Sunday, September 30, 2007

Slave Bitches Part One

SLAVE BITCHES

By

Peter Marriner






WARNING! All Olympia books are the subject of international copyright and should not be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form - including electronically - without the publisher’s prior written consent. ANY and ALL violations of Olympia copyright will be pursued vigorously through the appropriate courts.



A clerk emerged from the doorway of the Administrator’s office into the hot sunlight and surveyed the queue of hopeful suppliants, who waited as usual in the dusty mud-walled courtyard. He was a tall well-set young man, cocky with a sense of his superior position. Like all public officials in Bamba these days, anxious to demonstrate their rejection of Western influences, he wore traditional dress. The billowing spotlessly white cotton gown gave his bare head and neck the appearance of an ebony carving as he ran his gaze down the queue.
Amongst the row of would-be petitioners seated patiently on wooden benches along the wall, one stood out instantly. The only European among them, she chose that moment too, to lean forward in her place as if to make sure she caught his eye.
She was a pretty young woman still in her mid twenties, fair haired, her shapely figure enhanced by the skimpiness of her blue cotton dress with large white buttons down its front, worn with white high heeled sandals. She had worn it every day she had turned up here. Clothing made of artificial fibres had largely failed to survive the side effects of the Catastrophe and, since this had never been a cotton growing area, replacement cottons were expensive now. He guessed that she probably had nothing else fit to wear.
He knew her name, Angela Kerr, and her history. She had been some sort of organiser for an American educational charity, which had recently extended into this area. She had been inspecting school buildings for the charity and had been stranded here by accident, penniless and with only a few words of French and none at all of the local language.
Speaking foreign languages wasn’t a thing one boasted of in public just now. Idly he wondered if that was why the woman Ms Kerr lodged with didn’t accompany her. That one was an English speaker, a crafty businesswoman he had heard, married into a local family and probably too wary, he speculated, to get involved in a hopeless case. He saw how the rest of the queue, mostly women in billowing colourful robes and elaborately twisted turbans, with a few old men in white gowns or the ragged shirt and shorts of bush pagans, looked askance at their white neighbour. In their eyes she had once been rich and powerful and now, reduced to poverty and powerlessness, she was the very symbol of bad luck.
Since the Catastrophe, hysteria had been the common reaction to the totality of the disaster. No one could quite assimilate its dramatic inevitability and here, where superstition had never been eradicated the outsider was a natural scapegoat.
The clerk hardly needed the woman’s forward movement to draw his attention. He knew about her well enough. She had been waiting a week already, hoping for a travel permit. She really had no hope. He knew she was penniless. The funds that had once been available to Ms Angela Kerr, seeming so lavish by local standards, were now only memories of a banking system rendered meaningless. Very probably any other of her clothes that had survived had been sold for food or to pay her rent. Properly, the white woman should have lined up with the rest of the starving refugees to be fed by the public charity. The clerk guessed that she had been slow to realise the extent of the disaster, still thinking that order and credit could be restored.
Bamba had been fortunate. Its Administrator had been quick to block all access by refugees from the more thickly populated areas further south and only a few such filtered through the desert from the north. Being on the margins of the desert, the crops the local peasants grew with traditional un-mechanised methods were salt tolerant and so the disaster of the salt rains had been less fatal than elsewhere. The floods had flushed fish and shrimps from the old salt lakes into new environments where they quickly multiplied. With care the peasants would save enough seed to replant next year and the fortuitous fish harvest would tide over the population until then. Meanwhile the roads were closed and the movement of trading boats passing up or downstream was strictly controlled lest they spread the hopeful word and start a flood of refugees.
As if conscious of the clerk’s interest, the European woman had visibly tensed. His dark eyes met her blue ones. An administration still existed in Bamba. Paper was still being shuffled as if things were normal. Probably nothing seemed impossible to her. No doubt she hoped something could still be arranged. A hope the clerk decided he would encourage. This time his eyes didn’t slide past with contemptuous indifference. He beckoned.
With undignified haste Angela Kerr sprang up from the bench, ignoring the scowls from all about her, to follow the tall white-gowned figure, her heart suddenly thudding. Over long weeks her ideas of what was possible had in fact undergone a drastic change. Originally she had intended to petition for assistance in quashing the ridiculous financial claims being made upon her and for the restoration of her stolen vehicle and equipment, but reality had slowly forced itself upon her. By now she had narrowed her aim. She only wanted to escape from this place to somewhere even marginally more civilised.
The clerk didn’t pause in the outer office where previously she had always been interviewed, but swept straight through the crowd of scribbling clerks, idling orderlies and babbling petitioners towards a door at the rear.
Despite having almost to scuttle to keep up with his stride, Angela didn’t fail to take in the inscription that announced it to be the Administrator’s private office. For a moment she thought she was to be given an interview by the great man himself and quailed a little, contemplating her dusty hair and worn out dress. But then she remembered that she had seen the Administrator depart not an hour earlier with his usual grim expression, half a dozen orderlies trotting at his heels. To judge by his confident air before his fellow clerks, this young man must have been left in charge and she hoped by his swagger, inclined to take liberties with his borrowed authority. Hope sprang high in Angela’s breast as she followed him into his master’s inner sanctum.
It was unremarkable, workmanlike. She knew the Administrator to be an ascetic type, ex-minister in a former anti-Western regime before he was ousted by a political coup and exiled to govern this back-of-beyond dump. Since the trauma of the Catastrophe he had kept a tight hand upon the administration by what she had heard were unorthodox and sometimes ruthless methods.
Unusually his clerks were said to be afraid to take bribes and to follow the rules with obsessive zeal, but Angela’s instinct picked up the air of reckless excitement in the young man that she followed. In Bamba since the Catastrophe, erratic behaviour had become normal. This might be her best chance. She was even encouraged by the way he shut the office door with conspiratorial care behind her. It was a solid door and the chatter of voices was cut off abruptly. The private office was spacious if sparsely furnished with a cool tiled floor and high windows admitting a refreshing breeze from the grove of palm trees beyond them. Green metal filing cabinets stood against the walls with framed maps above them. An electric fan hung motionless from the ceiling, useless without power. The only item of any grandeur was a large finely carved mahogany desk, its polished top neatly set with papers and files behind which the clerk now seated himself. He gazed expectantly at Angela.
He was younger than she had thought, perhaps the Administrator’s confidential clerk. She noticed uneasily that he was fidgeting with his hands below the desk.
“Je suis Madame Angela Kerr. Je suis er ...” She endeavoured to conceal her weariness. She should have had her resumé off by heart now, she had been made to repeat it so often to so many uncomprehending clerks.
“You wish a permit to depart this place!” he said in English, interrupting her. Her spirits lifted a little. At least this one had decided not to play that particular game. Of course he knew what she wanted, they all did. Resentment gripped her at the memory of all that time and anguish wasted upon clerks who pretended not to understand her rudimentary French.
To the point and in English. Leave this place? Indeed she did! If only she could get to the capital, there would be consulates, or at least people who knew of her, organisations to help people like her. She was growing desperate. She had seen the hungry penniless people in Bamba, some of them European refugees, who were fed on a public dole of grain, resented by the local population as a burden. So far she had been spared that. She had heard horrifying tales of how the soldiers in charge kept order by beatings and barbarity. It was said that many European refugees had been murdered trying to cross the desert from the north. She couldn’t keep her thoughts from appearing in her face.
The clerk examined her shrewdly. No jewellery, her ears pierced but devoid of earrings. He would be surprised if she possessed any more than she stood up in. She had no future in Bamba and would only fall deeper into the hands of whoever was providing for her. He licked his lips.
“M’sieur le Chef. Il sont fait un tour des environs.” Angela nodded, guessing more or less at his meaning.
“I ... command here!” he asserted in English and Angela nodded again, almost making it a bow, hoping to convey respectful awe of his alleged power, wondering what he could be persuaded to do with it, eager to flatter him.
Frowning, the clerk drummed his fingers on the desk. “Perhaps I fix permit for you to go on boat.”
There! Angela dug her nails into her palms afraid of betraying the excitement she felt. Perhaps! Free from supervision, he was reverting to type. She knew all about small bribes to minor officials; she had been handing them out almost daily during her tour, a few banknotes passed and everything opened up. She almost felt triumphant until she remembered her position.
“Some people, I think, pay something for this service!”
Her heart pounded at his words. Her whole trouble was she had nothing left that was worthwhile for a bribe. Really, only cotton clothing and foodstuffs were of any account in Bamba. Refugees struggling southwards selling gold and jewellery in desperation had depressed their value and, in any case, she had been delayed so long that all of hers had been sold already to pay for her keep.
“Much payment I think!” The clerk wiped his lips with a white handkerchief; nervous of his petty crime, Angela thought. At one time the clerk would simply have named the sum and taken it in banknotes. Her heart sank. She still needed to pay her way on the riverboat unless she could also persuade the clerk to include an official passage along with the permit. Any trouble here might get to the ears of her principal creditor, Moussa Abbeou, whom she knew to have interests everywhere. Trembling with resentment, she could only try to throw herself upon this young man’s mercy.
“Please! I must get away from here! I haven’t got anything I can give you! My hostess insists I owe her for my keep and the owner of the school building claims I am responsible for the rent. I’ll starve here if I don’t get away. That beast of a woman has sold all my clothes just for feeding me.” Angela dabbed at her tears without concealment, feeling that a display of feminine weakness would serve her better than a stiff upper lip.
“Quite well fed, though!” the clerk thought to himself, admiring her curves, her tears stimulating in him a shrewd calculation. Then his eyes bulged when she suddenly began to undo the topmost buttons on her dress.
“Does ... does the permit ... I mean … will I get a free passage?” Intent upon what she was doing, she missed the licking of his lips as she fumbled in her bosom to fish out a small purse from between the swells of her breasts.
“This is all the money I have.” Her anxious gaze caught the direction of his gaze and she reddened furiously, thrusting the little sweat-dampened wad of local notes towards him.
The clerk admired the way the blushes spread and wondered how far down they went. He was resolved that he would find out. Angela blushed more furiously than ever. She was used to attracting lustful men, but this was the first time she had not been in control of the situation, or at least of herself. She wanted so desperately what it was in his power to give her.
His eyes barely flicking to the notes, the clerk pushed them back at her dismissively. “Not sufficing, this kind money!” Local notes were still accepted for small transactions, but grudgingly, so it was a valid excuse. Helplessly, Angela fumbled to restore the little purse to its hiding place. She felt oddly humiliated, as if she had tried to cheat him. Tears started, her emotion made her breasts heave within the still unbuttoned front of her dress where the smooth curves showed a hint of lace. She was having difficulty getting the purse back inside.
“Money, never mind!” the clerk burst out with, his eyes bulged until the whites showed with the intensity of his desire. “You make love with me, I fix! I give permit! No money!”
The words made Angela swallow hard, shame uppermost in her mind. Her gaze fled to the windows where a patch of blue sky showed between moving green palm leaves. She couldn’t pretend she didn’t understand. Yet she couldn’t deny either that it solved her main problem. The clerk stood up suddenly and Angela gave a nervous start, finding him overtopping her.
“You give me good fuck! I give you permit and passage also. No payment!”
Angela knew the price, though. She realised with shame that she had left it far too late to pretend she hadn’t been considering paying it. The proposal put so crudely almost made her flee after all, but somehow she remained transfixed, still paralysed by her dilemma. Revulsion vied against desire. It solved both her problems.
“I like to have white lady!” the black man grinned. “White ladies, very hot stuff!”
She wasn’t that sort! Angela was indignant, thinking angrily of some of the ex-pats she had met. Nevertheless she cast an uncertain glance towards the door.
“No one come! No one hear!”
No doubt it was meant as reassurance, but Angela nervously took it another way. If she fought and screamed, would anyone come to her rescue? Her gaze fell upon his big black hands. If she fled now, would she be allowed to escape? She dithered, knowing that every second’s delay made it more inevitable that she would have to do what he wanted. A few minutes’ unpleasantness, she reasoned, would set her free. Only a few minutes against what might happen to her if she remained trapped and helpless in Bamba.
“Come!” the clerk urged. “Quick! I good fuck! Fuck many girls! Very good! Very hard!”
“W-what if s-someone comes…” Angela, still seeking to delay, gestured to the door.
“I fix!” He held up a key triumphantly. She hadn’t even realised that he’d locked it. Her retreat had been cut off all the time.
“Let me have the permit,” she got out. There, she had done it!
“Fuck first, then I give you permit!” he bargained automatically.
“H-how do I know?” Angela insisted, blushing with shame, but determined.
