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A few days ago, while reading Joe Benitez’s ‘Lady Mechanika’ I was hit by an acute sense of displacement. In a scene set in the Sahara Desert, Mr Benitez had women dressed in the clothing of the desert nomads speaking Yoruba. Nothing in Mr Benitez’s story suggests that the Yoruba speakers are not native to their desert setting, yet they are speaking a language that originates nearly four thousand miles to the south. To understand the displacement I felt, imagine if you were reading a story set in Alaska, but instead of the natives speaking a form of Inuit, they are speaking a bastardised version of Maya, or some other South American indigenous language. Given the setting, a more northern language like Hausa or Berber would have been a safer bet, and had anyone involved in the creation of that story bothered to do any form of rudimentary research, they would have known this.
Joe Benitez’s gaffe is lightweight compared to the treatment Africa has received in speculative fiction as a whole. Recall what always happened in the TV series “Heroes” when a character needed to visit Africa? The vision of the whole continent, 56 countries, over a thousand languages and cultures as diverse and colourful as can be, was usually reduced to a shrubland somewhere in the middle of the Kalahari Desert. And the token African character appeared to have no home and passes his time creating “prophetic” art on rock faces. In all, the world of speculative fiction has largely failed to accurately portray the continent of Africa and, just like Hollywood, it seems to see no need to try.
This is why Africans need to tell their own stories, as this is the best way to own the narrative about Africa and to capture the changing face of the continent. And in this edition we are happy to showcase African stories that remind us of the tales our mothers told us. These stories revive aspects of our culture and belief systems that we thought lost, showing us how they still feature prominently in our urban lore.
Mayowa Koleosho mines the rich vein of Yoruba mythology for his beautifully told tale of two brothers whose relationship is transformed forever in “Ara and Monamona”. Adanze Asante’s “The Journey” is also a classic tale of transformation; a throwback to those days when people possessed the ability to change from man to animal and back. Pemi Aguda takes this ability to the cityscape of modern Lagos and masterfully retells it. Suyi Davies pushes the theme in a Lagos of the future even more immersed in the digital landscape than we are now in “Breaking The Habit”, and in “Maki” by Edwin Okolo, transformation travels in its own lane and goes beyond possibilities of the human. And if we ask the question of what is left behind after the change? “Horror in the Bush” by Mandisi Nkomo has the answer, and what an answer it is!
We are grateful for the opportunity to provide a home for these stories because until recently it was hard getting any form of genre fiction published in the few litmags available. Though elements of the speculative were heavy in many books being published here, no one wanted to class their “serious fiction” as “genre”. Nigeria, for example, is a country where literary fiction wields a tight-fisted supremacy over all other forms of literature. But the opportunities offered by Omenana, and other Afrocentric genre magazines using the digital landscape, are gradually transforming a literary society that once sneered at genre fiction.
In all, this promises to be a hallmark edition. It is our fourth edition and final regular edition for the year. We will produce a special flash fiction edition that will berth by November 2015. The project is in partnership with the Goethe Institut for a display at the African Future_Lagos exhibit which will take place from 28th October – 1st November 2015, in Lagos. This edition will also mark the first time we will be able pay our contributors – something we hope to continue in the future.
Hey, almost forgot that we will be at the Ake Arts and Books Festival in Abeokuta, Ogun State, Nigeria, from the 17th to the 21st of November 2015. Check out more info about the festival here. I will be talking about speculative fiction and all things writing. I will also be moderating a panel discussion called, “Africa Magic: The Rise of Speculative Fiction”, at the festival. Since we will be talking about elements of the genre in African literature and what differences are emerging in speculative fiction between Africa and the rest of the world, among other things, I expect it willbe an opportunity to further the cause of speculative fiction in the continent.
It’s been a wild ride and we thank you all for discovering us and spreading the word.
Running through the thorny blonde grass, the lone hyena stops to scan the plains of the Serengeti for food and water. After travelling for more than three sunsets, she’s hungry and searching for carrion, but it’s scarce this dry season. A starling alights upon her path as she relishes the strong breeze rippling through her fur, she spots a droughty pond filled with muddy water. Her stomach wrenches tight as she drinks, for the water only incites her hunger pangs.
Through a curtain of heat, a pack of female hyenas lope toward her. Orange dust billows from their paws as they approach. Her fur stands on end, her ears twitch, and at that moment she forgets her hunger. She realizes that she should have stayed on course, but her desire for sustenance had urged her to take a different route.
Knowing it’s odd for a bitch to be alone without her clan, the lone hyena remains steady and still, daring not to move as the leader of the pack pads toward her. This is the first time in her sojourn she has been threatened by her kind. If she shows fear, they’ll attack.
She observes that the matriarch’s head is much larger than normal and that she towers over the other six. Yet when Large Head approaches her, she notices that she’s her equal. Grinding her teeth, she allows the matriarch to move around her in one slow circle and sniff her sex.
Her claws dig into the dirt as she watches Large Head return to her clan, sneezing, grunting, and spitting. Shaking her head, she communicates that something’s wrong with this lone hyena. The clan groans in confusion then a frenzy of rage engulfs them; some stand on their hind legs, cackling.
The seven hyenas begin to gather around her, baring their sharp-razor teeth. The lone hyena remains steady watching them. Breathing slowly and deliberately, she calculates her next move. She never takes her eyes off of Large Head. She’s really too weak with hunger to fight, but she must. Death is the only option, for she is not the only one who’s hungry.
She leaps to rip open Large Head’s throat, but two of Large Head’s underlings foil her attack and pounce on her back. Rebounding quickly, she bares and snaps her teeth, forcing Large Head’s lackeys to retreat.
She launches to rip apart the weakest of the pack, but Large Head barrels into her, throwing her to the ground. They roll and scuffle, each growling at the other, then break apart – the lone hyena quickly scrabbling back up on all fours.
Large Head lunges to bite her neck, but she swiftly squirms out of the way. Then pivoting, the lone hyena clamps her jaws on the alpha bitch’s haunches. The blood tastes bitter yet sweet. Large Head briefly cries out in agony but quickly recovers; it would be death for the matriarch to show weakness to her clan. Her followers whoop and cackle in protest. Turning, the matriarch meets her gaze and they stare at each other for one long moment.
Suddenly the ground rumbles under their paws. Off to the east, a herd of gazelles is stampeding. The lone hyena releases her hold on the old matriarch and the two combatants look to the potential meat and salivate. Abandoning their duel, Large Head breaks into a run, aiming for the slowest and weakest at the back of the herd. The rest of her clan follows her, fanning out to a large hunting V.
The lone hyena watches her in bemusement. She understands that killing an odd hyena is no longer appealing to the clan; gazelles are much juicier. She wonders if she should join them. She could help them rip apart their chosen prey. During their feeding, she could choose a choice body part, thereby asserting her leadership. She notices Large Head has left a trail of blood behind. The clan will eventually kill her as she now appears weak. If she were the one to kill Large Head, she would then lead the rest of the pack.
She hears her own quick shallow breaths, her heart beating in her chest. The warbling of birds, the twittering of insects, even the guttural sounds of vultures circling overhead, clash like cymbals in her ears. A starling alights nearby and suddenly a barrage of sounds and images flood her mind: She is surrounded by smoke, the sound of drumming rings through her ears, cool waves splash against her body, and then a coarse voice whispers: “Go to the One with the message.”
She turns away from the pack, as the voice continues to hiss in her ears. It beckons across the vast plains, urging her to leave the clan of roaming beasts behind. She obeys.
As the sun climbs to its zenith, she catches a whiff of blood, causing her stomach to grumble louder. She looks up and sees vultures circling not far off. Frothing at the mouth, she trots toward the carrion birds and finds a half-eaten antelope – a lion pride’s leftovers. She lunges at the birds, scattering them. She manages to snatch a hind leg with her teeth and rip it from the carcass. They swoop in to peck her back, an attempt to guard their meal, but with the meat dangling from her mouth, she sprints away.
Under an acacia tree, she devours the antelope’s backside in several bites, hacking through its skin to the flesh with her knife-like teeth. She relishes how carrion always tastes better when they are seasoned with a lion’s saliva. Its smell tantalizes her so much that she even eats the bones.
She wallows in the dirt to ease the sting of her scratches from the earlier battle with the hyena clan. A starling alights on a branch of the tree above her. Then as the sky turns orange and magenta with dusk, her eyelids grow heavy, lulling her into sleep.
A slim bare-chested man is waving her in through the open door of his hut. His smiling eyes sparkle as he says: “Come to me!”
She is about to walk in when…
Something awakens her. It is a male hyena, marking his territory. Lying on her belly, she pants, observing him. Unlike females, males always roam alone as they are only good for mating and are useless otherwise. He circles her with caution, for she is twice his size and could crush him easily. Yet when he climbs on her back, she allows him. She is much too drowsy to rouse. Many males have approached her for mating before and she has always rebuffed them, but this time it feels good. It feels right.
