New Sweet Salone post: Prayer Day and Bush Cows
Meryl Olson
It is prayer day, which is the last day of Ramadan. For the last month, all the Muslims (or at least those not too young, too old, or too ill to do so) have been fasting from sunup to sundown. Today, everyone breaks fast and celebrates. The Christians join in the celebration too, since today is a prayer day for them anyway and everybody loves a party. The Muslims have cleared an area on the edge of town where they can all gather and pray, I think because the mosque isn’t quite big enough for everybody.
There is also a big inter-village soccer match in Semabu, which is a few miles from Pujehun. My friend, Ousman, is playing in the match, so we’re all heading to Semabu to watch. “We” is me, Sidie, Aaron, Baindu Joseph and possibly Baindu Jusu. Sidie is a student from Njala who I became friends with and who I’ve hired to help me with my research. He’s an awesome research assistant, and is living in Pujehun in the house next to my house for this month. Aaron is the new field officer for OneVillage Partners. He arrived in Jokibu from Minneapolis about a month ago to replace Kari. Baindu Joseph is a friend from Jokibu and Kari’s Sierra Leonean mother. Baindu Jusu is my other research assistant and translator, from Pujehun. She has a great sense of humor, and between she and Sidie, we manage to have a lot of fun during our long days in the bush measuring weed coverage and water levels in rice swamps.
One of the ongoing jokes between me, Baindu Jusu, and some of the other local OVP staff involves bush cows. Sierra Leone is home to dwarf or red buffalo which, according to my Bradt travel guide (the only one covering Sierra Leone) resemble short, sturdy cows with scary horns. Until I looked this up, I did not know that Sierra Leone had any buffalo, and given that most of the landscape is deforested and a lot of the fauna was killed during the civil war, I would have been skeptical regardless. One day when Baindu and I were walking around someone’s farm out in the bush, she noted a large indent in the mud and turned to the woman who owned the farm and said “tewui,” followed by a very serious conversation in hushed Mende.
“What are you talking about?” I asked her.
“Look, that is from a bush cow,” she said, pointing to the indent. I looked at the indentation, which looked nothing like a hoofprint.
“A bush cow? What’s a bush cow?”
“It is an animal. It can eat human beings!”
“WHAT? It’s a cow that eats people?? Cows only eat plants, Baindu.”
“Nooooo,” she said, laughing, “This one can eat people!”
People around here have lots of superstitions about the bush and what happens there, and Baindu is prone to exaggeration, so I decided to confirm this with JJ (John Joseph) and Yusuf, who were having a meeting with Kari at my house when Baindu and I returned (this was a couple months ago).
“JJ, Baindu told me that there’s some sort of big animal in the bush, like a cow, that eats people.”
“Oooh, you mean the tewui! The bush COW!” he said.
“Wait so this animal really exists? I want to see it.”
Baindu started laughing her ass off at this. “If you want to see it, you will go sleep in the bush. But you will go without me! I will not go!”
“Yes, I want to see the bush cow. I want to pet it and give it kisses.”
“WHAT???” said Yusuf.
“You want to ride on the bush COW?” JJ asked
“Yes,” I said, laughing.
“Then you are crazy!” said Baindu.
To truly appreciate this exchange, you would need to experience the language patterns of the people involved. JJ has a habit of emphasizing the last word of every sentence, deliberately, for comedic effect. Yusuf has a distinctive, high-pitched, “WHAT??” that comes out when you tell him something surprising (that JJ is great at imitating) and Baindu laughs at just about everything.
Thus began the running bush cow joke, which continues to this day. Every time I see JJ, he asks if I have seen the bush cow, then claims that he rode one from Foindu to Jokibu, or that he saw one in the market in Bunumbu. Baindu points out paths that could be bush cow paths, and continues to try to instill in me the proper Fear of the Bush Cow, perplexed at my skepticism of the bush cow’s taste for human flesh.
“What would you do if one ran after you?” she asks.
“I would go behind a tree,” I say.
“Not a tree! A tree is nothing to a bush cow!
“Then I would climb the tree.”
“You think you would climb the tree! The bush cow would shake the tree until you fall down and then eat you!”
When Aaron arrived, fresh from the U.S. with the power of the Googlemachine still in his memory, he settled the Bush Cow Question by finding a recent newspaper story from Pujehun District (in the south of the country, nowhere near the Pujehun Village where I live) about a woman being gored by a bush cow, and another story about a village terrorized by an overrun of bush cows. I then consulted the “Fauna” section of my Bradt Guide, and lo and behold, the bush cow is real, and apparently just as foul-tempered as Baindu insists.
I still kind of want to see one, but maybe from a distance.
