Mob Rule II

Over Christmas the ‘Madam’, our local nurse, had her house broken into and her dvd player and some other technological trinkets stolen. Double shit thing was, she was sleeping in the other room at the time. Anyway, Humjibreans are known to look after their own, (a tradition with a long history which I’ll get on to another time), and since the local snouts charge taxi fare to come and investigate, the good people of the village started making a few enquiries of their own. As it aint exactly the M25 round here, a car out of the ordinary doesn’t pass unnoticed. As the ‘inside man’ didn’t have the brains to sneak off quietly, instead getting his mates from a nearby village to come and pick him up not 500 yards from where he half inched the gear, he was duly rumbled. Word got out and a lynch mob gathered lusting for bloody revenge. The guy got a serious pummeling he wont be walking very gingerly away from and indeed his imminent breathing prospects looked decidedly asthmatic until the Chief, visiting the village after an absence of three years*, managed to whisk him away to the relative security of the cop shop in nearby Bekwai.

This is how things generally work round here. You hear countless tales of drivers who’ve knocked into someone being then chased down by machete-wielding vigilantes and put to the sword, as it were. More often than not, its not the actual driver but the next out-of-towner who makes the mistake of passing through. In fact, the sage advice given to local miners is that in case of an accident, the driver should just put his pedal down till reaching the relative sanity of a police station. This attitude I can kind of understand even if I cant condone. I guess if everyone’s got a 2 foot sharpened weapon back at their gaff (the ubiquitous machete), the tendency has gotta be to use it when pissed off. Especially since the coppers round here are more interested in standing by the side of the road collecting backhanders than catching bad guys. But when reading the paper, you start to wonder about the genius of crowds. Recent examples include an angry mob in Accra confronting a woman who was believed to make a man’s tackle disappear by touch. Another gathered at a hospital as an ugly rumour had gone round that a couple who were engaged in an illicit affair had been stuck together. Last week a dude from down the road got so narked off about the fact that he wasn’t allowed to stay in Spain when he got there that on his return he blamed his wife for bringing him such bad luck and for talking to other men when he was away. He got his cutlass (depressingly familiar story) and, along with a couple of buddies who presumably came along for (im)moral support, went and chopped up his gushing bride. Nasty. Makes you feel all cosy and safe at night, I can tell ya. Well, at least I’ve got my terrifyingly yappy wee pooch to bite the ankles of any would-be intruders!