2. WET

The birth of democracy???

Owongo decided that he needed to form what he called, in his head, a “political party” though he had no idea what political meant and his knowledge of parties had more to do with fermented apple juice that gave him a headache than anything else. But he knew that in the fulness of time he’d put one and one together and make a number between two and seven, so his best plan would be to go ahead and announce a General Election.

Mirumda was confused when he tried to explain it to her.

“Too many unknowns for my woman head,” she told him, and he nodded sweetly and told her she’d get to understand when the moon turned into gold, and he wandered to Prince Dickory’s cave, which, as you might expect was rather grand in that it had inside plumbing and a lavatory. At least, the rather fetid hole in the ground in a back recess was what Prince Dickory called a lavatory. The plumbing, on the other hand, was a majestic tributary to the village stream that had been obliged to change course as a subsequence of a rock fall a decade earlier and had, after a struggle meandered through a crack in his roofage. Though if you’d told Owongo and mentioned something as unknown as a decade he would have had no idea what you were talking about and assumed that a decade was something to do with chicken pox.

Or, maybe, on a bad day, smallpox.

Prince Dickory was in and he was peeling a huge apple, probably the one that Owongo was convinced should have been his own.

“Prince,” he began scowling, “I have come to a decision. “We need a General Election.”

“What gobbledegook be this?” growled Prince Dickory, waving his hand in a dismissive was at Owongo, “I tell you what, Wongo, my neighbour, you go and play tiddlywinks with your ankle-biters and leave rich men like me in peace.”

“We will have General Election,” Owongo told him, “and all the folk on the valley bottom, cave-dwellers and those in shacks alike, will choose a leader. And each man, Prince, will only have one voice. That is democracy, and it is fair.”

“You talk cuckoo language!” scorned Prince Dickory, “you know men are not equal! You know rich men are rich ‘cause they know how to swindle the poorer folk! An’ that makes them powerful, Wongo idiot! And their sons, if they have them, they will be powerful too in their turn!”

“Owongo calls General Election,” insisted Owongo, “and there will be two parties, you rich swindlers in one and me and us paupers in the other, and whichever party gets most votes forms leadership, and leader of that party becomes village chief.

“Gobbledegook!” repeated Prince Dickory, “and if you win the votes, whatever madness they may be, what makes you think Prince Dickory take any notice, eh?”

“We will have democracy!” repeated Owongo, meaningfully, “and then maybe, crime like treason and then maybe capital punishment, whatever that may be...”

“Demo-crazy! Sniggered the Prince, and to prove to Owongo that he was superior, he spat in his face, a huge globule of rancid smelling mouth-juice which made Owongo vomit there and then.

“Me call hustings!” he declared and returned to his own cave where Mirumda sponged his cheeks with a handful of dried grass and muttered sweet nothings in his ears as she did so.

Many men in those distant days would have been put off pursuing a course that not even they understood, but Owongo was one in a great number, bigger than any other number he could think of, bigger even than seven. He was not going to let a foul-juice spitting moron get the better of him. And he knew he was right when he thought the word moron, though he didn’t know why.

So when he was no longer stinking like, as Mirumda put it, a raccoon’s back passage, he created a notice for the populace of the valley floor to consult. And on that notice, (made of the bark of a birch tree and very crumbly) he inscribed characters that meant absolutely nothing at all, but which also meant the whole tribe had to ask him to explain what he meant because they had no idea. After all, a squiggle on pale bark rarely means anything at all, not even if that squiggle is joined by a whole lot more.

“We need to choose party,” he told them, “and I put myself forwards as leader of the don’t haves because I don’t even have my apple, not any more. And Prince Dickory” (and he spat when he uttered the name) “will lead the scumbags who have enriched themselves at the expense of honest folk.”

He didn’t actually use those words because if he had the tribes-people would have remained equally confused and shaken their heads and wandered off looking for whatever they thought Owongo might be on. Instead he grunted one way and then grunted another and everyone got a clear idea that there was going to be a general election one week away from that moment.

“What’s a week?” many demanded, but the more far-seeing asked “what’s election” or even “what’s general.”

Then Mirumda came up and took Owongo by one hand and kissed him in the French way, though nobody knew anything French, and then, in a loud and clear ringing voice, told them the story of the apple that Prince Dickory had stolen from Owongo’s tree, and how he had spat the vilest juices at her lovely man when he had challenged him and how it was most unfair how a small number (less than seven) of the people living on that valley floor should dominate the rest (more than seven) and that things must change or there would be misery for ever and a day, which is a mighty long time for the unprivileged to made to suffer in silence.

There was the loudest imaginable cheer, much louder than the one that had been heard when Hotcock, the chief hunter, had lost his front teeth in an altercation with Warmtoes, his own wife. Or she might have been his wife had marriage been invented that early in human activities, but what they were to each other meant almost the same thing.

Then Owongo was raised onto hairy shoulders accompanied by hoots and mighty cheers, and carried in glory along the path next to the stream until the effort became too much of a strain, he was dropped and got wet.

© Peter Rogerson 31.10.23

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