New, old systems and why there’s a bit of heaven in both

Growing up, I noticed a peculiar thing among old men in the village. Most had well-educated children who worked, lived and had families in cities and major towns. Yet these old men rarely travelled to the city, unless for medical check-up. Why did these old men have to wait until the Easter or Christmas holidays to see their children and grandchildren? Why is it that only their wives made the occasional trip to the city, which was planned with so much fanfare that word would spread far across the ridges. I found out that most of these mainly traditionalist men associated city life with colonialism, a dark patch in history that they’d have preferred to forget. Culturally, it struck them as an abomination to cram children, grown women and men old enough to be village elders into one small house. These men also believed the cackling of a hen just before laying an egg, and the bleating of goats in the meadows, unlike the case in stone-dead cities, was the very poetry of African life. It was a utopic world from which a tribesman could only be plucked by death.

In the blissful African cosmos, the boys never mixed with the women, and the girls had to be kept off the instinctively untrustworthy menfolk. So for some, the bush was so central to life that they wondered how grown men and their children could have a toilet right inside the house. How now? If you chose to relieve yourself in the house, these arrogant African lions predicted, you’d sooner than later shoulder the burden of dumping the effluent into the bush, where you should have deposited it in the first place. Today, the city in the sun is but a filthy eyesore. And those bushy-bearded elders must be guffawing in their graves. We called them illiterate bushmen. Ah, why didn’t our education warn us that the world would in 2016 be planting back the African bush to reduce global warming? Why, they must be chuckling with knowing bemusement, do we deplete our meagre earnings just to escape the concrete jungle for three days in the bush? And we were warned; the county government sewer systems now cannot ferry our effluent to the bush! Let’s not say anything about modern foodstuffs!