By Syrulwa Somah (PHD)
The river behind the village of Duu-gbor, in the shadow of Bassa Country, was a patient old teacher, always offering the same lesson in a dozen voices: keep what is yours, but learn how to listen when the water changes its mind.
In the edge of that river stood the Bassa compound, round huts drum-shaped by the wind, a chorus of calabashes and the low, steady hum of everyday life. The land, green and stubborn as a stubborn old man, held the scent of cassava and red earth, of paths worn smooth by many feet who had walked before. The land was said to have ninety-nine steps, each one carrying a meaning—the ancestors and the living climbing and descending, learning what belongs to them and what must be guarded.
Dyeni, daughter of King Mabam Kabian and the kingdom’s messenger of news, sat with King Mabam Kabian herself under a leaf roof that kept the sun from pressing down on their thoughts.
The day carried the weight of a memory that refused to settle: the memory of land taken by ruse, when settlers—people who looked much like them, yet moved with a different gravity in their hands and eyes—arrived with papers, promises, and fear dressed up as law. The river Dein, once a name spoken with reverence, had been erased and renamed St. Paul River, a violation of divine sovereignty and a wind from a different god claiming the same sky.
“Land is spoken for in the mouth and in the ear,” King Mabam Kabian said, tracing a finger along the edge of a woven mat. “When they spoke in the halls of the new government, it was not the soil that answered back—it was the fear in the heart of the people who watched from the margins.” Dyeni’s gaze lifted to the river’s slow sermon, thinking of the land as something more than a possession. She could hear the hush between the leaves, the way the old well remembered every foot that had watered it.
The land, Dyeni remembered, was the book of God to read, and the Ancestors were the bridge between past and present, never to be sold.
This land was not a set of papers to be stamped and filed away; it held the memory of Poro and Sande universities, the sacred shrines, and the gloves of ritual protectors who kept the old truth safe. Lying on the Ancestors is a curse invoked on this nation, a taunt that risks turning the world hollow when daughters and sons forget the white man’s book but lose sight of their own culture in the glare of its pages.
And yet the land’s deepest claim was older still: a covenant with the divine, a vow to guard the paths that weave the living to the dead.
Dyeni’s cousin, Kaidyi-dea, had a memory sharper than most. He spoke little, but when he did, the words came like a drumbeat that slow-courts the heart. He told Dyeni about the day the first parcel maps arrived, rolled like scrolls, sealed with a wax that never quite dried.
The men who signed them wore smiles that did not reach their eyes, and the women who watched from the edges of the crowd knew it was an exchange where only one side spoke the truth—the side that walked away with the land.
That night, after the market had closed and the fireflies had begun their slow carnival, Dyeni walked down to the Duu riverbank, where the water kept its own counsel. The Ancestors—who were not made of memory alone but of the courage to act on memory—were there, though unseen, like a chorus of soft rain. Dyeni thought of them not as distant figures but as a warning, as a map, as a breath you could follow into the dark and still return with your hands whole.
“Came to take what we sang with our mothers’ lullabies,” she whispered to the night, to the trees, to the water that carried reflections of their homes in its surface. “Came with a blanket of law that felt like home until you pulled it off and found the truth beneath.”
In the days that followed, the kingdom did not rise with loud anger; it moved with a quieter resolve. The elders spoke slowly, not to frighten but to remind: the land was a living thing, and a living thing does not yield its heart without a sound.
The land must be read as a holy text, a covenant with God and with those who came before, a shield against forgetting what makes a people a people. And the land’s sacredness did not stop at the soil; it stretched to the 99 steps, each one a vow to guard what is held sacred, to remember what must be kept from becoming mere collateral in a ledger.
One dawn, the kingdom gathered at the old palm called the Voice Tree, a tree that had watched many seasons pass and had learned to listen for the breath of the people. The eldest, Mabam Kabian, spoke first, her voice deep as the old drums and patient as the river’s curve.
“We did not come here to claim a land that does not belong to us,” she began, eyes bright with the light of a hundred sunrises. “We came to live within a covenant: we nurture the soil, the soil nurtures us, and we share the fruit with one another.
