South Roko, a land of make belief in “The Line in the Sand.”
In The Line in the Sand, South Roko is an imaginary island off the coast of West Africa. I created it so as to take liberties with the story line and the themes of revenge without having to locate the story in a particular country. I also wanted a country in which an Africa
Native African Tribal Chief
n Grey parrot would play a significant part in the story and as one did not exist I made it up. Anyone with any knowledge of West Africa will however be familiar with much of the socioeconomic, physical and psychological issues described in the book. So where is this South Roko in which twelve year old Dele Verity finds herself all alone after Sandman has her father and mother arrested?
It is an island off the West coast of Africa and home to a million Sirokos. In any league table of indices of development South Roko comes bottom or second to last. Two out of ten women who leave home in hope to put to bed do not return from that confinement. Only one minister out of ten who asked the people for their vote did a single thing the people asked for. Of a hundred contracts signed to clean the streets, none was honoured, only the contractor’s inflated invoices for doing nothing. So when Endo Salari, a South Roko hurdler “the laughing antelope” reached the semi-finals at the Athletics Championships, the rest of the world asked how he could live in such a land. A land of quarreling telegraph poles, mountainous garbage tips and flatulent ditches. He smiled and said it was a tourist attraction.
Yet tourists poured in. Oh what lessons this has for the rest of us, sick to the back bones with I-Pee and I-Piss and I-Pads and high taxes. Look at these beautiful people, on this same planet, so meek and mild. They live a true nightmare and still they smile. Their skin dark and shiny and their teeth white their legs reach further than the Mississippi. As we saw during the 1996 Olympics when they run and jump even the wind cannot resist them. Verily, verily, these are not downtrodden but people who should inherit the earth.
Corporal Babubacka was not listening. In December 1999, President Kofail went to Geneva to hide from the Millennium virus. The army seized power. To wild dancing, loud music, drunken public carnality, the toppling and thrashing of Presidential statues and memorabilia, Corporal Babubacka, promised much, ‘in the national interest.’ In green and white berets and fatigues, the coup leader shook fists full of cast-iron answers. Then he shook only cast-iron fists, but soon dropped the pretense and simply reigned over, seizing land, businesses and all the foreign exchange earned from garbage processing, tourism and timber. This is the land of South Roko.
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