Some More of God’s Greatest Mistakes

You come to accuse me. You people search my shelves and take things away and perhaps one day soon you come back and we walk together with you behind me and my wrists in handcuffs.

Sit. Your compatriot may take a while and we might as well be comfortable while we wait for him. Will you take tea?

Please do not compound your insult of my age and my position by refusing hospitality. Here. Take the cup.

There was a time when a boy like you would come with respect and ask for things to help him with his problems. If he wanted to be strong or to make babies or simply to ask advice about a problem a boy like you would come in supplication and ask my father for his medicines and his advice and for his wisdom. I remember I would mix the potions and see the fear that people had for him. They wouldn’t dare to come in with silly uniforms and guns and make him sit while they ransacked his storage shelves. Then the doctors came with their own medicines and their own gods to steal our people from us.

You disagree? You think their medicines are powerful and ours are old, outmoded, superstitious? You are a fool. You never stop and ask yourself why the same doctors that say our medicines don’t work are the ones that say we mustn’t use the rhino or the tiger or the elephant.

My father hated them. He told me not to trust the colonisers. He told me not to let the people go into their clinics. I know now that I was vain and foolish when my father died and I replaced him. The doctors came and lied to me and asked me questions pretending to be interested. The doctors of the colonizers with their clever ways of putting things made me think that we could be in harmony if I allowed some cases of severe sickness to be treated by their medicines. Do I deny their medicines have power in certain areas? Of course not. To do so would be foolish, and I am not a fool like you and your fellow officers.

Think. Once the doctors were allowed to treat the sickest ones, the little child whose mother was crying over him, the hunter who came upon a wild boar by accident and might have died without their surgeries, the women began to love them and the men began to trust them. I felt concern at the old ways becoming less respected but even I believed they might be trusted. Then they began to take away my medicines.

The strongest medicine must be made from the strongest animals. That is the logic of the old ways. That is the secret that we used to serve our people down the generations. When their doctors came they told me my ways would be respected. They lied and said my medicines could be used alongside the newer methods they were introducing. If I had no cure for one disease, they might have no way to cure another and together we could serve the people better. They were silver tongued liars from the start, you see, because once the people began to trust them they began to make my cures illegal. They told the people that no longer could we hunt for certain animals. The animals that they chose for this so-called protection were the same that happened to be necessary for my medicine. You see how clever these colonisers are, these thieves and liars that have convinced you come here to arrest me?

I don’t expect you’ll realize your foolishness. I was a fool at your age. I’ve told you how I became foolish, how I didn’t listen to my elders and heed the warnings not to trust the white men who called themselves doctors and scientists.

I am a scientist too now and I’ve done much research into the topic of the ways of the colonisers. My research tells me that the people are becoming destitute, that they starve and fight with one another and die in numbers greater than once did in my father’s time. My research tells me that where once we had a village now we have a wasteland of lost souls and misery.

If I had my medicines perhaps I could find cures for such soul sickness. Instead they will be taken to a lab and when a trace of bone from an endangered species of frog is found you will come back and take me with you to a prison cell.

Perhaps the frog will thank you. I will take my cup back now. I see your partner here is finishing and it seems he’s found something he doesn’t like much.  Shall I go quietly, or would you like to handcuff me?