Noir Outsider.
The Search for the Sisters of the Moon & The Queen of the Wild Cat People…
inmagine.
‘There was a time when...
...I lived untouched by magic like most men... but let me tell you a story...
a story that changed my life... 'it began in Africa on the coastal region of an area sometimes called...
‘White Mans graveyard’…
inmagine.
where noble rivers having run their course across that huge continent fnally spill unhurriedly...
inmagine.
…into the white sparkling sand edged miasmic azure blue ocean
...and it is here that my story begins!’
The Noir Outsider.
AFRICA !!!
Noir Outsider.
Africa is a continent so big that like the ocean there are places where few men have ever set foot.
A great social and cultural achievement came into being on this massive fertile subcontinent…when a great gardening people brought millions of miles of this huge continent under cultivation within a few thousand years… reflecting the immense value the agricultural community places upon the land and large expanding families.
Noir Outsider.
Black Africa has always included wandering people, small bands like the Forest people of Ituri or the Desert people of the Kalahari, Nomadic peoples always on the move in search of food... pastoral Nomads... following huge herds from watering hole to watering hole across the massive oceanic immensity of the open bush. Meanwhile in other places slash and burn agriculturalists...
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regularly move whole villages as the land refuses to produce crops year after year… year in year out... and then there is the widespread contemporary phenomenon of wage seeking emigrants moving to the cities.
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Many of these peoples follow the archaic religious traditions founded upon story telling and the Spoken Word... and there are thousands of different languages spoken in Africa, so stories are also related through performance arts, like dancing or drumming... forms of rhythmic expression for which Black Africa is well known!
Expressions of mythologies often so ancient that the origins are lost in the midsts of time...
Noir Outsider.
undulating with the landscape as if untouched by the death that surrounds her… this is a place where life is cheap… This spirit is completely incomprehensible to the outsider.
African women dance and laugh...
... in the midst of poverty... civil strife... harsh climactic conditions and death itself.
The Leopard Woman...
A man and a woman were once making a hard journey through the bush. A typical proud and beautiful young African woman moving down the wild overgrown jungle path, walking gracefully, her baby strapped to her back. Nothing to eat for days and they are hungry, and the baby cries softly sometimes. They come blinking into the light as the forest changes suddenly into a lush green plain… and there before them a herd of bush cows grazing contented in the warm afternoon sunlight.
The man stands looking at the herd for a moment... turns to the woman…
‘You have the power of the shape shifter... you can transform... change now to a leopard and capture one of the bush cows, that I may have something to eat and not perish'
The woman looks at the man long and hard… ‘Do you really mean what you ask..?’ ‘I mean it’ says the man.
With the resignation of a typical african woman she unties the baby from her back putting it gently on the ground. Dropping her loincloth revealing a well toned muscularly athletic ebony body…a female warrior... muscle and sinew gleaming in the light as she dances into a crouch… glowing... as all around her darkens as if in her own storm cloud...
Noir Outsider.
...a change wiping across her face… hair growing on her neck and body. Hands and feet turning to paws with claws… suddenly crouched before the man is a sleek and wild leopard…
The leopard growls deeply... carefully watching the man now shaking the tree tops.
When she is sure he is good and scared she turns and goes for the Bush cows...
in a lethal crouching run.
Tearing at a terrified young heifer bringing it crashing and screaming down into blood spattered red dust… dragging the bloody dying beast to the bottom of the tree she stands looking up at the frightened man again... who is now as high up the tree he can get... clinging on for grim death. Shaking with fear… moaning… crying… begging the leopard to go away… begging it to transform back into his woman. Slowly the leopard begins to change back… hair receding… claws disappearing until the beautiful lithe young woman is stood there naked before him once again.
Noir Outsider.
Even then he is still so frightened that he won’t come down until she picks up her clothes… dresses again… attaching her baby to her back again. She looks at him with great distain… ‘Never ask a woman to do a man’s work again'! Women care for farms... raise breadstuffs... grow children… but it is man’s work to do the hunting and bring in the meat for the family… mark me well… this girl child will one day rule over a kingdom full of richness and splendor… rule over a great female warrior tribe… happy in their belief in woman as the source of everything… as God… remember this day well weakling.’
The Wild Cat People are rumoured to live in a lush green valley with a wide river running through. The ruler of the tribe a blood descendant of this worrior woman Mantatisi...
Noir Outsider.
"Wild Cat people."
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She reigned in the 1820s, a woman endowed with fabulous qualities of leadership, and whose notoriety as an exterminator of other tribes was only surpassed by Mzilikazi…The black Napoleon…
They say her kingdom diasppeared into thin air...
but I know different…
It was like a hallucination... but then that is perhaps what it all was... but then there are the women in my pictures... my proof!
