THE LIONS ARE ASLEEP THIS NIGHT

The white man was drunk again. Robert Oinenke crossed the narrow, graveled street and stepped up on the boardwalk at the other side. Out of the corner of his eyes he saw the white man raving. The man sat, feet out, back against a wall, shaking his head, punctuating his monologue with cursing words.

Some said he had been a mercenary in one of the border wars up the coast, one of those conflicts in which two countries had become one; or one country, three. Robert could not remember which. Mr. Lemuel, his history teacher, had mentioned it only in passing.

Since showing up in Onitsha town the white man had worn the same khaki pants. They were of a military cut, now torn and stained. The shirt he wore today was a dashiki, perhaps variegated bright blue and red when made, now faded purple. He wore a cap with a foreign insignia. Some said he had been a general; others, a sergeant. His loud harangues terrified schoolchildren. Robert’s classmates looked on the man as a forest demon. Sometimes the constables came and took him away; sometimes they only asked him to be quiet, and he would subside.

Mostly he could be seen propped against a building, talking to himself. Occasionally somebody would give him money. Then he would make his way to the nearest store or market stall that sold palm wine.

He had been in Robert’s neighborhood for a few months. Before that he had stayed near the marketplace.

Robert did not look at him. Thinking of the marketplace, he hurried his steps. The first school bell rang.

“You will not be dawdling at the market,” his mother had said as he readied himself for school. “Miss Mbene spoke to me of your tardiness yesterday.”

She took the first of many piles of laundry from her wash baskets and placed them near the ironing board. There was a roaring fire in the hearth, and her irons were lined up in the racks over it. The house was already hot as an oven and would soon be as damp as the monsoon season.

His mother was still young and pretty but worn. She had supported them since Robert’s father had been killed in an accident while damming a tributary of the Niger. He and forty other men had been swept away when a cofferdam burst. Only two of the bodies had ever been found. There was a small monthly check from the company her husband had worked for, and the government check for single mothers.

Her neighbor Mrs. Yortebe washed, and she ironed. They took washing from the well-to-do government workers and business people in the better section.

“I shan’t be late,” said Robert, torn with emotions. He knew he wouldn’t spend a long time there this morning and be late for school, but he did know that he would take the long route that led through the marketplace.

He put his schoolbooks and supplies in his satchel. His mother turned to pick up somebody’s shirt from the pile. She stopped, looking at Robert.

“What are you going to do with two copybooks?” she asked.

Robert froze. His mind tried out ten lies. His mother started toward him.

“I’m nearly out of pages,” he said. She stopped. “If we do much work today, I shall have to borrow.”

“I buy you ten copybooks at the start of each school year and then again at the start of the second semester. Money does not grow on the breadfruit trees, you know?”

“Yes, Mother,” he said. He hoped she would not look in the copybooks; see that one was not yet half-filled with schoolwork and that the other was still clean and empty. His mother referred to all extravagance as “a heart-tearing waste of time and money.”

“You have told me not to borrow from others. I thought I was using foresight.”

“Well,” said his mother, “see you don’t go to the marketplace. It will only make you envious of all the things you can’t have. And do not be late to school one more time this term, or I shall have you ever ironing.”

“Yes, Mother,” he said, Running to her, he rubbed his nose against her cheek. “Good-bye.”

“Good day. And don’t go near that marketplace!”

“Yes, Mother.”

The market! Bright, pavilioned stalls covered a square Congo mile of ground filled with gaudy objects, goods, animals, and people. The Onitsha market was a crossroads of the trade routes, near the river and the railway station. Here a thousand vendors sold their wares on weekdays, many times that on weekends and holidays.

Robert passed the great piles of melons, guinea fowl in cages, tables of toys and geegaws, all bright and shiny in the morning light.

People talked in five languages, haggling with each other, calling back and forth, joking. Here men from Senegal stood in their bright red hats and robes. Robert saw a tall Waziri, silent and regal, indicating the prices he would pay with quick movements of his long fingers, while the merchant he stood before added two more each time. A few people with raised tattoos on their faces, backcountry people, wandered wide eyed from table to table, talking quietly among themselves.

Scales clattered, food got weighed, chickens and ducks rattled, a donkey brayed near the big corral where larger livestock was sold. A goat wagon delivered yams to a merchant, who began yelling because they were still too hard. The teamster shrugged his shoulders and pointed to his bill of lading. The merchant threw down his apron and headed toward Onitsha’s downtown, cursing the harvest, the wagoners, and the food cooperatives.

