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If you know anything about banana stems, then you know that they can be easily split into two, if, say, you insert a stick through it. If you don’t know anything about banana stems, then this is probably important information for you to note down. To avoid it splitting into two, you have to uproot the whole thing from the ground. The base and the roots are somehow strong enough so when you insert a stick into it, near the base, the stem would not be easily split into two. This way, the stem would be durable for a few more rounds.
If you know anything about banana stems, then you must know that they peel away quite easily, the way onions do. One minute you have a thick one, one that was heavy to carry uphill, and the next minute, you have remained with something very thin. The only advantage of it being very thin is that it was easy to carry uphill, it wasn’t very functional though.
To understand why this story about banana stems, you may need to first understand the geography of the area.
Our village was very hilly. There was a particular spot that had this relatively steep slope that headed straight into a river. Well, it was more of a stream that we had put barriers on the lower sides so that we can stagnate a bit more water in a particular section. This was our swimming pool. This was our shower. Don’t ask how they all worked together, they did.
We came here and swam. When I say swam, I mean we entered the water and started beating it as if it were drums. When that got boring , we started jumping into the water just from the shore of the river, competing to see who would jump the highest before falling into the water. We didn’ t have a way of telling who jumped the highest so this was never settled. When we got tired of beating the water, and jumping from the shore and arguing, we would get out, go uphill, all naked, run downhill and jump into the river. This was easier to evaluate because the person who got to the river first and jumped into the water was the clear winner.
One day, after we had gone uphill naked, someone came and carried all our clothes and ran with them on the other side of the river. So we did only what we could do, we continued playing and swimming and jumping in and out of the water. Actually no, we didn’ t even notice our clothes were missing until evening when it was time to go home. The story of what happened when we got home is not to be told today.
To make sense of all this banana stems thing, you may also need to know about the days of the week, especially Saturday.
Saturdays were special, not because there was no school but just because it was Saturday. There was a lot going on on Saturdays. It seemed to always be livelier. The sun would come out and announce its presence loudly. A calf would be head-butting the mother in the udder trying to squeeze out some drops of milk. Women would be coming from the river with pots balanced on their heads. Men would be sharpening pangas and jembes ready for a day in the fields. Those going to the market were ready with their kiondos . The chicken would be fighting and goats running around in circles. Saturday came with an unexplained excitement.
Us kids? We were preparing for everything else. Saturday was the day we could leave in the morning with all the cattle and we were not expected until evening. The only condition was that we come back when cows were full.
“All those cows should come back here looking like they are pregnant.” We were told. That was the only way to determine whether or not a cow was full because you couldn’t just ask it.
Of course, we knew how to make the cattle look like they were full. We would let them stay in the sun the whole day and eat whatever grass is around them and when evening came, when they were very thirsty, we would take them to the river. They would drink lots of water which would make their stomachs swell.
With nothing else was expected of us and cows already taken care of, we had to make plans, and that’s where banana stems come in.
We would uproot banana stems from someone’s farm, early in the morning. This would act as your car. Then we would insert a stick horizontally near the base so that it comes out the other side. This would be your gear. So with this, we would go at the to top of the slope, sit on the stem, step on the gear and go downhill as fast as your banana stem could go, straight into the water! Sometimes to make it go faster, you would sit two or three of you on one stem. Sometimes you would ask someone to push you from the back so that you take off with more momentum.
You would then carry your banana stem uphill and repeat the process until your banana stem couldn’ t take it anymore.
We needed so many banana stems.
Either we came to our senses that we were destroying food or the banana stems became short in supply that we started doing something else. Well, actually the same thing but only this time without the banana stems. We started going down the slope on our bare backsides. All we had to do was make the slope more slippery by pouring water along the course. This was more fun as there was no the heavy work of carrying your stem uphill and more convenient because we didn’t have to wait for Saturdays anymore. We even started going there after school.
This meant we would go there still in our school uniforms, sit on the grass and launch yourself forward – on the unforgiving, rough downhill path to the river.
Soon enough our shorts started tearing and having this almost perfectly round holes on the butt. It is still amazing that after all that, none of us ever got grass burns on our asses.
Soon almost all the boys were coming to school with shorts with holes on the backside . The lucky ones, whose mothers knew something about clours, would get patches there that actually matched the colour of the shorts. Others would get black patches on a khaki short sewn manually with a red thread. Or the other way around – red patches, sewn with a black thread. The rest of us would still walk on the roads like that, go around school like that, living our lives like that with torches pointing backwards from our asses like headlights of a car . No patches on our backsides!
Did I mention the part where in this parts of the world how, at that time for us, putting on an underwear was a rumour?