He awkwardly pokes his penis above her erect clitoris, which is as big and long as his member. Their sexes rub against each other as he tries to enter her shaft, but he keeps slipping off her sleek fur. Her sex moistens from his continuous tries. She stands up to make it easier for him to climb and poke again. When the tip of his penis finally enters, she whoops and chortles with delight. Yes, this time it’s delicious and welcoming.
Image: cryptidz.wikia.com/
A starling lands on her head and she tries to shake it off, when she hears: “Go to the One with the message.” Suddenly she remembers: She is no hyena. She is human. She is Duriya Osa! There is no way she can mate with this animal.
She throws him off her and then swipes at his face with her claws. The male hyena cowers under her strikes until she retreats, then tries to mount her again. This time she springs to bite him, snapping her jaws, but the male instantly moves out of the way. Rising on her hind legs, she yowls. He finally surrenders to her threats and lopes off to a nearby tree to lick his genitals and quench the fire of his excitement.
Under an indigo sky, Duriya begins to run. She runs until she is several miles away from the stud and the night lit with starlight. She finally stops beneath an umbrella tree to rest. This is when she hears the sound of an mbira. Her ears prick, listening to the faint notes, its tinkling sound dancing before her.
The sweet melody vibrates through her body, and with each tink-tink-tink-tink, she shudders as if from an internal storm. She leans against the tree shaking uncontrollably. Sharp pain shoots through her body like bolts of lightning and she jerks her head from side to side in rickety movements. With horror, she sees her paws begin to grow into human hands. Her black spotted fur starts to fade into coffee-brown skin and tight curls of human hair. She can feel her jagged fangs pushing back to human teeth. She has to get to the One before she fully transforms or she will not survive this journey.
But her body is changing beyond her control. She halts as her two front legs shrink to human arms. Her ears shrivel from her wide animal ones and her sharp-night vision fades into human sight. Her sense of smell dulls; her strength wanes. She howls in agony, but her breath is cut short as her spine straightens and her tail melts back into it. Her hind legs lengthen into human ones; she is now crawling on her hands and knees. She was to be there by the fifth night, she remembers, and time is running out. She has to get there. She just has to…
Crawling and changing, changing and crawling, she makes her way towards the sound of the mbira, which grows louder with each step. Then a pungent scent of violets stings her nose. She inhales… Ahh… that smell… She cackles and whoops, recognizing it. The One must be near.
At the tree that marks the entrance to his compound, she stretches her body upright and shakes off what’s left of her reddish-brown fur. She shuffles sluggishly to her lover’s threshold where she collapses, supine. She opens one eye and catches him watching her.
“Ahh … that’s my girl,” she hears him say.
#
Owodunni lifts the young woman, his legs buckling from a weight that is still that of a 200-pound hyena, and carries her into his home. A starling flies through the open door and alights on one of the root jars by the entrance as he places Duriya on a straw mat in the centre of the room. The air around them is as heavy as wet mist.
Burning fragrant herbs, Owodunni prays to the deities who helped create Duriya. He gives thanks and offers Ogo, the Dogon deity responsible for the powerful huntress, a boar’s head. He hangs his machete on a hook in the centre of the shrine. As the fresh blood drips from it into a sacred pot, he smokes Duriya’s body from head to toe with a bunch of burning twigs. He notices the deep scratches on her stomach and winces. When he’d cast the spell three years ago he had not thought to arm Duriya; he didn’t think she would confront any danger.
He tucks the shrine’s brown, gold, and ivory cloth around Duriya’s shoulders as she snores. He is careful not to rouse her, for she is still in the twilight of human and animal. It could be hours before her full transition and if he is not careful, she could tear him to pieces. As if to confirm his suspicions, she yawns, revealing sharp fangs. He keeps a safe distance between them and carries a fighting knife in the waist of his trousers: just in case.
He pours libations to Ogo again. He gives praises to his ancestors and to the forces that feed his powers.
#
Duriya’s body writhes in violent convulsions and she wakes up in tears. She struggles to look around. The room is decorated with lion and boar skins and furnished only by a chair with three legs, some wooden shelves against a wall, and an elaborate shrine. A wooden staff decorated with horizontal bands of light mahogany leans on the wall by the door, a starling is perched atop it, watching her intently.
The shelves are filled with glass jars of brilliantly-coloured powders, bottles of ogogoro, feathers, a doll’s head, the swollen carcass of a puffer fish, and three skulls – one of a dog and two human.
She studies the altar, gazing at the skulls and bones on it. The walls on either side of it are draped with gold and silver material. At its centre, there is a platter full of rice, yam, oranges, bananas, pineapples and beans – offerings for the deities and ancestors. This altar has been her home away from home for the past three years. It is where she seeks comfort from a husband she pretends to love.
Groaning, Duriya crawls until she is next to her lover, directly under the shrine. Her muscles pulsating from overexertion, she curls into a foetal position.
“When will be a good day for me to kill my husband?” She asks absently.
Owodunni glances over his shoulder at her, still not quite comfortable with her human form.
“Killing my brother takes patience, my dear,” he says, forcing a light tone.
He stands to fetch a jar of ointment from one of his shelves. Scooping some of the ointment with the fingertips of his right hand, he returns to her. “Turn over. This should take the scarring away.”
While Owodunni smears the ointment on her belly, Duriya thinks of how, in public, she has been humiliated by her husband’s beatings and threats. How, in private, she has had to concede to his desires for threesomes and foursomes. She thinks of how often she has sat in her hut alone at night dreading his return. Her only reprieve has been within Owodunni’s arms.
“I almost didn’t make it.”
“What do you mean?” Owodunni asks.
“They almost killed me.”
“Who almost killed you?”
“A big-headed hyena.”
“I’m glad you’re here,” Owodunni says. He reaches to stroke her shoulder but she flinches away.
“You don’t understand,” she says.
Owodunni remains silent and listens for he does not want to agitate the beast.
“I nearly forgot myself out there.”
“Did you hear me calling you?”
Without answering, Duriya looks up at the starling perched on the head of the mahogany staff. Then she nods.
“Well then, you have nothing to worry about,” he says. “You should eat something,” Owodunni says. He moves over to a round-bellied pot she hasn’t noticed before and stirs the soup inside it. “This will help you transition.”
“You know I can’t eat cooked meat right away.”
“I know, but I want a full woman right now.”
“What’s the matter?” She asks with a smirk. “Are you afraid I might take a bite out of you?”
“You are still part animal.”
“Is that so?” She cackles, crawling to him on her hands and knees. “Do I not look fully human?”
“Yes, but your mind and heart are still transitioning.”
He spoons the meat, yams and vegetables into a wooden bowl.
“Here, taste this.” He thrusts the bowl at her.
She shuts her eyes tight and smells the meal before her. Reaching into the bowl, she grabs a piece of meat and bites it. She lets it stay in her mouth for a moment before she tries to chew it.
“Ugh!” In disgust, she spits the morsel into the palm of her hand and wipes her mouth with her forearm. “This is awful! How could anyone eat cooked meat? It ruins its essence!”
“Taste it again,” he persists. “You will soon remember.”
“Remember what?”
“Remember your true self.”
She remembers how much she enjoyed the taste of fresh warm blood while in her animal state, how sweet carrion bones tasted. Too bad she only transitions when her husband ventures out on blood sports once a month, she thinks. Placing the piece of meat into a cloth, she lays the bowl aside.
“What if I don’t want to remember any more? What if I want to let myself go and mate with a male hyena?”
“Now that would be a problem,” Owodunni said, furrowing his brows. “Besides I would have to kill the hyena.”
Duriya laughs. Then she turns serious and asks, “So, you’re not going to cast a death spell on my husband?”
“No, not yet.”
“Does this mean that your medicine is failing?”
“No, it just means that I have to find another road.”
“Another road?” she asks, shaking her head. “Sometimes you talk in riddles.”
“I have to work around my brother’s protection.”
“Your brother’s talisman?”
“Yes, they were given to both of us at birth. I had to abandon mine when I embraced Dogon medicine.”
“Dogon medicine will serve you better than Yoruba.”
“But it means the Yoruba deities no longer protect me. If I cast such a spell against my brother, I would become his enemy and those deities would turn against me. All of my plans to take over his kingdom would end before they even began.”
“This is much too difficult,” Duriya says. “Why can I not kill him? It would be so easy as a hyena. Besides, I might enjoy eating the king’s meat and bones.”
“You are forbidden to kill humans; it’s against the rules of the spell,” Owodunni says, squatting in front of her. “Otherwise you will remain a hyena forever and you will lose all memory of who you are. Do you want that to happen?”
“I’m getting tired of travelling this way,” Duriya says, sighing. “I might not come back to you the next time.”
“Don’t worry,” he says. “You are protected under my spell.”
“I don’t feel protected when I’m out there.”
“You can hold your own,” he says.
She looks at her lover, this middle-aged man of medium height, and marvels at his mahogany complexion and chiselled body. She might have been staring at her husband, except for the gray streak in the middle of his hair and the way his body seems to dance with the wind. That is why she prefers him.