Robert passed by the food stalls, though the smell of ripe mangoes made his mouth water. He had been skipping lunch for three weeks, saving his Friday pennies. At the schoolhouse far away the ten-minute bell rang. He would have to hurry.

He came to the larger stalls at the far edge of the market where the booksellers were. He could see the bright paper jackets and dark type titles and some of the cover pictures on them from fifty yards away. He went toward the stall of Mr. Fred’s Printers and High-Class Bookstore, which was his favorite. The clerk, who knew him by now, nodded to Robert as he came into the stall area. He was a nice young man in his twenties, dressed in a three-piece suit. He looked at the clock.

“Aren’t you going to be late for school this fine morning?”

Robert didn’t want to take the time to talk but said, “I know the books I want. It will only be a moment.”

The clerk nodded.

Robert ran past the long shelves with their familiar titles: Drunkards Believe the Bar Is Heaven; Ruth, the Sweet Honey That Poured Away; Johnny, the Most Worried Husband; The Lady That Forced Me to Be Romantic; The Return of Mabel, in a Drama on How I Was About Marrying My Sister, the last with a picture of Miss Julie Engebe, the famous drama actress, on the cover, which Robert knew was just a way to get people to buy the book.

Most of them were paper covered, slim, about fifty pages thick. Some had bright stenciled lettering on them, others drawings; a few had photographios. Robert turned at the end of the shelf and read the titles of others quickly: The Adventures of Constable Joe; Eddy, the Coal-City Boy; Pocket Encyclopedia of Etiquette and Good Sense; Why Boys Never Trust Money-Monger Girls; How to Live Bachelor’s Life and a Girl’s Life Without Too Many Mistakes; Ibo Folktales You Should Know.

He found what he was looking for: Clio’s Whips by Oskar Oshwenke. It was as thin as the others, and the typefaces on the red, green, and black cover were in three different type styles. There was even a different i in the word whips.

Robert took it from the rack (it had been well thumbed, but Robert knew it was the only copy in the store.) He went down two more shelves, to where they kept the dramas, and picked out The Play of the Swearing Stick by Otuba Malewe and The Raging Turk, or Bajazet II by Thomas Goffe, an English European who had lived three hundred years ago.

Robert returned to the counter, out of breath from his dash through the stall. “These three,” he said, spreading them out before him.

The clerk wrote figures on two receipt papers. “That will be twenty-four new cents, young sir,” he said.

Robert looked at him without comprehension. “But yesterday they would have been twenty-two cents!” he said.

The clerk looked back down at the books. Then Robert noticed the price on the Goffe play, six cents, had been crossed out and eight cents written over that in big, red pencil.

“Mr. Fred himself came through yesterday and looked over the stock,” said the clerk. “Some prices he raised, others he liberally reduced. There are now many more two-cent books in the bin out front,” he said apologetically.

“But . . . I only have twenty-two new cents.” Robert’s eyes began to burn.

The clerk looked at the three books. “I’ll tell you what, young sir. I shall let you have these three books for twenty-two cents. When you get two cents more, you are to bring them directly to me. If the other clerk or Mr. Fred is here, you are to make no mention of this matter. Do you see?”

“Yes, yes. Thank you!” he handed all his money across. He knew it was borrowing, which his mother did not want him to do, but he wanted these books so badly.

He stuffed the pamphlets and receipts into his satchel. As he ran from the bookstall he saw the nice young clerk reach into his vest pocket, fetch out two pennies, and put them into the cashbox. Robert ran as fast as he could toward school. He would have to hurry or he would be late.

Mr. Yotofeka, the principal, looked at the tardy slip.

“Robert,” he said, looking directly into the boy’s eyes, “I am very disappointed in you. You are a bright pupil. Can you give me one good reason why you have been late to school three times in two weeks?”

“No, sir,” said Robert. He adjusted his glasses, which were taped at one of the earpieces.

“No reason at all?”

“It took longer than I thought to get to school.”

“You are thirteen years old, Robert Oinenke!” His voice rose. “You live less than a Congo mile from this schoolhouse, which you have been attending for seven years. You should know by now how long it takes to get from your home to the school!”

Robert winced. “Yessir.”

“Hand me your book satchel, Robert.”

“But I . . .”

“Let me see.”

