I. The Arrival
The white man returns on a river made of smoke.
I hear him before I see him—the sharp scream of his whistle, the churn of his metal paddles slapping the river like a giant’s drumbeat. Children rush to the shore, pointing, eyes wide. A few of them cheer. My youngest son, Mboya, mimics the whistle with cupped hands, but it comes out shrill and wild, like a bird being strangled.
I do not cheer.
His boat, Peace, arrives angry. It hisses, spits, belches blackness that settles over the reeds and coats the cooking fires in ash. Even the fish retreat when it comes. A canoe returns from the bend in silence. No one speaks until the thing is tied to the tree we call Mukonzi wa Maji—the River’s Chief. Its roots drink from the same mud we do. Its bark is the color of my grandfather’s back.
The boat moans as it’s lashed to the shore. The white man emerges with his coat pressed smooth, like it fears the wind. His skin glows red from heat, but he smiles, always smiles. Behind him, his men carry boxes of gifts on their heads—cloth, mirrors, salt, a gun wrapped in oilcloth. And paper. Always paper.
I stand waiting in the same spot as last time, under the fig tree beside the meeting fire. I wear the necklace my father gave me, carved from hippo tooth, polished over years of speech and sweat. I hold my staff.
I do not move when he steps off the boat.
He is called Henry Morton Stanley by his people—they say, perhaps the most famous person in all the world. He had found one of his own people—called Livingston, who had gone missing for six years while searching for the source of a great river his people call “Nile.” I do not know how a white man can go missing in Africa and not be found in short order or how that can make another white man famous. The white man has strange customs, but I do not judge. I simply observe.
We call this man called Henry, “Bula Matari.” Breaker of Rocks. He came from the east, they say, with boots that do not wear and a tongue that splits rivers. My people repeat his stories like warnings. They say he walked with fire on his back. That even the crocodiles opened their jaws to let him pass. I’ve seen what’s left when he goes. Trees cut down to make wide roads. Villages eaten by fire. Names swallowed.
This is his third visit. I have seen none of this.
Each time he returns, he brings more men, more boxes, more confidence.
He does not sit when I offer the mat. He walks past it and nods once, like a king acknowledging a child. His translator—Mpemba, a boy from the coast with polished shoes and a thin mustache—follows him like a loyal dog. I do not like Mpemba. His eyes are quick and quiet. His words slither.
“Good chief,” Mpemba says, with a bow too deep to be honest. “The great Bula Matari greets you with peace.”
The white man nods. Then turns away, inspecting the tree, the firepit, the children behind me. I do not move.
“What does he want?” I ask.
Mpemba smiles. “Only to renew your friendship. To offer alliance. To bring civilization to your people.”
“And what does civilization require from us?”
The white man reaches into his bag and pulls out a long scroll—crisp paper that rolls like snake skin. He lays it across a flat drum. I cannot read it. Its symbols crawl like insects in rows, looped and spiked. At the bottom is a line with a space beside it.
He places his finger there. Then taps the drum.
“It is only formality,” Mpemba says, soft and coaxing. “A gesture. A joining of hands. He will bring roads. Schools. Honor. The flag of the great king will fly beside yours.”
The white man gestures to his men. They drop a bundle on the mat—cloth dyed in colors too clean to be real, beads like sugar, a small brass cross, a bolt of salt, and a round medallion with the face of a white man on it. His eyes are empty. His mouth closed forever.
I do not look at the paper. I look at the man.
His hands are too smooth. No scar. No ash. No drum callouses. The eyes behind his smile are measuring.
“What does your flag mean?” I ask.
Mpemba waves toward the boat. “It is a sign of unity. You and the king, side by side.”
“I do not know this king.”
“But he knows you. He sent Bula Matari in friendship.”
The white man raises his hand. Two fingers. Calm. Like a blessing or a command. I cannot tell which.
The cloth flutters in the wind.
I stare at the paper. Then at the inkpot resting beside it.
Thick. Black. Still.
And I wonder—what kind of peace leaves marks that do not wash away?
II. The Offer
Bula Matari sits at last, but not on the mat.
He drags a carved stool from one of his crates and places it carefully beneath him, as though the earth itself might stain him if he touches it too long. His legs cross awkwardly, and his boots creak. They are black and perfect, the kind of leather that has never knelt in mud.
