When the Tiger Roars

By Graeme Cann

Sampa is set in a beautiful valley bordered on one side by a mountain range and on the other by a mysterious rain forest. At the foot of the mountain a river flows along the full length of the valley. For hundreds of years this valley was home to a people known as Sampians. The mountain range was home to various villages inhabited by tribes of primitive people whose culture was largely impacted by the fact that they were spirit worshippers. Their belief that the spirits were easily angered and that they could only be placated by constant worship and sacrifices meant that they were a fearful and superstitious people. The Rain Forest on the other hand was not inhabited by people but by a myriad of animals. The Great One of the forest was the tiger. In the early days of Sampa the Tiger and the people were enemies. The tiger killed their livestock and their people and the Sampians hunted the tiger. The tiger was the symbol of all that was fearful and uncontrollable.

A Covenant miraculously created between the Tiger and the Sampians meant that the people of the valley could live at peace and the Sampians became a people who lived without fear. One of the cultural characteristics of a society without fear is their love and generosity, which for the Sampians led to their welcoming over many years refugees from the Mountain villages. Some of these people brought with them their fear and superstitions and their propensity for violence and over the centuries the belief in the covenant which enabled the Sampians to live without fear was weakened and as fear grew the society changed.

The democratic government that the Sampians had always known was replaced by a dictatorship backed by a newly assembled army. Valued freedoms were lost, distrust between neighbors grew, family, sexual and other types of physical and verbal abuse became common place. However, a group of Sampians who for many years had argued for a return to the values and beliefs of the past continued their struggle even in the face of persecution. When at last, enemies from the mountain attacked and captured Sampa this group of dissenters escaped, finally taking up residence in a valley almost identical with the one from which they had come.

The new valley was named Loloma and the refugees from the doomed Sampa set about trying to recapture the values and culture of Sampa of the past. This was a daunting task as most of the new citizens of Loloma had themselves been the victims of abuse and betrayal. They themselves had lived in a culture of fear, distrust and violence and their life and behaviors had been profoundly impacted by their experience. The story of Loloma is the story of a people who believed that it was possible to recapture the values and qualities of a past time but in the pursuit of the dream, were in fact their own worst enemies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Release date: May 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781400325016

Graeme Cann

Graeme Cann was an angry child, despite having a wonderful family. At 17 he had a profound spiritual experience which changed his life’s direction. In 1962 he married Julia and they joined the staff of The Leprosy Mission. For 16 years they helped pioneer ElKanah to both wounded people and those who ministered to them. The Christian Counseling Association of Australia was born out of a vision that Graeme and others had. Julia and Graeme have 4 children and 14 grandchildren.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Fear imprisons but faith liberates; fear paralyses but faith empowers; fear disheartens but faith encourages; fear sickens but faith heals; fear makes useless but faith makes serviceable.

Harry Emerson Fosdick

For centuries Sampa had been an idyllic place in which to live. The beautiful valley was home to a people who had embraced a set of core values which meant that they lived without fear. They did not fear the people in the mountain villages on the north side of the river, nor did they fear the animals that lived in the rainforest that formed their southern boundary. Then nearly two hundred years ago, that all came to an end.

The leaders of Sampa were overthrown in a bloody coup, an army was established for the first time in Sampian history, and covenants with neighbours were broken. The core values of love and equality gradually gave way to fear and distrust, and their survival as a people now depended on the might of the military and the paranoia of the governing council.

Sampa was no longer an idyllic place to live. Children feared their parents because their misbehaviours were met with cruel and harsh discipline. Wives feared their husbands, who frequently used violence to affirm their superiority to women. The people as a whole feared their authoritarian and reactive leaders, and the leaders feared their enemies in the mountain and in the forest.

In the midst of all this fear, one man believed that the only road back to the peace the Sampians had once known was to return to the beliefs and values of the past.

