George and the Rabbits: A Christmas Story
George helped me with the school rabbits. A short, cheerful man, he was utterly reliable – something one has to be when dealing with something as crucial as the school rabbits. It was his job to clean them out and feed them when the schoolchildren couldn’t.
George came to mind because of Lucy’s efforts to cheer us up in the run-up to Christmas – the sleighs, reindeer, Christmas tree baubles, obese Santa in his red, ermine-trimmed coat, that sort of thing – because what happened to George related to that strange human condition, religious belief. To most of us, this Christmas thing is a charade, a commercial bonanza foisted on us earlier and earlier each year, a pagan festival that has far more to do with excess than believing anything. George, along with the true Christmas believers, the ones who, Wenceslas-like, go out and give their time and money to causes Jesus would have approved of, actually believed in his religion. It didn’t happen to be Christianity, nor any of the other major world religions: George was an animist, a believer in the spirits of his ancestors and the African bush, a believer in the power of the witch doctor.
I need to digress a moment on this matter of the rabbits. I may have misled you into thinking they were the sort of cute bunnies primary children bring home from school for the holidays because it’s ‘their turn’. I’m sorry: the rabbits we kept at this school were a commercial concern, mostly New Zealand whites. We kept hundreds of them – and killed a hundred or so every Wednesday, packaging them neatly for the local butcher. So you can imagine how serious the matter became when George, very suddenly, stopped being the pleasant, reliable bloke he had been and became morose, sullen and thoroughly unreliable.
One day he didn’t pitch up at all so I walked up to his quarters to find out what the hell was wrong with him. He looked terrible: wasted, grey, haggard, a pinched husk of the man I had known. Someone, he declared, had bewitched him, someone he had offended or, perhaps, who was envious of him, someone who had been prepared to pay the local ‘nganga a couple of goats to punish him. He was possessed of a devil. His end was inevitable. He was dying.
George didn’t die, not quite, though he was a very sick man for a very long time. His cure was to return to his village way out in the bush and pay his village witch-doctor to cure him, rather as Jesus cast the devils out of some of the people he cured.
As a result I believe in witch doctors far more than I do in Father Christmas. There’s a witch-doctor in Black Mongoose, not an evil one like the one who did for George, but a good one. A sort of black Father Christmas.
Jon