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27th December, 2011
THE YEAR OF THE ‘HARAT’
IN CHINA, YEARS ARE DESIGNATED BY ANIMALS: 2008 WAS 'THE YEAR OF THE RAT'.....
In rural Ghana, both the rat and the hare are edible animals. The rat lives largely underground in holes that it burrows deep down.
The hare, on the other hand, lives largely in ‘nests’ that it makes in shrubbery.
The hare is noted for its speed of movement and its ability to outthink its enemies. A snake may crawl noiselessly towards a hare which appears to be dozing.
But at the moment the snake is about to strike, the hare will jump high and far at the same time – and leave the serpent fuming. And still hungry.
Ok – now, make a leap of the imagination: a rat fell in love with a hare, and in this toli, they managed to consummate their romance. Not only that – they produced offspring. What do you think they called their offspring?
‘Harat’, of course! The rat had wanted to call it ratha,so that its own name would feature first in that of the offspring, in the same way that the lion’s name comes before that of the tiger in those grotesque animals I’ve seen on TV called ‘ligers’.
But the hare pointed out that such a name wouldn’t be fair to the offspring, because whenever anyone used the word “rather” in ordinary conversation, the offspring would jump up, thinking someone was calling it. And if it jumped up ‘by heart’ too often, its instincts would become dulled and its reaction-time, which should propel it out of danger, would be reduced abysmally and make it vulnerable.
So harat the new creature became. It combined the cunning of the hare with the greed of the rat. So, whereas a rat could be trapped with a piece of stinky fish or cheese, because it would stupidly try to pick the food out of the trap with its paw or even its mouth (and end up as a pitifully dismembered corpse in some farmer’s cooking pot) the harat would put a twig in its mouth and prod the food out of the trap with it by deftly manipulating its huge, yellowish front teeth.
Well, as often happens in the forest, a drought occurred and food became very scarce. So the animals decided to pool their resources together so that they could all survive. Some animals -- squirrels, rats, birds – became gatherers. Others – elephants, rhinos, hippos – became expert peelers of all sorts of hard nuts and fruits. And then the sharp-toothed ones – lions, leopards, cheetahs – flayed whatever could be pried off anything edible.
It was such a wonderful setup that political scientists could not find an ordinary name for it. They had to combine different words to describe it. The best they came up with was communanimalism. [If you think that's a clumsy name, try learning German, a language which thinks nothing of turning whole sentences into single words.]
Beasts from socialist countries came to study it and claimed partial ownership of it. The communanimalistsdidn’t mind. “The more the merrier”, they said. Capitalist-roaders also came and said that the new system was akin to theirs, because resources from the stronger animals ‘trickled down’ to the weaker ones and they all survived together. Again, thecommunanimalists didn’t mind, so long as the capitalist-roaders had enough confidence in their system to open letters of credit for their banks.
Meanwhile, the harat had been studying his country's situation carefully. He didn’t like the way his father and mother and half-siblings had become lean for lack of food. So he made friends with both capitalist-roaders and socialists who came to visit. They both took him for a stupid "freak" and so did not stop talking loosely in his presence about their own cleverness.
So he imbibed a lot from them about the differences between what they preached in their textbooks and what they practised. Thus, he became such an almost apolitical pragmatist that animals that didn’t like him accused him – with a choice of words that was in extremely poor taste, given his antecedents – of hunting with the hounds and running with the rats/hares/foxes.
Meanwhile, the leaders of communanimalism had been following the advice given by Joseph [of the Coat of Many Colours] to the Egyptian Pharaoh and put aside some of the food that was brought in each day. Theharat thought hard about how to legally get inside the stores where this surplus food was kept.
A group of elite guards, known as yerswals, were in charge of the stores. They’d been specially educated in how to write codes. Unless messengers from the chiefs could correctly recite these codes, the guards did not allow them near the food supplies.
