Childhood

The Diary Of Louis

“Hee! haa! Mune Jagooo, ba mwa tsoron wuta kaman tatashe!!!”
We chanted over and over after we won the match 386-152. Until today I still wonder who kept count of the scores of a football match that lasted over 4 hours. A match that would not have ended if our mothers had not gathered with canes to chase us home to take our baths for the night. We would have played until the sun was no where to be found. And so we ran, chanting still to our various houses to be scolded and bathed by our angry mothers.

My years of childhood were filled with play, and stubbornness, and fishing, and hunting. Other times it was filled with stealing from people’s farms and gardens. Once I was forced to falsely confess to my mother after she accused me of being part of a secret society, because I had eaten all the meat in the pot and accused the cat. Once my father dislocated my shoulder when a neighbor reported seeing me smoking paper behind his house. More than once I had played father, just to end touching and kissing Vera who was always playing mother.

Today, I laugh, at myself, how I had fallen more than a thousand times from rocks, fences and trees and also how I had wailed when mother flogged until the neighbours rescued me. How time has flown. Now Vera is married with a kid. I cannot remember if we had made real love while we were kids, but I remember that I had loved her.

Younglan Louis