According to the rainmaker, Majek Fashek:
"Everything in life has its time and season
"So you don't have to axe me why
"You don't expect to plant cassava
"And reap up cocoyam"
To be quite frank, I've never once planted cassava and wondered if I'd reap cocoyam. Even deeper, I've never really planted cassava. I don't recall such a time. I've planted yam. I didn't reap cassava, but what came out resembled a fetus more than it did a tuber. It was during the period when my father determined that all the male children in the family had to have their own little farms.
So we all had our own little farms. I wanted to grow tomatoes. My brothers laughed me to scorn. No real Urhobo man grew tomatoes, they said, not taking into account that I was all but eight years of age. "Well what about Bernard?" I asked. They said that Bernard, our very excellent gardener, was different. That once a person had passed the exams for gardening, he had to make tomatoes for the first three years. So I decided to go for something more appealing. I said I'd grow a carrot tree.
"You can't grow a carrot tree!" my older brother said.
"Why not?"
"I don't know... you just can't! Have you ever seen a carrot tree?"
I thought about it. I had never seen a carrot tree. I wondered how it was that carrots came to be. Could they be dead animals? Could a carrot be a deceased parrot, parading as a substance of vegetation?
I asked Bernard, our very excellent gardener who was forced to grow tomatoes for three years, and he gave me the answers. He told me that every two months, a man named Baba-Loko brought a sack of carrots to the world. People would pay Baba-Loko by giving him portions of their cut fingernails and he was always generous with his carrots. To see Baba-Loko, one had to go near the bush and shout: "Baba Loko! Baba Loko!"
Just like that.
Well, I decided that I'd grow carrots so that Baba Loko would not have to come to earth every two months. I could sell the carrots for him, and I'd pay him with my fingernails. Then I’d get paid by earth people with earth money, and everyone would live happily ever after. All I had to do was get carrots from Baba-Loko.
I went near the bush behind my house and stared intently within it. It was still. The crickets were making their normal racket. What is it, I wonder, that crickets shout to each other? If ever there was an invention they need, perhaps the phone?
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