A Dancer In the Dust Read Online Free

We’d driven to Tumasi that same day, out of Rupala and up a road that took us past those storied scenes of Africa, small townships, then the villages of the bush, and from there across that broad savanna the Lutusi had immemorially roamed, and to which I believed myself to be bringing my earnest gift of hope.

2
    There are three principal factors in risk assessment, I reminded myself not long after ending my conversation with Bill Hammond: the amount of the loss, the likelihood of incurring it, and in the event of loss, the subsequent possibility of either full or partial recovery. The first two may not be equally weighted, however. For example, the amount of loss might be very great but the likelihood of incurring it very slight. Or it may be that the loss is slight but the likelihood of incurring it is quite high. In all risk assessment there are only two invariables: that loss is possible, and that some things, once lost—innocence, for example, and sometimes hope—are irrecoverable.
    For a few minutes after receiving Bill Hammond’s call, I spent some time pondering the considerably less ominous risk of meeting him the next morning. He clearly had some request to make of me, but I reasonably assumed that it was one I could grant or refuse. Either way, there was little risk that my life would change. The odd thing was that Bill’s call had returned me to Lubanda in a way that lingered through the night, so that I again recalled myself as the young man who, some twenty years before, had arrived in the sedate capital of a languid country whose arid central region had for a long time remained pretty much undisturbed.
    At that time, Lubanda’s president was a Western-educated intellectual whose idea of social organization and economic development had been a form of pastoral anarchism, derived, as he freely admitted, from the lessons he’d learned from utopian novels, and which he called Village Harmony. His name was Kojo Dasai, and he was round and huggable, with a huge smile and one of those rich chuckles that immediately put everyone at ease. He’d encouraged his fellow Lubandans to call him “Baba,” which means “Father,” but Bill Hammond had early dubbed him “Black Santa,” and indeed, President Dasai had remained quite jolly, chuckling softly almost to the day he’d been hung upside down by Mafumi’s renegade soldiers, stripped of his signature bright yellow dashiki, and hacked to death in Independence Square.
    A gruesome video of his murder could still be bought on the streets of the capital when I’d last visited it. In it, the first flag of Lubanda waved at the far end of the square, a huge sunflower against a background of light blue, the design chosen by President Dasai. The flag had later been hauled down, trampled, spat and pissed upon. It was this filthy, reeking bit of cloth in which the president’s body, or what was left of it, had been wrapped, placed on a cement slab, doused with gasoline, and burned. The sound of his sizzling fat had been clearly audible on the video, and it was this detail, according to the hand-lettered sign in the shop that sold the tape, that “made it juicy.”
    Unlike Dasai’s murder, Seso’s death had not made news. But in fact, little having to do with either Lubanda or Lubandans had made news after that particularly savage assassination, the sole exception to this general indifference having been the slaughter of the animals held in the national zoo.
    I’d long been back in the States, a graduate student at Wharton Business School, successfully studying the risks inherent in almost everything, when I’d heard of it. And although Mafumi’s renegades had repeatedly demonstrated their love of brutality, nothing could have prepared me for the footage by then available on the Internet.
    A year after Lubanda’s independence, a wealthy London matron named Charlotte Hastings had decided that what this newly minted nation needed was a national zoo, and so, at her