This is a story about a small village in Africa, a story with an important message for all of us. The village is Mwanga in the beautiful plains of Tanzania. The villagers get their inspiration from Mount Kilimanjaro, a defining presence a few miles to the north on the border with Kenya. The village is beautiful in a very African way – forty-five mud and grassy huts set around a larger hut – the home of the village chief. It’s a peaceful place, the ninety-five inhabitants making a quiet living from farming and hunting in the surrounding plain. The setting sun paints a beautiful picture of the village.

Our story is about the village chief – Kofi Chikelu – and his son Winston Chekelu. Chikelu means ‘created by God’ and Kofi is indeed a good person. He has been a perfect chief of the village for over forty years. He has a huge throne in his hut, in which he meets the village elders and makes his – always very just – decisions on any disagreements between the natives of the village. He is well-respected, not only in the village, but also among neighbouring villages across the plain.

But African chiefs, like the rest of us, get old and eventually die. So it was with Kofi, and his son Winston becomes the new chief.

Winston was going to be a modern chief and bring the village up to date. Unlike Kofi, he wears jeans and sweater, and always carries his mobile phone. He introduces ‘Working From Home’ wherever possible, and conducts his meetings with the village elders on ‘Teams’. He has no need for his father’s enormous throne and replaces it with a nice chair from IKEA, trucked all the way from Mombasa. But it doesn’t feel right throwing out the old throne, so with the help of the village lads he stores the throne up in the rafters of his hut.

Winston’s rule over the village settles down and the villages gradually adapt to Winston’s modern ideas. The young ones are happy but the elders are not so sure – they are guided more by the Gods than by the Internet. But on the whole everything is going fine. Winston likes the new arrangement in the hut and sleeps well on his IKEA bed looking up to his father’s throne, still giving him inspiration from the rafters.

All is well until one night when there is a tremendous storm. It starts near the foothills of Kilimanjaro and sweeps furiously across the plain to Mwango. The setting sun disappears into the storm clouds and the wind sets forcefully upon baobab trees around the village. The storm reaches the centre of the village and moves the rafters of Winston’s hut so violently that Kofi’s old, heavy throne is shaken off the rafters and onto Winston, sleeping directly below, killing Winston in an instant.

That is the end of this sad story, but we should take note of the moral:- People who live in grass houses shouldn’t stow thrones.