Women love pictures of themselves… and for them these pictures were a great mystery… a mirror image that perhaps saved my life... but who would ever have guessed that after all that time that all I would have left to show for my journey were these few pictures… and my memories…
memories fade pictures don’t!
Noir Outsider.
But I’m running too far ahead now... so let's go back to where all this began.
Noir Outsider.
Taking off my reading glasses I half closed my eyes... focusing on the miasma of sparkling blue ocean… a panorama stretched out endlessly before me… emptiness except for an Arab dhow with a white sail moving close into shore.
A cool gentle breeze from off the water gently fanned my face... as I tried to savour my last siesta on the white paint peeling Raffles style colonial verandah...
Churchills. I knew Raffles well but this was a much smaller more ‘comfy’ venue… an old Victorian watering hole that time had passed by… it captivated me from the first time I laid eyes upon it… a dream after weeks in the bush… an English Gentleman’s club in the middle of a wilderness… built before the place was consigned to becoming a backwater… another piece of the flotsam and jetsam of history… diamonds had run alluvial rivers winding out of the huge fecundity of Africa and on into the Indian ocean… the diamonds had been there… but then the white men came… and then they were gone.
Shafts of bright sunlight gently moved to the rhythm of the wind whispering in the palm trees above my head… making a green sunlit ceiling sough above my comfortable arm chair… I sipped my scotch… Glen Grant…
Noir Outsider.
A light watery golden ‘water of life’ from my own land…Puffing gently on my ivory Meerschaum pipe...
a meerschaum pipe. wikipedia.
loaded with Swazi ganja…
wikipedia .
One of my last pipes it would be… I smiled to myself... I'd made the ganja last the trip… three smokes a day for two months… was that how long I’d been out there?... and found a great big nothing… when I was younger just that thought alone would have made me tense… but now I accepted things easier… accepted my failures… accepted my going home with my tail between my legs… home to the dark damp nights of a wintry London.
wikipedia.
As if to remind me another gentle breeze sends flurries of dust across the terrace’s expensive shiny mosaic tiled floor. I pulled my metal laptop across the mahogany table checking it was properly closed... even with a heavy duty Toshiba dust can play havoc. The camera bag pushed under my seat I lifted up onto another chair next to me, I knew the Cannon 350D was safe, I’d wrapped it in chamois and the Sony HDV 1E Camcorder was locked in the Hotel safe.
I put down my friendly old pipe...
Noir Outsider.
...settling back. I thought about another drink...
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...waving at the pretty uniformed black waitress in her tight fitting short French maid's uniform. It left little to the imagination. I could never work out how some black women have this ability to look undressed even when dressed. She had nice shining legs even in flat shoes. Full breasted, round hipped with a nice ass… very fit… sexy and she knew it… and not many single attractive ‘older men’ passed through here these days so she was very attentive... The next measure of Glen Grant was delivered like a gift...
Noir Outsider.
I relit my Meerschum and settled back into my chair content, watching the girl looking busy around the bar. There was a lot of bending over going on and it had the desired effect… I couldn’t take my eyes off her. But then I inevitably remembered tomorrow. Remembered I would be starting the two hundred mile trip back overland to the nearest airstrip. Remembering the trip down laughing and joking with Billy my photographic assistant… and friend… that was before he was sent back by the local Portugese quack... dengue fever he said it was. When I arrived back from the bush there was an e-mail waiting to say he was back in hospital in England and as well as could be expected.
I wasn’t looking forward to the trip back. Hours bouncing up and down across rough terrain…Toyota Land Cruisers... are good at what they do but shit they can be uncomfortable. And I knew London's winter dreariness would compound my sense of failure. I tried to count up the years of study and research I’d wasted on all this…I even began to doubt the old Major's mental health, honesty or even possible naiveté. He was the one who’d started all this. My Uncle, very pukah he was, an officer and a gentleman in the Scots Gaurds all his working life...
The Scots Guards by G D Giles. Cranston Fine Arts
Taking early retirement due to ‘wounds received’ in the Falklands war...
Pack 351. Pack of two Falklands War Scots Guards and Paras prints by Mark Churms.
