I have always believed that the world opens up to the curious and brave. If, as a child, you escaped boredom by devouring books and then eventually discovered the world around you with your hands, legs and eyes, then you will appreciate what I mean. Curiosity is like a hunger that once you feed, you earn an insatiable pleasure that grows more curious. This is why the saying ‘curiosity killed the cat’ is simply scaremongering unless you have the rest of the saying… curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.
This issue presents you four stories and an essay. In Beneath the Flower’s Gaze, Kevin Rigathi’s beautiful yet haunting tale that threatens to overthrow my earlier assertions about curiosity. You should read this story and discover if, and how satisfaction brought back the cats, ooops! people after their curious tango.
When you read Chisom Umeh’s Immortality, you can be forgiven for thinking of Christmas and hoping for a miracle. But this story’s twists will make you hate and love the Blessed One along his journey. I also liked the idea that some strengths cannot be buried or extinguished but can only be… read the story and find out.
At its very heart, Seeds of the Storm is an uncanny coming of age story where the new age is not an arrival, but a journey to a mantle that must be earned through fire, air, earth and blood. Bongiwe Maphosa has given us a tension-filled piece here.
When Uduak-Abasi Ekong wrote Senator Ibile, I wonder if they knew that this would be the story that many Africans wish on politicians of a certain ilk. It has a perfect blend of humour, horror and the best kind of swap. This is one alternate reality I would like to inject into life.
We also have an essay titled What the Water Remembers… by Oluwanifemi Bakare, in which he gives a breakdown of how the once-suppressed African imagination has been building a ‘formally ambitious body of work that is reshaping what science fiction, fantasy, and speculative literature can do and say’. We love to read and see it, especially as we embrace more film adaptations of speculative and science fiction works by African writers.
Senator Ibile usually woke in one of three places; most often in a Super King bed at an overpriced hotel after another pointless summit, sometimes in his girlfriend’s arms in the penthouse he rented for her in Oniru, and rarely on the California King in his Lekki home – inches from his wife. So, that Saturday morning, even before he opened his eyes, he knew something was wrong as his back registered the cold floor beneath him.
When he flung his eyes open, a couple of lizards on the wall were the first thing he saw and his eyes popped. But a quick scan of the room suggested he’d been abducted so he swallowed the urge to jump. He had to be captive, and making any sudden sounds would alert his captors. What else could explain waking up in a room smaller than his closet, the walls furred with algae, a football-sized hole in the roof, and dirty dishes in the corner crusted with mould?
Squeezing his eyes shut, he tried to remember how he’d been taken. But nothing came to mind. The night before, he’d watched a football match in the living room of his eight-bedroom mansion. His team lost, so he’d downed three bottles of beer and gone to bed, hoping to forget Gabriel Magalhães’s missed penalty that cost them the cup. And now, here he was. He rose and tiptoed across the damp floor.
He reached for his phone in his pocket, but to his surprise, his hands swept through empty air where the breadth of his thighs used to fill up. He looked down and could see his feet – something he hadn’t been able to do in nine years as a senator. Heart pounding, he ran his hands over his face and body. He could feel a beard, a fresh cut on his lips, even an earring in his left ear. Where was the plump body with the smooth, unpierced face he’d gone to bed with?
‘Blood of Jesus!’
He spotted a cracked mirror leaning beside a torn green window net and stumbled towards it. His reflection nearly stopped his heart when he looked into the mirror. The short, pot-bellied senator with greying hair was gone. In his place stood a tall, slender man with braided hair. And worst of all, Senator Ibile recognised the stranger in the mirror – the man whose body he now inhabited.
Senator Ibile screamed. He seized the mirror and shook it, scrubbing at the glass with his sleeves as if a stubborn smudge were to blame for his new appearance. He snatched a half-empty sachet of pure water from the floor and splashed his face. He had to be dreaming. He slapped his cheeks, pinched his arm, even punched his jaw. But each time he looked at the mirror, the stranger looked back.
The slap of wet bathroom slippers against concrete approached the room and Senator Ibile grabbed half a pair of black shoes from the floor. He slipped behind the termite-infested door, with his heart hammering and the shoe raised.
‘Gbenga, you don wake?’ a woman called as the door creaked open.
She stepped in, wearing only a bra and shorts that barely covered her thighs. She looked no older than twenty-five.
‘What have you people done to me?’ Senator Ibile demanded, lunging out and thrusting the shoe at her, as if its stench might force a confession.
She glanced at the shoe, then at him, then rolled her eyes and walked past him. ‘I no get time for your drama this early morning,’ she said calmly.
‘What do you want from me? Where is my body?’ he pressed.
‘Shey I told you not to follow Reggae Boi and smoke that loud last night. Nobody knows where he gets his own thing from, but you no dey hear word. Dey here dey play, next thing now, Reggae Boi go say since you no well, make im drive today,’ she hissed.
‘I don’t know who these people are. Just tell me how you did this,’ he pleaded.
‘Wo, Gbenga, it’s like you will not allow me to do my makeup here in peace,’ she said. She yanked open a splintered drawer, pulled out a makeup box, grabbed the mirror, and walked out, leaving him alone with the shoe and the stranger’s body.
Senator Ibile stared at the door as it slammed shut. Gbenga. He had heard that name just the day before.
On his way back from his girlfriend’s house the previous day, while stuck in traffic on Ozumba Mbadiwe avenue, a Danfo had tried to squeeze its way past his convoy and ended up dragging its dented yellow side across his brand-new Lexus 2026. The sound alone – metal scrapping against metal – had made his ears bleed.
His driver got down first, and the Danfo driver followed. They yelled at each other till their words became fists. From the back seat where he sat, cool behind tinted glasses, Senator Ibile lifted two fingers and two of his armed escorts stepped down with their rifles visible. Senator Ibile watched one of his escorts raise a rifle towards the driver, threatening to shoot, while the driver tore his shirt and stood before the rifle, daring him to.
‘Gbenga, no dey tempt these people,’ the conductor warned. He’d been hanging halfway out the Danfo with one leg inside and one leg outside, when the bus scratched the Lexus.
‘Reggae Boi, free me. Make them shoot me in front of everybody na, since they want to be mad,’ Gbenga refused to bow. Even with blood gathering in his mouth after one of the escorts knocked his teeth with the edge of his rifle, Gbenga stood there with his chest heaving.
‘Officers abeg, na small scratch, we go repair am,’ Reggae Boi pleaded, jumping down and laying flat on the ground.
Some of the passengers in the bus, who’d gathered by the window with their phones out, began to plead as well. One of the escorts glanced back at the car, as if to mentally ask Senator Ibile if he should let them go, but Gbenga followed his gaze and his eyes met Senator Ibile’s.
‘God punish you, foolish old man!’ Gbenga screamed. ‘Look at the traffic on this road because you people have refused to repair it. E no go better for you!’
The escort drove another punch into Gbenga’s face and he staggered for a moment as if his vision had suddenly blurred. He crashed to the ground, and blood continued to trickle from the corner of his mouth. He wiped it away with the back of his hand and staggered to his feet shortly after. He glared at the Lexus and fixed his sight on the young woman sitting beside Senator Ibile.
‘Ashawo! You no even get shame. Dey follow person wey old pass your Papa,’ he shouted.
Reggae Boi wrapped both arms around Gbenga’s waist and dragged him towards their Danfo before the escorts descended on him again.
‘Free me! Free me!’ Gbenga yelled, kicking his feet. ‘Senator Ibile, I know say you dey hear me so. One day, your cup go full and na me you go dey beg.’
Reggae Boi shoved him into the Danfo and drove off, leaving a cloud of black smoke. Gbenga’s words stayed with Senator Ibile. They followed him home, sat with him while he ate, and echoed in his home office while he tried to read some documents. Your cup go full and na me you go dey beg. Who was this insolent nobody with the audacity to threaten him? Did the fool have any idea what he was capable of?
His phone rang some hours later, and he picked it up to hear his girlfriend crying.
‘Baby,’ she sniffled. ‘Someone posted the video and now my face is everywhere.’
He sat upright as he clicked on the link she sent him. Someone had zoomed in when the madman, Gbenga, was shouting at the window and even with the tinted glass, people could make out who she was.
‘My baby, don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I will show that idiot pepper.’
After they ended the call, he remained seated in silence as he scrolled through the comments on Instagram. How dare this nonentity humiliate his baby girl? Worse still, he’d opened the floodgates for his own humiliation as well. The comments had moved from his girlfriend and people were now dredging up every allegation ever levelled against him. The homes he’d demolished to expand his liquor business and the road projects he’d received money for but never executed. It was only a matter of time before people he would rather avoid started calling to ask why he was trending. Party leaders, the governor, or God forbid, the presidency. All because one stubborn Danfo driver had refused to keep his mouth shut. This Gbenga person had to pay.
That evening, just before the Champion’s League final, Senator Ibile found himself in Makoko, ducking into Baba Ife’s shrine.
‘Baba, I want this man to run mad,’ he said.
Baba Ife did not ask many questions. He never did.
‘I will conjure madness to enter his body,’ Baba Ife said and Senator Ibile smiled. The ₦1,000,000 he paid Baba Ife monthly to have him at his beck and call always proved a good investment. Without Baba Ife, he wouldn’t have won his first, second, and third elections. It was also Baba Ife that made his girlfriend, the most beautiful woman in Nigeria, fall in love with him. Baba Ife also made sure all his bills were voted into law. He blessed the day he’d met Baba Ife.
Baba Ife wrote Gbenga on the side of a calabash in chalk that squeaked against the dry surface. He placed a small photograph inside it – the one Senator Ibile’s aide had quickly printed from social media. He knew Baba Ife would need a picture like he always did, and it had been easy to find Gbenga online when people kept tagging him in the comments of the video.
‘Dance around it three times,’ Baba Ife instructed.
Senator Ibile started dancing, serious and angry in the first round, he was sweating by the second round. Halfway through the third round, his phone rang. It was his girlfriend and he stepped outside to answer it. She said there were more videos of them circulating and people were starting to send her death threats.
‘I will send some of my boys to guard you. Don’t worry, my love. Nothing will happen to you and that useless Danfo driver will pay for what he did,’ he said.
When he stepped back into the shrine, the candles were low and Baba Ife waved a dismissive hand.
‘It has entered,’ he said, squatting before the calabash as fire erupted from it and consumed Gbenga’s picture. Senator Ibile smiled in satisfaction as he imagined Gbenga’s shock when the madness started to kick in. If only he could rub it in his face and let him know it had been his doing.
Now, standing barefoot in Gbenga’s damp room and wearing his body, Senator Ibile wasn’t sure what had entered what.
He rushed to the window and looked outside. He was met with rusted brown roofs that crowded in uneven rows, a wide lagoon amidst wooden houses on stilts and canoes sliding between them. His eyes lit up for the first time since waking up. He was in Makoko. The same Makoko where his face was plastered all over Adogbo and Oko Agbon every election season, the same Makoko he always promised to prioritise in ‘the next term.’ As he looked past the squalor in front of him, he realised that there was finally mercy in this madness. Baba Ife’s shrine was not far away.
Senator Ibile dashed out of the house onto the ‘street,’ which was a patchwork of narrow wooden walkways nailed to stilts driven deep into black water. Each plank dipped slightly under his weight and he walked as slowly as he could to avoid breaking them. He squeezed his nose as the smell hit him – stagnant water and smoked fish. He walked past women on low stools, frying Akara in blackened pans, children brushing their teeth over the lagoon, and a woman bathing her baby with water scooped straight from it.
Someone recognised the body he wore.
‘Gbenga, how far? I see you for video yesterday. Omo, you get mind o.’
Senator Ibile did not answer as he kept moving. When the planks gave way to sand, he sprinted towards the bushes and didn’t stop running till he arrived at the mud building with red cloth strips hanging from sticks planted in the ground. He walked past the empty bottles that circled the entrance and the white chalk symbols across the doorway.
‘Baba?’ he called out, pushing his head past the hanging beads.
The room was dim, thick with incense, and a goat skull sat on a wooden stool like it was watching.
‘It’s Ibile,’ he called out.
‘Ibile ke?’ Baba Ife squinted at him as he emerged from the dark corner. ‘Young man, you better tell me who you are.’ He lifted a red handkerchief, ready to fling it at him.
Senator Ibile knelt and raised both hands quickly.
‘Baba, na me, Ibile. Your Ibile,’ he pleaded.
Baba Ife’s eyes did not soften. Senator Ibile moved closer and lowered his voice as he began to remind Baba Ife of all he’d done for him. How, during the last elections, Baba Ife made the other candidates’ names mysteriously disappear from ballot papers in three key wards. He mentioned the election rerun that never happened, the tribunal case against him that dissolved like salt in water, and the white cowry he wore that protected him from bullets.
Baba Ife watched him for a long while. Then, slowly, he lowered the red cloth.
‘Ah, Ibile, how did this happen? What happened to your body?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, I’ve been trying to remember but…I don’t know, nothing is making sense,’ Senator Ibile said.
‘It is because you did not finish the third dance,’ Baba Ife shook his head.
‘But you said it was fine, and besides, since I did not finish the dance, he should have just ran mad small, not….’ he gestured to himself. ‘This.’
‘Are you questioning the gods?’ Baba Ife’s eyes flashed.
‘God forbid,’ Senator Ibile snapped his fingers quickly over his head. ‘When I’m not mad. I’m just asking, Baba, what do I do now? How do I get my body back?’
Baba Ife began to circle the room while chanting and shaking a small gourd rattle. As the candles flickered and the smoke thickened, Senator Ibile’s mind raced. What if the solution required something unclear, like the time the gods asked for a mature virgin’s blood and he brought a woman’s, only to find out too late that the gods wanted that of a man? That mistake still sat between him and the Governor’s seat. He could not afford another technical error.
Then, Baba Ife stopped chanting abruptly.
‘The gods have spoken,’ he said, breathing hard.
Senator Ibile leaned forward with his chest thudding.
‘You must look into the eyes of your real self before midnight today,’ Baba Ife said.
Senator Ibile waited for more instructions. When none came, he frowned. ‘That’s it?’
‘That is all, but you have to make sure you do it o. There is no other way,’ Baba Ife warned.
Relief flooded him so quickly his knees almost buckled. ‘That one na small thing, Baba. Please, tell the gods I said thank you o,’ he said, smiling. For the first time since he woke on that cold floor, Senator Ibile felt in control again. He adjusted the borrowed shoulders he now carried and stepped out of the shrine, already planning his return home, to his body.
The plan was simple. Senator Ibile knew his own schedule. By now, Gbenga – inside his body – would have woken up on Egyptian cotton sheets, beside his wife. He would be confused and she would assume he was still sulking over last night’s match.
But, when the hysteria increased and Gbenga started shouting that he was not Ibile, that he was a Danfo driver from Makoko, his wife would panic and call their family doctor. The doctor would insist on a proper evaluation, so they’d have to take Gbenga to the private wing at Maliver Hospital in Lekki Phase 1. That was Senator Ibile’s window of opportunity. All he had to do was get to the hospital and await their arrival. As soon as Gbenga got down from the car, he would give a good look at himself. Easy peasy. Problem solved.
Senator Ibile checked Gbenga’s pockets and found two crumpled notes – one ₦1,000 and one ₦500. He shook his head, but at least he had enough for his commute. He’d board a keke to the nearest bus stop, then a bus to Obalende, and another bus to Lekki Phase 1, and probably still have some change to spare. This nightmare would soon be over. He squirmed as he flagged down a keke along the road. He had not used public transport in fifteen years.
The tricycle was already full, with two sweaty, older men squeezed shoulder to shoulder, and their knees knocking against his. As the keke drove past one of his posters, one of the men hissed. Another turned to the hissing man.
‘Wetin Ibile do you?’ he inquired, then he continued, ‘The man don try.’
‘Try how? Because of ordinary borehole that he did?’ the hissing man asked.
Senator Ibile sank into his seat as the men argued, resisting the urge to clear his throat and correct their statistics. He’d dug three boreholes, not one, though two no longer functioned.
As they approached the main road, the keke driver suddenly swerved into a narrow, sandy path lined with bushes on each side.
‘Young man, why are we going the wrong way?’ Senator Ibile asked.
‘Police dey front,’ the driver said. ‘Dem go seize my keke.’
And then, it hit him. His proposed bill to ban Keke Napeps from major roads two years ago which had recently been passed.
‘We have to restore order on our streets,’ he’d said, while watching police officers set fire to the confiscated vehicles.
‘Are you new in Lagos?’ the hissing man asked, looking at him but Senator Ibile ignored.
‘Oga, please,’ Senator Ibile said, leaning forward. ‘Use the main road so I can quickly catch my bus. I promise you will not enter trouble. Just give me your name and details and I promise you, tomorrow, I will change your life.’
Everyone in the keke burst into laughter. ‘Oshey, commissioner of changing lives.’
Senator Ibile tapped his legs on the floor as the keke bounced through potholes and finally dropped them far from the junction. He jumped down and ran. By the time he got to the nearest bus stop, sweat had soaked through Gbenga’s shirt. He asked a stranger for the time and was told it was midday. One hour had gone. Would he even meet Gbenga at the hospital?
He squeezed into a bus heading towards Obalende with one leg half outside. His mind drifted as the Conductor shouted destinations. What would he do if Gbenga had already left the hospital? He’d built his house in a way that commoners were not allowed to even hover close to his fence without receiving threats of getting their lives wasted.
Suddenly, the bus came to a halt. Senator Ibile looked up and saw the wall of vehicles lined up ahead. He took his hand to his head as he remembered. The President was visiting Lagos today. In fact, he was supposed to be among the people welcoming him, seated in the front row and smiling for the cameras. Instead, here he was.
As the bus crawled forward inch by inch, people’s complaints began to swell. Senator Ibile buried his face in his arms and listened to strangers dissect his and his colleagues’ failures. They spoke ill of the President, of all who were going to welcome him, and threatened violence if they ever met them. Senator Ibile kept his head down.
When the traffic finally loosened, the relief lasted barely five minutes. A few young men appeared between vehicles, knocking on windows, and demanding ‘Transport union tax.’
‘For Senator Ibile,’ one of them said when they got to his bus.
Senator Ibile stared at the boy who looked like he should be in school. He didn’t remember ever asking him, or anyone else, to collect money from drivers in his name. After the young man left, the bus crawled shortly and then the engine coughed and died.
‘You have got to be joking,’ Senator Ibile screamed.
‘Oga calm down, fuel don finish. No be my fault,’ the driver said, wiping sweat from his forehead. He spoke to his conductor about pushing the vehicle, but Senator Ibile could not wait for them to finish their conversation. He got down from the bus and ran as fast as his new legs could carry.
Art by Sunny Efemena
By the time he got to Obalende, he’d already lost another hour and there was no point going to Maliver Hospital. He had to come up with a new plan. He walked hungrily down the road, past posters of his own face smiling above the words, Progress and Continuity 2027, stapled to electric poles. One was fluttering loose in the wind and he stopped, stared at it, then ripped it down.
Senator Ibile staggered into the shade of a kiosk where a woman was selling cold drinks. He bought a bottle of coke and some puff puff and lay under the shade.