“So, if we can’t destroy your brother then what’s the other road?”
“The other road is called patience.”
“Patience?” she asks, smirking. “I’m not sure if you’ll last, old man.”
“Ahh … you’re starting to talk like yourself,” his light brown eyes twinkle in the candlelight. He caresses her thigh. “How’s the soup?”
She dips her right index finger into the wooden bowl. It smells of tomatoes, onions, garlic, and peppers. Licking it, Duriya finds she is beginning to like the flavours. “It’s not so bad.”
“I’ve been waiting for you for too long,” Owodunni says. “Don’t make me wait another second.”
Owodunni wraps his arms around her and she clasps her thighs around his waist. They make love until dawn.
Afterwards, while Owodunni is fast asleep, Duriya finds a strand of hyena hair at the edge of the mat. It’s from the male hyena. Closing her eyes, she savours the memory of the wind hitting her fur out there on the plains. Clutching the hair, she thinks: just in case.
# END #
Adanze Asante (aka Doreen C. Bowens) embarked on her writing career when she lived in Harlem, trying to launch a community garden. The garden never grew, but her trilogy did. She is a recent Clarion West graduate and just finished A Mother’s Milk, Part I of The Spirit Warrior’s trilogy. Ms. Asante earned her M.A. in journalism from U.C. Berkeley and her writings have appeared in the following publications: The Network Journal, The New York Daily News, The Oakland Tribune, New York Newsday, The Oregonian, Corpus Christi Caller Times, and African Voices Magazine.
Felicity was born unhappy. She was conceived when her parents were young and unmarried. They wedded immediately then proceeded to use religion to punish themselves for as long as she lived with them. There were evening prayers filled with loud supplications to God to forgive them while she knelt there feeling every inch the mistake that they perceived her to be. There was the remittance of fifty percent of their income to the church, so that she never got those new shoes or money to go on the class’ excursion to Olumo Rock.
She grew up unhappy, too; sharing a tiny room with an older cousin who carried out the frustrations of being unemployed in a thriving city on her – slaps and kicks that left marks long after the physical scars had healed. Even when she ran away from home at nineteen – her bag heavy with money she’d stolen from her family – she remained unhappy. She paid for an apprenticeship at a tailor’s shop where she excelled. When she became assistant boss after a few years, she promptly poached all her employer’s good tailors to start her own business. But even then happiness eluded her.
Today, Felicity is a tall woman of forty-five with big feet and round shoulders that hunch forward. Her mouth is downturned and her thin bottom lip juts out, giving her a permanent look of one who has tasted something bitter. She is still unhappy and her tailors sometimes attribute her constant displeasure to her unmarried status.
“If man for dey, shebi im go dey smile?” They whisper among themselves.
She is on her way to buy sewing thread in bulk from Agege Market. She likes to do the shopping herself as she trusts no one. Her footsteps are heavy on the streets of the market, which are cluttered with Gala wrappers, unlucky Lotto tickets and juice from baskets of tomatoes. Her right arm hugs her handbag tight to herself while her left hand further protects it from grasping hands. She has been robbed before; her stern sneer hadn’t prevented them from approaching.
She walks past the men stretching out pairs of jeans, calling out to women younger and prettier than she is. She walks past the shops where the girls selling big Aso-oke and lace cloth look through her, searching for potential customers. But when she meets a crowd, Felicity stops.
It is her birthday today but she has told no one. There is no one to tell. She has no friends and she is not sociable enough with her staff to have them pretend to care. On this day every year, Felicity does something out of character. One year, she made herself a long red dress made of see-through chiffon. She stood in front of her mirror for hours in this dress, turning this way and that – never smiling, just staring. As she studied herself, she mentally tucked in a flab here and trimmed a bulge there, but she wasn’t satisfied. She squinted into the mirror, her mind hacking away at her person, imagining she was nothing but bones and that the red dress fluttered in the air.
Another year, she bought herself a huge bowl of ice-cream from the Big Treat Supermarket down the street and gave her staff the day off. Amongst the immobile sewing machines and headless mannequins, she sat in the silence of her shop and ate her banana-flavoured ice-cream spoon after spoon till the white of the plastic bottom stared back at her, the cold morsels settling in her belly like dead weight.
She moves toward the nucleus of the crowd to investigate its cause. People naturally step aside for the tall unsmiling woman. In the middle of the human circle is a small man selling potions. “Solutions,” he calls them. She hisses and starts to move away, shoving people aside, when she hears someone say to another: “Him say e be magician, o. E go soon show us.”
The mention of the word “magician” has made her pause because she decides right then that this will be her out-of-character thing: stopping to humour a trickster. She looks around at the swelling audience, their eyes wide in anticipation and she shakes her head at their naiveté. Magic. Ha!
She pushes her way back to the front of the crowd and stares at the wiry little magician. He is wearing a badly-tailored white dashiki: thread dangles from the hem of the trousers and the blouse is too short for his torso, making him look even shorter, like a dwarf. He is bald and his ashy lips and the smattering of bumps on his scalp give him an aura of ill health. Despite this, the man is jumpy. He dances from foot to foot as he proffers his potions to cure cancer, erectile dysfunction and bring home runaway husbands. His eyes flit from person to person, matching the excitement of his audience who have left their shops to be entertained, as if he too will be amazed by his own acts. Felicity shuffles in impatience.
Image: Stephanie Hasham
And then it is time. Felicity observes that he stows away his proceeds before starting his magic show so that when things go awry he will not be totally disadvantaged. Smart, Felicity thinks. He introduces himself as Ayao and presents a low bow. He starts with a few card tricks and Felicity rolls her eyes at the banal opening.
A member of the crowd picks out a card, a lot of skipping and dancing is done and then he reveals the card picked at random to the exclamation and yelling of the people. They yelp in delight as he does this over and over. Felicity’s eyes follow his moves, trying to uncover the charade.
Then a hush falls. It is time for serious business.
Ayao asks for a volunteer.
“For what o?” someone yells and the people laugh. But she can hear the uneasiness pulsate in the air after their laughter has died down.
Ayao’s eyes are wide and dark as he turns in slow circles to take in his captive audience. “To fly,” he says.
There is a small, almost imperceptible general step back. Felicity almost laughs. Almost. She sees Ayao’s game: If everyone is too frightened to volunteer, the magician can feign disappointment and leave the market with his reputation intact.
And so she steps forward.
She can hear their surprise.
Ayao gestures for her to walk toward him. She does. He raises his left arm to shush the murmurs of the crowd.
“Do you believe?” He asks Felicity, his voice loud enough to carry over the crowd.
Felicity lowers her gaze so that she is staring at Ayao. His eyelashes are long and bushy, emphasizing the size of his eyes.
“No,” Felicity whispers, but in the quiet of the middle of the marketplace, it is just as loud.
“No?” Ayao asks, narrowing his eyes.
“No.”
Ayao moves away from her, stepping back foot by foot so that his eyes do not stray from hers.
“Do you want to drop your bag?” he asks.
“No,” Felicity repeats, her suspicion blatant.
“Okay.” Ayao walks back to her. He walks around her. He dances around her. Then he begins to chant:
“Ase Orisa lenu mi.
Ase Orisa lenu mi.”
On and on, he tries to reinforce the authority of the deities he is invoking.
“Ase Orisa lenu mi.
Ase Orisa lenu mi.”
Felicity stands there – still, waiting for him to tire.
But he goes on, louder and faster:
“Ase Orisa lenu mi!
Ase Orisa lenu mi!”
Felicity has seen a man fly once. He jumped off the Third Mainland Bridge with his arms stretched out in front of him. As the people around her honked and screamed, Felicity had envied his freedom.
Then there is smoke, as there always is in every tacky magician’s show. And then people are screaming.
Why are they screaming? Felicity raises an arm to clear the smoke in front of her eyes. But her arm doesn’t rise. Instead, feathers flap.
Suddenly, she is high above the ground looking down at the market people running away from Ayao. The magician gestures for her to come to him; she can see the panic in his eyes from where she floats. Ayao’s hands rise to his shiny head, then lower, then rise again. He gestures towards her again then turns on his heels and flees. Felicity can see him winding through the streets.
Someone has snatched her bag in the melee but she doesn’t care. She is far away from the chaos. She can now see a pattern to the rowdy market streets and Felicity thinks how tiny the world must look to God.
And then she’s off, because she cannot think of a reason not to go. The air here is so light and she is so buoyant. Felicity feels like she has been relieved of a lifelong burden of being. She is both overwhelmed and enthralled by the things her new body is doing. How is she so weightless but still so strong? She slices through the air as she moves farther and farther from the market scene. She smiles. But there is no one to see it. Nobody to witness what it is for a bird to smile.
Felicity wants to see herself. She wants to stare at her new form the way she did when she wore that long red dress. What type of bird is she? Is she colourful? Is she as black as the unhappiness that now seems so foreign to her? She opens her mouth but she has never heard the warble that escapes. She knows nothing about birds.
