Who Empties the Bins in Your Fantasy Kingdom

A student in a workshop I taught in Yaba three years ago, a young man named Chuka, brought in ninety pages of a fantasy kingdom called Obara, complete with a coronation, a prophecy, and a marble palace of nine towers. I asked him a single question about page one: who empties the bins in the palace kitchens. He had no answer, and that gap became the most useful conversation of the term.

Chuka's Obara was not badly imagined. He had a currency, a religious calendar, a line of succession going back eleven kings. What he did not have was a single character whose job was unglamorous and necessary, and once I pointed this out he assumed I meant he needed comic relief, a servant with a funny line. That is not what I meant, and the confusion is common enough that I want to walk through the correction slowly.

The sanitation question

The sanitation question is not really about bins. It is a diagnostic for a specific gap: does this invented world contain anyone whose labour keeps the visible splendour running, and does that person ever get a scene of their own, rather than existing only as an implied fact behind the prose. A palace with nine towers produces waste. Someone carts it out, at an hour before the nobles wake, along a route that would show a reader the palace's back corridors, its economy of favours among the staff, its actual dependencies, rather than its throne room.

Chuka's response, when he understood the question, was to invent a woman named Ada who managed refuse collection for the east wing, and here is where the exercise became genuinely useful rather than merely decorative. I asked him not to give her a funny scene or a wise-servant scene, both of which are still forms of decoration dressed as depth. I asked him what Ada would know that the king did not. His answer, after a week, was sharper than anything else in the draft: Ada could tell, from the volume and contents of the refuse coming out of the physician's quarters, that someone in the royal family was being slowly poisoned, weeks before any noble noticed a symptom, because she was the only person in the palace who saw what was actually being consumed and discarded, unfiltered by anyone's account of it.

Why this beats a servant with a funny line

The instinct to give unglamorous labour a joke is a way of acknowledging its existence while still keeping it decorative, because comic relief characters rarely know anything the plot needs. Ada knowing something the plot needs is different in kind: her labour is not observed for texture, it is a sensor the palace does not know it has. Chuka's revised draft has the poisoning discovered not through court intrigue but through a woman doing her job carefully enough to notice a pattern nobody with higher status was positioned to see, because status is exactly what keeps you away from the bins.

The honest objection

You could argue that this exercise risks a different kind of condescension, that elevating a sanitation worker to secret plot-critical genius is its own cliche, the humble figure who turns out to be wiser than the throne. I raised this with Chuka directly, because it is a fair worry. His answer, which I think holds, was that Ada is not wise in any general sense. She has one narrow domain of expert knowledge, refuse volume and content, and the story only ever uses that narrow domain. She does not become a philosopher-servant dispensing folk wisdom to the king. She reports a pattern in her own area of competence to the one person who will listen, the physician, and then the story is done using her, which is closer to how expertise actually works than the wise-servant archetype ever is.

What Obara looks like now

Chuka's manuscript is under consideration with a small press in Lagos as I write this, and the coronation, the prophecy, the nine towers are all still there, unchanged. What changed was one scene in the second act where Ada walks her cart route and notices something is wrong, and readers of the full draft now cite that scene, not the coronation, as the moment they trusted the book. The bins were never the point. The point was that somebody in Obara had a job specific enough to see something the throne could not.