18. The Sausage Tree.

I feel a little guilty. On Tuesday, I put up a post that claimed to be about magic. But it wasn’t. It was about car guards. So today, I’m going to write about real magic. Just as soon as I’m done telling you about Sausage Trees. This is a Sausage Tree.

Its proper name is kigelia africana. It grows down in the Lowveld. It’s one of the bigger trees down there, about twenty metres tall, with a spreading canopy of thick green leaves that provide a dense, cool spot of shade. It has bright red flowers that look like they should be carnivorous. They’re pollinated by bats.

They have been known to catch and eat small birds.

But that’s not why we are interested in the Sausage Tree. We are interested in the Sausage Tree because of these;

No-one knows where this tree got its common name from.

The fruits are huge. They can weigh up to 10kg. They don’t seem very appetising, but a few creatures do eat them, like elephants and bushpigs. And they’re quite popular with the locals. But not for eating. They are, as promised above, magic.

One of the oldest recorded forms of magic is sympathetic magic. You know all about it, because you know about voodoo dolls. The principle is simple. You find an object to represent the thing or person you want to perform your magic on. In the voodoo doll example, this would be the little doll. Then you magically imbue that object with the essence of your real target. For your voodoo doll, you would use fingernails or hair clippings. Then you perform a spell.

Your target is now in your power, because what happens to the object happens to the target. Go get yourself some pins. You have work to do.

The sausage tree is not used for evil. It is the traditional answer to a problem that has plagued mankind since the dawn of time and, judging by some of the spam I get in my inbox, plagues him still.

This is where things get delicate. I am a little embarrassed. But, in the spirit of scientific enquiry, I will press on. I read about the magic of the Sausage Tree in an interview with one Merriam Mdaka in the Daily Sun, a local paper, so perhaps the best path forward here is to let her explain;

“My brother’s girlfriends always complained about his small penis. He is a handsome man, always wearing expensive clothes, but his biggest problem was his small manhood and women kept away from him.”

An awful state of affairs, I’m sure you’ll agree. But fear not, gentle reader, help was at hand;

“After consulting some elderly people they referred him to the Mpfunguri tree. My brother applied all the methods he was given until his penis grew to the size he wanted. Today my brother is a happy man and his girlfriends no longer complain because he is now a real man.”

An Mpfunguri tree is, as I’m sure you have guessed, a Sausage Tree. Quite why the Sausage tree was singled out I cannot even begin to imagine.

The fruit. It’s because of the fruit.

It works like this; you climb up the tree in the dead of night and select yourself a suitable young fruit, with which you perform a rather unsavoury little ritual “while communicating with the tree that you want your manhood to grow bigger”. Then you go home without looking back.

And that’s just about it. As the fruit grows, so do you. And when you’re satisfied, all you do is cut down the fruit and destroy it. It may seem a little unorthodox, but it beats the hell out of surgery.

Magic is not something to be taken lightly, though. There are risks;

“The danger is when you forget where the tree is or when someone else cuts the fruit because then your penis will grow to the size of a belt or snake”

This, I’m sure you will agree, could be a little awkward in the showers down at the gym, and you would no longer be welcome at the public swimming pool. But the risks don’t end there;

“You don‘t tell your friends about your plans because they can cut the fruit and hide it. That will make the penis grow too big too quickly and it can lead to your death as you will not be able to walk.”

The standards of friendship are apparently a little different down in the Lowveld. As are the mechanics of death (“Cause of death, doctor?” “Not walking!”)

Before South Africa did away with capital punishment, we did not use the electric chair. We simply used “the chair”.

I don’t think we’re making the best of this situation. I read the other day about “cosmetic surgery holidays”. You nip off to a secluded and discrete hotel, where you can get yourself a nose job and some liposuction and then lounge around the pool for a few weeks, drinking Mojitos and shoving painkillers down your throat before going home and denying that you look any different.

Why not magic penis tree holidays? There’s an untapped market here. We could set up a few discrete guest houses where wealthy foreign tourists could stay while the sausage trees worked their magic. The days would be quiet, warm and peaceful. The nights would be a little noisy though, split by regular shrieks and curses as German stockbrokers and dentists from Texas came tumbling out of 20 metre tall trees, pants around their ankles, fingers stretched upward as if still reaching for the choicest fruit.

Gott im Himmel!

But that is all in the future. For now, we should just be happy with what we’ve got. The Sausage Tree could a blessing, and we should be happy to have it. I will leave the last word up to the good Ms Mdaka;

“In our country, most of the women divorce because their partners fail to satisfy them in bed. Men with small penises must try the Mpfunguri fruit and their problems will be solved forever.”