As could be expected, the codes were so difficult to understand that even qualified yerswals fought bitterly over them all the time. So those yerswals who were proficient in them, were held in very high esteem. This paragraph from one of the codes will demonstrate why the codes made everyone else’s head swim:
“Whereas Article 5 (Section 110a Sub-Section D4) of the Constitution Interpretation Act 1959 (Cap 108) provides inter alia that a contract between a consignor and a consignee shall determine upon the execution of the signatures of the contracting parties, such contract hereinafter referred to as the “Agreement” therein, shall not determine without the heretofore procured consent of both the consignor and the consignee signatories, wherefore, notwithstanding any provision within any other law to the contrary, including the Constitution Order-In-Council (1949) the Agreement shall determine.”
Now, the harat, being as crafty as his father the hare and as greedy as his mother the rat, devised a plan, nay a "2TEMPLATE" whereby he went each night to keep the yerswals guarding the stores, company. He told them funny stories so they would not be bored to death.
Occasionally he offered them a swig of something called kpeh or ogogoro (specially spirited away from Nigeria by his mother, who, being a rat, had not declared it to the authorities). The ogogorobrightened the guards’ spirits quite sharply (puns intended).
Having thus wormed his way into the hearts of the guards, the harat told each of them in turn, “Look, I am worried about you, friendly as you have been to me, and offering me food and all that. But LISTEN -- how much longer will the drought last? You don’t know, do you? Well, once you leave here, you will be fed with tiny morsels of food, just like the rest of us. And you will grow lean. Your skin will become dry and lose its texture. Your hair will begin to fall out. Your eyes will hang loosely within their sockets. No females will come near you…. And even if they came, you wouldn’t be able to get your peckers up”
At this point, the harat would run off, pretending to be in fear of his life for making such a frightening suggestion to the guards. Hunger was one thing, but impotence? .
The guards gathered together on hearing this frightful prophecy. And each asked the other: “Hey, Charlie, what will you do when you are no longer on guard duty?” Each admitted that the thought hadn’t crossed his mind.
“Then how will you be fed properly”? the question was tossed out like a hand grenade.
Everyone fell silent.
They each remembered the pitiful animals which often came creeping up to them, begging to be given more food from the stores because they were starving.
“When we leave here, they will change the codes!” one wise guard said.
The rest began to feel extremely worried.
Well, for two days, the harat did not make an appearance at the stores. But on the third day, he showed up.
The guards surrounded him immediately and for a second he feared they might harm him for mentioning an unmentionable word to them.
But the leader of the guards said to him instead: “You know something Brother Harat?”
The harat shook his head till it nearly got torn off.
“We want to teach you the codes that open up the food supplies. Even if you don’t learn them well enough, we shall accept whatever you say, because we are the only ones who can tell that you are making mistakes!
You shall thereby be able to take food home legally. And you shall store it secretly for us. Your mother the rat will no doubt show you how to do that. So when we leave here, we shall live as well as we are doing now! And, of course, we shan't forget that it was you who helped us at our hour of need.”
'Hahahahahaha!' All the guards began to laugh. They were thinking of ways of cheating the "stupid harat" of his portion of the stored food.
The harat smiled to himself. He hadn’t done anything, except plant the seed of an idea into the guards’ minds. But he was assured of a permanent and munificent supply of food. For only he would know where the food was, and only he would decide how much of it to give to the guards.
He felt good as he imagined how beautiful ‘ratesses’and ‘haresses’ would sidle up to him and whisper, “Please harat me for I am in need.” Those whose English was not so good would probably even crfy:, “Please harass me….”!
And he would supply their need. And they in turn would supply his need. And they would tell their best friends… who would also like to be harated! Life would be good. He might even start a race of harats who would grow to be so numerous that they would stop being regarded as freaks of nature, an insult he had borne with stoical fortitude all his life.