‘Madam,’ he said in a thin voice. ‘Abeg, wake me in one hour. I need to rest my head small.’
She nodded absentmindedly and he slept sitting up. When he opened his eyes, the sky was dark, the kiosk was closed, and the woman was gone. Night had come in what seemed like a literal blink of an eye. His heart dropped. He scrambled to the street and begged a stranger for the time. It was nearly 9pm.
‘Blood of Jesus!’ he screamed. How had he slept for so long? Did the woman put something in his puff puff? Was Gbenga’s body such a deep sleeper?
‘Sir, are you okay? Do you want to call someone?’ the stranger asked, looking at him with pity.
‘Yes, yes,’ Senator Ibile said.
As soon as the stranger handed him her phone, he rushed to Google and typed in his name, hoping for any posts or tweets that would give him an inkling of where Gbenga was. Maybe Gbenga would be so freaked out in his body that he’d cause a scene during the President’s welcome. Maybe he’d see where Gbenga was rushed to and await him there.
But what he saw shocked him. There was Gbenga – in his well-tailored blue kaftan – smiling and waving as he cut a ribbon beside the President. Gbenga didn’t seem nearly as stressed as he was. He seemed settled, like he was in the body he was supposed to be in. Senator Ibile couldn’t help but wonder. Had this all been Gbenga’s plan from the beginning? How did he do it? Was Baba Ife in on it? Luckily, Senator Ibile knew what happened during these Presidential visits. They’d have dinner at Eko Hotels afterwards. He would camp out there and wait for Gbenga.
Senator Ibile waved frantically at passing bikes till one of them stopped. The Okada man named a price which felt like robbery because bikes weren’t allowed there. Senator Ibile agreed to pay, hoping to get down and run as soon as the bike slowed down. This new agile body was very fast.
They had barely moved 2 kilometres when a van screeched to a stop ahead of them.
‘Stop there,’ someone said and Senator Ibile’s stomach tightened. This was no time to get kidnapped.
They dragged the Okada man down first.
‘Come, don’t you know that you’re not supposed to be riding Okada here?’ one of the men asked, knocking his rifle against the Okada man’s head.
‘Officer, no vex,’ the Okada man pleaded.
‘Na Yahoo boy you dey carry?’ the officer asked, looking at Senator Ibile.
‘Excuse me?’ Senator Ibile frowned. The audacity of these men—whose salaries he had a hand in—to speak to him that way.
‘Shhhh,’ the Okada man pleaded at Senator Ibile.
‘See this fool,’ the officer said, letting go of the Okada man as he walked towards Senator Ibile.
‘You are the foolish nincompoop. Just because you’re seeing young men, you’ve decided that they are Yahoo…’ Senator Ibile began but a punch landed on his face.
‘E be like say you wan die. Why you dey run your mouth like tap?’ the officer asked.
‘How dare you? Do you know who I am? I am Senator Ibile and you will pay for this. Is this how you harass young…’ he said but the officer pushed him to the ground.
As Senator Ibile looked at the stars while boots landed blows on his body and face, he remembered his days as a Senior Prefect in secondary school, when his interest in politics began. He’d made so much impact he decided to pursue politics when he grew up. He had hoped to change Nigeria one policy at a time, but a few envelopes here, a few fake contracts there, and here he was, getting kicked by officers who were supposed to protect civilians. Officers he wouldn’t have run into if his journey was as smooth as it should have been, as smooth as it would have been if someone better was Senator.
‘Today na your lucky day,’ one of the officers said. ‘We no get time to waste bullet.’
They got into their car and left, and the Okada man fled on his bike. Senator Ibile lay there, surrounded by his blood and tears. The stars in his view began to spin as bystanders surrounded him. Then, he closed his eyes.
When Senator Ibile woke up, everywhere was quiet. He looked around at the blue sheets and health education posters around him. He knew this place, he’d donated those posters. He tried to sit up but someone held him back down.
‘I’m the one that brought you here. You get luck say you still dey breathe,’ the stranger said. ‘Doctor said you should rest small, that they have stopped all the bleeding.’
Senator Ibile looked down at his body covered in bandages. He glanced at the clock in the corner. It was five minutes to midnight.
‘No, I need to get to the private wing. Call the doctor for me. I need to know if Gbe…Senator Ibile is here,’ he pleaded.
Maybe Gbenga hadn’t pulled off impersonating him, and his wife had figured out something was wrong. Maybe she’d asked his guards to bundle him up and keep him here under 24/7 supervision by his doctor. Maybe the gods were still on his side, and everything had led to this moment, so he’d be able to easily look into Gbenga’s eyes.
‘It’s like they really hit your head o,’ the stranger said.
‘My head is fine, just…please, I have to check. There is a chance he’s here,’ Senator Ibile said, trying to get down from the bed.
In the distance, they heard sirens wail and the headlights reflected on their walls as a convoy sped past. The stranger looked out at the flashing lights and brought out his phone.
‘The Senator Ibile you’re looking for is probably inside that car,’ the stranger said, holding up his phone. He showed him the latest tweet from Senator Ibile’s account, complete with pictures of the Senator and the President at Eko Hotels.
Senator Ibile cried as he lay back on the bed. The stranger looked at him in confusion and rushed out to get the doctor. Senator Ibile wailed on. This could not be it. He had to go back to his body and fix all he’d seen today. He had to do all the things he’d once dreamt of doing. Tomorrow, he would return to Baba Ife and plead for the gods to give him another chance. Tomorrow, he’d make things right.
Senator Ibile stared at the clock as his cries subsided. When it struck midnight, he closed his eyes and hoped for another chance.
Uduak-Abasi Ekong is a Manchester-based Nigerian writer whose short fiction is in The Bournemouth Journal, Wensum Literary, Everscribe magazine, Brittle Paper, Ojuju Magazine, and more. She’s the winner of the 2025 Book Edit New Writers’ Prize. Her fiction has been shortlisted/longlisted for the Bath Novel Awards, Penguin Michael Joseph Undiscovered Writers’ Prize, Merky New Writers’ Prize, Oxford Flash Fiction Prize, Writers and Artists Working Class Writers’ Prize, Creative Future Writers’ Award, Mslexia Short Story prize, and Disquiet Literary Fiction Contest. She is a 2026 Smokelong Emerging Writer Fellow and an alumna of Faber Academy’s Getting Started: Beginner’s Fiction Course.
A magnificent ocean cliff stretched for miles on every side. It stood majestic and unmoved as waves, bright, blue and unforgiving, crashed into it. Above the cliff were mansions spread across the length of it; the serene beauty of their expansive manicured grounds forming a perfect counterpoint to the violence of the ocean below. Beneath the mansions and above the waves was the uncommon sight of a boy, barefoot and climbing his way across.
Few things are as attractive to danger as a curious child left unattended. Mwadime, with confidence only a ten-year-old could muster, deftly climbed across the cliff face, without even a scratch from the jagged rocks on his feet. Unknown to his parents, who were always busy, he had done this many times. As soon as Mwadime discovered that most of the houses were empty, the neighbours only visiting for the holidays, the temptation to see what lay beyond his home’s walls had become overwhelmingly irresistible. In Mwadime’s estimation, if there were no adults, there would be little trouble to be had from trespassing. And so sure was he of himself, that the danger of falling never truly occurred to him.
Today, he had a particular house as his destination. It was a towering white building with a large glass dome on top, reflecting the sun for miles, almost like a beacon calling to Mwadime. It had always seemed too far, but he had known that he would have to go there. Everything else he had done had been practice for it. It was to be the grand prize of his excursions. And today, after all this time, he was finally ready.
When he was sure he was at the right location, he climbed upward, peeking over the edge. He did not see any guards or groundsmen as he had found in some of the other houses and sighed with relief. He was too tired to sneak around. He pulled himself up and brushed the dust off his clothes and the neat cornrows on his head. Finally, the smile on his face was almost painfully wide with pride.
Few things are as attractive to danger as a curious child left unattended. Mwadime was right that the danger did not lie in the waves below. He was, however, wrong that it would have lain with adults above. The truest danger lay within the seemingly empty house before him, silent as death, for even the wind dared not approach it.
***
The house was a sight to behold. The coral stone walls, the large, curved windows with accents of mahogany timber and the elaborate carvings on the door gave it a feel of something from another time. Even the reflective glass of the dome atop it all seemed old somehow. It gave the feeling of something that had stood there for centuries yet was preserved and unaffected by the passing of time. But, for all its beauty and strangeness, it did not hold Mwadime’s attention for long. It was hard to blame him, for the grounds irresistibly drew the eyes. They were covered in flower bushes, the rows curving into each other in complex and unreadable patterns.
An explosion of colours – pinks, purples, reds, blues, and yellows – bloomed in endless combinations. Mwadime admittedly knew very little about flowers, but even he could tell many of them did not seem like the kind that could grow in Kwale. The question of who cared for this wondrous garden vaguely crossed his mind, but he was too spellbound to give it much consideration.
One bush in particular stood out to him. The flowers on it were made up of tiny rows of petals that seemed to spiral to the centre. The petals were stark, bloody red in the centre, gradually fading into a delicate pink towards the edges. Mwadime had never seen anything like this flower. He ran his fingers over the petals, and it was soft and powdery. When he pulled his finger away, he felt like it had been vibrating at his touch. Like most things he did, it was impulsive, but he decided to take one home with him. He did not know where he would keep it to protect it from the harsh climb back, but that was a problem for later.
He realised it was a mistake even as he pulled to pluck the flower, but his hand’s motion was already beyond the point of no return. He did not understand why he was filled with a sense of wrongness, a feeling that only grew worse as he held the detached flower in the air. He stood motionless momentarily, then gasped, stepping back, struggling to keep his balance. To his utter horror, the broken stem he had pulled the flower from was dripping with blood.
This is okay, he tried to convince himself. Maybe some flowers just have red liquid inside them.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
What do I know about flowers? He looked at the flower in his hand, which was also bleeding. Don’t be a stupid baby. This is just how this flower is.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
He wanted to believe his justifications, to try to believe that this was something he had never heard of. But he knew, knew it the way he knew his name, this was blood. He put his finger under the broken stem of the flower he held, and the single red drop that fell there almost drove him to tears. Before he could think up a new theory, the flower in his hand twitched and started to scream.
The scream was shrill and piercing, and it felt like a long needle pushing into Mwadime’s ears. The petals on the flower had flared out, revealing an oval-shaped hole that wobbled as it screamed. He tried to drop the thing and found that he could not let it go. A terror unlike anything he had ever felt before engulfed him, and he started to try and shake the flower off, but it only screamed louder. The flowers on the bush he had picked from seemed to turn and face him.
The tears were falling down his face now, and he found that he, too, was screaming. However, he had stopped moving. He stood, frozen in place, afraid to move again.
“Put it back on the stem,” a voice whispered next to him. No, it didn’t whisper; that was too simple a word to capture the true essence of what he heard. The sound was like a soft breeze blowing past his ear, and if it had not shaped words he could understand, he would have been certain that that was what it was.
He turned to see a woman, tall and so thin she was skeletal, standing next to him. A strange fabric was wrapped around her, patterned in shades of blue that danced like waves in the ocean to a wind that only the fabric seemed to catch in the still air. Her face was dark as obsidian; her skin, her lips and even her eyes, which were only discernible because of his reflection in them, were all the same shade. She tilted her bald head impatiently, and with that same breeze of a voice that seemed to only carry to his ears, she said, “Put it back on the stem.”
Mwadime, seeing nothing else to do, reached out and placed the flower back where it had been. It stopped screaming, and the petals retreated to their original position. The other flowers settled back, seemingly appeased by the silence. He found that he could let go now, and he did, but the flower stayed in place as if it had never been anywhere else.
He turned to the woman, finally taking a good look, trying to ascertain how much trouble he was in. She reached out to him, and he flinched, seeing that even her fingernails, long and sharp, were as dark as the rest of her.
“I’m sorry, I…”
“Shhh,” she said with the sound of a wave crashing into the cliff.
“I was just…” she silenced him by placing a hand over his mouth, gripping tightly, nails digging into his cheeks.
“What strange flower is this in my garden? Small and noisy,” Mwandime noticed that while her mouth moved when she talked, the motions seemed entirely different from the words that came out, like she was speaking in a different tongue that he could somehow understand.
She placed a finger on her lips and stared at him as if deep in thought. “We shall have to find the perfect place for you. You will grow bright and strong. I know.”
Mwandime tried to shake away, but he found her grip seemed to affect his entire body. He could not move.
“Yes,” she nodded approvingly. “I know.”
A Precious Land
Chacha stood at the cliff’s edge, covering his eyes as he watched the setting sun, already halfway past the horizon. The ocean dominated the vista in every direction. Calm waves, dark, orange and unbothered, swayed lazily. The fading sun’s light cut a widening line of white across the water, from the horizon to the cliff, but the darker waters around seemed to thin it out and overwhelm it slowly. To Chacha, it looked like the sun was trying to hold on tight to the water as the night dragged it down over the horizon. Behind him, a garden of flowers turned to watch the light’s hopeless battle with the dark.
There are few things as attractive to danger as a curious child left unattended; one of those things is a man with loose morals in his heart and a scheme in his mind. Chacha had been dismayed at the sight of the house and grounds when he had driven up to the property, so well taken care of when he had expected neglect, but he had not let that deter him. Seeing no one, he had climbed over the gate and started exploring. Chacha was, though he would have protested against the appellation, a con man. His speciality was land scams. So, when his contact at the lands registry had sent him the details of this property, with the brief that the only known owner had been dead for over fifty years, with no dependents, it had been too tempting to resist. He had taken off for Kwale at the break of dawn the very next day.
He had walked the entire length and breadth of the five-acre property, assessing everything. The grounds perplexed him, so meticulously taken care of, yet there seemed to be no one on-site.
Who was taking care of it? He stroked his long beard, puzzled.In the end, he decided it did not matter. He was sure the land had no legal claimants from the documents he had seen. A new title deed in the name of a company he controlled, some well-placed bribes and promises to officials and police officers he had in his pocket, and it would be his to sell. The figures were already adding up in his head. He kissed the gold crucifix he always wore and marvelled at his good fortune. The smile on his face was almost painfully wide with expectation.
Chacha was right in believing there lay no danger in law, procedure or on any claims to the land. What he did not know was that the truest danger lay in the breeze he had not felt as he stood over the cliff’s edge. It lay in the gaze of flowers that turned, watching him across the property as he climbed back over the gate and into his car.
***
He had barely started driving when he could not shake the feeling that someone was watching him. He looked back and around, but he saw nothing. He did not know why he was filled with a sense of wrongness, and it only grew as he sped up, trying to escape it.
I’m probably just tired, he tried to convince himself. It’s been a long day.
He wanted to believe this; he tried to blame his weariness, but he knew with the finely honed instincts needed for his profession that something was wrong.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
He turned slightly to see water dripping from his roof down to the fabric of the passenger seat. But how? There had been no rain, and even if there had, how had it penetrated his roof? The car was new.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
The seat next to him was already soaked through. He looked back at the road and slowed down, but when he turned back, a young boy, no more than ten years old, sat next to him. A strange fabric was wrapped around the boy, patterned in shades of orange and yellow that billowed and rippled like the sun glistened ocean at sunset. His face was dark as coal; his skin, his lips and even his eyes, which were only discernible because of his reflection in them, were all the same shade. The darkness was only broken by lines of neat cornrows, white as sea foam.
Art by Sunny Efemena
“Who the hell are you?” he demanded.
The boy only continued to stare at him. That unblinking stare unnerved him, and his hand unconsciously closed around the crucifix around his neck.
“You should not have come,” said the boy with a low whisper that reminded Chacha of putting his ear to a sea shell. “You should not try and take what is not yours.”
Before Chacha could say anything, the boy reached out and grabbed his wrist. Nails, dark and sharp as talons, dug into his skin. Chacha found that he could not move. He saw a sharp curve in the road ahead but could not turn his wheel.
“You will make an ugly flower,” said the boy. “But there is still grace to be found in ugliness for those who know how to look. This, I know.”
Tears of frustration found Chacha’s eyes as he desperately tried to break the grip and take control of the car. His foot felt heavy, disobeying his instruction and stepping harder on the accelerator.
“Yes,” said the boy as the car left the road; Chacha screamed as they ran over an uneven mound of soil. “I know.”
A Morning Sail
Muthama sat in a fisherman’s boat, staring at the sun rising over the magnificent ocean cliff before him. The dawn sky was shaded in hues of blue, pink and a delicate purple that reflected across the sea beneath him. The water was calm, almost still, and the waves seemed little more than large ripples sliding past. He sat in a boat with Bahati, the fisherman, as it floated on the edge of the cliff’s shadow, the demarcation between light and shade so sharp and stark it seemed they were caught between two worlds: the gentle tide slowly but surely, pulling them into the shadows.
There are few things as attractive to danger as a curious child left unattended; one of those things is a man desperately searching for truth. For almost a month now, Muthama had been trying to get footage of the infamous estate in Kwale that many called Billionaires Row. He had gone to great lengths chasing the opportunity, and until this moment, it had seemed like a futile quest.
The news of two disappearances in this area over the last year, a child and a known scam artist, had pricked at Muthama’s journalistic instincts. His initial reaction had been to dismiss the coverage as sensationalism, only a story because it happened among the rich, but something about it seemed off to him. Something under the surface of the story called to him, demanding he find the answers. Unable to ignore the matter, his research revealed a pattern of barely noticed disappearances in the surrounding area that went back decades.
He had chipped away at the mystery for many nights, trying to make sense of it. Was it human trafficking? Organ harvesting? A serial killer? Ultimately, he decided to survey the area himself; perhaps a clue would be revealed. Throughout his career, he’d found that being on the ground, even when he found no new information, always set his sails toward the answer. Getting there, however, had proved more challenging than he had expected.
The increased media attention in the previously quiet neighbourhood had security and police on the lookout for strangers with cameras. They were overzealous in their responsibilities to protect the privacy of the area. He had already been arrested twice during his mission, and the bribes required for his release had not been cheap. Worse, his boss was getting impatient, telling him to give up the story; still, he was determined to get to the bottom of this.
A chance encounter with Bahati, a fisherman who frequented his hotel offering boat rides, had given him the lifeline he sought. Bahati was intimately familiar with Billionaire’s Row and suggested that he needed to approach by sea if the road was impossible. No patrols were in this area; even if they were noticed, they would have plenty of time to escape. It was still dangerous, but the opportunity had proved too tempting for Muthama to resist.
Muthama fiddled with the controls of his drone, engulfed by impatience now that his goal was so close.
“Mkubwa,” said Bahati, clearly uncomfortable with the silence, “that thing will not help, haiwezi kusidia.”
“What makes you say that, Bahati?”
“Hii kitu…” Bahati shrugged. “This thing is more than scientific, jibu hapa ni kienyeji. Everybody knows majini stay here. They did this thing you are trying to study.”
“Is that so?” Muthama did not believe in the ubiquitous stories of djinn along the Kenyan coast and had found the superstition tedious in his investigation. But, as Bahati was his ride, he felt the need to indulge him.
