unknown rebel movement that had recently tried to take a border village in the Upriver region. For a squishy bar of Fruit & Nut, the limping callow youth told the reporter about the golfing range training and the first raid. En route to Upriver, having convinced the boy he’d be known as a friend to the world if he helped track down his old mates, the BBC man and his techie speculated whether this thing might have enough legs for an extended piece, or even, if they could just get rid of the damned static on the satellite phone, a live-feed interview on Newshour. Auntie’s interest had been piqued by their initial proposal, which included a clip of the youth telling about a deadly chicken-catching ritual. Voodoo rites always played well to the home audience. He also spoke of the man leading the new charge into the President’s tribal lands. He was apparently a bit of a fine-words-and-fancy-footwork warlord, that one.

When the reporter reached Bokarie and first let the young men roving around him play for a while in front of a lens-capped camera, he interviewed the dapper-tongued leader in an exclusive. This was during a heat-induced lull in the Restitution drive, and Bokarie whiled away the sun-beat afternoon by fencing with the reporter about rumours of a disco bar bottle drive to an early challenger’s neck. Impressed by the demure way the warlord responded to an account of his own legend, while his entourage crowded into the frame to confirm and embroider it, the BBC man decided he’d stick around and see what came of this. As a result, he had occasion to record the only extant footage of Bokarie making his most famous speech.

The reporter had it confiscated during an army checkpoint search when he returned to the capital. Labelling it stock wildlife footage didn’t convince them. The video, he learned upon later inquiry through one of his sources in military affairs, would not be going to England as intended. And if its owner tried to figure out which General it mentioned, he wouldn’t be either.

There will always be growing pains when a great nation is reborn! If a few sandals fall into the fire, or a little woman blood mixes into the ashes, what great loss is this? My brothers, it is no loss. My own mother, my own woman, my own child – they have fled, have starved, have been killed in the first wars of the new history, after the British and the French and the Germans left us to fight amongst ourselves for the right to tend our own fires. Meanwhile, the tribes Upriver have guns and electric and water and maize. They have as many goats in their fields as we have vultures above our huts. Do you wonder why? They worship the swine that squeals in the capital city, our self-appointed President-for-life, who sells our wives and daughters to Nike Red Cross U.S. of A. Who protects the Upriver villagers and fills their troughs because they are all of that snub-nosed, mongrel tribe.

There is one man who can put an end to this. The General. And he has told me that only the eldest and purest people of our beloved homeland can help him cleanse what has been soiled. This is why he has asked us to reclaim our ancient lands as part of his National Restitution Campaign. This is why we must crush the chirping locusts that sing of the President’s greatness and slaughter the dancing baboons that step to his orders. This is why we will at last greet rosy pink morning from the moist earth that your fathers’ fathers left to you. Brothers! When they desire mercy, you shall make of them a sacrifice! For our sons, for our General, for our nation!

After a few deliveries, Bokarie found his stump speech banal. He gave it from the flatbeds of derelict aid trucks to cap off pre-raid rallies on the outskirts of various Upriver settlements, before he sent the men off chanting their catch them kill them and sunken belly songs. The stump speech had become his standard because of the guaranteed response it gave. Though trite by comparison with the oratories he knew he had in him if only given the right ears to trumpet into, it proved to be the easiest way to keep his men pushing towards their final target. Which was officially known, by decree of the President’s office, as the World-Famous Village of Our Beloved President’s Glorious Birth, with Actual Manger in Which He Was Born Preserved to This Day and Recently Restored to Its Golden Humble Majesty.

While supervising the recomposing of the Upriver lands, Bokarie had no choice but to give up, eventually, on the Bible as an aid to his own great and terrible words, save a snippet from Hosea. It just didn’t get a rise out of people anymore. He had tried a few more portions after his Jesse bits had flopped—of Isaiah, then some of the harsher Psalms, even a little Judith when a few women joined up—but to little success. They just wanted the regular lines; the veterans enjoyed mouthing along, the new recruits demanded the speech because they had heard tell of it and wanted to experience it in person. Most of the Bible-fed orphans he’d taken from Father Alvaro’s, who at least could have appreciated his scriptural brio, had been cut down in the early going. That was unfortunate. Not even his brothers and cousin were sympathetic to his complaints of soul sap from saying the same thing again and again, only the more distracted as they were by their little conversations with each other. And so that stumpy speech would stay with him afterwards, until he finally found occasion for new listeners and new material.

After a few months, Bokarie was growing impatient for his mission to finish, so that he could be called down in glory to the capital and receive his reward, an address to the National Assembly as the newly appointed governor. Such a reception he would get then! His only happiness in those bloody Upriver days was that the General was cramming him with promises in every satellite chat they had along the route to the President’s village. This kept him driving his men towards that destination and reciting the same old same old every time he was introduced and stalked out in front to whip them up for another run. But while enduring this boredom for the coming reward, he became disgusted with his audiences, with their easy chanting and cheering and roiling at his words, at how easily he held them with such vulgar jingles and then sent them off to the General’s business, to their hacking and hollering and exterminating. The brutes.