The Death of an Old Village Woman
On the road of the local market, Loupou, a seventy year old farm woman of a small hamlet, is painfully and slowly walking, because she bears sixty kilos of rice on her head. Poor woman! She doesn’t have, to meet her needs, neither a niece, a brother-in-law, and not even a friend. Loupou is alone, all alone with no relatives on earth. To eat a delicious food, she has to count, with her wearyand shaking feet, du to her age, the twelve kilometer dusty road that separates her village to the Djalikwele agglomeration, the metropolis of Forest Guinea.
Whatever rebellious sentiment a person may be, isn’t this a condition anybody could pity? However, some African officers, through incompetence or animosity, at times, behave with an atrocity of a beast. Unfortunately, the noble people of Africa are often judged based on heartless people as these.
The two gendarmes sketched with my words are evidently among these people. They arrested a poor farmer woman at a gate and asked her to show her identification card in French. “I don’t know what you talking about, but I am going to the market to sell and do some shopping,” the woman said.
“Ha! Ha!” laughed the two officers, “take a seat till we finish with the others.”
As soon as all the other farmers left, one of the officers, as cunning as a viper, told the old lady, “If you don’t have paper – ID-, you have to pay penalty, 6000 Guinean francs.”
“6000 francs? Where can get 6000?”
“If you don’t have the money, you will go to jail.”
The two gendarmes, like a rock without heart, confined Loupou in an unfinished house. While she was in this confined locality, the next shift of gendarmes arrived and released our two heroes. Before they left, these dishonest officers carried the poor woman’s bag of rice on their motorbike leaving the following message behind with their friend. “You should free the prisoner after thirty minutes.”
As soon as she found out she had been robbed, after her liberty, she fell and died.
Joseph Haba
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