You can’t understand unless you comprehend what it is to be a true Fulani herdsman. Our creator Geno first crafted stone, then stone crafted iron, then iron crafted fire, then fire crafted water, then water crafted air. When the chain reaction was complete and the Great Experiment had cooled, Geno descended again. This time, the creator took the five elements and crafted the cow, then woman, then man. From a drop of milk, Geno extracted the universe, and, now, even in the desert, the rivers of milk flow. That is our most ancient cosmogony. It’s mostly forgotten, but I bring it back, I remember it and I will teach it to my future daughters and sons and they will remember it, too.
Before the Red Eye, we were almost gone. Most of us left the lifestyle or were killed off. First the desert swallowed the lands we’d roamed for centuries. What used to offer our steer plenty of food, became barren packed dirt, stone, and sand. We moved south and many of us, disenchanted and enraged by loss, began to violently clash with farming communities. Most of us even let our steer go and took up arms and fought and took from the farmers. They killed us, we killed them. The government tried to force us to settle, but nomads will always be nomads and thieves will always thieve. Plus, farmers will never share land. That is not their nature. So the killing started again. The farmers won, nearly wiping us out.
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.
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.
I watched them surround Ibrahim and hack him to death and then his wife as she tried to run away. Others began hacking at his cattle. It was horrific, the precision. They knew exactly where to cut to take down a steer in one chop. They worked so fast. As if they had trained for this! Then they took Aminu. His wife only stood there in shock. She didn’t try to run. She was the one with two children and she didn’t try to run. Then Aminu’s cattle and mine, too. The whole street began to smell like blood. I don’t know why, but I just stood there as Aminu had. Yet no one noticed me. I was still in my moment, I pulled the town into me, I’d settled on its surfaces, into its crevices. Maybe that’s why it took so long for anyone to see me or my cattle.
I heard a steer near me bellow. A guttural sound. It had already been chopped down. Those were death cries. Star. She was falling in pain and a woman standing over her had a machete raised. She was going to chop at Star again. This was when I finally raised the gun I’d always kept slung over my shoulder, and I fired. I did this before I even knew I did and the woman twitched and stumbled back, Star still braying in pain. There was a mist of blood from where the bullets hit the woman. I felt it spray over me. Now the air smelled of her blood, Star’s blood, so much blood. It wasn’t the first time I’d had to kill, and I still screamed.
More chopping sounds and then bang and bang, again. They were shooting some of the steer in the head. Executions. More townspeople had come to kill the rest of my cattle. For some reason, no one came for me as they did my friends. There were people from that town all around me. Mouths open, machetes raised, guns up, shooting, hacking, blood and flesh in their eyes, on their hands, spattering their feet, flying in the air. But no one saw me. Even after I’d shot the woman.
At some point, I turned and called my cattle and those of us who could, ran. Only two of my thirty cattle made it out of that town with me. Two! They killed the rest, along with my comrades. The road was dirt, despite all the brick and mortar buildings and autonomous vehicles made for the paved road. This served us well, because when we ran, we kicked up clouds of dust, making it harder for them to follow. I jumped on my cow Carpe Diem and rode her and that was how the three of us escaped.
When we reached a place over a hill that led into the desert, we stopped. I brought out my phone. I saw the news. They were calling my friends and me “herdsman terrorists” and said we’d returned there to attack the town yet again and instead gotten attacked. It reported the “victory” as a blow against herdsman violence after a great tragedy. I saw one photo before I shut my phone. It showed the townspeople celebrating, as if they’d won a war. People in the photo were roasting the meat of the cattle they’d killed over open fires. Some of those had to have been mine. Had they even removed the bodies of my friends? Or did they roast and eat them, too, in their violent fog?
And now, here you come into my troubled life.