“Nyie watu wa bara…” Bahati laughed at his city scepticism, “I have been fishing here for 20 years. I know what happens. There are Majini here. Everybody knows. Hawa matajiri wamefanya mikataba za kishetani au wana maadui wengi. No big secret.”
“Well, I believe there is a reasonable explanation. That’s what I am here to find.”
“Hebu niambie, maji yaliingia kwenye gari vipi?” Bahati pressed.
Tell me, how did water get into the car?
The conman’s case was one of the stranger ones. His body had never been found, but his car had been discovered overturned and empty, except for the fact that it had been flooded. Nobody seemed able to explain where all that water had come from. Mainly because the water had only been in the cabin, and the car’s exterior had been bone dry.
“Umeona sasa?” Bahati declared triumphantly at his silence. “Many people disappear; the majini here are very strong.”
To avoid further conversation, Muthama nodded and started up his drone. The loud buzz it made silenced Bahati as it flew over their heads and up the cliff. Muthama watched the screen as the view rose from the shadows, revealing the beautiful landscape.
He slowly panned the drone across, recording house after beautiful house. He did not see anything that told a story, but these things were never immediate; he knew something would reveal itself on further study. The fact that he was getting the footage was enough. Muthama could not hide the glee from his face, a smile cutting across it so wide that it was almost painful.
A burst of colour in one of the compounds caught his eye, but he couldn’t quite make it out. He considered for a moment if it was safe to dip low and get a better look and decided to do it. The worst was that they caught the drone, which he did not think was likely. He guided the drone lower and focused on that property.
“How does it look?” Bahati finally said, overcome with curiosity.
“Stunning!”
The colour became defined as the drone hovered over, and he made out flowers. Hundreds of them. The bushes curved in what seemed to him like a symbol from Arabic writing. He made a mental note to research what it meant. The clearer the scene got, the more confused Muthama became. The flowers were beautiful, but he had never seen anything like them at the coast. Against his better judgment, he guided the drone lower.
The myriad colours — pinks, purples, reds, blues, and yellows — bloomed in endless combinations, revealing themselves into clear forms. Muthama felt himself overcome with a sense of wrongness that he could not shake off. He had grown up on a flower farm and was well versed in the field, but for his life, he could not identify even a single one of the flowers.
“This is so strange,” he said to himself, “I’ve never seen flowers like this.”
“Flowers?”
“Yes, one of these houses has a garden of them.”
“That is not good, Mkubwa,” Bahati was alarmed. “They say Majini like flowers.”
Muthama scoffed and ignored him. Muthama had no way of knowing, but he was wrong to ignore Bahati. He was wrong that there lay no danger in djinn. That was where the truest danger, the greatest one, lay.
Suddenly, the screen buzzed and went black and unresponsive. Had he taken the drone too far out of the range? No. The drone would have warned him. And failing that, it would have started returning to the boat. He tapped the screen and turned the device over.
“What the hell is going on?”
“What is it?” Bahati’s panic was palpable.
“The controller. It’s…wet.” The entire back of the device was covered in water droplets.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Maybe water splashed on it, and I was too engrossed to notice. Muthama tried to convince himself. That must be it.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
He wanted to believe that a rogue wave had splashed onto the screen, but he knew with the finely honed instincts needed for his profession that something was wrong. The screen flickered back to life, and an image filled the screen. He studied it, trying to decipher what he was seeing.
“Jini,” wailed Bahati, just as Muthama realised what he was looking at. The screen showed an image of the back of his head.
He turned alarmed, and a man sat in the boat with them. He sat calmly, the drone resting on his lap. A strange fabric was wrapped around him, patterned in shades of pink and purple, fluttering gently with the breeze. His face was dark as a moonless night; his skin, his lips and even his eyes — which were only discernible because of his reflection in them — were all the same shade. The darkness was only broken by a gold crucifix around his neck and his beard, white as Kwale sand.
Bahati looked as if he was ready to jump over the side of the boat and take his chances, but he was stuck in place. The man turned to Bahati and turned his head quizzically. Muthama did not understand the words the thing spoke, but Bahati heard him loud and clear. You should know better than to be here.
Bahati wailed, curling into a ball on the boat’s floor in an attempt to prostrate himself before the thing. He stuttered with desperate apologies, but it ignored him, turning back to Muthama. Under that gaze, his lifelong disdain for superstition shattered in a moment. The creature gently picked his drone from its lap and dropped it into the ocean. With a movement almost faster than he could see, it stood with a grace that did not upset the boat, whipping its hand forward and wrapping fingers around Muthama’s throat. He could feel pricks of pain in his flesh.
“A curious flower,” the man-thing whispered with the sound of shuffling sand on the beach. “Yes, this will be a fine addition. Persistent and tenacious, this I know.”
Muthama managed to grab its wrist, but his energy failed as soon as he did it. He could not fight his way free.
“Please…” he begged, “Please.”
“Yes,” the thing said with a nod. Muthama noticed that the boat was filling with water, but he could not tell where it was coming from. “I know.”
A Gift of Flowers
The moon, bright and full, fought for her space against a cloudy night sky. Gusts of wind howled across the ocean, propelling waves with them in eruptions and crashes, turbulent and unforgiving. The mother of flowers flew around the house on the cliff with the lines of her wavecloth, black, blue and white, thrashing behind her, matching the ocean’s fury. She weaved in and out of the light beams and shadows among her flower bushes. She wore the skin of a man this night, not that any would have seen her if they looked.
The flowers in her garden trembled with anticipation, excited by the winds; they knew it was time. She hovered above them, calling to them, her flowers, her children. Her voice carried over them, bold as the breaking of waves. The flowers swayed and called back, like the tinkle of little bells. Across the garden, the flowers released an invisible dust into the wind. This was her art; this was her call.
Like a flower could attract insects with its scent, her call would travel far and wide and draw her prey to her. It worked best with the curious, the greedy and the obsessed. It latched on to these things, growing them, tending them, and aiming them in a particular direction until they could no longer be denied. It tamped down their fear and reason the closer they got, until it was too late.
The Mother of Flowers was not a malicious creature; she simply acted according to her nature. She needed bodies to survive in this world, and so she took them. They didn’t last long; her life force burned through them too quickly, but she didn’t kill them. She simply turned their spirit into one of her flowers. Flowers that represented the essence, the true nature of a person, better than any human body could ever aspire to; this, she knew.
She was Djinn to the core of her essence, but she was also a mother in the end. She believed that children deserved to stay close to their mothers. This was why Mwandime’s mother had found flowers at her doorstep, lying in a puddle of water, days after he disappeared: turquoise jade flowers with tiny petals. She had not known why the flowers had given her such comfort, why they seemed so familiar, even if she had never seen the kind, why she had felt compelled to keep them. The flowers were strange, like tiny ten pointed stars, nestled in an intricate nest of bracts. They seemed to hum when the wind grew strong, always leaning towards the ocean, no matter which way the wind blew.
Chacha’s mother had also found flowers at her home with large, spreading petals of different shades of brown, speckled patterns and a striking gold-flecked throat. They were hideous, with a strange texture, fuzzy and powdery, and dust that came off; they seemed more like spread-out, hairy moth wings. Still, she found that she loved them with an irrational fervour.
Muthama’s mother had cried when she held her flowers without knowing why. Their large petals rose and drooped, a warm peachy-coral at the centre blending into a vivid orange, vibrant with the intensity of flames towards the drooped tips. Two stalks rose from the centre of the flower, and anyone who saw them would say they looked like they watched everything.
The flowers the mothers received never seemed to wilt or wither, even if they were not watered. They stayed as fresh as the day they arrived.
The Mother of Flowers did not kill. More than that, she never let a body burn out completely. When she was done with one, she simply left it and put the spirit back – this was when the flowers died, when the disappeared would return.
Many spoke of the day when their loved ones vanished, but few told anyone about their return. Always older, sometimes much older than their time away could explain. The mothers could always tell it was them by their scent, the smell of the flowers they had cherished in their absence.
Though the families never said anything, neighbours whispered about Mwadime, Chacha and Muthama, the strange old men no one seemed to know. In their different neighbourhoods, the same topics dominated the conversation: how they smelled of sea and flowers, how, if you looked at them from the corner of your eye, light and shadow seemed to warp around them, how they rarely spoke, and when they did, it was only in strange whispers.
The three old men avoided heights and the ocean and seemed averse to the sound of dripping water. On starless nights with a full moon, they seemed to stare into the sky, feet rooted to the ground and swaying like blossoms, waiting for something. Waiting with an earnest, terrible patience that no passersby could have understood, for the Mother of Flowers to come back for them.
Kevin Rigathi is a Kenyan speculative fiction writer based in Nairobi. Over the years, a near addiction for creating things has seen him don multiple hats as a writer, digital artist, software developer, sound editor and podcaster. His work has appeared in Will This Be A Problem? And Ojuju Magazine.
There is a particular scene in Lionheart – Genevieve Nnaji’s 2018 film, Nigeria’s first submission to the Academy Awards for Best International Feature – that has nothing to do with its plot and everything to do with what Nigerian storytelling is quietly doing to itself. A man in a village square is telling a story. He is not telling it to move the plot forward. He is telling it because stories, in that square, in that tradition, are the thing that holds a community together before and after everything else. The film is, on its surface, a corporate drama. But underneath it runs this older current: the sense that the world being depicted has a cosmology, a memory, a set of beliefs about what the living owe the dead and what the land owes the people who name it.
That undercurrent is what African speculative fiction has been excavating, with increasing urgency and increasing craft, for the past two decades. And the argument this essay wants to make is a specific one: the African imagination was never lost. It was suppressed, deliberately and systematically, and it is now returning – not as nostalgia, not as ethnic cosplay, but as a rigorous, politically alive, formally ambitious body of work that is reshaping what science fiction, fantasy, and speculative literature can do and say.
The Suppression Was Not Metaphorical
To talk about the return of the African imagination, we have to first be honest about what its suppression looked like, and resist the temptation to make it abstract.
The colonial project was, among many other things, an epistemological project. It did not only extract resources and redraw borders; it worked to delegitimise entire systems of knowing. Oral tradition was reframed as illiteracy. Animism was reframed as superstition. The cosmologies of the Yoruba, the Igbo, the Akan, the Zulu – systems that had, for centuries, offered coherent accounts of creation, justice, time, and the relationship between the human and the divine – were reclassified as folklore at best, devil worship at worst. The reclassification was not casual. It was enforced through missionary schools, colonial administration, and a publishing infrastructure that decided what counted as literature and what counted as legend.
What this did to the imagination of a continent was not merely cultural. It was structural. If your creation myths are primitive, then your visions of the future will be, too. If your gods are superstition, then any story that takes those gods seriously is not serious literature, it is genre at best, embarrassment at worst.
Speculative fiction, in the African context, is the literature that refused that reclassification.
Nnedi Okorafor and the Naming of a Genre
In 2019, Nnedi Okorafor – the Nigerian-American writer whose work spans science fiction, fantasy, and everything that falls between and beyond those categories – published an essay distinguishing Africanfuturism from Afrofuturism. The distinction matters enormously.
Afrofuturism, as a concept, emerged primarily from the African diaspora in America. It is a vital and politically necessary tradition – one that takes the trauma of the Middle Passage as its originating rupture and imagines what Black life, culture, and futurity look like on the other side of that break. Sun Ra’s cosmic jazz, Octavia Butler’s fiction, Parliament-Funkadelic’s mythology, and Black Panther‘s screen mythology: these are Afrofuturist touchstones, and their preoccupation is with Blackness as it was forged in the crucible of American racism, slavery, and resistance.
Africanfuturism, as Okorafor defines it, is rooted specifically in Africa – in African history, African cosmologies, African futures as imagined from the continent itself rather than from the diaspora’s relationship to the West. Where Afrofuturism often negotiates with American culture even as it critiques it, Africanfuturism does not centre the West at all. The West is not the reference point. Africa is.
This is not a hierarchical distinction – it is a geographic and political one, and it opens up a different set of questions. What does a technological future look like when its foundation is Igbo ontology rather than Silicon Valley? What does space travel mean when the cosmonauts carry the memory of Sango’s lightning rather than NASA’s Cold War mythology? What does an apocalypse look like when it is understood through the Yoruba concept of ajogun – the forces of adversity, the warriors of misfortune – rather than through the Book of Revelation?
Okorafor’s own fiction — Who Fears Death, Binti, Lagoon — performs these questions rather than merely posing them. Lagoon, set in Lagos, begins with an alien arrival that the city absorbs not with panic but with the particular, exhausted pragmatism of a place that has survived colonialism, military dictatorship, and traffic on the Third Mainland Bridge. Lagos, in that novel, is not a backdrop. It is a character with its own intelligence, its own relationship to the strange, its own rules. The speculative element does not descend onto Africa from the outside. It rises from inside it.
Yoruba Time and the Problem of Linearity
One of the recurring formal problems of Western speculative fiction is its relationship to time. The genre – especially science fiction, is structured around a linear model: there is the present, there is the future extrapolated from it, and the narrative moves forward along that axis. Even dystopias are linear. Even apocalypses have a before and an after.
Yoruba cosmology does not work this way.
In Yoruba thought, time is not a straight line but a cycle, or more precisely; a spiral. The dead are not simply gone; they are present, watchful, capable of intervention. The Egungun masquerade is not a symbolic gesture toward the ancestors; it is, within the tradition’s own logic, an actual visitation. Ori – the personal spiritual essence that each individual carries, selected before birth – means that identity is not merely a social construction but a metaphysical one, chosen in a realm that precedes the physical world and persists beyond it.
What happens when speculative fiction is built on this architecture rather than a Western one?
Art by Sunny Efemena
You get narratives where the future and the past are not opposites but are in conversation, where an ancestor’s decision reverberates into a great-grandchild’s present, not as metaphor but as causal fact. You get protagonists whose interiority includes a relationship with Orun – the spiritual realm – that is neither supernatural horror nor cheap magic but simply the texture of a world that was always understood to have more dimensions than the visible ones.
You also get a very different relationship to prophecy. In the Western speculative tradition, prophecy is often a plot device – something to be fulfilled or subverted, a tension-generator. In Yoruba narrative tradition, Ifa divination is not a prophecy system but a consultation system. You do not receive a fixed future; you receive a reading of your situation, drawn from a vast oral corpus of odu – narrative precedents – that your trained interpreter matches to your circumstances. The future is not determined. It is negotiated. You have agency, at least in principle. You can make the right sacrifices, take the right actions, alter the trajectory.
That is a fundamentally different model of destiny than the one that structures most Western science fiction, and it produces fundamentally different narratives.
Nollywood as Speculative Infrastructure
Any serious account of African speculative imagination has to contend with Nollywood – not the prestige art film circuit, but the vast, prolific, formally anarchic popular cinema that has been producing speculative content since the early 1990s with almost no critical recognition.
The early Nollywood canon is saturated with what we would now call speculative elements: occult power, shapeshifting, divine intervention, the permeability of the boundary between the living and the dead. Critics – particularly Western critics, tended to read this as naivety, as a cinema that hadn’t yet learned to separate realism from superstition. That reading was wrong. It was, more precisely, a failure to recognise a different cosmological framework operating at full confidence.
When a Nollywood film of the 1990s depicts a man making a covenant with a water spirit in exchange for wealth, it is not being primitive. It is working from a worldview in which such covenants are understood to be real, consequential, and structurally embedded in how power and prosperity circulate. The drama is not whether the supernatural is real – that question is settled – but what it costs, what it demands, and whether the human being at the centre of it has the moral resources to navigate the exchange.
This is speculative fiction. It is using the non-real, or the differently real, to examine questions about power, greed, community, and consequence that are urgently, materially present. The fact that it did not emerge from a university creative writing programme or a major publishing house does not make it less sophisticated. It makes it more important, because it demonstrates that the African speculative imagination did not wait for institutional permission to exist.
What contemporary African speculative fiction is doing, in part, is bringing critical language and formal rigour to an imaginative tradition that Nollywood, in its chaotic, brilliant, underfunded way, kept alive.
The Middle Passage as Speculative Rupture
The diaspora question cannot be avoided, even in an essay that is writing from the continent.
The Middle Passage, the forced transportation of millions of Africans across the Atlantic, was not only a historical atrocity. It was a speculative event, in the most brutal possible sense: it created a population of people for whom the past had been violently severed, for whom origin was not a stable fact but a wound, and for whom the future had to be imagined anew, without the cosmological infrastructure that had scaffolded the imagination and knowledge of their ancestors.
Afrofuturism is, in part, a response to that severance, an attempt to reconstruct African futures from the material available after the break. And its most ambitious works ask a question that is deeply speculative: what if the rupture had not happened? What would African civilizations look like now, on their own developmental trajectory, without four centuries of extraction and disruption?
Black Panther – the Marvel film, yes, but also the decades of comic-book mythology it draws from – is a sustained attempt to answer that question. Wakanda is not a utopia exactly; it is a thought experiment. It is Africa-that-was-never-colonised, Africa-whose-technology-evolved-from-within, Africa-that-had-the-luxury-of-being-left-alone. That it resonated as powerfully as it did, across the continent and across the diaspora, says something about the depth of the hunger for exactly that imagining.
But the continent and the diaspora are not the same project, even when they share a longing. The African writer on the continent is not writing from rupture. She is writing from continuity – however interrupted, however damaged, however complicated by the colonial period and its aftershocks. She has access, even if partial, to living traditions, to languages that carry cosmological weight, to communities that still practice these traditions – a continuity that is real, if uneven, and not neatly confined to the continent: Ifa is kept alive in Bahia and Havana too, sometimes with a freedom that parts of Yorubaland itself no longer have.
That access is both a gift and a responsibility. It means that African speculative fiction from the continent has an obligation to those traditions – not to preserve them in amber, but to think with them, argue with them, push them into new shapes and new futures while remaining accountable to what they actually mean.
What the Return Looks Like
The return of the African imagination is not a single movement with a manifesto. It is a proliferation – of writers, of publishers, of magazines, of conversations. Omenana itself is evidence of it: a speculative fiction magazine dedicated specifically to African stories and writers of African heritage, operating from the conviction that the genre has both room and need for these voices.
What characterizes the best of this work is not the presence of African settings or African characters – though those matter, but a deeper formal shift: the willingness to let African epistemologies structure the story rather than merely decorate it. The difference between a story set in Lagos that uses Yoruba mythology as window dressing, and a story whose entire logic, its sense of cause and effect, its model of identity, its understanding of what a person owes and is owed, is built from Yoruba thought: that difference is the difference between representation and imagination. One borrows the symbols. The other borrows the logic.
The stakes are not only literary. Speculative fiction is, at its best, a rehearsal space for futures. It allows a culture to ask, in the relatively low-stakes environment of narrative: what do we want? What are we afraid of? What does justice look like? What does it cost? A continent that cannot imagine its own future, on its own terms, from its own traditions, in its own languages and forms, is a continent that has ceded that future to someone else’s imagination.
