As children, we used to accompany our grand-parents to the
farm mostly on Saturdays not to do any serious farm work but only to keep them
company, and also create some ‘fear and panic’ by trampling on some of their
sprouting crops. After creating enough chaos on the farm, we often become tired
and therefore go and hide under any shady tree we can find and sleep until we
are waken up when it is time to go home.
What we always hated as children, was this idea of being
asked to carry some load, be it fire-wood or food-stuffs, because we always
wanted to have the freedom to engage in playful activities even on our way home
from the farm. And grand-parents being what they are, they often allowed us to
have our way just to make sure we were always happy.
My grand-parents used to employ the services of what we
commonly call ‘by day’ people (farm laborers) during the clearing and
preparation of the land in readiness for the planting season. This ‘by day’
people were normally paid according to the land area they are able to clear in
a given time. For this reason, some of them used to employ all sorts of tricky
methods to make sure trees and shrubs over a wide area are seemingly slashed
down within a twinkle of an eye.
Fraudulent farm laborers
Having employed their tricks to cover a wide area, these ‘by
day’ people will then come to the ‘asoe’(a place on the farm where food and
other activities aside weeding are carried out)to consume large quantities of
food ranging from ‘kokoo ase bayere’,plantain or cassava ‘ampesi’ with
‘kontomire abom’ spiced with ‘kako’ and the good-old ‘ewurefua fish’ and elegantly
garnished with ‘ngo kokoo’(red palm-oil).And in the evening, they will come
home for their wages which was always in cash.
This cleared weeds and shrubs are then left to dry after
which it is burnt. Now, it is after this burning that the works of these ‘by
day’ people are always laid bare. This is because, if the weeds are properly cared, the burning will be thorough and therefore makes it easy to do the
planting of crops. On the other hand, if the weeding is not well-done, you will
find most of the ‘skeletons’ of the shrubs still standing even after the
burning because these shrubs were not cut-off during the clearing stage and
therefore did not dry-up for them to be burnt properly.
This kind of situation always present farmers with serious
challenge in terms of land preparation and if swift action is not taken to deal
with it in time for the planting, it will go a long way to affect the plans of
the farmer by way of missing the right planting season all-together. And by
this time, those who did the first clearing must have squandered the monies
paid to them and are probably busily employing their tricks on some other
unsuspecting farmers.
The already cheated farmer will then have no other choice but
to employ other laborers to clear these shrub-skeletons at an extra cost in
order to be on time for the planting season.
The farmer then comes face to face with the planting season after
going through the land preparation ordeal. And here too, the farmer is never
free from the activities of dubious farm hands.
You reap what you sow
Now, during planting of let’s say maize, the services of ‘by
day’ people are often engaged if the size of the farmer’s field is huge. Here too,
the farmer is not far from being cheated by these farm hands. As a matter of fact,
I have personally been a witness to some of these tricks by farm hands who once
assisted my very own mother on her farm, when I was about 10-years old.
It happened when my mother employed the services of these ‘by
day’ farm hands to help her plant maize on her farm. Here too, the amount of
money paid to these farm-hands is directly proportional to the area of land
planted.
Now, those of you who might not be conversant with how maize
is planted, here are some few tips; small holes are created with either cutlass,hoe
or a piece of wood into which a maximum of 5-seeds are put.However,because the
wage paid to these laborers is directly proportional to both the quantity of
grain and land-area planted, some of these workers tend to dump handful of
grains into each hole so that they will be able to plant bags of grain within a
short period of time.
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