The Bloodline

The spear and the drum.

Orbit the line, then meet each figure in full — the spear of Ntcheu, the prince who went west, the people of the drum, and the house a son can account for.

The Lineage

A thread, generation by generation.

From the spear of Ntcheu to the drum of Bangweulu — and the custodian who carries the thread forward. Orbit the line; touch a star to meet a name.

The Figures in Full

Every name, a thread.

Portrait to come

The Maseko Gomani

recorded · the origin

The King of Kings

The Maseko Gomani

The Spear · Inkosi ya Makosi of Ntcheu

“The fire from which a spear was carried west.”

In the highlands of Ntcheu reigns the Maseko Gomani — the Ngoni royal house whose kings are saluted as Inkosi ya Makosi, the King of Kings. This is the recorded origin of the name: a warrior dynasty, and the throne from which, the telling says, a prince would one day walk away and carry its spear a thousand miles into the west.

Portrait to come

The Prince Who Went West

told — unverified · three or four generations gone

He Who Turned His Back on a Throne

The Prince Who Went West

The Crossing · as it is told

“He chose the harder dignity.”

The telling — and only the telling — says a prince quarrelled with his father, the reigning chief, a quarrel of the kind that does not heal under one roof. Rather than bend, he went west: no army at his back, only a small handful of tribesmen who chose exile beside him, and the spear of the Ngoni. The open record does not yet carry his name. Hold him as legend until it does.

Portrait to come

The Abena Ng’oma

remembered · elder than the crossing

The House That Was Here First

The Abena Ng’oma

The Drum · the people of Kasolwe Chabala

“The drum was sounding before the spear arrived.”

The land that gave the exiles sanctuary held its own deep nobility — the Ng’umbo, the Abena Ng’oma, the people of the drum, descended through the mother’s line from the founder Kasolwe Chabala, who led them to settle the islands of Bangweulu. In the time of the crossing they were governed by four chiefs: a fourfold house, with no fifth.

Portrait to come

The House of Lubwe

told — unverified · the marriage

Where the Spear Met the Drum

The House of Lubwe

The Covenant · the door

“By the oldest covenant there is.”

The clan grown from the western exiles would not remain mere guests upon another people’s water. By marriage into the chiefly house of Lubwe — the door, the legend holds, through which the spear entered the land of the drum — a fifth fire was lit. The spear of the Maseko folded into the drum of the Ng’oma, neither erasing the other. As it is told.

Portrait to come

The Defender

recorded + remembered · to 2012

The Head of the House a Son Can Account For

The Defender

Patriarch of Chifunabuli

“Four sons, a name, and one honest gap.”

At the head of the house a son can account for stands a patriarch — here called the Defender, who passed in 2012. From him the Chitembo nobility of Chifunabuli is carried down: four sons, whose names are theirs to give and not mine to publish — and a single honest gap, where the record whispers of a fifth, now departed, of whom memory holds no portrait. Through the third of the four, the name Gomani reaches the custodian who sets this down.