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...That Arusha Statue of Ad-libitum!By Valentine Marc Nkwame
For those who still don’t know, then there are three human figures at the centre of the roundabout which is located adjacent to both the Arusha District and Regional Offices. The figure statues include that one of, a man carrying something heavy on his shoulders .... It looks like a banana bunch. Of course, the male figure may even remind you of the late, Xi, that Kalahari bushman, who starred in Jamie Uyss’s "The gods must be crazy!" Movie series. The female statue is that of a woman balancing what looks like a cooking pot on her head. She is also holding the hand of a child statue standing between her and the man. Now, all seemed to be well for the statues in their three years tenancy of the roundabout, until early this year when all hell broke loose .... At least for the female statue. Suddenly! The pot went missing from the lady’s head, a much closer look reveals the pot laying broken at her feet on the ground. Lets face it, the woman is just a statue, so she couldn’t have possibly dropped it. Somebody had knocked off the pot from her head .... and for some reason. It took about four weeks before local residents noticed the missing pot. In fact, one of them came to The Arusha Times, offices and announced that, the female statue had been beheaded. Apparently, the guy had always thought that the pot was the woman’s head and when you come to think of it, maybe even the culprit who knocked off the Pot could have actually mistaken it for the lady’s head. Two weeks ago, another attack was once more made on the woman, this time the culprit made sure that the real head fell off, completely. Fortunately, as we have seen, the woman is a statue, which means she went on with her business despite missing that crucial part of her entire anatomy. Besides as this week’s efforts proved, the head could always be fixed back. In fact not only has the lady got the head restored, but even her pot is back on the head. By the way, this time the pot is white, so cooking is out of the question here .... and so is the male chauvinistic belief that women should always be confined in the kitchen. So, why should this anti-statue terrorist only pick on the woman? ...Well, because if the child’s statue is touched, then UNICEF is likely to step into the case and have the fellow arrested ... Mm, could be. But who exactly is UNICEF? ... Maybe because the male statue wears a weapon sheath round his waist, which is likely to contain a double edged sword called simi ... Very likely. But isn’t he just a statue? ... Okay, what about the history of Arusha, precisely the one that dates back to the year 2003 which happens to be last year? ... Aha! what happened last year then? ... Apparently, at least, 18 women got butchered in Arusha last year, recording an average of 1.5 female deaths per month, all being engineered by some cold-blooded killers, most of whom could be still at large .... The deaths were usually done in this series; Rape, Eye gorging, Head scalping, Hacking .... Ad-libitum. Now, it sounds very weird to kill a woman in Arusha. I mean, this is not Mwanza, where old ladies are always being murdered, under some far fetched witchcraft pointers like; Red eyes, Black pots, Facial wrinkles, Being a Widow .... Ad-infinitum. Never mind but last year’s massacre of Arusha ladies, both old and young, could be the inspiration behind the constant attacks on the female statue, at the Goliondoi roundabout, either being engineered by those local Jack the Rippers themselves or the person who wants to reveal to the world how bad the situation is for women, around here .... May get worse if they don’t escape back into the Kitchen and paint their pots black. Nevertheless, the attacks being aimed at the statues could even be a series of local jokes by dark humorists, who enjoy to put their own ideas onto the Arusha’s version of the, Statue of Liberty .... Or Statue of Ad-libitum. It is also likely to be the same humorists who a few months ago dressed the child statue with a discarded blazer, which was probably salvaged from any of the Wednesday Tengeru market auctions .... and if the truth was to be told, the kid looked rather smart, dressed in that coat!
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The female
statue, which stands at the Goliondoi roundabout and that has been going without
its head for about two weeks, has finally got the upper piece of its anatomy
being restored to its rightful place .... apparently the head is back onto the
neck of the statue.
