Afrofuturism by HeadyMix

AFROFUTURISM

CURATED BY HEADY MIX WITH STORIES FROM WRITERS IN MALAWI, BOTSWANA, NIGERIA, SOUTH AFRICA, UGANDA AND KENYA

Published by Heady Mix Limited The Brew Eagle House, 163 City Road, London, United Kingdom Tel: +44(0)203 951 7985 Email: membership@headymix.co.uk www.headymix.co.uk ISBN 978-1-9162090-2-2 Â© copyright 2019 Heady Mix Limited All rights reserved First edition Printed in the UK

AFROFUTURISM

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

VIBING WITH BLACKNESS: CRITICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF BLACK PANTHER AND EXCEPTIONAL BLACK POSITIONINGS

THE MACHODUGO

WHERE PUMPKIN LEAVES DWELL

THE THING ABOUT CARRYING EYES

SAHARA

MYASTHENIA GRAVIS: LIBERATIONS

WAITING FOR THE END

VIRTUAL SNAPSHOTS

FAMILY MEETING

WOMEN ARE FROM VENUS

WAKING UP IN KAMPALA

THE LAST STORYTELLER

BIOGRAPHIES

105

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

109

INTRODUCTION Justina Cruickshank

American cultural commentator, Mark Dery, coined the term Afrofuturism in 1993 in his essay Black to the Future in which he wonders why “so few AfricanAmericans write science fiction, a genre whose close encounters with the other – the stranger in a strange land – would seem uniquely shifted to the concerns of African-American novelists?” Dery was wrong in his assessment. Publishing a book is notoriously difficult and rejection is par for the course for most writers, including immensely famous ones such as Agatha Christie, Dan Brown, Judy Blume, Beatrix Potter, Stephen King and JK Rowling1 We also know now that there were – and still continue to be – structural obstacles that prevent or make it harder for minority groups to get published. What Dery saw in the nineties as “so few African-Americans” was actually the lucky few who made a breakthrough. Nevertheless, Dery’s phrase took off as described by him to be: “Speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture — and, more generally, African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future — might, for want of a better term, be called Afro futurism.” Dery’s definition dealt with America, but like much of life, that American experience has since seeped into the rest of the world. No longer only about African-Americans, Afrofuturism is applied to any works of fiction (and other creative endeavours such as music, film, art and fashion) that contain sci-fi or speculative fiction elements that are written by a person from Africa and its diaspora. And therein lies the problem. Not for the diaspora so much, but for writers based in Africa where a history of sci-fi and speculative fiction has reigned long and strong in stories written in the many tribal languages of Africa right through to present day works told in English. However, when you search for books that storytell Afrofuturism, the works and commentary are dominated by the West, in particular the USA. In an interview with the South African Sunday Times, author Mohale Mashigo requested that her collection of short stories, Intruders, not be classed as Afrofuturism even though some are set in a future South Africa, as it didn’t “feel like the right coat to dress [her] stories in”. The newspaper goes as far as to say that doing so would be “lazy”. Mashigo, in the introduction of Intruders, explains why she doesn’t like the term: “There are stories that take place in the future but cannot strictly be called Afrofuturism because (I am of the opinion) Afrofuturism is not for 1

Africans living in Africa” That sentence has a powerful effect. Perhaps if you are like me, a person of African descent not living in Africa, you might feel offended. Perhaps if you are like me, you feel that you have failed your heritage. Mashigo states her purpose “is not meant, in any way, to undermine the importance of Afrofuturism”. And it doesn’t. The reality is it awakens all of us to her call for something different for Africa. Mashigo talks about South Africa’s “low self-esteem and too often [it] parrots the United Kingdom and United States of America.” I thought about what Mashigo was saying for a long time. The impact of her pleas led me to almost scrap this theme of Afrofuturism. I felt to continue would mean somehow failing Africa. I suddenly understood I was caught up in the Western enthusiasm for the term Afrofuturism. I had aligned myself with a certain connectedness with a term coined a generation ago by a white man living in America. Here I was gleefully curating stories from America and the UK that shut out the very voices that I purported to showcase. Had I become part of the problem that Mashigo had identified? Of course I hadn’t meant to. I started out by simply wanting to share stories about Africa that are sorely missing off bookshelves, but then here I was questioning my right to do that in the way I had chosen. In the end, I concluded it is all about experiences. Mashigo, an African living in Africa, has a very different experience to mine and those from the African diaspora. Of this, she says: “Afrofuturism is an escape for those who find themselves in the minority and divorced or violently removed from their African roots, so they imagine a ‘black future’ where they aren’t a minority and are able to marry their culture with technology. That is a very important story and it means a lot to many people. There are so many wonderful writers from the diaspora dealing with those feelings or complexities that it would be insincere of me to parrot what they are doing” Mashigo’s experience is of someone whose “television screen showed stories populated by black people speaking indigenous languages, so [she] has never suffered from a lack of representation as such.” So after wrestling with the theme, an existential crisis if you will, I decided I did have the right to share stories about Africa and to call it Afrofuturism. I made one important change, though, and focused only on stories by writers born, raised and based in Africa. There are so many talented writers from the African diaspora, which made it a difficult decision, and many would not agree with me. An African is always an African they will say no matter where they are born, raised or live. But I disagree. This is not about identity, though identity plays a role, but about experiences,

representation, and about highlighting those who are ignored. As a South African living in South Africa, Mashigo will never have my experiences and as a Brit living in the UK, I will never have hers. I heard Mashigo. I heard her rallying cry: “Africans, living in Africa, need something entirely different from Afrofuturism.” This anthology is not that collection of essays and stories.2 This anthology is for people, any people, outside of Africa to see Africa. What Mashigo and I have in common is our desire to see a future where Africa is prominent, where black people are the agents of change and are in charge of their own destinies. I am tired of slave stories or pasts that are difficult and haunting. Africa’s various histories are traumatic. Colonisation was destructive and we don’t learn nearly enough about its consequences as we should. This is not, however, merely about reimagining a future through rose-tinted glasses where everything is perfect. This is also not merely about sci-fi. Marvel’s film Black Panther was pivotal because it imagined an African country that did not require help from the West, and look how it thrived! Black futures matter. I found myself wistfully longing for Wakanda to be an African country of now. But no country is Wakanda. That is the greatest Jedi mind trick of them all. In pulling together this anthology, I started out hoping to curate a collection of stories that shone a positive light on Africa. Now, as I write this introduction, my only desire is that you consider Africa to have a future, and one that has influence. By reading these stories you have already helped reimagine a different future. What you read informs the present, but creates historical and physical legacies that shape the future too. Let those futures be African. The twelve works in this anthology explore the richness of Africa’s diversity: 54 countries, 1.2 billion people, over 2,000 languages and 3,000 tribes – distilled into the different individual experiences of the writers I have selected from Malawi, Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Kenya. There are no modern tales as such, instead we journey through magical realism, fantasy and sci-fi in a collection that shows each story’s common theme: a different Africa. We have reimagined Africa. Welcome to Africa.

1 For

more on the rejection for writers https://www.writersandartists.co.uk/writers/ advice/1204/a-writers-toolkit/essential-information/ 2

Mohale Mashigo is not featured in this collection. Her work is for another theme, another time. However, I do highly recommend her writing.

V I B I N G WI T H B L AC K N E S S : C R I T I C A L CO N S I D E R AT I O N S O F B L AC K PA N T H E R A N D E XC E P T I O N A L B L AC K P O S I T I O N I N G S Derilene (Dee) Marco (South Africa)

Abstract This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 2018 film Black Panther. It also considers other iterations of Black visibility and legibility in the current popular culture context which appears to privilege Black narratives in interesting ways. The essay uses conceptual lenses from diaspora studies, Afro science fiction and Black feminist studies to critically engage the film and to critically question the notion of Black exceptionalism.

1. Introduction “How do you know I’m real? I’m not real. I come to you as myth, because that’s what black people are—myths.” (Ra 2017) Gabi Ngcobo holds the position as the first Black curator of the Berlin Biennale. In various articles from South African and other global publications, the overarching message about the Biennale was its (and its curator’s) exceptionalism. This exceptionalism, it seems, is to be read as a slightly nervous celebration of Ngcobo as Black and an equally anxious reception of her all black team and a host of seemingly ‘unknown artists’ who were on the show. Ngcobo herself confronts this geographical and psychological positional through the following—a position that I wish to use in this article as a basis and space for reflection: “… To be seen as only a black team means Europe is still making itself the centre. It’s important, for me at least, not to think of [Europe] as the centre of power. My context, which is South Africa and Johannesburg, is my centre. And when I start to think, I think from that centre...there are knowledge systems that have been repressed for such a long time.” (City Press, Blignaught 2018) Celebration of Black exceptionalism and black trauma from predominantly Western centres means that, as Ngcobo articulates, we are still, traditionally and predominantly, taught and understood to think from the West as centre. Ngcobo, as curator and prime creator of the biennale, is about more than her being a woman. It is part responsibility, placed at her doorstep by an art world, and a cultural-political space that has become more aware of the problems of the part in the present. In an article for Artnet news, Ngcobo and Sao-Paulo based curator, Thiago de Paula Souza, who was part of the curatorial team, both argue for their position as one which is distinctively not about “fixing the mess” and which refuses to “exorcise Europe’s colonial ghosts” (Brown 2018). These vehement disavowals of responsibility have placed Ngcobo and her team in a rather challenging position in that they still had to put together the show. The intention of this paper starting

from this vantage point, one partially in the diaspora and partially thinking about contemporary representations of Blackness, is to place the consideration of Black exceptionalism at the forefront of the discussion. In other words, Ngcobo and her team are very aware of how their positions could be used to make certain Western/ European histories legible and to fix histories. In traditional institutions and spaces of authority and power, Blackness is still read as Otherness. Black feminist scholar, bell hooks, critically identified and engaged some of these representations in 1989 when she wrote about “whitesupremacist, capitalist patriarchy” (Hooks 1989). In 2017, Black feminist scholar Sara Ahmed engages some of the same ideas when she writes about which kinds of bodies fit in. Ahmed writes: “If we have a body that is expected to turn up, we might be less likely to be caught by what comes up … When you don’t fit, you fidget. How quickly the fidgeting body appears to be not residing in the right place. Eyebrows are raised. Really; really? Are you sure?” (Ahmed 2017, p. 132) Ahmed’s articulations about the body out of place can be traced back to Fanon’s theorisation about race in (Fanon 1967) Black Skins, White Masks but has found various iterations in theory and practice since. My intentions for starting this chapter with this theoretical approach located in cultural studies about race and otherness in cinema and specifically in the 2018 Marvel film, Black Panther (Ryan Coogler), is about keeping this approach in mind when discussing popular culture expressions of black (popular) culture and, what can only be described as Black exceptionalism. In particular, I am interested in how and when we see what Ahmed articulates through the question, “Really; really? Are you sure?”, for this echoes a particular performance of whiteness towards black bodies in positions which they hold now but positions which were historically embodied by white people. Keeping in mind this Special Issue’s focus on post-apartheid visual culture, the essay attempts to combine some of Ngcobo’s experiences as outlined above, with the Hollywood adaptation of the Marvel comic Black Panther. The essay attempts to filter through some of the rather larger conceptual concerns and decisions Ngcobo had to make, while at the same time critically engaging the worldwide celebration of various black-centred films in Hollywood over the past few years. I refer to films with Black protagonists which to some degree problematise race and whiteness. Films like Get Out (Jordan Peele 2017) and 12 Years a Slave (Steve McQueen 2013), pushed the boundaries of representations of race and blackness in mainstream cinema and popularised seeing black people on screen in ways that had not been done before, where blackness was not only a subject to be subverted. Black Panther’s marketing and thus appeal to a wide audience has not been very different to the aforementioned films and has yielded both celebration and conversation. Reviewer Steven Thrasher frames it in an interesting way when he describes Black Panther as Star Wars for black people. (Thrasher 2018) The recent years’ deluge of films about race is partly contemporary popular culture and partly in response to the global socio-political context. This paper critically engages representations and celebration of Blackness, and thus tries to speak to and draw on Black sensibilities in this era of awareness and political correctness. We experience these films, this kind of cinema, in very particular curated ways too; in some ways, these films ask the viewers to help with the exorcism of histories of slavery, pillage and death. While we may assume a film such as Black Panther speaks from the position of a very particular kind of black experience, we need to remain aware of some of the ways this watching can be exploited and 8

spectacularised, even as such films perform the work of building (critical) racial rapport. Drawing on Sara Ahmed in her writing about structural racism, I read the spectacular in this sense as Ahmed theorises when she writes about building rapport as a “requirement because of a stereotype…”. (Ahmed 2017, p. 130) Once a rapport has been built, it becomes easier to ‘accept’ an ‘other’, and even to critically engage whiteness. This essay thus attempts to engage notions of spectacular Blackness in a myriad of ways, keeping in mind positionalities of power and popular media’s role in propagating awareness or ‘lit’ sensibilities. This concern is huge in post-apartheid South Africa; however, I chose to think about these ideas with the film Black Panther because of its reach and global value—South Africa no less affected by the film than other parts of the world.

2. Afrofuturism “The notion of Afrofuturism gives rise to troubling antinomy: Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures?” (Dery 1994, p. 181) Afrofuturism is a multimodal term which is used to describe certain kinds of science fiction films with Black futurist sensibilities at their core, a genre of its own, and a term which is increasingly a body of scholarship about such films. As Lisa Yaszek notes, it was really the period of the late 1990s that saw an emergence in Afrofuturism studies, when critics and scholars such as “Mark Dery, Greg Tate, Tricia Rose, and Kodwo Eshun first drew attention to the centrality of science fiction themes and techniques in the work of many black authors, artists, and musicians”.(Yaszek 2006, p. 41) Often credited as the critic who coined the term, Mark Dery offers a two pronged definition of Afrofuturism in his 1994 edited volume, Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyber Culture. Dery is both invested in Afrofuturism as closely related to science fiction as an aesthetic genre and at the same time, politically invested in Afrofuturism as “a larger aesthetic mode that encompasses a diverse range of artists working in different genres and media who are united in their shared interest in projecting black futures derived from Afrodiasporic experiences” (Dery 1994, p. 136, in Yaszek 2006, p. 42). Afrofuturism is, in its very nature, interdisciplinary and encompasses a host of different positions and conceptual threads (Eshun 2003). Ytasha Womack describes Afrofuturism as offering a “‘highly intersectional’ way of looking at possible futures or alternative realities through a black cultural lens. It is non-linear, fluid and feminist; … Afrofuturism blends the future, the past and the present” (The Guardian, Thrasher 2015). Practicing this interdisciplinarity, Alondra Nelson’s critical work with artist Paul D. Miller has seen the pair create the Afrofuturist listserve (Nelson and Miller 2006), a platform to access a plethora of information and which has facilitated Afrofuturism scholarship as a growing area of enquiry and theoretical contribution. Yaszek’s consideration of the developments in Afrofuturism as political and aesthetic are useful when she writes the following: “Afrofuturism has evolved into a coherent mode not only aesthetically but also in terms of its political mission. In its broadest dimensions Afrofuturism is an extension of the historical recovery projects that black Atlantic intellectuals have engaged in for well over 200 years. According 9

to author Toni Morrison, these projects do more than simply combat the erasure of black subjects from Western history … Thus, Afrodiasporic histories insist both on the authenticity of the black subject’s experience in Western history and the way this experience embodies the dislocation felt by many modern peoples … Afrofuturism holds the potential to bring the Afrodiasporic experience to life in new ways.” (p. 47) Keeping the above in mind, the article now focuses on the film Black Panther, a Marvel comic adaptation about the kingdom of Wakanda and T’Challa (Chadwick Boseman), a black protagonist and superhero with an all-female army. Black Panther was celebrated as exceptional for its representations of black characters, black women, a black superhero and the way in which a fictional black nation exists and enacts its power in a dystopian future. In the context of popular and widely commoditised Afrofuturist films, Black Panther essentially made this genre one which is recognised in the popular imagination, not only in discourses of those who engage with the genre. Black Panther’s success however, can be read and questioned in a number of ways.

3. On heroes and comic superheroes The character of Black Panther first appeared in Marvel comic books in 1966 as part of the Fantastic Four and his first film appearance in Captain America: Civil War (2016). As Brent Staples writes, the comic was not at all radical when it was first introduced, but, the subtext was. Black Panther’s alter ego, T’Challa, was characterised in the same way as experienced in the film and this rendition of the character “begs to be read as a critique of both the western slave trade and (…) prevailing attitudes of superiority through which Westerners have long viewed Africans” (New York Times, Staples 2018). Staples’s position is not one which celebrates the 2018 film wholeheartedly but rather shifts our aspect to what may have been a radical subtext (which worked alongside the Civil Rights Movement) to and of 1960s North America and which problematises the character both in terms of filmic characterisation as well as popular appeal beyond the film. Staples notes that public perception of the character was often conflated with the radical black political party of the same name and thus always remained “a second-tier comic that often teetered on the verge of cancellation” (Staples 2018). In his work on Batman and Captain America, Christian Russell argues that comic book heroes are “role models for readers” (Russell 2014, p. 122). Russell’s thesis identifies specific “heroic moments” in relation to the characters of Batman and Captain America, arguing for a relation that audiences are able to, and need to draw among three moments: teaching moments, archetypal moments and ideal moments (Russell 2014, p. 122). Russell’s tracing of the histories of comic books and the need for them for audiences is a useful approach when he defines the aforementioned moments that an audience may experience while watching a comic: “‘teaching moments’, defined as moments where the heroes act in a manner that is obviously aimed to teach a lesson, ‘archetypal moments’, wherein a hero acts in a very traditionally heroic way, based on the Jungian ‘hero’ … and ‘ideal’ moments, when a hero appears in a manner that is meant to inspire the reader to act in the same way” (Russell 2014, p. 127). If we take Russell’s three defining characteristics and apply them to Black Panther, we are, throughout such 10

an analysis, confronted with the question of the representation of race and the disruption of what is essentially a white, heteronormative assessment of the white, heteronormative superhero. As is the case with science fiction scholarship, much of the existing theorisation exists about and in relation to science fiction cultural work (films, books, comics and other narratives) that imagine(s) a future without black people (Yaszek, Tate, Dery). And, as Staples argues, the character always existed in the Marvel stable but was never realised to the same degree as some of the other superheroes. This critical perspective posits blackness within science fiction as a genre and re-articulates the genre itself, hence Afrofuturism. However, this paper shows how Black Panther is less of an Afrofuturist work than a neatly commoditised Marvel comic which rides on the coattails of popular black culture, and a popular ability to perform ‘being lit’, more generally.

4. T’Challa and the ‘never colonised’ nation of Wakanda After the death of T’Challa’s father, the up until then ordinary young man has to return home to Wakanda to take up his position as King. For a film in which geography and space are so important, the film relies on the binary of global North and global South, cementing the film in a rather familiar, albeit complex geopolitical power relationship. T’Challa’s having to go home is also not unfamiliar in diasporic narratives, both African, Caribbean and other. It echoes a host of ‘African’ fables and diaspora literatures which hold the diaspora at its core. I use the term ‘never colonised’ to emphasise the distinction made by the film itself, that Wakanda was never colonised and that there is a form of reverence in this position that positions it differently from other African nations. As is commonplace in comic book adaptations, audiences are invited to see their superheroes as ordinary first and then see them morph or change into their alter ego characters. This pattern continues throughout Black Panther. After the death of his father, King of Wakanda, T’Challa returns home to a nation that is firstly, African, secondly, technologically more advanced than the rest of the world and thirdly, absolutely exceptional. The exceptionality of Wakanda rests on the country’s centuries’-long invisibility. This seeming invisibility alongside Wakanda’s storage of a powerful fictional mineral, Vibranium, means that they house power that no other nation knows of. The uncovering of this hidden mystery of Wakanda’s power in Vibranium, is the subplot to the film, one which stands in for various real national narratives of power too. Part of these exceptional positions are portrayed through characters however, part of the framing takes place through cinematography which often highlights specific images through mise-en-scène which emphasises Wakanda as different from other places (See Figure 1). A location shot is shifted to rely on the fact that it is not recognisable to affirm Wakanda’s exceptional position in the viewers’ imaginations.

Figure 1. Aerial shot of Wakanda (Taken in accordance with fair use of images rights for the film Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, 2018, Marvel).

The primary plot, however, centres on T’Challa and his ability to become the leader of Wakanda, a noble position. Reviewers have noted the highly gendered position of power in that although T’Challa is the leader, women run the army and, T’Challa’s younger sister manages the laboratory that essentially creates all kinds of things out of Vibranium. From the outset thus, while Wakanda may seem to display the traits of an intersectional uncolonised African reality, there is no active disruption of some of the traditional perceptions around gender and patriarchy, a point which the paper returns to later. The latter point notwithstanding, Wakanda presents us with a way to think about the intersection of past and present and invites us to grapple with historical and contemporary geopolitical positions and representations of such issues. In this interrelationship between past and present, the existence of Wakanda makes it permissible to imagine an African nation as truly powerful. However, this celebration is short-lived, for the mystery of Wakanda overrides the celebration. This mysterious element is exemplified when villain Erik Killmonger (Michael B. Jordan), who we later learn is also Wakandan and T’Challa’s first cousin, steals Vibranium from a British museum. In his brief interaction with a white curator at the Museum, an expert on African artefacts which they both look at through the thick glass cubes in the gallery space, we learn that ‘ancient Africa’ is a mystical place. He corrects her by telling her that the artefact they discuss belongs to present day Wakanda. His tone and dialogue explicitly make her out to be ignorant in her arrogance and places a colonial narrative of Western pillaging at the forefront of the fictional Marvel adaptation. The opening of John Akomfrah and Edward George’s 1993–1994 piece, Last Angel of History, starts with the following: “In the future, like racial memory, black futurology may be allotted rooms on the Internet. Housed in cyberspace vaults marked ‘tomorrow’, coded with a connective emblem, this past, our present, could be the 12

key to making sense of the future, the present of some yet unborn black person.” (Akomfrah and George 1996, reprint of 1993 piece in Chimurenga Chronic 2013) The piece by Akomfrah and George formed a loose script for what became a film by the Black Audio Film Collective, titled The Last Angel of History (1995) and seems fitting in relation to the opening scenes of Black Panther. In Akomfrah and George’s articulation about what a black future looks like, we are invited to imagine the interrelationship of black past(s), present(s) and future(s). In Black Panther, we are invited to view a kind of spectacularisation of blackness, a kind of exceptionalism both celebrated and desired in ways that have seemingly never been experienced in relation to blackness. This consideration around exceptionalism seems to me to be a consideration of ideas and politics covered in great detail already and which has specific links to what Paul Gilroy theorises in The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Gilroy 1993). Specifically, the issue of fictional Vibranium in a fictional Wakanda is telling of a much deeper seated issue around Western Modernity, a project of pillage and warfare in which the West was always in a position of power and which is still evidenced today, taken apart, in some ways in the story about and around Wakanda. The larger narrative suggests that perhaps there are other secrets in Africa that muddy an already complex colonial narrative, in some ways, I argue, delegitimising various existing histories of colonialism not written by white settlers. Paul Gilroy’s attention to thinking about modernity for the black subject as a conflict of self is interesting in the context of Wakanda because the Wakandans present themselves as somewhat conflicted but only Killmonger lives that personal double consciousness (Gilroy 1993, p. 5). The Wakandans are aware that the secret of Vibranium is what keeps them powerful but it is short-lived power that stays within Wakanda. The villain protagonist of course wishes to uncover this secret and to become more powerful with it. Also useful in Gilroy’s Black Atlantic is reflection on ideas of nationalism, ethnicity and belonging: for Gilroy, in relation to black British subjects in the United Kingdom, a struggle for belonging, but for this paper, nationalism and belonging is useful to think about who are Wakandans and why they matter. They are themselves ‘othered’ from other Africans and black people in the diaspora. In both these considerations, the physical idea of the Atlantic and attending discourses of slave movement across the Atlantic is either taken for granted or ignored completely. In the case of Wakanda, the Atlantic as a passage of loss and various national (some would say ethnicised) reconstructions, does not exist. Wakanda remains a fiction for the (real) black subject, both in the film and who watches and who continues to struggle through the rhetoric of belonging and mattering. In some ways then, the betrayed cousin’s anger could be read as an attempt at vindication not only for the personal loss and lack of belonging he experiences but also for these same traits that stand in for black people of the diaspora all over the world. Some of these conflicting elements are present in the scene when Eric Killmonger is presented to the council comprised of elders of neighbouring tribes. The positioning of each of the members of council is telling as he is presented to the council as an intruder (See Figure 2 and Figure 3). On identifying himself as one of them, the tone changes. The relationship between ‘us’ and ‘them’, is

immediately dismantled in the recognition that he is Wakandan. Initially treated as a threat and danger, through the use of a few phrases in the South African Nguni language, isiXhosa, the council realises that Eric is a Wakandan. In a shot-reverseshot sequence mainly comprised of close-ups between Eric and T’Challa, the pair discusses the impasse they find themselves in: that Eric feels that Vibranium could be used to set free the over seven million black people around the world who are still enslaved by Western structures. T’Challa dismisses this in a measured way by saying that he is not the king of all those people but the King of Wakanda and that that is not their way. T’Challa’s positioning here creates an unfamiliar binary between the dispossessed black diaspora, those somewhat left behind, and the wealthy Wakandans. Wakandans in this film stand in for Africans but they also do not, as Wakanda had never been colonised. It is interesting that they use isiXhosa in moments to speak in what we can only assume to be the language of Wakanda. Even accents lean towards South African sounding ones although it is hard to contextualise this in anything concrete. Partly because of the language and legibility of Wakandans to Wakandans without actually granting that language proper space in the film, I read South African inflections into how Wakanda is able to express its importance and visibility.

