Jiggi Tah

Ngomgham.: Stories Jiggi Tah

When I was in primary school our immediate neighbors were francophones. The house they moved into had been vacant for a while. There were five kids; two girls and three boys. The third of them was a dude called Papi. We must have been age mates. I was eight years old when they showed up. We had moved to Ngomgham from Ntamulung two years prior and by the time Papi them came those two years were enough for me to have surveyed and mastered Ngomgham. I knew everyone, whether you knew me or not. I had run into Tse Richard them lots of times, Cho Mbenge was my classmate and I once owed Tsi Bugubugu 250 for a borez he sold to me. Their house was fenced in so we only saw Papi them when they came back from school in a military Jeep. Their father was a colonel. I knew because the day they moved in their stuff was carted in by three military trucks and when I told my dad that a gendarme had moved into that house, he said it was a colonel. Every now and then the teachers in my primary school would want to have a word with my father about something I'd said or done. Mostly done. Usually they'd want my father to whip me because based on what had transpired, I needed to be whooped and if they had to do it themselves they might end up killing me. There would usually be at least three teachers in the headmaster's office, all women in their twenties, talking over themselves, each one doing the most to make my dad understand the true nature of what it was that I had done or said.