5. VOTING

It might sound ludicrous, but here we have a society of very primitive cavemen engaged in a general election...

OWONGO AND A PRINCE

5. VOTING

The day arrived, the one Owongo had decided would have to be election day, and he had even gone to the trouble of setting out a tiny cave that was too small for tribal men or women to live in even if they didn’t have ankle-biters, though he hadneeded to turf out a small family of wild dogs, who had previously been perfectly happy in so snug a place, with Owongo’s promise they could return home when the election was over.

His first problem, when it came to details, was how the voters were to mark their votes.

He favoured the idea of carved boxes in which they could place their mark, probably an x, but rejected it after spending half a day barely carving out one box and knew it would take longer than his lifetime to carve out as many as he needed, and in dire frustration decided to take himself off for a walk while he thought the matter out.

He was deep in thought and seeming to be getting absolutely nowhere when he came upon a group of children playing a version of ‘catch’. It was an easy enough game. Rather dangerous balls that enthusiastic fathers had carved out of stone, were launched by at thrower and caught by one of the the rest of the children, and catching needed considerable care if the catcher was to keep his fingers intact. Some of the children were boys and they had to catch the plain white balls whilst others, being girls, had to catch the fluffy red ones, which were exactly the same only wrapped in a fluffy coating of skin died red by being dipped in blood (not human blood, hopefully) and then dried.

The object of the game was for all the balls to be thrown by one child who may have been called the thrower (some of the balls in no way resembled the balls children many thousands of years might recognised, being a random collection of almost-but-not-quite spherical objects), and the team (ie, boys were one team and girls the other) that caught the greater number of the correct coloured balls was the winner, and any child catching the wrong coloured ball was, tearfully, out.

Owongo stood watching the children play, a smile n his face as they leapt and cavorted, until what later generations might call the penny dropped.

“Of course!” he shouted, and kissed half a dozen children on their heads before running back to his cave. Back then it was perfectly all right for a grown man to kiss a strange child on the head and no accusation of an unsavoury nature would arise. After all, he probably displaced a few nits by so doing.

Back in his cave Owongo yelped to Mirumda “I have it!” and she smiled enjoying his pleasure and told him that the moment he had gone for his walk she knew he would find the answer.

So there he was, then, at the polling station. In one hollowed out short length of log he placed a load of plain stones (not balls, that would have meant far too much work for him, and in the other an equal number stained black. So he had stones of a muddy colour like stones almost always are and another pile of stones that were black, or as black as he could make them by rubbing them with charcoal from the remains of a camp fire. Then he decided that Prince Dickory, having a black heart would be represented by the black stones and he, being of a muddy complexion, would be represented by the natural stones.

Them, when the voters arrived, and just about everyone did, even babies, each one took a stone of the colour of the person they wanted to vote for (Prince Dickory was one and he, Owongo, was the other) and placed it next to one of two spikes driven into the ground, thus voting for one or other of the contestants.

Predictably, Prince Dickory in the company of a couple of his thugs arrived early and they all voted for him, piling more black stones than was actually fair against the black spike. Then, when the ordinary people saw that he was clearly on his way back to his dark luxurious cave, the rest of the people came, at first in a trickle and then in a wonderful host.

By the end of the day Owongo was hoarse, having explained his system hundreds of times, and he closed the polling station by inviting the wild dogs back into what was really their home, and counted the two piles of stones piled by the relevant spikes.

And to his utter dismay there exactly the same number of stones in the two piles. He counted them again. They came to a different number, but still exactly the same as each other.

“What will I do?” he begged of Mirumda, “this was supposed to decide on a leader and the decision is nobody has won!”

“Then do what Prince Dickory did, and cheat,” suggested Mirumda, “he put more stones on his pile than he should have. I was watching him carefully. He put a whole handful of black stones next to his spike when you weren’t looking.”

“He did?” demanded Owongo, “the slime-bag!”

Whether he actually used the term slime-bag is open to question because it is only a rough traslation of his guttural grunt, but it will suffice. But whatever he meant to call Prince Dickory, he removed a single stone from the black pile and announced that he was the winner by a margin of one vote.

Then he pushed the two piles orf stones into one corner where the occupant hounds would be unlikely to touch them, and went back to his own cave.

Standing outside it, and in a loud voice, her announced that by a narrow margun, not specifying it, he had won.

“So I am the leader,” he said, “I have won the public’s approval. I will guide you all along the right roads into the future and maybe, in many thousands of something or other that may or may not be called years, the people will look back on me and know that I was the one who discovered the joys of honesty and fair play.”

A cheer went uip, starting first by Mirumda screeching her joy and approal, and then the neighbours who heard her, and then, in a wonderful rippling effect, down the length of the row of caves that represented the need of the people for a solid roof over their heads.

Prince Dickory heard the cheering and scowled.

“We’ll see,” he grunted, “just you wait and we’ll see!”

And next day he told Owongo he had discovered a new word in the lexicon of words relating to polling.

“We need a recount!” he barked.

© Peter Rogerson 05.11.23

...