Felicity heads towards a high-rise building with a glass exterior.
She starts to descend towards the building. Closer and closer, her reflection comes towards her. She squints to bring the fuzz into focus. And then there is a boom. She has hit the glass, beak-first. Pain jolts through her small frame in reverberations and the world goes black.
Felicity feels herself falling and falling and as she falls she feels the heaviness of her being return.
When she crashes into the ground, she is Felicity again. She is engulfed in pain. It overwhelms her so that she starts to weep. Felicity thinks: do birds cry? When she tries to move, pain shoots out from her joints in waves – her bones are broken.
Someone screams “Amusu!” and another yells “Aje!” then there is a circle of people around her, calling her witch in their various languages. And she feels so weak, so weak and so tired. Blood seeps from unidentified gashes and she twitches with every fresh flood of pain. Now she is the show.
A stone smacks into her back and rolls to the floor, red with her blood. She realises that she is naked. Then other stones follow. The people close in, their fear chokes her – how does something thing fall as a bird and land as a woman? – their horror bites at her shredded skin like sand flies. Her body feels weighed down, more than it has ever been, beneath their stones and their words.
A feather flutters within her view and Felicity is reminded of her temporary weightlessness. She is in pain now, but she flew! She flew!
There are more voices and more stones but Felicity succumbs to the rising within her. Her body sinks further into the ground, but she is leaving it behind and rising and rising…
Pemi Aguda writes short stories and flash fiction. Her stories have appeared in The Kalahari Review, Black Fox Literary Magazine, Prufrock Magazine, The Wrong Quarterly and the TNC anthology These Words Expose Us among others. Her short story “Caterer, Caterer” won the 2015 Writivism Short Story Prize 2015; published in Munyori Journal and the Roses for Betty anthology.
The two of us gathered about Feria and stared at her wrist with shiny eyes.
“Waow,” Indo said and ran her stubby fingers over the rubber band of the brand-new device on Feria’s wrist. “It’s so cute it could orgasm me.”
“It is,” Feria replied with a casual flick of said wrist. “It’s like, everything I’ll ever need.” She twisted her slender light-skinned arm like this and that, showing off the inscriptions written in reflective black on the thick, pink band: Beat the Habit and Nothing is Impossible.
“Nice,” I said. This wasn’t just something, it was the something. “How much?”
Feria shrugged. “Sammy, he got it for me.”
Uzzi sauntered into class then, the usual over-eager smile plastered on his face. We sat in a corner at the back as usual, away from the light of the Teaching Screen that undergraduate classes in Pan-Atlantic Uni, Lagos, now employed. Uzzi wove between rows of buzzing Biz-Admin students dressed in their Friday jeans and tight everythings. He took the empty seat beside me.
“Hey girls!” Uzzi always smelt of too much perfume and hair gel and today, like every other day, he wore derbies under jeans and a tucked-in shirt.
“Feria bought a HaBeat,” Indo announced.
Uzzi’s eyes widened and Feria gave a modest smile that, because I know Feria, was not really modest at all.
“Nahh! Where–how?”
“Sammy.” She smiled again. “He says I spend too much time online, so he got it to help.”
“Do you spend too much time online?” Indo asked. Indo was that one person amongst your friends who said or asked things no one dared to say or ask.
Feria shrugged. “Never really thought about it. I guess it’s the HaBeat’s job to tell me now.”
Uzzi leaned in across me, excitement written on his face. “Show us.”
To be fair, it resembled nothing more than a plain rubber wearable. Mummy once referred to it as stinky overpriced rubber because, well yes, it did cost close to the latest Keyless Mac. But she was just a school principal, she couldn’t understand.
Feria pointed to a curved bulging rectangle in the middle of the band, about the size of a small flash drive. “I heard the main thing is like a sort of tiny computer here.”
“Chip,” I corrected. I knew more about tech stuff than all of them put together.
“Chip, yes. Right, Yeji.”
We nodded. And when Feria stared at us like: that’s all there is to it, I offered.
“When it touches your skin, the chip tracks everything. Activity, sleep, behavioural triggers –whatnot. It’s paired by wireless to this HaBeat app that syncs around everything, even your car system. With it, you set goals and milestones for breaking or forming particular habits from, let’s say trying not to spend so much time online, to quitting smoking or keeping your bad driving in check.”
“How na?” Indo said. “How will it know?”
“Oh, it knows,” Feria said. “It’ll tell you once you’re doing it wrong.”
“So, with what, like alarms or something?” Uzzi inquired.
“Well…yeah, for some people,” Feria said and lowered her head. “Mine’s a bit different. It, uhm, it deducts a specific amount from my bank account.”
Mild gasps went around. Uzzi threw his head back and laughed.
“That’s some real shit,” he said. “Debit alerts ‘cause you live on the net?”
“Why would you want to do that?” Indo asked. “What if you like, have a relapse and the thing makes you go bankrupt?”
“I didn’t set it. Sammy did. He says it’s the only way to keep me loyal to the cause.”
“That’s… huh,” I said, at a loss for words. The others, too, creased their brows.
Feria shrugged again. “There are other ways, though. Some people get mild electric shocks, some use alarms, though the alarms are really loud and weird and embarrassing. Some others get rotten messages posted to their socialverse accounts.”
“Waow,” Indo said.
“That’s so… draconian,” I said.
“Englisher,” Indo hissed. “Me, I like it. It’s exactly what I need for my weight.”
I did buy the idea of a habit-breaking wearable, though I didn’t dig shocks or debits. But I knew immediately that Indo was right, and I too, needed the damn thing. If only to save me from my one unbreakable habit.
*****
The HaBeat’s half-price offer on DealDey stood at one-ninety-nine-k before it sold out. I lay in my small bed in my small room in the small Island apartment my parents could barely afford (even with just one child) and stared at my old Xperia screen, trying to convince myself I didn’t need this thing that bad. Besides, what yarn was I going to spin to Daddy about getting me that money, anyway? But my fantasies of the device refused to be quenched, fuelled by both stellar reviews I saw on vidblogs and the #MyHaBeatAndI selfies piling up on the socialverse.
And it didn’t help any when Indo buzzed me:
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: Babe
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: I gorrit o
<Yejide>: :-O
<Yejide>: Issalie
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)> has sent you a photo.
<Yejide>: The yellow one! \O/ Balling!
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: Balling ke? It’s my elder bro in UK I obtained sef.
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: He’s been promising me the new Keyless, but I just asked him for a HaBeat instead. :-$
<Yejide>: Nice. 🙂
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: I set mine to electric shock. I think that will work best for me.
<Yejide>: Won’t it be painful?
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: Not really. It has shocked me twice already. It’s not that bad.
<Yejide>: Oh? What did you do?
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: I set Early Rising, Workout and Light Breakfast goals.
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: I woke up late and got shocked
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: Then I paused during workout and got shocked again, until I continued.
<Yejide>: Wow.
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: So, when are you getting one?
<Yejide>: Lmao! Getting one indeed. You go buy?
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: Everyone needs one na. Uzzi got one last week. You know he’s trying to quit his impulse shopping.
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: You’re the only one left.
I paused and stared at that last message, thinking how I did need it, more than anybody in the world knew, but for reasons I couldn’t quite tell her. So I stared at my phone screen some more and typed nothing.
#
Phones quickly lost the perpetual blue-and-white screens of instant messaging and microblogging apps, quietly replaced by the black-and-grey interface of the HaBeat Social. Complete with charts and dials and instant messaging, this was where HaBeat owners could team up with friends and push the zap button when one of them missed a milestone, making achieving goals more likely.
At Pan-At, everyone had one. They giggled to one another and discussed nothing but milestones and goals for hours, with both real friends and virtual ones. They were joyous, like they had this renewed zeal to achieve, like their lives had just kickstarted.
Not me, of course.
If you know my parents, then you’d know it was moot even trying to explain the HaBeat’s importance to them. It had taken three years of convincing just to get Daddy to see that buying me an eBike made more sense than handing down his old 2016 Cerato. I mean, who got held up in Lagos jams any more when you could go a steady 20 mph on the free bike lanes?
Mummy had even shut off the SmartKitchen program and its accompanying appliances that came with our apartment. I usually turned it on while cooking to surf recipes on the projector, or to run the dishwasher and cooker with gestures. One day, I forgot to turn it off and minutes later Mummy was fuming at the SmartAssistant.
“I said I’ll boil the potatoes as long as I want!”
I giggled, and she turned on me.
“I’ve told you, Yejide: If machines wash your rice, peel your yam and tell you how much pepper to add, what is your role in the cooking? Why not just allow them to also think for you?”
I laughed. “Mummy, it’s not that serious now.”
“Quiet! When you get your own house, let technology do everything there – that’s your business. But if you touch my kitchen again, I’ll slice your fingers.”
How did they say it: you can’t put new wine in old skins? I had to use Plan B.
