Nyoka!

We’re lucky enough that our house came equipped with a few old, semi-inflated basketballs, so we have a host of local kids who come to play soccer every afternoon. They tend to be pretty dedicated to their soccer, so when we they stopped playing yesterday afternoon, we wondered what was up. Five minutes later Moses, the next door neighbor’s son and an afternoon-soccer regular, ran to the house yelling Nyoka! Snake!

There are quite a few different types of snakes in our corner of Africa, and they’re just about all poisonous. So what did we do? We followed Moses to the spectacle that had distracted all of the kids from soccer. In the middle of one of our fields, at the bottom of a 5 foot deep concrete-lined irrigation hole, was: a pile of rocks. With a foot of snake tail coming out the end.

Kids around here know the appropriate action to take when they see a poisonous snake: either run away or, if you can, kill it. Well this snake had gotten itself trapped in the irrigation hole, so was an easy target for the latter option. So for the past five minutes, the kids had been hurling bricks and chunks of concrete at the snake, and by now it was almost entirely buried in rocks and what we could see – the tail – had stopped moving. Was it dead?

We thought so, but when the kids started taking the bricks off the snake (using a 7-foot long stick, of course), it started to wiggle. When they uncovered its head, it was clearly still a very much alive – and very angry – Black Mamba snake. It flared its neck out and started hissing. So… we started throwing more bricks at it. Some hit the snake’s body, mildly impairing it. But eventually, one hit it squarely in the head, and it lost its vigor.

But it was still struggling. By this time, Courtney had run to the house to retrieve her camera and our gardening hoe (good thinking!). The snake was near the edge of the pit wall, and within the reach of the hoe for someone six feet tall. So I chopped the snake’s head off. Dead.

So what do 10 pre-adolescent boys ask one another in the presence of a dead poisonous snake? The answer is the same on this side of the world: Unataka kula? Want to eat it?
Hapana, sitaki kula nyoka, asante (no, I don’t want to eat the snake, thank you). Instead, we buried it behind the house, and went back to playing soccer.