Appreciating Tjizembua Tjikuzu’s poem “Prince of Rain”

Last night I thought of a video a friend had posted on Whatsapp, of millipedes in their thousands writhing by the roadside after the rain which preceded a decade long drought. The camera holder called the land cursed. And it got me thinking of my childhood on the reservation my family lived on. Omutiuanduko.

When I was a kid on the reservation, I genuinely believed it brought bad luck to kill a millipede, and when something bad happened I thought it was because someone had killed a millipede and didn’t count her millions of legs because that was how you broke the curse.

Tjikuzu’s poem, Prince of Rain” brings forward so many of the images from my childhood on the reservation: the dung huts, the three-legged pots, the firewood, the grandmother and her petticoats. And isn’t it peculiar it’s a grandmother being remembered? No men around to be remembered? I too remember the matriarchs from my childhood, silently nurturing us, alone on a reservation that looked like nowhere and somewhere all at once. I sense every child born of an Omuherero has these memories of playing with bugs, donkey dung, and as Tjikuzu’s poem illustrates, millipede remains in the “assertive sun.”

The language used evokes so much of the Ovaherero people’s history, of war, of death, of skeletons but first of a “sable” skinned people numbering in their “thousands” marching with purpose before the “white tongue of death” licks the grass and leaves “segments” of them, “rings” which evoke the image of skinless ribcages in the desert sand. And as human children play with the rings left by centipedes who had dried out, so maybe baby foxes played in our ancestors’ who having stashed their babies somewhere safe, were gunned down by Schutztruppe.