Sower Sefu

Sefu had not always been so patient. When he was very small he had hated the sowing — it felt slow and fussy, like being made to greet every single person in a long line when he only wanted to reach the food at the end.

The turning came the season the rains were late and the whole village had to plant the millet field together. Sefu had grabbed a big handful of grain and flung it across his row of soil in a great spray, proud of how fast he was — and his grandmother had come along behind him, shaking her head at the bare gaps and the crowded clumps where nothing would grow well. Then she had knelt and shown him: one seed, pressed into one little hole, a hand-width on to the next hole, one seed there. Slow. Even. Every stretch of soil given exactly one chance.

"The field is the board and the board is the field," she'd said. "You cannot cheat a row of soil, and you cannot cheat a row of pits. Go past a house without giving it its seed, and later you will wonder why nothing came up there." Sefu had watched the even rows she planted come up thick and green weeks later while his flung patch grew ragged, and something in him settled. He did not need to be fast. He needed to be fair to every house he passed.

When Sefu was old enough, Nana the Sowing Elder — who kept the great baobab board and taught the village children its ways — beckoned him to sit across from her.

"They tell me you are slow," Nana said, her eyes bright and teasing.

"They tell me that too," said Sefu.

"Show me your slow." Nana pointed at a pit heavy with seeds. Sefu scooped it clean, and began to walk the handful around the ring — one into this house, one into that, calm and unhurried, his lips moving very slightly with the count, until the last seed dropped softly into place. Not one pit had been skipped. Not one had been doubled. Nana looked at the tidy, even trail he had laid down all around her board and smiled the smile she saved for something done properly.

"Child," she said, "that is not slow. That is sure. Any wild player can throw seeds. Only a real one can promise every house exactly what it is owed and then keep the promise all the way round the board. Sit here at my board. You will teach the fair drop, and everything else these children learn will stand on top of it."

Sefu's first student was a restless boy named Bonzi who wanted only to capture, capture, capture, and who dumped his seeds in careless heaps trying to make big things happen fast. His seeds landed anyhow — three here, none there — and his grand plans kept collapsing because he never actually knew where his last seed would fall.

"You keep missing the pit you're aiming for," Sefu told him. "Watch why." He took Bonzi's fat pit of seeds and sowed it the fair way — one, one, one, one — landing each seed in the next house down the line, and his hand came to rest with the final seed in exactly the pit Bonzi had been hoping to reach all along. "See? I didn't guess. I gave one to every house between here and there, so I knew precisely where I'd end. Your dumping throws the count away. The one-at-a-time way is how you steer."

Bonzi tried it. He picked up a pit, and instead of flinging, he made himself set down one seed per house, saying each one under his breath. His hand stopped, at last, exactly where he'd meant it to. He stared at the neat trail he'd laid. "It landed where I wanted," he said, astonished. "I didn't hope. I knew."

"That's the difference," said Sefu. "Dumping is wishing. Sowing is knowing."