Figure 2. Eric Killmonger presented to council in Wakanda (Taken in accordance with fair use of images rights for the film Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, 2018, Marvel).

Figure 3. Wakandan council (Taken in accordance with fair use of images rights for the film Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, 2018, Marvel).

Firstly, in the relationship between the cousin and T’Challa (and the nation of Wakanda), we observe an estrangement that has been present for years and this is a similar estrangement experienced between people in the diaspora and those on the continent. This relationship speaks to belonging and nationality as a place of being home. The film addresses the double consciousness about which Gilroy writes. This, being able to show double consciousness and experience through the characters, takes place through a number of characters: cousin Killmonger who grew up in the United States (US) without a father and a sense of belonging, girlfriend to T’Challa, Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), who has a busy and full life outside of Wakanda doing work that she considers life-altering, and even T’Challa himself. We are also aware that this double consciousness is not new, because we know that Killmonger’s father lived in the US too. The conflictedness of being black, woven into the fabric of histories of slavery and displacement, is played out in these roles of questioning who belongs and who does not. This fractured sensibility and identity is only ever articulated by Killmonger, a villain, and thus a character who we are primed not to like and who we are certainly not invited to trust. Killmonger’s heartless killing also of the character of Zuri (Forest Whitaker), a kind of Mandelaesque moral large man, further removes any affinity we as viewers may feel for him. Once he kills Zuri and then T’Challa (or we assume he does), the music on the soundtrack changes to a deep and slow staccato beat to indicate change and disruption to what they knew before. It is the start of a new era for Wakanda, confirmed by Killmonger’s hard facial expression held in a close-up as he gets presented with the necklace of the King. Finally, exceptionalism appears also in the presence of the women who are assumedly powerful in a number of different ways and which the film wants us to know. I want to discuss Nakia (Lupita Nyong’o), Okoye (Danai Gurira) and Shuri (Letitia Wright) in more detail here as women characters who are considered exceptional (also read as ‘other’). Sara Ahmed writes of feminism as sensational, “We learn about the feminist cause by the bother it causes; by how feminism comes up in public culture as a site of disturbance”. (Ahmed 2017, p. 21) These three women are meant to be read as sites of disturbance, not necessarily to the fictional narrative in which their positions are normalised, but certainly in the affective experience these characters potentially elucidate in a heteronormative patriarchal society. One of the most striking things about Wakanda is that while ruled by a traditional male King figure, its army is comprised entirely of women. These women are dressed in red attire with metal spears and shields as part of their uniform (See Figure 4). They protect the royal family and Okoye, chief of the army and T’Challa’s protector, herself pledges her allegiance to the throne before anything else (See Figure 5). After Killmonger takes the throne, we also see conflictedness in Okoye because, while she pledges her allegiance to the throne despite who sits on it, it is clear that she also struggles with protecting someone who is not a ‘good’ King, and whose intentions appear to be bad. While the royal family, T’Challa’s mother, sister, and Nakia flee to a neighbouring tribe, Okoye stays to protect the King in her capacity as leader of the army.

Figure 4. The all-women army led by Okoye who is left front of screen (Taken in accordance with fair use of images rights for the film Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, 2018, Marvel).

Figure 5. Women of Wakanda – soldiers, Shuri and the Queen as T’Challa lands in Wakanda (Taken in accordance with fair use of images rights for the film Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, 2018, Marvel).

However, as Killmonger becomes increasingly more deliberate in his dismantlement of the values of Wakanda, we see her discomfort expressed through small facial expressions or related subtle actions, conveyed through close-ups. Nakia explicitly tells T’Challa that she wishes to continue doing her work outside of Wakanda. And Shuri, T’Challa’s younger sister seems to head a laboratory that is at the cutting edge of science and technology. She deftly explains how Vibranium works to CIA agent Everett Ross (Martin Freeman), whom she has also essentially healed after a life-threatening gunshot wound. Shuri, Nakia and Okoye are represented as strong, independent women and this thread is interesting because the nation of Wakanda is at the same time a traditional nation, expressed through centuries-old rituals, traditions and ways of doing things that are valued and protected. It is thus interesting that in the midst of this traditionalism, there are all these women who protect the nation. Despite the strong characters, the positioning of this womanhood is never explored further; for example, we never learn why Wakanda has an all-woman army, nor do we learn why or how Shuri knows everything she knows. A rather powerful intention then, feels somewhat misplaced, as though the film comments on patriarchy without really following through on anything. This appears to me to be a typically post-feminist assertion, a popular culture prop that is ever developing and which asserts a sensibility of girls who have power but which never truly offers much beyond. As this was

never the intention of such an adaptation which still comes from a stable of Hollywood-type productions, it would also be unfair to make this critique of Black Panther the primary argument of the paper. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that just as the film is/was celebrated for its exceptional positive portrayals of black characters and black women characters, essentially subverting the very notion that black characters are never superheroes, so it has also been celebrated for its representations of black women. Fundamentally then, what is striking about Black Panther is the affective connotations implied in these representations and how these contribute to our awareness and readings of blackness beyond the film, for this is really what the celebration was about. As Kara Keeling writes, “In order to produce value, technological cinematic machines draw on the affective labour of their spectators” (Keeling 2007, p. 96). Drawing on Marcia Landy’s work, Keeling argues about Blaxploitation as a genre that, “… in order to argue that Blaxploitation, far from being a misnomer or a regrettable diversion from the progressive history of blacks in American film, signals an intensification (arising out of a specific sociohistorical political formation) of the exploitation via affectivity (already a function of cinematic machines) of an audience (market) presumed to consist of ‘black people’.” (Keeling 2007, p. 96) I find many direct parallels between Keeling’s argument and the one I wish to expand on here. In the context of Black Panther, this exploitation of affectivity is portrayed through the seemingly positive representations of black people, as was also the case with the Blaxploitation era of films. Also similar to Blaxploitation which appeared in cinema around the period of the civil rights movement in the US, another kind of era of sociohistorical political formations and complexities exists in the US at present and these should not be overlooked in the context of Black Panther. Furthermore, Keeling’s comments on black women figures in Blaxploitation films, “Black Revolutionary Women as blacks with guns” reconfigure even a former critical positioning of women in these films (Keeling 2007, pp. 92–94). Again, similarly to Black Panther, existing scholarship about women characters in the Blaxploitation era often points to how women with guns redefine the woman’s role entirely; however, Keeling vehemently suggests otherwise and argues that part of this representation of a supposedly powerful woman also served to oversexualise black women even further. Her point is to show how the introduction of Blaxploitation was in response to a changing socioeconomic environment in the US and required of Hollywood to show that it could change. Keeling argues that the resolution truly experienced through Blaxploitation films was that as a genre and era in cinema, it came to and has come to stand in for “Black Power”, what Keeling describes as “common-sense black nationalism” (Keeling 2007, p. 101). Playing on the same tropes fifty plus years later, Black Panther’s positioning of black characters as powerful on cinema screens seems a moot celebration, at best. Perhaps it is more useful to think about a film like this along the lines of how Steven Thrasher puts it, that “It’s quite appropriate to have a nuanced opinion of Black Panther’s politics while also celebrating the unabashed joy of seeing black life depicted through black eyes” (Thrasher 2018). This essay has engaged with notions of Black exceptionalism and some of the ways in which Blackness is read as exceptional in popular spaces. In particular, it

has engaged the filmÂ Black PantherÂ and has, alongside that, held the South African post-apartheid space in the framework of critical engagement through discussing Black positionality, diaspora and power.

Funding This research received no external funding.

Conflicts of Interest The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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See works by authors, Ben Okri, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Chimamanda Adichie.

This piece appeared in the Chimurenga Chronic in December 2013 archived under Arts& Pedagogy, Healing and Bodies.

T H E M AC H O D U G O Acan Innocent Immaculate (Uganda)

At the bottom of every well, there dwells a mystical little creature with large bat-like ears and big round eyes the colour of charcoal. Its skin is the dark brown of moist loam, and between little fingers and little toes, skin webs across, giving its limbs the appearance of fins. The Luo people of old called it the machodugo, and it was said to be the Moon Goddess’ servant, beholden to her to provide clean water to her faithful subjects for eternity. In the quaint village of Odravu, west of the Albert Nile, the machodugo named Aasi lived at the bottom of his well in a beautiful little house carved into the rock, illuminated by the glow worms, the fireflies that came at night, and the reflections of the sun and moon’s light in the water. There, around his home, the most resilient of the mosses and the ferns grew, their leaves the darkest, greediest green, snatching at every ray of sunshine they could. The naughty plants which ventured into the water Aasi uprooted every morning and ate. This way, he kept the well’s water clean and clear. For many years, Aasi had served the people of Odravu well, his hands always ready at the bottom of the well, the unseen, unknown helper guiding the pail to the parts where the water was clearest and sweetest. His reward lay in the tinkering laughter of the villagers and the benevolent smile of his goddess when the sun set. He would have continued to serve the villagers for many years to come if he had never set his big black eyes on Philomena Andrua. Philo, her friends called her. A goddess amongst women; a nymph, surely, a runaway from the forests in the east. In his long life, Aasi had seen many beautiful women, but none whose skin was so smooth, gleaming like the black oil flowing under the ocean floor. None with a face so delicate he feared her laughter, as she leaned over the mouth of the well, would shatter her features. None with a voice so ethereal and sweet, it made him forget the melodious hymns the oceans sang to the Moon Goddess. When the pail descended into the well, Aasi rushed to it, webbed feet pattering against the mossy ground. For her, only the clearest water would do. Only the sweetest water, the water which tasted the last tendrils of the moon’s kiss every night. He dived into the cool water and swam to the bottom of the pool. There, water bubbled from a crack in the rock bed, still warm and fresh from the earth’s core, the perfect offering for the girl he was sure he loved. Above him, the impatient high-pitched voices of Philo’s companions tried to goad her into abandoning the pail. “There’s a natural spring just a few minutes’ walk away,” one of them said, her English twisted by her strong Lugbara accent. His Philo laughed and spoke in the crisp accent of those city kids who came to the village for Christmas, her tongue curling around r’s and drifting over t’s so that they sounded like d’s. “I want this water,” she said. “Dede Atte told me it’s sweet.”

And no matter how much her friends pleaded and threatened, moaning about how the sun would set before they all filled their buckets, she refused to leave, leaning over the lip of the well with a bright grin and shining eyes and exclaiming with delight when the metallic pail rose toward her at long last, so full its contents sloshed over its rim and fell on the machodugo below. Aasi watched with his breath hovering in his throat as he listened to the familiar sounds of palms cupping water and lips slurping up the liquid of life. There was silence, a delighted little sigh, and Philo’s accented voice breathing, “It is sweet!” His little heart swelled in his little chest, and he felt a heat in his veins – a rush more intense than all the love he had ever felt for his goddess. It was as if someone finally saw him, a grain of sand among millions, identical to the rest, but still unique in his own way. He felt appreciated. He felt cherished. Her companions grumbled under their breaths in Lugbara. The water is not sweet. You see this one with her city tongue. I thought they said we were the ones with the village excitement. Pretentious town girl. One of them dropped the pail, and Aasi scuttled away to the bank of the little pond at the bottom of the well. Let them fetch their own water, he thought to himself. Let them see if it will taste as sweet without the guidance of my hands. The pail ascended again, and a girl cursed with feeling. “Aka! For the city princess, the pail returns full, but for me, it’s not even halfway full!” she cried. Her companions laughed at her and told her to try her luck again. The pail dipped into the pond again and again, and Aasi sat before his little house in the light of the glow worms and the setting sun’s rays reflected in the water and watched it rise half empty, every time. Yes, he wouldn’t serve these ungrateful villagers who took the sweet fruits of his work for granted any longer. He would serve his mortal goddess alone and exult in her appreciation. And so, it was that the machodugo in the well in Odravu village stopped serving the other villagers, catering to the whims of one girl. No longer did the pail arise from the well with clear water brimming in it. No longer did the villagers carry their cups to drink of the well’s sweet water. The water was not clear anymore, and it tasted like the water the NWSC taps brought to the village – empty. Only the pail Philo sent down came back full. Only the water Philo took home tasted sweet. All the girls wanted to go with her to the well. The whispers ran riot through the village. Was Korobuga’s daughter a sorceress? Or did she have some sort of city technology which made the well bend to her wishes? Philo took pleasure in the well’s predilection toward her. She patted the well when she visited it, spoke to it, and crooned praises which Aasi soaked up like they were whispered in his ear. Good well, beautiful well. You serve me so well. Your devotion pleases me. With each day that passed, the machodugo’s infatuation with the pretty city girl grew, so consuming in its intensity that he forgot his duties and let the ferns flourish in the pond at the bottom of the well and darken the water to a green so revolting the people of Odravu cursed the well and threatened to put a lid over its selfish mouth. One day, while he lazed in his little house, dreaming of his goddess Philo, Aasi

received a visitor. It was his cousin Amaru. She had travelled from the well in Ombaci, by the underground rivers which connected all the wells. She looked just like him; big ears, big eyes, and little webbed feet; but where he was bald, she had a crown of wiry black hair on her head. “What kind of machodugo are you?” she demanded, setting her bag aside to yank the weeds from the pond. Aasi shrugged and carried her bag inside. When Amaru finished clearing the pond, she followed her cousin into his house and sat across from him on a tiny stone chair with her shoulders hunched and her small mouth downturned. “The rivers are whispering about you,” she said, her large eyes narrowed so that she resembled an old chameleon, “They say the villagers have complained about your neglect, and the Moon Goddess will hear their cries.” She leaned forward and poked Aasi in the chest with her webbed hand. “Do you want to turn into sand? Don’t forget that the Moon Goddess preserves our lives in exchange for our service.” The next day, Amaru left. The pond was clear once more, and Aasi served the villagers with a grumpy face and an unwilling heart, sending them pails which were just full enough to warrant their awed praise. Their cheers clanged in his ears like the gongs of betrayal, and he drove away the glow worms so that his home was plunged into darkness as miserable as he was. It was only when Philo’s voice floated down to him that Aasi’s disposition lightened. He scrambled to catch the pail before it hit the water and dived to the bottom of the pool, giddy with the prospect of pleasing his mistress. Her words came to him like a distant song, sad, disappointed. “I hear you’re now giving my clear sweet water to the villagers, you unfaithful well!” she scolded. Aasi swam up to the surface and saw her face in the flickering light of the sun as the clouds rushed across the sky. Her beauty was twisted by her anger into a grotesque ugliness which made Aasi cover his eyes and whimper. “I thought you were loyal to me alone,” she said. The pail rose toward the well’s mouth, and Philo pouted and said, “I don’t feel special anymore.” The pail tipped and poured its contents all over the little machodugo in the pond, making his ears lie flat against his head. Philo’s head disappeared, and the receding sound of her footsteps made Aasi think of nails and coffins. With a heavy heart, he dragged himself to his house and buried himself in contemplation. His love was angry with him. He had to make amends. Would he stop serving the people of Odravu? But the threat of death hung over his head like a weak branch requiring the smallest provocation to fall. But still… wasn’t the anger of his love a worse fate than death? He nodded to himself in the dark and made his decision. He would serve Philo alone. The cries of the villagers rose up to the Moon Goddess. From her perch in the night sky, she heard the sorrow in their tears. One of her servants wasn’t carrying out his duties. The well in Odravu spat up green bitter water for all but one girl. The Moon Goddess was furious. A machodugo dared to love another over her? Her jealousy scorched the people’s eyes when she shone with full force that night.

In his well, Aasi cowered under the all-seeing eyes of the Moon Goddess. Try as he did to hide in the shadows, her rays touched him and made his skin burn with the shame of betrayal. “You dare forsake me for a mortal’s love?” The goddess’ voice was an ultrasonic boom in the night. The village dogs barked, the cats mewled and ran under the beds, and the bats in the trees squealed. Aasi covered his ears and dropped to his knees under the force of his goddess’ fury. “Your well will run dry!” she decreed. She directed the oceans in her thrall to tell the underground rivers that they would feed the well in Odravu no more. The rivers flowed away from the well and took the water with them, and the machodugo of Odravu, his sole purpose taken from him, lay dying on the moist ground next to his little house, illuminated by neither the fireflies nor the reflection of the moonlight in the water. The next day, Philo and her companions came to the well, chattering loudly in that manner of young unmarried girls with no worries and laughing in highpitched voices. They dropped the pail into the well, and gasped when they heard the unmistakeable thud of metal against sand. Philo’s well had run dry! “Oh, Philo,” one girl cried, “what shall you do now that your well has dried up?” “My father is going to put piped water in our house,” Philo said, a careless shrug in her voice. “It was just a well.” And the last pieces of the machodugo’s soul, lingering in the hopes of seeing his love one final time, shattered into nothingness.

WH E R E PU M PK I N L E AV E S DWE L L Lillian Akampurira Aujo (Uganda)

You watched as the road swallowed Mummy back into the city. You imagined how it wound in and out of the shaded hills, like it chose to rest from the sunshine before deciding to go on. Kaaka’s scaly palm scratched your soft one as she told you to turn around and head back to your new home. Eyes still fixed on the patches of the road, you half turned, wishing that sometimes roads would just stop so people wouldn’t have anywhere to go. If that happened your mother’s figure would reappear and she would tell you the road to Kampala, like her journey had ended. The decision for you to stay in the village for more than the Christmas holiday had been arrived at like all the others in your life; a statement told to you by Mummy like she was trying to beg you for something when you actually knew she wanted you to know that you didn’t have a choice because you were the child and she was the adult. “But Mummy, why can’t I come to your school?” “It’s for adults and there are no children allowed.” “Why?” “Because there are no children there.” “But children are everywhere.” “Not there, they have no beds to sleep in and no one to look after them so they stay with their grandparents. Besides, I will have a lot of homework to do.” “I’ll help you Mummy, you help me all the time.” “Mine is complicated, you won’t understand it.” “What does comp-li-cated mean?” “Something very hard.” “So, who will help when my homework is complicated?” “Your new teachers.” “Is there another Aunt Naiga?” “I don’t know, we’ll see when we get there.” You opened your mouth to ask more but changed your mind when Mummy pressed her lips together and stared down at you. Complicated. Your mother is complicated. Why do adults make you do things? Why can’t you just do what you want? Why do they force you? You have to do it because you are the child and they are adults and they look after you. Grandmother tugs harder at your hand,

“Let’s go Pati, do you want the big, big snake to find you? It will swallow all of you.” There’s no ‘i’ in your name but your grandparents add it anyway. Mummy says it’s because they don’t speak English, so they turn whatever they are saying into Runyakore. Still the way they say it spoils your name. You pull your hand away from Kaaka and walk a pace in front of her. That way if the snake comes from the front you will see it first and turn and run through the mist while calling out for Mummy to wait for you and she will change her mind because she will know the village is not a safe place. If it comes from behind it will reach Kaaka first but won’t be able to swallow her because she is three times your size and you’ll have seen it and you will run round the bend and up the path that cuts through the coffee plantation and the smoky kitchen with a grass roof will be before you and Grandpa will be seated by its door on his low one-legged stool bent over a basin as he douses his face and grey chin with hot water from the black oblong tin that boils it’s water by the small fires that spill from the three cooking stones as Kaaka’s big saucepan of water for lemon grass tea boils. He will be there and you will be safe. You look at Kaaka over your shoulder. How did the woman know you were thinking about snakes? You shake your head at her as she says, “What?” You’re already thinking about the last time you talked with Mummy and you know you will not hear her voice for a long time. But remembering makes it seem like she’s still there. ‘Mummy?’ ‘Yes Pat?’ ‘When will I become an adult?’ ‘When you are eighteen, then you can do whatever you like!’ ‘But I am only six years, that’s so far away!’ Mummy smiles and hugs you. She smells sweet like chocolate and you feel a mixture of sadness and happiness that makes your chest want to burst like a balloon. She will visit often, and fetch you once she’s done with her school. School is important. Something you have known since the day Mummy spanked your behind because you ‘forgot’ to wear panties to school (but remembered to stuff them in your mattress cover) so that Aunt Naiga would send you back home like she did all the bad girls who forgot to wear their panties. Mummy had dragged you back to school and told you even if you didn’t feel like it, you had to go to school. So maybe Mummy doesn’t feel like going away to school but she has to all the same, even if it means leaving you in the village with Kaaka. Her humming makes you turn to look at her. You want to ask her if the only songs she knows are church songs because that’s all you’ve heard her sing. You want to tell her church songs are for Sundays only, but you know she will only laugh, and tell the story to her old friends when they sit round a circle to weave baskets on Thursday afternoon. 28

Soon the weeds with dew at their tips flicking your ankles disappear and the path widens. Kaaka is still following closely behind you. The coffee trees thin and you’re in Shwenkuru’s compound. He is seated on his one-legged stool washing his face with steaming water from the oblong blackened tin. Every morning Kaaka fills this tin with cold water, then sits it in the ash between the cooking stones as the tea saucepan is boiling, so that the same fire can heat the water. You ask him why Kaaka doesn’t heat another tin of water for you as well. He tells you cold water keeps a young mind awake. “So, you mean your old mind is asleep?” Shwenkuru shakes his head and turns to Kaaka. She laughs and heads to the kitchen. “No, my mind is not old. Or asleep. And that’s because I always bathed with cold water when I was young.” The next day you go with Shwenkuru to the pineapple garden. Before you turn onto a smaller path you’re on the one you took yesterday while seeing Mummy off. A long pumpkin vine has stretched across the path. You don’t remember seeing it yesterday. If it had been there you would have tripped over it. “Shwenkuru, who put this thing here? It wasn’t here yesterday.” “No one, my child. Pumpkins grow everywhere in this village.” “Do they grow overnight?” He breaks into one of his grins, the one that decides to stay on one side of his face. “I suppose so, don’t you think that’s why the village is named Lyakanshunsha?” “But that means where there are many pumpkin leaves, not so? I haven’t seen any pumpkin leaves on the coffee plants, the banana shoots, or any of them without the rest of their plant…” “Oh, my little wife, he pauses and ruffles your hair… the ideas in your head… but you’re right, except that sometimes words can’t explain everything.” “So, what explains things better than words?” “Knowledge Pati, knowledge.” “But we still need words to understand.” “I didn’t say we don’t, but sometimes they aren’t enough. Like the name of the village means a place where pumpkins grow in plenty.” “Hmm… if you hadn’t told me I wouldn’t have known and that’s not fair to all those who don’t know.” “You’re still young Pati, there’s time for you to learn many things.” “You mean when I am eighteen, I will know everything?” He laughs, “Even I with all these grey hairs on my head, I am still learning, I don’t know everything in the world, I learn something new every day.”

