WHAT THE NANNY GOAT TOLD HER KIDS (CHAPTER 4) - A

 

CHAPTER 4

 

THOUGH THE ‘EUROPEAN UNION SPONSORED’ PROJECT was yet to take off, the small-scale cassava flour business thrived with its unique gain and pain. Because of the large number of farmers involved in processing cassava in the four sections of the village, there was a glut of cassava flour at a point in time. Buyers made a mess of the situation, hoodwinking the sellers. So the prominent people in the cassava flour supplying business, including Mr Ransom, formed the Fufu Sellers Union (FSU) and eventually checkmated, as they thought, the excesses of the buyers.

Apart from passing their bylaws, the union demarcated the village into two sections that respectively would supply the buyers with the product every fortnight. The situation was ameliorated. But from time to time, some woes and blows kept surfacing.

There was this speculation initially of some farmers who had taken more cash from buyers of cassava flour who thought they could outsmart their rivals by lavishly advancing money to those they saw as major suppliers. But they later realized the big supplier during the dry season when motorcycles could go deep into swampy terrain who kept telling them they had acres and acres of cassava might turn out irrelevant in the rainy season when the tracks became waterlogged and slippery.

When it became hard for their debts to be offset, the farmers who had rolled balls of fufu that were bigger than they could comfortably swallow suddenly realized they were in a dilemma. They resorted to sneaking away from their homes when the buyers were around and returned when they had gone away.

Some of the buyers around the tail end of the year had bought on credit from the farmers and reneged on paying till late in the New Year. The information that later filtered out into the ears of the sellers (and believable too) was that the money the buyers did business with was borrowed from thrift societies and the loans were repaid so contributions could be returned to members but the buyers (who were top-contributing members and also in top positions of these associations) would get the loans back as fresh contributions started in the New Year.

Grace remembered one jovial and popular buyer, Madam Cash, who owed the Ransoms a large chunk of money for several sacks of cassava flour she carried away on trust. She betrayed that trust when other buyers started coming around to the Ransoms and Mr Ransom, with great worry, asked after not seeing her for more than three months, if they heard any news about her. Everyone initially wondered if she was sick but then they started sniffing foul play.

It was at that point Perempe, who often bragged how deep he was into traditional medicine but because of his new-found faith decided to do away with the spiritual aspect, felt highly provoked and decided he might plunge back into the mystical craft. And that did rattle Mr Ransom a bit.

Perempe threatened: ‘So this woman would pack my twelve sacks of fufu and run away with my money leaving me hungry with my wife and children? Then she would force me to pick the nonsense things I’d thrown away. I’d make her realize cunning isn’t wisdom. She’d leave to regret it!’

Mr Ransom and those who sat around his veranda that morning did believe, if forced to, Perempe could carry out his threat. Most of them had benefited from Perempe’s vast knowledge of herbs and their application.

Apart from that, there was a story told in the village about what once happened in the big town to a bunch of youths, when he was deep into traditional medicine, who robbed him one night on a visit to his brother.

With Grace’s fertile imagination, she tried to fit the pieces together to have a clear picture of the incident.

The sun had gone down in the west leaving the sky with the bright colours of orange and gold. Birds sang sweetly on trees as they prepared for the long night's rest in their nests hidden between leaves and on rooftops but the owls and bats were warming up to fill the space the others were about to vacate.

With the steady approach of night, men and women returned to the comfort of their homes from their diverse places of work – offices, factories and markets.

The public electricity was on. Bulbs and fluorescent lamps and lanterns lit beautifully the darkness gradually taking over the town.

Good girls busied in the kitchens with their mothers as they prepared the family meals for the night and obedient boys assisted in fetching water from nearby commercial boreholes and carried loads into the stores.

Then everyone gathered in the living rooms watching the weekend family programmes on television. Those who did not have television sets walked around to the homes of those who had and peeped through the blinds of doors and windows at the interesting programmes.

On a lane saturated with potholes, the sides lined mostly with mud-walled houses topped with corrugated iron sheets, a youth walked up and whistled to another. As the second youth joined the first, they walked up a few houses more and whistled to the third. Their number completed, the three-member gang went downtown combing for targets they could rob.