Please Destroy My House

Man must die. And it is a wondrous thing that we still want to have a say on what happens above Earth when we go into it. Is it a way to stay immortal? Is it a way of denying the finality of death? Maybe we disbelieve that when we die, that’s it; we disbelieve that there’s no more we.

Whatever the thinking is, deathbed instructions still continue to be issued to loved ones. For the lucky few, their wishes do get carried out by those who love them. But, it could also be, that for the majority, the wishes are not honoured.

‘My sons, my last breath comes. When it happens and you are about to put me into my resting place, please destroy my house. Dismantle it and use the bricks to erect my tombstone. This will make me very happy.’ The old man said, his faltering voice sailing slowly out of him like a ship leaving port. His sons, who were gathered around him, listened and, of course, promised with fervour and heartfelt goodwill.

Several days passed and the last breath came. And over the next few days, relatives and neighbours congregated at the house of the funeral to see off the old man. However, the sons had acquired other thoughts as regards their father’s deathbed wish. Why destroy a perfectly good house? It seemed a bizarre and unfair instruction from their sage old father to confer. Hence, they decided resolutely to keep the house.

On the final day when the old man was to be taken to his final resting place at the cemetery, people gathered from all over and surrounded the funeral home. The coffin had been brought out and was in the foreground and the Church had finished their program. It was time to leave for the cemetery.

Suddenly, there was a rambling sensation that could be heard coming from the house. Those who had been leaning on it yelped with fright and run out from the eaves of the house. There was confusion and horror as the gathering watched the house slowly but surely collapse into a heap of bricks, rafters and corrugated iron sheets. Women screamed. Children cried. And the men stood aghast.

The sons were shocked. But they remembered their father’s dying wish, ‘Please destroy my house.’

Peculiar News Compilation
'The Telling Is Mine; The Story Is Not'
© Dingiswayo Allan Sambo 2018

The Love Pentagon

The women were growing more and more beautiful by the bottle. And into the air, the electricity of seduction hovered. An infusion of arousal floated and seeped into the minds of the men.

The beer had flowed and now it was time for other pursuits.

He struck a deal with her and they covertly sauntered off to her room, a little way from the bar. They went into the room and it is not very difficult to imagine the occurrences inside. After some time, the man was seen coming out of the room and heading towards the bathrooms to relieve himself. Meanwhile, another fellow came strolling along and familiarly entered the woman’s room. The door was locked and the occurrences inside are, once again, for you to imagine.

The first man, having finished relieving himself, came back to the woman’s room but was surprised to find the door locked. He could hear sounds from within so he knocked. The woman informed him to wait because she was serving another guy. This shocked the man and he got furious and jealous, more so because he hadn’t finished his business with the woman. So he started rattling the door and yelling and calling on her to open the door. The dude inside didn’t take this lying down and he also got furious. He yanked the door open to confront the irascible man at the door. And found that the irascible fellow was his own pa!

Rage took over from shock and he let out a blow which hit the older man right in the face.

‘Do you want to kill my mother?’ the son roared in wrath.

Shock was also taken over by rage in the father and he too let fly a blow which also landed in his son’s face.

‘Do you want to kill your mother-in-law’s daughter?’ the father thundered at his son.

Things escalated out of control from there, with the woman at the centre of it all, running around helplessly in circles, fruitlessly trying to calm things down and separate the two fighting men. People came, excited and curious about the commotion. They were titillated when they heard the gist of the story and there was much mirth and amusement. They let the two fight it out and squeezed out the most from the hilarity of the situation.

Unfortunately, the other two women concerned got to hear the fun happenings of the night. For them, the mirth and humour of the situation totally zoomed past them. Consequently, the two marriages are, unsurprisingly, on the rocks.

