In the middle of Bloumpei, two gun shots set the town in disarray; elders, young men, women, and children ran helter-skelter in a “feet help the body” fashion. A man, Zarwee, a talented wrestler, hardworking farmer, and prolific hunter in Grand Gedeh County’s northern belt of the Dhoe Kingdom blew up the head of his two-year-old son and smashed the chest of his wife. At the fall of the nineteenth century, Zarwee, bereft of everything—love and wife—and despondent and depressed, did the unthinkable, the most abominable and traditionally callous thing when he shot his wife and son to death and blew himself up. While other men protected their families with their lives and preserved their heritage, Zarwee wiped out his, more so in the presence of elders, women, and children in an open village square. In Mother and Child Must Die, Gibson Jerue pieces together the story of an incident that rocked a village known for its serenity and progress in a new community of people who tasted of war and became warriors themselves, people who became both victims and victors. When a wife enriched the fame of a man and guaranteed his pedigree, taking away a man’s wife was not only to bereave him of manhood, but it was also to relegate him to the fringes of society and to do so by challenging him to fight back, if he can—however diabolical.
