9 Sales Lessons from A Popular African Folktale

The Tale

Once upon a time, there was a palm-wine tapper who chanced upon a gathering of daemons while making his way home through the forest. Tired, he was returning home with 20 gourds filled with nothing but his frustrations. After a hard day of scarring palm trees that wouldn’t yield any sap, all he’d managed to collect was a quarter-full gourd of condensed palm-wine from an ailing tree.

As he approached this gathering of strange beings, he ducked in the thicket, with his heart in his mouth and his heartbeat drumming louder than the plangent beats of a possessed onibata. From his hideout, he could see the otherworldly beings. They were unlike anything he had ever seen before. One had a head that looked like plumes of smoke and feathers in grey, yellow and wine colours. Another one walked with its head, and its legs swung crazily as it moved. One curled into a ball and rolled around the huddle, while another stood 10 foot tall covered in eyes. No sooner had he struggled to reign in his wildly beating heart than one of the daemons turned its huge nose up to the sky and signaled the rest to stop. The curious daemon then began moving slowly in the direction of where the palm-wine tapper hid, petrified. With each advancing stride, the palm-wine tapper sunk deeper to earth, willing it to yield and shield him but to no avail.