Peculiar News Compilation
'The Telling Is Mine; The Story Is Not'
© Dingiswayo Allan Sambo 2018

The Four Owls

Payday! For working people, that is the Day. A month of sweat rewarded by a day of sweet. It is the encapsulation of an age old means of livelihood; creditors line up, bills are squared, food is bought, clothes are purchased, rents are paid, savings are made, and, for the lucky few, wealth accumulates. For some men, it is freedom and license to binge drink. Smiles appear on women’s faces and kids get their treats. Oh, doubtless payday is the Day.

For him, payday came and he had to cycle all the way from his home to his work place at the sugar plantations; a one hour cycle trek. He worked that day and when the designated time came for the wages to be handed out, he lined up and got his pay. He started back on his way home, very mindful that unscrupulous people could waylay him.

Well, he needn’t have worried about anyone at all. Harm did come but not from man. It came in a way he could never have imagined had it not happened to him. Four owls came out of the foliage on the right of the track and flew about above his head. He was disturbed and looked at the strange occurrence with trepidation. Owls in the daytime? He put some strength into the cadence, trying to put some space between himself and the owls but he was shocked when they dived in and flew into his face one after the other. He stopped the bicycle, now very alarmed and very afraid.

What could this mean? What was happening?

He got on his bicycle again, trembling with fear and cycled with all his might, the adrenaline pumping in his temples. But the advantage of flight is superior to locomotion on hard earth. The four owls easily caught up with him and savagely flew into his face once again and this time he fell off his bicycle and landed face down, injuring his lips and cheek which swelled. They began pecking at him and scratching him. They did this for some time while he screamed and flailed his arms wildly about. Quite suddenly, they ceased and flew away.

Deeply traumatised, he wasted no time but got onto his bicycle and rode helter-skelter for the comfort and protection of his home, having seen the devil. He is now ensconced in the confines of his home, afraid to cycle to work again as he seeks help from ‘wise men’.

Peculiar News Compilation
'The Telling Is Mine; The Story Is Not'
© Dingiswayo Allan Sambo 2018

The Drunk Grocer

On that particular day, the grocer was seen to be in a very jovial and merry mood. His conviviality at the local tavern was a sight to behold and his jolly laughter echoed to the rooftop while his dancing antics excited jubilant cheers from his fellow patrons.

The beer flowed…and it flowed…and it flowed. And everyone agreed that never had a more superb and splendid time ever been spent at the tavern before. They partied late into the night till everyone had had enough and one by one they said their goodbyes with lots of goodwill and bright hopes for a better tomorrow. The grocer also saw it was his time to go back to his home behind his grocery. Extremely sozzled, he, nevertheless, managed to stagger home, falling countless times, singing happy songs along the way.

However, when he reached home, he remembered he had one more task he felt like doing. He opened his grocery and started throwing out the groceries. Alert villagers nearby pounced upon this one in a million chance and went away with the stuff no longer ‘wanted’ by the grocer. It took some bit of time to complete the subtraction of the well-stocked grocery but finally, having satisfied himself, the grocer closed shop and contentedly went to sleep, like a new born satiated baby with a big smile on his face.

He woke up to a beautiful day and the inevitable splitting headache…and to the bewildering and shocking sight of his empty grocery. Of course, he thought he had been robbed; so it was with teeth-gnashing and shirt-tearing anguish and gape-mouthed disbelief that he listened to the truth when it was told to him.

Some lessons are better learnt the hard way.

Peculiar News Compilation
'The Telling Is Mine; The Story Is Not'
© Dingiswayo Allan Sambo 2018

The Harvest That Won't Happen

He spent a lot of time inside his field. When everyone else had done their work for the day in their fields and gone home, he would still be seen inside his. He grew to like the solitude among the stalks of the maize crop, the expanse of the open air with the sun beating upon his brow and the silence of the field. The sounds of distant echoes of life all around him hardly penetrated his seclusion, so absorbed was he in his menial tasks. But, deep down, this extra time spent in the fields was a pretext to delay the time when he would have to go home to his wife and spend time among his in-laws. He was a ‘mkamwini’, a product of the age old traditional custom where a man leaves his home village and goes to stay at his beloved’s home village. In some cases, it works out fine; for him, it was not going all that well.

