Abstract

‘My name is Ephraïm Naana, I have already told you on one of these many occasions when you have come here before closing time to speak about my school. In my village, since you ask me, there are not all the things which are to be found on the market here, there are only those which grow there: mangoes, potatoes, maize, bananas, papayas. And my primary school teacher told me that in other places there might be even fewer things; he said that in the market in Khartoum, in Sudan, the nation is vast but on the stalls there are only onions and white and red beans; and even though they were nicely arranged in piles, they were still only white beans, red beans and onions; and then he said that the world was big and that the hunger we experienced was not the worst of famines.