“Like I just learned what the village name means?” “Yes Pati, tomorrow you’ll probably learn something else, and the next day, and the next one after the next day.” For every day after that you learn something new about Lyakashunsha. At first it is the children crying in the night. When you open your eyes the bedroom is so dark that you widen them to be sure they are still not closed. “Kaaka! Babies are crying outside. Who left them there? Why did they leave them out in the dark?” You whisper, until she replies like she’s in a deep dream. “Cats, Pati. Nothing but cats, go back to sleep.” But you fail to sleep until the morning birds begin singing. Then you sleep for what seems like days and when they wake you up, it is time for lunch. Shwenkuru sits you on his lap, “They were only cats, sometimes they are restless, and they cry through the night.” You shake your head, you heard babies, and you’re convinced they were babies. But you say no more to your grandparents and dig into the cassava and beans katogo on your red plastic plate. The next night you hear the babies again. You’re about to call Kaaka when you see them. They are numerous, small and pink like the baby mice that fell from the grass thatch on the kitchen when the kite flew past. They lie on the jagged brown stones in the compound where the coffee and beans are spread on wicker mats to dry. But there’s no sun or light. There’s only cold and darkness and the babies shiver. You also know the unkind stones that knocked out the nail of your third toe will cut their smooth skins till they bleed. You look around for their mother but she’s nowhere in sight. “Kaaka, Shwenkuru!” You run to the kitchen but it’s empty and there’s no fire in the hearth. You go around it and ran past the mango trees and the latrine but only its odour welcomes you. You run back to carry the babies to the house but the place where you left them is empty and only their white sheet with brollies and teddy bears remains. You snatch it to your chest and for some reason look up. In the dark sky the kite is carrying away the babies. They hang in each foot, gripped by the kite’s large talons. The bleed and they wail. The bright drops of their blood and the tears from your eye pool in your palms. You brush them against your nightdress and when you look up, the kite and babies are gone. You cry because you know if their mother had been with them she would have shooed the kite away and it would not have been able to snatch the babies. You cry because you know Mummy left you in this place where a big snake can come and swallow you any time it wishes and a kite can snatch you from your sleep any time it wishes. You cry for the babies and you cry for yourself.

Some evenings Shwenkuru takes you along on his walks. You like that as he passes by each home he introduces you to everyone and they all look at you as if they wished they could be you. One time you reach Bwengye’s household. There are more than ten children running around. The women touch your curly hair, move your head this and that way, and say, “Bambe! This child is surely her mother’s! How lucky you are Mungyereza that you have started to see your grandchildren.” Later you ask if Mungyereza is Grandpa’s other name but he says they call him that because before your mother was born he worked in Kampala building houses with bajungu. The men shake your hand, and ask you who your mother is, then add like they have just remembered, “What about your father?” You usually say nothing, until Grandpa comes to the rescue, “He is in bulaaya minting money. He will come when he will come.” Then there are the children. The first time they look at you with faces turned to one side, feet on top of each other, fingers probing their noses. Each person has two eyes, but having ten of theirs on you feels like they can see your koko so you look down to check that you’re still wearing your red and green skirt. You look up expecting them to laugh that your Mummy has left you in the village. But they only ask if they can touch your beautiful skirt and wear your sandals just for a minute. You say it’s fine, as long as they can chase and catch you. Most times you run faster than them and hide. They look behind the houses and up the short mango trees and beneath the granaries but they never look far off in the banana plantation. There you find heaps of red soil scattered between the banana shoots. You crouch behind one. This is your favourite hiding place but you get tired of hiding without being found so you make your way back to the noisy compound. You let the children touch your dress and wear your sandals. Then they teach you their game of catching stones; you throw a stone with one hand in the air and pick up another with the other hand. You keep playing until grandpa puts down the calabash of tonto and gets off the folding wooden chair. He says sleep well to the adults although the orange colour of the sun is still in the sky. “It’s time to go home, Pati.” “But it’s still early Grandpa! One more time, just one more time! Please?” “This child of mine thinks this is the city where lights shine like the sun even in the night. Pati, this is Lyakanshunsha where we go to sleep when the sun goes to sleep.” That night when you sleep, you find yourself in your favourite hiding place in Bwengye’s plantation. You hope this time your friends will find you because if they don’t, the red mound of soil will sink and gape and gape until it swallows you. You try to stand but a heavy weight like a huge bundle of firewood sits across your shoulders. You try to scream but the red soil fills your mouth and you see that you’re already inside its gaping mouth in the ground.

It’s dark like the night until you see small balls of light. You run towards them and as you get closer they widen into two solid human shapes. One has breasts and the other has a flat chest. They are beautiful and clean and you want to ask them how they remain clean and untouched by the red soil. You pull at the woman but she shakes a fleshless finger at you, “You think I would leave my babies in this cold desolate place and go back with you? I wouldn’t! I’d rather die for the tenth time than leave them all alone.” She points to a place at her feet and even before you look you know it will be the two babies that the kite carried away, “I tried to shoot the kite but it scratched me. Where were you when it was taking them? I looked for you! Everywhere! I looked for you!” “I was dead! I was already dead,” her voice is quiet, like the rain falling on a dead morning.” “What about him? Their father! He should have protected them”, you turn to where you last saw him standing but there’s only darkness. “Do you see him there now? He came before me”, she adds like she is used to saying it. “You should leave our home now, your mother will not like it if she finds that you have left your Shwenkuru’s house.” “Then why did she leave me all alone here? It’s not a good place for a child, is it?” “It’s not so bad, but she left you now so that she could be with you longer, so go back to her parents.” “But they are not my parents!” You move your shoulders up and down to show you are going nowhere. But then you blink and find yourself in the banana plantation with its mounds of red soil. There is a cross made of sticks on each mound. You wonder why you never saw the crosses before, and why you’re sure you shouldn’t be there. You break into a run. You’re about to reach the house when something holds both your legs and you crash into the wet soil and crushed weeds. Whatever is holding you has hairy fingers and they are moving up your legs. In moments you’re on your back, lifting your head to see what’s wrapped around your legs. There are just pumpkin vines so you relax, you must have stepped into their thick foliage. But then when they wind up to your knees you realise they are determined to eat you up. You kick and thrash with all your might. As your hands work to disentangle you from their hold you feel the sting of the hairy vines burn your fingers. But you don’t stop until the last one is lying at your feet, broken and lifeless. You run again but soon your chest burns and your legs get heavier with each step. You’re about to fall when the houses come into view. In the near dawn light you recognise Bwengye’s compound. You’re at one corner of the kitchen. There’s no one outside, you hurry to the main house but stop when the wooden door flies off its hinges and Bwengye rushes out dragging his wife Gaude by one arm. He is shouting at her,

“What sort of woman are you? Clearly not mine! No woman of mine spends the night out of my house. Karanzi meeting! Praying the whole night! What sort of god doesn’t know you have a husband? Meeting indeed! Do you people meet at the meeting of your thighs? Is that it? Is that why you go there every night? Since you spent there the whole night you might as well go back! Have you forgotten about the graves in our backyard? And all these orphans your children left behind? I should have known you and your children were cursed. Cursed to think about nothing but the fire in your groins!” Then he is punching her face and she’s bleeding from her mouth and nose. You wonder why she doesn’t make a sound. You shout but it’s like you’re yawning with so much energy. You know this is not something you should be seeing. Grandpa couldn’t have left you here. You took a walk with him and stopped at Bwengye’s and he sat on the folding chair and he drank from the calabash and you played hide-and-seek and then the game of stones with your friends. You let them touch your pretty skirt and wear your sandals. Where are your friends? Why are they not helping their grandmother? And what is Bwengye talking about? You know if someone doesn’t stop him he will kill her. So you run to the direction of Grandpa’s house. Soon you’re on the path that cuts through the coffee plantation and you can see the white sand walls of the main house. You’re about to reach when a pumpkin vine begins growing across the path. It’s a strange sight because even if plants grow, no one ever sees them grow. Until then you had imagined that plants grow in the night and the next day they have added a leaf, a flower, or a fruit but it’s not something you had expected to see with your own eyes. As you watch, the vine grows and grows and before long, its dark green, whitehaired leaves are as wide as saucers and they have covered the entire place around you. You know when you lift your foot they will not let you and indeed, they hold on to you and grow up your legs, stomach, and chest. They tickle your racing heart and stop at your throat as if they are considering letting you go. The last thing you remember before passing out is the end of the vine growing into the forked tongue of a snake and you know they had a plan all along. The big, big snake and the pumpkin vines in the place where pumpkin leaves dwell knew they would just come and swallow you anytime they wished, and they had decided that that time had come.

When you wake up Kaaka is looking at you. She smiles and shouts over her shoulder, “She’s awake!” There’s a wet cloth on your forehead and you’re in her bedroom. When Grandpa reaches your bed you pull at his arm. “The snake and the pumpkin vines want to swallow me, they want me. You have to stop them, cut them with the panga.” “You’re sick Pati, it was just a bad dream, and you have malaria. The nurse said the medicine would do that.”

You sit up in the bed and look at your grandparents. “Really? What about her?” “Her who?” “Gaude! Bwengye was going to kill her.” “What!” “I was coming to find you when the pumpkin vines and snake found me. I tried to stop him but he couldn’t hear me, and I was scared he would kill her, then beat me up as well.” Kaaka and Grandpa say nothing, they just look at you like you’ve lost your mind. “I saw him! And Grandpa, why didn’t you tell me those were graves in that banana plantation? I found their parents there.” “Whaaat!” “My friends at Bwengye’s house, their parents were in the grave with their twin brothers. They were the same heaps of red soil like the ones in their plantation, except they had crosses on them.” “Child, you’ve been asleep for two days, it’s all the dreams confusing you. Maybe I can bring some food?” Kaaka asks as she gets up. You nod even though you don’t want to eat. Grandpa follows her. You follow them when you start thinking about all that you saw. You’re about to enter the kitchen but stop by its half open door. Kaaka’s voice is a loud shaky whisper, “How can she know about that? All those things happened before she was born! She never knew Gaude, and true, Bwengye hated her faith and used to beat her up! That family went to the dogs when all their children began dying and leaving them orphans to raise. But how can she know all that when she wasn’t even born yet?” You turn and go back to the bedroom. When they bring the food you refuse to eat. You tell them you’ll eat when your Mummy comes to take you home.

T H E T H I N G A B O U T C A R RY I N G E Y E S Felicia Taave (Nigeria)

The thing about carrying eyes is you must not let them dangle, and you must go with them everywhere. It doesn’t matter if you have two, or four, or six, or eight, they have to have sockets, they have to have lids and lashes, retinas and balance and blinking and they are no less than mere eyes for being so many. So you look at things through the corner of your eyes that you can’t look squarely at, you carry your two, or four, or six, or eight eyes into the darkness and you meet the gargoyle that makes you squeeze all of them shut all at once. The thing about carrying many eyes is that it does not make you less afraid, it does not make you less vulnerable and they are no more than mere eyes for being two or four, or six, or eight. You can’t keep some in your vanity while you go out with the others, you can’t have a favourite one, a casual one, an official one, a prescribed one, a trendy one, a vintage; you just can’t. So, you carry your eyes – the same ones, whether they’re two, or four, or six, or eight – to school, to work, to weddings, to dinner parties, to raucous parties, to family gatherings, political rallies, lecture theatres, christenings, funerals, everywhere. Those same eyes. We tried to warn her when she was going. We told her to stay, to wait her luck out, sit tight, something good will find her. We said it wasn’t so much wrong or shameful as it was self-sabotage and she’ll bring back those same eyes that saw all that nonsense, and she’ll have a memory she cannot purge and she’ll have pangs in her chest and she’ll try to wash her eyes with saltwater issuing from herself, and she’ll pour and pour and pour but she could never flood her eyes clean again. Another thing about carrying eyes is you can’t recycle them, not really. She said okay. She knew what she was doing. Nigeria being what it is, even our children play and skip around knowing full well what’s up. These eyes we keep telling her she must protect, haven’t they read about the rise and shameful fall of power, haven’t they seen the utter, hopeless displacement of whole families because of ethnic fights and politically instigated religious squabbles? These eyes she must keep unstained have seen child-victims and child-monsters, girls that weren’t done being babies having babies, doctors profaning the bodies of their pliant patients, teachers abusing their hallowed places, lawyers fighting to reinstate the sheer animality of human baseness… and winning. These eyes have already seen much, theft and stealing glorified in the folds and flows of big, expensive garments; theft and stealing incarcerated for being shameless enough to show up in rags and tatters and scrawny faces. But you cannot fight this, we told her, no one can. Do you know how many million pairs of eyes your two, or four, or six, or eight, have to come against? It is not for nothing that Athens chose democracy – the game of numbers. There is power in numbers and it doesn’t matter if they’re dirty, if they’re rowdy, if they scramble into dark corners when you light your heavy eyes’ torches, they are more than you and so they win. But she said she’ll try anyway. She didn’t have money but she had a big heart and she believed it was in the right place. She would start an NGO for children and others (for she thought there had to be others with eyes like hers) will support her with the money, the services, the space, the help and assistance she’d require.

Calm down, we told her. There are orphanages and homes everywhere, you can rally your fellow dreamer eyes and organise visits and lessons and competitions and such other things without having to take full responsibility for lives and haunting eyes you can never satisfy. She’d laughed and said an eye for an eye like it was a sweet and novel joke. An eye for an eye. My dear, I drew her aside and whispered, if you want to give you can cook and give me a little, you can help brother Bem wash his clothes seeing that he manages on just one good leg, you can help Mama Nankling with her children’s homework, or you can lock your doors at night and put the whole earth in your prayers. Once your eyes have seen too much they’ll never recover. Okay, she said again. But sometimes when we gathered and talked about her under the tree in front of Mama Aaron’s shop, we would all wonder whether her eyes had begun to see corruption yet, whether she was getting insensate from the stink, whether it was boring holes in her lungs yet, whether she was getting those nightmares it had become Sister Funke’s sole purpose in life to chase away with expensive holy water. We all wondered how far she’d go straining her young beauty, punishing her dreams to take on the burden of the world around her, silencing all our collective noise and shutting up her conscience behind high walls where she made it soft and malleable, where a single prick would cause it to bleed and it could not stand the speed of sharpness, the pleasures of love or the good things of life. Then we stopped talking about her under the tree. Her eyes had seen what we all feared. We should have hooted and called ourselves right, we should have laughed at her short-lived exploits, we should have massaged that balm on our envies, we should have lifted her woe like a trophy, we should have shunned her and made clear our gloating. But when it was dark and others were sleeping our eyes were stung on our pillows, or at least mine were. It wasn’t so much that she gave up that struck us so mute; it was that she made us believe it could be done then went there and sold out for mere shiny things. Sometimes I wonder what her eyes can do to clean the glitters, it wouldn’t matter if they were two, or four, or six, or eight, if she can’t have them regularly cleaned it’s just a matter of time before she goes blind.

SAHARA Shadreck Chikoti (Malawi)

It’s either the northern raven or the girl. In the case of the raven, he is resting his hands on the balcony railing and looking down Avenue 6 Drive when the passerine bird, large-bodied, long graduated tail, huge black bill, all-dark, not the whitenecked pied crow known in these regions, flies by and perches on the balcony, barely a meter away. Their eyes lock in a staring contest that appears to last forever. It has brown irises. After a while, the ancient bird takes off, croaking as it soars away in the air, until it disappears behind the metallic edifice in front. In the case of the girl, and her case is commonplace, an aero-bus slowly docks at the Mandala terminal in Blantyre, and he looks at his clock; the square monitor embedded in his left palm reads 11:40am. It’s always 11:40am. He is sitting on the chair in the glassy waiting booth, undecided. The passengers scamper out of the locomotive like rats smoked out of their hole as soon as the doors slide open. He rises and walks towards the bus. He gets in through the front door and presses his palm on the Zooter for identification. There is a green light blinking on the driver’s console and the android driver nods for him to get in. He turns towards the isle and notices the bus is empty except for this one seat, occupied by a passenger who is looking down, her black dreadlocks shielding her face as they flow all about her. She raises her head and their eyes meet. Time stops. There is no sound that he hears except the thumping of his heart. Black glistening dreadlocks flowing about her like river water, enveloping an oval face where eyes as shiny as stars, a turnedup nose and thick lips, have made their home. Next, he is sitting with her on the chair and he doesn’t know how that has happened. She is on his right, sitting on the window seat. She turns and speaks to him: “What’chu sitting here for?” Her accent is Southern. “Eee, you said what?” “Many vacant seats, what’chu sitting here for?” she gestures with her hand. His eyes track her hand as it quickly swipes around like a surveillance camcorder, showing him all the empty seats. He stands up to walk away from her, find another seat, dunderhead! But she holds his hand and forcefully pulls him down. He collapses back into the chair, excited with the prospect but also wondering where a girl that pretty got all that energy. “You sit now bwana. Only joking, don’t like jokes? I am Sahara.” “Sahara like…” “Like the desert,” she takes the words out of his mouth. “Pleased to meet you, I am...”

“Kamoto, I know you bwana. Pleased to meet you too.” He freezes, looking at her with awe. How did she know his name? He wonders. “Look at the floor sir, you dropped your mandible.” she says. “It’s the badge on your shirt, it gave you away.” Dunderhead! She is gazing at him like an artist admiring the finishing of his masterpiece. She is smiling at him; that kind of smile a teacher displays when proving to his class the math wasn’t really as hard as they thought. Red dress, pink nails, golden earrings, a glassy necklace that sparkles. He smiles back at her. “This is me,” she says as she presses the red button on the sides. “Do you see that green house, behind those trees? That’s where I live.” She is standing and ready to go. “Sahara Chaponda, I work at the Great Shopping Mall as a manager. I am human.” She is smiling again. She takes something out of her brown handbag which he notices for the first time. “Here,” an e-business card. Her name flashes and goes on the top of the card. In the picture box, her face beams and disappears, to be replaced by a different one, this time she smiles and the next she frowns, yet another she remains expressionless and so on and so forth. Her contact details are at the bottom. The bus has docked and she is already at the door. It’s always like that, all the time. He has lost count but this is the third month he’s been seeing her and the dream always ends here. She gives him her business card and she vanishes. His psychiatrist says there is not such a thing as paranormal in the multiverse. That belief belongs to the old world, when people believed in UFOs and witchcraft. Humanity can no longer afford a room for unidentified things. We live in a world where to not identify a thing is to put the whole humanity in danger. “So, these are just dreams?” “Yes, they are just dreams.” “But why are they recurring?” “The only explanation I have is that these are symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. It is not a problem at all. You are trying to deal with your imprisonment issue.” “But that issue is resolved, after all I only stayed in prison for ten days.” “Yes, but how do you feel about the government? Do you harbour feelings of resentment towards the government? It’s all connected, Mr Kamoto.” “Don’t you think these dreams are pointing to something?” “No Mister, don’t even go there. That’s superstition and it has no room in this world.” “Zoona. You know the reason they’d arrested me for, isn’t it?”

“They said you were disrupting public order.” “There was a line in my news article that said, information from a reliable government agent confirms that there is no hope of finding a cure for the disease in the next ten years.” “That would bring fear and panic to the public isn’t it?” “Zoona. But look, does this not confirm that there are some things we have no answers for?” “In the case of the disease, we have a whole lot of information on it; we know what causes it, the part of the body it attacks, how to avoid it, and many other things, what we don’t have is a once off cure, that’s all.” “What do I do then?” “The dreams will go, slowly, they will go. Once you are back on your feet and you have forgotten all about the incident, it will go.” “Thank you.” But today he wakes up with a different feeling. He wants to pursue his dream, like literary, see what happens, there is nothing to lose if it turns out he’s been chasing after a hologram. He knows what his psychiatrist will say, so he doesn’t call. He calls his workplace work place instead, telling the chief editor he is pursuing a story in Blantyre. He doesn’t realise but the time is eight in the morning. Lilongwe is already awake and bustling; the harming of aero-engines, the honking of vehicles below – he is on the last floor – an ambulance siren in the distance, and the wind whispering by his window. The sky is a huge blue when he parts the drapes; it stretches as far away as his eyes can afford to see. There is a bird high up on the far west, playing freely. It takes two hours to drive a Gravity Mobile on the Gravity D-road from Lilongwe to Blantyre. He will make it, he tells himself. The plan is as clear as rainy water in his mind. By four in the evening he will be home, making himself a sandwich and tea, and watching history on the Telecommunication Curtain. It is 10:53 when he gets to Blantyre, his old city. He worked here twenty years ago when his career was just beginning, before the trophies had clattered his table, before the jealousy from workmates had crept in, before the responsibilities and promotions had come flooding by, and before the transfer to the headquarters in Lilongwe. From afar, the city of Blantyre looks like many pencils of different sizes protruding from the ground with mushroom shaped objects interspaced in the air between them. The words on the entrance arch; the one you find soon after crossing the seventeen kilometres of the artificial lake that surrounds the city reads, WELCOME TO BLANTYRE A CITY BUILT ON IDEAS. And the ideas are the many gravity domes that shield the light from the sun all the time. The ideas are the fact that you can’t drive your car in the ground streets as they get crammed all the time forcing people to pay a lot of money to the government so they can fly their Gravity Mobiles. The ideas are that Blantyre is a city feeding on hydro energy 43

and solar power. He parks his Gra-Mob on the 10th floor of a parking Carnivore, and waits on the extended balcony for an aero-motor-scooter. It is 11:35 when he dismounts from the scooter at the Mandala terminal. He goes into the glassy booth to wait for the bus. The monitor above his head confirms that the next bus will dock at 11:40. He doesn’t want to get excited. There is no such a thing as paranormal in the multiverse. When the bus docks, he does not wait for the passengers to come out before he leaves the booth, and the passengers who come out are less than the number of fingers on one hand. It is also a human who is driving not a humanoid and the bus is half full. Men in uniform, obviously going for afternoon shifts, a gentleman in a black suit, two women, one in red hair and the other in golden braids, at the very back; these two are the only women in the whole bus. They are absorbed in a conversation. His eyes rest on them for a brief moment, but none of them looks like his dream girl. He can hear faint echoes of laughter from the red and the golden hair at the back, the two women unable to conceal their mirth. He finds a seat. The bus takes off. There is no such a thing as paranormal in the multiverse. He thinks as he exists at the next terminal. He should have trusted his psychiatrist. “Mr Kamoto, you should trust me.” “Yes doctor.” “How old are you?” “Forty-five.” “Oh, you are so young.” “I am not.” “You are, how old do you think I am?” “Sixty?” “No, Mr Kamoto, I am a hundred and twelve. Don’t get shocked. It’s all about being healthy, healthy foods, healthy choices and a lot of discipline.” “Yes.” “Humanity has all it needs to live longer, so if you are wondering, no I am not a clone.” Laughter. “This is my fifty sixth year working as a psychiatrist. You should believe me. You know what these things we call dreams are?” “No.” “Just a window into our unconscious. It’s our own thoughts, our own fears, embedded unto the subconscious and manifesting themselves in the form of images and sounds when we sleep. Dreams can be your happy moments, but they can also be your worst nightmares which you push away during your

conscious zones.” “And we have no control over them?” “No. No control at all Mr Kamoto.” “I’ve been reading.” “Okay, you have been reading.” “That there are actually some inventions that were inspired by dreams?” “The Periodic table, Dimitri Mendeleyev, many centuries ago, just like James Watson’s DNA’s double helix spiral form and the modern idea of Free Space. I know all that. And all this confirms that dreams are our thoughts locked in the subconscious.” “How about premonition dreams, where people dream of events that will occur in the future” “Coincidence.” “Really?” “Yes, Mr Kamoto.” The frustration must have numbed his brains for he forgets to refuel his GraMob as he leaves Blantyre and only sees the blinking light when he’s driven for an hour. The screen on the console says he should refuel here and now. He is at Ntchewu, a town renowned for its cheap housewares. He stops the Gra-Mob at a pump and presses a button below his chair to let the fuel attendant android in the cubical structure in front know he is here. The doors to the cubical opens and a female android walks towards him. He is fumbling with the button that opens the lid on the tank and he does not see the gynoid approach. When he raises his head to command the gynoid, he is filled with shock. He stays for a moment, transfixed and looking at the machine like he is witnessing the sinking of Atlantis. Black glistening dreadlocks, shiny eyes, a turned-up nose and thick lips, structures that make a perfect human face. Red dress, pink nails, golden earrings, a glassy necklace that sparkles. Sahara! The gynoid extends her hand, showing him the screen in her palm. He turns to place his palm on hers so their palm clocks can touch; a routine task for identification. “Mr Kamoto,” he almost jumps out of his chair as the gynoid begins to speak. “How much should we deduct from your account?” the gynoid is smiling. It is a perfect smile. “Fill it up please,” he stumbles over his words. When the gynoid is done she comes close to his window. “I have something for you,” she leans closer.