I had to. I didn’t want to hurt anybody anymore.
#
The only corridor in our house runs from the living down to the back door. The master bedroom takes up one whole side of the wall and its door is at the end of the corridor – a long way off from my room, which is near the beginning. At night, it gets quite dark down here, as there are no windows and the lights are kept turned off, because they’d filter into everyone’s rooms.
It was in this darkness that I tiptoed, wearing stockings to muffle my footfalls, past the kitchen, past the living, to door of the master bedroom. Soundless. Nothing new. I had done this so many times, it was second nature now. Besides, Daddy was the light sleeper in the house and he was away for work. I knew not to come here when he was around.
The door was open a crack, and I nudged it further and went past the king bed to the wardrobe. The wardrobe door used to creak, until I finally stuffed the hinges with tissue paper. It didn’t creak now as I opened it.
Ancient soul that he was, Daddy still stored cash at home, in a fanny pack on the third-level shelf. Disarranged, so I knew he didn’t count it. I pulled out two five-thousand-naira notes, stuffed the remaining back, and completed my exit as I had entered.
Just a little at a time, I told myself as I walked back to my room. He won’t notice. Just a few more times, then it’ll all be over for good.
#
Image: Stephanie Hasham
My father is a smallish man, all thick and hairy arms weathered by the many different breezes in the many different countries he has visited on business. Some days he reminds me of a small grizzly. When I was little, I used to rub my face in his bushy arms, shrieking in delight when he would chase me about the house and threaten to get me lost in them.
On a hot Saturday afternoon a few days after his return, we went out for the family time out we took whenever he came back from a long trip. It was usually us three but Mummy was absent this time. Only after we parked outside a Yellow Chilli outlet in Victoria Island did I realize this was by design.
I could tell he was distracted, even though he smiled all through the banter on the way over. Daddy always smiled, so that meant nothing. It was his eyes; they were weighed down by a certain kind of sadness.
Our order was delivered, and halfway through my baked yams and grilled fish, he blurted it out.
“I know you’ve been taking my money.”
The fish on my fork jumped back to the plate, splattering onion sauce on my pastel blue blouse. I looked down at it and kept my eyes there, too ashamed to bring them back up to face him.
“I’ve known for a while that pinches go missing every then and now. There’re only three of us in the house, and of course it wasn’t your mother. I just didn’t want to believe it was you.”
I opened my mouth to say something, but only the smell of onions and shame came out. A ball formed in my throat and a lone tear jiggled down my left cheek.
Daddy saw it and reached across the table for my hand. I flinched, then slowly withdrew it and folded my arms. I didn’t want him to touch me; I was too dirty.
“I don’t love you any less, Yeji. You’re still my one cherished thing in this life. I’ll not stop loving you because of a few thousand naira.” He shook his head. “But this kind of habit, it can get you in big trouble. If you get caught by someone else…”
He dropped off, leaving me to imagine the consequences. As if I hadn’t imagined them a million times over myself. I had never stolen from anyone else besides him, but I couldn’t even find the voice to tell him that. I just stared down at the circles of oil widening on my blouse and let the lone tear run.
My father came around the table to my side and wrapped his small grizzly arms about my neck. I couldn’t say a word, fighting back tears. He held me the way he had when I was little, his prickly arm hair tickling my cheeks and the insides of my neck, so that I felt like his little girl once again.
“Just ask me for anything,” he said, rubbing my shoulder. “Anything. If you really need it, I’ll give you. But please, please, I beg you. Please don’t steal from me – or anyone – again. Ever.”
It was too much. I began to cry.
I cried for a long time and he held me, rocking me gently and giving reassuring smiles to onlookers in the restaurant. When I had exhausted all my tears, he took me by the hand and we went home.
I had never felt lighter than I did leaving Yellow Chilli that Saturday evening, and with that came the understanding that I never needed a HaBeat for anything in the first place.
#
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: Where’re you?
<Yejide>: Parking my bike. The others?
<:-* Indo-Nesia B-)>: Yuhp. They here.
Feria and Uzzi were seated with Indo at an outdoor Johnny Rockets stand when I got into Royals, the little mall on the only major intersection in our neighbourhood, far east off Lekki-Epe. They chatted in quick speech, and as I came closer, I realized they were talking about milestones and goals – as usual. They all had their HaBeats on: Indo’s yellow, Feria’s pink and Uzzi’s ankara all standing out on their African skin. Funny how it made them blend in more than stand out, seeing as almost everyone else in the mall was wearing one. It was I, whose wrist was adorned by a locally-made Asante bracelet, who stood out like a rose in a desert.
Uzzi saw me first and shrieked as usual. I smiled and shrugged as I sat at the table. Indo stared at my wrist with a quizzical look, then leaned in towards me. The diner chair creaked as she did. She seemed to have gotten bigger since the last time I saw her.
“Thought you said you were going to, ehm, ‘buy’ it somehow?” She whispered.
I smiled. “Nah.”
She lifted her eyebrows, and Uzzi saw.
“What?” he asked, looking from Indo to me and back.
“Yeji says she doesn’t need a HaBeat,” Indo said.
Remind me to kill Indo one day for her leaking mouth?
Uzzi adopted the same quizzical look. “How na? It’s like WiFi. Everybody needs it.”
I shook my head. “It’s my problem. I’ll fix it.”
“What d’you mean?” This was one of the rare times Uzzi grew serious. “Babe, the days of relying on our human selves to fix things are gone. This is a computer. It’s a hundred percent assurance that you’re becoming a better person.”
I smiled and said nothing.
Uzzi tapped Feria like: Look, you’re missing loads of crazy. Feria, who hadn’t so much as glanced up from the phone she was furiously tap-tap-tapping on, didn’t even flinch. There might as well have been a hurricane and at she wouldn’t have looked up.
“But don’t you feel…odd?” Indo asked.
I shrugged. “Why?”
Uzzi and Indo glanced at one another, then looked back at me the way you would look at someone who didn’t know they were stupid.
“Okay o,” Uzzi said and rose. “Na you know. Me, I’m hungry. Let’s do KFC. Feria’s paying.”
He bent and picked up – I counted two, three, four – Paul Smith bags stuffed with shirts, shoes and collectibles, and he went in the direction of the swing doors. Indo rose and went too, huffing and puffing with each step, beckoning to me to come along. Feria followed, her head downward, eyes fixed on her phone and fingers doing spider combos on its screen.
I lingered for a beat, watching the three of them go into the crowd of HaBeats. Then I stood and followed, smiling to myself all over again.
Suyi Davies writes Suspense & Speculative fiction, and lives in Lagos, Nigeria. He has published in Jungle Jim, The Kalahari Review, Wazi and ShortSharpShot. He was runner-up at TheNakedConvos’ The Writer Season III, 2014. Between reading and writing, Suyi works in Project Management, plays piano and guitar, and searches for spaces to fit new bookshelves. He lives on the web at suyidavies.wordpress.com and on Twitter at @IAmSuyiDavies.
The street is quiet. Mosquitoes sing an octave higher than the hum of electricity, often absent. My bed feels like a pallet of lead but I don’t thrash; I lie still as death. I am sweating from wearing three shirts and a sweater over two jeans and a pair of shorts. I click the heels of my boots against each other to keep myself awake.
I hear her in the other room, a drunken bee dancing around our things singing something I can’t piece together in a droning voice. She has been drinking, slowly, but with a determination I almost admire, since seven. It’s nearly three am. That’s nearly eight hours if you discredit the fact that she was hung over even then. I don’t grudge her drinking; if I had as much courage as she did, I’d do the same.
A loud crash comes from the passageway and then the muffled thud of her body hitting concrete, like the sound you make when you punch a pillow. I don’t move immediately; I wait ten, then twenty minutes. Just to make sure. Then I crawl off the mattress, feeling my way in the darkness towards the door that joins the halves of our two-room apartment. I freeze when in the near dark I spot a lump. She is splayed out in the doorway, half of her body in ‘my’ room. If I had stretched out my hand any further, I would have touched her, my mother.
I skirt around her body, it takes some contorting but I manage it without touching her. Even dead with drink, I can feel it; the pull of our telepathic connection. Being this close to her it is almost physical, like someone tugging on your arm, but I hold my breath and press my fingernails hard into my palm to distract myself. The front door takes some savvy to pry open but once I slip out into the dark, I feel free. Alive in a way that I had never felt before. I start to run and I haven’t stopped running since.
Applause rings from the circle around the fire. She stares at the flames, her cheeks flushed. They all look at her with pride, with such hope and she hates that she can read each one of them like an augury. They want to make her a leader, but she doesn’t want any of it.
“You’re so lucky, Maki. You never went to reform school. It’s horrible,” they chorus.
Almost all the girls on the street were there because they had been kicked out of the reform schools for being unable to learn the ‘dainty’ crafts. They have never seen anyone who has voluntarily escaped from a parent, a family unit. Even a dysfunctional one. It amazes Maki how excited they get each time she tells the story, how eager they are.
