With a heart heavier than the bao seeds before him, Gogo Sinsamala slowly dragged an old log to his favourite spot beneath the nsangu tree, sat on it, and sighed; long, deep, mournful.
In his trembling hands, a sealed dossier marked STRICTLY ORACULAR, smuggled from his insider informants within the Bawo Council inner chamber. Inside, the names of Nganga Chabwerakumanda’s newly anointed appointees for his second reign.
“This is a disaster, Chief Mourner,” Gogo murmured, as his old eyes scanned the list. “These are not new names. These are exhumations.”
He pointed to one in particular.
“This one here: Benz ya Mbeta! Wasn’t he caught stuffing seeds into his sleeve mid-tournament? Didn’t he once try to bribe Abiti Mwenye herself to rig the National Bawo Championships? We used to call him Bwenzi La Mbeta then. What business does Bwenzi la Mbeta have on the Bawo Council? Have we no memory left?”
The Chief Mourner, seated silently in the shadows, said nothing.
He had grown used to the mockery.
Lately, the whispers had grown louder:
“His tears are crocodile tears.”
“The Chief Mourner is jealous.”
“He weeps not for justice, but because he was never chosen to play.”
They had forgotten something crucial.
The Chief Mourner does not choose when to cry. The ghosts do not choose when to guard the graveyard.
He mourns when memory is being buried alive.
He mourns when thieves return to manage the vault.
He mourns when the dead are made rulers of the living, and the Bawo board becomes a theatre of resurrected scandal.
So mourn he must.
Even if they laugh.
Even if they jeer.
Even if they call him bitter, broken, or bored.
Because when the seeds of yesterday’s corruption are replanted, the harvest will be bitter.
And the only voice that will speak truth then will be the one they tried to silence today.
