The Day A Baby Pranked A Whole City

Tumie Modise | Monday November 23, 2015 15:00

This is good. Even I used to have this imaginary friend long time ago. Her name was Magdalene. My friendship with Maggie came to an abrupt end the day my father found me alone in the room, talking to her. It ended very badly.

So this baby, we are told, was just minding her own business that Wednesday afternoon near a busy road when she saw a ‘big snake’ leap out of a nearby pond. Before she could scream SNAKE, the reptile ‘snatched’ (ya phamola) another child before disappearing again into the same filthy pond. This is the official version, the version that was even confirmed by the area police chief. I refused to believe the story, from the word go. That a snake, never mind its size, snatched a child was, for me, the very first red flag! It couldn’t be. Snakes don’t have limbs and are incapable of ‘snatching’ anything, never mind a seven year old kicking and screaming child! I have watched several wildlife documentaries before, not once have I ever come across that spectacle. But then again, this is Botswana. Strange things happen around here. So for a while I really gave this child the benefit of the doubt. It doesn’t help that the nation was still jittery while recovering from the terrible student tragedy.

As the story goes, the child quickly alerted her mother. It is unclear whether the mother was nearby or whether she rushed home to report the bizarre incident. The mother we are told, then raised the alarm and before everybody knew it, half of Gaborone had converged at the ‘scene’, within minutes. As the story unfolded, pictures also started raining thick and fast on social media.  Children, students, loafers, the working class and eve a few CEO’s, thronged the place. I cannot be sure as to what they really wanted to see. The only thing I am certain of is I was too disturbed to even contemplate going there. I never want to see a picture of any dead person, it is worse if it’s a child involved. It traumatises me to a point of madness.

For me, the second red flag was the child herself. This was no ordinary city child. This was a child from the nearby hood, a self-made ghetto. Now as we know, children from that hood just like the adults, are not fragile and are definitely not stupid. People from that side of town, for lack of a better word, are ‘clever’ and very streetwise. Those kids don’t even buy into cartoons anymore. Most have seen real bare knuckle fights and they have seen blood oozing from a person. Tom and Jerry never bleed; none of them has ever been admitted to any hospital and neither has ever seen the inside of a police cell.

So back to this story, at this point, among the multitudes that gathered there to catch a glimpse of the snake and child, were the police, fire department with their trucks, a few soldiers with guns, snake handlers from wildlife department and Med rescue personnel, all clad in their emergency response gear. Politicians were there too. The response, as we are told, was prompt and on very high alert. The whole time this was going on and the smelly pond was being turned inside out, the child was there too.

Now the part where the emergency services should have smelt a possible prank was when the child who was supposedly ‘snatched’ by the snake also showed up at the scene, also watched as the search for ‘her’ continued. But still the search went on; no one was taking any chances. At certain intervals the child would occasionally be asked to narrate the story all over again, and each time, her story would change.  Who can blame her, she was by now confused and overwhelmed.

Hours later after sunset as it became apparent that this was nothing but a prank, there were collective sighs of relief everywhere. We were all relieved that no child was in danger after all, but a little disappointed that the Kgogomodumo story was still, just a folk tale. Credit to the response teams, they passed the emergency and preparedness test here. Because had that snake been found with the child in its belly, it would have been shot, before being later resuscitated together with the child in one of the many ambulances present at the scene! That’s just how serious and heavy that operation was, so I am told.