AFTERWORD

This was referred to when I talked about doing it for years as the “Alternate Africa story.”

I finally sat down and wrote it January 8-14, 1985. I revised it (some) on February 5, and sold it to Ellen Datlow at Omni on March 12, It was published there in the August 1986 issue and drew some weird letters.

One guy said “This is the end of Euroanthropism in SF!” (“About time, too!” said the late Chad Oliver.) Others wondered where the SF was in the story, since it was just a story about a kid writing a play in Africa.

“You must remember, Howard,” said Ellen, “most people don’t know much history.”

“Then why am I writing this crap!” I shreiked. “If they don’t know History, why am I writing Alternate History?!”

“You’ll have to answer that for yourself,” she said.

Three days after the issue came out I got a letter from Donald A Wollheim at DAW Books, sending me a contract for his Year’s Best SF (you can do that when you’re the editor and the publisher—most of the editors of Year’s Bests are freelancers and send out contracts in January and February, after all the stories of the preceding year are out. Wollheim read it, knew it was one of the year’s best already when he saw it, and sent me a contract. (It’s one of those things you never forget in an otherwise long and dismal career. Something, like the Little Match Girl, to warm the hands of my mind on . . .)

This story, too, has had legs—it’s been reprinted anytime there’s an SF anthology involving Africa. Its latest incarnation is in John Kessel and James Patrick Kelly’s Feeling Very Strange: The Slipstream Anthology which I just got a copy of two days ago. (although I didn’t do anything when writing the story I usually don’t do in others—I think there’s something in the tone Jim and John responded to.) I’m proud to be in the book even if sailing under the wrong flag, as it were.

Onitsha Market Pamphlets were real, in this world. I have through the kind courtesy of Ms. Eileen Gunn a couple of them, and have the one book about them readily available. Emmanuel Obiechina’s An African Popular Literature: A Study of Onitsha Market Pamphlets. Cambridge, the University Press, 1973. (You need to read it.) The real stuff was even more eclectic than the ones I have in the story.

Thus I repay my debt to the Tokens (as did Disney) and I think people have sent me every article on the guy who wrote “Wee-Mo-Way” ever published. His heirs have finally gotten some justice (and royalties) after 60 years. (It reads right out of Dickens’ Chancery Court in Bleak House, except it’s 20th C. and apartheid.)

Thanks, people, for sending them to me.