13/05/2025
The Palm Wine That Closed the Seed – A Tale of Mankon, Kom and Bafut
Black Flag Publishing: ACA
Long ago, in the green hills of Mankon, where the trees murmur secrets to the wind and ancestral shrines sleep under forest shade, lived a man named Tande. A proud hunter with roots in Bafut, he had settled in Mankon and taken a wife named Naya—a striking woman with sharp eyes and a tongue like pepper. Naya came from a broken line—her mother a Mankon woman, her father from the Kom highlands, where kinship was reckoned through the mother and family disputes were seasoned with sorcery.
Tande and Naya married young in their twenties. Naya often had occupied herself dancing in festivals where she met Tande and had grown a reputation for being a flirt among the men of Mankon in her youth but Tande not native to Mankon never understood this meant his wife had a habit of promiscuity which was amplified by trauma from her mother and father's failed cross-tribal marriage.
The union was tainted from the beginning with Naya still having extra-marital relationships with men she had entertained before her marriage to Tande. With his ego challenged in his marital home it was not long before whispers of Tande’s virility reached Naya. But when Naya failed to conceive, she suspected not her own troubled bloodline—but her husband. With cunning and silence, she climbed the sacred hill one evening to her grandmother’s hut. Ma’a Gimbi, a feared nyangar, was a Kom woman who spoke to snakes and stirred roots with moonlight.
“I want to keep him close, Ma’a,” Naya whispered. “But he may betray me like father did mother.”
Ma’a Gimbi listened and nodded. “Then we shall cool his fire, child—cool it so he burns for no other.” She mixed bark from the tree of barrenness, crushed bitter kola skins, and herbs that silenced men’s seed. She poured it into palm wine, tied the calabash with a red thread, and blessed it with an old Kom incantation.
“Tell him it will help you both conceive,” she said with a sly grin.
Tande, trusting his wife’s word and eager for children, drank the wine that very night. But moons passed. His strength faded. His loins stirred no more. Yet, Naya, knowing the secret, turned her eyes to other men. She began to slip away on market days, linger in hidden corners, and eventually lay with a smooth-talking man chosen by her Mankon aunt—an ambitious cousin meant to humiliate Tande and claim his household.
Soon, Naya’s belly swelled.
“Miracle,” she said, smiling falsely. But Tande, once filled with longing, now filled with doubt. His instincts stirred. He went deep into the forest, where the old ngambe, Tata Mualo, lived between two sacred iroko trees.
Tata Mualo threw bones, read fire, and listened to the silence between Tande’s words.
“You were given wine with a shadow,” he said. “Your fire was stolen by your own house. The child in your wife’s womb is not yours—it was planted by another hand.”
Tande wept and trembled, but Mualo gave him herbs of mulondo, blessed bitter kola, and a charm made from leopard root. He was to drink them under the next moon to restore his strength.
When Tande returned, he found Naya alone and glowing.
“My love,” he said, “whose child do you carry?”
“Yours, of course,” she lied, her eyes avoiding his.
But under pressure, and with the strength of the ancestors rising in Tande’s voice, Naya cracked. She confessed it was Ma’a Gimbi who gave her the wine. And then she laughed—a bitter, mocking laugh.
“You could not plant even cassava in a wet field,” she said cruelly. “Even with your restored manhood, I’d never carry your seed again.”
With that, she packed her things and returned to her grandmother’s house, her head held high but her spirit cracking beneath her pride.
But Tande, newly cleansed and protected by the prayers of Mualo, went on a trading journey to Bafut. There, under the shade of the great tamarind tree, he met a gentle soul named Ngum. Her beauty was calm, and her laughter sincere. They spoke, and something ancient stirred in him. She, too, had ancestral ties to the Bafut lineage—and their union was blessed by the village elders.
When Ngum bore her first son, the drums of Bafut echoed into the hills. And on that very day, Ma’a Gimbi, the scheming grandmother, died—her spirit pulled down into the land of the forgotten, her charms turned to ash.
Ngum bore Tande two more children: another son, and a daughter as bright as morning sun. Peace settled over his compound, and his strength never faded again.
As for Naya, her lover left her with the child and continued to deflower women around the town. Naya was just one of his casualties though she thought she was wounding her husband. Her Kom relatives, having gained nothing, turned their backs. She lived alone, bitter and proud, tending to a daughter who asked often, “Why doesn’t my father visit?”
She could never answer.
And so it was that truth and deception danced under the same sky, but only truth bore fruit.
And the people of Mankon, Kom and Bafut still tell the tale—of the woman who bewitched a man using palm wine, and the woman who healed him using her Love.
Black Flag Publishing: ACA Copyright 2025
