Naked Hills
Most parents didn’t buy books for their kids. Only a few of us could attend the private schools — schools like Aunty Beatrice Nursery and Primary School, like Greatness Kiddies Primary School. Schools none of us put in our resumés later in life. Everyone knew the rumour of the pastor who buried a live cow at the front of his church. There are no secrets in that place where my parents grew up, where I grew up. It is a generational continuum of lives in the vast bareness of the Naked Hills.
Most of my childhood is nebulous memories of running on stony roads, playing football on fields, and dancing in noisy classrooms. I remember the biggest house on the street, it belonged to a dynastical family whose patron died many years ago after buying five of the forty-three houses on the street. I remember Mariam, one of the many grandchildren of the patron who lived in that house. She was the one we made a long-lasting bet on — about who among us, my friends and I, she would befriend. None of us would win that bet.
After all, we were the kids parents warned their kids about. The kids that should only hope slightly better than becoming bus drivers like their fathers. We were bad kids because our parents could only afford to send us to government secondary schools where cultists and juvenile gangs fought every Friday. Students whose absence would not be noticed by the school. They didn’t come for classes and there were no parents to report them to. My mother warned me against my friends. My friends’ parents warned them against me. All of our parents pretended or believed or needed to believe each of us was the best-behaved kid and not to be corrupted. Perhaps it shielded them, even if imaginarily, from the nakedness of the hills.
I wasn’t yet a teenager when I left. Due to some fortunate series of circumstances, I had to leave for most of my early teenage years. When I returned at the beginning of adulthood, I no longer fit in the group I knew. My mates had become the kind of men who sent you to buy cigarettes and made you smoke your first. They stopped cars on weekends and hailed hurrying people for money — money they'd spend on cigarettes and dry gin. Some of their younger sisters already had one kid each. These kids are being raised by their grandmothers. Grandmothers who took the blame for raising wayward daughters. Some of my mates were dead, killed in cultist clashes, and butchered in gruesome ways. Their lives are now used as cautionary stories to warn children against joining cultism. One of my old rivals from primary school, the one who used to compete with me for the first position, is now a beggar. He lost both his legs in an accident three years ago. My mother told me he was working at the glass factory when a huge piece fell on him and cleanly amputated his thighs. She told me the street that day was filled with blood, a minute portion of the litres the Hills have swallowed. The Hills never ask for water when thirsty; they ask for blood and take it by any means necessary.
Some of us are lucky enough to grow hopes out of the barren lands of the Naked Hills. Where we are today, we didn’t imagine as children. We live dreams of hopeful parents. We hope to build dynastical families too. Some of the ones that handed these hopes to us have uprooted their families from the Naked Hills and planted them in ripe soils for eternal prosperity. And a great many hopes have been stumped, shrivelled in these hills. The Naked Hills will never change as it has stood and will stand the test of luxury. It stands as a reminder of the worst scripts humans can start their lives on. It brings to mind this question —what does a water plant do when it finds itself in a desert? Does it uproot itself and seek an oasis? There's an unspoken hope buried in that thought, one that is hard to write about. Inadequate, the stories you hear and the ones worth telling often seem impossible to speak aloud.
How do I begin to tell the tales of the naked hills?
Abdulrahmon Quareeb
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