As soon as the ship maintained a steady movement forward, I started looking at the forest that housed the mazuba tribe until i could no longer see anything. It was the place where I spent the longest seven years of my life before been rescued.
When I returned my attention to my rescuers, I started remembering how the events of the last seven years unfolded. I was born in Lagos, Nigeria. My father and his fathers were missionaries. Although I had wanted to thread a different path, my indifferent attitude to my education shattered my dreams of ever becoming a doctor, so I had no choice than to follow in my ancestors footsteps. I went on many missionary missions to underdeveloped, developing and developed countries alike that by the time I clocked fifty years of age, i had travelled to sixty countries on the globe.
It was on the fifth day and ninth month of the year "two thousand and twelve" that I received a call from one of my fellow missionaries. She wanted us to travel to India for another outreach, I wanted to refuse since we had just returned from an expedition to Mozambique, but I ended up saying yes to her request. We set out the following day, I drove us to the Lagos port where we boarded a ship going to England, where we we intended to board a plane to our destination. Only if we had known...
I've always had a phobia for water, so while my colleagues were busy admiring the large mass of water, I was sleeping in the cabin. When I woke up, I found myself on a shore and the ship I was travelling in was lying wrecked some meters from where I was. I was still trying to understand what had happened, when I felt some strong hands drag and dump me on a makeshift stretcher, and then I slept off again.
When I woke up the second time, I was greeted by faces painted in white chalk, with nails the length of my hands and heads twice that of my own. They kept on muttering words I could not understand while they pinned me down. I tried running when they finally allowed me to stand up, but I stood no chance against their speed and I was caught before I took five steps.
I was forced to eat some of their fruits, although the fruits were strange, I had no choice since I was hungry. After two days, I stopped trying to escape, since my efforts to do so always ended up futile. After a month, the people started bowing down whenever they saw me. I was confused on why they did so, but because I couldn't understand them, I just waved anytime they bowed. Slowly, I got to understand their gestures although I still couldn't understand their language. Whenever they talked, all I used to hear was something that sounded like mazuba, it was then I decided to call them the mazuba tribe.
Every year, there was a rite where I will be forced to bury the dead among them and made to eat from the dirty hands of every member of the clan. The second year was not different from the previous one except that I observed they kept their distance from me, but they still bowed whenever they saw me. It was not until the fifth year that I finally understood what was happening. I discovered that they aged at a very alarming rate and after every year, new set of people were the ones in charge of the affairs of the clan.
I knew I was their god in the sixth year of my stay, by this time I could converse in their language to an extent. I forcefully befriended one of them, it was from him I got to know how reverrred I was among them and from his words I got to know a thousand years to them was merely a year to me. "i wanted to preach a God to them but they made me their god".
It was this knowledge that prompted me to find a way to escape, since I knew my presumed immortality in their eyes might keep me trapped in their midst forever. My attempt to escape was met with little or no resistance, since they were afraid of me. I stood on the shores and waved my clothes every single day throughout the seventh year of my stay before I was finally spotted by a ship that rescued me. I concluded that a ship is meant to pass through that route every seven years...