African Spring | Previous Challenge Entry

how it works

TITLE: African Spring | Previous Challenge Entry
By Graham Starling
07/27/09
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It’s too hot to sleep. This time of year the sun bakes the house bricks during the day and they release it all too slowly through the night. For once I envy the locals their mud huts and thatched roofs and consider one more time moving the beds onto the veranda. Out here it’s cool enough to sleep, but we’d need to hang the mosquito nets and they trap the heat as well as the bugs. And we’d wake up to the audience of laughing village children peering over the fence, wondering what these crazy “nassara” are up to now.

Africa has no Spring, not like England. Here in Chad the relative cool of the early months of the year gives way to the hot season in March and April. The skies remain a vivid, clear blue and the temperature slowly rises from one day to the next, burning all that is green and living from the ground and leaching the strength from those who walk on it. As April gives way to May, the clouds begin to build in the south; great towering cumulus rumbling a promise of rain, too far in the future to be anything more than a taunt. The humidity begins to build and as the end of the month approaches, the titans of the sky pass towards the north, grumbling as if with indigestion, but not yet ready to drop their burden of life giving water on the parched and cracked soil below.

Tonight the moon is near full and the clouds are outlined in quicksilver as are the myriad shapes around me. Normally on a clear night like this the villagers would be singing, enjoying the moon’s brilliance, but everywhere is subdued. Food is short and bellies are empty. No-one feels like celebrating. Within the clouds there are flashes and grumbles; the gods it seems are fighting again. A bead of sweat trickles down my back and I add my silent prayer to all those around me for the rains to come.

Without warning a momentary, brilliant branch of light links ground to sky. The sound is overwhelming and immediate, startling me into alertness. In the silence that follows and through the fizz of adrenalin I hear a gentle hiss, growing in volume, until the sudden downpour is beating out a noisy tattoo with fat raindrops on the corrugated iron roof above me. I step out into the rain and the wind, heedless of the drenching and laughing aloud at the delicious cool drops of rain coursing down my body.

The deluge will last no more than a few minutes and be soaked up almost immediately by the parched soil as though it had never fallen. Most of the water will evaporate with the heat form the ground and within half an hour, the humidity will be higher than ever, but at least it came at night. The heat will not return until the sun climbs into the sky.

Already the rain is easing and in the village around me I can hear whooping and chanting. It may be days till the next rain falls, and the heat will be unbearable until then, but the first of the rains has fallen. Within a week there will be downpours nearly every day, the ground will soften and the parched arid land that stretches in all directions will be covered in verdant growth.

Spring doesn’t come to Africa, not like in England, but there is a time of new growth. We don’t wait in the cold and the dark looking for the turn of the season, but in the heat and the dry, for the first rains. This is an African Spring.

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