The beauty of it would be that no-one in the forest would suspect anything. For the code-keepers would not complain that any unauthorised person(s) had had access to the stores. They were the only guards. And who would dare to attempt to 'guard' the guards?
In rural Ghana, both the rat and the hare are edible animals. The rat lives largely underground in holes that it burrows deep down.
The hare, on the other hand, lives largely in ‘nests’ that it makes in shrubbery.
The hare is noted for its speed of movement and its ability to outthink its enemies. A snake may crawl noiselessly towards a hare which appears to be dozing.
But at the moment the snake is about to strike, the hare will jump high and far at the same time – and leave the serpent fuming. And still hungry.
Ok – now, make a leap of the imagination: a rat fell in love with a hare, and in this toli, they managed to consummate their romance. Not only that – they produced offspring. What do you think they called their offspring?
‘Harat’, of course! The rat had wanted to call it ratha,so that its own name would feature first in that of the offspring, in the same way that the lion’s name comes before that of the tiger in those grotesque animals I’ve seen on TV called ‘ligers’.
But the hare pointed out that such a name wouldn’t be fair to the offspring, because whenever anyone used the word “rather” in ordinary conversation, the offspring would jump up, thinking someone was calling it. And if it jumped up ‘by heart’ too often, its instincts would become dulled and its reaction-time, which should propel it out of danger, would be reduced abysmally and make it vulnerable.
So harat the new creature became. It combined the cunning of the hare with the greed of the rat. So, whereas a rat could be trapped with a piece of stinky fish or cheese, because it would stupidly try to pick the food out of the trap with its paw or even its mouth (and end up as a pitifully dismembered corpse in some farmer’s cooking pot) the harat would put a twig in its mouth and prod the food out of the trap with it by deftly manipulating its huge, yellowish front teeth.
Well, as often happens in the forest, a drought occurred and food became very scarce. So the animals decided to pool their resources together so that they could all survive. Some animals -- squirrels, rats, birds – became gatherers. Others – elephants, rhinos, hippos – became expert peelers of all sorts of hard nuts and fruits. And then the sharp-toothed ones – lions, leopards, cheetahs – flayed whatever could be pried off anything edible.
It was such a wonderful setup that political scientists could not find an ordinary name for it. They had to combine different words to describe it. The best they came up with was communanimalism. [If you think that's a clumsy name, try learning German, a language which thinks nothing of turning whole sentences into single words.]
Beasts from socialist countries came to study it and claimed partial ownership of it. The communanimalistsdidn’t mind. “The more the merrier”, they said. Capitalist-roaders also came and said that the new system was akin to theirs, because resources from the stronger animals ‘trickled down’ to the weaker ones and they all survived together. Again, thecommunanimalists didn’t mind, so long as the capitalist-roaders had enough confidence in their system to open letters of credit for their banks.
Meanwhile, the harat had been studying his country's situation carefully. He didn’t like the way his father and mother and half-siblings had become lean for lack of food. So he made friends with both capitalist-roaders and socialists who came to visit. They both took him for a stupid "freak" and so did not stop talking loosely in his presence about their own cleverness.
So he imbibed a lot from them about the differences between what they preached in their textbooks and what they practised. Thus, he became such an almost apolitical pragmatist that animals that didn’t like him accused him – with a choice of words that was in extremely poor taste, given his antecedents – of hunting with the hounds and running with the rats/hares/foxes.
Meanwhile, the leaders of communanimalism had been following the advice given by Joseph [of the Coat of Many Colours] to the Egyptian Pharaoh and put aside some of the food that was brought in each day. Theharat thought hard about how to legally get inside the stores where this surplus food was kept.
A group of elite guards, known as yerswals, were in charge of the stores. They’d been specially educated in how to write codes. Unless messengers from the chiefs could correctly recite these codes, the guards did not allow them near the food supplies.
