Reben Kapimbi
For three nights, the troopers hooked me to a horse-drawn wagon. The governor ordered us to round up the fleeing matchstick-leg natives.
On the first light of 15th August 1904, we ambushed the napping warriors at the solitary waterhole. Here, bird-leg warriors put up a pig-headed fight.
“The war is over,” yelled a soldier towards the skin and bone warriors.
The skinny fighters flung away their knob whacks and stooped on their needle-edge elbows.
Soon, the troopers closed in on the egg-shaped cheekbone warriors. As we circled the spring, the commander’s horse tumbled into a furrow. Then, my horse plunged too.
The warriors had dumped razor-sharp thorns into the water. Soon the knife-edge thorns trapped the horses. The plucky commander faced down as a straight razor thorn poked his forehead.
Suddenly, skeletal-looking warriors snatched our guns and stuck steely spears into the commander’s chest.
“Please don’t kill me,” I prayed.
Afterward, the wiry-leg natives fired shots at the battalions. Then, the scrawny warriors choked white thorns into my mouth.
Later, they dragged me to a reddish dark-brown tree. There, under the spear-like leafy tree, they chained my black-and-blue arms with metal rings.
Soon, needle-leg warriors pulled me into another ditch. Here stinging ants crawled out of the hollowed thorns and stung my face. Later, an army of ants freely scrambled into my ears.
The paper-thin warriors robbed the troopers of some machine guns and horses. They ransacked the troopers’ water sacs.
“If we surrender, the chief will not reach Botswana,” the thin-face warrior said.
Soon, he fired shots at the chained-up troopers and tossed their lifeless bodies into the water.
The evening sun-shaped shadows of raw-bone-legged warriors, who quizzed me about the troopers.
Soon, I picked up galloping horses racing in the nearby bushes. I earwigged the warriors’ whispers that one of these stallions carried the chief. Only after the sound of galloping horses had died out, did the toothpick-legged warriors untangle the chains around my swollen legs.
Instantly, a straw-like warrior chopped off my left arm. I could make out the warriors’ chanting songs of victory.
Before the sun’s reddish fingers flashed the treetops, the ghostly warriors deserted the bloodied waterhole.
After a few glittery sky nights, the fleeing troopers from the Coblenz battalion nursed my wounds and took me to Windhoek.
* This is historical fiction.