UNDER THE MANGO TREE--Tamsin Barzane

Saminaka just can’t resist an opportunity to torture prims into an opportunity for exchange, encouragement, and expansion of minds. It was Oliha Yiwama’s idea, after he saw the now-defunct Free African Bookstore in Saminaka’s Nupekwo compound. “Build a library and bookstore,” he nudged. And Artaud Bohemian further nurtured this idea, pointing out that too few people knew about Africa’s rich intellectual traditions, about Sankore and the other universities that once made Mali’s Timbuktu a rich and celebrated center of learning. Feretian String had lots of good ideas and landmarks, and also contributed the library lions for the exterior. Other friends added advice and questions. Complete stranger and now friend, consultant and publisher madddyyy Schnook lobbed some great building materials my way, when he saw me wondering dazed in a shop. The result? Wednesday will see the opening of the Slate, Scroll & Stick, Saminaka’s center for reading, writing, talks and discussions.

Why “Slate, Scroll & Stick”? The “Slate” comes from Koranic educational traditions, which predated colonial schools in many parts of the continent. Using water-based inks, students write their verses and created colorful non-representational illuminations on wooden slates, washing them off at the end of the day. The “Scroll” comes not only from ancient Egyptian practices, but from the ancient Sudan and Ethiopia, where writing traditions are millennia old as well. And the “Stick”? Even those parts of Africa that didn’t have an alphabet often used graphic symbols with specific meanings. Some, like the Ibibio, Efik and Ejagham of Nigeria’s Cross River area, drew them with sticks in the earth as well, conveying messages that might indicate a meeting was scheduled or refer to some other event.

The building (still unfinished as of this writing) will combine a traditional Hausa exterior from Nigeria with wall paintings from Mauretania on the interior. Portraits of notable Nigerian writers and scholars will hang on the walls (with bios nearby in a library book), and a video corner with informative, entertaining videos about Nigeria provides multimedia information. The lecturn currently "speaks" a poem by the late Nigerian poet Christopher Okigbo, and will change regularly.

The Slate, Scroll & Stick has nooks for relaxing, books to read or sit on, and places to think and write. There are library books that contain links to out-of-print volumes (mostly on Nigerian history and culture—we ARE Virtual Nigeria) scanned and available on the Internet, and some non-African tomes (including those that deal with SL content creation) that can be read in-world. The bookshop portion includes both notable Amazon links and inexpensive in-world volumes. Some are my slideshows in a takeaway package, but others will be the products of our new Egbe Akowe writing group.

We had our organizational meeting last week, full of fun and crackling with creativity. We are going to meet on Tuesday evenings at 6pm SLT in the SS&S. Our initial plan is to take turns originating a key word or phrase. Members will write a riff prompted by it during the week—whether poem, a bit of fiction (or hey, a whole novel!), non-fiction, etc.—and turn it in for distribution by the following Monday.

At the meeting, we do two things—share our reactions to what’s been written, and participate in a group in-meeting writing exercise. This might be a round-robin storytelling rampage, a timed poem, or could move in any direction. We had a goodly number of interested parties, but you can still join us—hit the Subscriber at the Manatee Lookout Palm Wine Joint, or the one inside the SS&S itself. It’s a Subscribe-O-Matic, so you don’t have to worry about dropping one of your 25 groups.