Who taught Africans to lie to kids to make them comply? It usually works, but the problem is that the kids tend to believe some of the lies for a long time. I'm not saying I am one of those kids, but how did I even imagine licking seasoning cubes would make my buttocks very big, let alone believing?
I was just a child. Come on. I mean, the cubes were very sweet, you know. And I was just standing idle, watching mom do her magic on the stove. So I tried to sneak out one maggi cube, but she caught me and said, "It's like you want your bum bum to be very big."
"Eweeeee!" I exclaimed. Leader of the pack myself, having humongous buttocks? I couldn't imagine. Fast forward to many years later, and I actually held on to it strongly and never allowed my tongue to collide with seasoning cubes ever again. Whattt?? Me, having figure eight?
But I have forgiven her. Eventually, I uncovered the truth, and guess what happened? Nothing. Sometimes, you have to know just how some seasoning cubes taste before spreading them over the cross-sectional area of a million dollar pot of soup.
If I count the number of lies I have been told in the last century... Oh my God. Another one that I want to talk about, and that I just became today-old debunking that lie, is the one about snakes.
Have you ever heard that when you cut snakes into two, you have to bury one half in Australia and the other in Europe? Otherwise, if you leave both halves around themselves, the snake would rejoin itself and come to haunt you. Somebody told me this, and I am wondering if the person's goal was heaven at that time.
I really believed it. It got me scared, actually. And so the five times that we caught and killed snakes when we first moved to our family house now, I made sure to burn the dead snakes or at least bury them with a great distance between the halves.
If I had simply done my research then, I could have used that wasted energy to build a house for myself, wife and kids, with a swimming pool so I can learn at my pace.
Speaking of snakes, even though I actually do not like to, I used to believe in a story a friend told me about his human-snake neighbor. Oh my Lord.
His neighbour had a mark on her forehead, perhaps a birthmark or scar, and it was very conspicuous. And then he made up a whole TV series out of that neighbour and her life. He often described her as turning into a big snake at certain times of the night.
I never visited his house anymore since that time. He could enjoy the sight of his shape-shifting neighbour all by himself. But I think what came to play were the kind of films I had recently seen then. I don't remember the title, but there was a film I watched as a kid about a snake that turns human or something like that. Maybe that's why. And now that I think of it... Yeah, the guy definitely enjoyed how I ate his cooked-up stories.
All images are mine