African speculative fiction is the refusal of that cession. It is the insistence that the future is not a Western invention, that technology is not inherently Eurocentric, that the question of what comes next belongs to everyone who will live in it.
The imagination was never lost. It was waiting, as Oya waits at the edge of the storm; patient, gathering force, knowing that the wind will turn.
Bio
Oluwanifemi Bakare is a Nigerian writer currently in school. His work investigates the human condition with a strange and particular eye — drawn to the absurd, the overlooked, and the things people do when they think no one is watching. He writes fiction, essays, and the occasional thing that refuses to be either. He loves films and the filmmaking process with an embarrassing sincerity. His work has appeared in Claudine, Afreada, and Akpata Magazine.
Sbane wakes with mud in her mouth on the forest floor.
The taste of wet soil and metal clings to her tongue. Her cheek presses against the little stones underneath, sharp and cold. For a moment she doesn’t move. The world tilts slightly, unsteady as her thoughts.
She does not remember coming here – only that it is the second time this week, and again, a strange woman wearing colourful ibhayi watches her from a distance.
The storm has already passed. Old rain drips through the branches above, landing on her face in patient drops. Only the smell lingers, sharp and electric, like the air right after lightning tears through the sky.
Sbane pushes herself upright. Her palms are coated in dark mud, packed thick beneath her nails, as though she has been digging for something the ground refuses to release. The trees around her form a small congregation, a patch of stubborn green fighting for a chance to loom over her while she is unconscious. She wipes the mud from her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing it on her damp pyjama pants.
Her eyes meet Mila’s – her charcoal dog, ears pinned, body tense. The dog doesn’t move, only stares at her and something a few paces away.
Mila hadn’t always been hers. The dog appeared the first night Sbane woke in the forest, like this, year ago, a shaking scrap of fur curled against her ribs in dawn’s cold mist. Sbane had taken her home because leaving her there felt wrong, not that she had a choice. The determined thing led a limping Sbane to her own home as if she’d lived there in a past life. For the first time in her life, something had chosen her willingly. It didn’t matter that the dog was an orphan as she was.
“Mila,” she murmurs. The dog doesn’t respond. Her white-tipped tail is tucked between her legs. Sbane exhales sharply. She must do something before she ends up in danger Mila cannot prevent.
She traces her steps to the nearest street. Rain-soaked asphalt gleams under dim streetlights. Her wrist watch chimes softly, cutting through the silence. Three hours. She has three hours to clean up, get to work, and act as though nothing happened, like she slept on a comfy mattress like a normal person and not one of moss and confusion.
The caseworker’s warning echoes in her mind:
“You’re a lovely girl. But this is your last job placement. I can’t help you after this.”
Sbane had only nodded, knowing nothing she could say about the constant nightmares or waking up in the forest could ever make sense.
Her thoughts drift, unbidden, to her parents. Maybe that’s why they gave her up and left her in an infant safety box with clothes and a yellowed letter. She remembers tracing the shaky handwriting on the letter: “You carry a gift. Protect it. Fear will find you if you forget.”
Perhaps she was too loud, too demanding, too… something.
The warm water of her shower does little to soothe the ache inside her chest. Her scar, faint and branching a miniature lightning tree across her collarbone – like the Lichtenburg mark one gets after being struck by lightning – itches. She presses a finger against it, as if feeling it might make sense of the unease crawling under her skin.
***
By morning, the city has swallowed the storm. Traffic returns. Buses sigh at corners, receiving the same people it carries daily. People scurry beneath damp skies with coffee cups warm in their hands. She spots the ibayi-wearing woman again, across the street this time. Her attire sways in the quiet draft. Sbane swears she sees the woman’s mouth curl to say her name. A damn bus passes between them and the woman disappears before Sbane can confront her. Her shoulders slump and she continues the commute to work.
“Morning, Omuhle,” Sbane greets the receptionist at the veterinary clinic where she works.
“Mila!” Omuhle chirps, crouching to scratch behind Mila’s ears. “And Sbane, I guess.” Omuhle sighs dramatically. Sbane has long stopped trying to coax Mila to stay home. The dog prefers watching over her. In the clinic’s small daycare space, Mila is content.
The day passes in quiet routine—injuries are patched, anxious pets soothed, and bills filed. Sbane moves through it like a shadow, occasionally joining in conversation, careful to appear normal. But even in the mundane, she dreads going home, the nighttime and the sunrise that will catch her digging in the forest again.
Mila’s growl gurgles in her throat. The bell over the clinic door chimes. Goosebumps rupture on Sbane’s skin, giving way for the hairs on the back of her neck to stand.
His aura enters first – enchanting, alluring, dangerous – obsidian locks complementing his skin. He is mesmerising, unsettling with an easy smile that somehow doesn’t reach his eyes.
He carries a Maine coon cat in a large carrier, its fur rivalling the hue of its owner’s hair. Something about the air around him shifts – just a flicker, like the way electricity hangs before a storm breaks.
Mila steps forward, growling deeper, pressing herself between Sbane and the man. Sbane crouches to restrain the dog.
“It’s fine, sisi,” she soothes. The man glances down at Mila and his lips curve into a faint, amused smile.
“She really doesn’t like me,” he says softly.
Sbane straightens, tucking her braid back into her bun.
“She likes everyone,” she replies. Mila huffs. “Usually.”
He glances around the clinic. His eyes, dark and sharp, flick briefly to her face then, lower. They linger just long enough to make her pulse quicken.
Sbane clears her throat. “How can we help?”
“This guy found my mother’s incense suddenly irresistible after ignoring it for years,” he says.
“Perhaps he suspects his affliction is more spiritual than physical,” Sbane adds with light laughter.
“Anyone around my mother for as long as he has would surely suspect the same.” He sighs. Sbane nods, curiosity sparking despite herself. She studies him, noticing the way he moves with casual confidence, yet there’s something restrained.
Omuhle takes the cat into the examination room while Sbane deals with the admin.
“He lives with you?” she asks,
“Not exactly,” he says. “He spends most of his time in my mother’s shop downtown.
“I can’t say I’ve heard of a shop downtown that sells incense,” she admits.
“It’s a hole in the wall that appears only to those it calls.” His tone darkens for a split second, so faintly Sbane thinks she misheard it.
She’s distracted when lightning flashes somewhere beyond the city, a distant rumble following seconds later. Sbane’s breath catches. A searing pain roots from her lower back folding her onto the counter. The fluorescent overhead lights flicker and stop suddenly.
“Are you alright?” The man steadies her, a gush of warmth from his hands dulls the stabbing pain.
Sbane nods, and when she catches her breath replies, “I’m fine.”
His cat is brought out and Doctor Uyazi updates the man on the diagnosis. Sbane is so focused on hiding her pain that their voices sound distant and muddled, until his cuts through the noise.
“You should come visit sometime, Sbane.” He doesn’t look back, only leaves a command disguised as an invitation.
***
Sbane soldiers on until just after lunch. She leaves work early, unable to stand the sharp pain across her back any longer.
The afternoon sun slants through wet city streets, golden and sharp, but Sbane barely notices. Her thoughts linger on the man from the clinic. The glint in his eye, how he knew her name even though she never told him, how she didn’t know his, and the subtle current of energy she felt around him.
She shakes her head when she realises she was smiling alone like a madman.
“Wenzani Sbanesihle?” she asks, reprimanding herself.
A narrow street she’s never walked before catches her attention. At its end is a shop that looks older than the city itself. A sign lures the curious girl into its fold.
IMBEWU YE SBANI
The Seed of Lightning
The letters are carved with care, Ndebele patterns cutting the edges. Something in her chest tightens. She doesn’t know why she feels drawn here, only that she does. Mila growls before she steps onto the cracked pavement. Sbane kneels, brushing her hand over the dog’s head.
“We’re just looking.” She negotiates, but Mila whines and pulls at her leash. She sits at the door refusing to enter the shop and rounds her eyes begging Sbane not to either, but she relents, hopelessly powerless to the treats she’s bribed with.
Sbane’s back pain hikes then disappears as soon as she steps in. She sighs audibly in relief, prepackaged for her alone.
The shop smells of dust, cedar, and something even imphepho cannot mask. Shelves are packed with hand-carved masks, beaded cowrie necklaces, wooden figurines, and glass jars filled with colourful grains and coarse salts she can’t identify. Each item breathes faintly, charging the air with mystery and a dare.
A middle-aged woman emerges from behind a curtain draped in dark, layered cloth, dreadlocks heavy with beads and shells, her presence carrying the quiet menace of something ancient. Her breath smells of something metallic that makes Sbane’s stomach tighten.
“Welcome, Sbanesihle,” she says, voice smooth as river stone. “I’ve been expecting you.”
Sbane freezes. Expecting her?
“I—” she begins, but Mila growls again, a low warning rumble that shakes Sbane’s chest. The dog refuses to move forward.
The woman’s eyes flick down to Mila, disgusted almost, and then back to Sbane. A thin smile curves her lips.
“Animals sense what humans cannot. The artefacts in here hold history that might be confusing your dog.”
“I was… invited.” She offers weakly after an awkward silence.
“Yes.” the woman nods slowly.
Sbane swallows. She is aware of every nerve, every flicker of electricity in the air.
A long glass vitrine standing beneath a narrow beam of light near the back wall calls to her. Inside, someone had arranged a careful nest of twigs, half-charred feathers, and blackened grass. At its centre sits a smooth, deliberate hollow. The expectant nest could have cradled an egg the size of a small melon, something heavy enough to demand its own shrine. For a moment Sbane has the strange feeling that the nest wasn’t empty at all. It was…waiting.
She glances around uncomfortably and notices a small amulet hanging on a carved wooden stand. The amulet has a bird etched into it, wings spread mid-flight, lightning streaking across its body, the head like an elongated hammerhead.
Compelled, she reaches toward it, and the shop seems to pulse in response. The lights falter, and somewhere above the city, distant thunder answers. Her fingers brush the carving. The instant she does, a jolt ripples through her chest, warm and sharp, as though the storm itself has followed her inside.
The woman watches, expression unreadable. “I see you’ve been drawn to the uThekwane amulet,” she says softly.“uThekwane?” Sbane questions.
“The nest behind you once held an egg of the lightning bird. It was taken before it could hatch.” Her smile thinned. “But storms have a way of returning what belongs to them.”
“I’ve never heard of this.” She answers, intrigued.
Art by Sunny Efemena
“In Nguni mythology lives a bird called uThekwane, a lightning bird, born of storm and ancestral presence. A human-sized bird of immense power that has the authority to cause thunder and command lightning and great disasters. Depending on which version you hear, of course. It can even shapeshift. Blood thirsty, misunderstood, shunned. A gift to some and a curse to others.”
Sbane pulls her hand back, heart racing. She looks at Mila, who is pressed against her legs, teeth bared.
A shadow moves behind a shelf, and the man from the vet shop steps forward, carrying a bundle of items for the shop. His eyes meet hers, dark and unreadable, yet in them flickers something familiar – something that makes the hair on her arms stand on end.
“You made it.” His sentence sounds like it should continue. Thunder cracks above the roof and Sbane jumps. This time, Mila goes haywire, torn between dragging her stubborn owner out and barking at the strange people in front of her. If only she could speak.
The woman laughs, slowly. “It’s only thunder, child.”
“MaNgozi, you’re scaring her.” the man whispers. She waves him off.
“She’ll find out sooner than later, Mpiyezulu.”
Sbane wants to ask what she means, but the words die in her throat. Mila growls again, louder now, warning her against something she cannot name.
Sbane’s pulse races. She looks at the amulet again. The bird seems alive somehow, wings spread, lightning frozen mid-strike. She feels it in her chest—the same tremor she has carried since the first forest. She turns to leave, hand gripping Mila’s leash tightly. She needs to get out of here.
Mpiyezulu catches up to her as she crosses the street. “I’m sorry. I should have warned you about my mother.” He confesses.
“She’s certainly… eccentric.” It’s the kindest word she can muster.
“Please let me take you out for coffee. My treat,” he says abruptly, as if his words caught him off guard.
“You don’t have to—” she says.
“I want to. If that’s okay with you, and Mila of course,” Sbane laughs lightly.
Say no. Say no. She thinks.
“Sure. Tomorrow though.” She says instead. He smiles triumphantly and walks back to the shop.
Sbane’s smile still lingers until she catches sight of his mother watching from the shop window. The old woman waves eerily. The storm humming faintly between them feels almost like recognition – like the world itself is aware of something Sbane is not.
That night, Sbane sleeps – or tries to. Rain drums lightly against her apartment window, a soft staccato that is almost comforting. But her dreams reject peace and drag her down along with them.
They condemn her to the forest again, though the trees here are taller, darker, their branches clawing at the sky. The air smells of fire and wet soil. She cannot remember how she arrived, only that the storm waits. Above her, two birds circle in the low-hanging clouds. One gleams amber, the colour of sunset, its wings crackling with soft, warm lightning. The other is dark as storm clouds, feathers jagged, and streaks of white fire flare along its wings. They scream at each other, talons bared, beaks snapping, wings slicing through the rain-soaked air.
Sbane feels her chest tighten as the pulse of the storm merges with her heartbeat. She raises her arms instinctively, as though she could catch them, hold them, and make them still. But the storm does not obey. She opens her mouth to call, and instead a low, miserable sound slips out – it is neither her voice nor entirely the birds’ voices. Electricity ripples along her skin, along the scar across her collarbone. The indigo bird flinches, and the amber one glows brighter.
A whisper threads through the wind, familiar yet alien: “You’re in danger, mntanami.”
Sbane wakes in her bed, drenched in sweat. The hum in her chest lingers, insistent, as if the storm followed her into the room. Mila is at the foot of her bed staring at something in the open window, alert, ears raised. The dog barks, more wolf-like as if speaking to the thing, warning. Whatever it is, it takes off, leaving black feathers, streaked with blood.
***
Over the next few weeks, Mpiyezulu appears everywhere – outside the clinic, in quiet cafés, at street corners where the air smelled faintly of rain. Sbane feels at ease with him. But Mila is never too far from her, occasionally huffing should the man touch Sbane. She tells him her story: how she was abandoned with nothing but a bundle of clothes, a branching scar, and a hollow place inside her no relationship has ever managed to fill. In return, he listens carefully, asking questions that feel thoughtful… and sometimes a little too precise. One afternoon he presses the uThekwane amulet into her palm, saying his mother insisted she should have it.
For a while, it almost feels easy. Until the night he asks her to walk with him.
The forest greets them with the smell of rain. Mila paces restlessly beside Sbane, ears pinned, stance wide, hackles raised. Mpiyezulu leads her deeper between the trees than she remembers the path going.
Only then does she realise something is wrong.
He stops in the clearing.
“I wish things didn’t have to happen this way, Sbane.” he confesses with her hands tucked safely in his. She frowns, perplexed. Before she can ask what he means, white lightning cracks the pewter cotton cloud and strikes the man in front of her.
She freezes. Her heart thunders against her ribcage. Something akin to terror and anguish grips her in its arms. But instead of rushing to comfort him, her belly gets hot with anger and anticipation.
Mpiyezulu doesn’t fall or stiffen like a person struck by lightning would. He transforms. Two colossal wings stretch out from his back. When he flaps, whirlwinds form. His eyes, luminous and malicious. He trudges toward her like a man possessed intending to take flight.
Mpiyezulu is blindsided, knocked on his back before he can react.
A beast, raven-black and resembling a dire wolf belts a deep resounding howl.
“You stupid hound! You have been a thorn in my side for too long,” he shudders.
Those eyes. Those burnt amber eyes. She remembers saving them one stormy night.
“Mila?” Sbane’s voice trembles. It’s her. But that growl is deeper, emitting ancient power. Something tells her to run, and when she doesn’t, the woman wearing ibhayi emerges out of the shadows to pull her away.
“Who are you? What—what’s going on?” Sbane questions desperately while they dodge trees and low hanging branches. But the woman doesn’t answer. She mutters to herself instead. For the first time tonight, Sbane acts of her own accord. She pulls her hand away. Demanding answers through her panting and the tears beginning to gather in her eyelids.
“I’m your mother, Sbanesihle.” the woman answers before Sbane can ask again. The confession lands in the pit of Sbane’s stomach first, then makes its way down her legs. She almost stumbles over the thicket of the forest floor.
Sbane laughs once, a broken sound she doesn’t recognise as her own. “No.”
“I thought I could protect you this way, but you aren’t safe anymore. Please. I will explain, just let me get you out of this forest.” Her voice is soothing, persuasive. Sbane hesitates, but only for a moment. She relents and they run to her apartment. Like Mila, this woman doesn’t need directions.
When they arrive, she doesn’t bother with hospitalities or changing out of her soaked clothing. She watches the woman expectantly.
“I never wanted to leave you,” her mother whispered, voice trembling, “but the night the lightning struck me, something ancient chose you before you were even born. uThekwane – the lightning bird – entrusted its egg to me. It told me where to bury it, where it would be safe, and I knew… one day, it would call you. It’s yours to nurse, to protect, until the next one hatches.”
“You left me for an egg? You owed a creature more than you owed a child you gave birth to?” Sbane’s voice is icy, her face vacant. Was that all she was worth?
“No, Sbane. That is why I had to let you go, why I left you where no one could find you easily. You were always meant to be its guardian. I saw what would follow you if you stayed with me – the storms, the things that hunt what they cannot control. I thought if I left you somewhere safe, somewhere ordinary, you might grow up untouched by it. Letting you go was the only way I knew how to keep you alive.”
Sbane stays silent for a while. She’d spent her whole life wondering why she wasn’t enough reason for her mother to stay. Sbane whispered, “You should have trusted me with the truth.”
“I know. I was afraid, Sbanesihle. Elders in the village warned me that because I had nursed uThekwane of fortune, the other uThekwane had marked you. I didn’t want you to be as ostracized as I was. uThekwane of the light sent a guardian, Mila. And though it killed me to watch you grow from an arm’s length, knowing you were alive eased that wound.”
“So, what now?” Sbane asks, teary-eyed but determined. This is no time to mourn.
“You choose. Stay with the light or become a child of darkness. Your blood does not agree with evil. That is your gift—and your curse. If you embrace it, if you fight… you will shape the storm.”
“And if I choose—” Sbane doesn’t get a chance to finish her question. Mpiyezulu part bird form crashes through her window, shielding his body from the shards. He rips Sbane from the safety of the land, flying her into the raging sky.
Lightning illuminates the ground and Sbane sees Mila tracking them. She has decided. Here, in the arms of a man she once trusted, as he drags her back to his master. No one will be choosing for her anymore. She bites his arm, drawing an animalistic screech from him, he instinctively loosens his grip on her, sending her falling towards the earth.
As she tumbles through the sky, Sbane closes her eyes, drawing a shaky breath. The storm hums faintly in her chest, a vibration like distant thunder. Mpiyezulu descends immediately, screaming over the thunder.
“We don’t have to fight! But MaNgozi wants you and I am blood-bound to deliver you and the egg that holds the next lightning bird.” His eyes flick to the lightning mark on her chest.
“She believes the storm buried it inside you.”
