FINGER LICKING GOD

It may or may not not have occurred to you that most township dogs and urban strays in Africa survive by scavenging alone. You can be certain that very few of them get a silver bowl of Pedigree with gravy every day just before they jump on the owners beds for a good kip. I have wept many times when travelling through townships and homelands in this country. The sight of skeletal, mangy, miserable looking creatures sniffing in the dirt is just too much for my old heart.

But while driving through a particularly brutal, downtown area full of noisy taxis and exuberant third-world shoppers the other day it occurred to me that these dogs may have received a bit of a life-line from an unlikely source. I saw the piles of litter lying in the streets and gutters, and when I saw the long queue at a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet a few moments later, the proverbial light went on. I found myself wondering how many thousands of KFC bones get discarded in the streets of inner African cities every day, and I wanted to shout for joy. The concept of a God would be a very relative thing to voiceless creatures, but to the millions of utterly disenfranchised stray dogs of Africa , Colonel Sanders may well be one.