BOOK ONE

THE WAY OF THE COVENANT

CHAPTER ONE

SAMPA IN THE DAYS OF KALUBA

It was once said that the moral test of government is how that government treats those who are in the dawn of life, the children; those in the twilight of life, the elderly; and those who are in the shadows of life, the sick, the needy and the handicapped.

Hubert H Humphrey

It was a black night and the rain beat loudly on the roof of the hastily erected shelter. It had been built on the verge of the rainforest at the edge of the valley. Perched high in a tree nearby, a young boy of about twelve years of age was keeping watch, although the driving rain made it almost impossible to see more than a few metres into the night. He was watching for the pin pricks of light that would alert him to the approach of lamp-carrying men. Inside the shelter, eleven earnest young men were listening intently to the man they called Alofa. In his early twenties, he was strongly built with broad shoulders and had the appearance of a superbly conditioned athlete. Like the others, his skin was black and his dark hair was long. It was his eyes that differentiated him from his companions. They were the intense, penetrating eyes of a radical reformer. His whole demeanour radiated an urgent energy that captivated and empowered his followers. For more than an hour they had shared stories of their activities, encouraging each other to maintain their rage against what they saw as the corrupt governance of the Elders, and in particular the leadership of Kaluba, the chief of the Elders.

Thank you for coming together at such short notice, Alofa said quietly. "We are all risking our lives by being here tonight. These are dangerous times, and Kaluba has vowed to execute any who defy the Elders. For fourteen days I have been tortured in the prison because I would not give up your names. I believe that I have only been released now so that I would warn you of the consequences of continuing to oppose Kaluba’s leadership. I know that you are all as passionate as I am about the suffering of the people of Sampa, but tonight you must each decide whether you are going to continue to endanger your own lives and the lives of your loved ones by maintaining your opposition to the Elders.

We have fought a long fight. We have maintained for many years that the only thing that will save Sampa from destruction is for the Elders and Kaluba to return to the ways of our fathers. They lived securely under the covenant that Abele, our first Mother-Father, made with the Great One of the Forest hundreds of years ago. For asserting that, we have all paid a high price. It may yet cost us the right to live in this valley where each of us here have grown up. So consider well whether you want to continue the fight. As for me and my wife Misha, we are ready to die for what we believe is the truth.

Kaluba is convinced that we are the ones who threaten to destroy Sampa as we know it, and it is possible that some or even all of us will die for our part in what he is calling a bloody revolution. His words were still hanging in the air when there was an urgent shout from the boy who was keeping watch. "Men approaching! Fast, on horseback! They have lights and dogs!

I will be in touch Alofa said quickly. But for now we must split up. I will take the boy; the rest of you must follow our usual plan of escape. The usual plan simply involved gathering up anything that they had brought with them and, under the cover of darkness, running deeper into the forest. They knew that the men would not follow them there. When their pursuers were gone, they would carefully make their way back to their homes.

***

Sampa was set in a beautiful fertile valley situated between soaring mountains on one side and a dense and somewhat foreboding rainforest on the other. When Alofa was a young man, Sampa was already a very backward village in a rapidly changing world. Although it had traditionally been a prosperous and safe place in which to live, it was no longer, and though it had once been led by great far-seeing men and women, who dearly loved the people and Sampa, its current leaders were not like them at all. It had, in fact, become increasingly entrenched in primitive ideas, attitudes and beliefs, even when the towns and villages around it had found it necessary to change. The government of Sampa had in the past one hundred years been given to a group of Elders who had made and enforced all the laws that applied to village life. New Elders were added to the Council from time to time by the Elders themselves. Alofa was fond of saying that there were three criteria that new Elders must meet. One, they must be male; two, they must be very old; and three, they must be relied on to defend Sampa against any new ideas.