She looks around the circle at the other girls, the youngest is thirteen and only a few weeks old in her new life as a street feral. Liesl is the name she has been given because, like the girl in The Sound of Music, she loves to whistle. The day they found her, she was sprawled on a rubbish heap, cigarette scabs on her inner thighs and a festering burn on her back. They brought her to Maki to clean her wounds. While she had daubed the blistered flesh clean, she’d found pieces of singed polyester cloth in the sores. She hasn’t been able to get the image out of her head since.
Someone else begins to enrapture the audience with a story of her own, but Liesl keeps staring at her long after everyone has turned away. When the fire settles into bright orange embers and the circle breaks for the night, Liesl follows her, puppy-like, and sits beside her as she transforms a disused table into a cove. At first, Maki ignores Liesl; it is the only way to discourage fawning. She hears Liesl’s heart speed up each time a strange sound pierces the silence of the night, feels the fear that keeps her awake. She is only half sure of her decision when she raises her ratty blanket and says:
“Just for tonight.”
#
A shriek sends a tremor through everyone. She is up on her feet and running before she is even fully awake, her hand a tight fist around Liesl’s wrist. Liesl stumbles and slows them down but she holds on and keeps running. More shrieks erupt behind her and Liesl seizes up. The police officers are shouting commands, interspersed by the meaty crack of their batons breaking bone through skin.
A number of street ferals run past her towards the complicated maze of decrepit buildings that is the slum they all escaped once, but she keeps the course, braving the exposure of the open field. She knows if they can make it to the swamps around the lagoon, they will be safe; the police would never bother chasing her there. Everyone knows dangerous, dark things happen in the swamps, that batons and guns are useless there. Liesl screams behind her and falls. Maki releases her hand just in time to see her convulse as five hundred volts of electricity pumps into her body through the taser barb in her thigh.
“Maki!” Liesl screams.
It surges up from her belly, the magic that lives inside her, spreading to her arms and pooling in her voice box, begging to be used. It is like liquid fire in her body – supercharged. She stretches her hand in the direction of the wire connected to the barb, at the policeman cradling the taser gun on its other end. Just a thought, a single command would the power inside hurtling through space to devour him.
To stop is to be caught.
To live on the street is to live alone.
She remembers the words, repeated by every street feral from the day they slip the leash and become ‘free’. Her hand falls to her side and she averts her eyes from Liesl, who is already foaming at the lips. She’s been juiced for too long, possible brain damage. Maki ignores the magic howling in anguish in her head and turns away, making for the marsh.
#
The swamps aren’t as deadly as everyone makes them out to be, not for someone like Maki. Every sentient thing is lit up like a small beacon of life, so she knows where to step and where to duck. She slowly wades through the brackish water, chasing away water snakes with a stick. The bigger ones know to stay away from her; they can sense the thing living inside her. That was why their house never had rodents, why as a girl dogs gave her wide berth. She feels like she’s been walking for days though she knows it’s only been hours. Still she pushes on without rest. Her thoughts return constantly to Liesl.
I let them take her. I’m worse than my mother.
She wonders how long it will take them to identify the young girl and return her to her parents. She wonders if Liesl’s parents were one of the ones who went to the State for help with handling their ‘difficult’ children. Whether she knew that her mother had been one of the 942 women in her generation born with magic. The magic that the State harnessed into the drone army that revolutionized their world. She regrets never asking Liesl if she knew what she was, regrets not telling her she wasn’t alone.
She starts to cry, knee deep in swamp water, wet, shaking and alone. This moment of weakness is all the magic inside her needs. She doesn’t notice the warmth spreading up and through her until her cheeks start to warm. By then it is too late to will it back down.
She feels her spine stiffen; her legs grow immobile underneath her. Like light, it suffuses her cells, until she feels herself rise out of the water, and hover in the air. Slowly it reaches her brain and subsumes it and she feels her awareness widen, growing wider, till all of her skin is a giant eye. She sees through the trees of the swamp, past thousands of miles, through the shanties of the slum and the concrete of the city, past the bulletproof glass of the New Lagos’s hovering buildings, to a spacious corner office where a coal-skinned woman in a black dress, sleek greying hair fringing her nape is poring over blueprints. Like an involuntarily sigh, the words escape her:
“Mother.”
The woman’s head snaps up like a hound’s, as though she can hear Maki from hundreds of miles away. She abandons the blueprints, moves towards the window and presses her face against the glass. Her mother feels so close in that moment that Maki is tempted to reach out and touch her.
The woman’s eyes widen.
“Maki.”
The wave of longing that hits Maki leaves her gasping. It’s all she needs to reclaim control of her body. She forces the magic to retract itself into a tiny ball of consciousness. Free of its control, gravity returns swiftly, plunging her into the brackish water. She rises, her afro drenched and speckled with slime.
She starts to wade quickly through the water, making for cover but it is of no use. She cannot shake the feeling of being watched. She can no longer ignore the magic inside her, now rebelliously asserting its presence with a queasiness that makes her want to bend over and vomit. Despite the nausea, she needs to find a hiding place before sundown. Her mother will tell the police where she is, and they will come for her.
#
The streets are empty of ferals. The silence is haunting; nights in the slums are usually filled with chatter and the crackling of furniture repurposed as firewood. Her steps are coltish, wobbly from the strain of wading through the muddy swamp for hours. She doesn’t dare return to any of her haunts; the police would have already found them. Ferals might be great at hiding but they turn easily once they are caught. There is only one thing to do: find a hiding place in New Lagos.
She slinks in the shadows, tense as a power line. The magic in her pulses, barely restrained. The temptation is always there: to give a little and allow the magic suffuse her. She could then levitate herself several feet through an open window and find dry clothes and a warm bed for the night. But she resists. Instead it is 30 minutes of lurking and backpedalling and then a tight squeeze through a hole dug under the separating fence and she is in New Lagos.
The slums are relics of a time when grounding buildings was the only way to ensure structural integrity but now, with people of her kind, levitation is the new craze. Plexiglas squares hover in clusters above the ground, their ultramodern, LCD-lit angles casting knife-edged shadows. She scuttles underneath the first one, checking to see if anything moves in the darkness.
Image: hdwallpapers.cat
Cast in silhouette in one of the windows of the nearest high rise is a family, their short-haired sons whipping around the legs of subdued parents. Across the lush landscape this scene is repeated, over and over in each lit window. There are barely any girls, anywhere. They are all gone. The darkness remains inky, foreboding. The next tenement building is floating towards her; bigger than the stationary one she is under, more likely to give cover. But the space she has to cross to get to it will leave her exposed. There isn’t much of a choice, she has barely a minute before it passes. She springs into the space between them and shrieks as the world explodes in light.
“Stop! We have you cornered!”
The magic inside her starts to flex, pushing inquisitive tentacles. Let me help you. The light is too bright, and it traps her in place like amber. There is no other option. For the second time in one day, she relinquishes control, this time voluntarily, and lets the magic spread. It rushes like heat, expanding, betraying its presence through the sheen of sweat that suddenly coats her exposed skin.
Voluntarily acknowledging the magic is very different from being forcefully possessed. Because it isn’t siphoning energy into wresting control, all of its power is at her disposal; it is giddying. She splays her hands and the floodlights trained on her explode in a shower of sparks, plunging everything into darkness, but it still hurts too much to open her eyes. She feels the lightness again, the laws of physics bending to her whims.
Then pain, sharp as a lance, pierces her right shoulder blade. A tidal wave of electricity pours into her from that point. She convulses, shaking like a leaf. She tries to hold on to consciousness but it is too hard, too painful. The magic is a coward; she feels it flee, retreating from her fried nerve endings, squeezing into itself till it is a tiny pinprick of usurping life in her gut. She hates it in that moment. That revulsion is the last emotion to bloom as the taser peaks and the world collapses around her.
#
The world is like a sepia photograph when she awakes, bathed in tepid brown light. Her jaw aches, her throat is dry. She looks down instinctively and sees her arms and feet are shackled to a metal chair welded to the floor. The design of the chair is archaic. There is a butterfly syringe head taped to her forearm; the IV package it is attached to is empty. She cannot tell how long she has been in this room, but because the magic doesn’t sleep when she does, she knows that it’s been four days since they took her.
She is sure someone is watching her through the mirrored wall. She tries to reach the magic inside her but now that she needs it, it won’t come. It is barely a sliver and she is half afraid that she might be imagining it is still there. She waits, hoping that someone will come and talk to her, an external force to move the stationary object. She waits and waits, but no one comes. She thrashes against her restraints in frustration, chafing her wrists and ankles. Droplets of blood dripping off her mark time and still no one comes. Exhausted, she settles in for the long haul.
#
The door creaks open, alerting her. It has been hours at least. How many, she can’t say. She raises her head and sucks in a deep breath.
