Chewing palm-kernels while suffering from tooth-ache (2)

(In the first part of this story, we read about two very troublesome monkeys, with the picturesque names of Kakaweadwe and Kwaagyadu, who devastated the harvest of a poor farmer by stealing his foodstuffs. Had they but known it, what the Greeks call “nemesis” was coming to them. Now read on!)

After a time when the farmer could not tolerate the stealing of food from his farm by the monkeys any longer, he decided to teach them a lesson. He got up early and dressed for farm work as usual. Only – he didn’t go to his farm!

He went instead to the market. He made straight for the stall of the women who sold calabashes and gourds.

He selected a nice gourd with a long neck, known in Twi as “toanoper” (the name was the compressed form of a proverb: toa n’?p3 na homa sa ne k?n, meaning “it’s the fault of the gourd that there’s always a string around its neck.” In other words, if the gourd had not had such a nicely-shaped neck, no-one would have thought of putting a string round its neck – a string that made it easy to carry water and palm-wine in the gourd.)

The farmer took the beautiful gourd to his farm. He then half-filled it with something that he knew monkeys liked very much – groundnuts.

He left the ground-nut-filled gourd in a clearing on the farm, and went home.

He did not go to the farm the next day. But on the third day, he went to the farm. And as he had half-expected, he saw Kakaweadwe with his hand stuck firmly in the gourd!

What had happened was that Kakaweadwe had put his hand in the gourd. And he had got some of the groundnuts to eat. No sooner had he finished eating them than he put his hand in the gourd again.

Meanwhile, Kwaagyadu was watching him and making a racket of a screeching noise, trying to get Kakaweadwe to withdraw his hand so that he, Kwaagyadu, too could take some of the groundnuts. But when it came to food, animals behaved strangely. They didn’t know who was a brother, sister, friend or even girlfriend.

So as soon as Kakaweadwe had finished the nuts he had been able to retrieve from the gourd, he inserted his hand in it again. And deeper and deeper went his hand. When his hand was getting towards the bottom of the gourd, he realised that if he didn’t take large fistfuls of nuts, Kwaagyadu might be able to pry him away from the gourd and eat all the remaining nuts. So he took a much larger fistful.

But when he tried to bring the nuts out, his fist had become so large that it wouldn’t come out. And Kakaweadwe wouldn’t let go of the nuts.

Kwaagyadu was by now besides himself with annoyance and hunger.

He screamed! He hopped from tree-branch to tree-branch. But the more he became hysterical, the more determined Kakaweadwe was, to hang on to the nuts he’d got in his fist.

Eventually, Kakaweadwe began to doze off. But even then, he still wouldn’t let go of the nuts.

Kwaagyadu “timed” Kakaweadwe often and when he thought Kakaweadwe had fallen asleep, he tried to pry his arm away from the gourd. But it didn’t work. Of course, Kwaagyadu’s own antics did not help matters: he screeched so loudly in anger and frustration at Kakaweadwe that Kakaweadwe always managed to stir himself awake when sleep was threatening to steal him away!

This was a deadlock of epic proportions: it was as if “an unstoppable force” had met “an immovable object”!

The farmer took in the situation as soon as he got back into the farm. He threw a net over the head of Kakaweadwe and put him – with his hand still stuck in the gourd – under his arm and walked home with him. As he knew Kwaagyadu would do, Kwaagyadu hopped from tree to tree, not too far away, all the way to the farmer’s home.

The farmer entered the house.

Kwaagyadu hopped on to the roof of the house.

The farmer put Kakaweadwe and the gourd in a cage he had specially constructed.

Kakaweadwe screeched hard. But he wouldn’t open his fist. So his hand continued to be stuck in the gourd.

Kwagyadu screeched from the rooftop – in mock sympathy. In the night, Kwaagyadu managed to creep close to Kakaweadwe and the gourd, to see whether he could take Kakaweadwe’s hand out. But the farmer had anticipated this and set a trap for Kwaagyadu. It sprang into action and Kwaagyadu too was caught!

The farmer put Kwaagyadu into another cage; He left the two monkeys on his veranda for the children of the village to come and look at them.

Some children stayed all day to watch Kakaweadwe with his hand stuck in the gourd, and Kwaagyadu making monkey noises which translated as, “You say you are selfish and won’t allow me to eat some of the groundnuts. Now, see where you have got both of us.”

The children who came to look at the two monkeys were supposed to learn from the monkeys’ plight that it is better to share things than fight over them.

But did they learn that lesson?

I don’t think they did – for the world is still full of selfishness, greed, insensitivity and all manner of anti-social evils.

People can even destroy rivers from which their own kith and kin derive their drinking water, in order that they might get gold from the sand and gravel in the rivers and streams. This evil is called galamsey.

It is a marvel which can never be explained – not until the world ends, I guess. By then, we in Ghana shall be in a worse mess than Kakaweadwe and Kwaagyadu!