Sbane opens her eyes. They catch his gaze, a mix of warning and understanding. She realizes, for the first time, the magnitude of the path she must walk. She is not merely a girl with a strange birthmark. She is the storm-born, child of lightning, bound to forces older and more dangerous than she has ever known.
“No,” she says softly, more to herself than anyone else, “I will face whatever comes.”
“There is no escaping this. You will be MaNgozi’s familiar, as I have been for decades! She is powerful and evil does not negotiate.” Mpiyezulu yells, but his voice hides misery. He really did start to love her. Sbane felt it. At first, he was sent to lure and seduce her, but her spirit lulled the evil in him.
“She cannot have me, Mpiyezulu. I am a child of lightning, and I will do what my blood tells me. The battle between storm and shadow has begun.”
The sky fractures and lightning strikes her for the second time in her life, but this time she is in control. The storm answers her. Wind spirals upward, carrying her like invisible wings. Her hair lifts around her face, the rain bending toward her in trembling arcs.
The branching scar across her skin flares bright amber. When she opens her eyes, there is no colour left in them, only pale light, like lightning trapped behind glass.
Mila looms over her when Sbane eases onto the ground, teeth bared, eyes glowing with an otherworldly vigilance.
MaNgozi emerges from the shadows, robes flaring in the wind, eyes alight with a cruel anticipation. Behind her, Mpiyezulu’s expression is unreadable, but the faint buzz in the air tells Sbane he still carries the darkness within him like a coiled cobra.
“You’ve come,” the witch says, voice sharp as a lightning bolt, “It is time to accept your fate. Use it, or I use you.”
Sbane’s chest throbs with energy. The mark across her collarbone pulses, small arcs of light rippling beneath her skin. She swallows, calling on the spirit to fight with her. The storm within her responds immediately, thrumming like a drum.
The witch raises her hands, shadows peeling from her clothing, curling into the shape of the chaos lightning bird. Mpiyezulu’s eyes meet hers briefly, tension flaring like the storm above them.
Mila growls, lunging forward. Sbane steps in front of her fierce guardian. This is a battle she must face with the storm.
The indigo bird shrieks and darts at her. Sbane closes her eyes, reaching deep into the storm simmering in her chest. The amber bird answers, wings crackling with warmth, light slicing through shadow. She feels its power merge with hers, trembling at first, but then surging, intoxicating, chaotic. Her body shifts, liminal. Fingers sparkle with arcs of electricity. The wind bends around her, rain stinging her face like needles. She embraces it; not fully, not yet, but enough to taste its raw power.
Mpiyezulu’s chaos bird form shrieks again, colliding with her light. Sparks of energy explode around them, sending trees swaying, debris flying, rain lashing sideways. Sbane staggers, Mila grounding her with a nudge, refusing to let her falter. Mpiyezulu moves at the same time, wings of terror rippling from his back as he strikes at her.
“MaNgozi, you cannot win!” he shouts, voice carrying over the storm. “We cannot take what is bound to her blood! You cannot steal what was given to her by her ancestors.”
“Shut up, you useless bird!” the witch spits at Mpiyezulu before turning to Sbane, “Ah, little storm-born… you think you understand your power? It’s ravenous. I gave your mother no choice, and soon I will own you. Embrace me, or watch everything you love burn.”
Sbane opens her eyes, white lightning searing through them. She lets the amber thekwane’s defensive wrath filll her, guiding it, bending it with the rhythm of her heartbeat. The dark bird inside Mpiyezulu shrieks, struggling against the purity of the storm that Sbane wields.
“The only thing that will burn is you. You will die by the sword you lived with.” Sbane commands a lightning bolt to strike the witch.
MaNgozi screams, a high, piercing sound, as a sinister shadow tears from her body. It darts for Sbane, intent on claiming her power. Sbane meets it, the amber bird surging to collide mid-air, and for a heartbeat, chaos reigns – wind, rain, electricity, shadows all twisting together.
Then it breaks.
A surge of light, pure and blinding, erupts from Sbane’s chest. The dark bird screeches, battered, and collapses into the mud. The witch falls to her knees, body drained, eyes wide in disbelief. She ages decades in a span of seconds. Mpiyezulu collapses as his master does, wings fading, breathing heavily. He looks at her, eyes no longer guarded, the darkness within restrained but alive. “You tamed it,” he said quietly. Sbane’s body quivers, the storm inside her quieting into a steady pulse. Light has triumphed over darkness – for now. Such evil does not simply disappear when bested in a battle. Traces of its thirst for vengeance still linger, suppressed but not gone—a reminder that the chaos would always be near, waiting.
Slowly the sky begins to clear, storm clouds tearing open into thin slivers of pale light. Mud clings to her knees as she kneels beside Mila, brushing trembling fingers through the wolf’s soaked fur.
“Thank you.” she whispers.
Mila rests her head against Sbane’s shoulder.
Behind them, Mpiyezulu struggles to his feet. The dark wings that had once stretched from his back are gone now, but something restless still flickers behind his eyes, like the last embers of a dying fire.
For a moment neither of them speak.
“I thought the storm would break you,” he said quietly. Sbane looks up at him, rain still sliding down her face.
“Not the one that chose me.”
Mpiyezulu watches her carefully, as though seeing her for the first time.
“What happens now?”
Sbane stands slowly. The wind stirs around her, lifting the loose edges of her clothes.
“I don’t think the storm belongs to anyone,” she said at last. “But it knows who it chose.”
Her scar tingles beneath her collarbone. When she presses her fingers to it, warmth spreads through her chest, the same steady pulse she had felt during the battle.
Mila howls suddenly, staring upward.
Sbane follows the wolf’s gaze. High above the broken clouds, something moves. At first, she thinks it is only the wind. But then she sees the shape of it – a great bird gliding through the thinning storm light, its wings vast and amber, lightning threading between its feathers like living veins. It circles once.
Just once.
Far above the city, lightning flickers once more across the clouds. Thunder follows.
And this time, it sounds a little like maniacal laughter.
The amulet at Sbane’s throat grows suddenly warm. She presses a hand against her chest and feels it – beneath the quiet storm, beneath her own heartbeat. Another rhythm. Slow. Waiting.
High above, the lightning bird screams once into the clearing sky.
Sbane understands then. The nest in MaNgozi’s shop had never been empty.
It had been waiting for her.
Bongiwe Maphosa is a budding speculative fiction author exploring the human condition through imaginative storytelling. Her work invites readers into reflective, thought-provoking spaces that linger beyond the page. Selected for the inaugural Caine Prize Online Editing program, she is a content writer and peer reviewer for JAYLit, and served as a tier 3 judge for the 2025 JAYLit awards. Bongiwe’s writing continues to develop a distinctive voice within the African literary tradition while engaging a growing global readership.
Nicholas arrived at the heart of the continent, hopeful. He wasn’t sure his reason for coming all this way was valid. But at least he could try. He might just be lucky.
His horses protested when he crossed the long, brackish river and stood at the outskirts of the village. He had ridden these beasts for centuries. There was no part of the world that they wouldn’t touch for him. He used to believe they’d walk into the underworld for him if he charged them so. But for the first time, he pulled their reins and they wouldn’t yield.
A thousand insects thrilled in the nameless trees that stretched over the edges of the river. The sun had begun to march back to its home in the heavens, as though even it disapproved of his coming. Was he sure about this? Was this not the right time to turn back and return to his Castle? To the safety of the known?
Nicholas turned around and glanced at his caravan. His men wouldn’t grumble. Not in front of him at least. But there was a stiffness about them that made it obvious they were shouting in their heads.
He paid them no mind. They were in his employ and not the other way around.
Nicholas went to his horse and raised a hand to pat her, but the animal recoiled once more, a protesting sound escaping her lips.
“Is it really that bad?” Nicholas asked. But he wasn’t getting any answers here.
He walked up to his men who had mostly dismounted and were investigating the area. “Araya,” he called to a balding man with youth in his eyes. “Load as much goods as we can carry into sacks. We go the rest of the way on foot.”
***
The sky had darkened completely when they got to the residence of the District Officer. Nicholas knew the British representative had a son. A seven-year-old boy full of dreams and imagination. Nicholas was going to bless his gentle colonial heart with a gift of figurine soldiers and wooden horses like he had always wanted.
The compound was spacious, with the main building sitting in the center and a smaller servants’ quarter standing independently to the far edge. Soldiers with guns stood at different ends, eyeing Nicholas and his group as they passed.
Just as he arrived on the front porch, the door flung open, and the DO came rushing out, his wife and servants in tow.
“Oh, what a pleasure,” he said repeatedly, rushing to shake Nicholas with both hands. “I’d never have believed that a Blessed One like you would choose to grace my home this Christmas Eve. Surely, I am of all men most fortunate.”
In the light streaming from the lamp hanging from a beam, he looked quite young to be a district officer. He was clean-shaven and nearly tall enough to look Nicholas – who was a hulking figure himself – straight in the eyes.
“I’m Briar Coleridge,” he said, “District Officer. But I’m sure you already know that.”
“Indeed.”
“When my men told me they had seen someone like you dock at the river-bank, I could have sworn they were making things up.”
“Well, they weren’t,” Nicholas said. His attention was more drawn to the boy holding onto the pleats of his mother’s skirt behind Coleridge, not nearly as animated as his father. “Come, Leroy,” Nicholas said, opening his hands. The boy looked up at his mother and the maid, who both nodded their agreement.
When he came, Nicholas whisked him in the air, drawing a gentle laugh from his lips. “That’s my boy,” Nicholas said.
“They say you’re immortal,” the kid said.
Nicholas stiffened. “I like to think of it as good health.”
“Well come on in, you all,” Coleridge said. “Come away from the night and have dinner with us.”
The house seemed a bit cooler on the inside than outside. The English flag hung from one end of the wall, and books were stacked on shelves. They were led to a long table packed with vegetables, roasted full chickens, and wine. Neither Nicholas nor his men needed the meal and could do very well without it, but they wanted to indulge their host.
Halfway through the meal, Nicholas eyed Leroy lying on his belly in a corner of the living room, flipping through a book.
“He should be asleep by now,” he said.
Coleridge, without lifting his eyes from his plate, replied, “Well, all of us are staying awake tonight.”
“Why’s that?”
He took a sip of his wine, dabbed the corners of his lips with a napkin, and then looked at Nicholas from across the table. Nicholas could feel it then. That morbid fear rising from him like a stench. As though he shat himself.
“Those damned locals. They’re very diabolical, I tell you. They have this thing, Ubunu-something. The name is a mouthful but we call it Long Juju. Very powerful black magic. They used it to enter into our sleep. Used our nightmares against us. It gets worse on days like these because it seems Christmas coincides with one of their fetish activities. They use it to fight us.”
Nicholas exchanged glances with his men sitting around the table who had been indulging their food but were now paying attention. “Well, you are foreigners trying to occupy their land,” Nicholas said. “You don’t expect them to not fight back any way they know how.”
The room fell silent, both the Coleridges and Nicholas’s men eyeing him unbelievably. Why was he defending these people after hearing terrible things like these?
Later, Nicholas and his men were shown to rooms to pass the night. But, despite trying to fall asleep, he found that he couldn’t, his mind heavy with worry.
In a bid to distract himself, he took out his leather-bound journal, sat at the table, and began to write. The privilege of unending life sadly didn’t come with unfailing memory. As time expanded, his precious memories began to spread thin. As he added new experiences over the years, so did the older ones struggle to keep pace.
At this point, Nicholas didn’t care so much about many things.
Just two things were really worth holding on to. One of them, Elizabeth.
He wrote about the contours of her eyes and the shock of white in her hair. He wrote every day to keep her alive in his mind. The previous things he had written weren’t as evocative as the new ones he conjured. One scene always came back to him, from long before he became a Blessed One. The very first day they met in the market, she charmed him with her kindness. It had been raining heavily and no one from the other stalls would open to sell to him.
“You’re that priest who gives gifts to children,” Elizabeth said under the rain.
“Aye,” he said, drenched and cold already.
“Here,” she said, handing him a bag of tomatoes. “Don’t bother about payment.”
He felt so moved he wanted to hug her, but then someone was tugging at his cloak from behind. He turned around to find a child looking up at him, the rain pouring over his face which blurred like images on a disturbed pond. At first, Nicholas thought it was another kid who had come to him for help. Then he looked closely and saw a flash of something sharp in the boy’s grasp. He flinched, fell backward, and clattered over a table.
“What… what have I done?” Nicholas stuttered.
“They say you can’t die. Let’s find out.”
He turned around to search for Elizabeth, but into the wind she had gone. Then the boy pounced on him, pinning him to the mud.
“Die, Blessed One!”
***
Nicholas woke immediately, still at the table, having slept on his journal. Something had begun to change in his body, and he knew it.
***
The next morning, after Nicholas had dropped off his gifts for Leroy and his parents, he was ready to move into the village.
John Okafor, a huge man from one of the villages, was summoned to guide Nicholas and his group. He bore one of those faces that always seemed on the edge of laughter, as though something about the world was perpetually amusing. He seemed like a simple man; wore khaki shorts and a rumpled shirt with a sad imitation of a tie hanging from his neck.
“So, John will act as your translator and mostly go-between when you transact with the locals,” Coleridge told Nicholas as he got ready to go. “Stay close to him at all times, please. He’s one of the first men who understood what would happen to his people if they didn’t cooperate and cause us to enforce the full might of His Majesty.”
“You speak English?” Nicholas turned to the man and asked.
“I try,” John said, then showed his entire yellowed dentition.
“Okay. Then lead the way.”
“You know you mustn’t do this, right?” Coleridge said in a small voice, holding Nicholas back. “It’s of no use. The world has better need of your time.” There were bags under his eyes, and his hair was a mess, as though he, too, had fought his way through the night.
“Merry Christmas,” Nicholas said, then looked behind Coleridge and beckoned his men who didn’t seem any more enthusiastic.
The walk took the better part of the morning, at least three hours between Nicholas’s departure and arrival in the hinterland. John was chattering in his English approximation all the way, his sentences a straw man sewn from English and his native tongue.
Nicholas never had trouble understanding people. He looked beneath their words and knew the stories they were telling and the ones they weren’t. Sometimes, they didn’t even need to utter a word for their history to undress before him.
Until he met John Okafor. Something seemed to be cloaking the local man. Try as Nicholas did, he couldn’t read John.
His men most likely felt it too, given that some of the powers that sustained Nicholas resided in them as well. But of their concerns, they had said nothing.
For the first time in ages, Nicholas seemed to be heading into truly uncharted waters. He needed little convincing now that the things he had heard about this place were true.
***
The village chief’s abode was a wide compound that had several mud huts standing a few meters from each other with the biggest one right in the middle. The walls of the huts were beautified with native chalk drawings of intricate patterns. Scattered across the compound were several sculptures ranging from life-sized to a few inches tall. Many had fearsome, hideous looks that gnawed at something inside Nicholas and forced him to look away.
The chief had received word of their arrival and sat with four other elderly men in a semicircle. They speared Nicholas and his men with their gaze, cutting a path into his resolve. Nicholas probed each of their minds but found nothing. Nothing about their demeanour or composure gave away anything of use to him.
“I greet you all,” he said, eyeing John by the side of the chief. “I’m Nicholas, and these here are my men; Araya, Memphis, Gladstone, Antonio, and Gable.”
“Nicholas?” John said, laughter bubbling up his throat, “Like the Saint Nicholas your missionary people talk about?” Then he caught himself and said, “Forgive me, forgive me. I joke.”
Art by Sunny Efemena
Nicholas let the comment pass. John spoke to the seated men, then turned around and reported what they told him.
“We hear you wan’ give us gifts,” he said. “Hope you don’t want our people for exchange? Cus if that why you come, you better take your gift and return.”
“No, no,” Nicholas protested, looking from one man to the other. “I come in peace. I’m not that kind of person.”
John relayed this to them and then replied, “Then what kind man you be?”
“I don’t believe humans should be sold like merchandise.”
“But it is inside your Holy Book,” they said. “You not man of faith?”
Nicholas paused for a moment, then replied, “You may find, someday, that very little about me has to do with the Holy Book.”
After they had handed the gifts to the chief and his kinsmen — alcoholic drinks, pocket watches, bales of cloth, notebooks, and quills — John Okafor informed Nicholas that the chief had permitted them to stay for as long as they wished.
At this point, Araya approached Nicholas and pulled him aside, the other four standing just close behind. “Boss, what’s going on? Don’t tell me we’re really staying here?”
Nicholas beheld Araya’s distraught face and saw his palpable fear. “Relax, Araya. We’ve spent time with lots of people we’ve gone to give gifts to in the past. We enjoy the new country and landscape for a while. Why can’t we do so here?”
“Nicholas, don’t tell me you don’t feel it. Don’t tell me you don’t realize that our powers are gone.”
“I’m not sure why that is happening and if anything, it has heightened my curiosity. What exactly are they doing to achieve that?”
“This is insane!” Araya was visibly shaken. How many years had it been since Nicholas found him? 200? 300? And yet the man was still so afraid of dying. Nicholas had been ignoring it all the while, but he could see now that his men had begun to unravel. Something about the village was reaching into them and taking them apart.
“Every other place in the world I’ve visited at least twice,” Nicholas said in a chastising tone. “I’ve lived so long that nothing interests me anymore. This is new, and there’s no way I’m running away from it like a coward. And neither will you or the others.” He looked away from Araya and planted his gaze on the other men, who gave eyes to the ground.
They were shown to small huts in separate compounds not far from the chief’s, and Nicholas was amused when he had to bend almost halfway down to enter the structure. He wasn’t surprised that the inside felt chilly, given that it was constructed from clay.
On the threadbare mat later that night, Nicholas returned to his dreams. This time, the child wasn’t Leroy. They had become someone he was much more familiar with. A girl he watched grow, nursed, and taught to read the scriptures. His daughter, Antoinette. The second thing he most cared for in all the world.
In the dream, he watched her watch her mother die. She was alone in this watching because Nicholas was away. Because he couldn’t bear to see his wife go. He was in some strange land gifting things to strangers who laughed and jumped and called him Blessed One.
But now the dream forced him to see, and he was begging to look away.
“No, no, no,” he writhed on the mat, tears rolling down the corners of his eyes, begging to be let go of.
Antoinette was aged in the dream too, but she held her mother’s hand as Elizabeth slept with the Lord, as a disease ravaged her body.
A decade and a half later, it was Antoinette’s turn to pass on, and Nicholas wasn’t there either. How could he, when he was in his forties and she, his daughter, was 72?
It was a paradoxical situation; a middle-aged father watching his child die from old age. Nicholas didn’t see that Antoinette couldn’t see anymore. She had gone blind a year before and had needed help from her husband and children to get around. On her deathbed though, she imagined her father standing beside her, the immortal Blessed ushering her into the next life.
Nicholas beheld all these in the dream, shaking and crying, his resolve for what he wanted to do calcifying. “Almost there,” he whispered. “Almost there.”
***
The next morning Nicholas met John Okafor as he emerged from the hut, just outside his door.
“You sleep well, sir?” John asked, his lips fighting to not arc into a smile.
