—
For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

—
For the Sri Lankan Sunday Times

In his Précis d’histoire, the Rev. Père Kwakume records that Aja tribal refugees from Dahomey, who once populated the village, passed three ordinances: against loud talking, firing rifles, and dancing to tom-toms — and so the place came to be known as Badépé or Badékpa (‘enclosure of the quiet voices’) or simply Bé (‘the hiding place’).

In recent times the villagers have forbidden the introduction of electricity within their boundaries, or the building of roads towards it from the nearby capital of Lomé (over which they still claim spiritual authority). Access to the village is prohibited to all non-Aja ethnicities, and the wood is guarded against unauthorised entry by camouflaged female watchers, who communicate through ululation and the throwing of voices. This, in combination with strange groans and cries emanating from the forest (as well as the shrieks of actual birds), serves to deter all but the most courageous and/or desperate supplicants. But the native anthropologist Kpomassie (An African in Greenland, Paris 1981; transl. Kirkup) narrates that the inquisitive children from neighbouring towns are kept away by fear of meeting a sinister creature called, in the Min or Mina or Gen dialect/language, Aguê* (and also ‘Azizan’):

a fabulous creature of the bush who has only one eye in the middle of its forehead and only one arm; it has only one leg, on which, we are warned, it can hop around with the greatest of ease and speed, ceaselessly patrolling all the forest paths. Its foot is back to front — that is, with the heel turned forward, the toes backward — so that its footprints deceive. Whenever it meets an intruder it has only to look him straight in the eye to scramble his memory. Then the intruder can’t find his way back and wanders in circles until the medicine men come for him.

The only purported defence against this treatment is to strip off all one’s close and dance naked before the Aguê. This amuses it, and so it loses its grip. Nonetheless, Kpomassie writes, what is certain is that ‘there were people who had entered that sacred forest and never been seen again.’ To this day, Togo bears the unfortunate reputation of being the saddest country in the world.

—
* a name curiously similar to Aglé, son of the hunter Djitri, founder of Lomé

— The Nelson Evening Mail, March 21 1907

.
When you register your child at birth, it immediately becomes the legal property of the state.

In WW2 German physicists were able to discern the weather conditions in London from the tolling of Big Ben broadcast on the BBC.

Male kangaroos flex their biceps to impress their females.

Sir Nicholas Gimcrack died from a fever brought on by chasing a butterfly.

A man in Thailand believes a 10-foot cobra is the reincarnation of his deceased girlfriend. They go to the gym together.

Former England rugby hooker Brian Moore is a qualified nail manicurist.

In February 1643, Dutch colonists massacred members of the Lenape tribe at Bowling Green.

When Samuel Beckett’s eyesight faded he played his favourite golf courses from memory.

They have the Queen’s English in Inverness.

Award-winning children’s author Anthony McGowan once lost two children while drunk in charge of a creche.

‘post-truth’ is now included in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Every one percent unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die.

All people who like musical theatre are divs.