The young Bamban stared angrily, then finding her adamant, caved in with a shrug. He rattled open a drawer, dragged out a pad and wrote furiously, began to give it to her, then checked and, finding a stamp and inkpad, banged it down a couple of times and waved it at her, grinning.
“Where do ... Here?” She looked about her, suddenly deflated.
The clerk seized the files on his superior’s desk and shifted them hastily, dropping half the papers on the floor. “Here!” A large hand recklessly swept the rest after them and, as if mesmerised by the gesture, Angela took a step towards the desk.
“Wait!” The man checked her with a jerky gesture. “Take off all! I fuck you like on movies! White girls all fuck naked!” As if taken by this idea he was already ripping open the collar of his own garment. “Vite! Vite!”
He had paid in advance and now he expected action. Hastily stuffing her precious permit into the little purse, the truth struck through all of Angela’s dithering and impelled her into shamefaced acquiescence. Cold sweat seemed to have plastered her dress to her body. It trickled eerily between her shoulder blades and down the insides of her thighs. It made things more difficult than she expected as she struggled with the usually automatic process of undressing.
“See! I help!” The expectant beneficiary made a clumsy lunge.
“No!” Angela wrenched hastily at the clinging fabric, trembling with vexation, but unable to allow herself the luxury of hesitation. She almost tore the dress off and dropped it on top of the papers strewn underfoot. Blushing nervously, she stood in bra and knickers, her eyes going instinctively to the man to look for a reaction, then dropping her eyes, startled into a reaction of her own. She had heard the expression - hung like a donkey!
Stripped of his clothes he stood by the desk like an ebony statue, his tall frame full of muscle, displaying tribal scars as proudly as any pagan warrior ancestor. White teeth gleaming, he cradled in one fist the thing that had startled her, a penis like a dangling length of dusky hosepipe. She stood as if transfixed. The change was so drastic from modestly gowned clerk to naked, savage masculinity.
Fortunately the Bamban seemed to take her expression as a tribute, beaming with conceit. “Ahh! You see it is so long eh! You will be well fucked, I think!”
Flight was no longer an option. Standing there in her underwear, shivering a little as an unexpectedly cool breeze goose pimpled her sweat damp skin, Angela tried to control her emotions. His boastful vanity irritated her. She didn’t enjoy the prospect of being penetrated by that thing, but she had to go through with it now. That was all there was to it.
“Come, woman! Make all naked!”
Her undesired partner was getting impatient, sure that his prize was nearly in his grasp. She saw he was exasperated with her dithering. She had to get out safely with her precious piece of paper. Fearing that impatience might get the better of him and he might tear the purse from her with the rest of her clothing, she hastened to appease him. With downcast eyes she reached back to unhook her bra, unclipped it quickly and let her breasts tumble free, heavy and bare on her rib cage, feeling the nipples prick and stiffen in the cool draught. She stooped, self consciously, one arm across her breasts as they swung forward, dropping the flimsy piece of lace on top of her dress.
She tried to slip out of her briefs with equal efficiency, but this time the damp cotton clung obstinately to her bare curves. Balanced absurdly on one leg, she found them caught in a twist around her calves. She was very conscious of the erotic spectacle she made as bent over in the struggle, made more nervous by the almost physical feeling of male eyes upon her. Tousled and panting, breasts bouncing wildly with her efforts, she ended by tearing the worn fabric irreparably before she got them off and stood up before the desk as naked as the man who faced her.
Despite her resignation, her hands fluttered nervously before her loins as if conscious of being a target and her eyes slid quickly away from the sight of his penis, springing from his enclosing fist like an emergent snake. But then, as he started round the desk, she hastily stepped towards it. Better to get it over with.
“You give me good fuck!” It sounded enough like a threat to unnerve her with its implied requirement for enthusiasm. Angela dithered again as he loomed closer, his fist jiggling his penis. She shrank back but was fielded by a long reaching black arm. Swung back up against the desk end, she scrabbled behind her, found its hard edge and hoisted herself up, assisted by a heave of his hand so enthusiastic that she went sprawling flat on her back, legs kicking and arms out-flung.
With the desktop hot from the sun it was like being splayed upon a stove. Angela’s reaction must have looked like an attempt to escape, for the Bamban slammed her down with unexpected violence. Seeing his angry glare, Angela prudently submitted.
Clutching the decoratively carved edges of the desk she closed her eyes and spread her legs wide, hoping he would be quick. Suitably appeased, the man grunted and lifted her dangling legs, sliding his hands under her knees, Angela remaining limp, fearing to annoy him further even if she wasn’t going to give him any encouragement either. She felt the desk edge hard across her bottom as she lay on her back awaiting the assault.
Nor did the brute use much finesse, despite his boasts. He drove at her with a rutting bellow and such vigour that she slid on her bottom across the slippery desktop. She was dragged roughly back and he tried again.
She had fully expected to be tested. The length of what she was to receive was vivid in her memory. The clerk’s black face was set in a grimace of concentration, looming over her every time she opened her eyes. His lithe and muscular male body rammed hard into her, driving her thighs even wider and forcing gasps from her gritted teeth. His blundering crudity disgusted her. Though she herself professed no great skill, she realised that he was not the experienced black Don Juan he had made himself out to be. She stiffened with resentment and secret scorn, without caring if it made it more difficult for him. She felt she had done her part after all.
Her clumsily thrusting abuser began to mutter curses, with a growing note of anger. He had lifted Angela up bodily by the hips, the damp flesh of her bottom cheeks peeling off the polished desktop like a half stuck postage stamp and her head and shoulders sliding on the shiny surface. Too late Angela was beginning to have intimations of disaster looming. His penis seemed too big to penetrate readily, stabbing bluntly. He blamed her for her efforts to hold onto the desk edge as she was shaken like a rag doll. Her teeth rattled and her legs waved wildly kicking in the air, high heels stabbing ludicrously.
“You make like dead woman!” He dumped Angela back on the desk with a thump, her legs dangling either side, and reaching forward grabbed the thong that held her precious prize about her neck. “You cheat me!”
“No! No!” Angela hung on, seeking to retain the small square of leather and was yanked over onto her face, sliding head foremost off the desk. The thong snapped and came away in his grasp, the purse dropping at his feet. Angela scrabbled on her hands and knees, trying to recapture it. Blocked by his bulk she clutched at the muscular black thighs caught between him and the desk end, overwhelmed by his unreasoning fury.
“You make hard again!” he raged. His enormous penis dangled limply before Angela’s eyes, more like a length of empty hosepipe than ever, as if it had been the clasp of his fist that had kept it up.
“Take!” The passionate tone and her helplessly trapped position, left Angela no alternative. However she might resent being made to take the blame she was going to have to assist in her own undoing. Resentfully she closed her slim fingers round the dangling rubbery stem, feeling the thing jump and start to stiffen just at her touch. Half relieved, half rebellious, she wanked it slowly up and down, the man giving mollified grunts all the while. Webbed with prominent veins, thickening as it rose in her hands it emanated a ripe smell that made her nostrils flare with distaste.
“Suck it!”
Angela looked up in involuntary dismay. But his face was a mask of lust and cruelty, glaring down at her like a menacing black gargoyle. She thought momentarily of breaking off and screaming for help, but she could see her little leather purse, with the permit in it, lying under his feet. She would never get it back and the men who came in response might only add to her abusers after all.
Recognising her lack of choice she clutched the great truncheon in her hand, closed her eyes and let her lips part to engulf the penis head, like a child enveloping a lollipop, cheeks bulging. Where her lips touched she felt it slither like an entering snake. It slid across her tongue and as she gagged upon it, filled the roof of her mouth and dived to the back of her throat. Its owner groaned pleasurably, his hips ramming her head back against the desk. Horribly trapped, she was forced to gobble around its seeming endless length, snorting desperately for breath and still clutching at the thick base of the shaft in an attempt to prevent it choking her.
“Let go! White bitch! Let go!”
Angela grovelled before his thighs, her head ringing from the clout he gave her as he tore himself away, cursing her ungratefully. He was triumphant now. He was rampant as a stallion. The swollen dusky knob and thick stem glistened with Angela’s saliva as the great cudgel of flesh wagged ponderously under her nose. Before she could recover, she was hoist like a toy, grabbed by whatever portion of her came handiest, swung by one arm and a leg and thrown down, smack, on her belly on the desktop.
Dazed and disoriented, she struggled to adjust. Pushed and yanked into position up on all fours, she knelt on top of the desk, trembling and fearful. She felt more humiliated than ever. This time she was going to be taken from the rear in dog-fashion.
But she had learnt that co-operation was expected of her. Feeling the woodwork of the desk quiver beneath the man’s added weight as he mounted behind her, she splayed herself abjectly for his convenience without having to be told, consoling herself with the reflection that at least like this she didn’t have to face the man or pretend appreciation.
Big hands were clapped to her naked flanks, lifting them and positioning her. She felt his erection prod on target, part her sex lips and enter her at once. Gasping and straining to accommodate his thickness, she reflected it was fortunate after all that she had been made to lubricate it first. Head pushed over the end of the desk as he thrust, her eyes focussed briefly on the purse on the floor, the permit within it now out of reach without his permission. Alarmed, she realised that it was not enough simply to endure a rape. She would have to play the whore, too. What if she failed to please him this time? Would the permit be withheld? Would she have to keep on trying until he was satisfied?
Responding with panic to such fears, she lifted her bottom to the next thrust, willing herself to co-operate. Driven by dire necessity, she felt she had no resort but to abandon all scruples. Whether her user recognised her effort she could hardly tell. Perhaps he took it for a tribute to his new-found virility.
He began ramming Angela with relentless vigour, forcing her to do her utmost to match it. He skewered her mercilessly until she grew too breathless to squeal. His big black hands clamped her pale flanks, holding her steady while his cock drove like a living jack-hammer, deeper and deeper. Waves of her resisting flesh seemed to build up before its bulk, only to be stretched spread and assimilated in its relentless progress. Her flesh enveloped his throbbing shaft in warm, tight, juiciness. His lean black thighs gradually closed with her wide splayed white ones, his black loins sank to enfold the quivering pale curve of her out-thrust bottom, as if centred by the solid black shaft connecting both.
Teeth exposed between parted lips, Angela clutched at the desk edges, hissing like a teakettle and feeling every inch of the solid shaft within her, its solid knob right up her at last.
The hissing changed to a long shuddering sigh of relief as her grunting penetrator drew slowly back and slid nearly the whole hot length of it from her clinging vagina. That breath was hardly recovered then Angela was forced to change her tune again, this time too a long shrill cry, as he sank it all back into her in one powerful thrust.
She was fully conscious of the noise she was making, imagining what listening ears beyond the office might be making of it but she was almost helpless to avoid it and, behind her, the clerk was becoming even noisier. They were into a steady rhythm of thrust and withdrawal, he gasping and grunting in ecstasy and enjoyment, Angela groaning and hissing in her efforts to conform to her user’s needs.
Up on the desk, black and white intimately united, they humped and strained more or less in unison. Sweat trickled between slithering and smacking flesh, a lubricant between the two. Tears merged with sweat and droplets of both flew from the panting pair to spatter the shiny surface of the desk. Slowly the rhythm increased as both participants abandoned control for different reasons. The in and out driving of the dusky cock-shaft engrossed them both. Angela was now obsessed, possessed with only one aim, to arouse the outburst that alone would release her from its surging red-hot shaft. For his part, its owner took his white victim’s co-operation for granted and was now working up into the final strokes grunting and humping, heedless of all but her melting hot depths and his coming climax.
Every one of her senses monopolised by her abuser, sensitive to every nuance of his performance, Angela anticipated the onset of his outburst to the very inch and as he drove deep for what she anticipated would be the last time, she let herself go with a triumphant cry of accomplishment.
Then several things happened at once.
Behind her the clerk had reared erect, similarly crowing in triumph while still firing his last spasms into Angela’s well-plumbed depths. Angela was still thrusting herself back to meet him meanwhile, as if anxious to milk every drop. She was elated by success, horrified by its necessity, but terrified of leaving off her efforts too soon. The clerk was noisily slapping her rump to encourage her, gloating in his own potency and also reluctant to give up.
Neither had heard the voices, nor the key that turned in the office door. A white-gowned figure stood in the doorway. Behind him and around him, a crowd of goggling faces peered in upon this lewd tableau. Man and woman, black and white, both naked and copulating like two randy dogs on the Administrator’s desk, amid a sea of spilled papers.
With bewildering suddenness, the pair found themselves torn apart. The clerk bellowed like a startled bullock, the first resentful blare turning instantly to fear. Angela feeling her last rearward thrust meet no protrusion, turned her head in astonishment and at once echoed his consternation in a shriller fashion. Her erstwhile penetrator plucked bodily from her like a cork out of a bottle, had suddenly shrunk to a caricature of deflated manhood, gripped firmly by two khaki-clad orderlies.
