Ruben Kapimbi
By the seedtime of 1904, the greenery trees in the Cattle Kaokoland were bladder-brownish. This forced the nomadic Himbas to drive their cows to the mushrooming rock-strewn cattle posts across the Cunene River. The famine had claimed dozens of sharp-horned and glossy-coated skin cows.
Soon the messengers from Goats Kaokoland clued up the Himba warriors that the Schutztruppe had crushed the Cattle Hereros at Hamakari.
Thereafter, a commando of Himba warriors armed with knobkerries and steel spears was dispersed to shield the death-cheating Hereros.
Amongst them, there was a hulky warrior. The colossus man journeyed south to face off against the troopers.
The titan man trekked southward in a two-wheel ox-drawn wagon. Instantly, the leviathan Samson roused the bull-drawn cart and galloped southward. Not long after, Samson reached the Omaheke wasteland and stumbled upon women and children scavenging for locusts and grasshoppers.
The Hereros had fled the firing squad, but the behemoth Samson was dogged to rescue the terrain stretching from the Otavi Mountains to the borders of the skies.
After weeks in the scorching Omaheke wilderness, thirst began to take tall of this towering warrior.
Although his fighting tactics boosted the morale of the fleeing Hereros, the sweat-thirsty Kalahari brazened him.
Every sunset, he collected dry cowpats from the oxen and kindled the blue and yellow fire. Samson shot down two firing troopers before escaping into the reddish Kalahari dunes.
Before long, he couldn’t catch up with the fleeing Hereros who had crossed into British Bachuanaland by the very skin of their teeth.
The blazing sun baked his blistered back and he scooped fresh cow dung and muddied it all over his chest and face. The only meaty cuisine he could stumble upon was a colony of dung beetles.
Later, the war disciple roasted and masticated the dung beetles. Then, he slurped the oxen’s pale-yellow urine against thirst. For days, he sipped the deep amber urine under the starry guarding evening sun.
Unfortunately, his retreating warriors had abandoned him after snubbing him to drink the reddish pink oxen’s urine.
Alone in the Kalahari, he supped the bitter water squeezed from green and white striped melons after the two oxen had succumbed to thirst.
There, under a tiny needle-thorn shrub, in the gory Omaheke wilderness, the goblin warrior sucked in the rotted smell of death.
* This is historical fiction.