by Aluta Nite
For entertainment, she beat a drum and sang many songs while swaying from side to side. All her neighbors loved her very much. One night, she died very peacefully in her sleep.
Bad Habits
Sam lived alone because his wife left him. His wife took with her their only son and child called Stan who was about ten years old then because of Sam’s drinking habits. He was a very hard working man though, who was getting lost in alcohol.
After work, his hobby was drinking. He drank to a stupor to the extent of sleeping outside the club because the club owner dragged him out after closing hours. Sometimes, he fell down on the way home especially on a rainy day and slept by the foot path till morning with dirty water entering his mouth, nose and ears.
His wife tried all she could to stop this bad habit, but she failed to convince him to stop. His wife therefore decided to take their son and leave him for good. She went back to her parents’ home and lived there while bringing up their son. She took him for formal education while she did menial jobs to earn some money to live on.
Meanwhile, Sam went on drinking like never before. His job was working on his land sometimes and working on other people’s land other times to get cash that he used to buy alcohol.
With his wife and son gone, there was no wife to say, “Heh, Sam, stop.”
And there was no one to do house chores therefore he really deteriorated to the extent of having no clean drinking water, food ready to eat, clean clothes to wear or think of having a bath. The house was stinking dirty with things strewn all over and rats doing the rounds inside.
This went on for a long time until one time he became very sick; coughing with a bad fever and shivering. When neighbors failed to see him for a few days, they went to check on him and found a very weak Sam in the house with his breathing as loud as that of a lion. He was miserable, hungry and filthy. They bathed him and took him to a small health center where he was admitted for one month.
Back at home, his neighbors found two dead rats in the pot bearing his drinking water in the house along with several frogs living in one of the other water pots. The stench in the house was like he shared the house with a skunk. The water in the pots was not spring water, but rainwater from the dirty thatched roof. It was brownish-yellowish in color, looked poisonous and had a terrible smell.
They cleaned everywhere and everything, fetched clean water from the spring and put order inside the house. They burnt bad stuff and threw useless things. They kept on visiting him at the center till he got well and returned to a habitable home with good food awaiting him.
After a few weeks of his return, when he started showing signs of gaining strength and energy, someone was sent to go and inform his son, Stan, about what had happened. That someone was also supposed to win his heart and favor to go back home and stay with his father in order to stop things from deteriorate again. After all, his son was now a teenager. His son was speechless.
His wife heard the sad story and told their son to go back and stay with him. She was not willing to go back herself since she feared that her husband could not change and she did not want to regret later. She asked their son to promise to visit her every now and then so that she could monitor his progress health-wise and performance school-wise.
Their son agreed and went back home to his father who was very happy to see him and promised him that he would not drink again. In any case, the doctor had already told Sam that, if he went back to drinking, he would die sooner or later.
To inspire his son and keep him at home with him, he kept his word and stopped drinking completely and both developed a strong bond and worked very hard on their land and elsewhere and became very comfortable economically. Their son also worked hard at school and was doing very well academically, but his mother never went back despite their son trying to persuade her to because her fears were very strong. It was a case of once better twice shy.
Kingdoms at Work
In the olden days, some communities lived under some sort of set rules called serfdom whereby royalty planned their lives according to the culture and traditions of each community. First of all, a community spoke the same language. Their neighbors were also other communities that spoke different languages and had different cultures and traditions.
Even intermarriage between the communities was very, very rare or hardly there at all. It was neither encouraged nor accepted. In fact, the few who dared do it were disowned by their communities and families and banished or banned from coming home and no one visited them wherever they lived.
The land in the communities belonged to the kings who allowed their subjects to farm it and deliver part of their harvests to the kings as per the agreed amounts depending on how much land one needed to farm going by the size of the family or capability. Besides working on the land allocated to them by the kings, they also worked on the kings’ other portions of the land for no payment. In other words the kings were the lords of all and they owned everything.
The kings dictated their wishes to the people and the people were their slaves, servants or serfs. In fact, the kings were known as the “husbands of all husbands”. Their appearance anywhere was met with a lot of awe because they were above everybody else and even above the law. After all, they were the law unto itself.
The kings lived in the biggest and the best homes in the communities with big compounds that were kept spotlessly clean by their subjects. The kings’ subjects lived modestly or poorly in the surrounding areas, but with a distinct distance between depending on whether one had a rank in the kings’ parliaments, hierarchy, member of the aristocracy or not.
