Africa39 by Wole Soyinka Page B

was and how it came to be. Some did not know. Some knew but did not take the time to explain. This was why they were irritated by the insistence of the little children who had to content themselves with knowing that, on certain afternoons, a rainbow would appear, and when it did, was beautiful to behold.
    Alú also enjoyed watching the sun as it rose and set. It seemed to him to be one of the finest spectacles that nature offered to delight her children. He found the shifting colours of the sun’s ever-changing faces infinitely poetic. Often, he would watch and think to himself, not bothering to ask anyone for an explanation since, as likely as not, no one would give him an answer. Sometimes the sun would set slowly, slipping behind the mass of earth that rose to form a triangle and seemed to hang, suspended in space, a mass of earth that seemed to follow the walker wherever he went. This mass of earth, I should have mentioned earlier, was the Pico Basilé. This feeling of the mountain as a constant companion from the moment you arrived on the island was spectacular. Alú knew, because he had been told, that in its day the Pico Basilé had been much bigger and had been sundered in two by the eruptions of nature. Now, the two great mountains faced one another, though the second peak towered over another country and the two were separated by a stretch of sea. At other times, Alú would watch as this same sun, depending on the evenings, silently plunged like a diver into the depths of the sea.
    The Pico Basilé was covered by a green mantle. It was, as I have said, a wonderful sight to behold when the clouds permitted, since often they would laze peacefully over the encircling trees, resting on the lush green foliage, forming undulating lines like a quivering froth of bubbles shrouding the peak in an impenetrable mist. The belly of the mountain concealed many mysteries. Alú had been told that the volcano was extinct now, that it could no longer spew lava, that hidden in its belly lived a bird incapable of surviving in any other place in the whole round world.
    These and many other details made Alú realise that he had been born in an exceptional land ringed about by seas, a place that was mysterious and unique. Even as a boy, Alú felt that if sociologists could rise above the politics of monolingualism and dedicate themselves to analysing human behaviour – our behaviour – they would go down in history. Through their books and their theses, they might teach humanity not to create breeding grounds for rapacious minds, censorious minds, malicious minds, they might teach humanity not to produce people with dull minds, with dead minds. But, he also believed – as I have already said, he was a boy with a very particular way of seeing, thinking and reasoning – that as likely as not they would die of starvation because here people, many people, were forced to live through corruption.
    Alú was nicknamed the ‘witch child’. Not because he disappeared from his bed at night using some magical power and caught a Boeing to other latitudes to live his other life only to reappear at dawn to live his everyday life. No, I am not referring to the type of witch who lurked in the subconscious of Alú’s neighbours. Alú was a child like other children; the colour of his hair, the colour of his eyes was no different to his friends. There was nothing to distinguish him physically from the others. He played with other children. He went to the same school they did; the only difference between Alú and the other children was that he took the time to question while those around him never stopped to wonder at the why of things. This is what made the boy different from others: his way of seeing, thinking, reasoning and doing things.
    You already know that the boy’s first name was Alú. This was followed by his father’s surname and then his mother’s surname. Out of respect for