Is he imagining things? “Please don’t get startled. Behave normal. I have something for you.” “What do you have for me?” He looks into her eyes wondering if he is really talking with a gynoid. “My master wants you to have something.” “Who is your master?” “It doesn’t matter.” The name on her shirt reads, SAHARA. Sahara’s head turns around, 360 degrees. “There is no one in proximity. Please act normal.” She extends her hand into the car. The arm parts in the middle and the two sections partially flip outwards to reveal a metal cylinder standing in the centre of the arm. There is a tiny card on the top of the cylinder. It is black. “Please take the black device. It is a memory card. It has information for you.” He is not thinking. He takes the card quickly and keeps it in his hand. “Thank you, sir, it was good doing business with you,” the final line from every fuel attendant android. He is still looking at her as she walks back to the cubical with a perfect human body and movement. What just happened? There is no such a thing as paranormal in the multiverse? His apartment is on the eighteenth floor on Avenue 6 Drive. After parking his Gra-Mob in the parking hallway below, he takes an elevator to the last floor where his two-roomed flat is. He feels his pocket to see if he still has the device. He has a lot of questions like, was the device given to him because it was him or was it meant for anybody? And how come the gynoid was his dream? He chooses not to ponder over the questions. His more-than-a-decade experience in journalism has taught him that there is more to life than the database can tell. People keep secrets and they want the secrets known, part of the reason he was imprisoned. He has learnt to conceal his sources and to play the authority; that’s why people trust him. He told them at the police station, “If I tell you my sources, you will be forced to relieve half of your officers including two who are part of this interrogation.” “Why?” “Because they are some of my sources,” he wasn’t lying. They never made further enquiries and released him after the ten recommended days. He sits on the couch in his house. Takes out the device from his pocket,

holds it up against the light of the sun from the window. The device has words written on it; SDXC, 164GB. He knows it’s an old electronic data storage card. The Telecommunication Curtain –TC – uses it as a symbol for the save button. Or could the TC have a slot where he can insert it? He takes the remote on the coffee table in front, presses a button that unrolls the TC. The monitor, which hangs on the wall like the old scrolls, unwraps. He rises from the chair to check the plastic bar at the bottom of the TC if it has a port for the SDXC card. It doesn’t have. He also knows that his pad in his room, as well as the audio side drawers on his bed do not have the kind of port. He switches on the TC with his remote. There is a blue line that cuts through the middle of the TC horizontally; the blue line grows, spreading with speed on both sides, to fill the whole monitor with a skyblue colour. On his remote he presses the keyboard symbol and the coffee table in front is illuminated; a neon keyboard forms on the glass of the table. He puts both hands on the keyboard and types, Free Space. There is a secular logo on the top right corner of the screen with the letters FS on it, Free Space but also standing for Fast Search. An empty rectangular box blinks below the logo. He types the word, SDXC card in the blinking box. Pictures of cards, similar to the one in his possession come. At the bottom there is a small write-up. SDXC cards are storage devices in the family of SD cards developed in the 21st century. SD; Secure Digital and SDXC Secure Digital extended Capacity can only work on old machines like computers, tablets and cameras from the 21st century. Their use is considered archaic and extinct but…Expand Space to read on? No, there is no need to expand space to read on, he tells himself. He remembers an antique item that he received as a trophy for his feature; has science failed us all? Published in the Daily Chronicles, a paper he works for. He is sure it was a computer. When he finds it, stacked in the pile of books, cartons, old clothes, and other cast-offs he does not struggle to switch it on and to find a slot for the card. The keyboard and pad are the same as those on the TC. Open file? Click Play video? Click Windows Media Player. Loading. 45% 60% 87% 92% 100% Words form on the black screen; words in white. This information is meant for you Thokozani Kamoto. Please destroy the card after watching. The words disappear and are replaced by a picture of a man seated on a chair.

He is putting on a white shirt, and dark blue trousers. He looks young; tiny ears, eyes that bulge a little, a flat nose, puffy cheeks, dark brown complexion. His eyes are red and tired. Kamoto doesn’t believe it. He knows the man in the picture. The imprisoned scientist, Kalaile, fondly referred to as “the mad scientist,” in the papers. They say he deliberately built androids that were packed with anti-government data, whatever that means. Sorry to put you in such trouble. But it’s all connected. Starting with the antique computer you are using, which is a trophy from our association. The award was suggested by me and I had you in mind for the prize. The dreams, Sahara, the raven, it’s all connected. Nothing mystical. As they say, there is nothing paranormal in the multiverse. Let’s start with your dreams. It’s really technical. But here is the short of it. I found your database on Free Space. I connected your Artificial Intelligence chip in your brain, which connects to your palm clock, with that of Sahara, a female android I built. The dreams were enhanced by a process, including that of the raven. The raven has lived with humans for as long as we have existed, owing its survival to the unselective eating habits. I called this project, Project Raven. It is a project for the survival of humanity. I hope that makes sense to you. But there is more a scientist can do than to just build androids, isn’t it? Which brings us to our subject… The disease is curable. I have found a cure. I reported this to the council three years ago, and they told me in my face that they were not interested in any antidote. Our job is to build humanoids, that’s all. What will happen to all the funding we get from the World Council? What will happen to the millions who work in the departments? They asked. I want you to write and tell the world that there is a cure. I had to use this antique device because you never know who is monitoring you with all these gadgets at our disposal. Here is the formula which you must publish. You and I can save the world. I know we can. The computer screen goes blank. Words and symbols appear. Before he reads and makes sense of the words and symbols, he sees a green telephone icon blinking on the TC. He folds the computer and hides it under the coffee table. He presses a button on the remote that answers the call. A face appears. A woman in a yellow top and green hair. Oval face with a pointed chin. Thick lips and a long nose. Small but wide eyes. Her eyelids look artificial; long and visible. “Mr Kamoto.” “Doctor.” “How have you been?” “Fine, I am fine.” “I was expecting you today.” “Yes.”

“What happened?” “I had an emergency trip to Blantyre. Following a story.” “I see. How are the dreams? Any improvements?” “I think I am feeling better now.” “Good. I will be expecting you on Monday. Is that fine with you?” “Yes, doctor, it is fine.” “Later then.” “Later doctor.” When the face of his psychiatrist disappears on the TC, he sighs, collapse his arms on his sides, reclines his head backwards with his eyes closed before returning to his computer.

M YA S T H E N I A G R AV I S : L I B E R AT I O N S Awuor Onyango (Kenya)

Some would say that it’s an act of cowardice but I know better, I know that it takes courage to unshackle yourself from the heartstrings of sisters, brothers, parents, lovers, people you have to be silent and muted around just so they can be. Happy. In that fleeting inconsequential way they preferred to be, not real happiness; that can be taken away from you, temporary fleeting happiness was what this world was about, a sharp jolt of electric happiness once in a while, something solid enough to reminisce over in the burning cosmopolitan lights, a scab once ripped off whenever necessary so as to recall that moment. One was so busy documenting happiness that they only knew it through the memory of documentation: pictures, notes, texts, calls…these were the new insipidly diluted portals of happinesses of this generation, even happiness was caged and forced to replay itself in continuum until it deteriorated into a tasteless unwantedness. “There’s no place for gods here; no gods wanted.” I was walking down Cabral Street when he came to me. I always wore my jeans too long so no one could see that I don’t actually touch the ground. Bastet invented shoes that bridged the gap between us and the ground, but those ‘high shoes’ always felt so heavy and I knew what the ground was made of; it was my destiny to become part of it. I was walking out of the archives when Tom Mboya had turned his face to me and I had walked faster before he could talk, but there I was, on Cabral Street, with Amilçar pressing his face to mine and Tom poking his bronze finger into my back. I had felt Amilçar leak out of the bold black letters CABRAL STREET, trickle down the street sign and into a reality of vapours and dust but my mind was so heavy I couldn’t float away into unmade realities of my own, and the traffic lights wouldn’t let me. I thought for a second of shutting down all the cars on the road so I could pass, but only for a second. “Hathor, you have seen what they do to us now.” Tom says heavily, almost pleading that I should leave. These are no longer the days when thousands would lay their dead bodies by our graves, hoping we will will life unto them upon our return. Cults were no longer a way of life, religions were no longer liberties held close in the night, patience was no longer a creed to live by. I always left people behind and now they were tired of hoping I would take them with me and their lack of hope was a rot in their bones. “They want no gods here; strength is reproachable, vision condemning, ambition too heavy for them to carry, revolutions a hundred and forty words or less parroted through a protected world of screens and anonymity. You are weak if you do not bring them to their knees before you; they want no gods here, only demagogues, cryptids and demons.” Amilçar repeats, as if I did not know this. Had I not kept mum about who I was while here, had I not camouflaged myself in a saccharine pseudo-mediocrity and blended as best as I could? “Why are you telling me this now?”

I demand, having passed by this street several numerous times, smiling at them, asking them how they are doing, avoiding touching them and falling down the black hole of their histories. I had felt their breath through the soles of my feet as I floated past them. Had we not exchanged hapless smiles of reverence and nods? “Because you are shrinking into captivity; their rejection of you makes you want to stay here, now; to abandon all the historicisms and futurities you currently undertake and untangle them from their miasmatic despondence. You think you can instigate them to start fires; they will burn you.” Tom hisses, his voice a dangerous indigo revolting viciously against the stiffness of my spine. I have burned to death before, he and I know this; I ate the flames and they became me. “Hapi. Remember Carthage, Libya, Alkebulan, Ortegia and Kush. What is this compared to that? Compared to losing your home Itiyopianu…” I start, turning towards him. “They will cut you open and use the rivulets of your blood for roads.” Amilçar says, and I know that he had seen the black opal stain of my worries jut out of the darkness of my skin, worries that wondered if this post-structural world where one could say but never be sure what was heard was worth saving or salvageable. “But what is death Anu? Have we not been through it a million times before? Had not each death built a bridge to a world previously unknown to them?” I challenge. He should know, he ferried the dead to the womb of the earth, made sure their carcasses did not drip blood and feed the children of the Kongamato, the Popobawa and the Inkanyamba; creatures only spoken of now in hysteria and dying folktales. The greatest trick of the devil, it was said, was in leading everyone to believe he didn’t exist. There was no devil, no hell or afterlife in the sense now believed, only a rebirth in a new skin to a slightly newer world built over the cadaver of the old. Popobawa, the one-eyed bat-winged rapist, the Kongamato no longer satisfied by the blood of the crew whose boats she flipped over, the Inkanyamba who caused storms so that she may drink the blood of its victims – these were the devils nobody knew of. “They will burn your bridges and dance by the firelight. They want no redemption, Hathor. Why don’t you understand that?” Amilçar points out. Tom agrees, in the beautiful way that he does, as if he had said it himself. I can’t pretend that I hadn’t noticed the malnourished ambitions they proudly wrapped themselves with, the tattered anorexic hopes they wound limply around their necks, hopes so thin they could not hang from them, not that they would ever want to, the borrowed perfunctory leaking masks they hid their faces behind. Some wore the masks of freedom, indicating a longing for it but an acute misknowledge of what it was, others wore the mask of their cages, either announcing the comfort they found in them or their hopes that if they stayed in long enough things could change. I had found that redemption meant many different things to many different peoples, that while we had always been here to lure people out of caves, to launch them into space, to break them free of the

cages set around them, these generations were intent on making their cages as comfortable as possible, with electricity and running water and shiny objects to distract them from the fact of their enclosure. They now believed this was the best they could offer, or have, or aspire to. “This is not the end of the beginning that I envisioned.” I sigh, knowing I would die for them anyway. I had never died for myself in the cosmic explosions and galactic expanses of my being. “We have done everything we could Hathor. We fought for libéraçion, we ploughed the earth for them, we swallowed the crusty loss of our names in the annals of history, the buttered demolition of our faces and reimagining of our lives, the divorce of our peoples from their places in the world we made for them. We cloaked ourselves in anonymity and pushed them as far as we could, and now they will not move unless under the watchful eye of silent tyrannies.” Amilçar says. I regret having come this way today. I usually pass through Kenyatta Avenue and then Moi Avenue; there were no remnants of gods to be found there, just ghosts of soldiers who had been conscripted for a war that was not theirs so they could learn to fight their own. I had been otherwise employed during the liberation struggles and had only awoken in my earthly form at around the eighteenth birthday of my seed, appearing as a crow in the third floor of her subconscious, pecking at its window to be let in. She was a lovely thing, as loud as she was silent, a mystery with the colourful appearance of none. I whispered to her in the wind while she was younger, and like me she had the ability to feel things, sometimes with a touch, most times with her eyes. She would wander to the thorny bark of a tree and place her hands on it and see the tree as a seedling, untangle the reason it grew thorns in reaction to this world, heal it of pains yet discovered. It was my weakness and strength that I had only to touch something for its history to unravel before me, chairs and tables turned into seeds blown by the wind stretching out of tight earths with ambitions of heavens yet unreached, meat into knobbly kneed calves chasing after their mothers’ tits as the herds boy sang them songs so beautiful they never imagined their death at his hands. Her visions of the future were cloaked in a deep understanding of mathematics, a subject she abhorred in school for its lack of humanity. This is not the math of our times, the math of the pyramids and solar insurrection, she did not know how to say, mainly because she innately knew that time did not exist and that math came from the spirit and not the mind. She could reach on her own, the possibilities of parallel universes within the same spot. Once while lying on her back, she saw herself in ages long gone doing the same thing, one in which she was a seer princess freshly escaped from the claws of Kongamato, starting her new empire in the deep forests of the Congo near Lake Tele. This frightened her considerably. She went to school to close her mind. I had to yank it open to the universe once more and here we were, reading up about the liberation struggles, occupied with the futures of what must be done. “You cannot do this by yourself. You cannot do this with an army of us.” Tom states, and I had recognised the army that had been here during the liberation struggles. It was a physical liberation, and I could not have contributed

anything but song and reconciliation at that time. I was in America with Ra and Osiris (or Malcolm and Martin) as they had then been known; Tom had come over to ask for help for Kenya, whispers of him everywhere. I was never political, it was never my concern or specialty, but it was the only way to move our people; Tom, Malcolm and Martin knew that. I worked the bars and dingy outposts, filling music with painful histories as I always did; I was Robert Johnson’s devil at ‘the crossroad’, I was playing Billie Holiday’s vocal chords as she sang ‘Strange Fruit’, I appeared to Sun Ra, Fela Kuti and Miriam Makeba hidden in darknesses they spew out in liberation songs, ‘a lutta continua’ she would say, ‘It’s after the end of the world, don’t you know that yet?’ Sun Ra would say, ‘Do as I say, not as I do’ Fela would sing, and these are only some of the people I touched with my eyes; they called it jazz. I was behind the population burst of the early liberation years, where countries entered double digit millions as if they had not had their sexual and other organs mutilated in ways no one wanted to ease out of them in song. No one noticed that Tom was no longer where his statue was meant to be, that he had followed me down to Cabral Street, knocking some flamingos over in his urgency to have me leave immediately; this was how blind and distracted they were, my children. I knew the history of statues, that’s why we never made them. Statues were a reminder of what not to do, who not to become, the equivalent of placing the head of a captured chief outside his village gates on the sharp end of a spear, a bronze, marble, steel, stone warning to curb your ambitions, a pedestal to climb with your life so that others may stare up at you and chase their visions of futurities away in fear of becoming you. Statues were the modern public hangings, the village guillotines with a touch of art and deeply cruel viciousness to them. Statues had a way of capturing you at your best human form, so that you were pleasing and beautiful to the eye, so that children would be pushed to ask ‘Who is this mummy?’ so that adults can think ‘She could have been here now, if she had just looked down instead of up.’ Statues said ‘He tried, but don’t we all wish he didn’t?’ and so it was easy to see Tom’s despondency as a reaction to his new statuesque state. Amilçar had his reasons too, Street names were more invisible than statues; Kenyans were in the habit of noting buildings and not streets: something was on the way past Odeon, near Hilton, opposite Afya Centre, close to that blue building that had a lot of shops in it. No one cared whose blood they stepped on while getting there, with the exception of Koinange Street where women could be lured into things at a price, though no one was sure which Koinange it had been named after, or that there were two. Who cared for Cabral Street, or went off in search of Amilçar’s history fighting and farming for Cabo Verde and Guinea Bissau? All they knew was that it was that short stretch of yellow market stalls that connected Odeon to Nairobi Sports House, that corner where a bakery had once been. He had the arduous task of being there and not existing at the same time; these were the wounds of timeless gods unwanted. I do not remember my most recent past, something I had done intentionally since Catharge, or was it the south of France? Perhaps I had sat back, content with touching people rather than stepping in myself…but there was a lack in love and a deterioration in music that brought me here and demanded my attentions. “These are my children; they deserved a second liberation and a third and a six hundred and eighty fifth if need be.” I sigh.

I felt him approaching. It took a kind of art to cause havoc on a still street with people standing and doing nothing more, yet somehow Tikoloshe has snapped an ankle of a perfectly stable girl and started a fight between two otherwise tired men. My alertness betrayed his presence. “What will you have me do then? I have worked to have their past and present in their hands so they can dream of a future worthy of their being; they simply do not want it. You can take a cow to the river…” He says. I didn’t understand why my husband chose this form, this short invisible hairy eye-less being filled with a thirst for slightly harmless chaos, but his voice washed over me as it usually did, in ways that echoed billions of worlds breathing. “Horus.” Amilçar says, his words stiff with respect. Tom nods as well, but the gouged-out eyes of the Tikoloshe rest on me and I know his next sentence. I was the fabled stubborn cow that would not drink and this had been the symbol of my worship; I have been leaving people behind since eternity began. “Where is your Impundulu?” I almost smile at how predictable and mysterious he could be. He had grown worrisome of my adventures and assigned a cowbell to me, a man-bird that could summon him in lightning form if I should ever need it, if Set should ever have me as he had Osiris once. “London. Only slightly aware of what he is.” I shrug thinking of him, my lightning bird, devourer of human blood, legendary creator of storms, doomed to a life of caring for me heavily and intensely, bound to me by the god of gods himself. I often built a life for him and then left him behind, hoping he would be tempted to live it; but he always followed me, thick with duty and affection. “If we tire of liberation there will be none for them.” I declare before he can demand that I summon my Impundulu here, or he states the obvious, that these were not times to wonder freely spreading love, prosperity and music to those I touched, and that Set had the upper hand here in this land of rotting half-eaten revolutions. “Everyone is tired of liberation.” Tom breaths, it is Amilçar’s turn to nod in agreement. The people were tired, the gods weary. “Perhaps it is time we left Set to his victory here.” Amilçar suggests, as if Set would not follow us to repeat his destruction of our worlds and peoples. “We will leave when she is tired.” Horus announces knowing well that I loved these people intensely even if they did not know who they are. I had worked with Chantico to free them in America,

and though they were not free there, and not free here, not free in the islands or in the continents, in the hills, slums, favelas, barrios, villages, mountains, defunct irrigation schemes, dams, highlands, lowlands, swamps and deserts, though they continued up the same struggle to Atoo, to Lalibela, Meroe and Kush, whose names they did not care to hope for anymore. I would die over and over again to have them realise they were a family of demigods playing a-spiritual games in the hands of cruel monsters to pass time.

