For this week's reading I read The Woman, the Ape, and the Child. This was an incredibly dramatic story about a man and a woman who were both slaves from different houses. They were married and had a baby, and each day while the woman worked a big ape babysat the kid. He was gentle and liked the baby and brought him back to his mother at the end of the day. There was a Nice Guy^TM who really wanted to date the girl but she said get lost because she was a decent human being and loved her husband. So the Nice Guy^TM went and told the girl's husband that she was hanging out with an ape. Long story short, the husband tried to shoot the ape but didn't quite kill it, but it got mad and killed the baby which made the husband mad so he killed his wife. Then for some reason the owners of the two slaves got in a huge fight, but finally decided to just kill the Nice Guy^TM because he started it all. I was pretty satisfied with this ending.
I think what's important here is the second guy was a total jerk. He liked a girl who was freaking married, and when she didn't reciprocate his weird feelings he got all butt hurt and felt the need to try to get her in trouble with her husband, which resulted in her death, her baby's death, and a ton of random people's deaths from the fighting. Oh and the ape's death too. So if I were to rewrite this story I would focus more on that side of things, that what he did was seriously messed up and that when a girl tells you no I don't like you you get over it and leave her alone. Not try to ruin her life. Jeez this is just sad that this was a thing all the way back then just like it is now.
Ape with baby from DailyMail
Bibliography: Folk Stories From Southern Nigeria by Elphinstone Dayrell link
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