Black Leopard, Red Wolf

Near Sogolon’s friend’s house, Tracker meets a buffalo who seems to laugh at him and steals the “curtain” (268) he’s wearing. They walk and talk: Tracker asks questions, and the buffalo nods and points with his head. A homophobic mercenary starts a fight with Tracker, but the buffalo gores him, and Tracker steals his axes.

Back at the house, Sogolon and her friend are talking about the politics behind the arrival of the mercenaries. Leopard embraces Tracker and has trouble remembering why they quarreled and other events; they eat and drink together. Fumeli interrupts, but doesn’t come between them, and they walk south while Tracker tries to fill in Leopard’s memory gaps.

Tracker visits Sadogo’s room, and leaves him to continue recounting his violence as executioner. After Leopard has sex with Fumeli, he no longer wants to go to Basu’s house with Tracker and starts arguing again. Now, Tracker begins to suspect that Fumeli is controlling Leopard and attacks him, but Leopard intervenes as a cat and almost breaks Tracker’s neck.

After a break, Tracker explains the Bingingun masquerade to Sadogo as they follow a parade as a cover for visiting Basu’s house. They investigate damage and corpses from the Omoluzu attack, but don’t find the writs against the King. A piece of cloth held by a corpse gives Tracker information about the missing boy’s location. 

Tracker picks up not only the boy’s scent, but also discovers Sogolon’s scent in the house. Outside the house are Kongori army men with lake-blue veils, led by a light-skinned prefect named Mossi, who—like most people Tracker meets—asks about his wolf eye.

Mossi takes them to the fort and questions Tracker about Basu. While Tracker tries to mask his attraction for Mossi with annoyance, Sadogo receives interrogation in another room. Mossi’s questions turn to the boy, who left his doll behind; “a boy can play with dolls” says Tracker (294), but dolls for all genders are taboo in Kongor.

Tracker, in return, asks about the Seven Wings, and learns about rumors of occupation. Mossi releases them, and Tracker lets Sadogo rant about his killings that night.

Maps introduce the fantasy trope of world-building in the first pages of Black Leopard, Red Wolf, augmented by many lengthy descriptions of locations. For instance, the narrator observes that a river surrounds Kongor which makes it “an island for four moons” (254), and goes into details about culture and politics. Most fantasy novels include a tour guide of some sort to help the reader understand an imaginary world. However, the world James creates does resemble Africa.

Another convention of the fantasy genre is including an animal as part of the questing party. A famous example of this is Red XIII from the Final Fantasy franchise. The unnamed but adored buffalo falls into this category and provides a foil of happiness for Tracker’s consistent discontentedness.

While the surface-level poisoning narrative of Fumeli controlling Leopard and causing discord within the party is running, there is a secondary possession that will not be revealed for some time. After Sadogo leaves the Darklands, Aesi has possessed him. There are hints of this change, but they get hidden by the more obvious memory loss and mood swings of Leopard’s poisoning; at one point, ”The Ogo remembers everything” (275) about their shared experience in the Darklands while Leopard doesn’t even remember entering the evil forest.

James describes the Bingingun masquerade setting as “a place for the dead among the living” (283), and has no singular reference outside of James’s world, but clearly draws upon Carnival and other masque culture. Masquerade as part of a parade also appears in the veils used to disguise Mossi’s men.

Tracker reflects on Sadogo’s tales. The first spans from killing his mother at birth and being sold; to learning “killing science” (299) and killing at his master’s discretion; to having an affair with the master’s wife and killing the master. The second story is Sadogo as executioner for the King of Weme Witu, who tires of one of his wives and makes Sadogo execute her.

The next tale is Sadogo’s time in the Entertainments—a fighting well for gamblers. As the most melancholy fighter, he is practically unbeatable. The girl who rides the bucket in the well to collect bets, Lala, befriends Sadogo after he saves her from rape, singing verse outside his cell. Sadogo plans to leave and take her with him.

However, the master learns of this, has another Ogo rape and kill Lala in hopes of getting Sadogo into a more vengeful fight with higher stakes. With iron gloves, Sadogo kills the blue Ogo, the master, and most of the gamblers, but leaves the new slave girl in the bucket unharmed.

The flashback ends when Tracker and Sadogo arrive at the lord’s house where the buffalo grazes, and Tracker warns him of men in black and blue. Leopard and Fumeli are gone, and Tracker learns the lord’s name is Kafuta. Entering Sogolon’s room, Tracker sees runes and glyphs and Bunshi.

Tracker talks with Bunshi about the “fellowship” and Aesi—“Necromancer. Witchman […] King’s adviser […] working secret science and invoking devils” (311-12)—who is also looking for the boy. When Tracker sleeps that night, he visits a dream jungle with the mingi children.

Tracker explains that noon in Kongor is the witching hour, while he travels to the Great Hall of Records, which is empty except for an old library master. After blustering over some maps, the librarian helps Tracker find Basu’s tax and household records.