For the rest, the tall white-clad figure of the Administrator of Bamba dominated the scene. He was a lean, grizzled man, with a dark face both angular and thin-nosed. Normally hovering on the borderline between handsome and forbidding, his present expression was one of outrage.
Left suddenly stranded in naked abandon on his desktop, Angela’s unfortunate pose, with up-thrust rump and widely parted thighs presented the gaping onlookers with a comprehensive view of her sexual parts. Her reddened cleft in a envelope of crinkle and swollen lips was clearly glistening wet and her curly brown pubic bush was prominently spattered with clots of white, from which thin thread dangled downward, carrying the eye to a small sticky white puddle between her knees.
“Descendez vous! Poulaine! Quitter le bureau!”
Angela had gone rigid in horror at her situation; her limbs seemed to have frozen. She was well aware that she was incapable of explaining it. It would have been difficult even in English. Choking back the wail of despair that was her initial reaction, she drew her sprawled limbs together, her brain trying to reconcile the simultaneous urges to conceal her tell-tale condition and to escape from the desktop.
A further bellow from the Administrator had cleared the office, the fringe of heads at the door instantly disappearing and the two orderlies briskly wheeling their prisoner about and rushing him out, too. It left Angela and the Administrator alone. She had taken advantage of the pause to tumble off the desk, tottering on her high heels. Disorientated by the calamity she had landed on the wrong side, separated from her discarded garments by the obstacle of the desk and the person of the Administrator. Squirming under his contemptuous gaze she tried to cover herself with uncertain hands, not daring to dart past him. Then frustration overwhelmed her shame as she remembered all she had gone through and what the intervention of this sneering official had cost her.
“Cette homme …” she burst out, made sulky by her inability to command the right words. “Il sont … er … promise. I mean … Je donner un … un … e r… f-fuck pour donner moi un permis de passage …”
The irate official might almost have been anticipating some impudent attempt to justify her position, for he swooped instantly upon her, visibly swelling with rage. Angela panicked. Yelping in fear, she tried to dodge round him in order to reach her clothes. Taking it for an attempt to escape, he intercepted her one handed, dragging her back with a grip on the back of her neck. Protesting shrilly, she found herself thrust head first towards the desk, but this time bent over it, with the carved edge hard across the top of her thighs. She saw from close quarters the flat polished surface stretching out in front of her, still damp in patches from her previous occupancy.
“Regardez!” he hissed violently. “Salope!” Then, “Lappez vous!”
The white blob of cum deposited in the process of the clerk’s abrupt evacuation of her, was still there accusingly on the polished wood, right under her nose.
“I wasn’t … I was … That is … Owww!” she yelped, as a stinging hand smack to her bottom almost took her breath away and deprived her of any hope of mustering a justification. His grip on her neck was inexorable and she felt in the lasting sting the power behind the smack of his hand on her bottom cheek. However humiliating his order, she shied away from the prospect of getting any more of those.
Feeling like a punished puppy and whimpering rather like one, she put her tongue out to the little blob of goo and reluctantly began to lick it clean.
Held to this task she could see nothing but the vague shimmer of her face reflected in the glossy surface, but she was conscious that the man behind her seemed to be breathing very hard. Suddenly she was conscious of the naked indecency as well as the humiliating nature of her posture and the masculine power of her captor. Deep within her she was horrified to find that last thought inspired a kind of reaction, a tiny quiver of the thighs. Perhaps the co-operation required of her by the departed clerk had affected her after all. Connecting this with the lingering smart of his hand on her bottom, it was impossible to repress a wriggle of shame.
And then, sensing that the man behind her had stiffened with a sharp intake of breath, desperation took her by storm. The reputedly incorruptible Administrator was human and male and susceptible. Like master, like man, evidently! As if reaching dutifully to lick another inch forward, Angela slowly squirmed her thighs apart under what she hoped would be his fascinated gaze.
“Ah … vous … poulaine!”
Momentarily, Angela went rigid in the man’s grip, then as a broad male palm came up between her spread legs and splayed strong fingers lingeringly across her bum and rested her plump pussy hot on his palm, she braced herself to squirm with a deceitful little moan against the firm clasp.
“Vous se ressembler … a la chienne …chienne blanche…!”
Deep and vibrant, his voice almost a purr, gave Angela time for a flush of guilty elation, convinced of a clever decision. So she was taken completely by surprise when the hand slipped away, reappeared briefly in the corner of her eye, dipping into a half opened desk drawer. It came up swiftly and the heavy ruler it held came smacking down exactly where the hand had caressed her!
Pain, rage and panic succeeded one another as Angela’s incipient seductive wriggle exploded into a wild threshing of legs and her languorous moan became a series of shrieks as she tried to escape from the desk. Her previous forward wriggle had carried her toes clear of the floor and the inexorable grip on her neck held her flat, kept her from backing off, presenting her bare bottom to the descending ruler,
The thing was wide hard and heavy and hurt like hell! Worse than his hand by far! Confused and demoralised, Angela greeted every whack with a squeal from behind gritted teeth, still doing her best to make a lewd display, thinking perhaps this was the sort of thing the beast found exciting.
He gave her six cracking whacks with the ruler, each one harder than the last, each leaving lines of fiery pain right across the width of her bottom. By the time he let up she was only too eager to do anything that might preserve her from more of the same.
“Se levez vous!”
Which evidently meant that she was to get up on the desk again in the position he had discovered her, kneeling on all fours, thighs widespread. She fully expected to be made to earn her permit a second time over and this time with a throbbing backside that promised to make it a lot more painful. Instead the man only laughed scornfully, making some comment she didn’t understand.
He left her isolated up there and opening the office door, bellowing a rapid volley of orders into the sudden hush that ensued. Amid a frantic bustle, two clerks rushed in and immediately began rapidly picking up the fallen papers from the floor, while doing their best to ignore Angela posed naked and red faced on the desk above them. The Administrator directed the clearance, pacing to and fro before Angela who dared neither to raise her eyes nor voice her feelings despite the chaos that reigned in her mind. The ruler was still lying on the desk right where she could see it.
The office was shadowy and cool. The throbbing glare of tropical sunlight was reduced by the deep eaves and over shadowing palm trees. The open door and windows made a pathway for what, in other circumstances, Angela would have found a pleasant breeze. As it was it made her quiver when it caressed her burning flesh, a reminder of her double attempt at sexual bribery and her humiliating failure. The fleeting glimpse she got of the Administrator’s figure showed no sign of arousal. It suddenly occurred to her that she might have misconstrued the words ‘se lever’, but by then she didn’t dare try to climb back down. She stayed where she was, salt tears on her hot cheeks, tasting the mixture of sperm and varnish on her tongue.
“You have proved yourself a harlot!”
The Administrator spoke loudly, using the local language evidently more for the benefit of the receptive ears in the outer office than for Angela’s understanding. Even the tone, however, was enough for the Englishwoman to squirm with shame. His magisterial delivery brooked no denial and she would have found difficulty in summoning any coherent defence even if she had understood the words. She saw that he had picked up the ruler again and she didn’t dare incur his wrath a second time. The Administrator was, for all practical purposes, a dictator in Bamba. His word could be made law. She was as helpless in his hands as the lowliest native inhabitant, more so, since she had neither family or patron nor protector to dispute any judgement.
“You are condemned by your own admission!” he barked inexorably, this time in English. “You were selling your sexual favours to my clerk in return for a permit to which you were not entitled. That is bribery of a public official; indecent behaviour in a public office and conspiracy to forge a document.” He turned with a swirl of gown to the door. “As you are a refugee and not a citizen, under Emergency regulations your case can be dealt with summarily. I intend to demonstrate that such behaviour will be dealt with most severely!”
A commanding bellow submerged a timid attempt by Angela to beg for an explanation. It brought rushing in, with crashing military salutes, two more khaki-clad orderlies, almost the twins to the pair who had removed Angela’s fellow delinquent. These two were accompanied by a large, heavily breathing black woman wearing a feminine version of the same uniform. Behind them from the outer office rose a buzz of excited voices.
Still ignorant of her fate, Angela was given no time to prepare herself, but yanked bodily straight off her perch and frog-marched briskly out of the office with her discarded clothing left behind on the other side of the desk. Out through a crowd of gaping people, clerks and petitioners she was borne, frantically protesting. Out into the even more public courtyard, from which she might well wish now she had never graduated, her protests falling on deaf ears. The tale of her offences and summary condemnation had run ahead of her. The crowd stared with interest as she was trotted past, stark naked except for her high heeled sandals.
The townspeople were unaccustomed to such displays of nudity. Even the bush pagans donned clothing to come to town, aware that nakedness was seen as a mark either of shameless ignorance or of abysmal poverty. Seeing this penniless European woman, having been caught in the act of immoral and criminal behaviour, reduced to such a level seemed to the giggling onlookers perfectly appropriate.
Trailed by a chattering and expectant throng of whom Angela was the only one ignorant of what was intended, she and her escort entered another compound. More spacious, its mud brick walls enclosed an almost empty expanse of well-trodden earth where at the centre stood a stout wooden post like a cut-down telephone pole. As they entered, another procession was just leaving, more khaki clad men carrying out by the arms and legs, head foremost between them a sagging half-naked black figure whose passing left a horrifying trail of bright red spots of blood; the last that Angela was to see of the initiator of her disgrace.
Her escort forced her to retrace the course of that trail as far as the central post. Angela had seen this post before, had passed it indeed each time she visited the Administration offices. Of course no one had told her what it was for and only now was she beginning to make connections between the whip the female orderly was carrying and the fate of her precursor.
She was thrust up against the post, facing it and embracing it. It rose well above her head despite her high heels and her arms were lifted up so that her wrists could be made fast with straps to a wooden peg high up on the far side. Her ankles were unceremoniously dragged apart and secured in similar fashion, so that she hugged the wooden post like a lover, breasts and belly pressed firmly to it. Securely strapped in place she waited helplessly; waiting for what she now guessed was the punishment she had been condemned to. This was a whipping post!
She turned her head with difficulty, got a view of the black wardress carrying the whip she remembered all too well, and shut her eyes. The compound was rapidly filling up with spectators, people crowding in around the walls. She was being made a public spectacle. She would have sunk to the earth if her bonds hadn’t held her up nakedly exposed as the target for all eyes.
Public whippings were still a novelty in Bamba, having only recently been re-introduced under Fundamentalist influence for minor crimes and offences against public morality. They had been a reaction to the townspeople’s fear that starving refugees would bring crime and disorder. In this town on the edge of civilisation, however, the modern world had always had an uncertain grip. By the animated buzz of the crowd, they seemed to regard this mediaeval display as a form of entertainment.
Angela’s naked flesh crept and twitched almost of its own accord, reacting to her vulnerability. She hugged the solid timber in terror of what was to come, trying not to squirm, knowing that every movement of hers was adding to the spectacle. The Administrator’s heavy ruler had left her with a persisting relic of its sting on her behind. She would have been glad to beg for that now, rather than what she was going to get.
With senses preternaturally heightened, she heard every sound behind her with desperate clarity. Booted feet shifted purposefully, voices muttered then a throat was cleared loudly. As the crowd fell respectfully silent for the announcement, a female voice close at hand read out something in a monotone in the local language, punctuated by the occasional oh’s and ah’s of the listeners. The judgement and sentence perhaps, it meant nothing to Angela of course, except the last phrase alone, which was repeated in bad French perhaps out of some archaic legal habit.
“Vingt de coup!”
“Twenty something! Twenty strokes?”
At last Angela was shocked out of her dumb submission, but since horror simultaneously knotted her vocal cords, the intended shriek of protest came out as a strangled croak. It was unlikely that it would have made any difference; the response of the onlookers seemed to be a ripple of approval.
For Angela time seemed to stand still. Sweat from her naked body was making damp patches on the whipping post. Her limbs held taut by the straps trembled with tension, muscles protesting. In agony of mind she assured herself that should she survive this, she would leave Bamba if she had to crawl upon all fours to do it. Half consciously her ears had been monitoring the buzz of the crowd. When it suddenly hushed she got the message at once. Gasping with fear she tensed herself every nerve quivering, alert for the hiss of the descending whip.
Swishhh! She convulsed in terror, thrusting herself with a shriek against the unyielding timber.
Nothing happened! It had been nothing but a testing sweep of the whip in empty air, never touching her. She found herself suddenly emptying her bladder against the post, all down the woodwork between her legs. Quivering with shame, she heard the laughter. She drew a sobbing breath, filling her lungs to scream at her tormentors begging to be put out of this agony of waiting.