WA I T I N G FO R T H E E N D Wesley Macheso (South Africa)

Miko Mende was used to seeing people succumb to the disease. By now he had gathered enough courage to stand the gaunt faces that were nothing but skin and bones. He had listed down all the signs and symptoms of the disease – the convulsions, gulping mouths, and the saliva that dripped endlessly – which made him to always stand composed before the patients. But he failed to stand before his own brother when the disease had finally attacked him. He could not stand to see his brother succumb to the new virus whose cure was still a mystery. As an accomplished scientist, he made it his vocation to find a cure for the disease but since the Technocalypse, there were more burning catastrophes whose solutions he felt rested on him if the human race was to be saved from annihilation. The virus was not the biggest threat to mankind in the year 2717; the total destruction of the Earth was. And so, he let his brother die. When they were burying his brother, Miko was nowhere to be seen. Tension was written all over his daughter’s face for she knew that her father’s absence would raise suspicions that invited unanswered questions considering that Miko and his brother were identical twins and were inseparable since their childhood. Miko’s daughter was caught between a rock and a hard place, that were her father and her husband. She was married to The Pastor, a man who commanded too much respect in these trying times of multiple disasters. He was the founder of a new faith whose primary aim was to do away with science if the Earth was to be saved. The Pastor told his followers that the world was crumbling because God had abandoned the Earth since man had decided to challenge him through scientific innovation. “We wanted to be clever and change the world through science, and what is the result? God deserted us! You can feel the heat; science has produced incurable diseases, dangerous creatures, and unexplained unnatural disasters, all because of man’s foolishness! If God is to forgive us then science and scientists must go!” he preached. Slowly but steadily, The Pastor made believers out of the desperate souls making his New Heaven on Earth congregation a force against modernity. His message made sense although it had been years since the world had systematically abandoned religion and blind faith, making science the only logical way of living. Scientific inventions and the practical solutions that scientists were providing to everyday problems made it completely impossible for people to believe in the Bible or any such ancient books. It was a world full of doubt and everyone pursued their questions until what they did not understand made sense. But in the year 2700, things changed. It was the Technocalypse that triggered the chain reaction leading to mankind’s impending annihilation. It was this fear of extinction that made people lose their minds and run back to religion. Although such faith was irrational, it became relevant as it became the only hope in a hopeless condition. The Technocalypse was the total breakdown in technology as a result of the malfunctioning of Hubloits. The Hubloits were humanoid creatures designed by scientists as a way of increasing efficiency for rapid progress. They

were brain children of robotics, genetic engineering, and bio-chemistry. The Hubloits were machines a million times smarter than the ordinary human. On the outside, they looked like humans but the green and metallic red in their eyes revealed the danger that their creators never foresaw. The malfunctioning of the Hubloits was more sensual than it was mechanical. These humanoid creatures caught feelings for some humans and love affairs sprout between humans and Hubloits in some of the world’s highly advanced industries. The marriage between humans and Hubloits gave birth to the problem that tore the Earth apart. Their offspring are what are known as Neo-humans – combinations of man and machine – that became a threat to mankind. The Neo-humans were born with a natural loathing for humans and started killing people secretly, starting with their own mothers. They wanted to take over the Earth with their cunning and swiftness. But scientists quickly realised what was happening behind closed doors and decided to act. Africa, being the hub of science, held ‘The Kampala Gathering’ where a war against Neo-humans was declared. In order to frustrate the efforts of humans, the Neo-humans used their superhuman powers to breakdown all digital technology and communication, sending the Earth back to the dark ages. That is what is recorded in history books as the Technocalypse. But the Technocalypse and the war were not the only problems that mankind had to deal with. Global warming had taken its toll due to the rapid increase of greenhouse gases and the almost total destruction of the ozone layer. The ice in the North Pole was fast melting and scientists had predicted that by the year 2718, the whole world would be submerged in water and that would be the end of the world. It was this impending end that drove people to the Bible, the Koran, and to other scriptures that were long forgotten. Human beings love life so much that they cherish fantasies of living forever and they will try anything to make that a reality. This desperation is what made The Pastor one of the most powerful men by the year 2717. He ingeniously evolved a new book of faith by selectively combining books from the Bible and the Koran and made it a pillar for his church, the New Heaven on Earth. They persecuted scientists and killed those who refused to renounce science. The new faith was to be the end of science and the salvation of the world. Although Miko Mende and other scientists publicly renounced their further involvement in science for fear of being hanged, he strongly believed that science was the only solution to the problems that were there. It was only through science that the Neo-humans could be defeated. It was science that could provide a cure for the new virus that he suspected was invented in a laboratory by the Neo-humans. And above all, Miko wanted to find a lasting solution to the global warming and the impending submergence of the Earth by water. His solution was to find a way of making the sun set for a thousand years so that the water freezes. He was to use science to find a way of making the Earth stop rotating on its axis or to move the planet from the solar system to an alternative source of energy in order to save humanity. And with science, he had a strong belief that all this was possible but the only obstacle was this new faith and this new man they called The Pastor. To make things worse, the pastor had married his only daughter and he had brainwashed her. Miko and two of his friends connived to build an underground laboratory where they could work on their plans undetected. By the year 2716, they had built

a facility that used and reproduced nuclear energy without anyone knowing about it. The laboratory held nuclear capacity that could blast the Earth within seconds. The power in that lab could lift the earth off its axis in a blink of an eye. The three men felt that they were closer to their dream than ever and they spent sleepless nights working on their project. This was why Miko often disappeared from his house for weeks with no trace or suggestions of his whereabouts. Despite that his twin brother was the closest person to him, Miko only visited him twice in the four months he suffered in the hospital. This somehow made The Pastor suspicious and he was determined to find out what Miko was up to by mostly manipulating his daughter. This is why it rained tension on the day of his brother’s burial. All along, Miko had suspected that The Pastor was a Neo-human in hiding. He remembered the metallic gleam of his eyes when he first met him. His daughter had brought him into his house and introduced him as a friend. This was a few weeks after rumours were heard that there was an underground movement geared towards killing science. Miko could not help but notice some strange features and mannerisms in the man who had befriended his daughter. He spoke too clearly and with a vehemence that surpassed human confidence. He was too quick to respond to puzzles that Miko quizzed deliberately. He could dart his eyes from wall to wall as if he wanted to swallow in everything. In short, he looked like a man with a plan and menace was imprinted on his forehead. “And how did you know that man again?” Miko had asked his daughter after the visitor left. “Well, I met him at school before the war began.” “What was he studying?” “He was doing genetic engineering, but he dropped out before the war.” “Oh! Any reason for that?” “He said he already knew most of what we learnt and that the world did not need people sitting in classrooms and discussing theories and what others had done before. He said the world needed people who would go out on their own and think of how to change the world by finding out what to change in order to change.” “And what did he say needed to change?” “Dad, why are you asking so many questions?” His daughter was visibly tired and annoyed and Miko had to find a way of making her comfortable if he was to know more about the young man who had just left. “But darling, I’m a man of science and you know that inquiry is my life,” he forced a smile. “But come on, Dad. Or maybe you just don’t like him?” “No darling… of course, I do. He is an intelligent young man… don’t you think?” “Well, I don’t know,” she was now blushing, “but to answer your earlier question, he said humanity must go back to the basics if we are to survive.” “Oh, I see. Basics in science or culture?”

“But Dad!” His daughter was obviously furious and he did not want to push her to the edge. But that was when his suspicion began. As such, he was not surprised when he later found out that the young man was the leader of the new faith and that his daughter had been completely brainwashed to believe the nonsense of going back to the basics and embracing the new religion. His daughter was caught between two opposing forces and two loves she could not reconcile. So, after the burial of Miko’s twin brother, The Pastor made his suspicions known. He told his wife that he believed her father was working against the progress of humanity. “If he is not working on some sinister plan, what can explain his strange behaviour lately?” That was his question and Miko’s daughter had no answer. She just promised her husband that she would make sure she found out what was disturbing her father and that she believed it was nothing sinister. Miko showed up three days after the funeral. He looked exhausted like he had not slept in days. His bottom eyelids were bulging; heavy with sleep. His clothes were as dirty as if he had just survived from a catacomb that had fallen in. His house was quiet as it had always been since he lost his wife a few years before. He knew that by then his brother had died and was long buried but he did not want to allow that sorrow distract his mind from the progress they were making in the lab. Sorrow had its place and time and there was no room for it at this moment. When he entered his bedroom, he noticed something unusual. The light was on but he clearly remembered switching off the lantern when he left the room a few days before. He was not the type to leave a lantern burning for days. He understood the value of energy and he conserved it jealously. He slowly stepped into the room and surveyed his surroundings cautiously as if he was treading into strange territory. Then he realised that the drawers on his dressing table were open despite the fact that he had locked them and carried the keys with him when he left. He rushed to the table, his heart thumping and sweat suddenly coming to his face. Somebody had tampered with his privacy. He found the drawers empty of all the papers he kept in them. They were not very dangerous papers of course – only sketches of the lab he and his friends had built in the mountain. He was sure the location of the lab was not written anywhere on the papers but still a piece of his secret was out and that was dangerous. All the sleep that had tormented him drained in the sweat and he stormed out of the room. He stepped out of the house trying as much as possible to be composed. He knew that whoever had broken into his bedroom must have been watching him – trying to find a fault in his actions. He ambled along the main street but his pace picked up with every new thought that came to his mind. Each new thought gave birth to paranoia which lit ominous fear in his heart. Without realising it, he was trotting to alert one of his friends, Wellington, with whom he was working in the laboratory. He understood that Wellington must have been too tired and sound asleep by then but this was an emergency and it could not wait. When he reached Wellington’s house, Miko just pushed in the door, and, to his surprise, it was unlatched. His heart beat faster and he run towards the bedroom, calling out, “Wellington! Wellington! Wellington!” Wellington’s bedroom was open and when he finally entered, Miko did not believe his eyes. His friend was tied to the bed and a cloth was stuffed into his mouth. He was mutilated on the cheeks

and there was blood on the bed and all over the floor. Miko jerked forward, making for the bed, but a familiar voice suddenly rang in his ears. “Stop! Don’t you make any move!” He turned around to find his daughter standing firm behind the bedroom door with a gun pointing straight to his face. He just gulped as if he was out of words and slowly raised his hands in disbelief. “Raise them up! High up!” She commanded, “Now move slowly and join your friend over there!” This was the first time a nightmare had come alive in Miko’s life. He saw his daughter with new eyes. It suddenly occurred to him that his daughter had changed over the years and that he did not even pay enough attention to notice these changes. His daughter had become a stranger and that stranger was about to shoot him dead in his friend’s bedroom. His adrenaline rose and he had to think like a cornered tiger. “You two old men have things to explain and you better do that quickly or I will kill you! What have you been up to?” she commanded. Miko did not have time to look at his friend who was grumbling on the bed; the gun was pointing to his face. His daughter was taking calculated steps towards him and she looked fiercer with every forward step she took. Tears were slowly forming in Miko’s eyes. They were tears of sorrow, disbelief, regrets he could not explain, and mostly, tears of love. Here was the only person he loved the most in the world threatening to kill him for attempting to save the world. For the first time in his life Miko felt what he thought Jesus had felt on that cross. He wondered what was more important between affection and life itself. Should the love for life force us to kill? Isn’t that an oxymoron? A new determination raved through his veins and he knew that he had to act. He had to stop his daughter or the Earth would be annihilated.

V I R T UA L S N A P S H O T S Tlotlo Tsamaase (Botswana)

Thirteen years ago, when I was three years old, the sky used to be a clean blue, curving outward to meet the horizon. The sun was a bright burning spot and the stars candles in the night. Men’s hearts weren’t oiled in evil. The shift from day to darkness was seamless, dividing activities. It hadn’t rained for so long, that all the water stored for the Harvest as the time was called, was insufficient. Our villages survived on an Aquaculture system, tending to the water-creatures to cultivate the food we needed. The dome had been created to protect us from the destructive environment we had orchestrated. It was a righting time. The day it rained, we were shaken. The sound of a bomb exploded above us. First, we thought the sun was dying, sending flames to torch our world. But the dome had shattered. Instead of shards of glass, soft drops of water soaked the cracked earth and moistened our bare feet. We screamed, “Pula! Pula!” The children ran into the heavy drizzle, mouths open to the sky. I remember that first taste of rain: exotic, addictive. Dangerous. We didn’t know what we were drinking then. We were delighted: old women ululated whilst sweeping the ground with Setswana brooms. The paranoid ones got their metal bathtubs out to collect this last hope of survival. It was the transformation from the old world to DigiWorld.

I Now: It has been seven hundred and thirty days since I left the house. Two years. Well, physically. Our joints are painful due to immobility. No praying in the mosque, legs dusted by a beg for God. A god composed of zeros and ones, face etched in lines of lightening, the moon his nose, an impression of cloud in sky. Our physical selves are latched to glass pistons by way of plastic tubes feeding medicine into our narrow veins. Machines beep our lives across limbs of time. We sleep in dark home-cells, little bulbs lighting our prison, and sweep through the door in our avatar versions. These are things we are told to remain in safety’s skin. Abide the laws. If you wake, do not detach yourself. If you pain, do not bend to relief. If you itch, do not scratch. In us, our souls are halos, waning, flickering—the light gone. I can’t remember the last time my skin was brown. Outside DigiWorld, it is expensive to maintain our health, which is why when we partially disconnect we must pay fees to keep us breathing. But, today I must leave. A message had slipped into my visual settings:

Older sister: Hela wena! Mama is unwell. Get here now. Outside DigiWorld, you know she ain’t connected. Me: The minute I step out of this door, I will need funds to sustain me in the environment outside of my house. Older sister: Chill, sisi wame, we will compensate you for your travels and your life. You are still family, mos. Pfft. Family, se voet! They kicked me out and never kept in touch. I’ve been living in a servants’ quarter for years. If I hide behind these walls, I won’t see the thing they talk about: Mama’s pregnancy. It could be her death. I will regret my life if I don’t see her. II I have a few financial units that will last me on my journey. I push open the door. Stars fall in streams of light, soft as rain. Slate blue eyes mock the beauty of the sky. Botswana. I don’t want to denote it the common cliché term ‘hot and arid’ because I hate to be another stereotype of limited description. It’s landlocked. It’s suffocated. It’s variety. It reminds me of the ocean, not in the literal sense, nor rather the freedom eloquence, but like the ocean it has borderlines you can’t see. We understand technology. We sit at computers and understand what we type. Our cars are not donkey carts. Our houses have corners, and we don’t have lions or animals of the wild parading the city centre, but some men are more beast than human. The rank is a chortling beast, fattening out into the city. A vendor scrambles to me, holding rotten goods to my face. “You want, sisi?” A rumbling, croaking noise alarms the state constituents to a wake. Sun alarm. The sun creaks. Creaking, creaking, creaking—machinery screws, pipes twist, grinded by laborious mine-worker hands. Sunrise, sunsets beg to be heard. Why were my sunlight rations depleted? Hadn’t I been in line yesterday to escape the rise in sunlight prices, effective today? I’m close to my mother’s residence, a place of warmth. A place I was thrown out from because I had reached the age of independency—because I was not from her womb. I had to fend for myself, a pariah unfit for their royal homestead. III My mother is an anomaly in this society. She’s one of those rare women who hold babies in their bodies instead of storing the to-be-born children in the Born Structure that sits in the centre of the city, its apex a dagger to sky. The Born Structure processes who’ll be born and who’ll die. It’s how I was born, shaped by glass and steel. Unlike others, the lucky ones, I’ve never felt Mama’s heartbeat close to my face. My sister swore to me that Mama’s current baby will last in the womb forever. “Sisi, I swear—nxu s’tru—that baby is not coming out,” she’d said a few months ago, in her oft-confident tone. 66

I’d grazed passed her, muttering, “Mxm, liar.” “Come on, you’re only jealous that you didn’t get the chance to bloma in Mama’s womb,” she’d said. “You know I’m right, just admit it.” So, I’d kicked her in the shin and ran. She’d pointed a finger like she was bewitching me: “Jealous one,” she’d swore. That was the last time I saw her. Mama has been pregnant for a year this time. Water is her church. Baptismal if you think about it—crawling back to God. I enter our horseshoe shaped settlement, bypassing the compounds into our own made of concrete and sweat and technology no one knows. “Dumelang!” the family members shout in greeting. I used to think that before I was born, Mama and Papa probably spat fire on my skin and rubbed warm-beige of fine sandy-desert soil to give it colour, and in particular hand gestures added dung-shit—for I’m not pure—to drive away malevolent spirits, insect-demons. But, I am not born. I am a manufacture of the Born Structure. “Jealous one,” Sisi greets me, guarding the doorway. “Howzit?” “S’cool,” I whisper. “Where’s Mama?” “Hae, she can’t see you now. Just put your gifts by the fire.” I don’t move. “Ao, problem?” she asks. “Yazi, it took me my last units—the last money I have to get here, and you won’t let me see her,” I say through gritted teeth. “Haebo! It’s not my fault you’re some broke-ass—” I pull at my earlobes to tune her out. This means I am not allowed to stay the night here. My presence will jinx Mama’s condition. “Can you at least loan me some cash?” I ask. “I don’t have enough to sustain me when I get home. Leaving home and disconnecting activated my spending. You know, there is no deactivation.” Her smile tells me it was the plan all along. “Then, you’ll be prepared for death. Your reputation dilutes our family name’s power. You understand why you must leave.” I don’t understand how a sister I grew up playing games with hates me that much. I don’t know when she disowned me—when she stopped thinking of me as a sibling to look up to. Is it just because I’m not her biological sister? That I’m a bastard shame in the family. “Leave as in…forever?” I can’t run to anywhere. I don’t know how.

IV When I leave, Mama is still too unwell to see anyone besides my older sister, the gifted one who lived in her womb for nine months. Mxm. So, Sisi stands by the door, waving, with a huge grin plastered to her face. “Hamba, jealous one.” The moonlight bleaches the village into a shockingly ghostly white. Air eases out from my lungs. My oxygen levels are slowly depleting. My sky is dead, but the blue ceiling is a magnet. Our thoughts, words and feelings evaporate from our minds like torn birds pulled by that magnetic force, and they light up the sky. Our stars are composed of ourselves. Maybe, tonight when Mama looks at the night sky, she’ll see me watching her. On the way home I pass through a nearby village. In one house with the green corrugated roof, three women sit in the sitting room, their soles bruised with black marks. “Heh Mma-Sekai,” shouts one. “I tell you, a child born with one leg that’s similar to the father’s and the other leg that’s similar to another man’s won’t walk. S’tru.” True. The woman crosses her fingers, a sign to God. “Sethunya’s child hasn’t walked for years. I’m not surprised. Woman sleeps around. You don’t believe? These things happen, sisi.” “Ah, don’t say.” One claps her manicured hands. “Surely, they can download software to update the child’s biological software,” the other says. Twins—one an albino with pinkish-copper brown hair—and one pulls a younger girl from the sitting room onto the stoep. “Hae! If I see you jumping the fence again, you will know me!” shouts their mother as their shoulders shrink. She gapes when she notices me. I am the child with legs from different men. I raise the middle finger. When will everyone stop gossiping about my family? So, we aren’t rich enough to buy all these gadgets to change our body size, our ethnicity, our hair—but we’re poor enough to know true happiness is not bought. We’re also poor enough to throw out one of our children because she wasn’t born naturally. We’re poor to not even care about that child, about the years that crawled into her sad heart because her father was an illicit man. “Shem, and she’s still so young,” one woman whispers. “Kodwa, would it make it right if I was old to take in this crap?” I want to ask, but I keep walking with my head folded into my chest. The sky tenses, pisses, a hiss of warm. Air humid-empty. My lips press tight to my wrist to check the moisture. My water levels are too low. Low tear supply. There’re only a few hours before the sun temporarily dies. Before I die too. V When I get home, the skin needs a scrub. But I let my scents accumulate so I

won’t forget the skin I wear. So, I remember the mother who used to cradle me and sing lullabies. I will miss her. Just when the sunlight begins to turn gold, the rain obscures the night-sky eyes into an eerie greyness. When my grandmother was still alive, I used to ask her, “Nkuku, does the sky hurt and bleed like humans?” She looked up from her knitted blanket. Wrinkles laced the contours of her face like rippled water. “The sky is the predator. All animals are humans but some humans are inanimate,” she said. She was the only one in our family who loved me. VI I wake to noise blaring in my mind. How many megabytes of memory space will be depleted just to contact those bloody, poor-serviced customer lines? Very well, psychomail it is: #file report 22 Thought number #53897 Subject complaint: Skin malfunction; does not detect sun. Pre-requisite water levels contained in lungs reaching 53%. Sent! Please hold for the next available customer advisor. All networks are busy. In case of emergency, please hold onto the nearest human for self-powering, explaining clearly your predicament to avoid violence and he/she shall be compensated within 7 days. Solar Power Corporations appreciates your patience. Goodbye. A second is not long enough to send a message to Mama, to tell her, despite what’s happened, I still love them all—my family. That is the only regret I have: no one to say ‘I love you’ to. No one to breathe my soul into. I cling to desperation halfway out the door as if a miracle will split the skies and save me. My neighbour half-waves from her stoep until she realises what’s happening. Her tear is the last grace I feel.

It is too late to remain alive. In three seconds I am dead.

FA M I LY M E E T I N G Mazie Nwonwu (Nigeria)

4: 35 pm, June 1, 2089, Abuja, Capital city of the Union of West African States “And that was how I discovered I have a fifteen-year-old son,” I said, forcing my eyes to rest on the ‘M’ shaped wrinkle line on the forehead of the grey moustached man reclining on the alligator skin chair opposite me. Uncle Elias, my father’s elder brother, was not known for his tranquillity, but even his booming voice that has been known to end all arguments, and ensure the imposition of his will, refused to break open the silence that followed my words. I don’t know what I had expected, but I knew I would have preferred if someone, anyone, had screamed disbelief, cussed, shouted, did anything but stare while the silence tried to suffocate me. I sensed disbelief. I waited. I had little choice. I shifted my bulk as unease reached down and unhooked my bowels. I cinched my buttocks. Brief relief came from the sense of tense air beating its hasty retreat. I drew my gaze away from my uncle’s forehead and mentally squared my shoulders as I began scanning the faces that housed the five pairs of eyes that stared at me with different levels of incredulity. They were familiar faces; some have hovered in front of my eyes from since I could tell right from left. They belonged to what Pelumi, my wife, called, with derision, “the extended family.” Uncle Jide, Pelumi’s mother’s younger brother, sat by the large sliding glass window that framed the coloured tile roofs of houses downhill from ours. The scowl on his face told of the storm that raged in his heart. To his left was his oyibo wife Lydia, who, to tell the truth, was the most culturally attuned person in the room. World renowned scholar of pre-colonial West African ethnicities, Lydia came to Nigeria 30 years before to study the marriage cultures of southern Nigerian ethnicities and had fallen in love with pepper soup and—the family gossip insists— the gasp inspiring girth of Uncle Jide’s third leg. Lydia’s eyes, when they left her husband’s face to hold my eyes, showed the sympathy she had earlier expressed as I ushered her into the house “Sorry you are going through this mess, James. Be sure to tell me what I can do to help. Inugo?” Sitting opposite me, near the dining area, were my elder sister Nneka and Uncle Elias. Uncle Elias flew in from Alaska for the meeting. My sister refused to meet my eye. I no longer tried to catch hers. Leaving her to her born again indignations was a cultivated habit. I was surprised she came for the meeting at all. The day before, her alincom had informed me that it would no longer transfer calls from me. I had chuckled at the dramatic tone of the electronic voice. You do love me sweet sister, if not, you would just ignore my calls or bar me, instead of going through the trouble of instructing your alincom to give me a message.

