Remembering our traditional games |31 July 2021
Young girls watch a lady plays a game of hopscotch
Gone are those days when a bicycle rim and a stick would provide hours of enjoyment to a 10-year-old boy.
Those days when children in the neighbourhoods would gather together on a Sunday afternoon for a game of hide-and-seek or cops and robbers, are now nostalgic memories of our Creole childhood.
Marbles and spinning tops are now virtually obsolete. They’ve been replaced by playstations and mobile games which unfortunately have become an addiction for many children and a source of exasperation to many parentsand … do I need to mention Facebook?
Those of us who have now reached the statutory retirement age of 63 years will remember how our childhood years of the late 1960s and early1970s were halcyon days of traditional games. Every neighbourhood was animatedwith the gaiety and the pleasant sounds of gregarious children at play. A group of girls would be playing skipping rope or a game of hopscotch, while boys play marbles or a game of cops and robbers. You would also notice a lone girl honing her skills at five stones or a boy demonstrating his skills with a spinning top. Games were not gender-restricted. In other words, very often boys and girls would play the same games together.
Girls would enjoy the thrill of knocking marbles out of the ring just as boys were always eager to prove that they could skip faster. Of course, Seychellois children of the late 60s were good at improvising: a length of vine was used as a skipping rope or a piece of an asbestos tile was pushed in the numbered squares for hopscotch.
I have no doubt that most of us would still remember at least a couple of those expressions that we used in a marble game: you were ‘mazet’ (clumsy) if you happened to miss striking your opponent’s marble. When you ‘pranlerim’, it meant getting the best vantage-point from which you could successfully strike your opponent’s marble. Definitely, you can’t have forgotten our ritual ‘bayondi bi deor’ at the beginning of a hide-and-seek game to know who will be the hiders and who will be the seeker: in a skipping rope game, the girl who is skipping would shout ‘piman’ if she wanted the rope to be swung faster, really faster!
It appears that our traditional games began to lose popularity in the early1980s when television arrived in our homes and provided families with the modern Western mode of entertainment.
Contributed by the National Museums