Nicholas, disheveled, stared at him. “Come, John.” He made the translator walk with him. “I hear there’s this thing called Long Juju your people worship.”
“It name Ibini Ukpabi, and my father is chief priest.”
“Oh,” Nicholas exclaimed. “What exactly does it do?”
“It an ancient deity living among my people for thousand years. It protect us from outsider using charms. Any magic they carry, if they come close to us or our land, it stop working.”
“So, this place is like a haven against malfeasant powers?”
“I don’t know what big English mean,” John said, stopping his walk. “But I tell you it’s work already.”
“That’s intriguing.”
“But why you ask, Nicholas? You know this already. You know it before you come here.”
Just then, a villager ran up to both men, a lanky boy of around fifteen with a wrapper tied around his waist.
“Uzo,” John said.
The boy, in between breaths, spoke something in their native tongue and John turned to Nicholas, concern in his eyes. “We need to go with boy.”
At the compound where his men were housed, a few locals stood outside watching. Some giggled as Nicholas came, pushed past them, and went into one of the huts. The small room was illuminated by a burning torch hanging on the wall.
Nicholas’s eyes adjusted to the light and a figure materialized on the mat. It was a shriveled, twisted, dried-up body. Its hair was entirely gone, eyes were sunken, cheeks caved in, and skin leathery.
For a moment, Nicholas almost jumped as he feared that his dreams had chased him to reality and his wife’s body had been dug up from the past and magically planted on that mat. But then he looked closely and saw the familiar cloak and boots of his men. There was a sheet of paper beside the man, and Nicholas picked it up with shaky hands.
Master, the words on the paper read in Araya’s handwriting. We woke this morning to find our brother, Antonio, like this. Completely drained of his energies. I warned you that this place was no good. Me and the others have taken off to find safety before the same fate befalls us. We can do anything for you, Nicholas, but we can’t sit still and watch ourselves meet certain death in this haunted place
Araya
Nicholas remembered finding Araya. The memory had been sandpapered by time, but he could still picture the forlorn, battle-broken soldier he found at a pub drinking himself sick. Nicholas made him a disciple then, touching him with a glimpse of his powers.
Now Araya had deserted him along with his other men.
***
Later that day, upon hearing of the death, the village chief sent word to Nicholas.
“He say he no want to be held responsible for your men or you,” John relayed. “So, he want you to leave early tomorrow morning. Join your men. Go back home. This place no good for you.”
They were in John’s house that bright afternoon, sitting in the front yard, watching his children chase goats and chickens around the compound. Nicholas stayed silent for an age, staring into space, until John broke the silence again.
“But I understand you no come all this way to run away. You no coward. So, I help you.” John put a hand on his shoulder, forcing Nicholas to turn and look at him. “I help you finish what you come here for, old man.” The smirk returned to John’s face, and soon he was laughing hysterically.
***
That night, asleep, Nicholas dreamed once more.
It was the night of his supposed blessing, which had much later turned into a curse. He had been secretly helping a man pay off his debts so that his daughters wouldn’t be taken as prostitutes. When he heard of the man’s plight, he imagined Antoinette being used as a sex slave because he owed money. So, for three consecutive nights, he threw a bag of coins from the window and stole away into the dark. On the third day, after Nicholas deposited the last bag, he made to walk away but a hand held him back.
He turned to find the man, probably twice Nicholas’s age yet with an iron grip, eyes glowing brightly in the darkness. He had been crouched in a corner, waiting patiently for Nicholas to show up. “My Lord,” he said, “for this kindness you’ve shown me and my family, silver and gold I have not to repay you. But I’ll give you something. Unending life is yours so that you can spend your days doing good to others, too.”
It had felt good at the time, for he neither fell sick nor suffered injury. Kings and emperors bestowed him with gifts to show them the secrets of immortality. A secret that he himself did not fully understand.
Until decades later when everyone he knew had passed from this world, including his wife and child and their children, and their children after that. He had tried everything he could to end his life without success, and anywhere he visited he tried to know if anyone there could break the spell.
Until recently when he heard of this place on the dark continent where they worshipped a deity so powerful it could undo every other power. It felt like a legend to him, but he hadn’t lost hope even through the ages.
The memory of his blessing had been as far from him as the North was to the South, but tonight it washed up in his dreams, forcing him to recall every detail. The look in the man’s eyes. The bloodcurdling pain he felt when the curse activated and arcane powers flowed into him.
Drenched in sweat, he awoke to someone clapping outside to alert him of their presence. It was still dark, countless crickets disturbing the night.
“Who is it?” Nicholas asked, voice groggy.
“It’s me. John. Are you ready?”
***
As both men walked away from the village under the cover of night, through a winding bush path, John said, “The dreams is side effect of Ibini Ukpabi’s power. Foreigners always feels like so. It force them to see nightmares.”
“Oh. But it doesn’t bother me so much,” Nicholas said.
“But you making noise inside your room before I knock. Why do you pretend so much? You lie to your men about why you come here. Get one of them killed for your own needs. Now you still lie to yourself.”
Nicholas thought about it for a moment, then said, “Everyone thinks I’m stupid for wanting to give up this power. So, I don’t explain myself to anyone anymore and just do whatever the hell I want. Might be selfish, but I’ve done worse.”
When they got to a clearing in the bushes, John said, “It’s here.”
A chill ran down Nicholas’s spine. It was finally going to be the day of his unmaking. The day he had been waiting for. Finally, he could be with his women again. Elizabeth and Antoinette. Hopefully, they find him worthy of forgiveness. For taking this long to return to them.
Under the silvery light of the moon, John seemed aglow. He had taken out several objects from the bags he had been carrying, including palm wine, which he poured on the ground for libation, and a chicken, which he cut open and sprinkled its blood on Nicholas.
For minutes, John uttered strings of words that Nicholas couldn’t understand. Incantations to awaken his god to speed up the aging process of Nicholas.
At some point, Nicholas felt something take him from within. That sharp, arcane power gripped him once more and he fell to the ground, writhing. Then, his life flashed before his eyes. The innumerous painful years he had walked the earth condensed into a split second and unspooled before him.
Then, John grabbed him and whispered in his ears, “The moment is come, my friend.” He helped Nicholas up, then handed him a knife. Nicholas wasn’t surprised. He always knew it would have to come to this. The man who forced this on him slit Nicholas’s neck that night after the act, and when he woke, he met the man dead too, by his own hands, one life exchanged for the other.
John pointed to this chest. “Finish the job, Nicholas. Then turn knife to your own neck. It the only way you can be sure it work.”
Nicholas’s hand trembled under the knife, even though he had taken men’s lives before. He had never been privileged to add his own life to the list, but now the opportunity presented itself and he seemed scared. “You have to know, dear John, that this power is painful and isolating. You’ll suffer alone for centuries and your god wouldn’t be able to save you because you’re not a foreigner like me.”
John laughed the same hysterical laugh Nicholas had now gotten used to. But now, under the moonlight, it bore a taint of madness.
“What if that my aim all along?” He laughed some more then added, “Might be the only way I can be strong enough to fight and keep the white man off our lands. So do it now, Nicholas. Now!”
***
After John Okafor’s body had fallen to the ground, blood pooling into the earth beneath him, the last thing Nicholas beheld in this world was the shape of the glowing moon, just before opening his own neck with the knife.
Chisom is a Nigerian fiction writer and poet. His short stories have been featured on Omenana, Apex Magazine, Clarkesworld, Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction 2023, African Ghosts anthology, Isele, and elsewhere. His short story, “Ancestors’s Gift” won the 2024 Tractor Beam short story contest. He was a finalist for the Seattle Worldcon Short Story Contest and is the winner of the 2025 Nommo Awards for Best African Speculative Fiction Short Story.
It is always exciting to bring you a themed edition, mainly because it is such a joy to sit back and see the robust interpretations that the imaginations of our writers cook up. We asked for Niger Delta–focused science fiction stories, and I dare say the writers we bring to you in this issue absolutely ate that assignment!
We sought futuristic stories that could fall within cyberpunk, climate fiction, African futurism, solarpunk, biopunk, eco–sci-fi, political sci-fi, alternate history, time travel, space exploration, AI, and robotics. The Niger Delta exists in southern Nigeria, but for this issue, we received submissions from across Africa.
We got some pretty interesting stories, many of which engage meaningfully with the region. I can tell you for free that the writers seem to agree that the Niger Delta’s future may be bleak, and that restoration and environmental justice will only be achieved, and sustained, by the brave.
In Waterbringer, Amina must endure loss and a painful journey to secure much-needed water for her people in a contaminated land, in exchange for a most precious item. However, a glitch in the enemy’s machine pushes her into taking some daring steps. A Time Like This shows us that we can never fully erase the past in our giant technological strides into the future, unless technology is made to serve humanity and nature. And sometimes, only the brave and fearless can make this happen for the benefit of all.
Did you think ancestors and deities would be dead and forgotten in the future? GbeneBeka: The Gospel According to Wiayor shows us what courage can look like when technology seeks to control the supernatural. In The Smuggler of the Wet Gene, we meet Orire—a genetic scientist by day and smuggler by night—struggling to save lives with biocodes suspended in liquid genes, while simultaneously evading cyborg cops.
The Last Fisherman of Oporoza is not just brave; he is someone who knows he is suspended, stuck in a loop that returns to the beginning once night falls. Can he succeed in altering the loop, or will failure become a permanent part of this mind-altering cycle? I’ll leave you to find out as you read.
Enjoy!
P.S. The only loop you are allowed to get stuck in is one where you are sharing and resharing this Niger Delta Issue of Omenana. Lol.
It is still dark when I push my canoe into the creek, my hands finding their way along the slick wood like they have done for twenty-seven years. The tide breathes against the shore, slow and steady, pulling at the edges of the world. The air is heavy, close to the skin, and the mangroves are already whispering in the language they use when they think no one is listening.
The day is August 17th. Again.
I do not need a calendar to tell me. My bones know it. My dreams know it. The cormorant perched on the broken jetty knows it, too. It tilts its head and watches me like it knows we are both actors in a play whose ending cannot be changed.
The first time it happened, I thought it was madness. A trick of fatigue. Fishermen are used to repetition: the same nets, the same songs, the same stretch of brown-green water. But that day, the day before the oil came, kept folding itself over me like a wet cloth. I would live it, sleep, and wake up before dawn to find it had returned.
The others forgot. Each dawn washed them empty, but the tide kept me instead. I remember the night it began. I was alone on the water when I felt the change, the creek heavy and still. Then the current shifted, slow at first, then wrong. The others were on land, under roofs that could not hear the sea’s cry. But I was out there, close enough to feel the tremor beneath the surface. After that, whenever the world folds back, I stay awake inside it.
The sun always rises slow and swollen, like it resents the work ahead. By midmorning, the gulls will circle near the mouth of the creek. By evening, I will smell the sour, metallic breath of disaster drifting from the offshore rig. By night, the sea will turn black. And in the morning, August 17th will begin again.
I have tried many things. Once, I paddled in the opposite direction, away from the nets, away from the others, straight into the labyrinth of mangroves until my canoe scraped roots like knuckles. I stayed there until the tide turned, but when I slept in that green darkness, the morning still spat me back to the beginning.
I tried telling my wife. The first time, she laughed and told me to stop drinking before bed. The second time, she frowned. By the fifth time August 17 dawned again, she would not look at me. And on the seventh reset, she was gone; no longer present in the loop. The house and my heart remembered her voice, but the day did not. She was not gone by death or travel, not taken by tide or time, just quietly absent, the way a detail vanishes when a story is told again. I began to suspect then that whatever holds this day in place only needs me to remain aware; the rest, including her absence, adjusts around me.
*
Now it is only me, the water, and the endless day.
Today, I decide to fish the same as always. The loop has taught me there is no escaping the tide’s will. But as I paddle toward the horizon, I notice something new: a glint in the water, far from where the oil rigs crouch. It is small, precise, too bright to be a wave. I steer toward it, heart knocking against my chest like a fist on a locked door.
It is a sphere, no larger than a mango, floating just beneath the surface. When I reach for it, the air around me hums, and the water stills. My reflection bends and shivers, and for the first time in this endless loop, I feel the day hesitate.
I pull the sphere from the water, and it is colder than anything I have touched in this heat. Smooth, without a seam, yet it vibrates faintly, like the inside is full of trapped wings. When I lift it to my ear, I hear a sound that is not a sound, more like a pressure in my skull, a shape pressing against the edges of thought.
The first sounds I hear are not in any words I understand. Still, they settle in my mind as if they have been waiting there all along: Temporal Containment Unit. Oporoza Node 12.
I blink, looking around at the endless brown water, the sky flattened under the sun. Node? Containment? These are not creek words. These are not words for fishermen.
For a moment, I think about throwing it back. But my hands do not listen. I cradle it on my lap and paddle toward the open sea, feeling the thing grow warmer, as though it approves.
Halfway to the horizon, the light changes. Not the slow gold of evening, but a sharp, surgical shift. Shadows bend in the wrong direction. The air smells of metal instead of salt. And ahead, where the rig should be squatting on the water like a giant steel spider, there is only emptiness.
I stop paddling. My breath sounds too loud. The sphere pulses. And then I see them.
Boats. Many of them, sleek and silent, floating in a loose ring. They are not made of wood, and they do not move with the tide. Their surfaces ripple like water though they are solid. Figures stand inside them, human, but not. Their faces are obscured by plates of mirrored glass.
One of them steps forward, onto nothing, as if the air is holding them up. Their voice is inside my head, not in my ears.
“You were not meant to interact with the containment field,” they say. “The loop preserves environmental stability until extraction protocols can be met. You have disrupted alignment.”
I want to ask what any of that means. Instead, I hear myself say, “Why August seventeen?” My voice sounds thin, unworthy in the thick air.
The figure tilts its head, the way the cormorant does. “Because this is the last viable point before irreversible contamination. We anchor the sequence here to study the event without losing the subject.”
I do not like the way it says “the subject.”
I glance at the water, where my reflection should be. But the water holds no image now, only a faint shimmer, as though my place in the world is loosening.
“You could stop the spill,” I tell it. My voice grows harder. “You could warn the people. Why do you not?”
The figure’s answer is slow, deliberate, as if it wants me to feel every word. “We are not here to change the outcome. We are here to learn from it.”
The sphere in my lap grows so hot I have to drop it. It does not sink. It hovers on the surface, spinning. The world around me begins to fold, the sea curling upward like paper in a flame, the sky turning the deep copper of an old coin.
The figure steps back, and the others turn away. I know the loop is about to begin again. I know they will not help. But something inside me, something stubborn as the tide, tells me that knowledge is a weapon, even in a trap.
When the world snaps back to darkness, I am standing by my canoe on the shore. The tide is breathing against the sand. The mangroves are whispering. And the day is August 17th.
Again.
I stop fishing.
That morning, or the thousand mornings before it, I cannot tell anymore, I do not push my canoe far into the creek. I stand on the shore, watching the water breathe in and out, thinking of the figure’s words. If they will not change the outcome, then maybe I can.
The first thing I try is warning the others. I walk through the village before the sun climbs over the mangroves, stopping at every house, telling them the spill is coming. Some laugh, others wave me away. A few grow uneasy, but no one packs a bag. By evening, they are on the shore, hauling in nets or mending them, the way they always do. And by nightfall, the sour metallic wind creeps in from the sea.
When the loop restarts, I go further. I smash the engines of the small boats that take the workers out to the rig. I hide their tools. I cut ropes, sink drums of fuel. But the work crews still go, paddling long hours in borrowed canoes, stubborn as the tide. The rig still breathes its poison. The sea still turns black.
Another loop, and another, and another. I try setting fire to the rig before it can bleed into the water. But the flames die too quickly, smothered by the wind. The next day, August 17th again, I am back on the shore, hands unburned, smelling only diesel and salt.
I stop speaking to anyone. There is nothing to say.
And yet, I keep changing things, small things. Each time I do, the day resists a little less. I teach my neighbour’s son how to set a net deeper, away from the oily sheen that will come. I take a longer route through the mangroves so I can leave palm fronds over the paths, a marker only I understand. I carve messages into the wood of my canoe, hoping they will be waiting for me in some loop where the spill does not happen.
*
One morning, I find a woman standing at the shore where my canoe is tied. She is not from the village. Her clothes shimmer like fish scales, and her eyes are too sharp to belong to this place. She holds the sphere I once pulled from the water.
“You are changing the data,” she says.
I tell her I do not care about their data. I tell her I want my wife back, my people safe, my river clean. I tell her I want to live a day that is not August 17th.
She looks at me for a long time, the kind of look that feels like someone measuring the weight of your bones. “You have already succeeded,” she says. “In one branch, far from here, Oporoza never drowned in oil. But that branch is not yours.”
I step toward her, heart racing. “Then, send me there.”
She shakes her head. “You are anchored to this node. To move you would collapse the study. But know this, the changes you make will remain here, inside the loop, even if you never see their end.”
She sets the sphere on the sand and walks into the water without a ripple.
I pick it up. For the first time, it does not hum or burn. It is just a cold, smooth stone.
That night, the oil comes. The fish float belly-up. The water stinks of death.
And in the morning, August 17th begins again.
But this time, the neighbour’s boy is already walking toward the deeper nets I taught him to set. And for the first time in the loop, the cormorant leaves its perch and follows my canoe out into the open water.
I do not know if it matters. But it is enough to keep paddling.
The air feels different before dawn, though I know the day is the same. The tide still breathes against the shore, slow and steady. The mangroves still whisper secrets into the wind. But there is something softer in the water’s voice, as if it is listening to me now.
I push the canoe into the creek. The paddle’s rhythm is the same as it has always been, but I no longer rush. Every sound feels heavier, the drip of water from the blade, the hiss of a fish breaking the surface, the rustle of wings as the cormorant glides low over the bow.
At the first bend, the neighbour’s boy is there, crouched over his deeper net. He grins at me when he sees the catch glinting in the dawn. I want to tell him to hold on to this moment, to remember that there is a world beyond oil and smoke. But I only nod, and he nods back.
Past the bend, I notice more small changes. A woman has begun planting new mangroves where the bank is thin. Two boys are building a raft from oil drums, not for work on the rig, but for fishing farther out. The old man who used to drink palm wine at this hour is mending a canoe instead.
It is all still August 17th. The rig is still out there, waiting to bleed into the sea by nightfall. The loop is still tight around us. But inside its grip, the people are moving in ways they never did before.
I paddle farther, toward the open water. The sun is rising, a swollen gold, and the heat is already folding itself around me. I see the shimmer of the sphere in my mind, though it is gone now. I hear the woman’s voice: The changes you make will remain here, inside the loop.
I do not know if there is a version of me somewhere else who has escaped this day, who has lived to see a clean horizon. But I know this version will keep paddling.
By afternoon, the gulls circle over the mouth of the creek. By evening, the sour metallic breath of disaster drifts from the sea.
I do not look toward the rig. I keep my eyes on the water, on the cormorant flying just ahead of me, its wings slicing the air.
When the black tide comes, I will face it as I always do. But for now, in this narrow stretch of the river, the water is still clear, and the fish are still biting.