Mpemba crouches beside the paper, tapping it like it’s sacred.
“It is a treaty,” he says, “between you and the king of the Belgians. A bond of trust. A sign of unity in the eyes of the world.”
The world. I glance around at the trees, the children chewing sugarcane, the dog scratching its ear beside the fire pit. This is the world.
Mpemba continues. “The king wishes to protect your land from others. He will send teachers. Builders. Perhaps even a doctor to cure your fevers.”
Bula Matari doesn’t speak. He strokes his mustache with his thumb and stares at a leaf floating in the water. His face is unreadable.
“He asks only your blessing,” Mpemba says.
I look again at the paper. It stretches longer than a man’s arm. The lines are neat, regimented, exact. Not like our drum code or the weaving of fish traps—this is not meant to be felt. It is meant to bind.
The bottom holds two marks: one already signed, in thick foreign ink, and one blank—waiting.
A breeze stirs the scroll. It makes a sound like dried skin being torn.
“What does it say?” I ask.
Mpemba smiles, as if I’m a child asking what stars are made of. “It says you are wise. That you welcome the future. That your name shall be remembered as the one who brought greatness to your people.”
I narrow my eyes. “Then read it. All of it.”
He falters. His tongue moves, but no sound comes. Then, quickly: “It is not necessary, elder. The agreement is good. Bula Matari has written it himself. It is proper.”
I say nothing.
Bula Matari stands. His coat shifts against him like stiff bark. He lifts one of the cloth bolts from the gift pile and holds it out. Blue—deeper than any sky, without blemish. He lays it across the mat like an offering.
A second man steps forward with a bottle—clear, sharp, sweating in the heat. Gin. The air turns sweet and bitter.
A third lays the medal at my feet. It catches the light and spins a thin reflection across my leg.
“These are symbols,” Mpemba says. “Friendship. Honor. Civilization.”
Behind me, the younger men murmur. I feel their breath tighten. The gifts shine, unnatural in this place. I hear the clink of bracelets. I hear my son whisper something to his brother. The children lean closer.
It is not the value that tempts. It is the shape of the moment.
To accept is to please the stranger, to stand tall in the eyes of the village. To reject is to make myself a stone in the path of their hopes.
But something in me holds still.
I kneel beside the drum and run my fingers along the paper’s edge. It is rough, fibrous. It resists, just slightly—like skin remembering the knife.
“What does the king give in return?” I ask.
Mpemba’s answer is quick. “Protection.”
“From whom?”
He hesitates.
And in that hesitation, I hear everything.
Bula Matari steps forward and opens the inkpot. The scent hits me—thick, earthy, like sap left too long in the sun. He sets the pot beside the scroll, along with a reed sharpened to a cruel point.
Then he waits.
His eyes do not blink. His hands do not shake. He waits as if it is already done.
I do not reach for the reed.
I place my hands on my knees.
I breathe.
The wind shifts. The cloth flutters.
Somewhere across the river, a bird screams and is answered by silence.
III. The Choice
The reed waits in the ink like a spear laid flat.
I do not move. The air thickens around me, heavy with sweat and smoke and judgment. I feel the heat of the village’s eyes on my back—my sons, my brother’s son, the elders who say little but remember everything. Their silence forms a circle I cannot leave without stepping through it in shame.
Bula Matari does not blink. He stands the way I’ve seen hunters stand at the edge of a snare—certain the prey will step forward.
Mpemba clears his throat softly. “It would please the king. And your people. The gifts are generous. Your name will live beyond this river.”
My name already lives here, I think. In the hands that carved the boats. In the songs the children sing at the well. In the tree I planted when Mboya was born.
I look down at the scroll again. The blank space yawns like a mouth waiting to be fed.
I remember when I was young, and the men of the Ngala came upriver with a pale cloth and asked for land to build a trading post. They brought mirrors and biscuits and spoke with honeyed voices. My father allowed them a clearing beside the water. Within a year, half the forest was gone, and the soil near the river turned to ash.
He said afterward, “They do not take. They wait for you to give. Then they keep giving your children’s share.”
My thumb hovers over the pot. I say nothing.
