The Bullfight

He met me all grown up, a man by virtue of having undergone a minor surgical procedure on a very influential organ, rekindling my childhood. David. That was his name. He worked as our shamba boy. The details are all blurry now but I think it broke my poor little heart when he left, albeit unceremoniously. Without reason. Without good byes. It is hard to think highly of such a man.  

At the time, adults seemed like creatures sent from another planet to rescue us from our happiness. As children, we never asked too much: we wanted to play, eat, and sleep. And then we longed for Christmas, never birthdays, for our births were remarkable enough not to warrant unnecessary annual celebrations. There were chores, here and there. When there weren’t, mothers would invent them. ‘Watch that sufuria,’ she would say. That sufuria would be on the fireplace, containing a sacred liquid namely: water.  

I would escape to the farm to be with David. We would dig, him telling me stories or me telling him, none of which I can remember now. David might as well been the only adult who was not keen on reprimanding a child. Given the chance, I would accompany him wherever he went especially when he was on duty. My favourite days were weekends where we’d take cows to a cattle dip approximately 247 km away. We crossed two rivers to get there. Nevertheless I enjoyed them.

The morning would begin early, with a ritual David had cultivated over time. He would go and fetch the finest cypress branches, cleaned to a baby-ass smoothness. He would fetch two of them: his and mine, although mine was a little smaller. Those days, mother would milk the cows a little early, and we’d set of at six thirty latest. We would drive the cows, and cows being cows were always ready for mischief. They would stray into people’s compounds as if they sensed that some of their relatives lived there. The fine cypress branch came in handy at that moment, where David would whip the cow into submission. Not only would the errant cow submit, it also did download the map to the cattle dip, where it proceeded to guide the rest.

When he left, that responsibility became mine. But then mother wouldn’t allow me to handle a panga, I made do with twigs or if we were lucky, picked branches from pruned trees along the way. The cows would always be a mess, so much that I dreaded taking them to the cattle dip. Calves would always want to explore farms with densely covered indigenous trees. I was with a cousin, who was older but belonging to the other gender, who, for lack of a better term, I will call female.

Because cows and rowdy cowboys didn’t respect us that much, we had to stick to a plan: maintain a schedule (every other Saturday), and get there neither too early nor too late. Like any other plan, it is bound to fail one time or another. That’s when we learned the importance of sticking to a schedule. One time, just before we got to the cattle dip, a huge herd of cattle emerged from what seemed like a forest cover. It wasn’t huge at first but then, slowly by slowly, the cows trickled one by one until the filled the road. Ahead of the heard were finely built bulls, billowing with unspeakable horniness. They heard to be restrained by the herdsmen.

Speaking of bulls, they always got charged in presence of too many cows. It is either because they are overwhelmed by the fact that they can’t get the chance to sniff all the private parts of cows at their disposal. I imagine them having bull thoughts such as: All these cows, man there has to be one on heat. I gotta get laid. When their frustration gets to a certain threshold, they decide to go with whatever cow that’s near them. Sometimes other bulls. As a tradition, experts on bull psychology recommended that the bulls have bull rings in order to restrain them. Some risk their noses for a chance to get laid. As a result a lot of unwanted pregnancies would result, leading to many cases of abortion among cows.

As a policy, we never let our cows mingle with the rest. They would be infected with strange venereal diseases. No, that’s was not the reason. They would get lost especially calves. So we waited for this large cloud of doom to pass. We waited. We had to wait also when it got to the cattle dip.

Another time, we encountered a hard of indigenous cows just after ours had swum in that filthy insecticide ridden pool. The best part of this exercise was that cows would have these mournful faces, as if wondering what crime they had done to be forced into a pool of filthy water. For that matter, they always knew their way home. This is the time grow boys and girls took to flirt with each other. We had a ferocious bull at the time: small and stocky. If it would have been a human being it would have been a Mexican drug lord.  And this is how I knew it.

As we approached the indigenous herd, which also had an indigenous bull, the bulls began getting charged.  A small boy, I stayed close to barbed wire fence ready to escape to avoid being trampled upon. The adults taking the indigenous cows had brain capacities the same as used condoms. They spectated rather than drive away their bull, which was seven and a half times bigger than our bull. The odds staked against our bull would be similar to the odds given to Gor Mahia when they face a Barcelona: 2000 against one. The bulls charged at each other, the other fellows cheering and I cowed on the other side of the fence since I had long decided that the match was going to be completely unfair.

If that bull had been listening to me, it would have also cowed. It charged the zebu breed with all its might, making maximum use of is centre of gravity, which the other bull lacked. Fearlessly, (our bull didn’t have horns so I can’t use the term locked horns) the two bulls locked heads. As I waited for our tiny bull to be pinned to death against the fence, thereby being converted into meat albeit prematurely, a strange thing happened. It pushed the other bull almost effortlessly, and pinned it against the fence. The zebu bull whimpered away with barbed wire marks and its ferocious billowing whimpered away too. If the herd boys hadn’t stepped in, it would have been turned into mince meat. And we have demanded a share.

At that moment, I may longed David had been in charge instead of me.