I. The Discovery
Panama City, Present Day By Hassan Warfa…
Ayrotv.com-Saylac City- The sun hung heavy over the jungle ruins of San Pablo Viejo, a forgotten colonial outpost on the edge of Río Cimarrón. Dr. Lul Aden knelt in the dust, her gloved fingers tracing the edge of a leather satchel wedged between the stones of a collapsed wall.
It was not on the registry. It didn’t belong here.
She tugged it gently. The old leather sighed, resisting the touch of time. Inside: folded barkcloth, brittle with age, and beneath it, a journal. Handwritten. Faint spanish script danced across the cover:
“Elli of Zeila. Interpreter. Soldier. Free man.”
Lul’s breath caught. She whispered in Somali, “Huunno, you found him.”
Her grandmother’s stories had always ended the same way: A man from Zeila, sold across oceans, led warriors in the New World. They named rivers after him. They feared his name. But no one believed those tales.
Until now.
II. The Diary
Entry: Year of Captivity, 1571 — Barava, Cape Verde
My name is Elli. I was born in Zeila, where the Red Sea meets the breath of the desert. I was a soldier in Ahmad Guray’s army — the one the Franks called “The Left-Handed.” When the tide of war turned against us, I fled. I wandered, wounded and hungry, until the Portuguese found me.
They saw a fighter and a translator. They chained both.
I was taken first to Barava, then to a place they called Capo Verde. Then to Panama. There, I was made to stand on the shores and speak to others — my own people — as they stumbled out of the ships like ghosts. Somali, Afar, Harari, Oromo. All captured. All broken.
I translated their orders. But I added words of my own.
“You are not finished,” I whispered. “There is a land beyond this place where the jungle hides us. There we will run. There we will build.”
They listened. Because we spoke one tongue. Because I knew what it meant to escape.
III. The Flight
We came to the Caribbean on a slave ship called Santa Milagro. The Spaniard who owned us made me his mouth — I translated between the old and the newly stolen. He didn’t know I was planting seeds.
At night, I taught the young ones how to find direction by stars, how to listen to trees. I taught them words from the Qur’an that gave us strength. When the lash sang in the cane fields, we remembered Zeila. When they beat us, we remembered the hills of Adal.
Then came the night of the fire.
It began with a whisper and ended in flames. We struck as they slept, slipped through the jungle and vanished. For days we ran. Some died. Others were caught. But many followed me to the valley near the wild river. There, we built a city.
No map carried our name. But we called it Bayo-Anood.
IV. The Englishman
The jungle was thick the morning he arrived. His ship had been crippled by Spanish cannon. His men scattered. He was weary, sunburned, and cursing in English.
His name was Francis Drake.
He had heard rumors — that somewhere in the isthmus, there was a settlement of escaped Africans who did not fear the Spanish. He asked for help raiding a convoy of gold. I studied him.
“Why should we help you?” I asked.
He grinned. “Because we both hate chains.”
He kept his word. We taught his men the jungle paths. We ambushed the Spaniards. Gold spilled into the palms of men who had never touched freedom.
We called ourselves “Cimarrones”. Fighters. He said our feet moved like rivers. After we saved his life in the ambush at Nombre de Dios, he carved our name into his maps.
I never saw him again. But he never forgot us.
V. The Fall
Years passed. Our children grew. We traded with passing ships. No Spaniard dared enter our forests.
But nothing lasts.
They came with fire and steel, and this time we were tired. They destroyed Xuriyadda. Burned our homes. Hanged our elders.
I was old then. I ran again. This time with my grandson.
I hid this journal in the wall of a building. I write with the blood of memory so that someone, somewhere, will know we were here.
We were warriors. We were brothers.
We were free.
VI. The Legacy
Dr. Lul Aden stared at the final line. The pages trembled in her hands.
A story buried beneath the jungle had risen. Elli of Zeila — once a whisper, now a voice.
She closed the journal and stood beneath the rising light of the Panamanian dawn. A fast-moving river snaked in the distance.
Its name?
Río Cimarrón.
