Nengwalamwe, and possibly for pretty much the same reason.

So Nengwalamwe, where did his name come from? It’s not Swahili. It’s not Zulu or Xhosa, though nengwe is a word in both. What does it mean? The Lion King’s Lebo M translates it as “tiger”, elsewhere its “leopard”. Most commonly and in most learned sources it translates as any generic “big cat”, hence could be used for either tiger or leopard. It’s the root of ngonyama, one of the many Zulu words for lion, others including mbube (which is the form to use when addressing a lion: not exactly common in real life, but would be the right word to use in many places in this story such as in, “Lion, let me introduce you to my mother.”), ihbubeshi and isilo, which both carry a lot of respect and cultural weight. So Nengwe is a “big cat”, and that’s what he is for me, a big house cat rather than one of the big cats. His short name is simple and “friendly”, but he needed a longer, more complicated name; a right mouthful in fact. I wanted it to be awkward to say, both for us and the other characters, so I added some African-esque nonsense syllables to get Nengwalamwe, of which, like his mane, he’s inordinately proud. For good measure I often let him give his full name as “Nengwalamwe, son of Nengwala”. I use his transition from that through Nengwalamwe to plain Nengwe to mark his personal changes.

Finally I must mention the dogs. Their names are of course English. Most of them were once captive; probably in Britain. There’s more however. You may have noticed they are not just any English names, they are English monarchs’ names: kings and queens. Even the short lived Jane: Lady Jane Grey, hence the colouration of her dog counterpart. There’s even a Mary, queen of spots, and the reclusive queen, who else could she be other than Victoria?

Yet with all this, my characters are not lions. No anthropomorphic characters are what they appear to be. These “animals” are all humans with animal skins on. I like to make those skins thick and as convincing as I can but under that skin they are as human as you or I. I try to make them concerned about the things that they should be as the animals they appear to be. I know that in the past some readers have not been able to get their head around the differences in their world to how they assume (often wrongly I have to add) our own is. I regard it as a point of honour to give my characters their own animality, analogous to our humanity, but different. Not worse: different. They don’t share our morality or live in our social structure and they face very different problems and solve them using methods alien to us. My characters don’t have anything that is recognisable as religion or spirituality, not even the “great kings of the past” stuff from The Lion King; they have more than enough just dealing with the harsh realities of life to worry about all that. There is, of course, something of that simmering under The Huntress at Sunset, indeed its key to the drive of the story but it’s not in the foreground. I don’t expect, nor indeed want, everyone to be able to cope with these ideas, rather radical as they are in the Lion King context.

The Huntress at Sunset is what we brits call a “marmite story”: you either love it or you hate it. If you’ve read this far, and aren’t simply reading the last few pages to see how it ends, you probably love it. Thank you for reading and letting me take you on Nengwalamwe’s journey.

Chris Boyce, February 2012.