If a hand tries to grasp what is not rightful, the earth sighs and the river moves to remind them that balance is law more ancient than any paper.” She paused, her hand resting on the bark of the Voice Tree. “The land is the book of God to read,” she continued, “and the Ancestors are the bridge between past and present. It is never to be sold, not even its Poro and Sande universities, its shrines, or the sacred gloves—the instruments of a people’s rite and their protection.
Lying on the Ancestors is a curse invoked on this nation, a curse that grows when daughters and sons learn too well the white man’s book and forget the living Bible of their own culture.”
Her words settled on the crowd like a calm rain. Dyeni felt the weight in the air shift, as though the night itself had exhaled.
From that day, the talk began to turn toward what could be done rather than what had been lost. The people organized in the old way—quietly, with a stubborn grace, the way fishermen adjust their nets with a patient glare at the water.
They drew lines not on maps but in memory: where the old wells lay, where the sacred groves stood, where the soil still remembered the hands that had tilled it for generations. And they told the stories of the 99 steps, of each landing and each ascent, so that the younger ones would know not only where to walk but why.
A young man named Kaidyi-dea stepped forward with a plan that sounded both simple and impossible: a chorus of voices to be heard in every quarter of the surrounding towns and cities, telling the truth of the land, their history, and their longing for protection under a law that recognized the rights of the people who had tended the soil since the beginning of memory.
The plan did not rely on violence or loud proclamations. It relied on the long patience of a river and the stubbornness of a people who refused to forget their own names.
They would hold gatherings under the same palm trees where their ancestors once sang to the river’s edge, inviting neighbors to share stories of their own lands, to remind the newcomers that the land was not merely soil but a web of relations—the kinship of trees and birds, the memory of soils that fed children and elders alike. They would insist that the land, with its 99 meaningful steps, be honored in every treaty, every deed, every mention in the courts.
In the months that followed, there were wins small and large: a hearing here, a postponement there, a recognition that the map could be challenged not by bold bluster but by careful, tireless documentation of the real history of the land and its people. They learned to speak the language of law as one speaks a difficult, beloved song—softly at first, then with a growing chorus that could not be ignored.
The settlers who looked like them but moved with different hands began to meet a resistance that was not merely one of anger, but one of undeniable truth: the land’s true caretakers were those who held its memory in their bones, who could tell, with a quiet certainty, where the soil’s old scars lay and what the land would demand if it were treated as something renewable rather than purchasable.
And so the Dein River kept speaking, in a voice that could be heard if you listened with the patience of a hunter who knows the forest’s moods. The Ancestors, always present, did not appear as bright figures in a dream, but as the recurring sense that one must act with courage when the wind shifts and the earth begins to whisper a warning. The river’s name, once erased, stood as a marker of memory that would not be erased again.
Toward the end of a season, a mediator’s voice rose above the crowd, not in triumph but in relief: a shared understanding, a recognition that certain lands belong to the people who have tended them, who have fed their families from their soils, who have woven the land into the fabric of their songs and their daily bread.
The paper might still dance with figures and stamps, but the living memory of the land—the pulse of the village, the names of fields, the tune of the drums—held its own ground.
Dyeni stood again by the river, feeling the current cradle the ankles that carried her for a lifetime of small, stubborn acts. The land was not theirs to surrender, she realized; it was theirs to guard, to mend, to teach.
If the world asked for a calm grace, the people would offer it—the grace of a morning sun tempered by a memory of nights when the smoke of the ancestors rose like a soft guiding wind. And the 99 steps would remain a living map, a pedagogy of memory, a discipline of care.
The night settled in once more, and the river Dein kept its counsel. In the glow of the fire, Dyeni whispered a promise to the soil: that they would not forget the names carved in the old paths, that they would tell the story of the ruse as a warning and as a map for future days, and that the land would be tended with the same patient, stubborn love that had kept them alive for generations.
The land is the book of God to read, the Ancestors the bridge between past and present, and it would not be sold, not for the clever speeches of men, not for the lure of a courthouse’s gold, not for the forgetfulness of those who would turn away from their own culture in search of a different world.