Hence his preference for the company of his inanimate garden to his very animated in-laws. Naturally, the extra time and care he bestowed on his field, led to his crop being the envy of the village. His extra effort showed in the tidy ridges and the height of the crop and the lush pumpkin foliage that snaked beneath the maize with plump pumpkins dotting the floor.

Meanwhile, eyes were watching and thoughts were being thought and words were being spoken and feelings were being felt. His marriage was floundering and his wife and the in-laws were throwing out unveiled clues that he was not what they had envisioned. Still, they couldn’t help but admire the garden. But there was no easy way for them to have it all to themselves. They couldn’t straight take it away from him because they were the ones who had provided it to him and in the 'mkamwini' system, that was not a line that could be crossed; otherwise the village chief could step in. So they talked it over with their daughter and sister and it was resolved the marriage's demise was the only way to get their hands on the harvest.

It was an easy task for the wife to execute. And very soon, the man saw that his time there had come to an end. He quietly removed himself back to his home village, regretfully leaving his crop but still glad to close the sad chapter of his life. Harvest time soon came and the in-laws prepared to reap where they had, effectively, ‘sown’. They went into the garden but, to their shock, all they could see was a dam of water. When they came out, there was the garden, inviting and open. But one step inside, a dam of water. They soon realized that their in-law had charmed the field.

The wife was told to do the needful and she travelled to the man’s village to charm him back. He admitted that he had charmed the field at the very beginning to protect the field against thieves who harvest where they had not sown. But he refused to go back with her, telling her that he would rather the crop should rot right there in the field.

Thus, all fields in the village have been harvested except for that one luscious field where slowly the rot is setting in…

Peculiar News Compilation
'The Telling Is Mine; The Story Is Not'
© Dingiswayo Allan Sambo 2018

The Dove In The Flour

In this part of Africa, the ‘dengu’ of maize flour is the heart of the house. ‘Nsima’ the staple cooked product of maize flour is the buffer between a full stomach and an empty stomach. And everyone on Earth knows that an empty stomach is not a desirable condition at all.

The ‘dengu’ of flour is always covered and protected. Cats are watched warily; you don’t want them helping themselves in the flour and then covering up their act inside the flour to occasion a nasty surprise later on. So are cockroaches and other insects observed in the same way. In short, if you attack a family’s basket of maize flour, you are declaring war. Worse, you will be suspected of witchcraft.

So imagine the horror of a certain family when they discovered a dove in their basket of maize flour. A dove! Cats, cockroaches, gheckos, moths, ants, chickens, pigeons, nasty and disgusting as they would be to find in the basket, are still understandable because they are unacknowledged inhabitants of our houses. But a dove! It is like walking into your bedroom and finding a car parked on your bed. But find it they did.

At first, they rationalized that, as improbable as it was, it was just possible that it had strayed into the basket. So the man of the house caught it and kept it in a box where it lived for two days. On the third day, he found it had died.

That was when things started getting weirder. The day after the discovery of the dead dove, a strange bird flew into the couple’s bedroom. The woman of the house was alone and she was startled. It flew around the bedroom and perched on a rafter. She got afraid and started screaming. People came to the rescue but it disappeared from the bedroom in a way no one could fully explain.

Two days later, the man of the house went to the field to work his garden. And a flock of strange birds, which fit his wife’s description of the bird in their bedroom, attacked him. He ran for his life back to his house. When the couple related the strange occurrences to friends and neighbours, they all agreed that the death of the dove must be the cause.

The family subsequently went on to experience several other visits from the strange birds at odd and unexpected moments over several weeks and, needless to say, they were heavily traumatised. Then all of a sudden, the visits stopped but by that time the uneasiness the family felt was intense. They thought it was a lull rather than an end. The man of the house resolved to seek help from ‘wise men’.

Peculiar News Compilation
'The Telling Is Mine; The Story Is Not'
© Dingiswayo Allan Sambo 2018