Dressed in a lilac jacket dress that perfectly complements her coal-black skin, with black pumps and pantyhose, her mother looks like something out of a noir film. There is no security detail with her. With the kind of power radiating off her, she doesn’t need security. Beneath her sleek grey hair, her mother’s pupils are ashen. Maki recognises the symptoms of end stage cataracts. It is disconcerting to watch these near-sightless eyes track her every move, even in the weird light. Her mother notices her staring and chuckles.
“My eyes? They’ll go white eventually. By then I’ll have already lost my sight. The price we pay for using the Sentience. But I’m one of the luckier ones. I doubt I’ll need it.”
Maki stays silent. Her magic is reacting to the presence of another user, ballooning to assert its presence. ‘Preening’ is the word that comes to mind. Her mother paces the room, her heels clicking on the ribbed Plexiglas floor. The sound is grating. Watching her gives Maki a chill, this woman is nothing like the person she ran away from. Her back is too straight, her gaze is too focused, her clothes too put together. Her mother’s movements are measured but graceful, as though she is moving underwater. But there is a lapse in her gait, a split second glitch that precedes everything she does. It’s almost gyroscopic, as though the world is slightly tilting to accommodate her. It takes a minute of watching for Maki to realise it is not her mother but the room that’s glitching, shifting to centre her – like everything else in her life.
“What happened to you?” Maki asks.
The knowing chuckle resurfaces. “After you left, I had no reason to pretend. No reason to fight what was inside me.”
Maki sighs. “You know why I ran away: You told me to.”
“Yes, I did.” Her mother says, idly scrutinizing her nails. “But I was a drunk, depressed woman; you didn’t have to listen to me.”
“I was eight years old.”
Maki realises why her mother keeps pacing the room. The moment she stops moving, she starts to levitate, only slightly. It is almost beautiful to see the magic fully symbiotic with its host.
“Do you know what that did to me, when you told me to go?”
“Oh, that,” her mother scoffs. “I was only trying to be a better mother to you than mine was to me. You know she never told me about the Sentience? Pretended not to notice when I levitated stuff, when I started to read minds, even as her own Sentience turned her into a bowed old hag. The day I killed her, she was still denying.”
“Magic.” Maki murmurs.
“What?”
Maki raises her voice. “It’s a magic, the thing inside us.”
Her mother gives her a strange look then shakes her head. “No honey bee, it’s not that simple. The thing living inside us is not magic; it’s an advanced parasite we call the Sentience. One not hundreds. It found a way to separate its component cells and transplant itself into the First Generation: the women who started the industrial revolution.”
She gestures with her finger and the room expands, groaning from the stress of reconstituting itself. Maki’s chair shrinks, immobilizing her even more. Maki struggles not to howl.
“What you call magic is its framework. All its cells are still connected by telepathic links. We the hosts strengthen that link with our bodies, and in return we get to use that telepathic highway to manipulate the things and people trapped within its matrix. With each generation, our bodies get stronger, better at supporting its power.”
Maki can feel her Sentience vibrate inside her. Every inch of her roils and her core burns so brightly she is afraid she’ll belch fire if she opens her mouth. She fights the Sentience silently with the techniques she learned from years as a runaway: breathe slow, focus on a single point, breathe some more. She understands now why sometimes her Sentience tries to possess her for no reason; this proximity to another cell is driving it crazy.
“You could have gone anywhere! Why did you stay even though you knew what this thing is?”
“Awwww,” her mother crows, “you know nothing about what is inside you. Do you know why this place is named New Lagos? The Sentience won’t leave the lagoon. My guess is there is something in its filthy depths that makes us able to host its cells. Your grandmother dared to leave, but then again she was always a fool.”
Maki hesitates. “My grandmother?”
Her mother’s façade slips, but for a second. “My mother… She only lived to be thirty four. I killed her myself when I was fifteen. She welcomed it. There is nothing worse than having a Sentience but refusing to manipulate it. Using the Sentience has a price, but so does fighting it. She was idealistic, like you. What I did to her was a mercy. A mercy I now regret never extending to you.”
White hot rage erupts inside Maki and she tries to lunge for her mother. The restraints catch at the last minute, halting her mid-lunge. The shackles have broken her skin again and a single rivulet of blood travels down the arm of her chair.
Her mother’s filmy eyes slant into a murderous glare. She flicks her wrist and the room tilts sharply, throwing Maki against her restraints. She twists her hands and the chair mimics her movement like a marionette, its metal limbs contorting around Maki’s body into a grotesque wireframe cocoon. Her mother gestures again and the cocoon sails across the room until the tines protruding from the frame trap her against the far wall.
“I should have never had a child,” she says. “I never wanted one. I wanted to end the generational cycle. But I was naïve and the Sentience had turned me into a raving sex freak, denying me its power until you were born. That is how it works. But history won’t repeat itself – not if I have anything to do with it.”
Alien energy surges through Maki. Finally, she acknowledges it and lets go of the reins. The result is orgasmic. Her body flushes with delight and every inch of her feels alive. She can see hundreds of shimmering bands of energy, a lattice that engulfs her and her mother.
Maki’s Sentience reaches for the nearest band and drains energy from it. She spasms violently, her body pries the metal cage she’s trapped in out of the wall and hurtles it into the air. It shatters into bits of twisted metal.
Her mother’s eyes widen and the room is suddenly flooded with white light. A part of the wall has slid open and men in misshapen green uniforms and tasers swarm the room. A single thought is enough to divert a band of energy that hardens like taffy and pins them to the wall. She commands the band to tighten and it constricts; the men scream in terror.
“If you let me go, I promise not to kill them.”
Her mother cackles, and flicks her wrists. The band Maki has manipulated around the policemen thins into a rope with the consistency of a fishing line. Her mother closes her hand into a fist and the rope tightens, threading their necks like an iridescent necklace. None even has time to gasp before the rope slices clean through their necks. Heads roll grotesquely across the floor between them and the band returns its original form.
Her mother cleans blood from her cheeks with mild disgust. “Don’t underestimate me.”
Maki reaches telepathically for the biggest energy band and pulls it to herself. She can hear the distant murmurs of the lives of other hosts through sift through it. It is disconcerting.
When her mother’s wrist starts to move, she is ready. She drapes herself in the energy, willing it to coat her. Her Sentience is all too eager to oblige. She fans the energy out, repelling it from her Sentience with all her strength. It floods the room like a giant wave. Her temples start to ache and her vision blurs momentarily. The force of the sonic wave sends her mother spiralling. The room starts to tilt and the older woman flails, skidding in the drying blood.
Maki sees it as an opening. She lets the Sentience lift her into an energy band and shoot her forward, towards the sliding door which starts to yawn at her approach. Just a few feet left, she thinks and she pushes herself harder. The Plexiglas room veers sharply to the right and she slams into the side wall. She tries to manipulate the room but the energy doesn’t seem to respond to her anymore.
Her mother is now on her feet, bloodied and fuming. She makes a series of deft swats with her hands and the energy dances, swaddling Maki and constricting her until she sees spots dance before her eyes. She heaves violently for air but she is too tightly wound. The Sentience is a drum beating in her skull, nagging for control. She cannot concentrate long enough to silence it, she’s dying.
She feels her Sentience spread its consciousness and a sharp jolt of energy whips through her, splicing the cocoon. It dissipates instantly and she keels forward, gasping for air. She manages to lift her head up. The horror of what she sees makes her blanch. Her mother is nailed to the wall by the interrogation chair, its aluminium legs mangled into tines. Her head lolls lifelessly to the side, her hazel eyes obscured by cataracts. Maki starts to cry.
Then her mother’s body begins to thrash expanding her wounds. Her neck straightens mechanically and her mouth opens wider than any human should be capable of. What pours out is a foot-long worm with moist, fetid skin streaked with blood. Tiny pockmarked holes across its length hold inverted eyestalks. Maki tries to scream but her larynx seizes up. The thing starts to crawl to her. She tries to stand but her joints have also locked. She feels her Sentience exerting control and dread fills her. The thing crawls into her lap, leaving a trail of slime. She struggles harder, but it’s futile, nothing moves.
It slugs over her shirt, between her breasts and then coils around her neck, lengthening till it is three feet long. Her jaws unhinge at the behest of her own Sentience and the new Sentience slips its amorphous head down her throat. The sensation is one of the worst things she’s ever felt; nausea without of the relief of vomiting. With a tiny flick against her palate, the new Sentience finishes its journey into her. Feeling returns, first to her face, then her limbs. She manages to stand, struggles to make sense of what happened. She can feel the nauseating sensation of her Sentience making space for this new thing, expanding in ways she never thought possible. She knows now that her Sentience is not on her side and that her body, just a shell, is ready to betray her.
With two inside her, the bands of energy seems stronger, corporeal even. There is no time to dally, not now. Surviving the moment is her only concern. She runs into the hallway and her senses expand. She can feel the girls abducted in the raid, like flickers of light. She senses Liesl, three floors down, restrained. And others. Hundreds more, sparkling like lights at the corners of her eyes. Their pain is tangible.
