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The deer in our
neighbourhood are racists. They are trying to run my family out of
town. We do not have the money to move to a poor neighbourhood,
otherwise we would move today. We are miserable. What is the problem?
The deer know we are Nigerians. And they know we love bushmeat. So,
they don’t bother us in the daytime. They leave our flowers alone and
they go eat up our white neighbours’ plants. They are smart, they don’t
dare come near us. They can see my firewood, groundnut oil, and cutlass
in the backyard, waiting for foolish meat, who wan die?

One day, my white
neighbours asked me why the deer avoided my flowering plants. I told
them how this tribe of monkeys was always bothering my father’s
vegetable garden until we caught two and had rice and stew with plenty
of monkey meat. They hurried off and never came back, the neighbours I
mean. It was not true of course; we only caught one scrawny monkey.
Getting meat out of the sucker was like raiding a crab for crabmeat; a
lot of work.

I have not seen
the neighbours and their two dogs ever since. We don’t eat dogs, where
I come from. We are ‘civilised’ people. My uncle ate my pet goat once.
It got on his nerves by stealing his one piece of meat and my goat took
the place of his meat. My father consoled me by assuring me that any
goat that ate meat was a witch and needed to be delivered to the
hottest part of hell. Who had ever heard of a meat-chomping goat, my
father asked me, as he chomped on my goat’s head.

My goat was
pretty, you would have liked her. Her name was Goodluck. Don’t ask me
how a female goat became known as Goodluck. I am still traumatised by
that incident. My medical insurance company will not pay for therapy.
They called it a “pre-existing condition”, meaning that I had serious
issues before America granted me a visa. I don’t blame the racist
jerks; hell, coming from Africa is a pre-existing condition. All that
drama.

I have seen a lot
of injustice in my lifetime. I have also been a witness to uplifting,
inspiring stories. One day, right after the end of the Nigerian civil
war, I met this Hausa professor and his monkey, Musa. I noticed that
the monkey had a wooden leg, and he was always nervous around the
professor. Each time Musa spied the owner coming near him, he would
start shrieking and holding on to his wooden leg while exclaiming
“Allah Kiaye! Please don’t eat me!”

I wanted to know
more about this intelligent monkey that spoke Hausa and English. The
owner tearfully shared with me that Musa was a genius; it had saved his
life during the war. Apparently, Musa had a keen sense of sight, smell,
and hearing. Whenever it sensed the rebel army was nearby, it would
blow a whistle and start reciting portions of Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’.
That was the cue for his owner to go into hiding immediately. That was
how he survived the war. I was impressed but curious about the wooden
leg. I asked the professor why the monkey had a wooden leg. He looked
at me incredulously and exclaimed: “If your monkey was this valuable,
would you eat it all at once?” I go die o!

We were talking
about racist deer. I am sorry. I tend to ramble, it is a medical
problem. As I was saying before Arogundade the monkey got into the
picture, the deer in our neighbourhood are racists. Why do I say so?
Well, I have incontrovertible evidence to back up my assertions.

We normally take
out our trash bins in the evenings and leave them by the curb for the
trash truck to pick them up in the morning. Well, at night when we are
asleep and not inclined to chase them down for our dinner, the deer
come by and knock down the bins and empty the contents on the streets
for our nosy neighbours to inspect.

We first
discovered the perfidy of these racist deer when we were almost
arrested for murder. Well, when the contents of our trash spilled onto
the streets, there were bones, you know, cow foot, cow leg, isi ewu,
goat head pieces, well scrubbed, I tell you, plus other mainstream
stuff like ogbono, egusi, etc, etc. Our neighbours called the police;
they don’t play with bones around here in America. They were sure they
were human remains.

We were not
arrested, but considered “persons of interest” until they finished
their analysis of the bone fragments in a secret FBI lab in Salt Lake
City, Utah, across from the Mormon temple. Until the results came out,
we did not eat anything Nigerian in our house, just sandwiches and
Lasagne and stuff.

Do you know, once we started eating strange things like that those
bad belle racist deer stopped messing with our trash bins? America is a
tough place.