Author Post: Jon Haylett

Conception

The story that became ‘Black Mongoose’, due to be published by PaperBooks in February, was conceived one lunchtime on a hard wooden seat in a pub on the south bank of the Thames, one of those run-down Victorian red-brick London hostelries tottering on the edge of what looked like a bomb site, to which I’d repaired while my wife and daughter pillaged the West End.

Conception requires a seed, and the seed in this case was a dance, an annual dance which takes place thousands of miles away from muddy Thames-side. I know you’ll say that likening what’s in this link to a seed is sadly inappropriate, because the clip features publicly-professed virgins – that’s why they’re carrying reeds, though one does rather wonder at those who drop theirs. Rather lovely virgins they are too, but the best part of this is definitely the singing. I love African singing for, however untutored they may be, both men and women sing like God’s angels, and all seem to have an innate ability to harmonise. See what you think:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbj8lmWE5xY

This reed dance is the Swazi version, but the Zulus do a similar one, the main difference being that, in the Swazi version, the local King gets to choose one of the damsels as his latest wife. As a consequence, the current King, Mswati III, has thirteen wives and 23 children, which is rather slow going as his father, Mswati II, had no less than 70. Mswati III’s latest, a 17-year old schoolgirl, was a singularly unfortunate choice as, in the face of one of the worst AIDS epidemics in the whole of Africa, the Swazi Government had been preaching abstinence, particularly among the young.

Don’t ask me why this particular gem of African culture suddenly bobbed to the top of my mind in a grubby London pub, for I have no answer, but the description of just such a dance began to came out almost too fast for me to write it down. I was hampered by only having a tiny notebook in my pocket and the stub of a pencil. The notebook had been borrowed from my daughter, a blue, mock-suede covered thing with a large pink flower on the front, but each page was emblazoned with a very appropriate logo: ‘Go Girl!’

Jon