“Yessir.” He handed the bag to the principal, who was standing over him. The man opened it, took out the schoolbooks and copybooks, then the pamphlets. He looked down at the receipt, then at Robert’s record file, which was open like the big book of the Christian Saint Peter in heaven.

“Have you been not eating to buy this trash?”

“No, sir.”

“No, yes? Or yes, no?”

“Yes. I haven’t.”

“Robert, two of these are pure trash. I am glad to see you have brought at least one good play. But your other choices are just, just . . . You might as well have poured your coppers down a civet hole as buy these.” He held up Clio’s Whips. “Does your mother know you read these things? And this play! The Swearing Stick is about the primitive superstitions we left behind before independence. You want people to believe in this kind of thing again? You wish blood rituals, tribal differences to come back? The man who wrote this was barely literate, little more than just come in from the brush country.”

“But . . .”

“But me no buts. Use the library of this schoolhouse, Robert, or the fine public one. Find books that will uplift you, appeal to your higher nature. Books written by learned people, who have gone to university.” Robert knew that Mr. Yotofeka was proud of his education and that he and others like him looked down on the bookstalls and their books. He probably only read books published by the universities or real books published in Lagos or Cairo.

Mr. Yotofeka became stern and businesslike. “For being tardy you will do three days detention after school. You will help Mr. Labuba with his cleaning.”

Mr. Labuba was the custodian. He was large and slow and smelled of old clothes and yohimbe snuff. Robert did not like him.

The principal wrote a note on a form and handed it to Robert. “You will take this note home to your hardworking mother and have her sign it. You will return it to me before second bell tomorrow. If you are late again, Robert Oinenke, it will not be a swearing stick I will be dealing with you about.”

“Yes, sir,” said Robert.

When he got home that afternoon Robert went straight to his small alcove at the back of the house where his bed and worktable were. His table had his pencils, ink pen, eraser, ruler, compass, protractor, and glue. He took his copybooks from his satchel, then placed the three books he’d bought in the middle of his schoolbook shelf above the scarred table. He sat down to read the plays. His mother was still out doing the shopping as she always was when he got out of school.

Mr. Yotofeka was partly right about The Play of the Swearing Stick. It was not a great play. It was about a man in the old days accused of a crime. Unbeknownst to him, the real perpetrator of the crime had replaced the man’s swearing stick with one that looked and felt just like it. (Robert knew this was implausible.) But the false swearing stick carried out justice anyway. It rose up from its place on the witness cushion beside the innocent man when he was questioned at the chief’s court. It went out the window and chased the criminal and beat him to death. (In the stage directions the stick is lifted from the pillow by a technician with wires above the stage and disappears out of the window, and the criminal is seen running back and forth yelling and holding his head, bloodier each time he goes by.)

Robert really liked plays. He watched the crowds every afternoon going toward the playhouse in answer to the drums and horns sounded when a drama was to be staged. He had seen the children’s plays, of course—Big Magic, The Trusting Chief, Daughter of the Yoruba. He had also seen the plays written for European children—Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, Nose of Fire. Everyone his age had—the Niger Culture Center performed the plays for the lower grades each year.

But when he could get tickets, through the schools or his teachers, he had gone to see real plays, both African and European. He had gone to see folk plays for adults, especially Why the Snake Is Slick, and he had seen Ourelay the Congo playwright’s King of All He Surveyed and Scream of Africa. He had seen tragedies and comedies from most of the African nations, even a play from Nippon, which he had liked to look at but in which not much happened. (Robert had liked the women actresses best, until he found out they weren’t women; then he didn’t know what to think.) But it was the older plays he liked best, those from England of the early 1600’s.

The first one he’d seen was Westward for Smelts! by Christopher Kingstone, then The Pleasant Historie of Darastus and Fawnia by Rob Greene. There had been a whole week of Old English European plays at the Culture Hall, at night, lit by incandescent lights. His school had gotten free tickets for anyone who wanted them. Robert was the only student his age who went to all the performances, though he saw several older students there each night.

There had been Caesar and Pompey by George Chapman, Mother Bomby by John Lyly, The Bugbears by John Jeffere, The Tragicall History of Romeus and Juliet by Arthur Broke, Love’s Labour Won by W. Shaksper, The Tragedy of Dido, Queen of Carthage by Marlow and Nash, and on the final night, and best of all, The Sparagus Garden by Richard Brome.

