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him.’
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ‘Then what happened?’
    Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â Â  ‘Ah my sister, may Allah preserve us. She sat quietly and bled to death.’
    In the commotion that had followed that catastrophe, Ali had been nearly forgotten. Indeed, the only one who seemed to have remembered his existence had been himself. He yelled and kept yelling until someone had picked him up, cleaned him and found him some breasts with milk in them. He never forgot the experience ever! Andfor months he never really stopped crying, completely convinced that if he stopped, he would be forgotten again.
    Like most men everywhere and from time immemorial — who have been able to pay for the luxury — Ali’s father preferred his women young and tender. They had to be virgins, of course. And he had acquired one such woman for a wife in each of his eight favourite stops on his trade routes. At the time, and at fourteen, Ali’s mother had been his youngest and his current favourite. He had tried to have her travelling with him, something he had not done with any other woman before her, and she turned out to be the last. For, much to his disappointment, she soon became pregnant and there had been nothing he could do about it. What he had done, however, was take her to his sister, who was living in Bamako and married to a tailor. She was known as Mma Danjuma, after Danjuma, her oldest child, who was about two years old when Ali was born.
    Ali’s father left him with Mma Danjuma, and for the first eight years or so of his life, Mma Danjuma looked after the orphan so well, people did not think they should even try to find out whether he really was her son, or whether what they had heard was true. Ali was Mma’s child. That was why, when he had come to choose a home, he had decided on Bamako. Not just because that’s where he had been told he had been born, but that was where Mma lived. Bamako was home. Then, having settled that question for the convenience of his heart, he had proceeded to claim the entire Guinea Coast, its hinterland and the Sub-Sahel for his own. In any case, since he had learned that his grandfather’s house had stood on the exact spot where Burkina Faso, Ghana and Togo met, he had assumed the nationalities of Ghana, Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Niger, Mali, Nigeria and Togo. Naturally, he carried a passport to prove the genuineness of each.
    Ali’s father had lived, travelled and traded through them all: Ghana when it was the Gold Coast, Burkina when it was Upper Volta, and even earlier, from the days of Trench West Africa’. He had gone on horseback; camels; deathtraps that called themselves taxis; the back of ancient lorries and all other things that moved and could carry a fully-grown man — including his own two feet.
    â€˜My father bought everything from everybody, and could sell anything to anybody,’ boasted Ali, laughing and touching his heart, while his eyes danced clear in their pools of kohl. And if it ever occurred to Ali that the women he seduced so easily fell more in lovewith the picture he painted of his father for them, and not so much for himself, it didn’t bother him too much. Ali loved his father completely, and was very proud of the part of himself that met his father’s approval, as well as that part of himself which he knew, secretly, resembled his father. Above all he was aware that establishing Linga was just continuing the family trade, with a little more organisation, modernisation and a whole lot of elegance. Of course, he had offices in all his countries, with the headquarters in Accra.
    The only way in which Ali was not like his father, and did not seem to care, was in the area of women. Ali liked his women mature, and he had no special use for virginity, especially in very young girls.
    Musa Musa had been the name Ali’s father had