Bula Matari nods to one of his men. The man opens a crate and lifts out something wrapped in thick cloth. Carefully, like a relic. He peels back the layers to reveal a rifle—long, polished, gleaming like wet bone.
Mpemba leans closer. “The king protects his friends. You will be strong.”
“Against whom?” I ask again.
There is no answer.
The wind kicks dust across the mat. A baby cries somewhere near the cooking pots, then is hushed. The fire pops.
My brother’s son coughs.
I reach for the reed.
I dip it.
The ink clings like old blood, slow to let go. I press the tip to my thumb, then place it firmly on the paper beside the first mark.
The drumhead shifts under my hand—slight, but enough. Like a warning I feel in the bone.
Bula Matari exhales through his nose. He turns away before I lift my hand.
A smile flashes across Mpemba’s face, but he catches it too late and tries to smooth it.
The rifle disappears back into its cloth. The scroll is rolled tight. The inkpot is sealed.
And just like that, the paper is no longer mine.
That night, I sit alone by the fire.
I do not speak. Mboya plays with a carved goat, unaware. His mother sings low, winding his breath into sleep. The elders have gone to their huts. The cloth and beads are stored in a bowl beside the tree.
I stare at my thumb.
The ink is gone, mostly. But I feel it still.
Not in the skin.
In the marrow.
A gift, they said. An agreement. But I did not agree to give anything. Only to allow.
And yet I feel something has been taken.
Not a field. Not a tree.
Something older. Something deeper. A thread I cannot name.
I close my eyes, and for the first time in many seasons, I feel afraid. Not of war. Not of sickness. But of what I have invited. Of what wears the face of peace and carries no drum.
Of what breaks rocks, not with hammers, but with signatures.
IV. The Omen
The rain does not come.
Three days pass, and the sky remains pale and stretched, like old skin pulled tight. The air tastes of ash and rust. The river runs lower than it should for this time of year, and the frogs along its edge fall silent at dusk, as if they too are waiting for something unnamed.
I wake with a heaviness in my chest, like I have swallowed a stone. The dreams do not leave me—they cling like sweat. Each night I see the scroll again, but longer. Endless. It unrolls across the earth, across my father’s grave, across the back of every child in the village. I chase after it, but my feet sink in ink.
When I speak to the elders, they avert their eyes. Not out of disrespect, but out of confusion. One says nothing. Another says only, “The gift is accepted. The world moves forward.”
But I do not feel it moving forward. I feel it moving underneath.
The cloth—the one Bula Matari gave—now hangs from a line near the fire. Its colors do not fade. Even the dust seems to avoid it. The children admire it, tracing the patterns with reverent fingers. It does not belong to this place. It shines too brightly. It does not soften. It does not breathe.
The bottle of gin is half gone. My cousin drinks it in sips, says it burns like good memory. He laughs more than he used to. His son does not laugh at all.
On the fourth morning, I walk alone to Mukonzi wa Maji—the great tree that watches the river—and sit at its roots. I press my palm against the bark and listen. It gives no answers.
The sky turns gray, but still no rain. The fish are fewer. Nets hang empty.
A heron crosses the bend. It does not call out.
I stay until the sun reaches the top of the sky, then return through the village in silence.
At sunset, a canoe appears from the east.
Not one of ours.
It carries three men—foreign, wide-shouldered, armed. One holds a square of folded cloth in his lap, blue and red and gold. The other holds a stick carved not from wood but from iron. The third, who does not speak, wears a coat like Bula Matari’s and watches everything.
They tie the canoe to the same tree. They ask no questions. They do not offer gifts.
They unroll another scroll and hammer a wooden post into the ground beside the path. On it is nailed a smaller version of their flag.
They do not ask.
They simply do.
I stand at the edge of the path and say nothing.
One of the men nods toward me as he passes. “You signed,” he says in a tongue I barely follow. “It belongs to the king now.”
Then they disappear into the bush, toward the next village.
That night, I sit beside the fire again, but Mboya does not play.
He stands near the tree, watching the blue cloth ripple in the breeze, and says, “Will they come again tomorrow?”
I do not answer.
I want to tell him they will not. That this was only formality. That they came to honor, not to take.
But I hear the scroll unrolling again in my mind. I see it stretching past our fields, our graves, our stories.