As could be expected, the codes were so difficult to understand that even qualified yerswals fought bitterly over them all the time. So those yerswals who were proficient in them, were held in very high esteem. This paragraph from one of the codes will demonstrate why the codes made everyone else’s head swim:
“Whereas Article 5 (Section 110a Sub-Section D4) of the Constitution Interpretation Act 1959 (Cap 108) provides inter alia that a contract between a consignor and a consignee shall determine upon the execution of the signatures of the contracting parties, such contract hereinafter referred to as the “Agreement” therein, shall not determine without the heretofore procured consent of both the consignor and the consignee signatories, wherefore, notwithstanding any provision within any other law to the contrary, including the Constitution Order-In-Council (1949) the Agreement shall determine.”
Now, the harat, being as crafty as his father the hare and as greedy as his mother the rat, devised a plan, nay a "2TEMPLATE" whereby he went each night to keep the yerswals guarding the stores, company. He told them funny stories so they would not be bored to death.
Occasionally he offered them a swig of something called kpeh or ogogoro (specially spirited away from Nigeria by his mother, who, being a rat, had not declared it to the authorities). The ogogorobrightened the guards’ spirits quite sharply (puns intended).
Having thus wormed his way into the hearts of the guards, the harat told each of them in turn, “Look, I am worried about you, friendly as you have been to me, and offering me food and all that. But LISTEN -- how much longer will the drought last? You don’t know, do you? Well, once you leave here, you will be fed with tiny morsels of food, just like the rest of us. And you will grow lean. Your skin will become dry and lose its texture. Your hair will begin to fall out. Your eyes will hang loosely within their sockets. No females will come near you…. And even if they came, you wouldn’t be able to get your peckers up”
At this point, the harat would run off, pretending to be in fear of his life for making such a frightening suggestion to the guards. Hunger was one thing, but impotence? .
The guards gathered together on hearing this frightful prophecy. And each asked the other: “Hey, Charlie, what will you do when you are no longer on guard duty?” Each admitted that the thought hadn’t crossed his mind.
“Then how will you be fed properly”? the question was tossed out like a hand grenade.
Everyone fell silent.
They each remembered the pitiful animals which often came creeping up to them, begging to be given more food from the stores because they were starving.
“When we leave here, they will change the codes!” one wise guard said.
The rest began to feel extremely worried.
Well, for two days, the harat did not make an appearance at the stores. But on the third day, he showed up.
The guards surrounded him immediately and for a second he feared they might harm him for mentioning an unmentionable word to them.
But the leader of the guards said to him instead: “You know something Brother Harat?”
The harat shook his head till it nearly got torn off.
“We want to teach you the codes that open up the food supplies. Even if you don’t learn them well enough, we shall accept whatever you say, because we are the only ones who can tell that you are making mistakes!
You shall thereby be able to take food home legally. And you shall store it secretly for us. Your mother the rat will no doubt show you how to do that. So when we leave here, we shall live as well as we are doing now! And, of course, we shan't forget that it was you who helped us at our hour of need.”
'Hahahahahaha!' All the guards began to laugh. They were thinking of ways of cheating the "stupid harat" of his portion of the stored food.
The harat smiled to himself. He hadn’t done anything, except plant the seed of an idea into the guards’ minds. But he was assured of a permanent and munificent supply of food. For only he would know where the food was, and only he would decide how much of it to give to the guards.
He felt good as he imagined how beautiful ‘ratesses’and ‘haresses’ would sidle up to him and whisper, “Please harat me for I am in need.” Those whose English was not so good would probably even crfy:, “Please harass me….”!
And he would supply their need. And they in turn would supply his need. And they would tell their best friends… who would also like to be harated! Life would be good. He might even start a race of harats who would grow to be so numerous that they would stop being regarded as freaks of nature, an insult he had borne with stoical fortitude all his life.
The beauty of it would be that no-one in the forest would suspect anything. For the code-keepers would not complain that any unauthorised person(s) had had access to the stores. They were the only guards. And who would dare to attempt to 'guard' the guards?
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