The Sleeping Baobab Tree Read Online Free PDF

the things she’d rather not hear – even if they’re shouted into her ear – from twenty millimetres away.
    But I had other things on my mind. Something was bothering me about my search results. Why had the guys with their clinic in New York come into the results when I had definitely included Zambia in my search string?
    When Mum got home I asked her innocently, “Have you ever heard of men called Ratsberg and Wrath from New York? Do they have some connection with Zambia?”
    “
Ratbag
, you mean?” Mum said in disgust. She’s not very good at hiding her feelings. “No, thankfully, neither of those
genocidaires
has anything to do with Zambia. They did enough damage in South Africa for ten lifetimes. Why do you ask?”
    “Oh, just a school project,” I said quickly. “It’s nothing.”
    “A school project on what? Don’t tell me Sister Leonisa has put you onto them? It’d be the kind of rubbish she’d believe in. God Almighty, what goes on in that school?”
    I should have known not to raise it. I’d just thought that in her current mood she might not have the energy to ask me why I wanted to know. I should have known better.
    “We were doing stuff about orphans and their names came up. I just thought they sounded funny.”
    “Funny, all right. Funny
evil
,” she said under her breath, stirring the pot of soup as if it was the enemy.
    “Anyway, I’ll just go and finish my homework now,” I said, trying to adopt Madillo’s breezy tone.
    She didn’t answer, just carried on stirring like a crazy woman. Now I had a new word to look up:
genocidaires
. It sounded like “genocide”, so I supposed it had something to do with mass murder and war. Not that that really helped, because if they were in New York, I would not really put them on a list of suspects.
    I thought I should have a list, though, and even though I was most definitely not ready to put Nokokulu on it, I did scribble “N” down, in pencil. It was a start.

FRED
Nokokulu and the Man-Beast
    My Great-granny Nokokulu is an unusual person. To put it mildly. She is full of powers. They’re all stuck in a spindly skinny body that creaks around the place like a rusty bicycle. She complains that soon she’ll die and there’ll be no real witch left in our family.
    She is wrong about that. First of all, of course, she is never going to die. There is no hope of that at all. Secondly, certain other people in this family have powers. And she knows that. That is why she is always trying to teach me the values she thinks I’m losing.
    “Chiti,” she says, “what’s the point of sitting in front of a screen where little idiot characters run around shooting each other? One day you’ll forget what real people look like, then what? Silly little voices, chirping and squawking like chickens with sore throats. That’s not life. I’ll show you what life is really about, then you’ll forget all these computer things.”
    She calls me Chiti rather than Fred. It’s my middle name and nobody else uses it. Today, after the twins had left (and after she’d given me her medicine, which might have made me feel better if I’d been sick in the first place), she sat down on my bed and made an announcement.
    “You and I – the Great Nokokulu and her great-grandson Chiti, named after the most powerful chief in the whole of Zambia – are going on a journey. You are growing big now, and I can see that you may have some of my powers running through your body. Not as many as I have, nobody has that many, but a few. They’ll do for the moment.”
    “We’re going on a journey?” I said, my voice giving that irritating squeak it seems to have all the time now. “I can’t go anywhere. I’m sick.”
    It wasn’t really much good telling her that, because she never listens. But it was worth a try.
    “I’ll plan carefully, and then we’ll go,” she said. “You and I, to the place where the Man-Beast has returned. The Man-Beast who thinks his powers will