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Out of Africa: Terror and Wonder
“The Moon Mask is real. It is what your mum and sister died for.”
These words were uttered as a barely audible whisper, carried upon a dry African breeze. They imbue the same sensations in me today as they did when I was eight years old: a sense of profound sadness, burning anger . . . and feelings of both closure and new beginnings.
The closure came about via my father’s explanation as we sat within the Wassu Stone Circles, Gambia. The sun faded to illuminate the sky in a cascade of blood-red before deepening to purple twilight. The drummer who had hounded us for repeated donations of Dalasi, for equally repeated rhythms, had finally left. The stories about magical masks, hyena-gods and ancient time travellers that my father had spent the day telling me still echoed through my young imagination.
Out of Africa: Terror
When I was three years old, I had stood helplessly in my family’s rented apartment in Lagos, Nigeria. My father, an archaeologist, had spent two months in the country investigating possible links to the mythological Bouda people whom he believed were our ancestors.
My mother, sister and I had flown over to spend two weeks with him around his birthday. While Nigeria may not be the tourist capital of the world – or even the safest place for a young family to visit – no one had predicted the political turmoil that had arisen.

It had exploded in a matter of hours into a full-blown military coup, fuelled by ethnic violence and driven by General Abago Abuku, the so-called Himmler of Africa.
Before his assignation a few years ago, Abuku had spent decades driving a regime of ethnic cleansing across Africa. He had no loyalty to any particular country or government and spread his campaign of terror across borders.
“Africa for Africans” was his motto, and many who had become disillusioned with the meddling of foreign powers in national affairs, or the wealth amassed by non-Africans on their blood, sweat and sacrifice, flocked to his bloody cause.
He was simultaneously bolstered by and bolstered regimes that furthered his cause, ordered the execution of countless thousands (if not more), and personally murdered innumerable others.
Including my mother and sister.
Before my eyes.
I want to say that I don’t remember much about that afternoon.
After all, how much does anyone remember from when they were three years old? Snippets of sitting on mummy’s knee, watching Thomas the Tank Engine (long before the days of Cbeebies), while eating chicken paste on toast; the buzz of excitement as daddy’s car pulled into the drive after work; selling plastic fruit and veg off your Mobi market stall . . .
Unfortunately, my memory of that afternoon in Lagos is far more detailed- the sense of terror and confusion, the screams, the flashes of shadow as men three times as big as me shouted and laughed at the horrors they inflicted on my family.
And the gunshots.
Two of them.
So loud that they rang in my ears, mercifully blocking out the sounds of my tormentors. Abuku himself placed his gun, its muzzle still scalding, against my forehead. It seared it into me, branding my flesh like some broken animal.
I can say no more about my memory of that day. I have already said more here in these few paragraphs than I have probably said aloud my entire life.
However, what matters is why this atrocity occurred, the reason why General Abuku, the demon of my nightmares, butchered my family.
Because he wanted the Moon Mask.
Out of Africa: Wonder
My father’s explanation of my mother and sister’s deaths brought with it a sense of closure.
Yet, as I said, it also paradoxically unravelled many other threads of the tapestry of my life and set me on course to my current destination.
My grandfather had been decorated as a hero for his role in the North African campaign of World War Two and granted British citizenship. My father, Reginald King, was thus brought up in Britain and, controversially, became an early ambassador of black representation at Oxford University.
Throughout his career, he encountered obstacles, resentment and even ridicule, especially in his early studies of Africa.
The prevalent belief was still strongly geared towards the so-called Hamitic hypothesis. This broadly attributed anything of value in Africa, in terms of ‘civilisation’ or ‘advanced technology,’ including metalworking, irrigation and complex social structures, with migrating ‘Hamitic’ Caucasians.

While supposedly supported by scientific study and reasoning, the Hamitic hypothesis’s core lay an incredibly racist view. It considered the indigenous Negroid and San people of Africa to be so primitive, so backward, that they couldn’t possibly have developed sophisticated social structures or advanced technology. That they had constructed elaborate monumental buildings like Great Zimbabwe, without the civilising influence of quicker witted early Europeans, was unthinkable.
However, my father started investigating our tribe’s claims to have descended from the advanced Bouda (see blog post), a people who, if they existed, are comparable with the builders of Great Zimbabwe.
He also began to recognise another underlying culture.
Identifiable through myths, legends and folktales, as well as, but more loosely, archaeology, he and I would eventually come to label this culture the ‘Progenitors’. My father’s peers, at the time, however, accused him of developing an Afrocentric model, focussing on comparative mythology to formulate an entirely fictional African mother-race to counteract European supremacy.
Indeed, this focus on an African origin for African culture, unintentionally echoing General Abuku’s motto “Africa for Africans”, brought the King family to the attention of the genocidal madman.
What better symbol, after all, is there to unite the disparate countries and peoples of an entire continent than an ancient relic, fashioned, broken apart and distributed across the otherwise unconnected cultures long before the days of Christ and Islam? Back before Africa became a carving block for other world powers to do with as they pleased? Back when Africa was ‘pure’?
That symbol?
The Moon Mask