She had her wish even before the words were formulated and instantly regretted even wishing it.
Shock as much as pain produced the first resounding howl. How could such a thing be happening to her? Then the pain followed to drive out reason. The thing had struck right across the full width of her backside, drawing a line at first numbed, then melting into a red-hot stripe and then spreading, throbbing and burning in a wider swathe.
With nineteen more to come!
Now she knew exactly how it would feel. She also guessed she was going to survive them but that was hardly consolation with nineteen to go. Dreadful anticipation had given place to the horror of experience.
The second stroke fell a fraction below the first, making Angela feel every inch afresh and doubling the pain with twin weals. This time her breath was too short to even howl properly.
The third fell while she was still gasping and writhing from the first two, so that she twisted a little under it and it sliced from hip to mid thigh, crossing the other two and removing what breath she had recovered.
She nearly fainted, but a delay in the delivery of the next allowed her to breathe again. The fourth seemed worse than its precursors and her recovered breath restored her ability to howl. She ground her naked belly against the solidity of the wooden post as the fourth weal blended indistinguishably into what was now a throbbing generalised torment. She tried fruitlessly to heave herself up the whipping post, fingers clawing at the straps, thighs and calves straining to assist.
The next blow seemed to follow her motion. Whipping upwards under the rounds of her bottom the thing almost lifted her off her toes, slicing the clenched cheeks as if to make two round buns of them.
On and on it went. Six! Seven! Eight! The strokes followed one another regularly spaced but carelessly aimed, doubling their effect wherever they crossed the earlier weals. Angela gasped with straining lungs after each stroke, expending it in a shriek and having to start again before the next, writhing with unrestrained vigour heedless of the spectacle she was presenting to the crowd.
At length one stroke, more wildly placed than before, struck her high up under the ribs and virtually silenced her during the next few deliveries. It was immediately followed with a correction which fell low instead, crossing the tops of her hitherto untouched thighs, leaving an effect like two red hot garters and so galvanising her that she tried to dance against the restraining straps. This and the succeeding two or three she could greet only with animal sounds as she tried to recover her wind, but falling as they did upon a body as wet with sweat as if she had come fresh from her bath, they made plenty of noise on their own.
An unexpected pause gave Angela time to catch up, a respite of sorts. She had lost count of how many strokes she had received but she was painfully conscious that it hadn’t been anywhere near twenty.
It was a long pause. Slowly regaining some awareness of her surroundings, Angela picked up a commotion among the crowd.
“That is she! Oh, the wicked creature!”
Uncomforting words and in a familiar if unloved voice, that of Mama Ogupo, formerly Angela’s employee as cook/interpreter, her present landlady and lately a disgruntled creditor. It was evidently her expostulation, in a mixture of languages, which was holding up proceedings.
Angela’s wrists and ankles were being unfastened from the whipping post. Was her ordeal over? Was Mama Ogupo of all people somehow rescuing her? She turned painfully to see through the haze of her tears, the massive ungainly figure, almost as wide as she was high, gaudy in her best gown and turban, contrasting with the ascetic figure of the Administrator beside her. The man’s face, angular and impassive gave nothing away. Mama Ogupo’s face, of which Angela once heard a pupil comment ‘a cow step on she’ was alive with indignation.
Angela made three or four tottering steps towards them before collapsing onto hands and knees before her presumed rescuer.
“Please … Please … speak for me,” she groaned, never reflecting upon the irony of begging for the woman from whom she had tried to escape, to rescue her from the painful consequences.
The fat ex-cook stooped over her, loose flesh wobbling like a sack-full of jelly, her little yellow eyeballs rolling in an expression of infinite malice.
Angela had been asked to take over control of the charity’s operation in Bamba after government complaints of misappropriations by the local organiser. She had been flattered by the guarantee of a completely free hand, even though she expected difficulties since she spoke little French. The project director had assured her that the principal contractor spoke good English and assured him that English speakers could be hired locally. That was true as far as it went, but she had discovered they were mostly prostitutes. She had been forced to rely upon Mama Ogupo as interpreter, whom she had originally hired at the contractor’s suggestion as cook-housekeeper.
Mama Ogupo had contacts among local politicians. A commanding woman with few scruples, she had been involved in some obscure political difficulty, which had impelled her to move across the border. She had been Angela’s most devoted champion up until the extent of the general collapse had become clear. Before the Catastrophe, Angela had been the authoritative outsider who knew how to make the system disgorge money, but with the disaster that system had gone completely, the world she came from buried under snow and ice or swept away. When Angela had gone almost overnight from a rich source of patronage and funding to the penniless reminder of a failed investment, it had become obvious that the other woman’s devotion had been to the possibility of making money.
A bad investment! Mama Ogupo had cast about, so far largely in vain, for the means of realising some return on her erstwhile employer. The news of Angela’s attempt to abscond and her consequent plight had struck the black woman with astonishment and fury. Clearly she had been cheated. The penniless debtor had attempted to capitalise upon her one remaining asset and mismanaged it into the bargain! She had hurried to the scene at once, brim full of indignation.
“Oh you wicked woman! Oh you slut! You never pay me what you owe me and now you think you can escape me!”
“M’sieu! M’sieu!” The fat woman appealed to the Administrator for justice upon the absconding debtor, totting up the sums for back salary, food and lodging, rent of premises etc to an enormous figure.
The man looked impassively down at Angela whose ability to follow all this had been somewhat submerged. The woman who had wielded, not the whip as Angela had assumed but a long flexible bamboo cane, had directed the contents of a pail of water upon her victim’s kneeling figure. The petrifying shock of cold water accurately directed upon her burning weals had rendered Angela temporarily speechless.
“This woman has been sentenced to twenty strokes of the cane for bribery and immorality. She attempted to bribe my clerk with sexual services in return for a permit to leave the town.”
His petitioner howled in dismay at the Administrator’s confirmation of her fears. She looked down at Angela who was gasping and groaning on all fours in a muddy puddle. “You wicked creature! You sell yourself to escape me!” Flourishing her fat fist she yelled, “Why you not sell yourself to pay me then?”
“You … horrible … woman …” Angela groaned helplessly, her humiliated reaction to the reproach owing as much to its logic as to its crudity.
“Attention!” Stony faced as ever, the Administrator silenced the rising babble from the crowd, advocating solutions of their own and pronounced his official judgement upon Mama Ogupo’s suit.
“If this woman,” he indicated Angela whimpering in non-comprehension at their feet. “If this woman, as seems to be the case, owes you more than she can pay then she will be assigned to you as a debt slave, as was our traditional practice in times past! And will remain so until such time as you have recovered all the sum of the debt from her service.”
Mama Ogupo looked astonished and the crowd buzzed. Then as the idea sank in, the fat ex-cook began to chuckle with sudden glee that shook her mountainous flesh. Angela, looking from one face to the other, had it explained to her in crudely brutal terms. Debt slavery was an old institution in these parts, difficult to eradicate, persisting within living memory. She protested feebly and tearfully but she knew she was trapped. Mama Ogupo didn’t bother to translate her protest.
“That will serve me very well, Sir!” she wheezed still chuckling. Then reflecting more shrewdly she pursed her lips. “But, Sir! What if she becomes troublesome in her behaviour?”
The Administrator dismissed the problem, saying indifferently. “Since she is your property until the debt is repaid, the remainder of her sentence has been suspended in order not to damage your interest in her. Should you wish at any time to waive your property rights then the sentence can be carried out in full. With the whip this time, if necessary! You may tell her that, so that she understands.”
The fat woman nodded, impressed. She made sure that Angela understood too, who sobbed impotently at her plight. She was to be at the mercy of the ex-cook who would house and feed her and be responsible for her discipline with authority to punish her for disobedience or laziness and have her returned here for a public flogging if she dared to rebel.
“Ah Sir! That is a very wise and suitable decision.” Mama Ogupo bobbed an elephantine curtsey to her benefactor.
“Submit an exact claim for your debts to my office.” the official said. “A clerk will calculate the period for which she will serve, making allowance for the cost of her upkeep, and will issue you with a license for her.”
“Sir she is likely to serve me for ever, she owes so much!” Mama Ogupo forecast jubilantly.
He nodded casually and waved forward the female orderly, whose approach with the long cane in hand set Angela sobbing afresh in fear of renewed punishment. “Leonie will furnish you with some sort of rag to cover your slave. It won’t be advisable to let her go naked in the street until people become accustomed to her status.”
On his instructions one of the orderlies, a man with a stentorian voice was already relaying the details of the judgement to the appreciative crowd. Leaving the rest of the arrangements to the women, the Administrator turned away and his escort began clearing the compound. While it slowly emptied, the ex-cook and Leonie together surveyed their victim’s red-wealed hindquarters.
“You haven’t badly damaged her, Leonie?”
“Only the cane. A woman’s punishment!” the female orderly said dismissively. She handed a short thick braided whip to Mama Ogupo before Angela’s apprehensive eyes. “The marks will disappear quickly enough, even from her white skin. The Administrator told me to give you the whip in case she gives you trouble. A white slave woman will be quite a novelty. You might make something out of her yet!” She grinned.
“In this place? Pfwaa…!” Mama Ogupo made a rude noise. “A black cow gives as much milk as a white. Who would pay much? The refugee women are dirt cheap!”
“Still,” Leonie remarked. “Men are strange and have odd requirements.”

“Angeeelaaa!”
At the call, Angela Kerr struggled up sleepily from her bed in what had been a school storeroom and now held besides her, only a mattress and a water jug and one other item. On one of the bare white walls where she could see it every time she lay down or awoke, a curled black dog-whip hung by a strip of blue ribbon from a nail in the plaster. Her eyes lifted to it and she sat up immediately. It was a sufficient reminder.
Hastily she reached for the piece of faded blue cotton that was the sole item of clothing she now possessed. Knotted about her waist it left her breasts bare but the scrap was deliberately insufficient to cover all of her decently and she had been strictly forbidden by her mistress to tear any of it.
Her mistress! Once she had been a person of privilege, a woman in authority, crossing frontiers with casual assurance, invited guest at government functions, courted by business men and ministers as a source of contracts and funding and employment. Then the Catastrophe and suddenly she was nothing, a penniless refugee, deserted sand unprotected. Worse, she was unfairly charged with enormous debts incurred on behalf of an organization now vanished. She was shunned by all except her creditors who still hoped to get something out of her and because of one false step she was now in their hands as a condemned slave.
She writhed mentally at the very thought of it. She might have rebelled but the cane was a sufficient reminder of the truth of her opposition. She might be, had been, could be again, taken at her mistress’s complaint, naked to the whipping post and publicly flogged. She was a slave, condemned for debt and until she paid it off Mama Ogupo owned her entirely.
“Angeeelaaa!”
Shooting out of the door into the dawn light, Angela started across the dusty compound at an anxious trot. Her mistress didn’t need to resort to the public whipping post for discipline, either.
The once well-groomed, smartly dressed, self-assured organiser of people was tousle haired, bare footed and bare breasted. A gang of men loading packages into a small cart turned to look. Feeling their eyes upon her, Angela was self-consciously aware of her jutting breasts goose pimpled, the nipples prickling in the chilly morning air.
Mama Ogupo had opened a lodging and eating house in the former school buildings to cater for the official river boatmen between trips, the fishermen from the riverbank and the Administrator’s soldiers who passed on the way to and from the refugee camp. The fat woman was well known to have access to the black market in foodstuffs that supplemented the official ration. She was far too ugly to have been a whore herself, but Angela suspected that not all the young women about the place could be granddaughters and was nervously concerned about how the food was to be paid for. Fortunately perhaps, women were readily to be had in the refugee camp by any man with food to spare and Mama Ogupo seemed content to use her as a scullion. Angela had been put to work from the start, cleaning out former classrooms still dusty from the sand-laden hurricanes that had destroyed many less well-built structures, chopping up wrecked desks for cook-wood, cleaning vegetables and pounding grain.
In the customary fashion of the country, Mama Ogupo was the undisputed tyrant queen over the microcosmic world contained within the compound walls and the other inmates took their cue from their matriarch and patroness in their attitude to the family slave. The fat negress had brought in some of the less prosperous members of her family to help in the new venture, her daughters Agatha and Beata, and the latter’s husband, Jonas, a river boat crewman, a tall thin very black man, who was often away on trips. The remainder were offspring of the two daughters, ranging from the suspect young women to tottering infants.
Angela noticed that Jonas was one of the men about the cart. A boat was expected to set off down river that day belonging to a rich relative of Mama Ogupo, a former public works contractor now turned trader, the man in fact who owned part of Angela’s alleged debt. No doubt the packages were to go down to the riverbank to be loaded aboard. Feeling Jonas’s eyes in particular lingering upon her, Angela quickened her trot, hearing the men laugh at her haste.
