African Story – a cooking pot and twisted tales

Image result for images of three legged stool

Mrs. Kamanu could barely hide her disappointment and displeasure.

Jude’s return to the village after many years of sojourn in Holland with an ‘oyinbo‘ wife was least expected and a foreign wife was not the daughter-in-law that she had prayed for, for her son.

Her eyes were set on Okeofia’s first daughter Nkemdilim whom she had been calling ‘my wife’ for quite a while now.

A hard working, pretty and a well-mannered girl whose ample child-bearing hips would give her the grandchildren that she wanted.

Seated on her three-legged kitchen stool, with lips pursed like someone who had sucked on an unripe star fruit, she wondered how she would communicate with a daughter-in-law whose nasal language was beyond her comprehension.

Quick glossary:

Oyinbo – White

Okeofia – An Igbo name which means Big Forest.

Nkemdilim – An Igbo name which means ‘May my own stay with me.’

Simobi hissed and muttered to herself as she mixed the potion for the cane. As the daughter of a renowned witch-doctor, she knew her charms.

She hated the idea of being relegated to the position of an abandoned wife; no one would make her the spectacle of wagging and pitying tongues.

Ekwenti and his kinsmen had gone to bring back her husbands’ new bride – a young maiden who would give Ekwenti more male children that he desired.

Stroking the ‘koboko’ with the potent potion, she uttered her commands to the cane and nimbly went to Ekwenti’s hut to replace his old cane with the new one and also replenished the powder in his snuff box.

By the cock’s crow the following morning, the smacking love play of Ekwenti and his new wife had reached a painful crescendo. The young bewildered bride was seen hobbling back to her clan as hastily as she could, while dear Ekwenti lay prostrate in anger with painful welts received from thorough caning and Simobi soothed his pains with gentle ministrations.

Quick glossary:

Koboko: a special cane used in Nigeria to restore someone’s thinking back to its default settings 🙂