Hare is defeated in the battle of brains

Yes, wonder of wonders – Hare was finally beaten at his own game! He was beaten by a challenger he had not imagined to exist. Till then this is the Hare who had gone prancing and swaggering throughout the entire republic of Animalia and boasting that he was the only one and will always remain the only one who never gets beaten by anyone else and will never be beaten by anyone yet to be born. 

At this instant let me tune my voice to retell for you, my assembled listeners, and for your instructive delight, the tale in which Hare, through extreme trickery and inborn cunning, outsmarted other crafty contestants for eternal fame. And for this retelling, O let me do so in song while plucking the seven musical strings of my magical and antique Elgonian lyre.

This is the tale in which Hare impregnated his mother-in-law and got away with it! (And this is the reason why a man should never come too close to his mother-in-law, to avoid the risk of desiring her; and why he should never carelessly chance upon her washing herself in stark nakedness in her own homestead, and why he should clear his voice and cough from afar and announce that it is he the son-in-law who is passing by the homestead in the semi darkness after sunset, or else his eyes fall upon her thus exposed – and he madly does the undoable.)  

So, Hare in this particular scenario had been secretly ‘swallowing saliva’ on his widowed mother-in-law. “Wha-tha a pi-the,” he lewdly lisped to his wife, “that my mother-in-law is going to die with all her remaining children still inside her!”

To his naive and puzzled wife he cunningly suggested that in order to beget another baby, his mother-in-law should be advised by her his wife also her daughter to go consult a famous diviner who dwelt inside a certain anthill three hilltops away.

To cut a long story short, the mother-in-law did as advised by her daughter, visited the presumed diviner in the anthill - who was none other than Hare himself wearing a diviner’s mask - and came away pregnant with her next baby boy and brother to his wife!

It is further retold that one morning when Hare’s wife and his mother-in-law were digging around Hare’s house, Hare remained on the verandah acting the babysitter to both his wife’s baby boy and his mother-in-law’s baby boy who were of the same age. He had his baby boy on one arm and his mother-in-law’s baby boy on the other arm. When the babies began to cry, Hare chanted them a lullaby: to the one-on-one arm he chanted, “Lullaby, baby mine in full”; and to the one on the other arm he chanted, “Lullaby, partly my brother-in-law and partly my baby–“ when, overhearing him, his wife suspiciously shouted, “What’s that you’re singing?” And Hare cleverly fooled her into agreeing with his rejoinder, “O, I’m just calling the babies this or that. Don’t you hear that they have stopped crying?”   

This is the very Hare who was squarely and roundly beaten in the next and final battle of craftiness and wits. For days on end at night Hare had been uprooting and stealing groundnuts from Farmer’s garden. So Farmer set up a bogus Watchman carved out of wood and covered with glue – to catch the thief.

On his next thieving spree, Hare sees Watchman, mistakes him for a human being, stretches out his fore-limb to greet him in pretended friendship - and gets stuck on Watchman! He tries to fight Watchman with his other fore-limb, each of the two hind-limbs in turn, forehead, chest and belly - and they all get stuck on Watchman!

And that is how and where Farmer finds outwitted Hare the following morning.

Prof Timothy Wangusa is a poet and novelist.                  

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