Haste was advisable. On the very first morning of her new subservience, Angela had been given a salutary lesson. She had been slow to respond to the call. Dragged threshing and kicking across Mama Ogupo’s ample lap with the scrap of blue cotton whisked up to her waist, she was spanked in humiliating fashion on her bare bottom like a naughty child.
“What your name?” Smackkk!
“Angela
“No! That is all finished! All gone! You are…!” Smackkk! “Just…!” Smackkk! “Angela…!” Smackkk! “Justangela…!” Smackkk!
“Ohhh …owww!”
“What you say if a person ask your name?” Smackkk!
“Ohhhowww…! Justangela!”
“Wrong!” Smackkk! “Justangela, Mistress!”
The fat pink hand had descended inexorably upon Angela’s cane-tender bottom, emphasizing every phrase. The Englishwoman’s former employee was big and strong her arm practiced by years of pounding the family grain, and her hand weighted with multiple rings. Two or three lanky, frizzle-haired teenage granddaughters, coming out to see what the row was, remained to watch and giggle. A covey of younger children playing in the dust abandoned their game to peer wide-eyed in a cluster around the doorjamb. Angela had been taught her position in the establishment very effectively.
Bobbing a sort of curtsey, she presented herself, panting, before her mistress, who was standing arms akimbo at the kitchen steps. The voluminous brightly patterned gown that enveloped the black woman’s ungainly figure made her look twice as massive.
“Please … I did hurry … Mistress!” Angela gulped.
An ugly scowl greeted this attempt at propitiation; an effect that came easily to Mama Ogupo whose face under the gaudy turban resembled a squashed black pumpkin.
“Get to your work! Here is Uncle Moussa come! He will think I make bad bargain for such a lazy creature!”
Angela scuttled past with a feeling of dread at the news. Moussa was the man to whom she was partly indebted, along with Mama Ogupo. If she was the black woman’s property then she must be his, too. Indeed he would be entitled to the lion’s share of her services. The eating-house keeper used her for a kitchen scullion. How would this man require his share to be repaid?
Angela worked in a daze all morning. It was well towards noon when Mama Ogupo’s leather slipper, snatched off in an instant, startled her from a fear-filled reverie into zealous activity. She was on hands and knees on the worn cement floor of a former classroom from which the rubble had been cleared and the roof patched. She crawled hastily out of easy reach between two plank tables, pushing an old metal bucket of dirty water with one hand, a scrubbing brush with the faded legend ‘Made in China’ in the other.
“Gibril!” Mama Ogupo having resumed her slipper and looked about her spotted her eldest grandson, summoning him to her. “You come here, boy! See this creature scrub good!”
Self-importantly the boy folded his arms and stood over Angela as she pursued her servile duty with more vigour than before, adding salt tears to the water she sloshed onto the concrete. This was now the eating area of the establishment, quiet in the heat of midday. A few men, traders waiting to meet the river-boat, were eating sorghum porridge and drinking local beer at the far end. They watched Angela’s backward progress towards them, the rounds of her bottom under the thin cotton bobbing and waggling as she scrubbed. Her long white back curved and straightened rhythmically, while dimly visible below heavily pendant breasts swung liquidly to and fro with each thrust of the scrubbing brush.
“What would you give to have that one to fuck tonight?” one of them asked.
“It’s an ugly sort of colour really,” the other joked. “But she’s well shaped. They say these white women know more ways of fucking a man than a house-full of whores. It would be interesting to try her out.”
“You will have no trouble getting a woman to fuck nowadays,” an older man commented. He indicated his half-consumed meal. “The refugee women out at the camp will do it for a bowl of porridge.”
“They have no fear of another mouth to feed!” one said heavily. They all nodded glumly, reflecting upon the crash decline in fertility.
“We all fuck like crazy these desperate days,” the older man said. “But you won’t get that one. Mama Ogupo isn’t keeping her for nothing. Not many whites available here. I’ll bet she’s being reserved for a better deal than you can offer.”
“Look at that arse waggle.” The first man returned his attention to Angela. “I’ll bet the bitch knows it!”
She was gradually backing towards them, her short and inadequate waistcloth working its way round until the split up one thigh revealed a segment of round bottom-cheek and at each vigorous movement a tantalizing glimpse of darkness within.
“Ohhh …oooh!” Clang! Crash! Unwarily Angela had moved her bobbing rump within reaching distance of the nearest man. His hand dived like lightning into the slit, two fingers effectively sampling its warm depths. In springing away, Angela crashed into the bucket and, as she and Gibril both grabbed for it, they collided and overturned a table-full of bottles.
“Let go!” Angela squealed, kicking wildly. The boy had come down on top of her and she reacted in defence, unsure whether she was under assault by man or boy. Gibril responded, at first indignant and then excited by her squirming softness, egged on by the laughing men.
“You think that beer for watering the floor!” The mistress of the house restored order with an indiscriminate hand. A large black palm cuffed Gibril hard enough to make his eyes water, the other hauled Angela upright.
“Please I couldn’t help it … It …was him …” Angela stopped, faltering, not really certain.
“How you tell such lies!” Her mistress ignored the possibility of it being the customer’s fault and chose to take it out upon the easiest target. Grabbing a handy bench with her free hand she drew it forward and thumped Angela face down across its seat. By this time the split in the skimpy waistcloth had worked right round and the garment fell naturally apart to expose her bare white bottom to view. The men at the tables grunted and sniggered in appreciation, enlivened by the stir they had created.
Mama Ogupo ordered the kitchen cane to be fetched and one of the teenage girls, who had been serving the men their beer, ran off to do her bidding, her departure the signal for a fringe of children’s heads to appear round the door. Gibril, keeping his own head down, scurried to and fro, removing empty beer bottles and refreshing the glasses. Angela, prostrate upon the bench, wriggled a little, cast one glance at the onlookers, her face quite scarlet and thereafter kept her eyes strictly on the floor beneath her.
The girl who had assumed the task returned breathless with the cane in hand and, exchanging a smirk with her sister, handed the instrument to her grandmother.
The onlookers noticed with amusement the woman’s red-faced reaction to the appearance of the cane. She wriggled uneasily, casting a frantic glance over her shoulder at them as to make an appeal for her punishment to be averted. Evidently she abandoned that hope at once. As the proprietress advanced upon her with cane in hand, the victim gave a kind of desperate groan and then settled herself across the bench, head down, her body supported by outstretched fingers and toes, slightly arched so that her backside was the highest part of her.
Splattt!!! The stout black arm wielded the supple bamboo with unmerciful vigour and all eyes flew to register the white woman’s reaction, which was to kick wildly and toss up her head with a howl, revealing scarlet cheeks and an expression in which pain vied with shame. Angela had learnt that trying to keep a stiff upper lip only earned harder strokes. As the cane came whistling down upon her, again and again, she put more and more feeling into her howls. This produced the very reverse of sympathy among her auditors who, unfeelingly, seemed to expect more fortitude.
The children mocked her howls and giggled and the two mop-headed teenagers loudly gave it as their opinion that she deserved it.
“It’s the only way to treat her,” one of them said to the customers. “She’s been used to having her own way. Being treated like a naughty child is the best way to make an impression!”
“You can certainly see the impression,” the older man laughed, as the sobbing Englishwoman retreated in disorder, pulling her skirt back around to conceal the four vivid stripes across her bottom. Angela’s shame was increased by the male laughter. She had only been given four and she realised perfectly well that she owed it largely to her convincingly abject display. She was sent to fetch the necessary utensils to sweep and mop up the spillage and then worked in the kitchen under her mistress’s eye.
It was evening and she had recovered some equanimity when she was next called upon to face a customer.
“Uncle Moussa requires your service!”
Trembling with nervous uncertainty as to what service this might be, Angela presented herself before her co-owner. It was growing rapidly dusk and the ex-contractor was seated alone in a small side room at a table by the window overlooking the yard, lingering over his meal. Eyes downcast as if concentrating upon balancing the tray of bottles and glasses she was carrying, Angela repeated her lesson. “Please Sir, I am Angela your, your d-debt slave,” with a dutiful curtsey as she had been taught, blushing fiery red as he looked up, belching noisily and wiping his mouth on a napkin.
“Ah! So you have learnt to be respectful to your owners, eh?” He showed big white teeth in a grin. “Excellent woman your mistress! Excellent!”
He pushed himself away from the table, turning to survey her from head to foot. Moussa himself was a big burly man, thick necked and pop-eyed, about fifty years old and exuding an aura of self satisfied masculinity. He sat very much at ease, as if he was quite used to being served by bare breasted slave-girls. His upper half was only partly covered by a loose gown, hanging open to display a broad hairless chest and muscular torso. Below the waist he wore a long cloth patterned in green and gold. He gave off an aroma of some masculine scent overlying something elemental. Angela’s burden wobbled a little.
“So, you tried to escape your debt by seducing the Administrator’s clerk. You were a fool. The Administrator was right to make a slave of you. You would never have survived in the city. I trade them a little food, those rich enough to afford it. Their soldiers can’t force the peasants to feed them without guns and there are too many city people anyway. They are down to offering me their wives and daughters for food. When they flee at last into the countryside they will have to kill to get food and the peasants will kill them in retaliation and both together will eat up everything.”
He had such a thick accent that Angela hardly understood him, only one thing sparked in her brain. He was still making trips down river to the city.
“So, you will naturally be eager to pay off the debt.”
Angela flushed deeper, uneasy with his manner, sensing the degree of satisfaction the situation gave him and remembering the last time they had met. It had been at a reception in the capital, a formal affair to which he had apparently contrived an invitation in the hope of doing business. She had been wearing a stylish evening frock, turning a few heads among the men there and he had been in evident discomfort in a European style suit. He had been ingratiatingly eager to lease her a property to house the new school and had delicately offered a bribe. He had taken her indignant rebuke with a display of humility. She had been outmanoeuvred all the same, for he had gone through the relevant ministry and she had been forced to accept the lease. No doubt it had cost him a much larger bribe. She was miserably conscious that she was being made to pay him back now and in a situation she could never have dreamt of.
“Come, I will have to inspect my new property.” His gesture with a thick forefinger supplemented his deep bass rumble to make the instruction clear.
Haplessly, Angela put down her tray and followed the gesture to come closer, standing meekly before him eyes downcast, hands nervously smoothing her skirt.
“But none of the property should be concealed from the owner.” The voice hardened and became more implacable. “Remove that!” He flicked his finger expressively at Angela’s waist. She took a deep breath, conscious that it made her nipples jiggle quite expressively, but she did as she was told. She had been instructed that she was to give him service. It seemed to be part of the terms for her repayment, but what it involved had never been spelled out. Here alone and facing him she could easily guess.
That spark of realisation still burned in her brain. She thought nervously that if she pleased him, he might take her with him on his next trip. She would get away from Bamba, perhaps run away from him too when they got to the capital, if she got the chance.
Undoing the knot, she dropped the garment around her ankles and stepped clear, stark naked for his inspection.
“Turn around!” He circled with his finger. Angela turned slowly trying to suppress any sign of her jittery qualms. She couldn’t be blamed for this if she was a slave. Moussa’s view of her rear of course, would include the four thin red lines across the plump ivory curve of her bottom cheeks, the lingering evidence of her earlier caning.
“Excellent woman, Ogupo, excellent woman!” He stood up, having shed his robe, as Angela faced him again. A big and imposing male, six feet tall at least, thickening at the waist but still muscular and virile. As proof of the latter, a visible protrusion poked at his remaining garment below his belly.
That made up Angela’s mind for her. She was going to be fucked she had to face it. She had no chance of escaping it so she might as well do the best she could for herself. She had to make him want to keep her as a plaything.
“Beer!” He slapped her bottom, amused at her yelp and confusion as she snatched up his empty glass. Despite her attempt at control he had read her inner struggle with complacent certainty. He had no illusions as to the aim behind her submissiveness but her situation amused and stimulated him. She was forced to wait upon his pleasure and make herself available in whatever way he decided to take her. He watched appreciatively as she padded barefoot to the tray, blonde hair sweeping down her narrowing back almost to the slender waist, hips flared into voluptuous curves and plump bottom cheeks bobbing as if to display the faint but unmistakable evidence of his kinswoman’s cane.
