"Looking at the bright side of life..."

"In the past, every man was his own boss. But this ended when the whiteman came. When they told us to work, we worked. They themselves chose the days when we worked and we made sure we always turned up on time. We knew nothing of money or even what it looked like. What we liked were shells. Shells were what we wanted."

"We were given to the whiteman's carriers in return for shells like these. My people gave me to the strangers to get their wealth. I was just a young girl, my breasts were still small. The strangers paid for me and the other young girls, with shells and steel axes. They were very wealthy and bought many more girls. We were terrified. We cried mother! father! We thought they'd eat us. In fact they were kind to us. We had sex together then we knew they were men. That's right - not spirits - just men...we saw they were humans with sex organs like ours. At first we thought they had none, but they were men all right!"