My uncle was smiling. His smile was not as broad as it was before I started my tale, but it was there, playing around his lips. I returned his smile and was rewarded with surreptitious thumbs up. I understood the man. Father had died without seeing a grandchild, so the fact of a grandchild existing before his brother died counted as something for Uncle Elias to be happy about. Two out of five, I thought as I threw my eyes towards the other person in the room. Pelumi was seated, away from everyone else, at the other end of the room. The drawn curtains behind her and the shawl she had thrown over her head hoodlike ensured much of her face was hidden in shadow. She had hung her head at an odd angle for a long time and had me wondering if she was not in pain. My eyes were drawn to her fingers. Restless as always, they were drumming a soundless but steady rhythm on the recycled plastic chair’s arm. A crouching lioness was the sense the image conveyed to me. Pelumi had not spoken to me since I returned home from Mars two days ago, but I had learned to place hope on the fact that she was yet to ask me to leave the house or allow the kitchen robots do my cooking. “Eh…James, I don’t get what you are saying,” Uncle Elias said, his gentle voice cleaving apart the silence. As I turned my eyeballs towards him, I thought I heard a collective sigh of relief. Uncle Jide rolled his big eyes and cut in before I could respond to Uncle Elias, his chubby index finger stabbing the air, “You mean to say you did not know of this boy? You no know when you gi’im mama belle too?” he sounded like he would not believe me even if I answered in the affirmative. “No sir…I mean yes sir. I did not know about the boy until two months ago. As for the mother, there was no way she would have gotten pregnant. There was no fear of that at all.” I said. “No way she’d get pregnant abi? But we have a fifteen-year-old boy that tells us there was a way.” My sister pointed out. Sarcasm becomes her, mother used to say. My uncle let out a loud guffaw and Lydia joined in. Even the stern Jide allowed a smile to touch his lips. Only my sister and Pelumi maintained their poise. I was too troubled to smile. Knowing Nneka, I was sure she never meant her remarks as a joke. “‘Technically, she is not a woman. I…” I began. “Technically, she could not get pregnant, but she did. Technically she is not a woman, but she was woman enough to get your dick raging and for you to stick it into her,” Pelumi said with some heat, cutting me off. “Uncle Jide, I am here out of respect for you and your wife. I don’t intend to sit here and endure James Maduka’s insults,” she added, moving to the edge of her seat. The shawl had ridden to the back of her head, giving me the first clear look of her face since we entered the sitting room. Shocked by how much pain was etched there, I again wondered if coming home was the best decision. Uncle Jide looked like he was getting ready to strangle somebody. He has three children, all boys, and had come to claim Pelumi as the daughter he didn’t have. It was he who had given her away during our wedding, and I recalled that he cried at

the reception. “I am sorry my dear, but we have to get to the root of this matter o. You know I would have taken you away from this house if not for Mazi Elias here, who apart from being an old friend is a complete gentleman. Something that can’t be said of some people that are supposed to share his blood,” Uncle Jide said. His eyes bore me no kindness. “Please calm down Pelumi,’ my uncle begged, ‘Eh…Chief Jide, there is nothing that can be done about that now. We are here to get to the bottom of this matter. Come, James, you can see what your actions have done to this woman, our wife. Jide, please calm our daughter; we’re here for solutions. That is why we left our businesses to be here. I believe the two children are willing to walk the path that does not lead to the cutthroat courts of Greater Abuja. Abi? Or is that not why we are here?” It was a rhetorical question, so no one answered. On my part I allowed a mental smile at being referred to as a child and the gibe about the courts of Greater Abuja. Uncle Elias had a ‘no love lost’ relationship with courts. It was at the Greater Abuja High Court that his third wife cleaned him out and forced him to cancel his muchcelebrated early retirement. He was married to wife number four now, with a wellreviewed prenuptial agreement sitting in a bank vault waiting for when she grew tired of him and his busy schedule. My uncle was a gentleman, but spent too much time chasing after money for his marriages to work as well as he wanted them to. My fingers itched with the need to take a bathroom break and to fall into the soft cushion of my chair, but fearing that any of that would spell disrespect, especially given the issue at hand. Steeling myself against the constant threat of a loose anal muscle I remained on the chair’s edge, with the upper half of my body slumped forward to show as much contrition as I could muster. “James, you have told us how you found out you have a fifteen-year-old son. You also insist that you have remained faithful to your wife. We all know that it is quite possible for a woman to conceive your child without you getting anywhere near her, especially you space people with all the samples they take from you and store away. But you also admit to sleeping with this woman, who you say is not a woman. Please make it clear, make us understand.” Uncle Elias said. I heard him, knew what was wanted, but didn’t know how to go about it. Where do I start my story? Beginnings for me tend to be too usual, too clichéd.

January 2072, Virgin Space Surfer, Mars Orbit I smiled, nervous, as she approached me, closing the space between with a sure-footed speed that surprised me, judging by how skinny her legs looked. She reached me and brushed her lips across mine as her arms, then legs, wrapped around me. I liked the feel of her lips on mine, like silk. I wanted to feel it again. I tried to ease her back, to bring her lips to bear, but she hugged me closer. I marvelled at the strength of her arms, at the tautness of the muscles I could feel beneath her skin. Finding I couldn’t do much else, I cupped her ample buttocks and carried her

to my bunk. She did something with her thigh as I bent over the bunk, still cradling her, and I felt myself sliding into silky warmth. Alarmed, I tried to pull back, but her legs were locked behind me. We crashed unto the bunk and the contractions within her drove me to frenzy. “You can be rough with me,” she whispered, biting my ears. Afterwards, as we lay in each other’s arm counting the stars we could see from the view port, she asked if I was of Fulani stock. “Yes,” I replied, wondering why it is important,” My mother is Fulani.” “They say Fulani men are endowed,” she said, not looking at me. ”They?” She waved a hand in the air. “Well, your penis is two sizes larger and three lengths longer than it was before I dropped my gown at your threshold. I can’t say it ranks among the largest I’ve seen. I would say it is average,” she said, with no hint of humour. “That’s a very mechanical thing to say, and ‘Threshold’? Who uses such words?” “Are you angry?” “No, just puzzled that you would be interested in my genealogy and the size of my dick,” “Well, we were made to please men. I was programmed to ask questions like these. Knowing will help me understand and serve you better.” 3: 40 pm, June 1, 2089, Abuja “I don’t know what else to say, Uncle,” I said, as I tried to stem the flow of memories, wondering what else they wanted from me. “She is a humanoid android. One of three that were being tested as companions for deep space exploration teams…I think one of the three was male. I was drunk and someone dared me to be the first to break one. I can’t remember accepting that dare, but I recall my bunk door opening and the woman walking in. As I said before, I had had some wine, maybe more than usual…we were about to go down to Mars…there was a party. I remember she asked very curious questions. I still don’t know how she conceived Sam and how the regulators allowed her to keep him, but she is his mother, or plays that part.” The silence that followed was heavier than before. I wondered, not for the first time, the sense in returning to Earth and calling this family meeting. Apart from her tirade after my initial explanation, Pelumi was yet to say anything else and with that upward tilt of her jaw, a sign of her stubborn determination, I doubted she would before the meeting ended. It was my sister that broke the silence this time. “Adultery is a sin, so is beastiality, but I think it is a greater sin to lie with an

inanimate object. The bible said in…” “Please save us the sermon, Nneka,’ Lydia cut in, exasperated, “I am sure we don’t want to hear all about hellfire and the damnation that awaits your brother. In my view, James committed just about the same crime I do anytime I thumb my vibrator on or when Pelumi climbs into that Crazy Horse I saw in her bedroom. The woman is a machine, and I don’t consider sex with a machine cheating. If we all agree that James had sex with a machine, we can agree that the boy that resulted from that union can be viewed the same way we view children resulting from surrogacy, no?” A very strong defence of my position from Aunty Lydia, I thought. It was very similar from the one I had made to Pelumi via an alincom message that was still unread. I sensed the two men in the room nodding, but my eyes were on Pelumi. She was staring at me with cold eyes. I understood her; she was very traditional. I remember how much talking it took to get her to use the Crazy Horse I bought for her. She had insisted that sex with the machine was akin to betrayal. Even when she agreed to ride, she had made me change the attached dildo to a simple pipe thing that lacked the contours of the human penis. I wondered if she still rode it. Lydia was still talking, and I tuned out my reflections to listen to her. “Pelumi, you know your ancestors had very evolved views about parentage—a child is his father’s the Yoruba say. I know the Igbo had a more complex view: they see the child born outside wedlock as belonging to the mother, in which case James would have no claim to Sam, except the mother’s family gives him leave to have him. With this situation, who is the woman’s family: the government or the person that built her? Also, there is that tricky situation surrounding how the android conceived. I say we step down from our moral horses and see things the way they are,” Lydia concluded with a note that dared anyone to contradict her view. “You don’t understand,” Pelumi said; her voice low. “Excuse me, what did you say,” Lydia asked, perhaps not expecting the retort— from Nneka, yes, but not from Pelumi. “I said, you don’t understand. None of you do. It is not about the sex, or the betrayal. Maybe a bit, but you don’t know how he made me wait. I couldn’t have the baby I’ve always wanted because he said he wanted to be there to watch the child grow up. I am still waiting, but he already has a son that is almost as old as we’ve been married…tell me how to begin forgiving that?” I could hear the whirl of a mechanical saw. The garden robot must be trimming the hedges. Usually you can’t hear that sound from here, but the silence in the room was such that every little noise seemed amplified. Silent, I watched Pelumi grip the arms of her chair and push back. No one moved to stop her as she left the room. I heard the silence expand and felt the tension churning in my guts. Leaning back into the chair, I let the gas escape with very little restraint. The heat and silent whoosh were a relief.

WO M E N A R E F R O M V E N U S Tiseke Chilima (Malawi)

GENESIS GENETICS: Malawi Headquarters Service to women only That signpost… it gave me the hovers. That’s what my mother called it when I hovered, unable to take the final step over the precipice and into my decision. I had it bad; my feathers were quivering something awful. It was a horrible childhood habit but even mother wouldn’t flash her perpetual look of disapproval right now, especially considering the magnitude of the decision I had to make. My indecisiveness was justified for once. The DNA-shaped building rose tall, proud and daunting into the gold-strewn sky. Women of all shapes, colours and styles flowed in and out of the brushed metal doors as fluidly as water. I was so busy gawking at the astronomical difference between the women shuffling in and those waltzing out that it took me a moment to realise that I’d been spotted. I almost thought I’d imagined it but then I saw it again. The four doorwomen greeted everyone that walked through the Genesis Building doors. As soon as she had a free moment, the one closest to me zeroed her almost black eyes in on me. Mxii. She wasn’t meant to notice me from here. I didn’t know Genesis had increased their Potential Customer Detection Radius. The doorwoman beckoned me over with one gloved hand, full lips curved into a frighteningly realistic smile. Some people might be fooled into thinking she was organic, or even demiorganic, but I knew better. The smile of an android, even one as detailed as her, couldn’t fool me. I had to admit though that she was impressive for an android produced by men– almost as good as Venusian work. I’m sure thousands- maybe even millions- of women had been coaxed into the building by that charming demeanor. But not me. My feet wouldn’t budge. Still, I couldn’t help but wonder if I would come out as perfect as her if I went in there. I averted my eyes. What was I doing? What was I thinking? “Um…Maybe some other day.” I walked away. I made my way to the heart of the city, pondering how Martians had improved their androids so soon after their last disastrous update. The dusk traffic flowed seamlessly around me. No one paid me any attention- exactly how I liked it. Usually, when I am in this part of town, I spend time marveling at the sheer beauty of Tilapia Harbour. Designed and built by some of the best architects in the world – a good number of whom were native Malawians – many would agree that the only thing that outdid Tilapia Harbor during the day was Tilapia Harbour at

night. The open-chambo-shaped city built on the second-largest fresh water body in the United Countries of Africa (UCA) started to come alive in a whole different sense when the sun began its glorious descent towards the horizon. As God’s artwork faded with a final burst of colour and light, dusk ended and the city picked up where He left off. As night time fell, the walkways lit up, revealing exotic fish living their days peacefully beneath the glass roads. A collage of scents from the stalls lining the pier carried on the breeze, dancing together in a medley of spices, meats, fish and fruits. But even the aroma of flame-grilled chambo couldn’t tempt me away from my thoughts. A woman selling colourful wax zitenje from Tanzania State and an android child waving a holo-newspaper depicting increased female trafficking cases in the UCA both tried and failed. Something caught my eye and I looked over my shoulder again. I couldn’t ignore it anymore; the feeling that someone was following me. I was probably being paranoid but I sped up anyway. I was so focused on my routine evasive manoeuvres that I walked right into him. How he regained his balance- and mine- is beyond me. I expected a Terran to be weaker. “I’m so sorry,” I said quickly, my palms up in surrender, demonstrating that I didn’t want any trouble. He began to respond but his partner cut him off. “You should watch where you’re going!” the woman snapped. I hated her voice. Whoever had given it to her had done an amazing job but Venusians aren’t easily fooled. My perfectly tuned ears picked up a faint graininess, the inevitable result of voice generation bio-software-unnoticeable by dull Terran ears. Her perfectly shaped eyebrows were drawn together over eyes so huge and blue that the contrast with her onyx skin and platinum blonde 20th century haircut almost made me reel back in surprise. There wasn’t a blemish in sight on her person. I couldn’t help but hate her perfect little tummy, her perfect hips and bust, and her perfectly fake reaction. One of those supermodel types. Her husband must be quite shallow. “I said I was sorry,” I retorted, my wings twitching. “Besides, if you hadn’t stopped so suddenly, this wouldn’t have happened.” The woman kissed her teeth. “You Venusians are all alike. All you care about is yourselves.” “You Venusians? My, aren’t you loyal to your species. You traitorous dolls are alike, too – about as natural as breast implants and as friendly as pit vipers.” Angered, the biologically-enhanced woman stepped forward, hand lifted high in preparation to slap me. Suddenly, a police officer appeared. And, just my luck, the officer was Terran; an organic human man. “Is something the matter here?” he asked, looking from her to me.

He lingered on me, eyes narrowed in brazen suspicion. “She walked into my husband,” the woman said, pointing at me and scrunching up her nose. “She’s probably broken his rib or something. Venusians are such brutes; they don’t know their own strength- or the meaning of decency for that matter.” Bite me, you racist cow! “I see,” said the officer, completely ignoring her blatant racism. He reached for the slab of black glass strapped to his belt, right next to an electromagnetic stun gun. For a split second, I think he truly considered taking it out. The officer started tapping away details. Then he asked the man if he was hurt in any way. The victim looked me over, probably deciding how he wanted to twist the officer’s ear and make things even worse for me. To my surprise, he smiled and said he was perfectly fine. Liar. Why was he defending me? Martians, the men who settled on Mars, weren’t very fond of Venusians, women Venus settlers. We had, at most, a seething tolerance for each other. Most preferred the bioengineered women. The only way they took up an imperfect Venusian was if she had those imperfections genetically scrubbed out of her. Most of them, like Terrans, wished all-natural, temperamental Venusians like me would scrub up or perish. So what screw was loose in this one? “Miss, you should apologise to this man and his wife,” the officer said, pulling the emergency brakes on my train of thought. “You’re joking me, right? I did. Besides, she’s being a racist tart. She should apologise to me.” “You seem quite irritable, Miss.” I snapped my mouth shut. Whoops. The officer narrowed his eyes further. “Sorry, but I am obligated by law to ask you.” He paused to wet his lips, his hand slowly reaching for the handle of his weapon. “Have you taken your calming pill today, Miss?” I tensed. “Yes, Officer.” “…I’ll be double-checking that in the system. What’s your name and how old are you?” “My name’s Hope Livuza and I’m old enough to make sure I regularly take those foul pills you force on my kind.” “Please just cooperate, Miss. How old are you?” “Old enough.”

“Miss, you’re only making things harder for yourself. Show me some ID. If you fail to do so, I am within my full rights as an officer of the Malawi State Police Force to restrain you by any means necessary.” He squeezed the handle of his gun for emphasis. With a groan of ill-concealed annoyance, I pressed my palm against the tablet he held out. This is harassment. A neon light illuminated the handheld, followed by a tinny female voice. The tablet was definitely Martian-made. That’s the police for you; even toddlers have better gear than they do. “NAME: DR. HOPE LIVUZA. AGE: CLASSIFIED.” The officer looked at me with a semi-exasperated look. The voice continued. “INTER-PLANETARY CITIZENSHIP: FIRST GENERATION TERRA-VENUSIAN. INTRA-PLANETARY CITIZENSHIP: MALAWIAN. OCCUPATION: INTERSTELLAR MECHANIC. CRIMINAL RECORD: …CLEAN.” “Well, that’s a surprise,” said the bio-woman, arms folded across her inflatable chest. “Calm down,” said her husband, placing his left hand on the small of her back. His wedding ring made contact with the small metallic plate fused to her skin. The woman jerked, as if touched by an electric shock, and then melted into the crook of his arm. She almost seemed pleasant when she shut up and smiled like a good little biologically-engineered trophy wife. “Very well, Dr. Livuza,” the officer continued, butchering the pronunciation. “Don’t call me that.” “Have you undergone any sort of genetic surgery in the past?” he continued as if I hadn’t interrupted. “No.” Then I added, since he was going to ask anyway, “I follow my prescription strictly. This sassy disposition is just my natural state.” “I see.” He didn’t seem convinced but I don’t think he cared. If this issue got any bigger, he was going to have to file a report. Nothing irked the law enforcement more than doing Venusian paperwork. Designed to make Martians’ lives miserable, they said. Ugh, men! Everything’s always about them… not to say they were incorrect. Mr. Tall, Dark and Mostly Silent chose that moment to jump to my rescue. “Officer, this issue seems resolved to me. I’m fine and she already apologised. Now, if you’ll excuse us, my wife and I have a dinner reservation.” The pair walked away down the pier. If he were Martian, I would understand why he covered for me but a Terran defending a Venusian? That was unheard of. Once upon a time, we had gone to war with them about gender injustices and taken all their women away from the planet to force them to change the living conditions of female population. Generations later, Martian, Venusian and Terran 80

alike lived on between each other’s planets but still hadn’t forgiven each other. Well, that didn’t matter now. “See, Officer? It sorted itself out and I have a squeaky clean record. Now can I go? I have to catch an aeroshuttle back to Blantyre in a few hours…” “Look… you’ve already acquired dual-citizenship. If you’re tired of taking your prescription, just fill the necessary paperwork and get scrubbed. Don’t get yourself killed.” Was that a hint of concern? Nah. Two Terran men being kind was two too many for any Venusian’s lifetime. “Don’t patronise me. You wouldn’t have treated me like that if I were a Martian, would you-?” “Hope?” I turned around ve-ry slow-ly. Sean stood a few stalls away, one tattooed arm laden with compressed shopping bags. He cocked one eyebrow, and looked back and forth between the two of us. “Uh, hey…Babes,” I mumbled. He scowled. I was in big trouble. After a brief cheerful conversation with the officer, Sean grabbed my arm and half led, half dragged me home. The feeling that I was being followed came home with us but I didn’t dare mention it. “Sean, how long are you going to keep this up?” When he’s in stereotype mode, Sean can keep a full-blown sulk on for weeks. Right now we were on hour two and I was already going mad with the suffocating silence. Why couldn’t he be more like us super-repressed Venusians when he was mad? Emotional constipation wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. “Sean, seriously?” He continued to ignore me, instead on fitting our belongings into travel-size compression bags. Every few seconds he looked out the window, stared, then went on. He was stressing me out so much that my feathers were starting to fall out. There was only so much coaxing I could do before I reached my limit. Hello, Limit, my name is Hope. I flopped onto the bed, switched on the motel holo-vision and ignored him right back. It didn’t take him more than five minutes to burst. How ironic that he can’t handle the taste of his own medicine. “You almost got arrested!” he barked at me, smashing his fist against the coffee table.

A spider web of cracks fanned out across the surface, each line converging underneath his fist. “You know what happens to Venusians that get convicted on Terra,” he growled. “Malawi may be one of the safest places in the UCA for you guys but the prison system is just as harsh. Are you crazy? Do you want to die?” “No.” “It was a rhetorical question!” I take it back. I liked it better when he was brooding. “And you still didn’t go to Genesis? Hope, we talked about this-” “-No, you talked, I listened. Hardly the same thing.” “Are you seriously getting technical with me right now? I dare you to say something like that again.” Just like that, he’d switched from his mild, mellow Martian father to his wild, pig-headed Venusian mother. I didn’t challenge him. Challenging an irate Venusian- even a half Venusian- is asking for trouble. Sean closed his eyes and took a deep breath, kneading the space between his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. “Hope, we’re engaged. I know we haven’t known each other for very long but I do care about you.” Liar. “It’s our culture and neither of us really had a say but I think we can agree that we’re not that bad a match. All I asked was for you to get scrubbed.” “You say that like it’s simple.” “Isn’t it? You do it all the time. You went to the salon just the other day to get your hair altered. Come on, even Venusian hair doesn’t change colour on its own,” he said, gently tugging at a lock of my hair. It coiled back into place, a snake ready to strike. “I don’t see what the big deal is. You’re just doing it to the rest of your body this time. How hard can that possibly be? Life will be much easier for you this way. I’m only insisting because I’m trying to protect you,” he said, cupping my cheek in his hand. And there it was – that foolishly misplaced Martian heroism that gets on my last nerve. I smacked his hand away. “I’m from Venus, I literally don’t need your protection; you’re not nearly strong enough,” I hissed. “Is genetic rectification easy to you? You’re only asking me to change my very genetic identity for you, to give up the ability to go home for you. But I guess it’s no big deal because I’m a woman and have easily manipulated DNA.” “That’s not what I-”

“Yes, it is. Hurray for us; we learnt to alter our DNA just to survive on our manless planet. Great for you that you had the resources to build technology that does everything for you. Did you even do any research on scrubbing? God knows you Martians are so lazy, you probably had your AI assistants gather the information for you.” It was his turn to be offended. “I did it myself.” “Oh? Then did you know that once Venusian DNA is altered, it can never be changed back?” Sean recoiled as if he’d been slapped in the face. I smirked. “I thought so. Being Venusian is not easy. We’re born with the correct genetic code, theoretically, but only experience determines whether we live or die on that godawful planet. Some survive – barely. Most die. Our genetic sequence is tricky and can’t be copied, unlike Martian DNA. Everyone’s who’s tried to readapt died.” I sighed and lowered my voice. “Look, I didn’t want to marry you either. Giving up being Venusian means being a second-class citizen for the rest of my life, just like the women of the 21st century. I intended to run away.” “Then why didn’t you?” Sean asked, his voice small and riddled with bitterness. “Because I thought I could convince you to let me stay Venusian. I like the genetic identity I was born with. I want to be able to go back to my planet. I love Malawi but I love Venus, too; perpetual storms and near unlivable conditions and all. I thought I could make you understand.” I lifted my head, looking him square in the eye. “Clearly, I was wrong.” He didn’t answer for the longest time. Eventually, he came and sat next to me. He touched my hair, my cheek then my shoulder. “I understand,” he said. “Thanks for making this easier on me.” He injected something into my neck that first burned hot then freezing cold. I pushed him back, flinging him clear across the room. The impact broke a leg and his arm twisted into an odd angle but both limbs healed instantly. I rolled off the bed and onto the floor. Venusians and freezing cold simply don’t mix. Any colder and I’d die. I wrapped my wings around my body in an attempt to keep me warm but it was no use. My feathers were too light. Malawi didn’t get this cold so my wings weren’t adapted to this temperature. “What…?” I clutched at my chest. “What…did you…do…?” “Just calm down, Babes,” he said. “You’re just going to take a little nap. My associates will take good care of you.” The door to our motel room swung open and three Martians in dark outfits strolled in. One handed Sean an electronic cheque. Sean whistled appreciatively. “As always, it’s a pleasure doing business with you, gentlemen. You’re worth a

lot of zeroes, Babes. I could even buy a bio-woman of my own. I’ll make sure to tell your parents the sad news about your accident and organise a beautiful funeral for you. Where did you want to be buried again? Cape Maclear? Oh well, on to the next one.” One of the men put me inside the last empty compression bag. It stretched out to accommodate my size then began to shrink. I had the vague sense of being constricted. “You should’ve gotten scrubbed when he asked you nicely. Oh, and nice evasive manoeuvres, by the way. You almost gave me the slip several times back there,” he said, zipping the bag shut. I flitted in and out of consciousness. If anyone thought my kidnapper was suspicious, no one stopped him. Terrans respect Martians. Partly because they’re both male and do this weird male bonding thing, but mostly because Martians were responsible for the technology that brought female company back to Terra. Where would I end up? Venusians with African ancestry are exotic and rare. Most likely I’d probably be on the first subterranean-shuttle to the Eurasian Confederate and sold to the highest bidder. And here I thought I’d be safe in my home country. I was just about to shed my first tear when I was unceremoniously thrown out of my abyss. I landed on a hard surface with a thud. Before I could orient myself, my ankles and wrists were strapped down and my mouth bound. “Make it snappy. This is the last one to be shipped out then we’re closed for the season.” The voice sounded as far away as if he were at the end of a tunnel. I was wheeled to another room. I looked up at the nurse through the haze. “Let’s get you ready, shall we?” she said in a singsong voice. She swabbed my skin then injected something into my bloodstream. I assumed it was a serum flooded with Nano-robots that would alter by DNA on command. The surgeon in charge read out the specifications but I could barely hear over the pounding in my ears. I never should’ve come back to this cruel planet. “Alright. You might feel a slight sting-” “Freeze! You there! Step away from the Genetic Splicer!” Yelling, threats and gunshots erupted around me. A strong pair of arms lifted me upright. Someone supported my lolling head against his shoulder. Male… Terran…Familiar-looking… “Dr. Livuza, drink this. It’ll help.” “Please, don’t call me that,” I croaked. He lifted a bottle to my lips. I started to feel better instantly. I glanced up at my savior. “You…but weren’t you that…?” “We meet again. I’m with Special Enforcement, my name’s Darren Phinda. I

owe you an apology for using you as bait to capture Sean Jemusi and his associates. We’ve been after this Venusian Trafficking Cell for a long time.” “Wha-? Sean was-?” “But, you know, you owe me for bailing you out at Tilapia Harbour. How about we discuss it over dinner?” I’m a genius yet I didn’t see any of this coming.

