How Friends Become Enemies

Don Miller was in Uganda the last two weeks with a few friends doing important stuff.

On occasion, he'll bring back gifts for friends, so he stopped in a bookstore and bought a few copies of "Our Heritage Series", a collection of Ugandan children stories. Here's the back cover copy:

"Our Heritage Series are carefully selected and graded children readers intended to improve English language reading and comprehension skills.

They are also intended to educate children about Uganda's rich cultural heritage."

There are 32 books in all (Don only brought back three), divided by reading level.

At level 2, things, the titles are pretty tame, like "The Bull with a Calf" and the curious "How Friends Became Enemies".

The further you go up in grades, though, the crazier things get. Level 3 brings in "How Chameleon Avenged His Father's Death", a theme that could be endless in a country where Idi Amin ruled. Level four goes tame again, with the worst being "How Hare Was Caught Stealing".

Level five and up, though...that's where things get nuts.

"The Ungrateful Mother"
"Mother Eats Her Son"
"The Man Who Ate His Eye"
"How the Rat Escaped the Trap"
"Alira and the Cannibals"

And it's not like the cover art takes the edge off.

Wow. You can buy the books and look at other titles here.

I read through "Mother Eats Her Son" last night. It's about a girl who takes her baby brothers on a walk and finds a tamarind tree. She and the brothers eat tamarinds, and the girl accidentally leaves her baby brother's carrying sling behind.

When she gets home, her mother beats the crap out of her with a switch after her kindly father goes to talk with the neighbors. Then her mom makes her go back to the tamarind tree in the middle of the night, which is when the flesh-eating ogres roam the countryside.

Anyway, to make a long story short, she gets trapped by the ogres, then escapes. The ogres now don't have a meal, so they kill one of their own and take him back to camp, where the dead ogre's mother cooks and eats him unknowingly. The lesson for the little girl is to always obey her mother and father.

Of course, European culture is known for having some pretty jacked up fairy tales, too, but did the ogre mom have to eat her own son? And how did that fit in with the lesson?

The sad thing is, real life for Ugandan children is probably worse than the stories. At least "Mother Eats Her Son" end happily enough for the little girl.