I was born on a farm in the district of Ifafa in Zululand, Natal, in South Africa. That farm was hundreds of acres in extent. A wide variety of fruit and vegetables was grown for sale at public markets in towns and Cities along the Indian Ocean coast of Natal.

Along with all the countless usual farm problems, our farm, along with some of the neighboring farms, had a unique problem: wild Monkeys.

Our farm, along with some others, were in a section of the Country wedged between two forests miles apart and miles in their north-south extentions.

Except for the Winter months of June, July, August, tribes of wild Monkeys would unexpectedly travel on the ground from one forest to the other. At those times, lasting up to three hours at a time, all outdoors farm work stopped. All humans and domestic animals took shelter indoors. All windows had adjustable wood-covers to protect the panes.

As they scampered along the ground, screaming and fighting among themselves, those Monkeys threw one another against farm buildings along the way.

Surprisingly, although the Monkey problem was generations old, no farmer had ever come up with a non-violent retaliatory solution. No farmer, that is, until my Granny.

Snakes on a farm in tropical Africa is as normal a feature as vegetation. In tropical and equatorial Africa, where there is green, there are snakes: greens, browns, blacks, red, and some other nameless colours.

Sadly, most snakes in Africa are venomous. Fortunately, there are medicinal remedies against venomous snakebites, if the bites are below a person’s knees or elbows; and if the medicines are administered within minutes of the bite.

All farmers in our section of the country were ever mindful of the farm snake issue. Granny’s mindfulness triggered a solution because Granny’s mindfulness was an obsession.

Granny read a little of the Bible every day. The Bible story of the snake named Nehushtan disturbed her, forever.

With most if not all readers of the Bible, that anonymous snake in Eden, was not an issue because it got what it morally deserved. At the beginning, Granny was like most if not all those other readers of the Bible in that she paid no attention to that Eden-snake culprit.

I was many, many years long gone from our farm when Granny died in her sleep at over a hundred years old in 1973. Family members who were with her in her last days, said she spoke quietly about the Biblical snake named Nehushtan right up to the end.

In the Bible story, Jehovah, almighty God, ordered Moses to make a bronze statue of a snake coiled about a pole, and to lift that statue high for everyone to see. Everyone who was bitten by a poisonous wild snake on the ground would not die if they looked upon that bronze image of a snake. The name given to that statue was Nehushtan, “The little brazen thing.”

The Bible omits to state if Nehushtan itself was of a venomous or non-venomous snake.

For generations after, a great many of the people of Moses’ Israelites took to worshipping Nehushtan as a god.

What troubled Granny about the story, in the first instance, was that God’s order to Moses to construct a nehushtan was in direct conflict with the commandment God Himself had given to Moses on Mount Sinai previously:

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.”

In the second instance, Granny was appalled that centuries later, Jesus, the Son of God, endorsed his Father’s blatant premeditated disobedience by proclaiming:

“And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.”

Contributing considerably to Granny’s anguish was her puzzlement with Jehovah’s choice of a Nehushtan snake-form of salvation after He Himself had so terribly cursed that anonymous real snake in Eden, a creature among the countless creatures Jehovah Himself had created by speaking His very own Word:

“Thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field. Upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.”

In her deep pain of spirit, Granny found a feint glimmer of hope in Jehovah’s willing expression of repentance in the Bible; at least five times.

Granny intuited, if by Nehushtan’s form Jehovah used a serpent to embody eternal forgiveness and salvation as will be realized ultimately and finally in Jehovah’s only begotten child, Jesus, our Messiah and Savior, could that mean that Jehovah has, too, forgiven that anonymous culprit serpent in Eden He so terribly cursed; Jehovah’s sixth and most significant repentance?

Precisely how Granny’s intense grappling with the snake stories in the Bible led to her coming up with a most practical solution to our farm’s Monkeys problem, will never be known. It might have been just that Granny took to reading about snakes outside the Bible whenever she had the opportunity.

None of us knew that there was an official small snake zoo in the City of Durban. It was situated on a site that made the shores of the Indian Ocean its backyard. Although for a small entrance fee it was open to citizen visitors, it did not advertise its location. Its main purpose was scientific herpetology: the study of reptiles.

Although the snake zoo itself closed down sooner or later, it’s name lives on in the present-day location of Durban’s Snake Farm Beach.

Granny came to know about the existence of the Durban Snake zoo, approximately fifty miles north of our farm. One weekday, a few family members visited the Snake zoo.

It was there that they were informed that all Monkeys, even the most gigantic of Gorillas and Apes, are insanely afraid of snakes. I think nobody on our farm knew that fact in Nature.

It was there, too, that we were informed that there were snakes that were not poisonous to us, although they ate poisonous snakes!

In all my years on our poisonous-snakes infested farm, I never heard anyone state that fact.

Granny’s solution was simple: we infest our farm with snakes not poisonous to us, but ubiquitously visible to those marauding simians.

The Snake zoo persons showed us how to populate our farm with Coachwhip and Indigo species of non-poisonous snakes. We planted flower bushes along the Monkey routes on our farm, and snake-infested the bushes. When we informed neighboring farmers, they happily took similar measures.

The best of all measures were our expeditions to populate the mountain forests with Coachwhips and Indigos.

These measures implemented on all the farms and in the distant forests, brought the Monkeys problem to an end in two years.

Granny died peacefully of old age in 1973 on the farm. She was 102 years old. By then, there hadn’t been a Monkeys problem on any farm in over twenty years.

Contact Ezra
(Unless you type the author's name
in the subject line of the message
we won't know where to send it.)