Why mosquitoes buzz in people’s ears?
By Aardema Verna (1975)
Why mosquitoes buzz in peoples ears? Is an ancient West African story about a beautiful Iguana. When Iguana was ready enough to marry, all creatures from the walks of life came to confess their love for her and demonstrated their skills. Since there were many creatures with impressive skills, Iguana had difficulties choosing a husband. Then Mosquito came along. Who was so determined to marry her. However, the Iguana didn’t quite find him qualified for the position. In fact, she told him off in front of the other creatures and that made Mosquito very hurt and ashamed.
From that day forward, Mosquito decided that each time he runs into Ear, he would vigorously buzz in her Ear to annoy and make him known to her. Than the Iguana not wanting to hear such nonsense decided to plug her ears with sticks and thus, fails to listen to the python. In assuming that the Iguana is angry with the python, he plots a mischief which resulted in him hiding in the Rabbit’s hole which disturbed the Rabbit.
Inconclusion, this chain of events goes on until a baby owl was killed as result of confusion and the King Lion trying to investigate who actually killed the owl and the story ends in the Mosquito taking the blame for starring up chaos in the forest. Why was anyone angry at Mosquito? Well, because it was the Mosquito who annoyed the Iguana, who frightened the Python, who scared the Rabbit, who startled the Cow, who alarmed the Monkey, who accidentally killed the Owlet and who made the mother Owl to not wake the sun so that the day can come.
The history of the story began way back as an ancient African tale when the elders of a community would gather all the members of the family and sit them down around a fire to educate younger children about the morals of miscommunication and how lying to elders can cause mistrust between to people. And the social themes expressed in the story being that children will engage in finding out the cause and effect of a problem. More like solving the problem that raised out of “why” an insect obtain the characteristics of “buzzing” and solving the problem by using animal adventures to explain their behaviors.
We can probably also re-tell this tale to a contemporary audience by using human behaviors.
Once long time ago, in the Western part of Africa live a beautiful woman who couldn’t decided on whom she wanted to marry. The beautiful woman was so picky and she caused such a raffle between the men of the village. However, there was this one annoying man who couldn’t quite understand why all the man in the village where so hopelessly in love with this one woman. So the annoying man set out to seduce the beautiful woman, marry her and later divorce her. Just to prove a point that not every beautiful woman can keep a man or not every man can love a beautiful lady.
