The Beauty of Being by Abiodun Oyewole

Author:Abiodun Oyewole
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: culture, personal, spiritual, social justice, history, arts
ISBN: 978-1-940939-74-2 (print)
Publisher: 2Leaf Press
Published: 2018-09-25T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 9

Scarecrow

NOT TOO LONG AGO in a rice village in West Africa lived a special girl named Oduwa. When she was born, there was a great celebration because she was the first child of a new union.

It became apparent after a while that she was not going to be so pleasing to the eye. You couldn’t look at her and say, “Oh, you have such a pretty baby.” Oduwa was not pretty, but her mother and father loved her just the same.

When she started going to school, some of the children would tease her about her looks. She tried not to let it bother her, but it did. Oduwa didn’t look like her mother or father; let’s just say she had her own “look.”

One day, when Oduwa was very young, the village chiefs came to her house to ask her parents to use Oduwa as a human scarecrow to shoo away the crows that would come to feed off of the rice paddies. Her mother cried and protested, “You want to use my daughter as a human scarecrow?” She felt this was an insult and an embarrassment to Oduwa and the family.

The village chiefs told them that they would be greatly compensated. At first, they said no, but then after discussing it and thinking about how they could spend the money, they decided to go along with it. Still, her mother feared this could scar Oduwa for life, and she would never feel good about herself. Her father felt the same way, but they both agreed that more cowrie shells (a form of money they used at that time) they had, the more things they could buy at the market. Oduwa was an obedient child, so she did what she was told.

Every morning just before dawn Oduwa would go into the fields to shoo away the crows so they wouldn’t eat the rice. This caused her to get teased even more by the children at school. They would point at her and say, “Scarecrow, scarecrow, Oduwa’s a scarecrow!” They even created a game of tag, and if you got tagged then you were now the scarecrow. Oduwa never played the game. What they didn’t know was that Oduwa never really shooed the crows away from the rice paddies. She would sing and dance all around the field, and the birds were so enchanted they never touched the rice.

Oduwa seemed to enjoy performing for the birds. She was able to create her own little world where she entertained Mother Nature, and really didn’t care what the other children said. This went on for quite a while. Her mother was still very distraught over her daughter’s job, but she noticed it didn’t seem to bother Oduwa.

“You don’t mind scaring the birds away, Oduwa?” her mother asked.

“No I don’t mind momma.”

“I hear that the children tease you at school about it.”

“It doesn’t bother me,” she’d say.

It had to affect her in some way, her mother thought. Her mother didn’t know what she was

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