The Hypocrite

By Baba Galleh Jallow

One rainy season, my father found a way of keeping me busy and preventing me from either dancing in the rain or going to one of the ponds to swim. He bought some sheep and told me so long as school was out, it was my responsibility to take the sheep to the bush and herd them. I did not like this idea at all, but there was nothing I could do. I dared not refuse because my father would kill me if I did. So every morning after breakfast, my father would say, 'Acha! To the sheep!' And I would go untie the sheep and lead them to a grassy spot outside the village and let them graze.

Now there was one old female sheep that made me really angry. After only a few moments, while all the other sheep were busy grazing, this old female sheep would start running toward the village and all the others would follow suit. And I would have to run after them and around them shouting and waving my hands so that they would return to their grazing. I came to call this sheep 'the hypocrite' and would always give her a good beating after she made me run all over the place. Sometimes, I would tie her to a bush and then she would refuse to eat and keep bleating all day long. Then when I took them home, my father would look at them and say they had not eaten their fill. Sometimes he would accuse me of spending the whole day playing and not taking the sheep to a spot with lots of good grass. Sometimes, he would get so angry that he would beat me up. I thought he was being very unreasonable but I dared not tell him so, because all I could do was take the sheep to a grassy spot in the bush and make sure they don't run back home. I couldn't force them to eat and I thought he should at least know that much.

One day, after a particularly hard day with the hypocrite, having run all over the place trying to make her stay in one spot, and afraid to tie her because then she would not eat, I came home to find my father sitting in the yard. As the sheep flocked into our compound, I saw him eyeing them angrily. And then he said, 'The sheep have not eaten anything today! Look how flat their bellies are! Ha?' Without thinking, I angrily retorted that all I could do was take them to a grassy spot in the bush and that I could not force them to eat.. My father was furious that I dared talk back to him. He seized a stick lying nearby and rushed towards me. I ran and we circled our house several times. He could not catch me and said he would kill me that day. I was so terrified and did not know what to do. I knew there was no way I could escape him because we slept in the same house. I stayed on the look out till night time when my mother came for me. Fortunately, my father did not beat me that day. Maybe he knew what I told him was true.

After that day, whenever the hypocrite tried to run home, I would tie her and all the other sheep to bushes nearby, and I would sit under a tree and read a book I took along. It was because it offered me lots of time to read that I started liking herding the sheep. I rightly guessed that my father would never again tell me that the sheep had not eaten anything, even if at the end of the day their stomachs were flat.

I was always so happy when there was no longer any grass in the bush and my father had to buy bags of hay for the sheep. During the dry season, all the sheep were tied at home and served with baskets of hay. All I did was take them out of their shelter every morning, tie them to their stakes, and fill their baskets with hay. Every few hours, someone would add hay for them. And at sunset, I would untie them again and take them into their hut.

Most of the time, I either went to school or went bird-hunting with the other children. Sometimes, we took Basiru's dogs to the bush to hunt for rabbits and squirrels. We also had our catapults and would sometimes shoot down pigeons and other birds. The only birds we did not hunt were the Pichi Serign, the sparrow and the Gootoot. The big and red-eyed Gootoot was believed to feed on snakes and could itself change into a snake. The hardest bird to hit was the Musa Njubuli, which flew away as soon as it sensed some movement. I sometimes thought what a coward it was.

When we did not go bird-hunting, we wrestled in the sand or played soccer or sat under Pa Lami's mango tree and built trucks out of dry maize stalks. We would make them wheels out of empty milk tins and tie strings to them. Then we would pull them into the bush and fill them with groundnuts, which we then brought home to our mothers. Or sometimes, we would simply race around the village with our trucks, making engine noises. Sometimes, we made our trucks collide and those not strongly built would break apart. Or we played monkey wrestling, who gets up, falls down.