Frying pans of locusts

Catherine Nicolette;
Many years ago we had a plague of locusts in Welkom, and everywhere we went as children there were the whirring of wings. As we drove by the local fields, young hoppers were everywhere moving steadily on, leaving behind them absolute devastation. We weren't best pleased when the plague moved up to our home, and we spent time running around our garden and our beloved mimosa tree, flapping our blankets and blowing smoke at the locusts to try to get them to stay away from the tree, the fruit trees and the grapevines in our garden. We managed to save our garden somewhat from the scavenging horde, but many's the tear I shed when I picked up the hoppers to put them out of the garden and they lashed out with their hind legs. Locusts are anything but defenceless - there is a surprising kick with their back legs, and on occasion their leg spines left behind small bleeding punctures on my hands.


It was a miserable time. Locusts are great within reason. But this was like the great plague of Egypt.  I would trudge gloomily back and forth to school, avoiding the moving carpet of locusts and hoppers with my feet. However, I started to notice dark rings of burnt out fire patches at the roadside which puzzled me. One day, the enigma became clear. As I walked down the road from school on my way back home I saw one of the labourers from Lesotho sitting at the roadside. He had set up a ring of stones, set a small fire, and was thoughtfully frying a pan of locusts in oil. The sounds of the sputtering oil filled the air. I greeted the man courteously, Dumela Ntate. He gravely returned my greeting, Dumela kleinmies. I asked if I could watch, and he invited me to sit on one of the stones on the opposite side. I duly put down my school satchel, perched on the large grey stone which had obviously been borrowed from the kerb of our Afrikaans neighbours' house garden, and settled to watch. The gentleman fried the locusts, stirring them briskly around in the battered black frying pan, and it was a soothing picture and sound; the labourer, with his carved noble features serenely sitting in the late afternoon glow of the African sunlight, with smoke drifting above our heads into the canopy of the trees whose foliage had been stripped by the ravening hordes of locusts. The sputtering of the oil and the scrape of his cooking implement were loud in the serenity of the quiet afternoon. The strange thing was, the whirring of the locusts in the vicinity had stopped, and there were no locusts nearby. Some sense of insect preservation had warned them to clear the area.
 
Once the gentleman had finished frying the locusts to his satisfaction, he tested them for crunchiness by breaking off a leg. He then settled down to eat his impromptu afternoon meal. He invited me to join his meal, but I declined. I watched him eat the locusts, amazed at this choice of a meal so different to what we ate at home. Young as I was, I realised then at that moment that what we had seen as a plague, he had seen as an opportunity. Thereafter I went on my way. As I looked back, the gentleman from Lesotho was still sitting there, finishing his meal.


I never saw him again. Yet, every time I walked past that tree from home to school, and school to home, the black fire marks on the designer stones of the family home which had carefully been put back into place reminded me of the infinite courtesy of the gentleman from Lesotho sitting staring into the fire and holding the pan of locusts, probably dreaming of home.


*Photograph taken by Catherine Nicolette