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