Grand Ma

Wa tin a bu ngoyn miso wa yeyn wo ma?

Ma yeyn va a dzi miku ni isas I yum i

Wa tongti ma na ni, ma fang ti bumi,

Wa fang ti buf na ma ku imien a

Ma ku imien a Bigha ma ku mien a

If you were not a witch how would you know that I am a witch when you greeted me on the way to the
forest and I did not answer and you did not ask me whether I had caught a black snake.
 Why the cock has flies on his head

Once upon a distant time in the kingdom opf animals, there lived he animals of the forest in perfect
harmony and had a solid and demicatic administration. There was peace, order, respect and other
virtues that kept the animal kingdom in total harmony. Each animal espected his or he own space and
other animals as well, there was no bullying and slaughter.There was an administration in place to judge
and punish defaulters.

Then on this faithful day, Snake was by the stream washing his medicine to take fo his headache fo he
wasn’t feeling so well, out of nowhere Fly came and politely asked to have a piece of the medicine but
the snake politely refused. The fly demnded again but Snake was not willing to give Fly pat of his
medicine. The fly demanded again this time threatening to defecate on is head which will make it decay.
The Snake way terrified and in his state of mind, he ran fom the fly leaving his medicine behind, missed
hi hole and ran into the ratmole’s house. Rat mole was so frightened that he left his hole running for his
life because the snake has never been visiting him and this time it came in a rush, uninvited and he was
convinced it was an attack, he ran outside into the hills at top speed (other versions hold it that he ran
out with red soil on his head). Scared of a pursuit, the antelope saw him and started off, he too was
convinced that the kind of hunte who would force the ratmole to run out of his hole in daylight (and
with red soil on his head) will be a dangerous one. In his seach for safety, and on his heels, his horns got
hooked in the webs of the spider.
That night my dad made me realise

that I inherited my wild ideas from him

he said “a mad man once asked;

what did Jua do wrong to Masquerades?

Theyre always calling his name”

We laughed for so long

And in that process, I thought about how happy my family was

Poor as it is

Then after a while my dear mum said

“you sure a mad man said that”

Once upon a very long time in a very distant land of the Kom, there lived this widow with her two
children, a girl and her little brother. Their mother got sick and was about to die, she thought to herself
“my children are still small and cannot survive on their own, if I die now, they will suffer or worse
become slaves.” She had a sister who lived in a distant village, she could not go there with her present
condition to look for her sister. She told the children “when I die and am buried, you should plant
‘antoh’ (a kind of pumpkin) on my grave, never sleep in any house, you will stay in this house and watch
it grow, and spread, you should follow the way it goes but never sleep anywhere, any day you see it
climb on someones veranda you enter the house and live there, that is my sister’s house.” The children
did exactly as she said, they followed the bud of the plant for months as it grew and spread, the tallest
branch spiraled through the village and grew fa away fom the village, the two children watched it grow
and followed it during the day and come back to the mother’s hut in the evening;. It moved through
villages and forests, farmlands and fields and finally it spiraled though a cetain village and climbed on a
veranda, the children did not go back hoe that day but stayed in the house. When evening time came,
the mothe of the house came first and on setting down her ‘mbang’ (walking stick) in its place, the
‘abuh’ (a place in the kitchen between two beds or the space between a bed and a wall used especially
to keep immediate firewood and the stick used to prepare fufu corn) she touched someone and asked;

A ngi nda abuh a?

She replied; a ngi ma a ni.

The mother said, fi gvi ma yeyn va

She came out of the abuh and the mother sang and dance