And I know the answer.
Yes.
They will come again.
Tomorrow, and after.
V. The Consequences
They come before the moon has ripened.
Six men in red sashes, boots that crush cassava stalks, and guns that shine even in shadow. They carry rope. They carry ledgers. They carry whips braided from hippo hide and stained dark from use.
They do not bow. They do not speak to me by name.
One carries a sheet of paper folded in quarters and pressed flat between two boards. When he opens it, I recognize the lines. My mark is there. The ink, though faded, still holds the shape of my thumb.
He points to the signature, then to the trees.
“Rubber,” he says. “Twenty baskets. By next full moon. Or hands.”
He holds up his own, spreads his fingers wide, and taps his palm with the butt of his rifle. The threat is not metaphor. The threat is practice.
We do not understand at first.
Rubber is a nuisance crop—something the boys used to smear on tree bark to make balls that bounced. It dripped slow and sticky, a thing to scrape off. Now it is life or death.
Twenty baskets?
Impossible.
The vines do not bleed fast. The trees are spread far. To gather that much, we must abandon the millet, the cassava, the fish traps. We must send even the boys and old men into the forest, scratching bark with knives that dull too quickly.
Mothers bind their fingers in cloth to soften the blisters.
Fathers stop teaching their sons the names of birds.
By the third week, the first basket is full.
We hide it, foolishly, thinking perhaps if we bring it all at once, we’ll be spared. But the men return early, guns slung casual across their backs like farm tools.
They ask, “Where is the king’s share?”
My brother steps forward. His hands shake.
“We are gathering,” he says.
The man nods. Then takes his knife from his belt and calls for the youngest boy.
It is not my son. But it is someone’s.
I bury the child with my own hands. No one else will.
The mothers wail softly. The fathers look away. The men who came do not stay to watch.
By the time the baskets are ready, three more children are gone. One girl. Two boys. One of them had brought me water just days before, splashing it on his bare chest and laughing when the clay cup slipped from his hands.
The men take the baskets. They weigh them without words.
Then one of them looks at the bundle of cloth still hanging from our fig tree and says, “The chief has good taste.”
He reaches for it.
I rise without thinking.
But before I speak, I feel Mboya’s hand on my wrist. He says nothing. Just holds.
And I let the cloth go.
That night, I do not sit by the fire.
I sit alone beneath the Mukonzi wa Maji, my back to the bark, my face to the sky. The moon is full and merciless.
My thumb throbs though it is uninjured.
I press it into the dirt, over and over, until it leaves no mark at all.
VI. The Cost
They come for Mboya at dawn.
Not with guns. Not with rope. Not with a scroll or a signature. They come with silence and a man whose face I do not know. His eyes are pale, his hair is wet though it has not rained, and he speaks no word of our tongue.
He points at my son.
That is all.
Mpemba stands beside him, arms folded, face blank.
I step forward.
“No,” I say.
“He must go,” Mpemba replies. “The quota is short again. The vines do not bleed enough. The men grow tired. The chief must show leadership.”
I shake my head.
“He is a child.”
“He is your child.”
The silence that follows is louder than his voice. It breaks over the village like a wave.
The man with pale eyes says something clipped and sharp. Mpemba translates without looking at me.
“The king does not ask again.”
Behind him, another man raises the butt of his rifle just slightly. Not aimed. Not idle.
Mboya looks up at me. His hands are still sticky from the mango he was eating. A line of juice runs down his wrist.
He does not cry.
He does not speak.
He simply walks forward, because I do not stop him.
They take him without rope, without resistance. As though they are collecting tools from a hut.
As though he is already gone.
I do not remember walking to the tree.
I only know that I am there—knees in the dust, fingers wrapped around the roots, forehead pressed to bark that does not care. My breath comes hard. The tears do not. They hide.
I see my wife at the edge of the clearing. Her hands are still. Her eyes are two stones lodged beneath a sky that refuses to break.
No one touches me.
No one speaks.
They have seen this before.
By the time the sun sets, I know.
The men return the next day with sacks of bark and numbers scribbled in charcoal on a square of wood.
But not Mboya.
Not even a piece.
That night, I sit at the fire with the bottle of gin untouched beside me. I do not drink. I do not eat. I listen.