That such a small country could produce so many good playwrights in such a short span of time intrigued Robert, especially when you consider that they were fighting both the Turks and the Italians during the period. Robert began to read about the country and its history in books from the school library. Then he learned that the Onitsha Market sold many plays from that era (as there were no royalty payments to people dead two hundred fifty years.) He had gone there, buying at first from the penny bin, then the two-cent tables.

Robert opened his small worktable drawer. Beneath his sixth-form certificate were the pamphlets from Mr. Fred’s. There were twenty-six of them; twenty of them plays, twelve of those from the England of three hundred years before.

He closed the drawer. He looked at the cover of Thomas Goffe’s play: he had bought that morning—The Raging Turk, or Bajazet II. Then he opened the second copybook his mother had seen that morning. On the first page he penciled, in his finest hand:

MOTOFUKO’S REVENGE:

A Play in Three Acts

By Robert Oinenke

After an hour his hand was tired from writing. He had gotten to the place where King Motofuko was to consult with his astrologer about the attacks by Chief Renebe on neighboring tribes. He put the copybook down and began to read the Goffe play. It was good, but he found that after writing dialogue he was growing tired of reading it. He put the play away.

He didn’t really want to read Clio’s Whips yet; he wanted to save it for the weekend. But he could wait no longer. Making sure the front door was closed, though it was still hot outside, he opened the red, green, and black covers and read the title page:

CLIO’S WHIPS: The Abuses of Historie

by the White Races

By Oskar Oshwenke

“So the Spanish cry was Land Ho! and they sailed in the three famous ships, the Nina, the Pinta, and the Elisabetta to the cove on the island. Colon took the lead boat, and he and his men stepped out onto the sandy beach. All the air was full of parrots, and it was very wonderful there! But they searched and sailed around for five days and saw nothing but big bunches of animals, birds, fish, and turtles.

“Thinking they were in India, they sailed on looking for habitations, but on no island where they stopped were there any people at all! From one of the islands they saw far off the long lines of a much bigger island or a mainland, but tired from their search, and provendered from hunting and fishing, they returned to Europe and told of the wonders they had found, of the New Lands. Soon everyone wanted to go there.”

This was exciting stuff to Robert. He reread the passage again and flipped the pages as he had for a week in Mr. Fred’s. He came to his favorite illustration (which was what made him buy this book rather than another play.) It was the picture of a hairy elephant, with its trunk raised and with that magical stuff, snow, all around it. Below was a passage Robert had almost memorized:

“The first man then set foot at the Big River (now the New Thames) of the Northern New Land. Though he sailed from the Portingals, he came from England (which had just given the world its third pope), and his name was Cromwell. He said the air above the Big River was a darkened profusion of pigeons, a million and a million times a hundred hundred, and they covered the skies for hours as they flew.

“He said there were strange humped cattle here (much like the European wisents) that fed on grass, on both sides of the river. They stood so thickly that you could have walked a hundred Congo miles on their backs without touching the ground.

“And here and there among them stood great hairy mammuts, which we now know once lived in much of Europe, so much like our elephant, which you see in the game parks today, but covered with red-brown hair, with much bigger tusks, and much more fierce-looking.

“He said none of the animals were afraid of him, and he walked among them, petting some, handing them tender tufts of grass. They had never seen a man or heard a human voice, and had not been hunted since the very beginning of time. He saw that a whole continent of skins and hides lay before European man for the taking, and a million feathers for hats and decorations. He knew he was the first man ever to see this place, and that it was close to Paradise. He returned to Lisboa after many travails, but being a good Catholic, and an Englishman, he wasn’t believed. So he went back to England and told his stories there.”

Now Robert went back to work on his play after carefully sharpening his pencil with a knife and setting his eraser close at hand. He began with where King Motofuko calls in his astrologer about Chief Renebe:

motofuko: Like to those stars which blaze forth over head, brighter even than the seven ordered planets? And having waxed so lustily, do burn out in a week?

astrologer: Just so! Them that awe to see their burning forget the shortness of their fire. The moon, though ne’er so hot, stays and outlasts all else.

motofuko: Think you then this Chief Renebe be but a five months’ wonder?

astrologer: The gods themselves do weep to see his progress! Starts he toward your lands a blazing beacon, yet will his followers bury his ashes and cinders in some poor hole ’fore he reaches the Mighty Niger. Such light makes gods jealous.

Robert heard his mother talking with a neighbor outside. He closed his copybook, put Clio’s Whips away, and ran to help her carry in the shopping.

