The Yesu's Baboon Podcast: Recent Episodes
Gerhard Venter
This week, I'm sitting at a camp fire in the bushveld, and I'm telling how Koyati was besieged inside a woodpile by Marcie and her two hyena sisters. A woodpile that was the home of King Mambo, a huge black mamba.
Koyati, like many children had his own special place where he felt safe and calm - a mountain spring with a pool of fresh, clear water. But the circumstanced that lead him to discover it were not so calm. In fact, it almost cost him his life. Let me tell you about it …
Koyati tells how elder Tabari's storytelling of 'The Rabbit and the Crocodile' inspired him to start carving. He went to elder Nuru, the village woodcarver and asked him to teach him to carve a rabbit. This started Koyati off on what turned out to be a … no, I'm not going to put a spoiler in here!
The area of Tanzania where Koyati's village is located is up in the north, near the Serengeti district, which borders on Kenya to the north of it. The local big city is Arusha (Dar es Salaam is way south). Koyati's big sister — only nine or ten at the time (he was around six years old) is sent to Arusha to go 'live with a family member.' His mother simply put her on a bus, and she was gone. Koyati never forgave her.
Two con artist inmates manage to get themselves appointed as Koyati's woodcarving apprentices. They were not intent on harming anyone. They just needed to get away from their cell bully — if only for the eight hours a day they would spend in the woodcarving shop. They know less than nothing about woodcarving. But Koyati could not possibly be worse than the monster with whom they were locked up in their overcrowded cell. Will their gamble pay off?
In the previous episode I described Koyati's little workshop. In this episode, Koyati is eating the late meal with his fellow-inmates (they decided to never call it breakfast, lunch, or dinner as long as they ate slop out of bowls at picnic tables) and Sparrow teaches them, like you teach little children, what the Holy of Holies is — and why it applies to Koyati's workshop.
This episode also tells about Koyati's two apprentices.
At the dinner benches, Sparrow explains what an 'inner sanctum' is. Then he compares Koyati's little workshop within the big workshop to an 'inner sanctum' for Koyati. He does not know how right he is, because in there, Koyati will soon be experiencing visions. Or something similar.
Koyati has many misgivings about recording his life story on the voice recorder inside the fluffy heron. But things change when she unexpectedly speaks to him …
The author explains how the voice recorder inside Miss Heron is supposed to capture the story of Koyati's life. The reason? Isidora, his defense lawyer, suspects that he had been abused as a child, and if Koyati should talk about that, she can use it for arguing mitigation of his sentence.
Gerhard starts out on a storytelling journey. The first chapter tells about Koyati, The Trickster. Koyati is very young, but he's on death row in the City Central prison in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
How it all started: Gerhard talks about the late (and very great) Dr. Yaroslav Pelikan, his collection of creeds, and specifically the Maasai Creed. And how the Maasai Creed inspired Yesu's Baboon.
Gerhard Venter, the author of a BFAN (Big Fat African Novel) talks about the book, reads a bunch of passages, and explains how they came about. This is the introduction.