We are all practitioners of the same sacred, sinful craft. The government merely holds the copyright. They steal from nature, they steal from your labour, and they call it 'tax'. The preacher steals your fears and sells you paradise, and calls it a 'tithe'. The suitor steals a daughter from a family and calls it a 'bride price'. It is all the same transaction, polished with different names. If you are not a thief in this grand bazaar of existence, you are not a player; you are the merchandise.
After the great vanishing of my house—exorcised into non-existence by Pastor Ganji’s conveniently divine real estate magic—my only mission was to find Anita. To find a root for my rotting tree of memories. One morning, guided by an intuition that smelled suspiciously of desperation, I decided to consult a witch doctor. My breakfast was a testament to my new reality: a plate of Mesopotamian worms, a bowl of Nubian cockroaches, a glass of Hippo’s milk from the Hiddekel. A man eats what he must to survive the day.
As I left, I met a man of impossible proportions. His face was a round Ethiopian chapati, his nose a Zimbabwean pumpkin, his jawline a tribute to King Kong. He was a living cartography of absurdity.
"Hey, tall boy," I greeted. "Lost tourist? What’s your name?"
"Atido," he said. "Atido Tungi. Younger brother of Sophia Herman Tungi."
The name was a punch to my spiritual gut. My dead love’s brother, a spectre from a past I could not bury. I invited him to the shrine, a foolish attempt to blend my quests. He agreed, and with every third pace, he asked a question, peeling back the layers of my sanity until, at the very threshold of the witch doctor’s domain, he vanished. Poof. A puff of narrative smoke.
I fled, seeking the opposite pole of power: a man of God. Pastor Richard Ganji had already stolen my house; perhaps another could return my peace. But when this new pastor prayed over me, the world did not right itself. Instead, I saw it clearly: my life was a poorly managed franchise of the house of broken hearts. I found Anita not in power, but in squalor, dying of Falciparum malaria in a brothel. The final thread of my old life snapped. Romata was a corpse, and I was a fly on its lips. It was time to leave.
My exodus to Nopinia with my friend Junior and his beloved Mercedez Benz was a pilgrimage to the gilded heart of the new world. But the journey was a descent into the national subconscious. We stalled in a jungle, the very cradle of our nation’s forgotten soul. My grandmother’s stories flooded back—tales of Rolmaghata, the "Land of Winged Snakes," where a tribe worshipped reptiles with the blood of virgins and practiced the ‘Gadubadu’, a brutal initiation of theft and rape. The colonialists, our "Saviors," had not eradicated this tribe; they had merely rebranded it. They changed the name to Romata, "Rule of Masters and Abductors," and built a government in its image.
And then, from the shadows, they emerged. The tribe itself. Not as ghosts, but as living refugees, displaced by the very deforestation and greed their modern "brothers" in the capital had unleashed. They were pushing their children in carts, fleeing a jungle that could no longer hide them. We were two sides of the same stolen coin: I, fleeing the spiritual bankruptcy of the state; they, fleeing its literal environmental collapse.
"They say a goat is a goat, even if mothered by a cow," I told them. "Why not go to the capital? Your brothers are in power." One of them looked at me, his eyes holding an ancient, untarnished truth. "Do you think we will master modern theft?"
The question hung in the air, a perfect, damning indictment. They had not forgotten their nature; they had simply failed to adapt it to the sleek, legalized theft of the modern age. They left us there, carrying their "holey gaberlunzie" and their purity of purpose.
We finally reached Port Anipi, the jewel of Nopinia. It was a city of light, a paradise of chrome and cleavage. It was the ultimate distraction, a sensory overload designed to make you forget the cost of entry. At the Emperor Haile Selassie Hotel, and later at the Big Day Music Hall, I lost myself in the rhythm and the body of a woman named Yolanda. I was a moth to a gilded flame, dancing to the lyrics of the man on the radio.
But the house of broken hearts has branches everywhere. I fell asleep in a luxurious bathroom and woke to a violent translation. The air was thick with the smell of raw sewage and despair. I was in San Python, the "Armpit of the World", a shanty town clinging to the underbelly of the shining city. This was the real Nopinia, the hidden cost of the paradise above.
A madwoman, naked and caked in filth, became my hysterical guide. I ran from her, a phantom in a nightmare, until I vanished into the thin air of my own disorientation. I found myself before a sign: Saint Peter’s College of Cultural Heritage. The locals, with more honesty, called it the San Python School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
The principal, a man drowning in apology for his mad wife, confirmed it. "In this town," he whispered, "everyone is either a witch or a wizard." He directed me to New Bridge Street for a room. The path there was uglier than the word ‘ugly’ could ever describe, a concrete manifestation of a broken system.
And then I saw her. Another madwoman, another prophetess of the abyss, naked and painted in the blood of her own cycles. She was the spirit of this place, the truth that San Python screamed and Port Anipi whispered. I ran from her, my flight a silent scream in the morning air. I ran until I disappeared, not into safety, but into a terrifying revelation. For the greatest thief of all is not a man, but a system, and its most precious loot is not your money, but your very soul.
The old man fell silent, the echo of his last words hanging in the firelit room like a verdict. The children, for once, were not sleeping. They were frozen, their eyes wide, trying to map the terrifying geography of his story onto their own world.
In the pavilion, King Rhombus—David Coin—stood up, his face pale. The hissing woman was gone. In her place, standing at the edge of the compound, was the figure of Atido Tungi, the impossible brother. He was not looking at the king. He was looking at the old man’s house, and in his hand, he held not a weapon, but a single, weathered seed.
The old man inside met the children’s terrified gaze, his voice dropping to a whisper that seemed to come from the earth itself. "Remember," he said, "a tree grown from a stolen seed will only ever bear bitter fruit."