Suddenly it was happening. After all the rumours and false starts, the chief was returning to his ancestral home. Through the trees at the back of the house we could hear them coming up the hill – muffled instructions, tangled shouts – as he rode above them on the wooden armchair which had served as his daughter's bridal throne a year before. Soon a bed was set up in the front hall and by afternoon the “daughters” – the bride-taking in-laws – had begun steering pigs up the stone steps and into the cool space under the house.

Youths and girls gathered on the lower steps or leaned against the house piles, watching the slaughter, while inside the rumble and swell of formal speeches began. (My tapes always have a background of animal screams: a protest from below stairs.) We listened to rich orations from the platform – first the chief of Hilimböwö, a tall clerkly man with a fiery tongue, and then the bluff, white-haired chief of Siraha who afterwards sat on the bed and nattered to his old friend. Every village from the old federation was present. The “nine chiefs” of the Upper Susua had come to pay their last respects.

Ama Darius was pensive and subdued. He could outdo them all. The instrument of his fame, the “speaking heart”, contained all their voices: the irony of one, the anger of another, the piety of a third. He was master of an orchestra. But now he was silent. Perhaps this was the moment that would decide things. If the dying chief gave him the nod, and if the Susua chiefs approved, the succession would be a formality; prosperity and recognition would follow. Otherwise humiliation.

He sat near the bed, alert and attentive, slim and almost youthful beside the portly and imperious figure of Ama Ezra. When the chief called him during one of the speeches, beckoning with a limp arm, Ama Darius bent over his old rival, their faces inches apart as if to receive the anointing breath, and I saw the deputy's expression, tense and alight with expectation, his forehead damp with sweat, his eyes fixed coldly on their object.