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who decided that the group must relocate without further delay because, dear Baobab, when one of our number died, we’d set off at once, on a two or three day journey, in search of a new homeland, there were two reasons for this painful migration, first it was thought that a change of place was the only way of shaking off our fears and anxieties, which lay largely in our terror of the hereafter, in the fact that we believed that the next world was populated entirely by terrifying creatures, the governor turned this to his advantage by telling us that when a porcupine dies he revisits his former fellows again a few days later in the guise of an evil spirit, but this time giant-sized, with his quills raised, longer and sharper than the hunters’ javelins, and, again, in his version, the quills of such a porcupine scraped against the clouds, darkened the horizon, stopped the day from breaking, so we lived in fear of this phantom coming back from the kingdom of the dead to terrify us, stop us sleeping, pull out our pretty quills, threaten us with its long poisonous spikes, but the second reason for emigrating after the death of one of our number had more to do with survival instinct, we were convinced that a man who had slain an animal in one place would be tempted to return,
‘forewarned is forearmed’, the governor would say, if he felt that the fear of the phantom of an ill-willed porcupine was insufficient to persuade us of the necessity to move on, and if he saw we still weren’t happy with his decision, despite his threatening talk, he would say mysteriously, ‘trust me, I’m like a deaf man running till he’s out of breath’, adding, ‘and if you do see a deaf man running, my dears, don’t ask questions, follow him, because he hasn’t heard the danger, he’s seen it’, and this is possibly why my fellow porcupines had left the place where we’d been living for some time, leaving no clue as to how I might find their new territory, and even if some of them had thought of guiding me towards it by whatever means, by, for example, leaving palm nuts along a path, or quills on the ground, strewing excrement, or spraying urine as they went, marking the trunks of trees with their claws as they passed, it wouldn’t have helped, the governor would have destroyed the signs, he probably posted himself at the rear so as to keep a watch on the migration and above all, to destroy any such clues
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    and so it was that on the fifth day, when I returned to our territory to rest after my first contact with young Kibandi, I found no one from our group, all was calm, the burrows were deserted, and I realised at last that the governor must have given the order to clear out and I had been declared dead by my own people, faced with this emptiness, I started to sob, the slightest noise in the undergrowth revived my hope that I might find one of my fellows coming to embrace me, rubbing his quills against mine by way of joyful greeting, teasing me, calling me ‘little fawn’, and when at last I did hear something, my quills began
to tremble for joy, alas, my enthusiasm was short lived, and I realised that it was only a palm rat venturing forth, his sinister laughter said it all, even now I don’t understand why these lovers of palm nuts hate us so much, obviously I did not respond to his challenge, his silly snickering, I stayed there alone for six days, on the seventh day I noticed a squirrel of a fairly advanced age hanging about, and since at least squirrels are rather friendlier towards us, and we’ve never actually come to blows with them, I asked if he’d seen a bunch of porcupines leaving the region a few days before, he burst out laughing too, and did all the things we most dislike about his species, dashing about wildly for no reason, rolling his eyes, twitching his nose, bobbing his head about in an epileptic fashion, all of which looks quite