Angela found a beer bottle and returned with it and the glass, endeavouring to appear unselfconscious before his gaze. She was long-legged and heavy breasted, her pubic bush conspicuous against her white belly. He remembered her walking across a crowded room at a government reception, assured of the admiration of the men and the envy of the women. Then that figure had been sheathed in midnight blue silk and she was made-up, adorned and perfumed, the men who eyed her hoping for a flicker of her interest to come their way. Now she was forced to perform for him alone, naked and nervous, conscious that she had no other options. There was no doubt to who she would have to give herself. She had an owner.
She had to lean over him to place the glass where he indicated. Her breasts swung liquidly forward, the nearest dropping handily into his cupped palm, even as his free hand delivered a hard spank to her rump that sent her pitching forward across his lap with a surprised squeal.
“Your mistress caned you this morning?”
Angela wriggled uncomfortably on his broad thighs, feeling his hand lingering on her backside and even more daunting the growing bulge prodding up into her belly through its thin covering. “Y-yes, Sir!”
His fingers tracing the weals on her bottom reminded her of Mama Ogupo’s strictures on the need for respect.
“So you won’t want to be spanked by me, eh?”
“Nooo Sir!”
“You would much prefer to be fucked, eh?”
“Yes … Sir!” Angela mumbled, head down over his lap.
“Ask politely!”
“Ah … Yes … Ah … Please ah f-fuck me, Sir!” Angela almost yelped. Her creditor’s final demand was already presented, poking through thin cotton. Chuckling, he removed the beer bottle from her grasp and poured himself a glass above her prostrate body. “Patience. I fuck you after I drink this.”
He took a couple of leisurely sips, holding her down casually with an arm across her waist. His free hand patted her bottom and dipped between her legs, spreading her wider and delving deep. Angela wriggled and whimpered resignedly as the caresses became more and more intimate. Resistance seemed counter productive, given her circumstances. With a groan she surrendered to their effectiveness. She was panting and trembling wide eyed when at last Moussa set down his glass and let her slide off his lap onto her knees.
He stood up, grunting ponderously, loosed and dropped his waistcloth. Stripped for action, he displayed the erection that had caused such a bulge. It thrust straight outward with swollen veins zigzagging round its swollen stem and crowned by a dusky purplish club-head. To Angela, down on her knees as if in a position of obeisance, it looked almost as thick as her fist. She gaped up at a loss, mouth open, paralysed by her sense of helplessness.
Grunting with evident satisfaction at this reaction, the Bamban curled his fist round the shaft and thrust his hips forward, emphasizing its rearing length and stripping back the stretched foreskin from the naked crown. His free hand whipped out and seized Angela by one ear, yanking her towards him. Instinctively she threw out her hands to clutch his thickly muscled thighs for support as the thick cock banged her on the mouth and cheek. She was grabbed by both of her ears as she tried half-heartedly to dodge it, his deep growl bringing her quickly to submission. Choking back resentment and suppressing her distaste, Angela reflected that after all she had done this before. Mental comparison with her volunteer performance for the Administrator’s clerk evoked a groan even as it crossed her mind. Choice was beyond her now. This big brute was her owner and she was expected to give him his money’s worth.
Mechanically she let her lips part, allowed the thing to slide into her mouth. He rammed brutally deep at once, right to the back of her throat, so that she gagged and gurgled in extremis. She had to guide it or choke upon it. Curling her small hand about the thick shaft she sought to control it, feeling it jump and surge under her touch. Closing her lips upon it, she hastened to use both lips and tongue to keep him happy. This was what she had come to. She felt she could sink no lower. On her knees in a dusty lodging house sucking for dear life on the cock of a man who owned her, simply with the aim of taking his fancy as a good performer.
His big hands held her tightly, splayed on either side of her head her blonde curls spilling over his black wrists. Angela surrendered entirely to necessity, using both hands and mouth, fisting the slithery stem, cupping his balls, sucking him up and down, running her tongue along the underside of the shaft. She received his groaning appreciation with relief. She was doing well!
But soon she was having to snort for breath in unladylike fashion, mouth full of the massively surging intrusion which had begun to take on a life of its own. She responded frantically, sucking and tonguing ever faster, feeling that only by bringing him to a quick finish would she get enough air to fill her lungs. Her fair head was now going up and down like a pumping engine over Uncle Moussa’s lap as she sensed his coming orgasm, bracing herself in a near panic to take the coming flood.
Uncle Moussa was still in control, however. He yanked himself suddenly free and, with a clout on the ear, drove Angela from her dazed attempt to cling to him.
She landed on her bottom on the rough matting floor, yelping, falling on her back with her legs open. He followed her down onto the matting with a heavy thud, lifting her splayed legs and hoisting them swiftly, one over each shoulder as he knelt between her thighs. He thrust into her ruthlessly, lubricated with her own saliva, his big hands clasping her bottom cheeks like ripe fruit as he drew her onto him.
She was given no time to recover her breath but jolted and bounced on his hard thighs, squealing breathlessly as she was penetrated inch by inch. He rose slowly to his knees, his solid shaft still deep within her. Angela arched backwards, flung to and fro, banging her head on the furniture and flailing about her for a grip. Hard up in her he somehow managed to rise massively to his feet, gripping Angela by the hips, her torso arching unsupported in front of him, her finger tips just brushing the floor and her hair sweeping dust from the matting. He walked slowly forward, swinging Angela bodily from side to side, her head and elbows making painful contact with chairs and table legs as she bounced and flailed.
In this fashion they lurched slowly the full length of the room, Angela groaning and yelping, Uncle Moussa grunting in ecstasy. They barged open a door, Angela’s head performing the actual operation. Within was a small room almost filled by Uncle Moussa’s bags and bales, but with enough room for a narrow bed upon which she swiftly found herself disposed. She was turned skilfully about, without him even having to disengage from her, her vagina sending sharp prickles of pain, and propped up on her knees on the edge of the bed.
He was overpoweringly big and heavy, driving Angela’s head and shoulders down into the mattress her rump held up by his clamping hands with the big cock lodged like an additional prop in her expanded orifice. She tried dutifully to play her part, but he seemed to need little assistance of that sort. His hard thighs banged her wider and wider until she lost any leverage on the bed edge and her legs wavered in the air behind his arching back. Angela wriggled and kicked helplessly, upside down, gasping in a breath at each withdrawal and expelling a muffled whimper at each thrust.
“Ha! … Give you … something to whine about!”
He surged and thrust with brutal passion, grunting and cursing Angela whose whimpers turned to hisses, her fingers clawing at the edges of the bed as he thumped the breath out of her.
“Now you feel me!” The bed squeaked and groaned beneath them in steady rhythm. “Wriggle your arse girl … Wriggle it…! Faster…! Faster…!”
With a muffled wail Angela tried to respond, her knees and heels pressing for whatever grip they could find on his thrusting body. Uncle Moussa panted and snarled, obeying his own exhortation to speed, pounding until it seemed the creaking bed would collapse and the grunts and groans of both parties filled the room with all the noises of a zoo.
Suddenly there was no holding the man. His heavy black belly pounded like a pile driver into Angela’s obediently thrusting white butt. The rich bass of his bellowing almost drowned out her shriller tones. He exploded very quickly, driving into her with quick repeated jolts. Angela lay with her mouth agape, eyes closed, hands clutching the bed shuddering in shame at each wet spurt within her.
“How you like being fucked, eh?”
She was forced to respond. “Uh … very … ah … good … Sir!” she swallowed hard as she came up with this miserably mendacious response.
Uncle Moussa chuckled complacently. Stretching out on the bed with a beer bottle in his big fist, he propped his heavy body up on the pillows from where he could oversee his diligent servitor. Crouched by him, head bent, Angela was set to work licking clean the limp organ so recently withdrawn glistening from between her own legs.
“I have a pretty big cock, eh?”
“Y-yes, Sir,” Angela mumbled in between efforts to curl her tongue round its massiveness. At least she didn’t have to lie about that.
“Yet you haven’t had an orgasm from it, eh?”
“No, Sir,” Angela swallowed uncertainly.
“You’d like to have that put right, eh?”
“Uh … yes … thank you … uh, Sir.” Angela mumbled in untruthful acquiescence from beneath the shifting screen of her hair.
“Get up then! We’ll have a sixty-nine session. I’ll work you up while you make me hard again.”
Angela was forced to comply as he directed, straddling his big chest and presenting her parted thighs vulnerably to his exploitative hands while she kept her head bent over his stiffening penis. Lascivious fingers stroked upwards over the inner surfaces of her arched thighs to the apex and her pouting vagina, teasing and caressing. Angela endeavoured to concentrate upon her own task. Already his once limp cock had lifted and stiffened under her ministrations.
She took the naked knob head into her mouth again, feeling it bob against her teeth and tongue in the wet warmth, involuntary gurgling noises escaping her as she felt the effect of his fingers between her legs. Angela tried to empty her mind of everything but the physical sensation. Thinking of what she was doing might be fatal to her chances. She tried to match the action of her lips and tongue to the sensation of his fingers between her legs.
Uncle Moussa for his part was as skilful as he had boasted. His warm hand held her pubic mound like some small furry animal on its palm while first one, then two long fingers delved beyond coaxed it to respond. Angela snorted wildly, head bobbing, her lips sliding up and down the stiffening stem, her tongue teasing the sensitive underside in electrifying curls. Two stiff penetrating masculine fingers inside her shaft drove her hips up and down too, making electrifying curls within her sensitive lips and stiffening clitoral bud.
Faster and faster, Uncle Moussa led Angela on, both of them gasping and hissing. Her blonde hair spilled over his black loins, her white belly down-curved brushed his hairless up-arching rib-cage, her elongated breasts dangling pink nipples traced curlicues of sensation on his broad black belly. As their pace increased, the noises made by both became more animal-like. Angela whimpered and mewed, Uncle Moussa grunted and bellowed.
The senior partner was still in control, however. Angela’s reared backside writhed voluptuously in time to his finger work, her pale thighs clamping his black wrist and squirming around his uplifted arm as if it were a monster cock. Her head nodded in complete synchronization with the penetration, her muted cries escaping around the real one betrayed her inner state. Confusion reigned in her brain. In seeking to neutralise her scruples she had laid herself open to excitation. His teasing fingers penetrated to succulent depths and she ground her furry quim against his palm in effort to assimilate the effect, writhing in slow ecstatic circles.
She no longer knew whether she was sucking to do her duty and save her skin, or to achieve an orgasm. She had forgotten by which she was possessed, persecutor or benefactor. Still she managed to keep her tongue at work, curling it like a hot wet prehensile muscle about the male shaft that her softly slurping lips seemed at last to have drawn back into full erection.
For some minutes they were poised together like some exotic working sculpture, ivory mounted on an obsidian base, male and female interconnected and interacting, lubricated by running sweat, and powered by lust.
Uncle Moussa broke loose first, his eyes starting as he arched upward with full-throated, masculine bellows. Angela’s head jerked up off him almost at once, hair flying, her eyes wild, her mouth still showing an empty oval, wet lipped, a skein of white dangling downwards to his cock. Still hanging unthinkingly onto his massive cock, with one small white hand, she rammed her haunches down onto the solid black fist between her thighs, her mouth gaping and her squeals without reservation. The small hot room reverberated with the sound of their combined orgasm.

When the pearly tropical dawn flooded the sleeping compound with light, not yet holding the threat of coming heat, Angela and Uncle Moussa were still at it. Somewhere in the distance people were slowly stirring, but Moussa, about to set out upon a risky journey, seemed eager to utilise his new acquisition’s desire to please. Angela having once abandoned resistance to the fires of sexuality, had convinced herself that she was doing so in her own interest.
“You are very good at this, eh!”
“I hope … so … Sir …” Angela panted. She had been moved back into the cooler space of the dining room, and was bent her over one of the tables.
“Good, eh!”
“Yes … yes …” Angela was not entirely lying. She had been made to serve Moussa with beer in the cool before dawn, the faint breeze from the un-shuttered windows goose-pimpling her nakedness. Then she had been posed on the table while the experienced debauchee having long since cooled his own sexual ardour amused himself by reawakening hers before entering her from the rear.
“You like this, eh?”
“Y-yes … Sir …” Angela groaned, torn between shame lust and hope.
“You would make a good whore!” he grunted. “You would you like a job in a brothel, eh?”
“No, Sir! Ah … No Sir!” Her mouth opened and shut in regular gulps like a fish in a bowl.
“No?”
Angela gasped and gobbled wordlessly, feeling her own body betraying her with a electrifying response to Uncle Moussa’s slow steady thrusting in and out.
“Sure?” Moussa grunted.
“Ah … Just … just with you … Sir …” She drew her wits together, about to express the plea she had been rehearsing, the sum of her hopes reduced to words, the hope of being adopted as a rich man’s plaything. But with a long drawn out, deep-chested groan he forestalled her, denying her the opportunity of going further into shame.