I let the paddle rest in my hands. The current carries me forward, and I breathe in the salt, the sun, the slow promise of a moment that cannot last, but is mine all the same.
Tomilola Adejumo is an emerging writer from Lagos, Nigeria, with a published work featured in Punocracy, African Writer Magazine and The Shallow Tales Review. Her upcoming publications include pieces in The Kalahari Review, Afritondo and Efiko Magazine. Tomi shares engaging stories, ranging from thought-provoking, nostalgic, funny, to haunting, on her Substack page, “Thoughts Archive.” She is on Twitter at ‘earth2Tomi.’
¹I did not mean to summon her. I was not even sure I believed in her anymore. Or in anything for that matter. I just needed someone, or something, to hear my plea. After all, they say, “na woman wey never see problem na im dey hold breast run.”
So that day, I went to the old iroko, the last one standing in our village. I knelt in the oily mud and prayed like my grandmother used to. A prayer from grief, not faith.
² “Mama, abeg na, look our face. We don nearly die finish.” ³ I thought my prayer would vanish into the swamp air like all things do here, but that night, the sky answered. GbeneBeka returned.
⁴ My name is Wiayor, and this is the story of what happened when our goddess remembered us and what happened when we tried to, um… well, own her.
⁵ I was born around the time when our lands began to fail us. Our rivers turned thick with oil, and the mangrove swamps had become skeletons draped in black sludge. Even after the drills were silent and the company abandoned its camps, the land still bled crude. The air smelled of decay mixed with petrol. Crops withered. Fish floated belly-up in poisoned creeks. My people, once proud fishermen and farmers, coughed on the fumes of our poisoned sky.
⁶ Many had already left, scattering like frightened birds to any place that offered clean water (or just water) and untainted soil (or just soil). I stayed, because Goi was all I’d known. It was home. My home. Each day, I walked the perimeter of the village, from the remains of the old schoolhouse to the stagnant pond. I carried offerings of palm wine and kolanut to the shattered shrine of our Mother, deep in the bush. Few others bothered. Most had lost faith entirely.
⁷ And this was all thanks to “modernizing our thinking.” Critical reasoning workshops, if one could call them that, replaced storytelling hours. The chiefs held a public burning of “superstitious” objects: charms, prayer clothes, even a carved effigy of our Mother, GbeneBeka, herself. They said it was the dawn of a rational age.
⁸ I went along with it, but at night, I would sneak to the old iroko to pray. The path was always empty, as most of us had already forgotten how to hope. Worse, we had even learned to mock the gods. But I remembered the stories my grandmother, “mama”, told me. Stories of GbeneBeka, the great “Mama from the Above”, who had first led our people to these fertile lands. Mama said that in ancient times, GbeneBeka gifted us abundant harvests and watched over us, but we had since forgotten her and her ways. Some nights, by the dying fire, she would whisper, “One day, someone will cry loud enough, and our mother will hear.”
⁹ As a boy, I’d imagined a beautiful giant descending on a ladder of clouds. This image was engraved deep inside of me like symbols on carvings… Anyway, as I was saying, I prayed that night.
Chapter 2
¹As I knelt, a sudden breeze swept through the heat, cool and with the scent of rain. A smell we had almost forgotten. The breeze rippled the rotten water. I looked up, wiping my eyes. Above the tree, clouds gathered.
² A distant rumble of thunder made the ground tremble. I rose to my feet. A single drop of rain. Then another. Soon it was pouring. I laughed in surprise, spreading my arms as water washed over me, cleansing the oil from my skin. The ground under the iroko drank eagerly.
³ For the first time in years, the earth no longer smelled of poison but of wet soil and renewal. Through the curtain of rain, a light glowed. At first, I thought lightning had struck and set the great iroko ablaze, but the light was soft. I watched, mouth agape, as she appeared.
⁴ GbeneBeka. She came down with the rain, stepping lightly onto the highest branch of the iroko. She was taller than any mortal. Her skin was marked with patterns like the veins of leaves. Her eyes shone gold-white in the darkness. Her hair fell in black coils that sparkled with lightning.
⁵ She wore a single cloth of pale sky-blue, and in her hand was a staff of living wood, green with unfolding leaves. For a long moment, she stood upon the branch, gazing out at the land. Rain cascaded around her, but she remained dry.
At last, Mother looked my way.
⁶ “Na who call me?” Her voice was like a flute’s note. It spoke directly to my soul.
“Na me, Wiayor, your pikin,” I stammered. “So, na you dey disturb me wit prayer every day?”
⁷ Lightning flashed. I feared she might strike me down, but her face held only sorrow. She stepped from the branch to the ground, and it seemed to me as though the earth welcomed her. She placed her hand on my head. The weight was lighter than I had expected.
“My pikin,” she said.
I fell to my knees.
⁸ “E don too tey wey I come dis place.” The rain slowed. Frogs croaked, crickets chirped. GbeneBeka tilted her head toward the returning life.
Still trembling, I said, “Mama… we don loss finish. Our land don drink poison like kaikai. See as everytin don die. And nobody even remember you again sef…” I went on.
⁹ She answered by drawing me into an incredibly loving embrace.
“Calm down, Wiayor.” She said. “You do well as you remember me. You na good person. You try well-well.”
“So, you go helep us? You go save our land?”. She looked toward the lanterns of the village.
¹⁰ “Even after wetin dem do your papa? Ah, you be my pikin true true!”
Indeed, there had been gossip that my father, always seen with a worn wooden pipe clenched between his teeth, was a troublesome activist who had dared to challenge both the chiefs and GulfCurrent Nigeria.
That he disappeared, not by gods, but men. They said he called them out — the Company, for the poison they poured into the creeks, for their lies, for how they flaunted their green promises in Europe, while here they flared gas night and day and let children drink firewater. He once told my mother that Ogoni was a test of conscience for the world. That if they could desecrate us and still be called civilized, then civilization meant nothing. He joined others who dreamed that we could speak for ourselves, choose for ourselves, govern ourselves. That dream cost him everything.
But the loudest story is that he was used; that someone, somewhere, fed him visions of change. Told him he was chosen. Maybe he was. Maybe that’s why they crushed him.
My mother died not long after. Some claimed it was because of grief; others said it was our bad water.
“I go do wetin I fit do,” GbeneBeka said. “Take my hand. Carry me go see everytin wey don spoil.”
Chapter 3
1 And so, hand in hand with a goddess, I returned to the village at midnight. She must have noticed that I took her through a rather long route. I led her down a narrow path, through groves of stunted palms and between silent clinics. Where her feet touched the ground, grass sprouted, little green blades pushing up through the oily muck. I watched in astonishment as it seemed like even my footprints filled with seedlings after we passed. At the first occupied dwelling, a house where an old couple still lived, I knocked frantically.
2 “Make una come out o!” I called excitedly. “Make una come see!”
When the door opened, the glow of a lantern fell upon the tall figure beside me. The old man inside gasped, dropping to his knees at once. His wife peered over his shoulder, then let out a cry of joy. One by one, people emerged from their homes. Some had been woken by the storm, others by the unfamiliar sounds of frogs and night birds. They gathered in the muddy village square, mouths agape at the glowing woman standing beside me. Ah, I remember the faces, faces that had known only despair now filled with wonder and hope.
3 Mothers held their children close. Fishermen bowed their heads. And wives. Wives struggled to find their husbands’ hands as they saw the powerful and irresistibly beautiful being. A few villagers began to sing old, half-remembered praise songs their grandparents had taught them about GbeneBeka, welcoming the goddess. GbeneBeka stood quietly among us. She spoke in Khana, our Ogoni tongue, so that all could understand. It was only then I realized she had spoken “rotten” English (Pidgin) to me, because my Pidgin, not my Khana, was the language I carried best.
4 “My children,” she said, “I have returned as you have called. I see the suffering of this land.”
5 She knelt and pressed her palms to the earth in the center of the square. I heard a vibration underfoot as if the ground itself responded.
6 “No more shall this land be barren”. Enter happiness. Disbelief in faces was replaced by gratitude. Some prostrated in the grass; others reached out to touch the new-grown plants to be sure that they were real. A young boy laughed in delight, stomping his bare feet on the soft ground. Laughter! When had we last heard such a sound here?
But amid the celebration, a coarse voice cut through.
“What is the meaning of this?”
7 It was Chief Baridi, stepping forward with his cane, flanked by two of his personal guards. He was an older man, his face carved by years of bullying others. It was hard to believe that once, he had been a firebrand for the people, but in the later days of oil he’d grown wealthy on the scraps tossed by the company.
The Chief’s eyes were now focused on GbeneBeka. No one had ever seen them in that manner. But within seconds, his eyes changed from reverence to calculation. Before I could answer him, one of the guards barked, “It’s witchcraft! A trick!”
8 A few villagers murmured in confusion. Chief Baridi held up a hand, forcing a smile. “No, not a trick,” he said, looking GbeneBeka up and down. Rain still drizzled, water beading on the chief’s fine embroidered shirt.
“If I recall the old stories, this would be our… benefactor. The Mother of our line.”
His tone was polite, almost reverent. GbeneBeka regarded him quietly.
9 “I am GbeneBeka,” she affirmed. “The land was crying out in pain. I have come to answer.”
“Truly, a remarkable night,” the chief said, bowing his head slightly.
“We are honoured by your presence, great one. Forgive my hesitation. These are strange times. We have grown unaccustomed to spirits walking among us.”
10 A nervous chuckle rippled from Chief Baridi’s guards. I stepped closer to GbeneBeka, suddenly protective. I didn’t like how the chief’s eyes lingered on her, as if assessing the value of a rare artifact.
“The times may be strange,” I said, keeping my voice respectful, “yet our need is real. GbeneBeka has already shown proof of her grace.” I gestured at the grass and blossoms underfoot.
“Our land can be healed.”
“Yes,” a farmwoman in the crowd shouted, “I can smell life in the soil again!”
Chief Baridi nodded slowly. “Indeed. A blessing beyond measure.”
He tapped his cane on the new grass, as if to assure himself it wasn’t illusion.
“We must give thanks in the proper way.” Turning to GbeneBeka, he offered a smile that didn’t reach his eyes.
11 “Great Mother, allow us to host you well well, to express our gratitude. We should have a feast to honour your return.”
Murmurs of agreement rose. It sounded like a good idea. But something troubled me. I remembered how the chief had hosted similarly grand feasts whenever a company executive visited, occasions that always ended with deals cut behind closed doors. I glanced at GbeneBeka. She was studying Baridi, perhaps reading his face.
“I come not for feasts, but to heal,” she said gently. “There is much work to be done for this land to be whole again.”
“Of course, of course,” the chief hurried to reply. “Yet your children wish to honour you. Please, will you not rest and dine with us tomorrow? We have a community hall still standing; we can gather there at dusk. You may speak to us of what must be done, and we’ll slaughter dogs in your name.”
GbeneBeka flinched. I doubt anyone else noticed, but I did. I lightly touched her arm, with the hope that she’d understand that to mean that they had forgotten her taboos. A lot of the villagers did not trust Baridi, but I knew they were excited and would follow their leader’s suggestion. Perhaps it would be alright, a feast could be harmless, a chance to cement her welcome. After all, what could the chief possibly do to a goddess? GbeneBeka inclined her head.
“If it pleases the community, I will come at dusk tomorrow to your gathering,” she said at last. A cheer went up. The chief flashed a grin that looked political. That night, we settled GbeneBeka in the finest hut we had. My late uncle’s place, which was roomier than most. Many villagers brought mats, clean cloth, food. GbeneBeka accepted only a simple wrap to change into (her sky-blue cloth, though miraculously clean despite the mud, made her too conspicuous, she said with a soft laugh).
She sipped politely at the palm wine offered. Until the sky paled with dawn, I stayed near her, answering her gentle questions about all that had befallen our land in her absence. I told her of the oil boom that came, how at first we rejoiced, thinking fortune had finally smiled on us. I described the pipelines that snaked through our fields, the gas flares that turned our nights into false daylight, the spills that poisoned our water. She listened with deep sorrow, nodding or sighing as if hearing of wayward children. But I know now that she already knew. I didn’t need to recount the protests and the violence. She knew more than me.
Dawn arrived gentle and clear. All day, GbeneBeka moved through the village and beyond, bringing small miracles wherever she went. A bedridden elder, Baba Madara, rose from his mat, breathing easy. Barren cassava fields sprouted green shoots at her touch. Word spread quickly, and by midday people from near and far had gathered to see the wonder with their own eyes. I stayed by her side, shoulders swelling with pride and hope. Me, ordinary me. My prayer had been answered beyond my dreams; it seemed a new dawn for our land. Yet as the crowds grew, I felt a knot of unease. Many folks came with pure gratitude, but others thrust forward with selfish pleas, begging GbeneBeka to cure every ill, to bless their ventures, to make them rich.
She gently reminded all that she came to heal the land and not to conjure gold or grant favours. Some understood and bowed thankfully. But I caught many frowns, from those dissatisfied that her gifts would not fill their pockets overnight. Then I spotted Chief Baridi at the edge of the crowd, fussing over some newcomers in crisp shirts who had arrived in shiny cars.
Even from afar, I recognized them. My shoulders sank. Company men. Or maybe Government men. Though their rigs had left, some still prowled for opportunities in our region. And here they were, drawn by the scent of miracles. Among them I saw Mr. Cole, the foreign manager who was known as the “condolences manager”. The chief was gesturing excitedly, talking to them with a suspicious grin, and they kept glancing toward GbeneBeka as if measuring her worth. It made me very angry. This was a sacred blessing for our people. What right had those profiteers to be here at all?
As evening fell, nearly two hundred people crowded around and inside our community hall for the feast. Chief Baridi ushered GbeneBeka to a seat of honour at the head table, a wooden chair draped in our finest cloth. The hall was aglow with torchlights and buzzing with anticipation. Tables overflowed with food provided by the company: roasted meat, yams, plantains…
GbeneBeka had to duck under the low doorway, and when she entered, the assembly fell quiet, with every eye upon her glowing form. The people had already begun eating before GbeneBeka spoke.
“My children,” she said. Suddenly, they remembered who was before them again. “Today I have seen your pain and your hope. I have come to heal this land, but I cannot do it alone. I will need your help. Your patience, your faith, and your understanding that what I offer is life and renewal, not gold or weapons or power over others. Use the gifts I bring with wisdom and humility.”
There was a murmur of agreement. People came forward with laughter and songs, pressing food and palm wine on one another. She barely tasted the offerings, but smiled kindly, accepting the spirit in which they were given. A drum and flute struck up a joyful tune, and for a short while I was pleased to see my people united in hope.
Chapter 4
Just before the speeches began, I went to wash my hands after the food, then I caught two company men whispering behind a parked car, their backs turned. One carried a bundle of something wrapped in cloth.
“I still can’t believe the plan worked,” one said, laughing loudly. “How they found just the right vessel. The pious believer.”
The other replied, “The chiefs dem don talk sey Wiayor still dey pray. Sey im holy die!”
I halted. Their words weakened my knees.
I pressed myself against the wall. But each word sank deep. Had they watched me all this time? Maybe they even fed the ember of belief they now mocked. Ahh! Was my faith, my grief, all part of some twisted script?
I backed away. I had to tell GbeneBeka.
But as I stepped into the hall, I froze again. Custom sealed my lips; You don’t interrupt elders, especially not when the goddess you called down is being courted like some market bride. I opened my mouth, but nothing came. I stood there, caught between urgency and the reverence that had been conditioned into me. And in that pause, Cole began to speak.
“Pardon me, Great Mother,” Cole, the condolences manager, said smoothly, switching to English.
“What an absolute privilege to witness this… uh, environmental miracle. I represent certain parties interested in the well-being of this region, and I believe we could help share your gifts with the world. Imagine if we collaborated. Your powers could bring prosperity everywhere! There would be great benefits for Ogoni people, of course.”
I winced. My father had taught me better; Ogoni was enough. The land and the people were one — you did not split them with bureaucratic terms. To do so was to speak like an outsider, even when you meant well.
Before GbeneBeka could respond, Chief Baridi eagerly added in our language, “Yes, Mama! With your help, our land can be rich again. The oil may be gone, but perhaps there are other blessings you could bestow: water, fertile soil, new resources… We would ensure it is managed properly. Our people deserve compensation after all these years, do they not?”
His smile was thin, his eyes switching between the goddess and Cole. A heavy silence fell. GbeneBeka slowly rose from her seat. When she spoke, her tone was rather cold.
“I did not return to make any person rich,” she said. “And I will not help anyone exploit this land further. What remains in the earth must stay in the earth if the land is to heal. I came to give life, not wealth. If you seek only profit, I will leave this place.”
The chief’s eyes reddened at being chastised before everyone. Cole’s polite mask slipped, revealing a scowl.
Then suddenly, Cole spoke louder than we’d ever heard him speak.
“There are ways to harness energy like yours,” he said. “Clean, renewable, bio-spiritual resources. The technology is evolving. With the right containment protocols, your gifts could be channelled safely. We could bottle your blessings, so to speak.”
Chief Baridi burst out laughing.
“Yes, Mama de Mama. We would treat it with respect, of course. But it will be our own miracle supply. Rain on demand, soil that never fails, healing water. Your presence could make our land brand new.”
For a second, all was quiet, but many faces were flabbergasted. GbeneBeka tilted her head slowly. Her face revealed nothing.
Chapter 5
Then suddenly there was a blinding flash and an ear-splitting bang as a grenade detonated in the center of the hall. I flung my arm over my face, staggering as chaos erupted. Villagers screamed and stumbled in panic. Taking advantage of the confusion, the company’s henchmen and the chief’s guards rushed forward. They hurled a thick net studded with either charms or some technology over GbeneBeka, entangling her.
“Aha! Hold am well well!” an old chief shouted.
“GbeneBeka Holdings,” Cole mocked.
She cried out in pain and surprise as the net sapped her strength, its cords tightening around her like the coils of a snake.
“No!” I shouted.
Through smoke and the madness, I saw the men struggling to hold the net. Without thinking, I reached for the small pocketknife I always carried at my waist — a keepsake from my father — and hacked at the net with all my might. It hurt my palms, but I ignored the pain. A guard charged at me. I kicked him away as I looked around to see if anyone else would volunteer some help.
I picked up a stone and flung it.Cole’s skull gave way like an overripe melon: sweet, sudden, and deserved. He staggered back with his hands reaching for nothing. He collapsed, blood blooming at the base of his skull.
“Wiayor!” GbeneBeka gasped, pinned to the floor as they pressed her down. Then, just as the pocketknife tore one of the cords, GbeneBeka screamed. Every light in the hall died at once. The ground shook and the hall split apart. People and tables tumbled as a gaping hole opened beneath us. I felt myself falling amid splintered planks and screams. Water, cold and fierce, rushed up from the depths of the earth.
In the blink of an eye, a flood of dark water burst through the gap, sweeping across the collapsing hall. I was caught in its current and pulled under, tumbling in darkness. I felt GbeneBeka’s arm clamp around me, holding me tight as the flood swallowed us.
