Softly Softly Catchee April 30
Samantha has lived on this island her whole life, but she feels like an outsider, which may explain why she befriends expats, artists, and other castaways. She says she needs to return to the source of her Indian roots, albeit four generations removed from the north country. Her sensible car is adorned with a dashboard Hanuman, the monkey deity, Hindu patron-saint of indentured servants everywhere, embodying loyalty, chastity, and selfless devotion—traits I would hardly associate with monkeys, but this is what gods are for.
The dry season has taken its toll on the rainforest. The hillside is browning against its better nature, wild fruit are falling before they are ready, and water has become a desperately sought commodity. Edith Falls is reduced to barren shale. The ground is littered with dead fall, the sky smoky from countless small bush fires in Tucker and Petit Valleys. Conditions are perfect—we are here to catch sight of a monkey.
“If it were not for the depressing heat and the urgency of the work, one could sit down and laugh to tears at the absurdity of the thing, but under the circumstances it is a little wearing. But our motto is the old West Coast proverb, ‘Softly, softly, catchee monkey’; in other words, ‘Don’t flurry; patience gains the day.’“
Lord-Major RSS Baden-Powell wrote this in 1896, while eulogizing the fallen Ashanti King Prempeh, and the expression achieved popularity during the Boer War, and subsequently with Baden-Powell’s lionization as founder of the Boy Scouts. Earlier, in 1832, lexicographers at Oxford attributed the proverb, “safly, safly, catch monkey, to the “rude and infant communities…in the colony of Demerara,“ home to the Ashanti. In 1833, the year of Emancipation, a signal station designed by Prince Kofi Nti, son of Ashanti King Kofi Calclai, was built atop Cumberland Hill, at Fort George, as a monument to constancy.
The saying shares a history with folk-magic traditions—like Baku, the little evil spirit known as Buck in Trinidad—originating in Ghana, West Africa, and spreading to the cane plantations of Guyana, home to howlers and capuchins, as well as British masters with an ear for monkey metaphors. But if the phrase preaches patience and design, then it became increasingly important that it not belong to negroes, so “catch“ became “catchee“ in the late 1800’s, to serve a baseless claim that it was a Chinese proverb. Anyplace with monkeys apparently will do for the English.
But only Old World monkeys can be captured by the tail, which hangs straight and flaccid; whereas, the prehensile limb of capuchins and howlers can too easily bring a gasping hand to its incisors, turning patience into prey. Sam and I muster no hope of catching one, particularly given the sharp bite marks covering dozens of unripened green mango on the dry forest floor. At least eight of them pace the balance beams of leaning bamboo, wood cracking like a Tamboo ensemble, pausing occasionally to watch me peel my fragrant banana. A youngster in tow clings to its mother’s fur. The adults’ tails bear the inward curl of the Thinker’s fingers. They will not permit closer examination. Capture seems all but impossible. Hanuman forbids such selfishness.
“Softly, softly,“ we agree and creep forward.