“Bad… luck…!” He gave her a quick succession of hard, heaving thrusts and shot his bolt at last. Angela groaned in acknowledgement as he drove deep into her, squeezing the last drops of cum from his depleted store. She thrust back automatically her breasts bouncing on the table-top as she hollowed her back and went up onto her toes, spreading her legs wide to accommodate him.
“Bad luck …” he repeated with a grunt. “Because …” he grunted again. “I don’t …” another grunt. “Don’t own you any more!” he finished with a regretful sigh, remaining within her holding her firmly by the hips bent over the table edge.
“What that you say, Moussa?”
Mama Ogupo must have come up quietly behind them. The big man pulled out of Angela, giving her a casual spank as he moved heavily away to recover his discarded waistcloth. The imprints of his fingers lingered reddened on the curve of her ivory flank as she remained in the position he had left her, gathering her breath.
“Time to go,” he said to his relative. “Those bugs have ruined everything, whoever put them into the air, either the Weapons for Peace people or the Fundamentalists, or maybe those Japanese lunatics; they had access to a satellite. It’s pack animals I am looking to buy now, not women. I sold this one,” he jerked his thumb at the humiliated Angela who was still dazed, trying to assimilate this news, “to my patron, who seems to have taken an interest in her.”
“Aaargh! You wicked man! You never tell me before!” Mama Ogupo screeched. “She service you all night for nothing!” she protested but without great heat, rather amused and seeming pleased.
The light had dawned upon Angela meanwhile, who looked from one to the other, aghast.
Uncle Moussa cackled.
Angela wailed at the thought of what she had gone through for nothing. “You disgusting … horrible …” She failed to find words adequate and, in blind fury, hurled herself at her betrayer. The force and speed of her unexpected assault toppled the big merchant off his perch and he fell backwards with Angela on top of him, raking nails reaching for his face. Moussa swiped her hands away vigorously before she could connect. She was kicking and threshing but at her second attempt he caught her wrists in a powerful grip.
Rendered almost helpless and finding a thick black forearm pressing across her mouth, Angela, without reflection, bit it hard. Her opponent bellowed as he felt her teeth sink in, but the muscular bicep proved too massive for her jaws to get a grip and she was shaken free. Cursing, the man shifted his grip, holding Angela well clear of him despite her spitting fury, as he rose to his feet. Her kicking and clawing then rapidly ceased as her rage suddenly exhausted itself and the futility, not to say danger of her action, dawned upon her in its place.
Rumbling ominously, Uncle Moussa thrust her towards Mama Ogupo whose ugly features were distorted by rage, and who now flourished the dreaded dog whip clutched in a massive fist.
“You wicked creature!”
Angela’s nerve abruptly collapsed. “Please don’t … Please don’t …” She had a vision of being led back to the whipping post again.
“She bites like a dog!” Uncle Moussa declared indignantly.
“I make her into a dog,” his kinswoman declared. “You!” She shook the whip at Angela. “You bite like dog, you be treated like a dog!”
Grunting in sudden amusement, Moussa dumped Angela bodily and abruptly at Mama Ogupo’s feet where she remained completely deflated, cowering upon all fours, eyeing the whip and whimpering in propitiation.
“Outside! You go like dog now!” Mama Ogupo reinforced her authority with a vicious cut of the dog whip, sending Angela scuttling with a howl towards the outer door upon all fours. “I chain you in kennel, you bitch!” her mistress declared. “Until you be better trained!”
It was a notion that seemed to take a permanent hold on the woman’s evil sense of humour. Out in the yard Angela crouched upon all fours, hot tears of chagrin and defeat making dark splashes in the dust. Her mistress meanwhile fetched the collar and chain that had belonged to a guard dog, a half-savage animal that before the Catastrophe had been allowed to roam loose at night. Probably it had ended up being eaten by some desperate refugee.
She stooped over Angela and clapped the heavy collar about the girl’s slim neck. It was cold and stiff against her skin, weighted with brass studs and heavy buckle.
“Come!” she commanded, yanking the chain leash. “Make yourself like a proper white bitch!” Still in fear of the whip, Angela was forced to comply. While Uncle Moussa lingered by the door and a gaggle of children collected to watch, the fat ex-cook made her demoralised former employer scurry up and down the yard on the end of the leash upon hands and knees as if she were a dog in training.
“There!” At last Angela’s heavily breathing tormentor found it too exhausting a pursuit and bent to fasten the end of the chain leash to a staple in the outside of the kitchen doorpost. “Now you stay tied up like good bitch. You be guard dog. Let me hear how good you bark! Louder! Good! Now these children trouble you, you bark jus’ like that!”
And there Angela was left for the while, not really secured except that she dared not release herself. She knew Mama Ogupo’s eye would be upon her and the dreaded dog whip hung from the staple as a further warning.
The children set out at once to test her. Angela was almost defenceless. She didn’t even possess a dog’s impressive set of teeth to deter them. While she might easily have removed the horrid collar or even unfastened the chain, she could guess what would be the result of that. She could slap any child than came within reach, but when they took to pelting her with stones she had to act. Yet it took two or three tries, opening and closing her mouth before she could bring herself to emit, shame-faced, a sort of yelping bark.
The cook pounced with a promptness that suggested she had indeed been keeping a close watch. She scattered the shrieking children like a flock of birds with a few swipes of the kitchen cane and returned to the cookhouse grunting with satisfaction, ignoring the humiliated ‘dog’ by the door.


With the work of setting up the eating house now completed, Angela found her duties light, since she was no longer put to work in the public part of the eating house. Whether this had anything to do with her new owner she didn’t in the least know, since Uncle Moussa had departed without revealing exactly whom she had been sold to. She re-lived the episode with Uncle Moussa often, with fear and shame in her mind. She feared that their discovery by the cook might have given the fat beast of a woman some ideas. No doubt many female refugees had been forced to descend to such efforts to stay alive. Perhaps there was no lack of recruits, but Angela supposed she would at least have novelty value. She dreaded being expected to entertain the male customers of the house in the same way, so that at first she was as disobedient as she dared, even risking a whipping in the hope that her conduct might be taken to disqualify her as a whore.
Her mistress caned her soundly for her behaviour but seemed satisfied to continue her treatment of her white slave as a dog, chaining her up ignominiously in the small, high-walled compound behind the cookhouse and from then on, expending a good deal of time and energy in ensuring that Angela behaved appropriately.
A week or so after Uncle Moussa’s departure, the compound lay bare and dusty, with only a few low unpainted wooden hutches and a tethered goat to relieve its emptiness. Mama Ogupo emerged from the kitchen doorway followed by several children who sped to open the hutch doors liberating half a dozen scrawny chickens, while one older girl led away the goat.
Mama Ogupo herself, a long cane in her hand, went to the furthest hutch accompanied by two children carefully carrying two bowls. Shooing away clucking chickens, the fat black woman directed the placing of the bowls before the hutch. The children subsided chattering and giggling onto the kitchen steps in anticipation. Beata appeared head and shoulders in the only window overlooking the yard and leaned on the sill.
Mama Ogupo unfastened the hutch door of metal wire mesh. “Angeeela!”
Angela emerged from the hutch, quite naked and crawling upon all fours with a length of thin chain dragging behind her from the heavy dog collar. She kept a nervous eye upon the cane but obeyed its directions, scurrying towards the bowls. The long night in the dusty hutch had given her a desperate thirst. She could almost scent the coolness of the water in the bowl.
Her eyes slid sideways in shame to those of the audience for whose amusement it seemed she was being so treated. Collared and chained like a dog, she had been tamed and disciplined appropriately. She was all too conscious of the impatient twitch of her mistress’s cane and remembered its painful lessons. Her bottom was still throbbing and painful from its recent application but she feared the whipping-post even more.
With only a flicker of hesitation she ducked her head over the bowl and began slurping up cool water as best she might. The first inhibition broken then, she went on to the other. The food had been almost as tempting. She knew very well that the starving refugees outside the town would have fought over it.
In the window Beata had been joined by a male figure lurking in the shadows behind her, Jonas, her husband, watching over her shoulder the ludicrous performance in the yard. Angela by now had her head down, licking thoroughly around the sides of the dog bowl. From the doorway Mama Ogupo glanced across reflectively as Beata suddenly disappeared from view, drawn down out of sight.

During the long nights, as she lay crouching on the dusty earth in the starlit courtyard, Angela spent many a fruitless hour trying to adjust her ideas to the gap between her past and her present life. They seemed so far removed now as to have been in different worlds. Yet it was only a matter of months. Had it been a mistake of hers. Could she have avoided this? Could she still escape it?
She knew it had been thought that Third World countries would be most vulnerable to a worldwide catastrophe. Surely, she thought; there must be centres of civilisation about the world that were still capable of reviving.
In this her instinct let her down. Bamba had always been close to mediaeval in its self-sufficient economy and was now luckily insulated by its remoteness to survive loss of technology, crop failure, hordes of refugees and disease. She could not bring herself to believe how great the Catastrophe had been. The major centres with their fragile networks and complex infra-systems were much less able to adjust to such a disaster. Instinct was a delusive guide.
About local events she had a confused picture, gleaned only half consciously from bits and pieces and illumined by Uncle Moussa’s monologues during the long night she had spent servicing him.
Bamba was largely isolated from the outside world. Only a trickle of refugees came across the desert wastes and word of Bamba’s relative order had been kept from reaching the south. Few of the hordes of starving refugees thought of striking northwards towards the desert. The survival of bush villagers through the Catastrophe meant that the town still functioned as a market centre. Old crafts were being revived in wood, straw, leather and metal to replace disintegrated plastic or useless machinery.
The Administrator’s control depended upon a precarious balance of interests. The soldiers, reduced in power with their guns rendered useless, were kept loyal by being conscious of the general resentment against them. The townspeople accepted his control as a guarantee of public order. The peasants, long exploited, resented his demands for food taxes from their dwindling supplies of scarce produce but appreciated his control of refugees and looters. Lastly the refugees, resented by all as a useless burden, relied upon the Administrator’s taxes for the scanty rations that might permit their survival.
Angela’s status was even lower than the refugees, though far better fed. Her new owner, whoever it was, had never put in an appearance, so far as she knew. The fat matriarch, apparently left to indulge her own fancy, relegated her slave to doing the duty of a dog. She had her lanky son-in law Jonas build a large wooden kennel in which Angela slept at night to perform her part as a guard dog, chained up with strict instructions to sound the alarm in case of intruders.
Angela assumed this to be another piece of cruel humour, until twice on successive nights furtive figures slipping over the wall disturbed her solitude. Whether she or the cookhouse stores were the target she didn't wait to find out and the startled intruders vanished instantly when she screeched an alarm. Thereafter she spent the nights mostly wide-awake with her ears alert, thankful that the lazy emptiness of her days, with only a few vegetables to prepare, allowed her to catch up on her sleep. Sometimes the cook or one or other of her daughters would bring a friend to view the “guard dog” but they were always female with the air of whores out in unaccustomed daylight.
Angela was primed to raise the alarm at any night-time marauder, but she was less prepared for assault from the inside.
The household had settled into sleep when Gibril, the eldest grandson, slid from the window of the room he shared with his parents and crossed the moonlit compound towards the kitchen wing. The women were asleep in the dark rooms round the compound, his formidable grandmother snoring reassuringly in hers. Threading his way through the dining room, he entered the room that Uncle Moussa used. The shutters were closed and he groped his way in the warm darkness to the window, the only window opening onto the small yard in which the white slave was kennelled. Lying to the rear of the kitchen and surrounded on two other sides by blank walls of the former school building, it was accessible otherwise only from the kitchen and by a door locked and barred, on its fourth side, which formerly gave onto a school garden.
The shutter was closed but not fastened and a gap showed a strip of faint light. Gibril crouched and applied his eye to the gap. For some minutes he peered into the yard, mouth open, shifting silently this way and that for a better view. At length he straightened and with infinite precaution gently parted the shutters wide enough for him to climb up and slip through the gap.
Much of the yard lay in shadow. The dark shape of the dog kennel his father had built was barely distinguishable in the darkness, but from beyond its bulk came soft rhythmic slapping sounds that stirred the boy’s curiosity. Consumed by excitement he crept boldly alongside the house wall, keeping in the shadow, bare feet silent in the soft dust until he could see past the kennel.
The waning moon cast a patch of light there as if to illumine a night scene on stage. As he had suspected when he discovered his father’s unwonted absence from his bed, Jonas was one of the actors. Angela, of course, was the other. The European woman’s shapely form was marble pale in the moonlight though anything but rigid in action. Jonas’s black skin made him almost invisible by contrast, though there was light enough for the boy to see that she was stretched across his father’s lean thighs.