Cranston Fine Arts
When the second Battalion Scots Guards captured one of the most strongly defended Argentine positions of the Falklands campaign, their losses were nine killed and fourty three wounded, one of which was my uncle Lawrence... who then became a fellow of the Royal Geographic Society and a reasonably well known explorer… Africa his speciality… Africa had been in the family all the way back to his Father who’d been killed in the Zulu wars. He had a 40 acre country estate in Sussex... a brilliant shot… with plenty of good pheasant and duck shooting on his land,
The Shooting Party by John Trickett. Cranston Fine Arts.
high... fast... hundred mile an hour birds with the wind behind them... driven off wooded hills towering over wide wooded valleys…
Down the Line by John Trickett. Cranston Fine Art.
we stood in the bottoms…
Head of a Black Labrador by Mick Cawston and Winter Shooting I by John Trickett. Cranston Fine Arts
picking off the birds as they whizzed over our heads…
Finest View by John Trickett. Cranston Fine Art.
he was a great shot…
usually taking a left and right with each barrel of his engraved matching pair of sporting guns…
Good Lad by John Trickett. Cranston Fine Art.
he also had a fine wine cellar… I used to shoot there a lot during the season... his wine cellar was reknowned accross the home counties for its quality and style... we became firm friends. Towards the end of his days he became pensive and often seemed troubled at times spending many hours locked away in his study all alone with a bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. Even though there was such a difference in our ages he always treated me like a ‘pal’ and his endless stories started a romantic and deep desire burning inside me to become an explorer and adventurer too. It even fitted in with my work as a freelance reportage photographer.
One moonlit frosty snow frozen night after a slap up shooting party diner with a lot of good claret and roast beef and Yorkshire pudding we were cleaning our guns in front of a roaring fire in the gun room that was also his study.
Surrounded by exhausted black Labradors we lovingly worked at oiling and shining the ornate sporting shotguns
Noir Outsider.
and drinking good whiskey...
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he poured two large Johnnie Walkers into crystal glasses...
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and settled down to talk.
I knew he wanted to talk… it was in the air… he explained he was worried that what secrets he had would die with him... he didn’t want that to happen... so having thought about it long and hard he’d decided to tell me his secrets… the story of a girl child who grew to one day rule over a kingdom full of richness and splendor… rule over a great people… happy in their belief in woman as the source of all… Woman as the only God.
He started by asking me if I was aware that it had been proven categorically by at least three international researchers in to DNA that we... all of us... whether European, Middle Eastern or African were all descendants of a single Black African woman living in Africa 140,000 to 290,000 years ago. I nodded agreement... I’d seen on the net that the the university of Berkley California’s had verified such findings.
‘So remember this concept of Woman as God… how different would the world be if the Lords prayer said …
‘Our Mother who art in heaven’… and not … ‘Our Father who art in heaven?’…
In Africa there is a story... the story of The Wild Cat people who lived in a lush green valley with a wide river running through. The original ruler of this tribe was Mantatisi, a woman endowed with fabulous qualities of leadership, and whose notoriety as an exterminator of other tribes was only surpassed by Mzilikazi the black Napoleon. Mantatisi was a woman of outstanding intelligence. Tall straight and lean, she was lighter in complexion than most of her subjects and her expression of countenance was sweet and agreeable.
Mantatisi was described by the early missionaries as ‘astute and vigilant, and being of dignified deportment.’ She was known far and wide as a ruthless conqueror ‘utterly callous to human suffering’ and the legend is that she and her kingdom disappeared into thin air. The circumstances of this Kingdom's disappearance revolves around the mistery of a sacred golden... carved necklace... with two serpents heads intertwined... with ruby red eyes glowing... sparkling rubies embedded... eyes reknowned for their magical powers.
of the modern medical profession and symbolic of many things including , quite possibly,
the twin spirals of DNA
Wikipedia.
or perhaps representing a particular wavelength or frequency. 'Years of research have given me good reason to believe this tribe may hold the answer to many things… believing as they do that they fell from the stars... Daughters of Nut...
The Goddess holding up the skies...
Wikipedia.
'This tale, wild and strange as it may seem has always convinced me of their existence.’
He unlocks and opens a desk... pulling out old parchment writings... in a strange hieroglyphic hand... and maps and a cow hide pouch tied with black beaded golden braid. Spreading out an old map of Africa. There is a big circle to the West. In the corner is what looks like a red seal embossed into the parchment... clearly an ancient illustration of the sacred golden carved necklace with the two ruby eyed serpents heads intertwined.
‘This is where I believe the necklace is, somewhere to the West, somewhere in this circle around the mountains of Nut'... regretfully he shakes his head... ' but I never found it... three trips... and not a trace’
At this point consternation and disappointment cause his face to change from his usual kindliness to the haunted, troubled, pensive mask of recent months. I cannot help myself …‘but sir if you can’t find it how do you know it exists?' In response he opens the pouch and empties the contents into his hand… a rock necklace… the Caduceus again... the intertwined serpents with red eyes... smoothed... worked... rough on one side... as if chipped from a larger stone... faded purple with gold scratching on the smooth surface in the heiroglyphic language I did not understand except I recognised the figure 8 on it's side clearly carved into the stone... The ancient symbol of infinity...