A consequence of the Elders’ continual rejection of new ideas, as well as the refusal to return to the core values of the past, was that the people of Sampa had been caught in a painful, soul-destroying time warp. The men had become almost solely hunters and miners. The manufacture of goods, the growing of crops, and the farming of animals, for so long the heart of Sampa’s economy and activity, were now the occupations of a very few. The culture had become entirely patriarchal, an evil that had been exposed and rejected by the Sampians hundreds of years before. Women had no standing in the society other than as child-bearers and home keepers. The gardens and fields they had once so happily laboured in were now owned by the powerful among them, and were mostly neglected and unproductive. Many of the men hunted and trapped every day; others worked, several days’ journey away in the rainforest, where they mined for gold. Once a month some of the men would take cartloads of animal pelts to Towin, their local trading centre, a day’s journey from Sampa, and then return with essentials like flour, grain, salt, and sugar. The women and children never ventured outside Sampa, and the more isolated they continued to be, the more fearful of the outside world they became.

The women and the children had good reason to be afraid. Wives were frequently subjected to savage beatings by their husbands, and the Elders afforded them no protection at all. Women who complained of rape were isolated by others in their families, and men boasted of their sexual conquests. Parents had unrealistic expectations of their children when it came to labour. Children of five or six years of age were expected to gather firewood or carry water. Boys of eleven were trained to be hunters and gatherers of food in the forest. Girls of thirteen were frequently forced into marriage with older men. When children were perceived by their parents to have misbehaved or to have disobeyed an order, they were harshly disciplined.

The Elders regarded themselves as Watchmen or Gatekeepers. The enemy that they watched for and fought against valiantly was modernism in the form of change, and their main strategy was to resist any form of education other than that which reenforced their own current culture. They also resisted a return to the values and customs of the past, when Sampa had been a peaceful place to live in. They punished the people who told stories of long ago and banned them from singing songs about the great leaders of past eras.

The Elders zealously enforced all the laws under which the Sampians lived. Punishments for lawbreaking were harsh. People who opposed the tyrannical rule of the Elders, or who were found guilty of following or promoting new ideas, or who encouraged a return to the more peaceful and prosperous days of Sampa, were publically beaten, and on a number of occasions even executed, as these behaviours were regarded by the Elders as rebellious and inflammatory. The contradiction, however, is that they had introduced new liberal laws under which the Sampians had never lived. For instance, in a culture that had always been monogamous, it was now lawful for a man, when he had been married for ten years, to take a second wife, and after twenty years of marriage he could take as many other wives as he chose. Although historically Sampa had lived in harmony with its neighbours, the Elders now encouraged raids on some of the small, peaceful villages nearby. The main purpose of these raids was to capture young women and bring them back to be wives to the older men.

There was serious division among the people. There were those who, for their own reasons, strongly supported the Elders. Some secretly longed for change but were generally too afraid to declare it. There were still others who were prepared to risk their lives to bring about change and to free Sampa from the tyranny of the Elders. There was indeed fear everywhere. The Elders were afraid of the outside world and the people were afraid of the Elders. Neighbours were afraid of each other, because the Elders encouraged them to report any treacherous behaviour. Wives were afraid of their husbands and children were afraid of their parents, because the parental style was largely authoritarian, and their mode of punishment was often cruel and violent.

The people were primarily hunters and miners and the law said, If you do not work you will not eat. This led to a sort of class culture. Those family groups who had a number of hunters or miners in their households did well and had abundant food, but families who had only one hunter or miner among them, or even worse, none at all, often had little or no food. Some widows, their children and the elderly, were forced to skin the kill and prepare the meat for the more prosperous families in order to earn a portion for themselves. The life of the hunter was hard and the work was dangerous. The rainforest in which they hunted was home to many different game animals and birds, and there was an abundance of edible plants, roots, and fruits, and in that sense the forest was a veritable food bowl. However, the gathering of that food tested the men to their limits. Larger game animals like deer and wild goat had to be stalked and run down in an environment where other predators stalked the hunters. Tigers and wild dogs, poisonous snakes and boa constrictors presented a continuous threat to the hunters. Injuries were frequent and deaths not uncommon, as the men of Sampa ventured deep into the rainforest in their constant struggle to feed their families. Likewise, the miners who worked for and were paid by the mine owners worked under extremely difficult and dangerous conditions, often for little return.