The explanation of the slapping noise became evident. Jonas was spanking his captive playfully as she wriggled across his lap. For her part Angela, though apparently kicking vigorously in protest, was curiously muted, making no attempt to wake the sleeping household. Neither participant had eyes or ears for anything other than their own interaction. The panting and gasping and the slap-slap of Jonas’s hand were sufficient cover for Gibril creeping closer and closer, fascinated by the almost ritualistic reactions of the naked pair, two figures black and white intensely combined in the moonlight.
Suddenly Jonas hissed and rose to his feet with an effort, gripping Angela by her hair with one fist and above the knee with the other so that she swung with arms and legs splayed out like a large pale frog. He had been seated on the small stool that the matriarch commonly sat on outside the kitchen door. Now he swung his burden and dumped her belly-down across the stool, limbs sprawling.
Crouched in the shadows Gibril could see her eyes wide but the only sound to emerge from her was a little squeak of surprise. She twitched her limbs and wriggled this way and that on the stool as if in preparation for escape while making no real attempt to do so.
“No … You shouldn’t,” she protested, but Gibril noticed nevertheless that she kept her voice low.
His father at any rate took no notice. He was wearing a skimpy pair of cotton underpants and was now struggling to remove them with one hand while holding Angela down with the other. A thick dark snake seemed to rear suddenly out of Jonas’s curled fist. The woman twisted about, craning to look over her shoulder as the man slid down behind and between her spread thighs.
“Your wife … I’ll tell … I’ll scream … I really will!” Her voice rose and Gibril froze in dismay as his father recklessly ignored her threats. He could see his teeth glinting white in a baffled snarl and two large hands splayed black against her white body reaching round her ribs to restrain her, gripping the soft white breasts as if restraining her escape.
The boy had been manoeuvring for a better view without much effort at concealment. Angela’s bottom, opalescent in the moonlight, had risen a little as if it was impelled upwards by his father’s prodding erection, her hips wriggling this way and that to frustrate the man’s efforts. Gibril clearly saw her expression when she lifted her head, wavering between panic and indecision.
The black hands slid quickly from Angela’s breasts to her hips, allowing her upper half to flop, Angela struggling to push herself back up from the dust. Black thumbs slid round to splay her bottom purposefully apart, the other fingers sinking deep into pale flesh to hold her in an inescapable grip. Despite all her wriggling, his father was about to make a prize of her whether she would or not.
Watching half fascinated, half alarmed, Gibril saw Angela’s expression harden. He saw her mouth open. Instinctively he rose, prepared for flight as she gathered breath to shriek. Then, in sudden inspiration, he leapt forward instead, covering the distance between him and the older pair almost in one bound and just as his father thrust hard, landed upon Angela’s shoulders, one hand clapped hand firmly over her mouth, the other gripping her hair.
Jonas hardly flinched his face wore an expression of reckless lust. His back arched and naked muscles rippled, reflecting the moonlight as he began to prise the white woman apart from behind. “Good boy!” he hissed, nodding vigorous encouragement to Gibril’s filial zeal
The woman’s incipient shriek had been smothered, cut back to a muffled squawk. She beat at the newcomer with indignant fists but the boy was weighing down her shoulders, one knee across the back of her neck and there was nothing she could reach that would discourage him. Soon her efforts flagged as the parental thrust and withdrawal began to monopolise her attention and she began to run short of breath, snorting and gurgling beneath Gibril’s muffling hand.
Jonas was getting stuck into her with muscular vigour. Angela splayed her fingers on the hard earth to steady herself as she was jerked to and fro by the elder’s vigorous fucking. Sensing that she no longer had sufficient breath left to make an outcry, Gibril relaxed a little, though keeping a precautionary grip on her hair. Presently the two adults almost forgot his presence. They were otherwise engrossed, both snorting puffing and groaning, more or less in unison.
His father rumbled deep in his chest, his face looked like an ebony carving its gleaming highlights picked out by the moonlight, white teeth clenched, a mask of lust and erotic effort. Stretched before him Angela’s slim white body flopped and wriggled like a strange sea creature, her muted cries only adding to the effect of male triumph and female submission.
Gibril let go of her, leaning back, merely an excited observer. No longer restrained by his grip, she toppled off the stool with her wriggles and was left with it wedged under her belly, heavy breasts dangling, head and shoulders thrust out beyond. Jonas thrust her backside up until she was on her knees. She pushed downwards in turn, seeking to lift herself off the stool, ending up on all fours. Like a stray bitch being humped by a dog, Gibril thought. His father was certainly treating her like one, thumping steadily away, the heavy leather amulet dangling from his neck bouncing on her arched back.
Gibril was almost beside himself with excitement, imagining himself in his Sire’s position playing the dog. Jonas was going at her faster and faster, thrusting hard. He grunted more vigorously now and Angela responded with rising cries of alarm as if she knew what was coming.
Looking about him, Gibril found his father’s discarded shorts to hand and stuffed them into her mouth, slithering his knees further under her shoulders and pushing the stool sideways. Shifting to claw at his hands, Angela collapsed onto his thighs, her chin in his crotch and his erected shaft rearing up against her cotton stuffed mouth.
They tussled madly until Angela, distracted by his father’s thrusts from behind, gave up the attempt. Her soft breasts were squeezed between the boy’s knees and she clutched with sharp fingernails at Gibril’s hips and buttocks, gurgling furiously into her gag. His penis was now bumping its shiny crown against her thin European nose, thrust up and down by the last surges of his father’s penetration of her. Jonas let go with a long sighing groan and a last huge thrust. Angela, tangled among the legs of the overturned stool, was almost cross eyed as she contemplated the glossy purple knob going up and down before them. Gibril held her tight by the hair over her ears forcing her face against him; he was coming too.
He gritted his teeth as he felt the dam burst and spurts of white goo shot up into the air and fell upon her, on hair, cheeks and forehead. The cloth fell away from her mouth as he backed away and released her smothered groans. Slowly they wound down to a stop, all three participants panting in exhaustion.
Gibril was suddenly brought to earth. His father too, had become uneasily aware of their situation. Looking at one another they listened for sounds from the dark building about them. In those last few minutes surely he and his father must have made enough noise between them to rouse the sleepers. Guiltily, father and son considered the other of the trio, the one who had least to lose by discovery. Angela raised her head and glared.
“You … you … pair of swine!” she hissed with the recklessness of despair. “You had both better help me … If you don’t I’ll tell … tell your wife … tell Ogupo!”
“She whip you too!” Gibril laughed uneasily.
“I don’t care!” Angela hissed. She had hold of Jonas’s discarded underpants, wiping her face and fending off his attempts to retrieve them. “Help me or I tell!”
Gibril looked to his father. There was little stuffing left in the satiated Jonas. After his night’s exploit he only wanted to sneak off again and would happily have abandoned his victim had he dared. Jonas furrowed his low brow. It didn’t need Gibril to translate. Though his father knew no English, he had guessed what the slave was threatening. He knew his formidable mother-in-law was supposed to be preserving the woman for someone special and didn’t fancy facing her wrath if she found out how he had used her prize.
He decided he would be magnanimous. She had been a good fuck and the boy would keep his mouth shut. Would it matter if he helped her anyway? As a river boatman he had a shrewd idea what her chances of rescue were.
Angela, of course, was less in touch with reality. Ignorant of the language she assumed that Mama Ogupo and Uncle Moussa were likely to be lying. She had never come to grips with the sheer scale of the Catastrophe. She saw herself as the victim of an exceptional breakdown of normality in a backward place on the margin of the world. As she saw it, all she had to do was get a message out. Gibril would provide the writing material, pens and paper were readily available in a building that had been a school. Jonas was a river man, she recognised now the smell she had noticed about Moussa, much stronger upon Jonas, the aroma of dried fish cargoes. So now she had means to transmit the letter down river to the capital on one of his trips with Uncle Moussa’s boats.
In her dog kennel, after she had been chained up the following night, she drew the writing materials out of concealment and composed a tear-stained appeal addressed to anyone in authority or concerned with the welfare of refugees. It was entrusted to Jonas via Gibril to await his next trip.
In this she found a snag. There was a price to pay. She relied upon Jonas and his son as collaborators. When the letter went, Jonas of course, went with it, but his son remained.
Her days were still long and uneventful but by night, whenever he could evade his grandmother’s vigilance, she was subject to the secret visits of young Gibril. She dared not offend him by refusing him sexual privileges. His co-operation in keeping quiet could only be secured by her doing the same and so she was forced to submit to being fucked by him whenever he turned up. Of course the young swine exploited his position. She was being kept firmly in her place as a plaything.
Mama Ogupo was surprised to find her English slave suddenly have become diligent and submissive, for Angela now fervently desired to avoid being relegated to the doghouse where she would be called upon to perform for an increasingly ingenious youth for no reward. In fact she pleased her mistress too much for her own good, for the dominating negress decided that Angela was subdued enough to be taken with her in the capacity of a porter, on one of her daily visits to the market.
Early in the morning, Angela was loaded up with a small pile of goods for barter, mostly items that had been received as payment in the eating house, but including one or two items of the debt slave’s own former possessions. Since fresh supplies of factory made goods were unobtainable, second hand goods of the most worn and battered kind readily changed hands. Mama Ogupo, who had first come to Bamba as a market trader, still enjoyed the process of bargaining.
The market took place outside the town about an hour’s walk from the school compound, the track following the riverbank across a flat wasteland dotted with rubbish heaps and the carcasses of abandoned vehicles. The way was haunted by lean goats guarded by watchful boys from the hungry families of refugees who squatted in some of the wrecks.
Mama Ogupo, majestic in her billowing multi-hued gown and elaborate turban, led her slave at the end of a rope halter, more for effect than for security. Angela was balancing, with difficulty, a head load of trade goods. The pair were tailed by a straggle of curious black refugee children clad in ragged vests and shorts or tattered gowns according to age and sex. The wearing of clothing had always been a token of civilisation hereabouts. Even the visiting bush pagans donned whatever garments they possessed to visit the town. Now with cloth at a premium it was a matter of status, the poorest of the refugees along the riverbank tried to keep at least one garment in their possession. To have sold everything would have been admitting total demoralisation.
Angela wore even less than the poorest child. Her sole covering was a tiny triangular scrap of blue cotton, sufficient only to conceal the dark fuzz of hair in the V of her thighs. Thin cords spanned her hips to support it and another dived between naked bottom cheeks and was knotted above them to hold it in place behind. Inexperienced as a porter, she had to keep her arms uplifted to her load and she trotted self consciously behind her mistress, acutely conscious of the way her up-thrust breasts jiggled and prodded in naked display and flustered by the juvenile audience.
An even bigger audience met her when they reached the market. It was in full swing, for the laws against hoarding were strict and food had to be bought and sold in public directly from the producers. A buzzing anthill of people, the market assaulted the sense with colour noise and stink. Fish and prawns, fresh and dried, were the major part of the edible produce. There were stalls shaded by awnings and more informal heaps of goods. A section was devoted to second hand clothing, mostly of bright colour and pattern. Locally woven cloth of goat’s hair and roughly tanned goat and other animal skins were the only substitutes available.
Manufactured drugs were unobtainable but there were strange ingredients for home remedies, or magic potions with which to attract a lover or destroy a rival. There were petrol and kerosene tins for sale in profusion but of course no trace of the former contents remained, that function supplied by bundles of firewood or baskets of charcoal.
Altogether the market was mostly a female enterprise. Massive black matrons squatted by their goods in solid dignity, younger women jangled armloads of bangles, exchanging strident gossip or advertising their wares with high-pitched cries, while about them moved a kaleidoscopic flow of colourfully dressed shoppers. Fresh foods were sold by the womenfolk of the peasant producers, who sat patiently with sacks of sorghum or rice, peanuts or roots. Sometimes as little as a handful of wild fruit or a bundle of herbs, painfully foraged, were proffered by a squatting vendor.
Many of the women carried small children astride one hip and shoals of older children ran and dodged in and out among their elders, but there was a notable lack of very young babies. It had been rumoured even before the Catastrophe that Anti-fertility viruses existed, genetically tailored to fit specific populations. Somehow they had been released. A white man’s plot, some said, to empty Africa of black people. A Chinese plot to reduce their own population, which went wrong, others contradicted them. Or there was the wilder theory that creatures from outer space were seeking a vacant Earth for their own use.
To one side the meat and fish market was identified by a row of vultures squatting warily along its roof ridge. Carrion eaters were the most prosperous part of the animal population; only the most desperate would resort to eating them, but Angela knew that Mama passed off vulture as chicken. Fish and meat was a commodity sold exclusively by men or boys.

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