Ndjambi was a war prisoner who hashed out at Shark Island after being ambuscaded by the German troopers at Omatupa. His lips were coiled inwardly fabling the anger towards the soldiers whipping his sore back. His cheeks had holes as deep as potholes.  

By now, the frosty and nipping wind had numbed his legs. Like a human frame, he limped towards the mountain of indigo water. Surely, he sensed the tip of the gun poking his neck. Minutes later, the bone and skin prisoners queued up facing the dazzling sun about to dip into the water. The goodbye-waving sun had painted the once blue water red. 

“Nobody should blink,” a trooper yelled. Ndjambi, along with a troop of walking souls had been branded as the trouble prisoners who must not leave the island in their only clothes, their black-and-blue skins. Their hair had shaped picturesque of kinky sunhats. Their death-cheating souls had hyper-inflated the fee on their skulls.

The commander pointed to the hillocks of water and giggled, “Let’s drain the Atlantic”. He pressed furnace-hot shovels into the prisoners’ hands, who only picked up that the trowels were microwave-hot after dipping them into the water. That didn’t bother Ndjambi and his fellow prisoners as their bruised hands were numbed. For months, they had sipped their sweat and washed their faces with pale yellow urine. 

For Ndjambi, it was a textual legend authored by the troopers to narrate the endurance of the natives while being escorted towards their own death with poise. 

“Wasting pricey cannonballs on the tongue-tied skeletons was not necessary,” said the whiskery bearded commander. Soon the natives dipped their scoops into the water and hobbled back and forth. They realised that emptying the ocean had taken them the entire freezing night. The water kept splashing at their feet. Out of the 20 prisoners, 18 drowned while emptying the Atlantic. 

For Ndjambi, he had thought up a plan for the surfs to bring the water to his knees, instead of jumping into the ice-cold water. By the next day, only Ndjambi and his younger brother Muningandu had cheated death to snitch the belly-deep laughs about their failed duty to drain the Atlantic.

Finally, they were chained and shipped to Cameroon and Tanzania for refusing to die. 

Footnote: Healing the wounds