When the daily hunt was over, there were a myriad tasks to be done. Animals had to be skinned, meat had to be prepared, the birds had to be plucked, and the fish cleaned and scaled. Most of this work was done by the women and children, and was often not completed till late in the day. Then food had to be cooked and families had to be fed. There was little joy in the village. There were rarely any special events or celebrations. Singing and dancing was frowned upon by the Elders even in their own families, and socialising between families was a rarity.

So you can see, even though the Elders could not, that such a community was well on its way to destroying itself. Such fear, with the anger and the violence that followed in its wake, can only lead to one consequence: self-destruction.

CHAPTER TWO

ALOFA

A people without the knowledge of their past history, origin, and culture is like a tree without roots.

Marcus Garvey

Alofa was a seeker after knowledge. On his monthly trips to Towin, he would spend his evenings with an old gentleman who left Sampa as a young lad and never returned. Muralu taught himself to read, and was a voracious reader of history and philosophy, and had also become a student of the Bible. He was the undisputed expert on the history and traditions of Sampa. This old man was frail in body but sharp in mind. His weathered face and large rough hands identified him as a tiller of the soil. He had a shock of grey hair that showed no sign of receding. His eyes were a startling blue, and his smile lit up the whole of his craggy face. He lived alone, for his wife had died many years before. His three sons had become businessmen in Towin, and although they loved him, they wanted nothing to do with their father’s old culture.

From the moment that Alofa would sit down in his tiny house, Muralu would begin to share stories that came from a lifelong journey in what was to him an exciting world of learning. Alofa loved this old man deeply, and the more that he listened to him, the more he hungered for this great one’s wisdom and knowledge. At first, all that he wanted was for Muralu to come back to Sampa and be their Mother-Father, but he knew that this was impossible. The Council of Elders would undoubtedly reject him and possibly even kill him. Gradually, however, it began to dawn on him that Muralu had chosen him to be the keeper of Sampian knowledge and wisdom, and although this realisation frightened him, such was his love for Sampa that he willingly embraced whatever responsibilities and dangers that would bring.

In his heart, Alofa knew that if Muralu had lived in an earlier time, he would have been one of Sampa’s great ones. One of the foundational customs of the Sampians until eight decades before Alofa was born was that there was always one person chosen by the people of Sampa to be their Mother-Father. This person could either be a man or woman, whose primary role was to be the keeper of the collective wisdom of the Sampians. He or she was chosen, not elected, by a process that will be revealed later, that singled them out as a person who had learned to master fear. The Elders, who served the people rather than governed them, would consult the Mother-Father when wisdom was needed, and matters that required mediation or judgment would be referred to him or her. The men and women who had filled this position over the centuries were deeply revered and loved by all the people of their time.

Things had changed now. There was no Mother-Father to watch over and nurture the people, and Muralu, living in a sort of self- imposed exile in Towin, was the only remaining keeper of traditional Sampian knowledge and wisdom. Alofa was greatly inspired by Muralu’s stories of great Sampians from the past. These were men and women of enormous courage and wisdom, who had built safe and prosperous communities in which people lived without fear of the things that they could not personally control. All of them were men and women of great knowledge and grace who understood the truths that undergirded the core values to which they were committed. Among those truths to which they were firmly committed was that this world of abundance in which they lived had a Great Creator whose will and purposes could be known by those who sought after such knowledge. Alofa hungered after that knowledge.

Muralu set out to teach Alofa to read. It was an ambitious task, but Alofa was a good student and a quick learner. Often the old man would say, You must learn to read, Alofa, and then you must teach others. My son, never forget the things I have taught you. Store my words in your heart. If you do this, you will live for many years and your life will be satisfying. Never let loyalty and kindness leave you! Tie them around your neck as a reminder. Write them deep within your heart. Then you will find favour with both the Creator and your people.

