From under the wreckage rose a giant whose simple mission was to save his people. All of his people. In the days when Mwanga had been a man, not a city, an N’Kuru girl had been kidnapped by a Kyoga man — one of thousands. Their mingled blood ran through the generations and down the centuries to flow in the veins of Dr Julius Karanga. Educated first at a mission school in the bush and then with a scholarship at the Sorbonne in Paris, he had been subject by chance to the French method of colonisation and had been not only well educated but also fully trained in the practicalities of government. He understood the systems which had to be put in place. He knew that Mau needed not armies and secret police but law, justice. And that meant courts. Schools. Hospitals. A social structure. He had the vision to see that his country could only afford these things if she produced the goods to pay for them. And she would only produce the goods if she was united and well governed. He saw that the first step was to bring the people together, his people together, and allow them to choose a government they trusted.
Invited home from his work as a political commentator in Paris, he accepted the post of President only on condition that it was a temporary appointment, to be confirmed or cancelled by due process of democracy. He made it his first mission to explain democracy to a people who had known only supposedly benign dictatorship. He toured the country, talking to the elders in the villages and townships. He described how his vision of democratic government would work. He began to ask for men to come forward and present themselves as being worthy of government office. Kyoga men came and then, at last, N’Kuru men. This was the early sixties. Women, largely uneducated, still worked on the land. He took the men, fired them with his vision and began to try and organise elections. As his year of office ran out, he held his precious elections. They were violent but ultimately successful in their immediate aim. A government was formed and he was recognised as its head.
Companies began to return with the new stability. Banks. The World Bank. As if to add a divine blessing to the process, diamonds were discovered in the Kyoga lands, then, right up near the border to the north, reserves of coal and oil. Slowly, painstakingly, over one decade and then another, this great leader began to unify and restore his country. The high jungle was carefully cleared to allow access to the mineral wealth of the outback. But it was not wilfully destroyed and the habitats of the gorillas and the jungle leopards were preserved. The farms on the plains were organised into communes, for the French-educated leader was not too proud to see that some of what the communists had instilled into the N’Kuru freedom fighters was wise and practical. The communes held their land on condition that they, too, would protect the dwindling populations of antelope, wildebeest, rhino and elephant; on condition that they were careful with the pesticides and chemical fertilisers they used on the land, that they chose their crops with care and did not over-farm the soil. The grasslands had been over-farmed, however, and badly so. The farmers found their work painfully difficult and became increasingly grudging about protecting species they saw only as vermin which put their livelihoods at risk. A trade grew up in ivory and rhino-horn poaching as some N’Kuru came close to starving. Rumours began to circulate that the N’Kuru Lions were getting ready to return.
Julius Karanga’s reaction to this was typical. He set in motion his greatest project so far: the great Mau dam and irrigation project. He gathered all the power and prestige he had and poured it unstintingly into the project which would make the N’Kuru farmlands bloom again. By early 1985 it was ready to go. The elder statesman was invited by the dam-building consortium to lay the first stone — the dam was destined to bear his name — and he accepted. On 16 July, he stood high on the southern bank of the river and declaimed to the world, ‘I lay the first stone of the Dr Julius Karanga Dam here before you today in the land of my N’Kuru ancestors. In the fullness of time I shall stand on the land of my Kyoga ancestors and lay the last stone so that we can bring back life and prosperity to all of our country! I tell you, my people, the future has never looked so bright.’
These were the last words he was ever to speak, for the bomb wrapped round the body of a young N’Kuru freedom fighter standing nearby exploded at that moment and twenty people nearest to her, including the Premier and many of his closest colleagues, died at once. The N’Kuru Lions were back.
In the political turmoil which followed the outrage, twenty years of Karanga’s work fell apart overnight. The new government, Kyoga men, began an undeclared war on the N’Kuru. The Lions reacted in kind. Terrorism came to Mawanga with a vengeance. The great plains became no-go for anyone associated with the powers that be — the army, the police, the commune organisers. The crops died. The land dried. The red soil began to blow away. Five carefully planted terrorist bombs closed the coal mines and set the oilwell on fire. Only the diamond mine remained in production, for security there had always been tight.
The people began to starve. Desperate, the government begged aid from its neighbours. The Congo Libran government which had sheltered the Lions sent cattle to supplement the N’Kuru herds but the cattle were infected with rinderpest and the plague wiped out all the herds. Shipments of food began to turn up desultorily: meat from Europe which had already been refused by Russia because it was contaminated; grain from the United States which had been sprayed with illegal chemicals; free milk powder for the children, which did not contain the nutriments they actually required to develop properly. The usual. But there were other demands on the aid agencies much more urgent than Mau’s seemed to be. For twenty years, the country had stood as a symbol of everything positive in African independence. It was difficult for the rest of the world to come to terms with the speed and the scale of the disaster overtaking the once prosperous state. And, just as divine power had chosen to give to those who had by adding oil and diamonds to the security brought by Julius Karanga, so the same power chose to take even from those who had not, and the great drought came. The grassland became a bowl of red dust. The black soil of the escarpment became cracked and dry as the jungle withered. The mighty River Mau dried to a stinking trickle which oozed a full half-mile away from the place where Karanga had died, where the first stone of his dam had been laid. All that kept the harbour of Mawanga open was the depth of its tectonic floor; the river itself could hardly make it to the sea.
The drought was in its third year now and the world was just beginning to wake up to it. Because Julius Karanga had achieved so much so independently in the sixties and seventies and because his cabinet had been wiped out with him, the United Nations had few contacts in Mau, and so even that organisation, so widely experienced in the causes and results of disaster, was only just beginning to wake up to it. And there was much to wake up to here. The whole N’Kuru nation on the move. The better part of five million people seemingly mere weeks away from death as the last of the food and water trickled away. The desperate Kyoga government on the verge of collapse, relying on the increasingly uncontrollable army to keep an impossible situation under control. A number of general officers building well-armed, dangerous power bases, ready to grasp control. The Lions set to ‘liberate’ the country by any method, no matter how brutal, and at any price, no matter how high. The neighbouring states quietly massing their own armies along the frontiers, all set to snap it up, for Mawanga was the best harbour on the western coast, and that alone would make invasion worthwhile.