i wanna go to UniPort, to get nuff' educa shun

we went a few miles up the road into bangou with several members of the press. perhaps twenty women all dressed with the same sort of pagne came around to talk to us and inspect the girls. the head wife approached becky, saying to all of us elle est bien jolie. peut rester ici avec nous. surely she had the best child-bearing potential amongst all of us. some dancers from the village came out and raised up a bunch of dust, or they would have if it hadn't been raining every day since i got here, and then the chief came out flanked by two men wearing cafe do brasil burlap sacks adorned with cowrie shells and horns, to ward off evil spirits. the doctor told us that each of us must remove our hats (except for him, who was a kingmaker), and bow slightly, clapping three times, to greet the chief. it was very important not to touch the chief. the chief, through the honorary american prince Lorne, told us that he would grant us the opportunity to take a picture with us, and that he was very pleased for us to come visit him. he is a progressive chief who fights against rural exodus and has a proposition for our ambassador.

all dances stopped and a group of men wearing masks made with frightening carved wooden faces or quilts of cowrie shells and red beads, all with dreadlocks made from the hair of those who danced the dance since generations back, hundreds of years, bamboo seed pods were tied up and down their legs to make a sound like water as they danced. even the chief may not enter their preparation room, for they are the secret society. all of the young dancers had replaced their fathers recently in the society.

the chief then invited us down to his palace, where several artifacts were laid out. his cultural advisor explained to us that the copper virgin mary and jesus meant that they were a christian village, after which he proceeded to an illustration showing the course of evolution of men from chimpanzees, saying that we are connected to the animals. he said that the chief had granted him special permission to get near a certain chair in order to explain its function to us. carved in black ebony and lined with cowrie shells, it had a globe at its bace, upon which two lions stood. on the backs of the lions sat a man, who made the seat of this throne. the chief is "the one who cannot be hunted, so he sits on the back sof the lions" the arms were carved to resemble scaled dragons, representing the attack of the white man on the chief, the ones who felt that they could hunt the chief. the man who makes up the back of the chair holds the necks of two other men, representing the european's strangulation of the africans. the chief may only sit in this chair when he meets with a king from another village.

the reason he had invited us, he began to explain, was that as americans, we were half-brothers of his people-he would explain why shortly-there were some 200m off two separate squares which hundreds of years back served as auction squares for slaves. in one square, people of bangou were secretly sold to traders to be exported to the united states via Limbe, and in the other, the bangou people bought slaves from other lands to maintain their own population, in light of the loss due to slaving. so he sent greetings to the children of the village who now live in the united states, using us as proxy, and told us his intentions to build a monument to the slave sales of times past, as a way of asking forgiveness of the mothers of the villages whose children went to the united states. for this, he would like the support of our embassy.

then we were showed his habanero plantation where he produces a commercially available pepper sauce as a condiment(he orders the people to grow habaneros since they make more money than coffee and they will allow the young men to build a house here with their earnings), and then we went in for a small snack, which turned out to be a rather extensive feast prepared by his wives.