Thursday 5 October 2023

Barumba’s life in stages

Barumba is a character from the Baruuba’s adventures series by Yoshimasa Ikeda. 

Matthew Chikudate was born in Hawaii, to a fashion show seller and her Okinawan partner/roommate, but he lived there for only the first few months of his life. Then they arrived into what would become Uganda, the Pearl of East Africa, likely to look out for treasure, but got stranded in a mountainous jungle instead, so they’d build a stilt house there, when he was only a young baby boy. 

When he was in the stilt-hut, his parents, who were struggling to survive a flash flood, were dragged over by a cannibal apeman king, who would bludgeon and eat them later on, making them dead in his eyes. 

An old ApeWoman (of the snowman kind) found the baby boy crying and adopted him as if he was her grandson, while bringing him over to her village in the jungle. Most of the fellow apemen were both envious and distrustful of the baby, which meant that she had to raise him mostly in the trees. She took him into her wonderful den, which sat upon a rather tall tree while both a tent and a gorgeous tree boma were nearby. She named him Barumba, meaning ‘strong beauty’ in her people’s rudimentary language. 

As for Wemero, one of his friends, his own birth parents, a Japanese American mechanic and her Egyptologist husband, were kidnapped by a bunch of bad spirits and were semi-permanently trapped there when he was a young child. Thus, he had to live with the furry swamp hicks and travelled with them throughout a part of Uganda’s western region, only to leave them behind in adulthood.