Sumali, the Princess
by Pierre d'Amour
BookRix Edition 2017
Copyright by Amé
Pierre d'Amour:
SUMALI, THE
PRINCESS
Love is stirring in
the heart of Africa!
Cover photo from Pinterest
without a copyright attached
A mysterious Meeting
When I went down to the stream to check my fish traps and crab pots I saw her again: she was standing across the vast expanse water in the reeds and was watching me with her big black eyes! All the boys and girls of the Hama tribe were looking pretty much the same with their mud-smeared ocher hair and their skimpy little loincloths, and I only knew that she was a girl because she had two small bulging breasts on her chocolate brown chest! African women were absolutely proud of their breasts and they were never hiding them from their men, sometimes they were hiding their nipples behind precious jewelry, but not from shame: probably because they were getting a constant arousing tickle from the strings of beads! Compared to my two scrawny sisters with their ankle-long petticoats, high-neck dresses, their silly straw hats and their sickly pale skin a suntanned and healthy African girl was quite a different view indeed!
The Hamas were reserved people and mostly kept to themselves, and they haven't given us any trouble maintaining our tobacco farm on the other side of the Omo River - they could get most helpful for a block of the precious chewy stuff and they were working hard for it! But they were surely as curious all the other human beings about everything, which had to do with sexuality, and to spy at a white boy in his wet underpants was surely something to see for a young Hama girl! It was the third time that she was watching me emptying the traps and re-baiting them, and by now I had grown used to her curious black eyes on me, was well aware that she was arousing my curiosity too: even my little dickel wanted to know more about her and stretched the wet panties wide! So I was waving my hand at her to acknowledge her presence, her big eyes grew even bigger and she threw a broad smile full of blinding white teeth back at me - gingerly she was lifting her brown right hand to show me the bright pink palm as the greeting of peace!
»Sehlahm!«, I yelled at her over the quiet wide river, a word which meant hello in Amharic, the melodious language of the native people of Ethiopia. My old black nanny Enku had taught me the dialects of the local tribes well, she had always maintained her stubborn view, that only through talking understanding could happen - and she was a perfect pearl of all local wisdom! »Dehnah!«, the lovely girl was shouting back, which meant, that she had understood and that she was fine! She threw my a kiss and then she was gone, she had disappeared like an animal in the brown scrub along the sluggish river, she had blended into the harsh hot land with ease - a strange feeling of emptiness was gripping my heart: I was promising myself, that if I saw her again I would jump into the river and swim over to her, fighting the crocodiles and the hippos all the way just to be with her for a while, to tell her my name! All this just to find out hers, to put a sound to her pretty face, something I could whisper to myself before I fell asleep!
I probably was just a romantic lunatic and probably the first time in love too, just not with one of the silly girls at the Sunday school at church, but with an erotic mirage from the far side of the river! I was looking at the vast Omo Valley with its steppes and forests, saw elephants and giraffes grazing in the meadows and the colonies of hairy baboons siting on the sunny bluffs, and I was staring in awe at the majestic Mount Mago at the far horizon, nearly reaching the fluffy white clouds with its peak! This was Africa: all rugged and wild: the cradle of humanity, inhabited by more predators than prey - a melting pot of the most different civilizations, both ancient and recent, both black and white! And I was amazed how stubbornly those black people were holding on to their old traditions, refused to get sucked in into the sweet Coca-Cola world of the colonists - there were motorboats cruising on the river and noisy airplanes traversing the skies, but the Hamas didn't bother: they were only caring for their cattle, for their survival!
Walking back up the path to the homestead with two crabs and a small perch in my bag a vision took shape in my mind: I saw myself building a bridge over the wide brown river, not really in a material way, rather in an emotional attempt to connect the different cultures on it's sides, to open up a path to our mystical neighbours! My family had decided to emigrate from a richly populated France to the desolated countryside of East Africa without asking for my opinion, but this was my home now and to make friends here was pretty much up to me - the boys at the missionary school all were bullies, believing into their unbeatable white supremacy! They all were wankers and before they were properly married in church to a skinny white girl they would never ever have the pleasure to see a naked woman, and to look at a half-naked black girl would only evoke disgusting sexual jokes from those frustrated blokes anyway - they would never share my dream of being part of this extremely strange but completely enticing country!