During recess the next morning he stayed inside, not joining the others in the playground. He opened his copybook and took up the scene where Chief Renebe, who has conquered all King Motofuko’s lands and had all his wives and (he thinks) all the king’s children put to death, questions his general about it on the way to King Motofuko’s capital.

renebe: And certaine, you, all his children dead, all his warriors sold to the Moorish dogs?

general: As sure as the sun doth rise and set, Your Highness. I myself his children’s feet did hold, swing them like buckets round my conk, their limbs crack, their necks and heads destroy. As for his chiefs, they are now sent to grub ore and yams in the New Lands, no trouble to you forevermore. Of his cattle we made great feast, his sheep drove we all to the four winds.

This would be important to the playgoer. King Motofuko had escaped, but he had also taken his four-year-old-son, Motofene, and tied him under the bellwether just before the soldiers attacked in the big battle of Yotele. When the soldiers drove off the sheep, they sent his son to safety, where the shepherds would send him far away, where he would grow up and plot revenge.

The story of King Motofuko was an old one any Onitsha theatergoer would know. Robert was taking liberties with it—the story of the sheep was from one of his favorite parts of the Odyssey, where the Greeks were in the cave of Polyphemus. (The real Motofene had been sent away to live as hostage-son to the chief of the neighboring state long before the attack by Chief Renebe.) And Robert was going to change some other things, too. The trouble with real life, Robert thought, was that it was usually dull and full of people like Mr. Yotofeka and Mr. Labuba. Not like the story of King Motofuko should be at all.

Robert had his copy of Clio’s Whips inside his Egyptian grammar book. He read:

“Soon all the countries of Europe that could sent expeditions to the New Lands. There were riches in its islands and vast spaces, but the White Man had to bring others to dig them out and cut down the mighty trees for ships. That is when the White Europeans really began to buy slaves from Arab merchants, and to send them across to the Warm Sea to skin animals, build houses, and to serve them in all ways.

“Africa was raided over. Whole tribes were sold to slavery and degradation, worse, wars were fought between black and black to make slaves to sell to the Europeans. Mother Africa was raped again and again, but she was also traveled over and mapped: Big areas marked ‘unexplored’ on the White Man’s charts shrank and shrank so that by 1700 there were very few such places left.”

Miss Mbene came in from the play yard, cocked an eye at Robert, then went to the slateboard and wrote mathematical problems on it. With a groan, Robert closed the Egyptian grammar book and took out his sums and ciphers.

Mr. Labuba spat a stream of yohimbe-bark snuff into the weeds at the edge of the playground. His eyes were red and the pupils more open than they should have been in the bright afternoon sun.

“We be pulling at grasses,” he said to Robert. He handed him a big pair of gloves, which came up to Robert’s elbows. “Pull steady. These plants be cutting all the way through the gloves if you jerk.”

In a few moments Robert was sweating. A smell of desk polish and eraser rubbings came off Mr. Labuba’s shirt as he knelt beside him. They soon had cleared all along the back fence.

Robert got into the rhythm of the work, taking pleasure when the cutter weeds came out of the ground with a tearing pop and a burst of dirt from the tenacious, octopuslike roots. Then they would cut away the runners with trowels. Soon they had made quite a pile near the teeter-totters.

Robert was still writing his play in his head; he had stopped in the second act when Motofuko, in disguise, had come to the forgiveness-audience with the new King Renebe. Unbeknownst to him, Renebe, fearing revenge all out of keeping with custom, had persuaded his stupid brother Guba to sit on the throne for the one day when anyone could come to the new king and be absolved of crimes.

“Is he giving you any trouble?” asked the intrusive voice of Mr. Yotofeka. He had come up and was standing behind Robert.

Mr. Labuba swallowed hard, the yohimbe lump going down chokingly.

“No complaints, Mr. Yotofeka,” he said, looking up.

“Very good, Robert, you can go home when the tower bell rings at three o’clock.”

“Yes, sir.”

Mr. Yotofeka went back inside.