The kings dressed lavishly and ate deliciously always with their big families. They also had guests who were similar to them from far and near who had to be entertained with good food, dances and songs by their subjects. The people had to rise to the occasion and dress well in traditional attire on such occasions so as not to put the kings to shame.
The kings’ granaries were always full and overflowing because of food delivered by their subjects and food harvested from their other portions of land. At times of hunger, they would not give their desperate subjects some of the food, but forced them to buy it with their labor or barter trade. That is how mean the kings were.
Kingdoms were not very friendly with each other always since they kept on fighting wars of supremacy to see who was strongest. Sometimes, they fought because of cattle rustling or stock theft, border disputes, revenge on each other for past deeds like injuries or deaths of members of one community caused by another, especially if compensation as agreed on had not been paid.
Supreme elders from one community arranged meetings with similar members of another community to resolve differences but sometimes, they did not agree on issues at hand and this could cause a scuffle.
Sometimes, they agreed on resolutions to issues and then there could be a delay in meeting the fines agreed on and the aggrieved party got impatient and therefore started a skirmish. Sometimes, the party to pay compensation just decided to be stubborn and not pay as agreed in order to attract the wrath of the other and this could start a clash.
Wars were fought using poisoned spears, bows and arrows, knives, machetes and clubs. Young men were be groomed for these wars. The young men practiced war songs and victory songs to perfection on and off while waiting for the appropriate time to use them. Most of the wars were fought through ambush at the enemy’s territory at night or waylaying the enemy day time.
The dead were brought back home and buried and some enemies were also captured and brought back home at the end of the war and they became slaves in the communities until such time that their communities paid handsomely for them then they returned home. And such was life then and people coiled themselves and lived unhappily throughout their entire lives for not knowing how to get out of such bondage.
Farmers, Warthogs and Porcupines
Some farmers worked very hard on their land every rainy season. Despite working hard every year withou
t fail, they reaped very little harvest. Their main crops were grain crops like corn, millet, sorghum and quinoa; a variety of groundnuts like peanuts and Bambara nuts; root crops like cassava and sweet potatoes; beans and lentils.
When corn cobs formed on the sides of the corn stalks and the silky female flowers started appearing on the top of the tiny corn cobs, farmers became very worried.
The female flowers got fertilized by the male flowers called the tussles which appeared on the top most parts of the corn stems. This was the beginning of the formation of rows of corn grains on the cobs on the middle sections of the stalks.
Farmers had to shift from staying at their homes especially at night to sleeping in makeshift huts at the hearts of their farms. The huts were temporary shelters made of grass, cloth, canvas, jute or sisal sacks and poles to shade wind, rain and sun. They worked on the farms from early morning to lunchtime or early afternoons then go home for a few hours for some quick sleep and return to the farms in the evenings in readiness for the night surveillance.
In fact, some farmers never went home at all in the afternoons because they made arrangements with their wives or children to take to them food at the farms and any other things that they needed. This was a very crucial time in crop development because during the day, birds destroyed beans, lentils and nuts as they flowered.
And at night warthogs and porcupines came running like mad cows and felled the young corn crop and ate the cobs whose grains were forming. The animals also dug out the young forming nut shells and left the top parts lying on the ground as well. They also ate the young pods forming on the beans.
Farmers therefore had to spend nights awake chasing warthogs and porcupines in order to save their crops. Farmers lit fires whose flames were supposed to deter the rogue animals from entering the farms. Sometimes, farmers got very tired and fell asleep by the fires with no flames burning except red coal embers glowing. At such times, the animals got into the farms and really caused a lot of havoc while eating with all the greed in the world.
Farmers woke up on hearing the commotion caused by the animals and started throwing stones at them. In the morning, whenever the farmers identified the direction from where the animals approached the farms, they laid traps and sometimes caught one or two and during those periods, the families had plenty of meat for several days.
Sometimes, the animals lied low especially when they had been harassed too much by the farmers and ate quietly at one end of the farms while the farmers were on the far end of the farms. The worst of it was when a whole family or group of any of the animals entered the farms because a group was usually large, daring and very destructive. The hogs ate with a lot of noise coming from the throats and noses while the porcupines unleashed their pines or needles as defense mechanism.
In the morning the farmers walked through the farms accessing the damage and picking the broken young cobs and corn stems for their cows to eat. They also picked the broken legume stems and tendrils and groundnut bushes to feed cattle with.
