Old Tropes

Kembe and Ayana were distraught. Neither one knew what to do. Their childhood legends lay dead in front of them, and Nganga was about to destroy their village and their families.

They had to do something, but what could kids do against a two-hundred-foot Nganga? If even Danh and the Elephant Bird were too weak to stop him, Kembe and Ayana had no chance.

They tried to look out through the waterfall and they tried not to cry. Maybe their families would see Nganga coming and would run away. Or maybe something else would save them. But both of them knew only they could save their village.

But how?

From within the center of the beam of light, Nganga grew. He grew taller. He grew horns. He grew fangs. He grew fire from his headdress.

He looked very, very mean and very, very angry. He looked down at Kembe and said he was going to wipe out everyone in the village who had ignored him. They deserved to die for their lack of belief.

He asked Kembe to come with him, but Kembe wouldn’t.

The Elephant Bird folded its wings and became a giant rocket, going so fast that they barely got wet as they shot through the falls. They landed in a massive cave that was lit in hot orange from burning lava at the back of the cave.

The bird placed them gently on the floor and waddled away from them toward a pile of rocks. The pile rose from the floor, and they realized it was a snake, much bigger than the Elephant Bird.

Ayana stood still, and the Elephant Bird picked her up and flew up into the sky so high it seemed they could touch the moon. Ayana knew this was supposed to be scary, but she was just glad to see Kembe again.

He pointed downward. She saw their village far below, and Mount Kilimanjaro beyond it. That reminded her of her climb, and she told Kembe about it. He looked impressed, then excited when he heard about Anansi and kind of green when she showed him Anansi’s sticky, yucky gift.

She was too scared to ask what it was, and too scared to turn and run. So she put out her hands and closed her eyes. The instant the gift touched her hands, she found herself back in Nganga’s hut.

He was very impressed with her gift, and said it would lead them to Kembe. So they prepared food and water and left. As they walked, Ayana noticed that Nganga was eyeing Anansi’s gift and she decided to keep it with her even though sticky yucky spiderweb was getting on everything.

They walked a long time, but after climbing to Anasi’s cave, she couldn’t go any further. While Nganga made camp, she lay down for a short rest and was instantly asleep.

Ayana was a very brave and practical girl. The first thing she did was watch where the Elephant Bird carried Kembe, and then she ran as fast as she could back to Nganga.

He told her that there is only one way to deal with magic things like the Elephant Bird, and that is to find Anansi, the oldest and most powerful of African legends. She had never believed that Anansi was real, but if Elephant Birds were real, maybe Anansi was, too. She would have to look for his cave on Mount Kilimanjaro.

And that was how the two friends found themselves near Victoria Falls. Nganga had told Kembe that Elephant Birds liked to nest on Mount Kilimanjaro and that they were attracted to brightly colored things in the sky.

They set up several kites near the wind billowing up from Victoria Falls. Then Ayana laid out their picnic. Just as she was inviting Kembe to join her, a huge shadow darkened their picnic spot. The shadow grew bigger and bigger, and Ayana looked up just in time to see Kembe standing still, looking up at the biggest bird she had ever seen. It was so big that it could be nothing but an Elephant Bird.

Kembe and Ayana lived in Africa, a place full of legends.

Some legends are places so big that people revere them, such as Victoria Falls, a waterfall so large that it makes its own rain storms, or Mount Kilimanjaro, a mountain so tall that it’s hard to breathe at the top.

Other legends are stories just like the ones Kembe and Ayana learned as they grew up. People revere the characters in the stories, such as Anansi the spider, Danh the snake god of unity, or birds big enough to fly away with elephants.

I stood there, staring down at a room full of second- and third-grade faces. I imagined they were wondering how boring this guy was going to be. After all, isn’t that the problem with school in the first place?The face in the middle was my son, and he had every right be nervous. I'm the type of dad who creates voices for all the characters in a book, changes the story on the fly to see who catches me and bugs the kids mercilessly until I get everyone to participate.But he wasn’t nervous. I was.

 It’s impossible for us in the twenty-first century to feel what it was like to see Earth from space for the first time. The power of that image, and its deep-rooted impact on the human soul in 1969, is lost to those younger than ... let’s say 50.

Likewise all the other miracles we now take for granted. Flight. Mobile phones. Instant information. Our entire music collection in the palm of our hand.

The price we have paid for instant, unquestioned access to the miraculous is a ruthless loss of wonder. Not the sickly sweet wonder of certain new agers or the manufactured wonder of TV execs, but the kind that binds us humans together in mutual respect for a mystery bigger than ourselves.

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