Moments later, my head came out to the surface. Coughing, I found myself being carried swiftly downstream by the swollen river. Night had fully fallen. GbeneBeka was beside me in the rushing water. Her eyes were glowing in the dark. The current bore us away from the village with relentless speed. We managed to drag ourselves onto the far riverbank, hidden by reeds. I collapsed to my knees on the wet earth, chest heaving. Across the water, faint shouts and flashlight beams showed our pursuers scouring the opposite shore, but they had lost our trail. We were safe, but it didn’t feel like safety.
As I knelt there, I felt terrible about what had happened.
“I’m sorry,” I blurted out after catching my first breath. “Great Mother, I am so sorry. I brought you into this… and they… they tried to…” My Khana failed under the weight of guilt and sorrow.
GbeneBeka placed a hand on my shoulder. Warmth flowed from her palm into me, steadying my breaths.
“No be your fault, Wiayor,” she said softly. “You na better person. Lion no dey born goat. Dis betrayal na for their head.”
I looked up. In the moonlight, she looked hurt, but her resolve seemed unbroken.
“This has happened before,” she murmured. “Greed! Ah….and dem warn me o! Di elders been warn me. But I tink sey…”
She did not finish the thought.
Chapter 6
1 Then for the first time, I saw unmistakable anger on her face.
2 “Na me dem wan take use do fuel,” she said. “Me? Ahh, I don suffer.”
3 She stood slowly, facing the direction of the village, now hidden behind the trees. Before I could speak, she raised her arms to the sky and said:
“Pikin wey say im mama no go sleep, im sef no go sleep.”
4 There was a strange stillness. The night suddenly turned to day, like a switch. But there was no sun. The earth beneath us rumbled. Across the river, we watched as the village shone. The soil cracked, and black water swelled. Roots and tree branches twisted. Then came the cries. Shouts. Buildings buckled. Flood met flames from hell. The earth swallowed all that had scorned her, and who stood by in silence.
5 But GbeneBeka, she began to dim.
Her hair lost its light. The mantle of clouds above her dispersed. Her eyes, once gold-white, became brown, then smaller, then simply… human.
I rushed to her side.
6 “Wetin happen, Mama? Wetin dey do you?”
“I gave all,” she said. “The land is awake now. It is clean.”
7 I caught her before she collapsed. She felt… lighter and looked different. Her skin was warm, her breathing shallow.
Chapter 7
1 That was the end of her divinity. But the beginning of us. We found a clearing where birds sang. We built a shelter with our hands.
2 The rains came, we welcomed them. She planted seeds. I fished in a stream that ran clear.
3 Some nights, she weeps. Some nights, we laugh.
4 And some days, we walk the land together, collecting shells. Two keepers of a soil still healing.
5 We have no name for this place. Perhaps one day they’ll call it Eden.
6 But we call it home.
Seun Lari-Williams is a Nigerian writer and poet currently based in Antwerp, pursuing a PhD. He is the author of the poetry collections “Garri for Breakfast” (2016) and “A Little Violence” (2022), with his debut collection being longlisted for the NLNG Nigeria Prize for Literature.
The year is 2225. In the former Niger Delta, now called Down-Creek, much has changed over the past two centuries. Technology has advanced so rapidly that cars not only drive themselves but hover like low-flying aircraft. The entire architecture of Down-Creek is aquatic: buildings float, bricks are lab-designed to withstand the impacts of climate change, and the infrastructure adapts to the rhythms of water.
This transformation wasn’t born of innovation alone, it was survival. After decades of oil contamination and toxic leaks, the city was forced to adapt swiftly. The crisis was catastrophic as eighty percent of the vegetation was eradicated, and thousands of people lost their lives. The water remained saturated with chemicals the government to this day struggles to clear.
Scientific strategies helped slow the death toll. Cyborgs were deployed to assist in hospitals and police stations, especially in high-infection zones where human survival was near-impossible. A nationwide curfew was enforced with a lockdown from 10 p.m. to 5 a.m. daily.
To manage population pressure on fragile infrastructure, the government imposed strict birth limits: only two children per family. Any additional children were seized by the state, raised by the system, and reintroduced at age 21 to a sterilized zone in what was formerly the south-eastern Anambra State now referred to by its scientific designation, PSG-100. It was the only area the government had successfully decontaminated, and it was fully operated by cyborgs.
This fuelled public suspicion and deepened mistrust toward President Obele’s administration. Yet, despite growing unease, she continued to win elections, manipulating public perception with calculated precision. After all, it was her government that had saved the Delta from total collapse, restoring fragments of vegetation and stabilizing the region. Whether people liked it or not, none of it would have been possible without the innovations her administration adopted.
Artificial intelligence had become the only viable path forward, but the speed of its expansion terrified many. It felt as though cyborgs were replacing humans, aided by the very government sworn to protect them.
Children raised by cyborgs lacked essential traits like empathy, intuition and cultural memory. The rise of cyborg labour displaced human workers, igniting waves of unrest. Orire was among those who protested, but President Obele responded with force, cyborg police trucks, mass arrests, and exile for repeat offenders.
Orire learned the hard way. After her own jail time, she realized that the most effective way to fight was not through confrontation but through infiltration. She would learn the system, master its language, and use it against itself.
Tonight, she works as usual. She moved like myth, gliding between boats and beneath the thick mats of algae that cloaked the water. Her black, lab-tailored swimsuit was coded to regulate body temperature in the ice-cold currents. This was her hometown, and she knew it like the back of her hand.
Fluent in both Itshekiri and Nembe, Orire had been home-schooled since the age of five and by twelve, she had already learned to code, a skill that now proved invaluable to her smuggling business. Her mother, a scientist employed by Biotech for forty years, had exposed her to the intricacies of genetic research. Orire had volunteered at the lab for five years while studying at university, absorbing everything she could.
Though the entire Delta is aquatic but none of its water was safe to consume. Clean water was so rare that it had become a commodity occasionally traded like currency.
Orire inherited her interest in scientific research from her mother, and her smuggling instincts from her father. Her favourite time to work was two hours before midnight, few patrols roamed the Delta by that time, and she had mastered the art of evasion. Whether by encrypted digital capsule or by submerging herself in algae-infested waters, she always found a way to disappear.
By day, she gathered algae for chemical processing. By night, she traded in contraband, bio-codes suspended in liquid-genes that rewrite forgotten ancestry, and restore what contamination had erased in many children.
Tonight’s assignment was different. Three clients were expecting her after 1 a.m. but she was not comfortable meeting anyone at the deep hush of night. Too many things could go wrong. The fine for traveling during restricted hours was as steep as 8 million naira or six sachets of water and working in the dark came with its own dangers. One could never be sure if it was a trap or if it was a criminal after her capsule and contraband.
So tonight, she brought Taye and Fefe. Better safe than sorry.
She halted abruptly, raising her hand to signal her companions to stop and listen. For a moment, she thought she’d seen a shadow but as she looked closer, she realized it was only a tree, a mangrove. Its gnarled limbs swaying gently in the water, she exhaled and motioned for them to move on.
But before they could take another step, a blue-ray light flashed across the water.
“Police!” Taye hissed, diving beneath a cluster of dead leaves drifting on the surface.
A patrol boat hovered nearby, its searchlight sweeping the water. Orire’s thoughts raced. If they were caught, it meant a hefty fine, two years in prison, or three years burned from the country.
“Hello, citizens. Anyone here?” came a voice from the blue light, mechanical and rising. A cyborg officer.
Orire didn’t waste any time. She signalled to Fefe to follow Taye and, pulling out her capsule, she dived into the water too. Straining her eyes to see inside the murky water, she punched coordinates into a scanner and tracked it to focus on the patrol boat’s sensor array. The capsule flickered purple — a successful digital shield.
The cyborg circled them for ten tense minutes. Orire remained submerged, motionless, lungs aching. The cyborg did one last circle and then drew away.
Orire surfaced. Her heart felt like fire and the first breath she drew provided welcome relief. She slapped the water to alert the others that the coast was clear.
“Goodness, I thought they’d never leave,” Fefe gasped as she surfaced. “We need to move quickly. It won’t take long before they realize the sensor has been disabled.”
“That way,” Taye said, pointing with his finger
“Let’s go,” Orire urged, her voice low and urgent. She surged forward, swimming like a fish. Her companions followed, and within five minutes they reached an orange-painted hybrid floating house.
Orire scanned the surroundings, ensuring they hadn’t been followed. Then, three knocks, two, and three again. The door swung open. Eight knocks instead of a bell was their code.
A woman in her thirties stood in the doorway, silent.
“My world, your world, equal to one world,” Orire said, exhaling and raising her hand.
“With one heart,” the woman replied, her face softening into a smile. “Welcome. I wasn’t sure you’d make it. There are so many patrols tonight.”
Orire nodded briskly. “That’s why we need to work fast. We have to reach the second client before reinforcements arrive.”
She pulled out the capsule, now displaying encrypted text, and opened her phone to check the messages.
“Delia is the client. Seventeen years old,” she said, scanning the data.
The woman nodded and led them to the teenager’s room.
Delia lay fast asleep. Her skin glowed faintly, and her eyes were sunken, a sign of something deeper. Fefe and Orire exchanged a glance. Fefe, with ten years of nursing experience, had seen this before, metabolic dermatitis triggered by prolonged exposure to algae and dehydration.
Still, Orire activated the capsule’s medical scan to be sure. It flickered, then pulsed with light as diagnostic rays swept across Delia’s arm, numbers cascading across the screen.
“Why didn’t you take her to the clinic?” Taye asked, his face wearing a frown. “The medical-aid burned us for two months for using the card to buy water,” the woman said with a sigh. “You know water is expensive.”
Orire’s expression shifted. Her mind flicked to the daily reality they all endured, an area shrouded in water, yet none of it safe to drink.
“But there are thirst-suppressing pills,” Fefe pointed out.
The woman’s expression shifted sharply. She turned to Fefe, with eyes blazing. “Does it look like they’re working?” she snapped. “What do you take me for? Why would I spend our medical aid on expensive water if the government’s pills actually worked?” Her anger hung in the air.
“Don’t worry,” Orire interjected gently, gesturing for Fefe to let it go. “She’ll be fine after tonight. I’ll administer an anti-pathogen serum, along with a slow-release wet gene tablet and hydrate her.” She added, pulling out a small bottle. “It’s purified in the lab, it is safe to drink, but only a quarter cup daily while her body adjusts.”
The woman clapped her hands in gratitude, tears gleaming in her eyes. “I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You don’t need to,” Fefe said softly. “It is the little we can do. We have to stick together, it’s the only way we will survive these unprecedented times.”
“Just make sure she doesn’t speak of this to anyone,” Taye added, his tone firm. “Anyone practicing biomedical work must be registered. If word gets out, the police will arrest us.”
The woman nodded repeatedly. “Don’t worry. I’ll make sure.”
“Alright, we need to leave now,” Orire said, tucking the capsule into her bag. She adjusted her swimsuit, increasing its thermal setting.
They slipped into the water together, the air shimmering faintly above them.
“The next house is five blocks away,” Fefe said, checking her S575 bio-water resistant watch. “We need to be there in fifteen minutes.”
“Wait,” she added, squinting at the screen. “The watch shows high levels of cyanobacteria in the water. We’ll need to take the east route.”
She opened the navigator, recalculating their path.
Art By Sunny Efemena
“What? But the east route is longer,” Orire protested, her brows furrowed.
“It’s either we reroute or risk high exposure,” Fefe replied. “The suit can hold off bacteria, but it’s not fool proof.” She added
Orire sighed and pressed her palm to her forehead, a gesture she always made when deep in thought. She shrugged. “We could try the upper route,” she said, eyeing the tangled pathways that snaked through the water city like capillaries.
Fefe was the first to object. “There? You’re joking. I’ve already been arrested three times. If they catch me again, it’s exile.”
“We don’t have much of a choice,” Taye interjected. “We can’t swim thirty minutes without being picked up by cameras or crossing paths with a patrol boat. If you prefer, we could postpone.”
Fefe shook her head quickly. “No. The client is scheduled for court tomorrow. He’s been loyal for six years. Besides, we’re already halfway.”
“Then the high route it is,” Taye said, swimming toward the solid ground.
They followed, keeping their heads low to avoid detection. They ran fast, but not fast enough. As they reached 7th Avenue, a sensory light triggered a siren and snapped a photo, alerting nearby patrols.
Within seconds, a floating police car emerged and hovered above them.
“Citizens, this is a lockdown. You’ve passed your restricted hour,” a cyborg voice announced. “You are under arrest.”
Orire, Taye, and Fefe didn’t wait. They bolted, turning sharp corners and racing toward the water, their only refuge. The house stood just ahead, half-concealed by trees. Instead of approaching the front door, Orire gestured to Taye, who tossed a handful of his kobo coins at a window tucked behind the foliage.
The police car passed without noticing them hiding behind trees
A head appeared in the window, and a man quickly opened it to let them in.
“This way,” the man said, without a formal greeting.
Orire and Fefe hurried into the lounge while Taye stayed behind to keep watch. A child sat awake, reading from a digital book, her eyes flickering in the dim light.
“Why isn’t she asleep?” Orire asked, glancing at her wristwatch.
“She was, until an hour ago. The patrol lights woke her. I couldn’t sleep either. I’m anxious about tomorrow,” the man said, his voice tight with frustration. “If she doesn’t appear on the registry as a citizen, the court might hand her over to social services. They’ll take her away.”
“We’re here,” Orire reassured them as she settled on the sofa. “We’ll set it right.”
She looked toward the dining room light. “Ile-AI Brightness increase by ten percent, please.” She said glancing at the lights inside the lounge. The light slightly increased
The man sat down, visibly shaken. “Miss, my daughter’s life is at stake, are you sure you can pull this off? I can’t lose her.”
“You don’t need to worry about the registry anymore,” Orire said, her voice steady. Her mind drifted to her father’s words: “Learn the system, Ori, and sing it by heart. Then there will be nothing to fear. The system has holes, but you won’t see them unless you understand its language.”
She smiled. “By tomorrow, she’ll no longer be a ghost. But remember, the law only allows two children per family. So, Hendrieta, the eldest, will now be registered as your brother’s child.”
The man’s face darkened. “But I don’t have a brother. And the state knows that.”
“I’ll create a bogus one,” Orire replied. “If there’s one thing about inscription, you can put information in as easily as you can take the information out.”
She tapped into the country’s mortuary system. “There were four deaths registered in October last year. I’ve just added a name and listed him as deceased. Now, the birth registry: Alero Ossayi. Address, year of birth, blood type O positive, fingerprints, all done.”
She stood up. “Make sure Hendrieta remembers the name: Efe Ossayi. Your late brother.”
Just in time Taye signalled from his sentry position at the window, a soft Hammerkop bird call.
Orire moved toward the window, ready to jump, but something caught her eye, a cluster of water lilies, cattails, and lotus flowers blooming a few meters away. It always amazed her how nature found a way to bounce back.
She turned her head and saw the man watching her, as if he’d read her thoughts.
“They’re lab-grown,” he said, tossing her a bottle of purified water. Orire, who had momentarily forgotten about the payment, caught it with a nod of gratitude.
She nodded and raised the bottle to the man, in a quiet gesture of appreciation.
“Quick, Orire. We can’t waste a moment,” Taye urged. “The police are on the prowl. Three boats have already passed the house. We need to hurry back before we’re caught.”
Orire didn’t respond. She dove from the windowsill straight into the water.
“Three boats?” the man muttered, gripping the window frame as he leaned out. Below, Orire and her team were already swimming. “It’s usually one boat patrolling five sections. Why so many tonight?”
“We used the high route to get here,” Orire rasped. “You know how cyborgs operate, one movement and they swarm. We’re practically imprisoned in this place.” She added before sinking deep beneath the surface
If they were to avoid detection, staying submerged was their only option. Orire opened her capsule, using it for both light and navigation. Twenty minutes underwater was uncomfortable, even with a lab tailored swimsuit.
Taye was the first to reach his house, slipping through the pet door since the main entrance was locked. Fefe scrambled to her own door, dropping her key card twice in panic.
Orire wasn’t so lucky. She arrived just as a police boat passed her house.
Thinking fast, she scanned for the nearest Delta-Care Clinic, a 24-hour facility. She quickly crammed the first patient number she saw into her capsule, then let the device sink into the water in case the police decided to search her.
She pressed her watch as she raised her arms. Her swimsuit fibres shifted, morphing into peach-coloured pyjamas with a sleeping kitty printed on the front.
“Citizen, this is a restricted hour. Why are you out?” the cyborg officer asked, stopping the boat a few meters from her. A scanner touched his forehead and lit up as it scanned Orire.
“I was sick,” she said, turning to face him. “I’m coming from the clinic.”
The officer nodded and checked his wrist-pad for confirmation.
“Patient unique number?” He asked
“Dtk32074ps,” she said, holding her breath steady.
The officer paused, then nodded. “Ah, Bridget Rice. Good evening.”
He started the boat and drifted away.
Orire didn’t respond. She hurried inside and shut the door behind her. The capsule could wait until morning.
“Call Petunia,” she instructed, pressing her wristwatch.
“I’ll see you tomorrow for that lunch you promised,” she said, hoping the client understood the code.
“Oh, for Banga soup?” came the voice. “I heard tomorrow will be very cold. What happened?”
“There was so much blue,” Orire replied. “We’ll have to eat the soup in the morning if it’ll be cold by lunchtime.”
“Well, that’s fine. What time? You know crayfish spoils easily.”
“Eight to turn. I won’t be having cereal,” she added, then hung up.
“Co-pilot ilè, play my music,” she said, stepping into the shower. Blue water streamed out chemical-infused, good only for washing.
She paused before bed, gazing at the painting of old Port Zebei. The date in the corner read 22 July 2025.
“Those were different times,” she murmured.
Orire slept only a few hours. When she woke, it was drizzling. She stared at the cloudy sky, her eyes drawn to a crescent-shaped, red-coloured moon.
She took out a chemical-filled bucket and attached the sulphur filter to it. Then she dove into the water to retrieve her capsule. She found it lying nestled in a bed of kelp. She retrieved it, then raced toward Miebi’s house.
He was thirteen. He didn’t need much, just a contraband dose coded with inscription, designed to act as both pacemaker and DNA filler, repairing the gaps dug by the hostile and contaminated environment.
As the serum took effect, the boy’s eyes turned amber. His hair curled into soft, floating coils. He looked up at her.
The gene was working. It wasn’t natural but if it saved lives, it was enough.
Who knows? Maybe this was a future president. One who would give voice back to the people and silence the bots.
Orire smiled and gently fiddled with the boy’s hair.
Khayelihle Benghu is a South African writer who resides at 185B Lefu Street, Phiri, Soweto, Johannesburg. She has been writing since 2008. Her poem “In This Den Should We Offer Our Sacrifice” was published by Decolonial Passage in 2024. In 2025, her works “The Heart of the Boy” by Aliko and “Colours of Rainbow” by Literary Cocktail were published. Her piece “It Might Take a While” was published by Suburban Witchcraft, and “The Jewel of Sympodial Palace” will appear in Person of Interest.
