For Zuri, Darian was her first love. He was her only love really. Her only love in the way only teenagers can love, with a young devotion. Theirs was a relationship carved from stolen moments and unfinished promises. It rebelled against the laws written by the old men of the village who had already enjoyed their lion’s share of youth and desire, and the taking of young girls as wives. In loving Darian, Zuri was not merely loving a boy; she was daring the world she had been born into.
Their world was a village that sat cradled along the shores of Nam Lolwe (Lake Victoria), the great lake whose waters swallowed the horizon and reflected the blue sky. Zuri and Darian were teenagers in a Luo fishing community sealed off by customs as much as by geography. Beyond the thick ring of trees that guarded the village lay roads few had walked and lives fewer still had imagined. Outsiders came only on market days—rare birds arriving in coughing vehicles, their engines announcing them long before they were seen. The richest among the outsiders drove the classic 1980s Volkswagen Sciroccos, their paint sun-faded but still glossy enough to inspire awe among villagers whose fastest transport was a donkey cart.
Life in the village followed rhythms as old as the lake’s waves themselves. Men fished at night, casting nets beneath the moonlight. Boys herded cattle by day, their bare feet hardened by soil and thorn. Women smoked fish, patched nets, and stitched clothes whose seams were more of tradition than style. The rules of connection were clear and unquestioned: boys and girls did not mingle before circumcision, and certainly not before marriage. Desire was something to be postponed, bartered, or beaten into submission.
Zuri and Darian broke those rules, quietly.
Their meetings happened in the open fields where no one thought to look closely. Darian followed his father’s cattle, a slim silhouette against the grass, while Zuri occasionally came with lunch for her brothers—githeri, sometimes and a flask of sour milk. The couple would drink the milk in their agwatas, their hands brushing too long. Their eyes lingering. Soon the fields became their sanctuary, and the tall grass their cover. When Darian’s parents attended community meetings or traveled to the market, Zuri slipped into his home. Love found them there, clumsy and secretive. They learned each other in whispers, moans, and hurried breaths, always listening for footsteps, always knowing discovery would mean punishment by death or banishment, and sure disgrace.
Yet Zuri’s hunger stretched beyond Darian.
The village’s market days fascinated her. She lingered at the market benches longer than necessary, watching outsiders speak loudly and laugh freely, their clothes brighter, their skin smelling of soap instead of smoke and fish. They spoke of towns beyond the trees, of electricity, of radios that sang, of women who chose their own husbands—or chose none at all. They spoke of loka (abroad), eutopia stories that rolled off their tongues easily.
Zuri drank in these stories greedily. The village began to feel smaller for her each day. She grew tired of their mud houses that sweated in the heat, of waking to the stench of cow dung and drying fish, of old men whose breath carried rot and authority. She felt the dresses sewn for her hid her beauty instead of celebrating it. They did not bring out her bunda the way a girl would want. Worst of all, she dreaded the certainty of her future: turning eighteen and being handed to an old man as a seventh wife, her youth traded for cattle and amusement.
Zuri shared her dreams with Darian in the fields and by the lake’s edge. Darian listened, torn. By day he herded cattle; by night he fished until his arms ached. Days when he rested, he read folklore—stories of ancestors, spirits, and the sufficiency of life within the village as it was. Yet Zuri’s tales started to plant doubts in his mind. What if there was more beyond Nam Lolwe? What if the lake was not the center of the world, but merely its edge?
Zuri urged him to leave with her, just once, even if only to see. Darian hesitated. Part of him longed for the unknown, yes, but a greater part feared betraying the beliefs that had shaped him. He believed, as he had been taught, life within the lake’s shores was enough. The fish was enough. The women were enough. They needed nothing more. But Zuri, slowly and painfully, realized that love alone would not move him.
So she stopped asking.
On a market day like any other, when dust rose beneath foreign tires and gossip buzzed like flies, Zuri made her choice. One of the outsiders—a man with a well combed full beard and a cream-colored Volkswagen—lingered around the market longer than usual. Zuri climbed into his car before fear could catch her, and the engine roared. Dust swallowed the road. By the time the lake reappeared in the villagers’ sight, Zuri was gone!
Her absence exploded by nightfall. Her parents and siblings searched hut to hut, calling her name until their voices broke. Word had spread that she was gone, and the villagers whispers started to harden into accusations.
Zuri had always been trouble. Too bold. Too curious. Too visible for a girl at the market. They said she clung to outsiders’ clothes and invited their attention. They hated how their sons stared at her, at her diastema that aided her beauty and of course her big bunda, and how their daughters listened to her questions. Loka was a dangerous place, the elders had said—a place full of alcohol, prostitution, and outright evil. But no one in the village had ever been beyond the lake and the fence of trees. Zuri had refused since early on to subscribe to their fear and bullshit. She had chosen the dust and motion over obedience to folklore.
Some villagers rejoiced at her disappearance. A bad influence on their daughters was gone. Their sons could finally think straight again. They joked that a fat hippo must have eaten her, for only bad people were taken by hippos. Others hoped the gods had struck her dead in the forest. Few offered comfort to her parents. The fingers started to point towards Darian simply because he loved her. He said nothing. He could not admit that Zuri had planned this escape for time, that they had shared bodies and dreams. Such truth would have made him a sacrifice to appease the gods.
No connection to the outside world meant soon the searches faded. The forest yielded nothing. The hills were silent. The lake remained indifferent to her parents’ woes. Time did what it always does—it moved on. Years and moons went by. Darian married another girl, her bunda not as generous as Zuri’s, yet custom, as always, had to be obeyed. Bummer. Zuri’s parents aged quickly, their joy was sacrificed alongside prayers, spending long nights fasting and offering their livestock to the gods, begging to know why their daughter had been taken, while the villagers exhaled in relief that the girl who had defied them for so long was finally gone—good riddance!
Until one mundane evening, when a cream Volkswagen crawled into the compound.
The car looked foreign and familiar all at once. A sharply dressed man stepped out with a big afro, trousers scandalously tight—so tight they seemed stitched directly onto his being. He jingled his keys unnecessarily before opening the door for a thin woman holding a swaddled baby.
The woman moved slowly, uncertainly. Shakily. Huge glasses hid her eyes. A scarf made of foreign cotton covered her nose and mouth from the dust. When she removed them, the villagers who had followed the car to the homestead gasped loudly. Her hair clung sparsely to her scalp. Zuri was back—smaller, weaker, trembling—but unmistakably Zuri. Her famous bunda was gone. It was unclear whether the earlier gasps were for her disappearing bunda or for her reappearance itself.
Her parents froze between joy and disbelief. A crowd had gathered, mouths open, questions unspoken. Zuri took one careful step forward, then another, and forced a smile.
“Hello, mother!”
✍🏽Reagan.