Bango.

• Author: Lovelace, Earl
• Position: Excerpted from 'Salt' - Fiction

`Watch the landscape of this island,' he began with the self-assured conviction that my mother couldn't stand in him. 'And you know that they coulda never hold people here surrendered to unfreedom.' The sky, the sea, every green leaf and tangle of vines sing freedom. Birds frisk and flitter and whistle and sing. Just so a yard cock will draw up his chest and crow. Things here have their own mind. The rain decide when it going to fall. Sometimes in the middle of the day, the sky clear, you hear a rushing swooping sound and voops it fall down. Other times it set up whole day and then you sure that now, yes, it going to fall, it just clear away. It had no brooding inscrutable wilderness here.

There was no wild and passionate uproar to make people feel they is beast, to stir this great evil wickedness in their blood to make them want to go out and murder people. Maybe that madness seized Columbus and the first set of conquerors when they land here and wanted the Carib people to believe that they was gods; but afterwards, after they settle in the island and decide that, yes, is here we going to live now, they begin to discover how hard it was to be gods. The heat, the diseases, the weight of armour they had to carry in the hot sun, the imperial poses they had to strike, the powdered wigs to wear, the churches to build, the heathen to baptize, the illiterates to educate, the animals to tame, the numerous species of plants to name, history to write, flags to plant, parades to make, the militia to assemble, letters to write home. And all around them, this rousing greenness bursting in the wet season and another quieter shade perspiring in the dry.

On top of that they had to put up with the noise from Blackpeople. Whole night Blackpeople have their drums going as they dance in the bush. All those dances. All those lascivious bodies leaping and bending down. They couldn't see them in the dark among the shadows and trees; but, they could hear. They had to listen to them dance the Bamboula Bamboula, the Quelbay, the Manding, the Juba, the Ibo, the Pique, the...