‘Chewing Palm Kernels Whilst Suffering From Tooth-Ache!’ (1)

THE name came back to me deep down my sub-conscious mind.

I was thinking about the antics of a couple of Internet trolls [troll = a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting quarrels or upsetting people, through posting inflammatory, extraneous or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a forum, chat room, newsgroup or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response, or of otherwise disrupting normal on-topic discussion, often for the troll’s amusement!).

Trolls often work in groups and attack a chosen victim in tandem. One waits for another to say something and then chips in to praise his partner, while rubbishing any answer the victim may have provided in the mean time. Internet experts say that one “can never win an argument with a troll.” For, of course, the object of conspiratorial needing can lose his cool.

As soon as that happens, one has jumped into a boiling cauldron prepared by the trolls. They move the argument away from the substantive issue and begin to attack one for being emotional or vituperative, or both. Any point that one makes in self-defence is seized upon to generate a new, unrelated controversy. In the end, so many subjects are exhaustively contested that the originating argument is lost completely. That is of no consequence to the trolls, however, for their object was always merely to “discombobulate” their victim.

Anyone familiar with Greek mythology would recall being faced with a “Charybdis and Scylla” type of menace. Charybdis was a sea monster with six heads, and it ate every human being who strayed into the area of the sea where it lurked! Scylla was a whirlpool that sucked in and destroyed any ships that got blown by an ill wind into Scylla’s domain. As the Greek writer, Homer, described them, the two lethal obstacles to sailors were so close to each other in the Strait of Messina (off the coast of Sicily) that if a ship’s crew somehow managed to escape from the one, they would inevitably fall into the clutches of the other! How Odysseus, the hero of heroes in Greek mythology, was able to outwit both of them, will bring enormous pleasure to anyone who cares to look up the story. So I won’t spoil it by telling it to you!]

Now, whilst wondering why the Greek god(s) of creation thought it fit to put Charybdis and Scylla so close together, in the potential paths of sailors, it occurred to me that there was an unforgettable, similarly-paired characters that I enormously enjoyed reading about when I was in Class Three at Asiakwa Presbyterian Junior School.

How did extremely interesting textbooks (like Kan Me HwƐ No 3) vanish from our schools? In one of these books, there was a story about two monkeys who were inseparable and executed a lot

of destructive pranks together against humans. One monkey was called Kakaweadwe, while the other’s name was Kwaagyadu.

Kakaweadwe’s name fascinated me, for its inventor had employed a lot of imagination and verbal dexterity in constructing a single name that expressed a very complex idea namely, “one who likes to eat palm kernels, even though he suffers from tooth-ache”!

In our infancy, this was a graphic depiction of the type of dilemma we faced when we went to swim or bathe in one of our rivers. After a swim, we needed to oil ourselves otherwise our skins would become extremely dry and blanched.

This wasn’t a desirable outcome of swimming, for our parents could tell from the colour of our skins that we had not gone to school, but gone swimming! The easiest way to hide the consequences of swimming on our skins was to look for fallen palm nuts in the bush, crack them open with a stone, and chew the kernels inside the shells. Then we would use the oil in them to smear our skins, take a dip in the river to wash it off, and be as good as new!

Now some of the palm kernels were soft but the majority were quite hard and if you tried to chew one when you had a tooth-ache, you would wish you had never been born. As an impeccable wordsmith, someone had thought about all this and had aptly named a very troublesome pest of a monkey as “Kakaweadwe”! [Literally, the name is parsed thus: kaka = tooth-ache; we = tochew; adwe = palm kernels].

The name fascinated me as a kid and I still marvel at the rich imagery used by the story’s creator to craft such a complex idea into a single- telling word. And coined by an “illiterate” story-teller into the bargain!

Well, the two monkeys – [the second one’s name, although not as picturesque as that of the first, also had clever wordplay woven into it – Kwaagyadu literally means kwaa = fellow; agya = father(s); du= ten: in other words, a fellow with ten fathers; i.e. a bastard!

Now think of that – monkeys are very promiscuous animals, and so profound was the knowledge the story-teller had of monkey behaviour that he figuratively likened it to that of a person with no training about good behaviour (because he did not have one father-figure to bring him up!).

Even so, ten fathers? What was the mother’s stock-in-trade then? Any wonder that Kwaagyadu specialised in pillaging stuff from someone’s farm? Which of his ten fathers would tell him not to do things like that? Did his mother even know where they had disappeared to, after having had their way with her? Kwaagyadu!

www.cameronduodu.com
By CAMERON DUODU
(To be continued)