...of the colonised

But they are there every day, on the quay, from dawn, waiting for who knows what, a pirogue to carry them upstream or bring them a mysterious message. Then they leave, they disappear, walking through the tall grass, to the east, on the road to Awgu and Owerri. Geoffroy tries to speak to them, a few words of Ibo, phrases in Yoroba, in pidgin, but they are always silent, not haughty, merely absent, disappearing rapidly in single file along the river, lost to view in the tall grass yellowed by drought. They are the Umundri, the Ndinze, the "ancestors," the "initiated." The people of Chuku, the Sun, circled by his halo as a father is circled by his children.
It is the itsi sign. That is what Geoffroy saw on the faces when he first arrived in Onitsha. The sign carved into the skin of the men's faces, like writing upon stone. It is the sign which entered him, touched his heart, marked him, too, on his too white face, on his skin where from birth there has never been the mark of the burn. But now he feels this burn, this secret. Men and women of the Umundri people, in the streets of Onitsha; absurd shadows wandering in the alleyways of red dust, among the acacia groves, with their herds of goats and their dogs. Only some of them wear on their faces the sign of their ancestor Ndri, the sign of the sun.

 
[Onitsha, Le Clézio, J. M. G.]