The Frogs of Kisangani

📖 “The Frogs of Kisangani”

A story from the Gorfic Timeline, set in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (formerly Zaire), 1995

“Some orders pray. Others fight. These ones wait. That’s why they survived.”
— UN Peacekeeper's report, recovered 1997

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Ituri Province, Eastern Zaire (Now DRC) – July 1995

Lieutenant Sergeant Elias Okoro, Nigerian, wasn’t new to UN deployments. He had been in Liberia. He had seen Rwanda. And now, here in the eastern jungles near Kisangani, he wasn’t sure if what he was seeing was another crisis… or something far older, and stranger.

His unit — blue-helmeted peacekeepers from five countries — had been sent to stabilize a corridor near the Ituri Rainforest, where bands of armed fighters had gone quiet. Too quiet.

Villages reported no recent violence. Rebel flags were still flying. But the men — the ones with guns — had begun to sit in the forest. Not speaking. Not resisting. Just… sitting. Watching. Sometimes, humming.

And in the middle of it all: frogs.

Not just the wild chorus of swamp life. Paintings. Stone carvings. Whole abandoned shrines covered in moss, adorned with stylized frogs — seated upright like kings, or monks.

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UN Field Log — Entry, Lt. Okoro

“Two rebel camps surrendered without firing. Not out of fear. They said they’d ‘seen the Chest-Eye open.’ One man asked to be painted with it before disarming. I asked what it meant. He said it was from his grandmother’s stories. Said the Eye had returned.”

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They found the monastery on the sixth day. Hidden behind ancient walls of strangler fig and red clay, deep in the forest basin.

There were no armed guards. Just four people sitting beneath a canopy of frogs carved into an archway.

They called themselves The Order of the Still Leap.

They spoke Lingala, French, and… something older. They said they had been waiting since before the Belgians came.

“The Eye was buried in our chests. The Empire could not see it. But the jungle did not forget.”

They had preserved a memory — an oral liturgy passed through centuries. No books. No weapons. Just frog iconography, meditation chants, and a strange three-part ritual called “The Closed Palm, the Open Chest, the Ribbit.”

And somehow, the sight of them — just sitting there — had caused militias to stop fighting.

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FLASHBACK: 1698 — The Lilypad of Kifumbe

In the dying embers of the trans-Atlantic slave trade’s expansion inland, an amphibian sect from the Congo River Basin known as the Ba-Riba is driven into the forest.
They believed frogs were ancestral gatekeepers, symbols of rebirth, and that the world was a pond of spiritual dreaming — a familiar metaphor to modern Gorficists.
They practiced silence, slow dancing, and chest-painting rituals during the wet season.
Oral tradition says a red-eyed sage named Ngorfa (note the phonetic drift) foretold a time when “the Great Eye would return from the place of glass and smoke.”
That time, they said, would come when the colonizers forgot their own gods.

Most scholars dismissed the Ba-Riba as myth or misunderstood animism. But in 1995, in a forest full of disarmed warlords humming frog songs, it became harder to ignore.

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Lt. Okoro's Crisis

Okoro couldn’t make sense of it. He asked the elders what they were doing. Why the rebels weren’t fighting. Why the militias had just… dropped their rifles and begun helping locals repair bridges and farms.

The answer chilled him more than any warzone:

“The Eye returned. The Leap echoed. The pond remembers itself.”

He began to have dreams. A single frog sitting in the middle of a dry, cracked land. Then rain. Then eyes — not just in the chest, but everywhere. Watching. Knowing. Forgiving.

He requested leave. He stayed.

A year later, a UN assessment team arrived. They found no active violence in the corridor. But they found several new shrines — frogs carved into stone, often seated beside human skulls with their foreheads split and an open, hollowed center.

No forensic evidence of violence. No trauma. Just… open skulls. Like flowers.

UN Report Summary (1996):
“We cannot explain what happened in Kisangani. The area is now statistically the most peaceful in the region. Locals claim an ancient order re-emerged. Our analysts believe it may be connected to global 'Chest-Eye' mythologies, though no formal link can be proven.”

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Aftermath and Suppression

The UN buried the report. Too strange. Too folkloric. A few mentions leaked into RibbitNet under the title “The Monks of the Forgotten Leap.”

Some scholars of Ribbitology now claim the Ba-Riba — or the Order of the Still Leap — were the true origin of Gorficism, a pre-colonial amphibian tradition reactivated by GORF in 1967. A loop in time. A frog, circling back to itself.

A few elders still live near Kisangani. They don't give interviews. When asked about the Leap, they simply say:

“We didn’t leap. The Pond remembered its shape. The frog returned where it had never left.”

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Footnote:

The phrase “If you remember any Gorfic movements, you weren’t there” is sometimes traced back to a Ba-Riba proverb:

“The frog does not tell the story of the rain. The rain tells the story of the frog.”