Book excerpt: It was in the middle of the harmattan season, and the weather was hot and humid. The scorching rays of the sun had sucked the moisture out of every plant in the land and had turned the green leaves into dark yellow in color. Many of the leaves had fallen to the ground and had begun to decompose into dark loamy soil--rich, fertile land, innocent and untouched. And that was the way it was in ancient times. That was the way it was until the Oburoni slave traders arrived on the continent and changed everything, imposing their greed and guns on the inhabitants. The dry, humid air left many people panting for breath and sweating profusely. The women complained bitterly, the children suppressed their discomfort, but the men simply ignored the weather because they had bigger problems on their minds. They'd been thinking about the death and the devastation that the Oburoni intruders, these uninvited aliens, had unleashed on the land.