When Alofa returned from each of his trips to Towin, he excitedly shared with Misha, his wife, all he had learned. She listened intently and asked many questions. Muralu says such magnificent things, he once told her. Yesterday he said ‘Joyful is the person who finds wisdom, for wisdom is more profitable than silver or gold.’

That’s beautiful, said Misha as she rested in Alofa’s strong arms. One day she said to him, I want to seek after wisdom also. Will you teach me to read?

Misha was one of the most beautiful girls in Sampa. Her slim figure, luxurious long black, curly hair and the darkest of dark brown eyes made her the envy of all the other girls and the desire of all the young men. But she had had eyes only for Alofa ever since she was twelve years old. She had announced then, to all who would listen, that one day she would marry Alofa, who was four years her senior. It would be six very difficult years before that happened, but for her as a twelve-year-old, it was never in doubt.

Like all the girls of her age she was uneducated, and had often been abused and mistreated by her parents and members of her family, but unlike many of the others she was confident, headstrong, and very hungry to learn everything she could. So when Alofa returned from his visits to the town and his conversations with Muralu she drank in his stories, and with him helping her began the challenging task of learning to read. This put her at odds with many of the other women in Sampa, and of course with the Elders, who saw her as a bad example to the other girls. It is difficult to know what her expectations of marriage had been, for all the wives that she knew were often treated harshly by their husbands, but in Alofa, she had found a gentle man who treated her and other women as equals. When she was upset or afraid, he would hold her in his strong arms and speak to her of love, forgiveness, and courage. She loved him dearly and would be eternally grateful for the influence of Muralu on her husband.

***

In order to fully comprehend the struggle in which Alofa and his followers were engaged, it is important that we seek to penetrate the mind of Kaluba and understand what manner of man he was, because as the chief of Elders he exercised supreme power over the people. He had inherited the leadership of Sampa from his father, Rubin. Rubin had taken the leadership of Sampa by force, replacing the last of the great Mother-Fathers, Marita. He was the first leader of Sampa to establish an army which became then, and was still under Kaluba, the primary instrument of governance.

Historians would describe Kaluba as a dark figure in the history of Sampa, who in his lifetime was responsible for the most horrific atrocities against his own people; but in truth he might simply have been the most fearful Sampian leader of all time. It was not that he was cowardly, not in the slightest. He was a brave and courageous hunter and military leader, afraid it would seem of no man or animal. No, when history describes him as a fearful man, it will be speaking of what drove him in every decision he made and everything he did as chief of the Elders. His self-concept was predicated on the position he held, the possessions that he owned, and the power that he wielded. He knew that there were very few Sampians who loved him, and that indeed most either feared or hated him. This was of little concern to him, however, because his deepest felt need was not to be loved but to be in total control. Whenever he felt that his authority and control was being challenged, he became very afraid. His fear would cause him to be angry, and his bursts of rage and violence would terrify everybody around him. He ruled Sampa through the imposition of draconian laws. He saw tolerance of lawbreakers and the extending of mercy to those who pleaded for it as a weak and dangerous policy.

He understood that the cost of using his personal and political power to exercise absolute control over his subjects was that he would never be loved and admired, but he never lost a moment’s sleep over that. Far more important to him was that every threat was quashed and every dangerous challenger was neutralised. Although in public speeches he would often pledge his commitment to protecting his people and his community, frequently reminding his listeners of his love for them, the real truth was that if he was dedicated to anything at all, it was to quieten his nagging anxiety by exercising ruthless control over the Elders, the military, and the ordinary people.

His wife, who like him was in her eighties, was rarely ever seen in public. Indeed, for the fifty years of Kaluba’s harsh reign in Sampa, she had almost been invisible. At first, as a young mother, she had protested strongly against