OJboss

The Throne of Ivory and Bone Listen, children of the red earth, listen close. To the tale of the wind and the silence of the ghost. In the Kingdom of Zanj, where the sun is a hammer, And the markets were once full of joyful clamor, There sat a King named Oba the Cruel. Who treated his people like the stubborn mule. He was tall as the Iroko, broad as the bull, With a belly that was always, eternally full. He wore a robe of leopard skin, spotted and fine, And drank from a horn of the strongest palm wine. But his heart was a stone in the bottom of a well, A dark, cold place where no mercy could dwell. He taxed the farmer for the yam in the ground, He taxed the hunter for the game that he found. He taxed the mother for the child at her breast, He gave the weary kingdom no moment of rest. "I am the Lion!" he roared from his stool. "I am the river, the rock, and the rule! The ancestors speak, but they speak through me. I am the root and the branch of the tree." But the tr...