Madam Koi Koi: The Click of Red Heels in the Night Dormitory
This chronicle has watched a legend be born once before — the chupacabra, hatched in 1995 under television lights — and it closes its African wing with the continent's own great modern birth: a ghost younger than independence, at home in three time zones, and known to virtually every person who has passed through a boarding school in Nigeria, Ghana, or Tanzania in the last two generations. She needs no description, because her legend, with superb economy, has reduced her to a sound : in the dormitory dark, long after lights-out, from the far end of the corridor — koi... koi... koi... — the unhurried click of a woman's high-heeled shoes on concrete, approaching. That is Madam Koi Koi, named for her own footsteps: the ghost of a teacher — on this every version agrees — a beautiful one, remembered always with the one blazing attribute that survives death and retelling alike: red shoes. Red high heels, whose sound was her herald in life as in death; and the students in their bu...