Mr. Labuba looked at Robert and winked.

motofuko: Many, many wrongs in my time. I pray you, king, forgive me. I let my wives, faithful all, be torn from me, watched my children die, while I stood by, believing them proof from death. My village dead, all friends slaves. Reason twisted like hemp.

guba: From what mad place came you where such happens?

motofuko: (Aside) Name a country where this is not the standard of normalcy. (To Guba) Aye, all these I have done. Blinded, I went to worse. Pray you, forgive my sin.

guba: What could that be?

motofuko: (Uncovering himself) Murdering a king. (Stabs him)

guba: Mother of gods! Avenge my death. You kill the wrong man. Yonder—(Dies)

(Guards advance, weapons out.)

motofuko: Wrong man, when all men are wrong? Come, dogs, crows, buzzards, tigers. I welcome barks, beaks, claws, and teeth. Make the earth one howl. Damned, damned world where men fight like jackals over the carrion of states! Bare my bones then; they call for rest.

(Exeunt, fighting. Terrible screams off. Blood pours in from the wings in a river.)

soldier: (Aghast) Horror to report. They flay the ragged skin from him whole!

“But the hide and fishing stations were hard to run with just slave labor. Not enough criminals could be brought from the White Man’s countries to fill all the needs.

“Gold was more and more precious, in the hands of fewer and fewer people in Europe. There was some, true, in the Southern New Lands, but it was high in the great mountain ranges and very hard to dig out. The slaves worked underground till they went blind. There were revolts under those cruel conditions.

“One of the first new nations was set up by slaves who threw off their chains. They called their land Freedom, which was the thing they had most longed for since being dragged from Mother Africa. All the armies of the White Man’s trading stations could not overthrow them. The people of Freedom slowly dug gold out of the mountains and became rich and set out to free others, in the Southern New Land and in Africa itself. . . .

“Rebellion followed rebellion. Mother Africa rose up. There were too few white men, and the slave armies they sent soon joined their brothers and sisters against the White Man.

“First to go were the impoverished French and Spanish dominions, then the richer Italian ones, and those of the British. Last of all were the colonies of the great German banking families. Then the wrath of Mother Africa turned on those Arabs and Egyptians who had helped the White Man in his enslavement of the black.

“Now they are all gone as powers from our continent and only carry on the kinds of commerce with us which put all the advantages to Africa.”

ashingo: The ghost! The ghost of the dead king!

renebe: What! What madness this? Guards, your places! What means you, man?

ashingo: He came, I swear, his skin all strings, his brain a red cawleyflower, his eyes empty holes!

renebe: What portent this? The old astrologer, quick. To find what means to turn out this being like a goat from our crops.

(Alarums without. Enter Astrologer.)

astrologer: Your men just now waked me from a mighty dream. Your majesty was in some high place, looking over the courtyard at all his friends and family. You were dressed in regal armor all of brass and iron. Bonfires of victory burned all around, and not a word of dissent was heard anywhere in the land. All was peace and calm.

renebe: Is this then a portent of continued long reign?

astrologer: I do not know, sire. It was my dream.

His mother was standing behind him, looking over his shoulder.

Robert jerked, trying to close his copybook. His glasses flew off.

“What is that?” She reached forward and pulled the workbook from his hands.

“It is extra work for school,” he said. He picked up his glasses.

“No, it is not.” She looked over his last page. “It is wasting your paper. Do you think we have money to burn away?”

“No, Mother. Please . . .” He reached for the copybook.

“First you are tardy. Then you stay detention after school. You waste your school notebooks. Now you have lied to me. “

“I’m sorry. I . . .”

“What is this?”

“It is a play, a historical play.”

“What are you going to do with a play?”

Robert lowered his eyes. “I want to take it to Mr. Fred’s Printers and have it published. I want it acted in the Niger Culture Hall. I want it to be sold all over Niger.”

His mother walked over to the fireplace, where her irons were cooling on the racks away from the hearth.

“What are you going to do!!?” he yelled.

His mother flinched in surprise. She looked down at the notebook, then back at Robert. Her eyes narrowed.

“I was going to get my spectacles.”

Robert began to cry.

She came back to him and put her arms around him. She smelled of the marketplace, of steam and cinnamon. He buried his head against her side.

“I will make you proud of me, Mother. I am sorry I used the copybook, but I had to write this play.”

She pulled away from him. “I ought to beat you within the inch of your life, for ruining a copybook. You are going to have to help me for the rest of the week. You are not to work on this until you have finished every bit of your schoolwork. You should know Mr. Fred nor nobody is going to publish anything written by a schoolboy.”

She handed him the notebook. “Put that away. Then go out on the porch and bring in those piles of mending. I am going to sweat a copybook out of your brow before I am through.”

