1. APPLE

Owongo is an everyday sort of caveman living a heck of a long time ago and things are not quite right in his world. He must do something about it!

OWONGO AND A PRINCE

1.APPLE

You might be the sort of person who looks at the situation of power and politics in our present time and grunts about things never having been so bad in the whole history of time. But if you are that sort of person you may have no experience of deeply distant prehistoric times, the oceans of years in which the rather loveable Owongo lived and breathed and had his being, and a self-styled leader (there were no such things as leaders back then, and if there had been the chances are it would have been Owongo himself) glorying in the name Prince Dickory ruled the roost.

Prince Dickory was a self-styled bully and autocrat with only one aim in his tiny mind (and I’m not being offensive here, I mean literally, his mind was tiny) and that was to gain all the riches he could so that everyone could see just how great he was because he made the strange equation in that tiny mind that equated wealth and riches with character and decency and all the things that the aforementioned Owongo possessed in spades.

If you can’t remember or haven’t come across him before, Owongo was what you might call a very early man. He was even around before Neanderthal man, and he was really very early in the march of humanity towards so-called civilisation as he/she made his/her way up the distant road to today. In fact, Owongo was so early that he hadn’t as yet invented clothing, and nobody thought it odd when he was seen stalking the bank of the stream that ran trough the valley, stark naked, though he did occasionally de-maggot an unwanted animal skin and drape it over his nether regions on a particularly cold day when a keen and icy wind found him shivering in his cave or trying to look brave and warm as he dragged the odd minnow out of the icy waters of his favourite stream.

His partner in life was Mirumda, she of the pleasing smile and huge bosom together with long flowing locks of mud-brown hair which turned almost to auburn when she took it to the stream that ran through their valley, and washed it using tree-sap as shampoo. It worked, thought I wouldn’t try it if I were you.

And it so happened that one day Mirumda rushed into the cave she shared with Owongo and shrieked something like “you do summat ‘bout it, man o’ mine!”

“What is, precious mine?” he replied. You will note that anything like decent grammar hadn’t as yet been invented. But the sense and the anger, even the fury, were there in the tone of her voice and his loving reply.

“That there Prince Dickory,” she spat, “there were two apples on the little apple tree by the stream where you play with minnows, and he pinched the both of them! So we have no apples for tea and me angry!”

Now, before I ramble on, it might seem that the loss of an apple to a self-styled Prince is a small matter until you understand that apples in the forest around Owongo’s cave were absolutely huge with cores the size of a soccer ball, not that they had soccer balls back then, but you probably know what I mean. So one apple was sufficient for a family of four (Mirumda, Owongo and their ankle-biters, He Junior, aged four and She Junior, aged three. The youngsters were, in fact, twins, but Mirumda Junior took so long to crawl out of her mother’s womb that it seemed she must surely be a year younger than her big brother), and Owongo claimed it had lasted the best part of a year, not that time was divided into years back then.

“So you no apple?” demanded Owongo, “the greedy Prince Dickory is so greedy, eh?”

“Like he always is,” agreed Mirumda, “and Owongo must do something about it, or Mirumda will, and when Mirumda takes the lead all women follow!”

The whole idea of an army of angry women on the march thrilled Owongo so much so that he found it very difficult concealing his excitement, but he also knew that an army of women might include a handful of deaths before they gave up, and the very last thing he wanted was for the love of his life to be among the buried. After all, he had the juniors to think of, and like many men since then, he was at a loss.

“Owongo make rules,” he promised her, though he himself had no idea what rules were and how he might make some. But then, in a flash of inspiration, he concluded, “we need democracy!”

“What big word mean?” demanded Mirumda, “what you mean, demo-crazy!

“One man, one vote!” explained Owongo, though he was still talking with his head in the skies and making no more than a blabbering sound to his own ears. He had no idea what a vote was or how one man might own one. But then, and this was his genius, he was capable of giving a name to the completely unknown, and by so doing give it a life.

“Watch Owongo!” he demanded, and he took a large log that he intended to use to warm them up when he invented fire, and using a stone blade that he had created only last week, he carved a panel out of it. Then he took some soot from the dead ashes of last week’s fire after the thunderstorm had ignited a pile of kindling, and daubed some random squiggles on it.

“What you doing?” demanded Mirumda, and the two juniors frowned and asked the same question in toddler voices.

“Pay heed to Owongo!” he demanded, “Owongo inventor of great fame and notoriety!” He had no idea what notoriety meant but it sounded good, so he said it. Then he pointed at the squiggled in black on the sheet of wood (that looked as if a saw from the future had created it, but as there wasn’t anything like a saw from the future anywhere near to do any such thing he’d achieved a similar product using his bare hands and a stone blade).

“Here we have words,” he said proudly, marks that always mean the same thing! And these mean, in capital letters GENERAL ELECTION!

He had no idea what he meant by capital letters, but hey, that was Owongo all over!

TO BE CONTINUED

© Peter Rogerson 30.10.23

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