MANGO TREE

Growing up in a traditional environment, one never envisions that they would do the abominable. It is not talked about. You do not consume alcohol, you do not bribe cops, you do not abort or even consider abortion let alone lust after another man’s wife.

That was our training. Children respected their parents and never asked why.  Shamba boys did not talk to their masters with capes on. Househelps were never met in the corridors. If a visitor came by, the best china was unveiled and immediately put away upon their departure. The dogs and cats were a necessary inconvenience. They ate the crumbs that fell from their favourite child’s plate. No special meals or budget for them. Fighting rats, mice, lice and Orumbugu were part of the family joint activities. We talked about certain things but not others. 

The neighbourhoods were alive with drinking local brew, beating up the village thief and stealing mangoes from the old man who was rumoured to be a night dancer.[1] It was never envisaged that villages would be formed of people who did not know the others full name, history, date of birth and parentage. Girls spent the better part of the day weeding, fetching water and learning how to mingle finger bread or to peel plantain (matooke). The boys spent the days in the hills, kicking banana fibre balls, herding and playing pranks on the passers-by.

In the hot afternoons, old mothers sat bare-chested under the mango tree whose bark had been stripped off for medicinal purposes or by the goats. The tree itself would be leaning close to the ground. Having survived many a fight between siblings for dominance over its one old branches but still held back by one of two roots. It had heard many a whisper of love at night and a whimper of sadness for a lost one as a bereaved sought its shade to remember one long gone. Now the old mothers, sat on raffia mats, draped in old thread bare lesu’s as they warded off a lazy fly here and a nosy bee there. Callused feet occasionally crashing to death the scavenging insects and being wiped off with a yellowed mango leaf.

I wonder what stories this mango tree would tell if it had been given voice? Would it recall that spring when as a fruit, it was handed over by one lover to another as they surveyed the plains to choose which way their home would face as they constructed their house? What about the cries of newly born babies or the harsh hurricane that had broken off its apex as a seedling struggling to get its ‘feet’ into the ground having been dropped there by the love struck lass? Would he tree tell of the forest fires that almost burnt it to the ground? The fights of small boys over which yellow fruit mango belonged to who? Of its branches that were cut off for firewood in the days of scarcity? Of its bark that was used to treat the cough? What about the story of the village preacher? The one who brought salvation to the homestead and commenced to use the tree shade as his first church? Would the tree tell of the many souls that were saved under its branches?

I wonder.

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[1] Those who laid curses upon others in the dead of the night. Often did so stark naked.