WA K I N G U P I N K A M PA L A Wesley Macheso (South Africa)

The atmosphere in Kampala, the Silicon Valley of Africa, in the summer of 2515 was sticky. The sun hung bored above gathering clouds, emitting faint and malnourished rays that could not be felt even on the most sensitive of skins. Too much water lingered in the air, stagnant and deliberately refusing to make way for fresh air. The atmosphere was claustrophobic and the city itself smelled of wet wood. Everything about the city reflected my mind; highly sophisticated, conservative, tense, and above all, suffocating. I hurriedly made my way out of the streets and entered the MGMT building on the eastern end of Nakawa division. I pushed my wife’s wheelchair across the corridor and squeezed us into a waiting elevator. I commanded the machine to drop us on floor number 62 and waited. My wife was distant. Since we survived the fatal accident, her mind was suspended in a bottomless world of silence. In the early days after the accident, I tried to cheer her up with lifeless jokes that failed to ignite life in her brain that refused to live in the moment. I tried infusing life into her reluctant body by buying her the popular Salima Pizzas, but they went cold and developed mould before her blank eyes. I gave up my efforts after two weeks. I realised that I was not being kind to her – I was rather being cruel. The accident had altered both of us but I refused to acknowledge it. I told myself, “don’t dwell, life goes on”, but was life going on? Didn’t I feel like I was being constantly dragged down to the ground and choked to death? Then how much of that weight could a grieving mother bear? To begin with, she had been recently paralysed and lost a daughter. We moved out of the elevator on the sixty-second floor and I pushed the wheelchair down the dimly lit corridor. My wife was humming a distant tune and I was nodding my head to the beat, trying to keep alive. We halted at our destination and the words at the top of the door were supplemented with a blinking green arrow: KAMPALA GENETIC ENGINEERING CLINIC I ignored the weight of the sign and entered. Our daughter lay right in front of us in a huge jar you often find in museums, euthanised and preserved in some green solution. Reader, by the year 2495, the world had taken two opposite directions just like my marriage was threatening to do at the moment. As the United States of Africa was soaring to embrace the sky, Europe and America had taken a downward plunge. Africa was accelerating, each pull of her natural engines of advancement taking her further, higher, and wider; colonising Venus, Mercury, and Mars. Conquering China and the entire eastern region and providing the most essential solutions for the deadliest vicissitudes of the Post-Technocalypse. On the other hand, the West was in reverse gear. The Technocalypse had destroyed the West and the after effects were threatening to swallow the world. As one of the leading researchers in Biotechnology, I was at the centre of this battle for the survival of humanity. The world was caught on the confluence of multiple disasters. History books today tell us of the HIV/AIDS pandemic that tormented the world about 500 years ago, but believe me reader, this was nothing like it. The marriage of men and

machines gave birth to the Human Braino-deficiency Virus (HBV) whose solution literally lay in my hands. On the night that I lost my daughter, we were travelling to Kampala where I was to be honoured with the ‘Award of Excellence in Biotechnological Advancement’. I had recently discovered a vaccine that could reduce the multiplication of the Human Braino-deficiency Virus in the human body down to 300 cells per annum. We were coming from a situation where the HBV was reproducing at an average rate of 7000 cells per hour. With every exposure of the infected body to direct sunlight, the virus doubled its rate of reproduction such that by the time the pandemic was declared an acute emergency, half of the world’s human population had been wiped out. The hubloits, that had been the pride of earth a few years before, were now quarantined in heavily guarded concentration centres. Mankind, with its tendency of shunning responsibility and shifting blame, condemned the hubloits for allegedly destroying the world. You see, humanity had developed advanced techniques in science that saw the birth of the hubloits. These were brainchildren of robotics, biotechnology, chemical engineering, and nuclear energy. Mankind killed God and other supernatural beings and, in their place, came machines embedded with humanity. They were individuals with metallic skeletons and human flesh. They had beating hearts that did not pump human blood. They operated on radioactive nuclear energy. They were smarter and more efficient than the humans who created them. The hubloits could read your mind and recount your lifetime experiences within the first three minutes of meeting them. They became handy in interrogating suspects in courts of law. They were swift in providing solutions to seemingly fatal problems. They took over in science, medicine, sports, and entertainment. The hubloits were literally machines with human DNAs, products of the science of humachinisation – the most prestigious field of study in our time. But like all products of the human mind, the hubloits were fallible. When Eros, the most efficient hubloit on the nuclear plants of Detroit, malfunctioned in June of 2477, I wanted to fly to the top of the highest mountain and scream in the face of the whole world; “We told you so!” I was at the centre of what was later dubbed “The Laggards’ Conference”, where Africa agreed to ban hubloits. This was after a fatal train accident in South Africa that claimed lives of 447 school going children. The kids were on a site-seeing escapade aboard an automatic train. The robot driving the train accidentally lost control and drove the machine off-track, plunging and crumbling in the cliffs of Drakensberg Mountain, trapping the innocent lives in its wreck. The debris of that wreck still floats on the shores of my memory. Somehow, “the laggards” foresaw the imminent danger in machines and decided that we could do without them. The world mocked us. Cartoons were created in America, newspapers sold, and comedians made money. But we chose to stay conservative. Africa still preferred trees to the Automatic Oxygen Machines (AOMs) that had replaced them in America. We still tilled the ground and preferred organic foods when our friends in London were all for genetically modified foods. But just as we can’t hold back the sun from setting, there were other things we could not stop. When the virus attacked Eros’ operating system in Detroit, we watched the world going down in flames. Nobody can explain what exactly happened but Eros somehow lost it and unleashed nuclear reactors that were being held in the largest

plant on earth, burning half of America down to the ground. Within 30 minutes of Eros’ disease, the whole world was affected. This is what has been recorded in recent history books as the Technocalypse. Every hubloit that was linked to the central operating system in Detroit caught the virus in a flash and contributed to the destruction. Oil reserves burst, radioactive rays were released, computers crashed, and the world came to a standstill. And since man had decided to join humanity to machines, the computer virus adapted to the human DNA and attacked human beings, eating on our brains. Alarms were sounded, lives were lost, men hanged themselves, and civilisation travelled back in time. By December of the same year, the West was back to the 17th century. Reader, you may be wondering as to why and how Africa was spared from the catastrophe. The simple truth is that we were not spared. But the effects of the Technocalypse were not as grave up here, thanks to the “Laggards’ Conference”. I can testify that the Human Braino-deficiency Virus has tormented humanity more than any other pandemic on earth. I watched my brother die from the disease when he came back from Berlin last September. The monster dismantles the neurocognitive functions of the human body. The virus is a chameleon – it takes its time and meditatively kills you with ease. Like all victims of the virus, my brother became delusional. He confused my daughter for the ancient queen of England and bowed down every time he saw her. His altered perception took him out of this world and he started living in the books that he had read as a history professor. He lost his sleep because he could hear bombs going off in Benghazi. He always lamented the lot of the Chibok girls who were kidnapped in Nigeria and was always angry with the lack of urgency that characterised the African Union. All these things resided in books. This was part of ancient history that he taught at the university. I have heard that Africa was once a continent and not a single country. I have read of the wars and terrorist attacks, the hunger and the poverty, and the diseases that defined life in Africa. But who could believe that now? We are the centre of the world, the architects of civilisation. And how could this small land have been different countries? It beats me. From his delusions and altered perception, my brother started losing grip of his memory. He lived in history and that history was slipping his mind at an alarming rate. The virus hit the brightest nooks of his mind and he succumbed to intellectual disability. He failed to hold his sphincter muscles. It was no longer up to him to pass urine or not. He could not bring his lips together to close his mouth. Saliva dripped out of his mouth as the virus descended into his veins, knocking his joints and tanning his skin. My brother was darker than me but now he became black as tar. In a week he receded into a persistent vegetative state and then we lost him. That is how they all went – tortured to early graves like rabid dogs. The HBV was a threat to humanity and it demanded swift action. Africa took the leading role in dealing with the virus. America and Europe were incapacitated. Flights from the West to Africa were treated with caution. Passengers had to undergo rigorous medical examination before being allowed into our land. With our robust environment and rich natural resources, we spent sleepless nights devising natural remedies that could stop the radioactive virus. We discovered some saps from ageing natural trees that could effectively curb the effects of plutonium, the chemical element comprising the nucleus of the virus. We produced vaccines and capsules for export. There was a boom in the import and export sector of the economy and Africa made supernormal profits. The west 89

bought our vaccines in huge quantities and administered them to their dwindling population. As Africa made trillions of dollars, Europe went into recession. America called us “drug dealers” and Germany called us “soulless kaffirs”. The suffering lot called us saviours. When they could no longer afford to pay for the drugs, we gave them loans with tight strings attached. As the hard times rolled, we gave them grants with detailed proposed expenditure sheets. Reader, by the year 2500, the world was at our mercy. So, when I woke up on that sticky Kampala morning, I found myself at the crossroads of life. Instead of waking up to the most prestigious award in medicine and natural science, I woke up to life changing decisions that were to be made. To be honest, I rather woke up to indecision. The weight of my fear to make a decision coupled with the fear of not making a decision weighed heavily on my shoulders. Above all, I wanted to know what was in my wife’s quiet mind. I wanted to know the kind of emotions she was locking up in her heart. There was a lock to the door of her heart, bars to protect, chains and strings shutting it tight. Deep inside I knew she had made a decision. She was going ahead with the procedure. I was the one delaying life –keeping it stuck in nowhere. We sat down to face the doctor in front of us. I did not want to face the body of my only daughter suspended in the huge glass jar beside him. As such, I concentrated all my faculties on the pint-sized physician before us, unwillingly studying his curious features. He wore a coffee Jacket under his official white coat. The jacket looked dusty. His face was strained, probably from lack of sleep. He was bulging under his eyes and he looked like he could use a glass of water and a long morning nap. The doctor working on the body of our daughter was overworked – a typical Makerere nerd. He must have graduated first class from medical school. “As I said, you can have your daughter back,” he paused. There was a flash of light in my wife’s eyes. A shiver of life swept through her body and I could feel the power of the physician’s statement in the atmosphere. “Genetic engineering is all about direct manipulation of an organism’s genome using biotechnology,” he continued. I knew all that. But why did he make it sound so simple? And how did he do that? Why couldn’t he be meticulous? I hated him. “I hope we are together here…” we nodded. “We will conduct a procedure where we will try to create a new multi-cellular organism, genetically identical to your daughter,” he paused again and during that pause I swallowed a lump that burned down my throat like a sword of fire. “In essence, this is a form of asexual reproduction. What it means is… You will have your daughter back without going through the cumbersome natural process of reproduction.” He smiled as he passed on this piece of information. In the room, there were two excited faces; one was my wife’s the other the physician’s. One excited at the prospect of new hope, the other at the prospect of achievement. There was something in his voice that betrayed him. It reminded me of my father. His voice had a velvety texture that marinated into a husky chord, seductive at its height, robbing it of any trace of sincerity. He sounded like a man of many secrets and regrets – a self-made man driven by ambition. Where my wife saw a life saver, I saw a man deeply immersed in research and hungry for achievement. Where she saw detailed prescriptions and signatures on piles of informed consent papers, I saw journal articles and multiple publications.

I saw certificates of recognition and honorary degrees; the pint-sized physician veiled in gowns of knowledge upon a successful experiment. In his statements, my wife heard “have your daughter back”, “a procedure”, “identical to your daughter”, and again “have your daughter back”. On the other hand, I heard “direct manipulation”, “organism”, and the words kept humming in my mind; “NEW MULTI-CELLULAR ORGANISM!!! NEW MULTI-CELLULAR ORGANISM!!! NEW MULTICELLULAR ORGANISM!!!” The horror! And I, with my PhD in Biotechnology and Natural Science, was sweating in one of the stuffy offices at the Kampala Genetic Engineering Clinic. My mind raced back to the events of the last three weeks. Since the accident, I had been involved in a fierce tug of war with my family. “I have lost a daughter and my ability to walk. And what have you lost? Only the prestige of receiving an award before the admiring eyes of the world, isn’t it? Do you even care?” my wife fumed. I chose to believe that most of her statements emanated from trauma and the shock of it all. I could not tell her that I may have loved our daughter more than she did. I could not amass enough courage to tell her that after witnessing thousands of people succumbing to the Human Braino-deficiency Virus before my eyes, my daughter was the only thing that made sense to me. My wife could not comprehend the horror of a leading Biotechnology expert in 2515; constantly experimenting on hopeless human souls in search of a cure for the deadly virus. She could not understand how it felt to have people mistaking you for their great grandfathers or for sons that they had lost to the virus. Understanding reader, it was torture to be a beam of hope in the Post-Technocalypse. What made it worse was that my father and my wife were on the same side of the divide. The whole family was on one side. “The world has changed son,” he would say. “Human cloning is no longer taboo. Cloning is part of us now. Give your wife the greatest gift you can afford. Give her back the daughter she is about to lose.” My father was annoyingly convincing but I rarely fell for his manipulative tricks. Yes, the world had changed. Didn’t we all witness science changing the world? Didn’t the world crumble under scientific experimentation? Patient reader, call me backward or conservative, I care less. My experience has led me to believe that, when all is said and done, science may be man’s worst enemy. My generation has witnessed changes that have become part of our DNA. My father calls us “the Frankenstein generation”, which he thinks of as fearless. I, on the other hand, think our generation precarious. Taken to the extreme, science can create monsters. This “procedure” that the physician and my family were advocating for, could create a monster. A single mistake in the procedure; BOOM! All hail the birth of Frankenstein’s monster! Reader, when they talked of evolving an organism genetically identical to my daughter, I objected. I knew that whatever was to be produced from that experiment would not be my daughter. It would not be the same daughter who wanted to be a science fiction writer in this era where everyone is studying robotics and chemical engineering. My daughter who followed in the footprints of my deceased brother and read history books that I had never set my eyes on. She was only twelve but she knew about the rise of China back in the year 2000. She schooled me on our ancient forefathers’ delusions when they anticipated an apocalypse back in 2012. My daughter studied history with intense curiosity and she did not seem to comprehend why back in the day people could believe in the existence of an imaginary supernatural being called God! “What was their problem? 91

Doesn’t science explain everything Dad?” she used to ask me. I still remember the last words she spoke to me before our car plunged into that truck on that fateful Kampala evening; “Dad, do you know that Kabaka of Buganda had chosen the zone that would become Kampala as a hunting reserve?” I stroked her back, surveyed the competing skyscrapers, and laughed in disbelief. Then my ears met the crashing sound that consumed us in darkness. I was still cogitating on the physician’s words. “Maybe I’m being too radical and emotional.” I conversed with my soul but I still could not get myself to allow my daughter to be cloned. I could see waves of impatience sweeping across the physician’s face. Tears were forming in my wife’s eyes and she began to shake. My mobile phone came to my rescue. It was my father calling from back home in Salima. “I just wanted to check on you, kids. How are you doing?” Why did he do that? Why did he call grown-ups like us kids? What was wrong with my father? “We are doing Dad. We are doing.” “Son, before you make any decision that you will later regret…” I waited for him to say whatever he was going to say. I would not let him manipulate me. “Sometimes we have to do what we have to do. Let them go ahead with the procedure.” “You can’t tell me what to do. It’s my daughter, not yours, Dad!” I objected. “Don’t be stupid son, go ahead with the procedure!” “I said no! Go to hell, Dad! Shut up!” I wanted to hang up and smash the phone on the floor. “But you too were cloned!” I thought I did not hear him right. “You’re afraid of what you are.” I carefully put down the phone on the physician’s desk, cleared my throat and slowly walked out of the office. My mind was nowhere. The elevator pulled me down the building and I stepped out onto the electric avenue. A rush of dry wind swept across my face, blowing off leaves from jacaranda trees, robbing the streets of shelter. Kampala was bracing up for a storm.

T H E L A S T S T O RY T E L L E R Dilman Dila (Uganda)

She woke up before the sun and flew down to the lake. They still called it a lake even though it no longer had water and a city sprawled in the basin. Most houses were shaped like fish, with mouths gaping at the sky, eyes glowing, while those that belonged to the leaders looked like boats. Aya perched the bruka on a rock that fishermen on canoes had once used as a natural pier, but which now sat on top of a cliff, and she looked down at the waking city. Particles of ice on the rock and on sculptures of dead trees caught the light from the fisheyes, giving it a pinkish hue. The heater threw a red glow onto her face and it left her yearning for fresh air, as though she was stuck in a hole underground. The noise of early traffic wafted to her like music from the shakes of a thousand gourds. Bruka wings flapped in the city lights, sailing past the open fish mouths like prey fleeing predators. She could not get his face out of her mind. She could not remember him. The sky brightened and the city lights started to go out. Aya glanced at the thermometer and saw that the air outside had warmed up considerably. The ice had started to drip. She stepped out of the bruka, pulling a thermal blanket tight around her, and greedily sucked in the fresh air. She let the blanket slip off her shoulders and the chill bit into her skin. She walked around, stumping her boots into the wet stone, hugging herself, rubbing her palms against her arms, and yet she could not get rid of his face. The sun came up and for about an hour it would be nice and warm and friendly. She removed her storyglass, and the beauty of the city vanished. Now all that she saw was grey and dreary blocks of fish-like metal sticking out of the lakeâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s basin, gloomy in the mist. She flipped on her hatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s visor to protect her eyes from sunrays, and when she did, the default story she had set opened up, and again the city transformed. The buildings now looked as though brightly coloured mushrooms stood above the fish like umbrellas, such a multitude of colours as though an artbot had been playing with paint. The fisheyes now looked like gems, some were pearls, others diamonds, some marbles, and sunrays bounced off them like lights in a nightclub of dead civilisations. The last of the ice melted away. She could still see her breath, bluish against the warm sky, and she wished she could magically read her past in it, then probably she would know who exactly he was. She could not go back home. He was there. He said he was her husband. Aya walked up a stone path, under the sculpture of dead trees, and for a moment she wondered what it had felt like to sit under a real tree. Ancient poets described the music leaves made as a breeze rustled them, and the song of birds perched on the branches, and that it was considered good luck if a bird dropped shit on you. For more than a year she had wondered what it would feel like to fly her bruka alongside a bird. Would the bird know her ornithopter was a machine or would it mistake it for another bird? There were tales of eagles ripping drones out of the sky, but scientists and historians were not sure if the eagles thought the

drones were rivals, or if they foresaw their extinction and tried to fight back. The first bruka took to the air nearly a decade after the last bird had gone down, so there was no way of knowing how the two would have related to each other. She had become so obsessed with this relationship that she ended up telling a story about it. She had thought that the protagonist was entirely from her imagination until last night, hardly ten hours after she released the veepic, when he showed up at her doorstep with an electronic flower in one hand. The flower emitted a perfume, which she vaguely remembered as a scent her mother had loved, and it hummed a tune that her nanny had sung to her when she was still in kindergarten. Her nanny claimed to have seen real bees hovering on real flowers and she claimed that they made this kind of sound as they sucked out nectar. She insisted her tune was the right tune, and the one they played at the museum was fake, probably from a robobee. Aya had not heard that tune in nearly thirty years, and it soothed her, so she did not scream at seeing her protagonist in flesh and blood, nor did she slam the door on his face. She had stood there like a stone sculpture, wondering if she were having a nightmare, or if someone had already seen her veepic and printed out a copy of the protagonist as some kind of joke. It had to be someone who knew her intimately, who knew how she would react to that scent and tune. He had cut his finger and bled, to prove that he was not a print. She had tried to drag up memories from the smell of his blood, and she caught glimpses of an injured man lying on the floor, a knife in his chestâ&#x20AC;Ś. but that looked like her father. Aya turned a dial on her helmet, changing the story, and the world around her transformed into what it had looked like way back then, with water in the lake, shacks struggling for space underneath trees, bare chested men dragging big canoes into the water, stalls with stacks of fish, women in colourful dresses cleaning the fish. She walked up a sandy footpath, to a large anthill, which was starkly red against the green vegetation. She sat on it and watched a half-submerged boat a few paces away, choking in hyacinth, bobbing in the waves, six white birds standing on it, their reflections wavy on the water. Her veepic had come to her as she experienced this story, as she looked at this boat, at the birds dipping their heads into the water in an endless loop. She had wondered what was in the water, and she had thought of a corpse. Him. And the veepic had fallen into her, just like that. Now, she again looked at the white birds on the boat, watched their heads dipping into the greenish water, hoping it would trigger off something, a long lost memory, an image, anything, something that would tell her that she indeed was married to the man she had imagined. Surely, this image had answers since it had given her the story. She stared until her eyes hurt. Nothing. Not even a reliving of the trippy exhilaration she experienced when the story came to her. Nothing. Just another visualisation of a dead world. She closed her tight eyes, willing the pain to go away. Dead? Had it even existed? Had birds really filled the skies? Had trees and plants really grown all over the