Robert clutched the book to him as if it were his soul.

renebe: O rack, ruin, and pain! Falling stars and the winds do shake the foundation of night itself! Where my soldiers, my strength? What use taxes, tribute if they buy not strong men to die for me?

(Off): Gone. All Fled.

renebe: Hold! Who is there? (Draws)

motofene: (Entering) He whose name will freeze your blood’s roots.

renebe: The son of that dead king!

motofene: Aye, dead to you and all the world else, but alive to me and as constant as that star about which the groaning axletree of the earth does spin.

(Alarums and excursions off.)

Now hear you the screams of your flesh and blood and friendship, such screams as those I have heard awake and fitfully asleep these fourteen years. Now hear them for all time.

renebe: Guards! To me!

motofene: To you? See those stars which shower to earth out your fine window: At each a wife, child, friend does die. You watched my father cut away to bone and blood and gore and called not for the death stroke! For you I have had my Vulcans make you a fine suit. All iron and brass, as befits a king! It you will wear, to look out over the palace yard of your dead, citizens and friends. You will have a good high view, for it is situate on cords of finest woods. (Enter Motofene’s soldiers.) Seize him gently. (Disarm) And now, my former king, outside. Though full of hot stars, the night is cold. Fear not the touch of the brass. Anon you are garmented, my men will warm the suit for you.

(Exeunt and curtain.)

Robert passed the moaning white man and made his way down the street, beyond the market. He was going to Mr. Fred’s Printers in downtown Onitsha. He followed broad New Market Street, bring careful to stay out of the way of the noisy streetcars that steamed on their rails toward the center of town.

He wore his best clothes, though it was Saturday morning. In his hands he carried his play, recopied in ink in yet another notebook. He had learned from the clerk at the market bookstall that the one sure way to find Mr. Fred was at his office on Saturday forenoon, when the Onitsha Weekly Volcano was being put to bed.

Robert saw two wayway birds sitting on the single telegraph wire leading to the relay station downtown. In the old superstitions one wayway was a bad omen, two were good, three a surprise.

“Mr. Fred is busy,” said the woman in the Weekly Volcano office. Her desk was surrounded by copies of all the pamphlets printed by Mr. Fred’s bookstore, past headlines from the Volcano, and a big picture of Mr. Fred. looking severe in his morning coat, under the giant clock, on whose face was engraved the motto in Egyptian: TIME IS BUSINESS.

The calendar on her desk, with the picture of a Niger author for each month, was open to October 1894. A listing of that author’s books published by Mr. Fred was appended at the bottom of each page.

“I should like to see Mr. Fred about my play,” said Robert.

“Your play?”

“Yes. A rousing historical play. It is called Motofuko’s Revenge.”

“Is your play in proper form?”

“Following the best rules of dramaturgy,” said Robert.

“Let me see it a moment.”

Robert hesitated.

“Is it a papertypered?” she asked.

A cold chill ran down Robert’s spine.

“All manuscripts must be papertypered, two spaces between lines, with wide margins,” she said.

There was a lump in Robert’s throat. “But it is in my very finest book-hand,” he said.

“I’m sure it is. Mr. Fred reads everything himself, is a very busy man, and insists on papertypered manuscripts.”

The last three words came crashing down on Robert like a mud-wattle wall.

“Perhaps if I spoke to Mr. Fred . . .”

“It will do you no good if your manuscript isn’t papertypered.”

“Please. I . . .”

“Very well. You shall have to wait until after one. Mr. Fred has to put the Volcano in final form and cannot be disturbed.”

It was ten-thirty.

“I’ll wait,” said Robert.

At noon the lady left, and a young man in a vest sat down in her chair.

Other people came, were waited on by the man or sent into another office to the left. From the other side of the shop door, behind the desk, came the sound of clanking, carts rolling, thumps, and bells. Robert imagined great machines, huge sweating men wrestling with cogs and gears, books stacked to the ceiling.

It got quieter as the morning turned to afternoon. Robert stood, stretched, and walked around the reception area again, reading the newspapers on the walls with their stories five, ten, fifteen years old, some printed before he was born.

Usually they were stories of rebellions, wars, floods, and fears. Robert did not see one about the burst dam that had killed his father, a yellowed clipping of which was in the Coptic Bible at home.

There was a poster on one wall advertising the fishing resort on Lake Sahara South, with pictures of trout and catfish caught by anglers.

At two o’clock the man behind the desk got up and pulled down the windowshade at the office. “You shall have to wait outside for your father,” he said. “We’re closing for the day.”

