The Island of Roko in “The Line in the Sand”
In The Line in the Sand, Roko is an imaginary island off the coast of West Africa. It is 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; and just 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.
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. These beautiful people, meek and mild, live a true nightmare and still they smile. With dark and lovely skin, white teeth and long legs; when they run and jump even the wind cannot resist them. Verily, verily, this earth should be theirs.
Babubacka comes to power
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.
To be continued.
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