planet, with all kinds of animals feeding off them? Had there really been a lake with boats and fish? What if the past was a lie? What if it had always been a gray and dreary world of stone and steel, with some mega sensory implant giving the universe an illusion of colour and a diversity of life? She had experienced a historical veepic once, which argued that the planet existed as it was because of life. That an asteroid with life, which was dying because the asteroid was too small to support it, fell on a bare planet, and then life found a chance to live, and so it engineered the formation of water, of an atmosphere, of gravity, and over billions of years it built for itself a proper home. Life. She turned the dial on her glasses to exit the story, and when she opened her eyes again, she did not switch to another story, and so she saw the street as it actually was, no birds, no water, no beautiful lakeside. Just plain gray steel stuck on bare gray rocks. And hunger. She walked away from the lakeside, to a large building in the distance, which gleamed in the early morning sun. It was shaped like the shacks in the story she had just experienced, rectangular walls and roof, rectangular windows and doors, and not for the first time she wondered why her forefathers had been obsessed with geometrical houses. The other popular design, which stood next to this building, was circular with a cone-shaped roof. She walked into the circular building. A restaurant. She turned the dial on her visor and the bare steel benches morphed into décor from the past – the fake past. She sat on a round, three-legged stool, at a round table meant for twelve people. There were two other patrons, each at a huge table that emphasised their loneliness, and each with a veepic headset over their faces, as a robotic arm fed them breakfast. Aya could tell, from the icon blinking in the centre of the headset, that the person nearest her, whose gender she could not tell, was experiencing Birds on a Boat. Aya stiffened. She watched zee’s body language to see if zee was enjoying the veepic, as her excitement soared. Her story had indeed topped as early statistics had suggested. ‘People are hungry for a human story,’ one comment had said, that, ‘It was easy to get into this story because you could feel it digs into humanity in a way storybots never can’. She had been skeptical about this kind of praise, but never before had she walked into a random restaurant and found someone experiencing her veepic. Her table beeped. A menu glowed. She tapped on an icon for a story called Blue Sun, and the décor of the restaurant did not change, which immediately told her it was a generic story. A waitress strutted out of a door at the extreme end of the room with a tray of food. Even from the distance, Aya could tell she was a print, her eyes were green and lights from the window bounced off her chocolate-coloured mercury skin. When she was near enough, Aya could hear a faint whirring from inside her, and a steady thud-thud-thud that imitated heartbeats. The waitress gave her a smile and put the food on the table, and then glided away, her heels clicking against the steel floor. The wall opened and the waitress vanished. At one corner of the table, the icon of the veepic’s sensory set glowed. She tapped on it and a yellow bag parachuted from the ceiling onto the table. She took 97

out a headset and the bag returned into the ceiling. She wore the headset, feeling a pinch on her nape as a sensory cable touched the implant at the base of her skull. A row of veepics presented themselves. One column had the topping stories, with Birds on a Boat at number four, the only human-made story in the top fifty. The column next to it had a list of veepics she had loved in the past, and similar veepics she had not yet experienced from storytellers whose channels she had subscribed to. At the bottom of the screen, were suggested veepics. She dithered, wondering if to get into the number one topper, which she had not yet experienced, but she could not take him off her mind, so she decided to experience Birds on a Boat, for the first time as a non-storyteller. The moment she tapped on its icon, the restaurant vanished, and she â&#x20AC;&#x201C; â&#x20AC;&#x201C; is sitting on a white plastic chair, in a rectangular room with a dusty floor. She is pleased to find the room packed. She glances at a picture framed on the wall to sees the stats. A million experiences already, and steadily counting. Music with a lot of drums and guitars throbs from a radio with creaky speakers, a bored waiter dances by herself at one end while a woman with oversized boobs and a masculine beard clips her fingernails from behind a counter. Behind the woman, a small service window opens to the kitchen, and Aya glimpses bare-chested cooks sweating over large saucepans on charcoal stoves. The windows are large, rectangular, with burglar proof iron bars, and with yellow curtains fluttering in the breeze. Paint is peeling off the walls, which were once cream coloured, but are now a dusty brown. Through the windows she glimpses the world outside, houses with red brick walls and rusty iron-sheet roofs, trees whose leaves whistle in the breeze, caked with dust from the dirt road. The table is wooden, and she feels the living warmth of the rough surface, so unlike the smooth, cold steel she is used to. The waiter brings her a menu, still dancing to the music, and she chooses a katogo of goat offal cooked with matooke. She watches other people as she awaits her order, and is pleased to see them smile. The waiter brings her a clay bowl of steaming bananas and goat offal. She picks up the fork and stuffs food into her mouth. It is surprisingly hot. She tastes salt in the crunchy goat innards, pepper in the mushy bananas, tomatoes and onions in the soup, and it gives her a smile. Her heartbeat quickens as he walks in. The door has a curtain made out of beads, which rattle as he brushes in. He glances at her, probably realising she is his creator, and for a moment she thinks heâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll not follow the script and will come straight to her table. He gives her a slight nod and walks up to a woman eating millet porridge and a mango. The woman does not smile. These two, along with the waiter and the woman behind the counter, are the only characters. The rest are real people experiencing the tale. Magara. That was the name she gave him. Last night he said his name was Obaraf, given to a person born on a day that ice does not melt at sunrise. Akello. The name she gave her. Last night he said she was called Aya. Her name. They were married. He smiles at his wife. She does not smile back. She pulls a photograph out of her bag and puts it on the table. The photograph is of him and another woman. He chuckles. A storybot would have made him protest dramatically, even theatrically, not a chuckle as if she had told a joke. This, commentators said, made the story

truly human. They could read guilt in that chuckle. Akelloâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s reaction, again, is nothing like a storybot would come up with, not overly dramatic. She smiles, picks up a knife on the table as if she is going to cut the fruit, and stabs him in the chest. Just as if she is playfully poking him. His blood squirts onto her face, but that does not take away her smile. She leaves the knife in his chest and he slips onto the floor. She picks up her spoon and continues to eat her porridge. Her father died like that. Her mother had stabbed her father after she caught him with another woman. He lay on the floor with the knife in his chest, his blood staining the steel tiles, little Aya watching from the doorway. Was it really her father? Last night, she had seen the scar on his chest. He said a doctor saved his life. She could not watch anymore. She took off the headset, and at once, the restaurant vanished. She was back in a steel and sterile room, eating something bland â&#x20AC;&#x201C; she could no longer taste the salty, crunchy, greasy intestines, the mushy peppery bananas, the oniony soup. Her mouth was full of something spongy. She spat, and a blob of something that looked like mucus splattered on the table. The robotic arm that protruded from her plate dangled in the air, holding a spoonful of goo, uncertainly. Lights blinked on the plate, urging her to reconnect. Why could she not remember him? She hurried out of the restaurant. The sun had grown hostile. She tapped a button on her shoulder and her pants and shirt turned into a flowing gown that swept the ground as she walked. She turned a knob on her helmet and it became a wide brimmed hat. She pressed another button on her shoulder and a sensory cable snaked out of her helmet, into her nape, and she no longer felt the heat. There were a few more people in the street, all with flowing gowns that made them look like daytime ghosts, their heads hidden inside gadgets that made them think they were in a town of a long dead civilisation, under a friendly sun with tons of birds and animals and insects living happily with humans. Her bruka was too hot to touch, even with the sensory implant wadding off the sun. She used a remote-control feature on her wrist band to open it. She climbed in. She tapped the button on her shoulder and the gown transformed back into pants and a sleeveless shirt, while the hat retreated into being just a helmet. She checked the time, and saw she still had thirty minutes before the records offices would allow visitors. She watched the city below, refusing to wear a visor to see the virtual vibrancy, and instead seeing it as it was, nondescript steel sculptures of fish. Fewer brukas flew above the open mouths, racing by too fast for her to enjoy the flapping of their wings, as she had when still a little child. The minutes passed and she tried to fill her mind with things that would make her forget him, at least for the moment, but she could not get his face out of her mind, nor that knife scar on his chest. She thought about her mother and wondered if she still lived in the Elephant City. Aya had never liked that city, she thought the elephantine buildings were graceless, even repulsive. The stuffed elephants in the museum did not have that many colours, they were mostly gray with white tusks. Her mother however had loved to sit on the top of her building, which was a calf, and watch the herd of adults around her.

Mama would definitely have answers, but Mama would want to talk about other things, things that Aya would rather stayed buried deep in her subconscious. Had she wanted her husband completely out of her mind, just as she wanted to forget her mother? It did not make sense for she could not afford a memory surgery. She could now, with her story a topper, though she would have to wait a week, until after the credits had showed up in her account. Until then, she had to continue living in the guts of a fish too small to swallow her properly. She had not created it entirely on her own. She had used an app that made it easy to quickly create stories that could compete with bots. She did not use a cerebral implant, she refused to have that for she did not want to become only halfhuman. She did not mind the sensory implant for it only messed with her senses, like a drug, but a cerebral implant controlled how a person thought, and often led to madness and sudden death. Some storytellers preferred it to compete against bots, and though they achieved success, audiences quickly reject the stories as being more bot than human, regurgitating the same old crap that bots had been recycling for nearly a century. And yet, people needed those formulaic bot tales to survive. For a human to make an equivalent required many years of hard work, and the results were not often reliable. Then came the app. Paromit. She had been skeptical at first, for many software had come before it and none delivered, but this was a true revolution. She simply had to type in what was in her mind, and the app would render it into an image that came alive in a virtual world. She could not have dragged him out of her memory. There was no way. She started with a random picture of a man she had found in the datanets, and then kept instructing Paromit to add features to his face, and remove others, and she kept modifying it until the face of the protagonist came about as she saw it in her mind. Had she really not dragged him out of her memory? Was he purely her imagination? Mama would have answers. No. Not Mama. She was not even sure if Mama was still alive, just because she did not get a notification from The Department of Birth and Death Registration did not mean Mama was still alive. The bots might have sent the message and she deleted it unread. She could not think of Mama, she had to hope there were records somewhere that would give her answers. She put on her headset and now she – – is in the Population Records Office at the Department of BDR. She wants to check for her mother, to see if she is still alive. Her answers might be more satisfying than a collection of images that might not mean anything, but she can’t talk to Mama. Not just yet. There is a crowd already waiting to access records, nearly a dozen people lining up to use the six data booths. If the credits had already reflected in her account, she would not have had to wait. She would have paid to jump the queue. Now, she must wait her turn in the line. She has the option of wandering into other interesting worlds, but she thinks she deserves the torture of watching people standing in a queue in a room that’s steel gray, with no walls and no floor and no ceiling, with the only furniture being six blue booths. Everybody else has a secondary headset on, and she notices with satisfaction that several of them

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are experiencing Birds on a Boat. She wonders what scenes they started at. She would have to go check the stats to see which parts people frequented the most, maybe before the stabbing when Magara and Akello are all over themselves in love. Maybe after the stabbing when Akello is in jail and in love with her cellmate and Magara is a half-human-half-robot zombie-like creature that can barely remember the love he enjoyed before his death. The story meanders about, much like real life, and if anyone started at any scene, it would not be too hard to follow, unlike some storybot stories that tried too hard to be clever, or that were incomprehensible to humans, though set in beautiful and addictive psychedelic worlds. Her turn to use a booth comes sooner than she expected, and she is thankful for it. Her fingers tremble as they hover on the keypad. What should she search for, her own records, or his? Finally, she thinks it is safer to start with herself. She searches for her marriage records. Nothing. She searches for any memory surgeries that she might have had. Nothing. She sighs in relief. She punches in his name, searches, but gets a single line on the screen. This person has never existed. She walks out of the booth, her knees are weak. She walks away from the queue, but the room has no visible wall, or ceiling, or floor, just a blank grayness, and she has gone nearly a kilometer from the booths before she remembers where she actually is. She takes off the headset and she â&#x20AC;&#x201C; â&#x20AC;&#x201C; plunged back into her bruka. The sun had grown even more hostile, and the horizon had become nothing but a white and featureless strip, the sky a sick, yellowish colour, like pus. He must be a print. Nothing else could explain him. A real-life print that bled real blood and had the scent of a real person. Maybe the machine had become so efficient that it could print a real-life person. Maybe it had been like this all along, from the beginning of time, printing out birds and animals and insects to live alongside humans until something went wrong and it could not make the prints anymore and now it had repaired the fault and was printing out real humans to replace humans. He must be a nightmare. Mama might know. No. Not Mama. Maybe Mama printed him out to force her to talk. He had after all told her something similar, that when she made him the protagonist of Birds on a Boat, she subconsciously wanted him to reconcile with her, and so he had come straight to talk to her. I never stopped loving you. His voice sounded like a rusty engine struggling to come to life, the kind of voice that alcohol had ruined. Even when I had your knife in my chest, I never stopped loving you and you put the knife in my chest because you could not stop loving me. No! 101

When she had gotten the idea for the story, on seeing the corpse under a submerged board, birds dipping their heads into the water to eat him, she had meant it as a metaphor of her own life. She had imagined that she would die and would be rotten before the neighbours discovered her. Her house would know she was dead, of course, and would notify the department of births and deaths, and then chuck her into the recycle system. But her neighbours would only know of her death when a new tenant comes in, probably months later. If she had lived in the past, however fake the past seemed, she would have had pets, a dog, a cat, maybe a bird in a cage, and upon her death, even if the neighbours did not know, her pets would have eaten her. If they did not, she would have ended up in a grave to feed maggots. It would be better to die in that imaginary past; it would have been better for something other than metal to eat her. Somehow, he was right. She made the film to send him a message. Not him, the ghost that had shown up at her doorstep, but someone else, someone who would interpret her veepic and fall in love with her and grow old with her, and probably have children with her, natural children that would grow in her womb the old fashioned way. Her nanny had once told her a folk story, which did not require any headsets to be enjoyed, just words falling out of her tongue, about a boy who had wished to have a friend. He sat under a tree that, though he did not know it, was a home for the ancestors. A spirit heard his wish and materialised as a human, and the boy was overjoyed to finally have a friend. But it was not a good spirit and the story had a horrible ending. If he was not a print, then he was a nightmare. He was her wish coming true. Mama would have answers. No! Maybe it printed him as a gift to her. IT. Life. The machine. It needs people like her because stories fuel its survival. IT knows of her rare ability to imagine, and IT knows she will make better veepics if she were happier. Her house must have known how lonely she was, that she spends days not talking to anyone, refusing to commit to a relationship with anyone, so IT prints him to ease her loneliness, for IT knows individual parts need to bond with other individual parts to be happy, and IT knows that if IT prints something right out of her imagination, she would commit to a relationship with it. If she went back to the records office, and this time searched for him under prints, would she know the truth? Probably. Probably not. Probably he was just her imagination. Her nightmare. Mama would have answers.

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No! No! No! She ignited the bruka and pedaled hard as it leapt into the air, its wings flapping against its body, and she flew away from Fish City, away from the sun, into the harsh whiteness of the horizon. She did not have to go back to the squalor of the Fish City. She had nothing she needed there. He was still in her house, squeezed inside the guts like a worm, waiting for her, but she would not go back to him. Everything she needed was in her bruka. With the success of Birds on a Boat, she could find a new house on a loan, maybe she would go to Flower City, where they ate real food that grew in special gardens protected from the sun, where they walked around without special gowns and visors because they lived in a dome that kept them safe from the environment. Surely, she could now afford it. Surely, there were enough empty apartments for her to easily get one on credit. She would not go back home. Not to the ghost that waited for her.

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B I O G R A PH I E S Derilene (Dee) Marco

Dee lectures in the Media Department at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. She holds a PhD from the Film and Television Studies department at Warwick University in the UK. Her research deals with apartheid and post-apartheid cinema and sensibilities of the Rainbow nation as seen in postapartheid cultural works. Dee is currently working on a new research project which deals with notions of how mothers and children were ‘produced’ as Black subjects in South Africa. The project focuses on the area of birth as a critical moment of producing persons, motherhood and the complexity of notions of ‘mothering’ in relation to apartheid and post-apartheid lives, particularly those of people who were born in District Six and moved to Athlone and surrounding townships. Dee teaches courses such as Postcolonial Media in the Global South and Global Cinema. Dee also co-hosts a podcast, Mamas with Attitude as a way of laughing about, talking through and creatively interacting with the various avenues of mothering and motherhood in her own realm. Dee enjoys writing, discussing feelings with her three year old and finding small moments of joy in the everyday.

Acan Innocent Immaculate

Innocent is a Ugandan writer and doctor-in-training. She won the Writivism Short Story Prize in 2016, and has been published by AFREADA magazine, Omenana Magazine, Brittle Paper, and in Selves: An Afro Anthology of Creative Nonfiction. Her most recent work is a children’s book titled The Pearl Trotters in Black, Yellow, Red. She loves to write fun stories and stories that force people to look within themselves for answer.

Lillian Akampurira Aujo

Lillian is a poet and fiction writer from Uganda. She is the winner of the Jalada Prize for Literature 2015 and the BN Poetry Award 2009. She has been shortlisted for the Gerald Kraak Award 2019, the Brittle Paper Anniversary Award 2018, and longlisted for a Nommo Award 2018. She is a 2017 fellow of the Ebedi Residency in Nigeria. She has presented poetry at the 2017 GIMAC meeting in Addis Ababa. Her work has been published by the Caine Prize, Prairie Schooner, Transition, Jalada, Babishai-Niwe Poetry Award, Bahati Books, Omenana, Enkare Review, Brittle Paper, and 20:35 Africa, An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry. Her poetry has been translated to Malayalam and is set to be translated to Italian. She has been a mentor in the WritivismAt5 Online Mentoring programme.

Felicia Taave

Felicia is a Nigerian writer whose works have been featured in several magazines, blogs and e-zines. When she’s not reading, she enjoys travelling, singing and playing with writing.

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Shadreck Chikoti

Shadreck is a Malawian writer and social activist. He was listed by CNN as one of seven must-read African authors. He has won numerous literary awards including the 2013 Peer Gynt Literary Award with his futuristic novel, Azotus the kingdom, also shortlisted for Africa Nommo Awards for speculative fiction. He was recently nominated by the Africa39 project as one of the “most promising African writers under 40.” Chikoti’s work has also appeared in the Caine Prize anthology To see the mountain and other stories (2011), and in All the good things around us: an anthology of African short stories. He is the director of Pan African Publishers and in 2013 he founded the Story Club, a space for literary enthusiasts. He lives in Malawi with his wife and three children. Awuor Onyango

Awuor is a queer womanist and former reader of laws who embraces existential depression, delusions of united Africanities and extreme curiosity about humanity as her preferred catalysts to call for change in society through various art forms. Her first memory of writing is that of using charcoal on walls to tell the story of the quick brown fox that jumped over the lazy dog. From about the age of nine, she went on to write poetry and plays that were performed by the various schools she attended up to national competition levels and even attempted to revolutionise the high school romance circuit by writing novels with African characters in them on exercise books and distributing them throughout the school “To combat the notion that romance only happened to women with rose-coloured nipples in the ranches of Arizona”. She is a writer, a fine artist, a photographer and a budding film-maker.

Wesley Macheso

Wesley is a Malawian writer currently teaching Creative Writing and Literature at Mzuzu University. He is a columnist with The Daily Times, hosting a weekly column under the title “The Write Stuff”. His short story This Land is Mine is published in Water: New Short Fiction from Africa (2016). His children’s book, Akuzike and the Gods, won the 2014/ 2015 Peer Gynt Literary Award. He is an alumnus of the African Writers’ Trust 4th Editorial and Publishing Training Workshop. Some of his work can be read on The Kalahari Review, Brittle Paper, Storymoja Africa, and Africanwriter. com. Twitter: @Wesleymax89

Tlotlo Tsamaase

Tlotlo is a Motswana writer of fiction, poetry, and articles on architecture. Her work has appeared in Terraform, An Alphabet of Embers, People of Color Take Over FSI, and at Strange Horizons. Her poem I Will Be Your Grave is a Rhysling Award nominee.

Mazi Nwonwu

Mazi is the pen name of Chiagozie Nwonwu, a Lagos-based journalist and writer. While journalism and its demands take up much of his time, when he can, Mazi Nwonwu writes speculative fiction, which he believes is a vehicle through which

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he can transport Africa’s diverse culture to the future. He is the co-founder of Omenana, an African-centrist speculative fiction magazine and Managing Editor of Olisa.tv, a web-based based blogazine. His work has appeared in Lagos 2060 (Nigeria’s first science fiction anthology), AfroSF (first PAN-African Science Fiction Anthology), Sentinel Nigeria, Saraba magazine, It Wasn’t Exactly Love, an anthology on sex and sexuality published by Farafina in 2015, and elsewhere.

Tiseke Chilima

Tiseke is a young Malawian woman with a passion for digital illustration and writing fiction, particularly fantasy, adventure and science fiction. She won second prize at a national writing competition in Malawi at the age of 14, during her last year of high school. After that, she went on to study Agronomy at Bunda College of Agriculture – a far-cry from her artistic calling. After graduating, she applied as a writer at a local child and youth media organisation called Timveni where she worked for nearly five years. Within two years, she was promoted from a writer to Head of TV programming in the TV department. Tiseke’s work featured in the African speculative fiction anthology Imagine Africa 500 and The Manchester Review. Through attending the workshop that preceded and led to this anthology, she became connected to the storytelling group The Story Club, teaching at several creative writing workshops. She has also taught at a writing and arts camp for girls that happens every year in a rural region of her country. With a Master’s in Arts and Culture Management under her belt, she is currently a full-time arts and culture freelancer and is working on her debut novel and a series of web comics.

Dilman Dila

Dilman is a writer, filmmaker, and all round storyteller. He is the author of a critically acclaimed collection of short stories, A Killing in the Sun. He has been listed in several prestigious prizes, including the British Science Fiction Association (BSFA) Awards (2019), the BBC International Radio Playwriting Competition (2014), the Commonwealth Short Story Prize (2013), and the Short Story Day Africa prize (2013, 2014). His short fiction has featured in several magazines and anthologies, including A World of Horror, AfroSF v3, and the Apex Book of World SF. His digital artworks have been on exhibition at KLA ART in Kampala and at University of North Carolina in the US. His films include the masterpiece, What Happened in Room 13 (2007), which has attracted over eight million views on YouTube, and The Felistas Fable (2013), which was nominated for Best First Feature by a Director at the Africa Movie Academy Awards (2014), and which won four major awards at Uganda Film Festival (2014). His second feature film, Her Broken Shadow (2017), a sci-fi set in a futuristic Africa, has screened in places like Durban International Film Festival and AFI Silver Theater. More of his life and works are online at www.dilmandila.com and you can support him to make African science fiction films on patreon.com/dilstories or by subscribing to his channel youtube.com/dilstories.

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AC K N OWL E D G E M E N T S

Vibing with blackness: critical considerations of Black Panther and exceptional black positionings first appeared in the Arts Journal special issue New Media Art and the South African Social. The Machodugo was first published in Artsheba in 2016. Where pumpkin leaves dwell was winner of the inaugural Jalada Prize for Short Fiction in 2015. African Writer published The thing about carrying eyes in 2016. All the good things around us: an anthology of African short stories, ed. Ivor Agyeman-Duah (Oxfordshire: Ayebia Clarke Publishing, 2016) first published Sahara and it was also featured on by The Manchester Review.Â Myasthenia gravis: liberations was published in Jalada Africa in 2015. Wesley Machesoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Waiting for the end and Waking up in Kampala first appeared in African Writer. Terraform first published Virtual snapshots in 2016. Family meeting was published in Brittle Paper in 2016. The Manchester Review published Women are from Venus in 2017.

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In the introduction, curator Justina Cruickshank guides the reader through the challenging definition of Afrofuturism and what it might mean for black people depending on where in the world they are based. Powerful and honest, the introduction ensures the reader is set for what is an intimate discovery of Africa through the eyes of those that live in its many diverse countries. 12 stories are shared by writers from Malawi, Botswana, Nigeria, South Africa, Uganda and Kenya. We travel through each story experiencing magical realism, fantasy and sci-fi in a collection that asks us to rethink the future and reconsider our conceptions of Africa.