Tales by moonlight thrives on call-and-response give-and-take. “Story, story,” the storyteller invites the audience, honey in his voice, suspense in his eyes. “Story!” the audience booms back. “Who knows the meaning of this proverb? A fish rottens from the head,” the storyteller asks. Under this moonlight, I am the storyteller. I can see some eager hands up, waving frantically to answer my question, confidence breathing heavily, but, please, please and please, allow me to illustrate this proverb with a short story.
In the 1990s, a random Abdulrasheed found his way into the US. Burning with unquenchable greed fuelled by criminality, the empty madcap soon showed up at a branch of BankBoston in Boston, USA, presenting a stolen cheque of £247,000 from the world-renowned aviation company, Boeing. Before the ink of the signature he wrote on the cheque dried up, cops had flooded the bank, and Abdulrasheed was handcuffed and bundled away in a police vehicle.
Hahahaha! “Were ni Abdulrashidi pe Oyinbo, o ra ago pannkan, o ni ko ni àláàmù.” Abdulrasheed thought the white man was a fool; he bought a wristwatch from the white man for a penny and complained that the watch did not have an alarm. After he was busted in the £247,000 scam, the notorious ‘419’ kingpin was indicted in another scam, with the American police charging him with forging a £59,000 cheque, using the name of one Thomas Eyring.
