The midwife maneuvered the baby out of the birth canal, spied betweenits legs, and gasped. “Call the chief!” she said. Hearing themidwife's sharp voice, the assistant settled the calabash of warmwater on the floor and shot out of the bedroom, damp and earthy withthe odor of withered leaves and herbs. Matching the assistant'shaste, the midwife, who was also the newborn's grandmother, cut theumbilical cord. Then she wiped the newborn, swaddled it in a mudcloth, and held it up for its mother, her daughter-in-law, tosee.

“Control yourself,” the grandmother said.

“Will she be able to have children?” the mother asked, her headspinning.

“He will … but we must –”

Approaching voices drowned out the grandmother's reply. She knottedher face: “Leave everything to me.” She handed the baby to itsmother and pushed open the door. Waiting under a bluish-pink morningsky was her son, the Chief of the Temdogo, a people of the northernSahel. Next to him stood his two most trusted advisors, an oddcouple with wrinkled foreheads fondly referred to as Tall, the onewith a battalion of teeth in his mouth, and Short, the one with onlyoutposts in his.

“We have your successor,” Tall said. “Temdogo's future is assured,unlike that of those Kridogo mosquitoes. Their king has manychildren, but their succession rules are so strange that war is sureto erupt when he dies.” The three men chuckled. A long-standingdispute over who owned a stretch of semi-arid grassland between theTemdogos and their southern Kridogo neighbors had turned the twopeoples into bitter-in-the-throat enemies. The Temdogos claimed thatback when the world itself was a newborn, they had loaned the landto hapless Kridogo wanderers who now will not give it back. Fortheir part, the Kridogos said the land had been theirs since Atalathe Supreme created the Sahel: “You cannot give away that whichnever belonged to you” was their refrain to Temdogo claims ofownership of this borderland. And that was how two founding storiescaused Kridogos and Temdogos to fight and kill each other forgenerations. When they could not shed blood, putdowns of the othersoothed their anger.