entitled Beginnings, an effort that had rekindled the old controversy between paleoanthropologists and the so-called scientific creationists and that had incidentally served to make Blair’s name a household word in even the smallest hamlets in the United States. By now, though, Joshua was used to dealing with the Great Man, and he had no qualms about voicing his complaints about Babington’s plans for the circumcision rite.
Blair assured Joshua that educated Kikembu, especially Christians, also regarded Ngwati with distaste, and that Babington would not try to make him keep the “small skin” if Joshua were vigorously opposed to it.
“I am,” said Joshua, but he neatly parried the Great Man’s many well-meaning proposals for sidestepping the circumcision rite altogether. He felt he owed Babington, and he wanted to earn the old man’s respect.
Apprised of Joshua’s intentions, Babington declared that the ceremony would take place two days hence, in the very grove where he and his protégé had their tree house. Blair then informed Joshua that in order to prove himself he must not show any fear prior to the cutting or cry out in pain during it. Such behavior would result in disgrace for himself and his sponsors. Moreover, to lend the rite legitimacy, Babington had sent messages to several village leaders and asked Blair to invite some of the Kikembu from the outpost village of Nyarati as onlookers. Once the knife glinted, they would applaud Joshua’s steadfastness or, if he did not bear up, ridicule his public cowardice.
“Onlookers!”
“It’s traditional, I’m afraid. Of what point are the strength and beauty of a leopard if no one ever sees them?”
“Of considerable point, if you’re the leopard. Besides, we’re not talking about leopards. We’re talking about my one and only reproductive organ. Onlookers be damned!”
“They’re for purposes of verification, Joshua.”
“Maybe Babington ought to circumcise a leopard, Dr. Blair. I’d love to see them verify that.”
“Now, now,” said Alistair Patrick Blair. “Tsk-tsk.”
* * *
Joshua spent the night before his irua at the park’s sprawling Edwardian guest lodge with Blair. At dawn he bathed himself in a tub mounted on cast-iron lion’s paws, donned a white linen robe, and, in company with the paleoanthropologist, set off for his rendezvous with Babington aboard a Land Rover driven by a uniformed park attendant.
They arrived in the acacia grove shortly after eight o’clock and found it teeming with young people from Nyarati, both men and women. The women were singing spiritedly, and the boisterous gaiety of the entire crowd seemed out of proportion to its cause, the trimming of an innocent foreskin. Blair pulled off Joshua’s robe and pointed him to the spot where the old Wanderobo would perform the surgery.
“You’re not to look at Babington, Joshua. Don’t try to watch the cutting, either.”
“I thought that would be part of proving my manhood.”
“No. Rather than being required, it’s prohibited.”
“Thanks be to Ngai for small mercies.”
Naked and shivering, he entered the clearing beneath the tree house, sat down on the matted grass, and averted his face from the ladder that Babington would soon be descending. Blair, his aide, could offer him no physical assistance until the rite was concluded.
The songs of the Kikembu women, the bawdy masculine repartee at his back, and the anxious hiccupping of his heart isolated him from the reality of what was happening. This was not happening to him. Only, of course, it was.
Then Babington was there, kneeling before him with a knife, and Joshua put both fists to the right side of his neck, placed his chin on one fist, and stared out into the savannah. The cutting began. Joshua clenched his teeth and tightened his fists. Doggedly refusing to yip or whimper, he caught sight of a pair of tourist minibuses rolling over the steppe from the vicinity of the guest lodge. That morning while boarding the Land Rover, he recalled, he had seen them parked inside a courtyard next to the lodge. Somehow the tour guide had learned of the approaching ceremony. When the minibuses pulled abreast of the acacia grove, clouds of dust drifting away behind them, Joshua wanted to scream.
The faces in the windows of the two grimy vehicles belonged primarily to astonished Caucasians, many of them elderly women in multicolored head scarves, out-of-fashion pillbox hats, or luxuriant wigs much too youthful for their wearers. The cutting momentarily ceased. Passengers from both vans dismounted at the outer picket of trees and filtered inward to stand behind the swaying and ululating Kikembu women.
“Jesus,” Joshua murmured.
“Hush,” cautioned Babington. “Or I will deprive you