James Cairns

A while back. A good while back, when I lived in Troyeville, Dorothee says to me she’s organising a storytelling competition for the Ethiopian community. It’s going to happen at a shop on a second floor of some block of flats in town, but here’s the thing – only Ethiopians have entered the competition so far. Don’t I want to enter so there’s a bit of diversity on the bill? WITS Arts School is hosting and they’ll be the judging panel. There’ll be great food and it’ll be fun.

Catering is an act of benevolence often overlooked – especially when the catering is as good as Ethiopian usually is – and so I in an act of reciprocal benevolence agreed to take part in the competition.

And promptly forgot about it.

The day came and I had nothing. No story for the storytelling competition.

But stories have a way of floating to the top of the brain’s slush pile when needed, be that need a well-lubricated circle around the braai or a panel of well-meaning academics. That morning (a Saturday) I happened along Emmerentia Drive and at corner Wicklow the story became clear.

He wasn’t there on the day, but the story concerned a beggar who plied his trade there for some years. One of his legs was skew, bowed, not so much so that he couldn’t walk, but he did so with some difficulty. He didn’t make a song and dance out of it, but the leg obviously made life difficult for him. The leg aside, he begged well and became beloved of the passersby at the intersection.

Now the good people of Parkview and Greenside decided to do something nice for the guy and they raised a considerable sum of money for him to undergo surgery to have his leg straightened. If I remember correctly, it was an amount just south of R30k. I heard the operation was successful and indeed the man’s gait improved most excellently and he could now go on to what wonderful gifts his life had to offer, because post-op, he had no impediment to his obvious upward socio-economic mobility.

A few months later, he was back begging at corner Wicklow/Emmerentia walking far better than he had, but undeniably what he’d gained in walking, he’d lost in sympathy. He just wasn’t the beggar he used to be.

Careful that a helping hand takes far more than it gives.

He left the corner shortly thereafter to a fate unknown to me.

Now, I made no diligent independently audited study of what happened prior to or post the story described above. Seemed like a cool story, a pithy warning against do-goodery gone wrong.

In a second-floor room in a building near Bree taxi rank in town where the Ethiopian storytelling competition was held, that’s the story I told. And I won.

Not often you find a story so well-formed with a moral and everything just lying there corner Wicklow/Emmerentia.

Didn’t go down well. There were mutterings of collusion and the like. Guys were bleak. How could this guy come in there and win the thing just like that with this story he picked up on the road on the way in?

I felt guilty about it – still do. Won some other guys’ storytelling compo with a story about another guy.

Sometimes storytelling is borrowing, but if I want to think I borrowed that story, how do I ever give it back? I can’t. That’s not how stories work. All I can do is pass it on.

And see what happens.

And watch out for those Ethiopian storytelling competitions. Tough crowd.