FIRE FROM THE GODS

Another episode in the achievements of Owongo, an ancient ancestor of all of us, this time making an accidental but very vital discovery.

FIRE FROM THE GODS

The day my ancestor of 100,000 years ago invented fire they might have put the flags out, but didn't because they didn't have any.

It was like this.

Owongo was chipping away at an old rock with a chunk of a different and slightly harder rock, trying to reduce the first rock into something he could throw at antelope next time any were foolish enough to venture anywhere near his hunting grounds. It was hard and dusty work and Owongo, being in his twenty-seventh year and kept awake at night by the latest in a stream of offspring,, was accounted as an old man and didn't like old age or work.

For starters, sometimes the rocks, when struck together with sufficient violence, sparked, and that made him jump. He didn't like sparks because sparks were like fire and fire was unpredictable, the consequence of lightning strikes and the like, and it could burn great swathes in the forest and race across the savannah. Nasty things happened, things that could be very dangerous: hadn't Chief Bingbong's own father been scorched to a cinder by such a raging fire?

Owongo wanted no more than to avoid fire at all costs when he quite accidentally and unintentionally discovered how to light one.

So there he was, chipping away with one rock against another, disinterested in the day (which seemed to promise rain) when sparks flew from it, and he leapt back in alarm, squawking obscenities.

These sparks, though, instead of vanishing into nothing almost immediately landed on a pad of dry moss used by Owongo to mop his brow when he sweated. He hadn't used it yet, so it was particularly dry, and at least one of the sparks, caught by a random draught of air, made a little flame and some smoke.

Owongo was terrified.

Here was fire and fire would spread and burn and cause chaos everywhere it could. It would drive old folks from their homes (and at twenty-seven he was one of the old folks). It would decimate the population and leave women weeping for lost sons, lost fathers and lost spouses.

But this time it did none of those things.

Owongo's little pad of dried moss burnt with a bright flame, but there was only rock and dust for it to move onto and as neither rock nor dust burn easily, it went out. And Owongo watched it.

He saw the sparks land on the moss. He saw the moss flare up. He saw the moss go out, leaving just a pile of grey dust and a few dying sparkles.

Now I think I mentioned that Owongo was one of my ancestors, so he must, by definition, have been a bright boy, and he almost instantly worked something out.

He worked out cause and effect.

So the very next thing he did was find another little pile of dry moss and set about creating more sparks with his tool-making exercise. He bashed away with one rock against another, and of course, every so often sparks flew. But none of them flew onto his moss. They were too random to do that. They went into the air, landed painlessly on his skin, flew just about anywhere but into the warm and cuddly centre of his pile of dry moss.

He might have given up, but we Owongos don't yield to failure so easily. He worked out that if he engineered the right proximity, if he arranged a few rocks into a kind of trap for the sparks to fly into and filled that trap with moss then he might light fire.

And it worked!

He did it time and time again, and a crowd gathered round, all of them outraged that one of their number should be so cavalier in the presence of dangerous stuff like fire.

But he knew the right words to put them straight.

“The gods brought fire to Owongo,” he said quietly. “The gods gave Owongo power to control fire, and use it.”

His woman (Mirumda the ugly) smiled to herself.

A little bit of fame and kudos never hurt anyone, and those whom the gods smile on have that in spades.