Hungry Red Lion, The

The story of the Hungry Red Lion as told by Sibongile Mabaso: ‘One day a huge lion arrives in our parts. It has a taste for people, and since it is voraciously hungry it eats up all of us one by one. Finally, the only person left is Van der Wahl, the white dip inspector. Our cattle have to bathe, as everyone knows, otherwise they would be eaten up by ticks. What is not good is that our dip inspector likes to hurt people. If anyone arrives late with their cows, or is not fast enough, he gets to taste the inspector’s bullwhip. He enjoys using the whip and no one can claim that he doesn’t handle it with great skill. We all remember when he flayed the skin off Tutsi from his feet to his genitals. It was only afterwards that the boy fell to the ground, and nobody who saw him then believed he would survive. And when there was nothing left the lion fell upon Van der Wahl. That was its big mistake. Even for a very big lion, Van der Wahl was too fat. He got stuck in the lion’s gullet and since he was such a rotten person his meat was putrid. The lion was poisoned, of course, and became seriously ill. It vomited and got violent diarrhoea. As a result, we all came back to life. We came out in vomit and shit, all of us except Van der Wahl, who slowly rotted away So we got rid of Van der Wahl. If the lion survived, it never dared eat people again.’