To the cracking of wood.
To the hiss of fat on the coals.
To the sound of feet I know I will not hear again.
The next morning, I walk alone to the place where they kept the scroll. The same crate. The same paper. I do not touch it. I only look at the edge—frayed now, slightly torn from use.
My thumb is steady.
It does not hurt anymore.
And that, I think, is the worst part.
VII. The Remains
The scroll is gone.
I do not know when they took it. I only know that the crate is empty now, the drum bare, the inkpot closed and dry. No one speaks of it. No one asks.
The cloth is gone too. The medal. The mirrors. The bottle remains, half full and gathering flies. No one touches it. Not even my cousin.
The men still come.
Not the same ones. They change like seasons—different faces, same demands. They no longer explain. They no longer threaten. They no longer need to.
The flag near the river sags on its pole. Its colors fade in the sun, but it does not fall.
My people work.
They bleed the trees, weigh the baskets, count the days. The children grow quieter. They still laugh, but only when they think no one listens. Their games involve hiding, pretending to vanish. One boy ties cloth around his head and calls himself the king’s ghost.
No one corrects him.
Sometimes, at night, I still go to the Mukonzi wa Maji.
I sit with my back to the bark and wait for the river to speak. It does not. It never did, not in the way I once believed. But I listen anyway, because it is all I have left that hasn’t been signed away.
My thumb no longer throbs. The skin healed clean. But I feel the mark beneath it still—not a scar, but a memory etched too deep for the body to carry alone.
I think of Mboya when I hear the wind rattle the trees. I imagine him somewhere in the vines, knife in hand, eyes dull with hunger, feet too sore to run. Or already gone. Or turned into something I would not recognize.
I pray for him anyway.
I pray to gods I do not name anymore, and to the ancestors whose names I signed away.
Sometimes I wonder if Bula Matari remembers me.
If he ever thinks of the mat I offered, or the ink he opened, or the way I hesitated before I pressed my thumb.
But I know better.
He is likely already walking new rivers, breaking new rocks, speaking of civilization while men behind him build cages from trees they did not plant.
The land is still green.
The river still runs.
The birds still call in the morning.
But something is missing. Not a person. Not a thing.
A silence.
A gap.
A space that once held the right to say no.
And that is what remains.
Not the ink. Not the gifts.
Not even the boy.
Just the quiet after.
And a flag that will not fall.
Author’s Note
This story is a work of fiction.
The chief you’ve met has no name in any book. His village cannot be found on any map. His son, his people, his sorrow—they live only in these pages.
But what happened to him is real.
Between 1880 and 1884, Henry Morton Stanley, already the most famous man on earth, traveled through Central Africa as the agent of King Leopold II of Belgium, gathering over 450 so-called “treaties” with African chiefs. These documents—often signed with thumbprints or marks on paper the signers could not read—were used at the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 to legitimize Leopold’s personal claim to the vast Congo Basin.
From these signatures, the Congo Free State was born: a colony not ruled by a government, but owned by a single man.
Under Leopold’s regime, rubber quotas were enforced with forced labor, mutilation, hostage-taking, and mass executions. Villages were razed. Families destroyed. Arms and legs severed as punishment for missed quotas. Though exact numbers vary, historians estimate that between 8 and 10 million Congolese people died from violence, famine, and disease directly linked to the regime Stanley helped create.
What Stanley set in motion was not an anomaly. It was a template.
The so-called treaties he gathered—and the brutal order they enabled—helped define the colonial trajectory of Africa in the 20th century, where European powers divided the continent by map and myth, with little regard for the people who lived on the land. Borders were drawn in ink, and enforced in blood.
The world at large knew Stanley as an explorer—the man who found Dr. Livingstone. The people he left behind remembered something else.
And the long trajectory of history teaches us that, as important as anything or anybody might be in the short term, history, untended, always always always forgets. Henry Morton Stanley was one of the top five most famous, and to some degree important, people in the world during his lifetime, but shy of “Dr. Livingston, I presume,” almost nobody but the most curious of academics has even remembered his name.
And that’s not significant to him. It is significant to everybody. Nothing we think is important ever truly is unless we decide to make it so. Eventually, even history forgets.
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