The Sunday News
Christopher Mlalazi Lighterside
I ONCE wanted to be a scientist. That was before I went for primary school. Please don’t get me wrong, I didn’t dream of being a scientist when I grew up, but I wanted to be a kindergarten one.Big dream wasn’t it?
As every child, there were many questions baffling me about life and the natural environment at that time.
Yes I was an intelligent child, easily challenged by things that I could not understand and which adults could not provide satisfactory answers to my toddler’s mind.
Like for instance, and one of the most baffling questions — was why we humans couldn’t see air no matter how much we squinted. Yes that air that surrounds us.
I mean, we could feel it whenever it blew against our cheeks right? Or on cold days when it made our eyes smart with tears, and on really windy days when it whistled through the branches of trees like some really angry goblins.
And we had ample evidence of its existence sometimes when it also thundered out when we surreptitiously released belly gas.
And talking about belly gas, why do most of us look startled when it escapes from us explosively in say a crowd like at the bus terminus, I mean, it’s your gas and it doesn’t kill hey.
But then that question on my young scientific mind equipped with a natural laboratory in my heart that had only curiosity as its single and most prized lab tool — why couldn’t we see the air if we could feel it?
I don’t know when I gave up trying to solve that very important puzzle. But it must still have been before I went for Grade One at Saint Bernard’s Primary School, where I quickly became consumed with the much tougher task of trying to solve why all teachers for Grade One pupils were ladies, and why they pinched so much.
There was another very important question that I tried as much as I could to solve during those days. This one always literally cropped up when the first rains came and we had to take our hoes and go to the bush to plough our fields.
Yes we also ploughed young as we were, using hoes with handles twice as tall as our height. My biggest fascination with ploughing was the maize seed. Yes that creamish and dry looking seed that almost looked like a fairy tooth.
Before a maize seeds is planted, it must be dried from a fresh cob. And before that the cob must be plucked from the maize plant. And talking about a cob, I know izikombi have raised their eyebrows, as this is a word potent with meaning for them, kikikiki.
And before the maize plant grows, a maize seed must be planted from which it will grow from if weather conditions are conducive, and so we are back to square one, the seed.
I remember once sitting on a rock in our field and stripping off the skin of the dry maize seed and inspecting the flesh inside, trying to see what the magic inside this flesh was that could make a beautiful and green plant shoot from it that could feed nations.
Of course what my laboratory discovered was that inside the maize seed was a tiny yellow thing, which when the maize seed was boiled, could be popped out intact.
Sometimes you can see this tiny yellow part of the offals of the maize seed sticking on the teeth of people eating grilled or boiled maize, just like the eye of Kapenta fish does.
This thing I am calling a thing is called the cotyledon. And come to think of it, I remember our biology teacher at high school whom we called Mr Cotyldon. I will leave it to your imagination why we called him that, but it had something to do with the way he said this word, and not how he looked physically.
We also had Miss Photosynthesis. But she was nice and beautiful and I think every boy in our class had a crush on her.
And so, as most of my childhood science experiments, the puzzle of the maize seed and why it germinated when it was buried under soil during the rain season was never also satisfactorily solved.
Now the biggest of all puzzles of that childhood science days. Why a stone, if it was buried under fertile soil and watered, did not also germinate into a “stone tree” just like seed.
But as we always say, in the creative arts a stone can be made to give birth to another one.
This is today’s puzzle.
