He’d thought that going back to college would be a cinch. With both his career and his marriage foundered on the rocks, time to go find some time in the sun. After years of eighteen-hour days, how hard could homework be? And then there were the lovely young coeds, long legs flashing by, skirts swirling and flirting, practically begging to be snapped up by a not particularly bad looking former SEAL.

Well, the homework wasn’t actually that bad, or it wouldn’t be if it weren’t for the classes he had to take. History. How bad could it be? Greeks and Romans and Persians and the Renaissance. Egyptians and feudal lords and maybe memorizing a bunch of dead guys’ names.

Little did he know. That was “old history.” His current major course was “An Introduction to African Pre-Colonial History.” As far as he’d been able to determine, his definition of what constituted “history” and the definition used by the University of Georgia History Department didn’t come from the same dictionary. Sure, the old time historians made stuff up. Livy read like something written by Tom Clancy and Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars was written with political image in mind with only brief touches on reality, something like a Democratic stump speech. But it had brief touches on reality and it was at least written. Prior to the “colonization” period, Africa had no writing and, apparently, no problems worth discussing. His professor attributed every ill of Africa to the colonialism of the White Man, ignoring the ongoing tribal wars that dated back thousands of years, not to mention the Arab slave traders that benefited from them. He’d had to see the first episode of the mini-series Roots and had been loudly shushed when he started laughing in the first fifteen minutes. Slave traders didn’t get off their boats and go chase bush-bunnies around. They bought them from Arabs, not fucking “Islamics,” Ay-rabs. And the Arabs bought them from the tribes, who were constantly at war with each other.