The Holy Prostitute

A body lay in the pool of blood on a track. The wide open eyes fearfully protruded from their sockets. The mouth was agape. His white shirt and blue trousers were extensively stained by blood. The torn shirt was particularly bloody on the belly.

There was only one black shoe on the left foot. The right one could not be seen anywhere nearby. The shoe seemed to have been lost in an obvious struggle that had preceded the violent death. The right leg of the body that lay on its back was folded, but the left one had been stretched.

There were numerous fresh footmarks around the area. The tall grass near the road had been trampled to the ground as more than three hundred villagers craned their necks to see for themselves the victim of a rare horror.

By 8 30 AM in a remote rural village of central Zambia, the number of onlookers had gradually grown bigger and bigger around the dead body that lay 700 meters away from Mfyalawampata Primary School. Young and old people were anxious to see the dead body so that no one would deceive another about the horrific sight.

Most of them wanted to recognize the dead man. No, they could not. The face was unfamiliar. None of the villagers could even recognize him by the clothes he was wearing. Moreover, no one was missing in the nearby villages so it had to be a stranger who had been murdered, they concluded.

Two hours later a traffic police van roared onto the scene. It was navy blue with white words ‘police’ on the doors of the twin cab. Three policemen jumped off the back of the vehicle. Then a female officer and male colleague dashed out of the cabin. The driver, Sammy, was fat with a bulging pot belly. People wondered if he could still manage to chase a thief in his early forties. Detractors called him a pregnant constable.

The woman constable was Angela. She was tall and slim with. Male suspects had nicknamed her iron lady.One of the officers who came off the back of the vehicle was Tenson. He was tall and very muscular .Colleagues had nicknamed him Swazz.

Another policeman was short and fat. Sykolo was notorious for battering suspects until they confessed how they had allegedly stolen. As far as Sykolo understood, suspects were already guilty until they were luckily found innocent by a court.

The fifth policeman was Farrent, a tall man with very strong muscles and black knuckles. He loved bundling suspects into police vehicles. To him, it was one of the most exciting fleeting moments of the job.

Meanwhile, the hundreds of villagers promptly gave police room to access the body surrounded by the gradually growing crowd. The five uniformed police officers who were also wearing white gloves roughly lifted the body and dumped it onto the back of their pick up vehicle.

Villagers observed that police seemed to live in their own world where there was neither fear nor respect for the dead. Mfyalawampata residents wondered how the officers would grab a body like a log without fearing to be followed by the deceased’s ghost, as widely believed by villagers.

Meanwhile the police vehicle headlamps flashed before it slowly moved away. A kilometer ahead, the officers found an abandoned white Ford Ranger car which they suspected to have been driven by the deceased. Farrent drove that car. The vehicles moved on until they reached the general hospital of Kabwe city, 80 kilometers from Mfyalawampata village. Kabwe was also the regional head quarters of Central Zambia.

The following day, police escorted the abandoned car that transported the body 200 kilometers north of Kabwe city to Ibenga hospital in the Copperbelt Province where postmortem was carried out in the afternoon while hundreds of mourners wailed outside the mortuary.

The pathologist was a tall thin middle aged white man. Dr. Sally unfeelingly sliced the body open to expose internal organs, including the brain, in the presence of five relatives of the dead man and two traffic officers.

The surgeon showed the police, relatives and friends of the deceased a deep cut across the throat and belly, sliced liver, four cuts on the small intestines ,two broken left ribs and skull as causes of the death. He also said the swollen neck had been fractured.

Having seen the cause of the man’s death, soon a convoy of light trucks and cars slowly flowed towards the nearby graveyard where a brown coffin was laid on the heap of freshly dug out earth near a pit.

Mourners screamed louder after an announcement that they would not view the body because of the horribly injured head, a result of the fatal attack.

The deceased man’s mother and several women had to be supported by friends’ and relatives’ arms around their shoulders and bodies. They could not bare the grief of losing the man who was in the coffin and about to be disposed of in the open pit. One thousand men, women and children sorrowfully looked on as they waited for the announcer to lead the burial ceremony. Soon a tall thin man wearing a black shirt and blue trousers stood near the pit.

“This is a very sad moment. The man did not deserve to die like that. He was not a criminal,” the master of ceremonies complained.

Suddenly two men jumped into the shoulder-deep grave. Then they stood on either end of the pit. A few moments later four young men passed the coffin to the two in the pit who laid it at the bottom. Then they clambered out before seven boys vigorously shoveled and hoed soil into the pit until a mound was formed. Mourners wept louder and drowned the sound of the implements hitting the ground. That vigorous dusty activity showed the mourners that it was all over. They had lost their beloved man to the soil again. Then the mourners filed to put flowers on the grave. Close relatives were first, followed by distant ones and friends. More women had to be supported for them to manage to drag themselves through the crowd towards the grave and lay their wreaths.

After the laying of wreaths, a group of men and women circled the grave and sang a song before a man dressed in a blue shirt and green trousers said the last prayer.

No sooner had he said amen, than the throng flowed towards the vehicles which had started their engines while the mourners were still praying. Mourners hurried towards the vehicle by which each individual had come, lest they be abandoned in the graveyard, as those cars and light trucks were sure to be overloaded.

Soon the graveyard was deserted again. The fresh grave lay in the middle of thousands of mounds with various objects on top; ranging from broken cups, plates, plastic bottles dry flowers and crosses. Most of them had names and dates of birth to death written on metal crosses or tombstones.

There were trees also in the graveyard among the graves. Grave diggers did not bother to uproot them at all. Therefore trees stood there just the way mourners had found them. They seemed to look on sorrowfully, as humans continued to be brought one after another to the same final resting place.

In the periphery of the graveyard was seasonal tall grass. If it was dry season, it was normally dry and short. That time the grass was tall as the rainy season was soon coming to an end.

Meanwhile as mourners went back to their homes, the cycle of nature continued. The wind continued blowing through the bush, including the graveyard. Streams continued flowing too. The weather continued as usual. People’s normal lives went on. Traffic flowed on the roads. Yes, the death of that person never meant anything the rhythm of nature.

The death of the man did not change anything. The dead only lay silently in their graves. It did not matter anymore how they met their fate. They did not know whether it was day or night. They were unaware of whether it was Monday or Tuesday. The dead people just lay in that eternal darkness and rested. Sorrowfully, reality was inevitable; they would lie in the dark graves for thousands of years. However, only the livings were anxious about their fate. For they did not know their own funeral day.