“Wait for my father?”

“Aren’t you Meletule’s boy?”

“No. I have come to see Mr. Fred about my play. The lady . . .”

“She told me nothing. I thought you were the printer’s devil’s boy. You say you want to see Mr. Fred about a play?”

“Yes. I . . .”

“Is it papertypered?” asked the man.

Robert began to cry.

“Mr. Fred will see you now,” said the young man, coming back in the office and taking his handkerchief back.

“I’m sorry,” said Robert.

“Mr. Fred only knows you are here about a play,” he said. He opened the door to the shop. There were no mighty machines there, only a few small ones in a dark, two-story area, several worktables, boxes of type and lead. Everything was dusty and smelled of metal and thick ink.

A short man in his shirtsleeves leaned against a workbench reading a long, thin strip of paper while a boy Robert’s age waited. Mr. Fred scribbled something on the paper, and the boy took it back into the other room, where several men bent quietly over boxes and tables filled with type.

“Yes,” said Mr. Fred, looking up.

“I have come here about my play.”

“Your play?”

“I have written a play, about King Motofuko. I wish you to publish it.”

Mr. Fred laughed. “Well, we shall have to see about that. Is it papertypered?”

Robert wanted to cry again.

“No, I am sorry to say, it is not. I didn’t know . . .”

“We do not take manuscripts for publication unless . . .”

“It is in my very best book-hand, sir. Had I known, I would have tried to get it papertypered.”

“Is your name and address on the manuscript?”

“Only my name. I . . .”

Mr. Fred took a pencil out from behind his ear. “What is your house number?”

Robert told him his address, and he wrote it down on the copybook.

“Well, Mr.—Robert Oinenke. I shall read this, but not before Thursday after next. You are to come back to the shop at ten a.m, on Saturday the nineteenth for the manuscript and our decision on it.”

“But . . .”

“What?”

“I really like the books you publish, Mr. Fred, sir. I especially liked Clio’s Whips by Mr. Oskar Oshwenke.”

“Always happy to meet a satisfied customer. We published that book five years ago. Tastes have changed. The public seems tired of history books now.”

“That is why I am hoping you will like my play,” said Robert.

“I will see you in two weeks,” said Mr. Fred. He tossed the copybook into a pile of manuscripts on the workbench.

“Because of the legacy of the White Man, we have many problems in Africa today. He destroyed much of what he could not take with him. Many areas are without telegraphy; many smaller towns have only primitive direct current power. More needs to be done with health and sanitation, but we are not as badly off as the most primitive of the White Europeans in their war-ravaged countries or in the few scattered enclaves in the plantations and timber forests of the New Lands.

“It is up to you, the youth of Africa of today, to take our message of prosperity and goodwill to these people, who have now been as abused by history as we Africans once were by them. I wish you good luck.”

Oskar Oshwenke,

Onitsha, Niger, 1889

Robert put off going to the market stall of Mr. Fred’s bookstore as long as he could. It was publication day.

He saw that the nice young clerk was there. (He had paid him back out of the ten Niger dollar advance Mr. Fred had had his mother sign for two weeks before. His mother still could not believe it.)

“Ho, there, Mr. Author!” said the clerk. “I have your three free copies for you. Mr. Fred wishes you every success.”

The clerk was arranging his book and John-John Motulla’s Game Warden Bob and the Mad lvory Hunter on the counter with the big starburst saying: JUST PUBLISHED

His book would be on sale throughout the city. He looked at the covers of the copies in his hands:

The TRAGICALL DEATH OF KING

MOTOFUKO

and HOW THEY WERE SORRY

a drama by Robert Oinenke

abetted by

MR. FRED OLUNGENE

“The Mighty Man of the Press”

for sale at Mr. Fred’s High-Class Bookstore

# 300 Market, and the Weekly Volcano

Office, 12 New Market Road

ONITSHA, NIGER

price 10¢ N.

On his way home he came around the corner where a group of boys was taunting the white man. The man was drunk and had just vomited on the foundation post of a store. They were laughing at him.

“Kill you all. Kill you all. No shame,” he mumbled, trying to stand.

The words of Clio’s Whips came to Robert’s ears. He walked between the older boys and handed the white man three Niger cents. The white man looked up at him with sick, grey eyes.

“Thank you, young sir,” he said, closing his hand tightly.

Robert hurried home to show his mother and the neighbors his books.