Excerpts from the dead man’s books—journal entries about his six sons—appear in the novel here as italics, punctuated with Tracker’s unitalicized reactions. Tracker reads about the King’s sister, Lissisolo, and gets frustrated. However, he then finds a clue to a secret hiding spot in the windowsill of the hall. Inside are the writs against the King: some are process issues, such as property of a dead man going to his first wife, but one abolishes enslaving people, and another demands a return to a different royal bloodline.

In other words, Basu “called the royal house corrupted [and] had written his own death note” (323). Tracker smells milk on some pages and believes it is invisible ink. Mossi, the prefect, appears and interrupts Tracker from putting the note near flame, until Tracker explains his theory. Candle flames reveal glyphs that Tracker can’t read, but Mossi can read some of them, like “the god butcher in black wings” (327).

They look over family maps together in context of the writ about changing royal lines, and Tracker lets Mossi in on some of his political theories involving the boy they seek and previous discoveries. Tracker realizes the glyphs on the writ match the glyphs on the corpse that let off a black cloud and disintegrated. 

After shuffling pages, they find two more with secret milk ink and find directions to take the boy to Mitu and Mweru. After the library keeper leaves for the night, a flaming arrow sets the library on fire. Mossi and Tracker escape, but the records burn and their attackers—wearing the outfits of prefects—die like the corpse with the glyphs.

They find the librarian and discover he sent a pigeon message, as a result of Tracker asking him about Basu, which triggered the attack. Mossi and Tracker run through the city, pursued by Aesi and the Kongori citizens he possesses. They reconnect with the buffalo, Sogolon, and Venin, who arrive with horses. Sogolon crafts a spell with runes that knocks down all of the possessed people.

On horseback, they travel out of Kongor and across the river into Mitu where Sadogo awaits. Sogolon directs them to a crossroads that contains one of the ten and nine doors. Tracker reveals what he and Mossi learned in the hall of records before opening the door with a spell from Sangoma. In Dolingo, Sogolon warns Tracker to stay awake to avoid Aesi possessing him.  

After switching horse pairs—Tracker now with Mossi and Sogolon with Venin—Tracker struggles to stay awake. They make camp, and Tracker argues with Sogolon, with Venin coming to her defense. To help keep Tracker awake, Mossi walks with him to the river.

They talk for hours about how Tracker’s scent of the boy fades in and out, other details of the case, the Omoluzu, faith, religion, and Mossi’s past in Kongor. Mossi convinces Tracker to go skinny dipping in the river. Eventually, Mossi dozes off on the riverbank. The next morning, the party sets off, and Tracker gets a whiff of the boy. An invisible force attacks Sogolon, as she was outside the Darklands, and Venin makes runes around her which stop the attack.

The earth starts to crack from sulfur and births Mawana witches—controlled by Aesi—with the sounds of cackling and wings. The party fights and defeats these foes, but loses a horse. Sogolon accuses Tracker of possession (when it is actually Sadogo), and Tracker realizes the boy is traveling through the ten and nine doors.  

The group arrives at the house of a lord in Dolingo who resembles the lord of the house in Kongor. Tracker scraps with Venin—blocking her inept passes—when she tries to keep him from seeing Sogolon. Sogolon sends a pigeon message to the Queen, asking for an audience, and they argue about her lies surrounding the quest.

Mossi reveals he kept the writs, but Sogolon can’t read the glyphs. She reveals she works for the sister of the King with an interest in restoring the old matrilineal line. Mossi reads the secret messages about where to take the boy—to Mitu, through Mweru, to a city called Go—aloud. Sogolon reveals the boy is the King by the matrilineal line.

She then tells a story that contrasts the King, Kwash Dara (a vengeful rapist), with his more virtuous and wiser sister, Lissisolo. After Kwash Dara takes the throne, he beheads Lissisolo’s love, a southern lord, and imprisons her. When the King visits her in the dungeon, he brings Aesi; they exile her to the divine sisterhood of Mantha, a nunnery.

Bunshi sends Sogolon to Mantha to get close to Lissisolo, and Bunshi also appears to Lissisolo; they sneak a prince from Kalindar into the sisterhood by disguising him as a eunuch and he creates a royal heir who they give to Basu while Lissisolo hides with the Queen of Dolingo’s allies.

After this story, the party discusses the boy heir traveling through the doors with the monster called Ipundulu, “Lightning bird,” by the “people in the Hills of Enchantment” (383). The lord of the house is a griot, and Sogolon asks him to sing the bird’s story.

He goes on a (spoken not sung) series of tangents about the Ipundulu's predation on local villages. The griot describes the opium-like qualities of the lightning, and how monsters, like Adze and Eloko, are traveling with the Ipundulu and the boy.

After some bickering, the old griot pulls out a map of the ten and nine doors. The doors are one-directional until the end of a path, and the boy’s group is traveling in the direction opposite of Tracker’s party. However, the two parties should meet in Dolingo.