Generations’ Prosperity
There was a tendency that seemed to hurt development in many communities in a particular society. The generation where Nathan belonged did very well economically. They had few problems financially because they planned their lives and worked very hard to take care of themselves then and their children and great grandchildren.
Obviously, the generation to which Nathan belonged expected their offspring to do the same for themselves, their children and great grandchildren, but it never followed so. Nathan's generation died happy and satisfied because they had fulfilled their obligations on earth.
That generation therefore owed the future nothing. Richard, in the next generation, after Nathan's generation turned out to be very different; just the opposite to put it as it was. They were lazy and assumed too much without lifting a finger to correct the assumptions.
Richard's generation did less and consumed more therefore depleted all that Nathan's generation had saved and invested in. The shops collapsed due to debts not being collected and families eating out of the inventory in the shops and into the reserves. Cattle disappeared through slaughter and sale. Land was partitioned or subdivided and sold. There was no saving or investing anywhere as the generation reached a dangerous status of living from hand to mouth or paycheck to paycheck.
To this generation, responsibility was shunned and there was no respect to what the foregone generation struggled for. The assets left by Nathan's generation, were taken for granted and squandered like a joke and within a very short period. Nobody thought about tomorrow or the future generations. This was total selfishness.
As a result, they had nothing to leave to their children or great grandchildren. They died poor and miserable. Their children were left poor and sad because they had to start from nothing, yet they had seen and heard how their grandparents did well and left big fortunes at the time of their demise.
In order not to repeat their fathers’ mistakes, the next generation that was David's, swore to turn things around and do better than their fathers did. They did not want their children and the upcoming grandchildren to be left poor the way they were left needful. They therefore doubled their efforts in all that they did in order to multiply their stakes in all that they undertook.
And slowly and surely, they started acquiring more land, making investments and saving. As time went by, they denied themselves so much in order to make more money for then and the future generations. They were keen and sturdy and it paid off. They eventually managed to acquire all that their grandparents had left behind and their parents squandered. And they were very happy.
They tried to teach their children about hard work, savings and investing. Some of the children listened and started doing the right things before David’s generation passed on, but some of the children brushed it aside and started doing the wrong things that their grandparents had done.
That generation got split as a result and some ended up doing well and some doing badly depending on who listened to advice and teachings and who did not care to take heed. The disparity was therefore created and it remains so. And that disparity created jealousy and division in the once cohesive community. With that jealousy and division, developed hatred and witch hunt and anything bad to go with it. And prosperity slowly dwindled and in came desperation and anything else that was distasteful.
Girl Turned into a Rock
In ancient times, listening and acting as one was told was paramount, otherwise there were other forces that were at play. And those forces caused harm or created havoc to many a fellow who refused to obey the commands dished out from time to time. The old people in the communities and villages had the knowledge that they passed on to the rest of the villagers.
To illustrate how such orders worked the story below of one disobedient girl who met her fate after doing the unthinkable comes to mind. Her calamity came in the process of a journey. Journeys were planned well in advance and the planning was the responsibility of the older members of the communities and traveling involved many people in a single trip.
Both men and women were involved in a single journey and both young and old people were part of most journeys as these journeys were teaching lessons for the young people who would take over responsibilities from the old people with time.
The young people in the journeys were there purposely so that they could learn and master many things from the old people in the course of the journeys. There were no formal schools therefore everything was being learned from the old generations regardless of whether the instructions were from parents directly or from other members of the communities and society as a whole.
A young person could not refuse to act as directed by another old man or woman bearing no relation to him or her otherwise his parents would deal with him accordingly if they got to know that he was disobedient to someone else because that someone else could report him or her to the biological parents. That other person also had the right to correct and punis
h any child or young person in the society.
Maria was a young woman who was full of energy, joy and curiosity. And as the saying goes- “curiosity killed the cat”, the saying was proved beyond any reasonable doubt in her case. She was a member of the group that was going visiting in faraway land. There were no vehicles then therefore all journeys were done on foot with stoppings every now and then as people had to rest a little and also to eat.
They carried enough food and water to last them throughout the journeys depending on the routes they were taking. At night they slept on the way under trees and sometimes at particular villages if they knew the villagers or had relationships with them in one way or another in which case they could stop for hours and even refill their water pots and acquire more food. Such stops could be no more than a night and it used to be mostly in the evenings and nights to recuperate and continue the journeys very early next morning.