Mawdo anko Mawdo tigi Jarama!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
All the figures of Speeches utilised in a manner so comprehensible without any grandiloquence or malapropism. Baba you are a living legend.
Muhammad Bai Drammeh
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On Sun, 27/11/16, Baba Jallow <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
Subject: [G_L] Smiling Forest Revisited - 10
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Sunday, 27 November, 2016, 22:01
Chapter Ten
How some
animals switched sides and General
Loony’s radical philosophy of
Me-Alone
For a while after the Tragic
Day of the Foxes, some of
the animals who were not top officials in the former
government but were
closely associated with Talkmuch Dolittle kept a low
profile, afraid that the
foxes would hunt them down and lock them up or kill them.
Prominent among these
were Jege the hen, Nice Boy the monkey and Cheku the parrot.
Jege the hen kept
close to home and made it known that she had a dream that
she was going to lay
eggs soon. Nice Boy pretended that he had caught the flu and
constantly coughed
and spluttered and loudly blew his nose, while Cheku claimed
that he had high
fever. His wings and head drooped ominously and his entire
body continuously
shook and he constantly croaked “I sweat, I sweat, I’m
cold.”
Soon however, Jege the hen,
Nice Boy the monkey, and
Cheku the parrot started making public statements in praise
of Loony the fox
and his infinite wisdom. Jege the hen who used to call
Talkmuch Dolittle father
and his two wives mother, publicly denounced and renounced
the ousted royal family
and declared her undying love for Loony. She made a great
hue and cry and
loudly declared that she could give every single one of her
feathers to Loony
if the new king demanded them right there. She would wipe
his shoes and sweep
his palace without pay and she would plunge into a fire if
that was required to
show her love for Loony. Nice Boy the monkey, never to be
outdone, declared that
Talkmuch Dolittle was an evil king who deserved his evil
fate. The animals of
Smiling Forest, he preached, should thank the Great God
Yallah and pay humble
homage to General Loony for saving them from what could
otherwise have been a
horrible fate. The chorus was picked up by Cheku the parrot,
who now
specialized in singing loud songs of praise for the Great
Leader and his
gallant cabal of armed foxes. Cheku, also reputed to have
called Talkmuch
Dolittle father and his wives mother, now declared that the
former king was in
fact a cheat and a liar and that he had so much love and
respect for General
Loony that he could willingly become his slave. The eventual
effect of these profuse
compliments was that Jege the hen, Nice Boy the monkey and
Cheku the parrot were
soon declared national patriots, awarded the highest
national honors – the
national honor of the lips - and co-opted into the new ring
of die-hard Loony
loyalists. They were given new jobs and held up as shining
examples of the new
revolutionary creed and disposition of unquestioning
patriotism.
Meanwhile, the
ordinary animals of Smiling Forest
regarded their new king with dreadful awe and
wonder. A web of fantastic tales and myths was woven
around the Great Leader’s person, which soon made him
larger than life in the
minds of the less imaginative animals.
All manner of
tall tales were told about him. Word soon spread that General Loony
had great
supernatural powers and could even turn himself into a
donkey.
Rumor had it
that the General was actually
all-knowing and all-seeing and could turn himself into a
chameleon if he was in
the mood.
Some said that
he could make
one of his eyes red and the other eye green; and that if he
looked at you with
the red eye, you dropped dead and if he looked at you with
the green eye, you
immediately turned to stone. Some even argued that General
Loony was a
reincarnation of the great prophet Moosaa, sent by the Great
God Yallah to save
His people from the clutches of the evil Firr-Awoon and lead
them on to the Promised
Land. Some whispered that he was in fact a reincarnation of
the legendary
Yadicone of the numerous tails, king of the cats. At their
most dramatic, the
rumors had it that Loony was in fact the mythical Yappa
Yakh, king of the squirrels.
Still other
tales had it that General Loony had great
healing powers. The General himself declared that he came
from a great lineage
of healers and that he was himself a great
witchdoctor. He claimed that he could heal all
manner of
illnesses ranging from leprosy, to hapati, to
poverty.
Through the
rattling beaks of Cheku the
parrot and Jege the hen, now his most vocal spokespersons,
General Loony spread
the word that he could heal any disease with a single tap of
the hand.
When Toothy the
boar heard that one, he
loudly groaned and blew his nose. Sindah
the lizard instantly had a running stomach! Mbota the frog
loudly croaked and
plunged into the pond for his annual hibernation, even
though the time was not
yet ripe. Momba the tortoise quietly withdrew into his shell
to avoid, he said,
the fantastic hailstorm from breaking his fragile
head.
But General
Loony’s greatest renown came in the field of
philosophy. He soon made it known that
he was a great thinker with a unique mind and baffling
thought processes. His
personal philosophy of life, he declared,
was the infallible philosophy of Me-Alone, which showed the
general’s profound
understanding of the workings of not only the animal mind,
but also this mortal
world whose cardinal characteristics were past, present and
future plus one,
two, three. At every possible opportunity General Loony
would delve into a
learned exposition of his erudite philosophy of
Me-Alone.
He would
explain to his faithful cronies and
to the entire Smiling Forest community how any animal would
drown in hell who
did not know that everyday was divided into morning,
afternoon and
evening.
“You cannot
come to afternoon
if you do not pass through morning and there would be no
evening without
afternoon”, he would loudly squeak, his head titled to one
side, a distant look
in his eyes.
He would
proceed to
indicate that it was thanks to his personal wisdom that he
was able to discover
this brand new philosophy of life which hundreds of
generations of wise animals
had tried in vain to discover, namely, that life is divided
into yesterday,
today and tomorrow.
“My personal
philosophy of Me-Alone,” he would squeak,
“is no simple philosophy and can only be understood by
animals whose eyes, ears
and noses are in their right places.
But
those of you whose eyes are where your mouths should be will
never understand that
one sunrise follows another, just as yesterday was followed
by today, not
tomorrow.” Another favorite line of exposition for the
wise general, who now
insisted on being also called Chief Londibali, was that in
counting, one must
always start with one, two, three. Everything in life, he
preached, was based
on one, two, three, which were also the basic principles of
his erudite
philosophy of Me-Alone.
Indeed, such was the great
depth of the Great Leader’s
wisdom that apart from Chief Londibali, he was soon called
Chief Jahasay, Kidunnit,
and Monteh. Some of the more modest animals called him
WaSenagi, MoiTurugi, and
Kanjagi. Loony gleefully basked in the light of these new
titles which, he insisted,
had come into existence as a direct result of the boundless
wisdom of his
philosophy of Me-Alone, which would now define his ruling of
all the animals
and land of Smiling Forest.
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