'I know this is a copy of the original'... ‘but its as close as I ever got to it... and if this is a copy... then there must be an original'...
I asked him how he came by it?
He recounted that it had been by accident… rummaging in an old african market he’d picked it up noticing that the markings resembled the hieroglyphics he’d seen in old carvings and illustrations relating to the necklace and the lost city of the Wild Cat People. Descendents of the fabulous queen Mantatisi... The old antiquarian could not remember where it had come from... some vague story about a traveller giving it to him in exchange for food and water... he’d tossed it into a pewter dish full of old coins and forgotten about it for years.
‘He gave it to me for nothing… and I give it to you for nothing… take it… someday you might be able to find the Lost City of the Wild Cat People and the descendents of the fabulous queen Mantatisi He gave me the maps and papers saying gently ‘you take up the torch my young friend, maybe you will be more lucky than I.’
He died of cancer shortly after this.
Cranston Fine Art.
That was twenty six years ago and I was no closer to finding the necklace or the fabulous lost kingdom of the Wild Cat People... I took a pull at the scotch… shaking the memory from my mind… after all this was my last day in Africa…thoughts of getting drunk slipped into my mind like I knew they would… sipping my whiskey thinking how difficult it would be for me to finally say goodbye to this beautiful and incredible continent.
As I began drowning my dark and lonely thoughts I heard a tapping sound growing… noticed an old woman limping across the shining floor towards me… walking with the aid of a stick… dragging one foot slightly behind her …barely covered by a faded yellow ochre ragged and dusty robe …hard to see her face hidden by the gray and white matted stringy hair daubed with red Henna…face covered in white sand stone paste to keep off the sun… A specter …through the mists of time came an echo… Blind Pew’s tapping stick in Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Treasure Island’ …come to deliver a pirates promise of execution… the dread ‘black spot’ …the pretty waitress moves towards her ready to shoo away the gnarled apparition… but as if by magic the old woman somehow moves quickly around her… stopping directly in front of me… reaching out her shaking well worn hands. I reached into my pocket for some change... she reached forward... stopped me with a surprisingly strong grip on my forearm… leaning in at me... in a fierce rasping whisper she said...
‘I know where you will find the necklace of the Wild Cat People!’
I was shocked. Frozen. Taken aback. The young waitress broke the silence as she moved in again to remove the beggar lady. I waved her away. She went obediently back to the bar a look of relief on her pretty face. For some reason I found myself looking around as if afraid we were being watched. Again came the rasping whisper...
‘I know where you will find the necklace of the Wild Cat People!’
‘The necklace of the Wild Cat People?’ ...I heard a voice say ...and realized it was my own voice.
I was watching her closely trying to see her face... trying to gather why she had come to me with this information… she would not meet my eye... as if haunted... glancing around the room like I myself had done… as if she was also afraid we were being watched. She appeared to be in a kind of trance... or a daze of preoccupation...
‘Yes I know what it is you seek... it is twenty three days march from here… to the West of the Mountains of Nut.’ I had spent almost two years on and off in those mountains and had found absolutely nothing. I was getting irritated ‘Who are you my sister are you trying to get money from me?’ I demanded. ‘No’ she cried her voice stronger now... more urgent... as if time was running out. She put her finger to her lips silencing me... whispering urgently...
‘I have been looking for you. For you and only you!’
This sent an involuntary shiver down my spine... "Find a big warrior by the name of Sizwe in the villages of the tribal people to the west of here. Find him and you will find the necklace and the valley of the Wild Cat People’ She held out her hand and this time I knew she was expecting a toll. I reached into my pocket pushing a 100 dollar bill into her hands.
The way of the world...
She took the money bowing low whispering ‘believe!’ ...and then she was gone... limping slowly back the way she had come... disappearing from sight as if she’d never been. She never looked back. I was suddenly sprung loaded… thoughts flashing through my mind… filling my head with ideas that would have been impossible an hour earlier... I needed a drink. Smiling to myself I waved again to my pretty waitress as the sun began it’s dip into the horizon… getting ready to set to the ocherstration of the crickets on another warm African night. Thinking about dinner... I ordered another whiskey and as the pretty maiden leaned in to take my empty glass... gently brushing against me with her breasts...
"What time do you get off work ... ?’" I whispered...
she smiled at me knowingly and said ‘in half an hour’...a broad grin spread across my face as it struck me I wouldn’t be leaving the Dark Continent so soon after all. It was just after that... that the single image flashed into my photographer's mind's eye... a close-up of the old woman's gnarled hand gripping the well worn staff she carried... and just above... a worn carving of two red eyed serpents wrapping themselves around the staff.
To be Continued...
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