Phoenixcollections

obika was one of the handsomest young men in umuaro and all the surrounding districts. His face was very finely cut. His skin was like his father's, the colour of a golden pumpkin. People said of him (as they always did when they saw great comeliness) that he was not born for these parts among the igbo people of the forests; that in his previous life he must have sojounred among the riverain fold whom the igbo called Olu.        but two things spoilt obika. He drank palm wine to excess and he was always inflicting injury on others. His father, who preffered him to edogo, his quiet and brooding half-brother, neverthless said to him often: "it is praiseworthy to be brave and fearless, my son, but sometimes it is better to be a coward. We often stand in the compound of a coward to point at the ruins where a brave man used to live. The man who has never submitted to anything will soon submit to the burial mat."        ...

A wonderful new world at secondary school i found myself in a new and wonderful world. For the first time i saw a laboratory and we started to learn some real science. To begin with, i was completely puzzled by the biology classes but soon the subject came to have a great fascination for me. I had never been good at mathematics but at munali i had a good teacher and the subject soon lost it terrors so that when we took the final examination i came second in the class. History had always been my best subject but for some reason i did not do well in it, perhaps because it was all southafrican history that we had to study. English literature i came to love but i did badly in the grammar paper at the end of my course.      we lived a full and interesting life at munali. It was by no means all work and study in the classroom. I immediately found myself in the football team and we had many exciting and some very rough matches with local teams. I still carry on ...

The dancing palm tree    once upon a time tortoise found that he could not get enough food to eat. He lived near a market but of course he had no money. He thought that there must be a way to get some of the food for him.      At last he figured out a fine plan. When everyone had gone to market, tortoise crawled to a certain palm tree a hundred meters or so from the open market. Clumsily he wedged himself into a hole near the foot of the tree, safe inside, he began to sing.                               "Dance, palm tree, dance,                Dance all the way around                the market-place.            ...