Young Writers Society

For lack of a more accurate word I’m going to use the word superstition and, weird facts. The former means the belief in things that are not real or possible and the later, you know, facts that are eerie, creepy, odd... I have heard much superstition in my primary school years and later years, I resolved to dig into many of them and I have, though some still baffle my understanding, they are mysteries. I have made up a mental list of a few and I had to write down what I think about them (superstitions) and the weird facts of course.

A cat’s droppings glow in darkness. I read this from the weird facts collection in a newspaper. I have had to clean up after the cats, but this particular time I decided to find out if this is true, and I dearly paid for this, I didn’t matter whether the droppings glowed or not , these animals have a reason for wanting to hide their dropping. Please don’t ever leave a cat with no option where to poop, or you will pay.

Lightning has a liking for colour Red. For some reason we believed if you put on red on a rainy day, you were courting danger. A red sweater would make all the other kids seating next to you acting uneasy accusing you of wanting to attract lightning, albeit jokingly. Its only Master Bright(he had 2 other names plus Aggrey if I remember correctly, don’t ask me why..) then a new science teacher in Primary.5 who barked at me to take-off my red raincoat, my, was he serious! Experience has taught me lightning seek out red, it has taken many school kids especially those from schools that don pink uniform shirts and dresses, its a favourite colour for schools in the country-side.

Shave your first Goatee and you’ll grow wild beards. If you’re not the type that grows a forest of sideburns even before Senior.1 ( there was one that type nicknamed Black Jesus ), you wont appreciate that naked feeling you get when a wind blows by. The next time you go for a haircut you feel like strangling the barber if he shaves too close to it(the goatee). If you’re lucky you get a stubble, and if not fellow teenagers tease you for looking smothered and possibly being under-age. Nature is absurd; it punishes you for not looking macho.

How far-fetched is this one! If you hit the eye of a swirl wind, akasoroza, with a stick, a snake comes out of that chaos. I considered grabbing a stick and actually spanking some sense into this phenomenon but for the unpredictability of swirl-winds, the dust and rubbish it carries and the fear of snakes, I gave it up. Swirl-winds, dust clouds and walking on murram/dirt roads have fed me enough dust since, and small stones.

My neighbour-friend one told me the tissue connecting the seed to the seed jacket (please excuse my Biology, I know this would make my biology teacher shake his head, but my English teacher would appreciate the improvisation and I can live with that)is the sweetest part in a ripe mango, and my big brother didn't show doubt(which should implicate him..). I spent my entire childhood, trying to sniff out this one, that means opening up ripe mango after ripe mango and handling worm eaten-seeds, I have no clue how the worms get in there. When I eventually got a good one it didn't taste like anything and my big brother and neighbour-friend were away schooling, I couldn't enjoy telling them their superstition was trash, would they have remembered? I wonder.

Around the start of this Century, somebody came up with the statement that stepping on a plane is a blessing, it opens doors! We have seen folks live Uganda to go study or look for employment opportunities overseas and they always come back better off, almost always. This should sound like the truth since flying on a plane puts you in a class envied by mortals who can’t or won’t afford a plane ticket unless they need to get a heart transplant or something overseas.