She knows they are coming for her but she cannot leave all those girls in the hands of these people. She sinks her fingers into an energy band, connecting to it. She forces it to thicken, not just the one but all the bands that encompass the building. They join at the edges and grow into sheets that traverse each floor. There are thirty-four floors, two hundred and seventy-six girls, two thousand people in total. The amount of information that the bands can collect astounds her.
She sends a command and the sheets increase in density. Beads of sweat pop up on her forehead from the effort of what she is doing. The building starts to plummet. The force finds the mechanism that keeps the doors shut and fries them. Doors start to open, popping out of place with a mechanical shlick. Restraints twist and spring open. The building finally slams into the earth with a sickening thud, bringing everyone to their knees. Shrieks of joy as the girls realise they are free confirm that her mother was telling the truth: the neural pathway works.
Through the plexiglass door she can see the vague shapes of policemen as they appear at the end of the hallway holding tasers, she can hear their muffled screaming. Shots ring and the door fractures. A few kicks bring it down. She waits as long as she can to give the other girls time, then she flees, turning the first corner. She hears a taser barb sing past her ear, a few inches shy. She calls to the Sentience but it doesn’t respond. She is on her own.
“Stop!”
Running seems futile so she obeys, turns to the sound.
“Help me!” She whispers to the Sentience under her breath.
At the other end of the corridor is a phalanx of kevlar suits and muscled bodies, arms outstretched, weapons pointed. She senses her Sentience awaken but only slightly.
Then she feels it, the first pang. A rawness in her throat, a hunger lower down.
It wafts in the air, pheromones. Her body responds to it, shuddering. She can smell them from across the hallway. The policemen. Sweat on each of the male officers, distinct like perfume notes, separating them, picking out the most virile, the most likely to impregnate her.
How easily you could get any one of them to sleep with you. Just a thought, one energy band.
Her thighs grow slick at the thought of it.
NO!
She digs her fingers into her fist, presses her legs together.
“What the hell is wrong with me?!” She screams, startling the policemen.
The epiphany is as subtle as a brick to the face. The parasite needs to be transferred from one generation to the next. Through parturition. From to mother to daughter. Her Sentience wants this. It has slowly orchestrated everything to bring her to this point. Even now, it is subtly manipulating her, trying to override her logic with hormones. It is growing stronger; she is losing control of her body. She remembers her mother’s words, realises they were earnest, not vicious.
I didn’t want a child… I tried to break the generational cycle. The Sentience forced me…
“How did I miss this? How?” She whispers in disbelief.
Looking through the window beside her, she can see the girls, nearly a hundred and twenty feet below her, pouring out onto the street like a swarm of brightly coloured insects. They are oblivious to what she now knows: Each one of them is destined to be forced into a standoff with their mothers, doomed to matricide for the survival of creature within them. Saving them might not have changed anything. Grief engulfs her.
There is a corridor to the right but she knows she won’t make it that far without getting caught. She cannot concern herself now with the future; all that matters is now, escaping those men, breaking the cycle. The window, three paces away, is her only chance. She strafes hard, then throws herself at the pane, a hail of taser barbs pouring in her wake.
The glass breaks on impact and she sails, momentarily weightless.
She free-falls.
END.
Edwin Okolo works as a blog administrator and fashion writer. He says he primary writes to explore concepts that he wrestles with but cannot directly experience as a result of his gender. He runs several blogs and has contributed to a number of others, most memorably running the experimental fiction column ‘The Alchemist’s Corner’ atwww.thenakedconvos.com. He is a 2011 Farafina Workshop Alumni who has written one and collaborated on another experimental fantasy novel on www.wattpad.com under the username psielementobliterate. He has also been published in the Kalahari Review and The Lonely Crowd Literary Magazine.
They came on mechanical Fellbeasts, gnarled wings screeching, showering bullets. I fled while shooting back, yelling profanities and, “freedom!”
So often I wonder what ancient evil possessed these people? Harbingers of doom they are, who arrived on boats propelled by the winds of white magic. They spoke of benign and forgiving Gods, whom it appears, do not forgive the dark-skinned. They brought technologies and the promise of civilisation using what was uncovered in Europe: some intertwining of the organic with man-made crafts, using runes, metallurgy and spells to bind. But the bindings were corrupt, and all the dirty work was laid heavy on the backs of dark-skinned men, women and children. Like a battery, the blood, sweat and tears of the dark-skinned was collected and siphoned to hold the New World aloft. The creation of such a scheme; it boggles my mind. Truly, I cannot fathom it, and therein lies the fear. What kind of a person would I be if I did?
I wander the Namibian veldt with my rifle and few munitions; a meagre defence. The pale trolls hound me from the ground as the mechanical Fellbeasts shriek above. I take care with my footprints, so my path might remain unknown. Though they may lack the spells of the Wringwraith, they are still large and vicious.
I lived once in a cave marked with drawings of the Khoi, my ancient brother who is now all but extinct. Rudimentary yet beautiful depictions of characters and animals, I appreciated the drawings greatly. They were taken from me by a pale troll, wielding a hose that sprayed no water. For the next week I was forced to sleep on a patch of dry grass, huddling under my thin blanket, too frightened to light a fire. I returned eventually to find the troll gone and the drawings scratched off.
Even with no roof, little food, endless walking and hard sleeping, the bush is a better place to be. I do not wish to be a slave or ‘contract worker’. Forgetting the indignity of it, I fear contamination. Should I be exposed to their magic too long, I myself might be possessed by that ancient European evil. I too might become a wraith and terrorise the dark-skinned. I want no part of it.
When hunger strikes I seek out my sister, whistling a tune shared between us. Stomach grumbling, I find her and she bravely feeds me. Against those European spells that would make a man into a beast, she stands simply with vegetables and pots. We sit around the fire and discuss the nature of things: the hypocrisy of beasts calling others beasts.
She recalls the time she was tortured by the whip of the Balrogs. Bathed in white flames designed to expunge the dark, the Balrog are so old many of the whites have forgotten where in the Netherlands they were found. At first completely feral, a great white mage discovered how to control them, fusing charmed metal horns upon their heads. It interrogates in a harsh Dutch tongue and each strike of its whip burns while paling the skin.
I refuse to look at the white scars on her back, and I cry, apologising for my part in it. If I had not signed up for the resistance she would be of no interest to the architects of Apartheid. She assures me that I have made the right choice. She does not regret assisting me or keeping my location secret.
We must not bow to these creatures, she says.
After resting at the hut, I must always return to the veldt, wandering from rock to rock and breathing in the dry air. Many of my comrades have been captured or killed. I fear capture more than death really, for if I am captured I shall be taken to Pretoria. Pretoria, that necropolis of the Undead, that bastion of white evil. There the dungeon masters, the Balrogs and the mages, reside torturing dark skinned people – poking and prodding, interrogating and infecting, experimenting. They fuse white magic and eugenics, seeking the means to cast out the remaining dark.
They have already cast out much of the dark. They have shaped the present in their sickening image and built pillars of vile white that have infected the very history of man. As I wander this veldt so close to the cradle of humankind where the world began, I wonder why people chose to trek north to Europe. Perhaps when descendants of the Khoi arrived on that white continent they opened something they should not have, and monsters spilled forth spitting white fire and venom. From Europe they spread, tainted with white magic, and they arrived back at the cradle – ravenous.
Now I flee and fight over rock and veldt, resting against the thick trunk of the baobab tree, all in fear of Pretoria and Robben Island. African lands deformed by the idolatrous markings of Apartheid – they are tainted, bathed in white ichor.
The Wringwraith approaches. The shrieks of its mount stir my meandering mind.
Image: Stephanie Hasham
I wait, and in my desperation I hope it will veer off towards another downtrodden mark. Behind a small formation of rocks and boulders, I listen with my knees aching against the granite. I hear the wings of the mechanical Fellbeast grow close.
I run, flinging dust in my wake. The sound of the screeching grows louder, piercing my ears. The Wringwraith, one of the nine Lich Kings, launches bullets from his fingers and I leap out of the open into the embrace of waist-high grass. I lie on my belly uncomfortably, hugging my rifle and shaking. I ignore the itch of the grass and the tickling crawl of ants on my skin.
Freedom.
I have no white magic. No spells. I stand with only a rifle and my sister with her pots and vegetables. What hope is there really? I whimper and the Lich on his mechanical Fellbeast passes overhead. I exhale and roll onto my back. The formations of the stars look down upon me with apathy. The calm rustling of the grass is disrupted by the Lich’s cold cackle, and I curse him.
They turn around.
The Lich commands his mount to descend. The crooked wings of the mechanical Fellbeast whirl, buffeting my face with sour wind. I sit up and behold him. He is cloaked in white, part flesh and part machine, all fused together with glowing white runes. His face is pale, and his eyes a dead grey. Cold white mist leaks from his mouth. Even in the cool of the summer’s night, his cold is distinct and makes the skin prickle. His frost sucks the very nutrients from the earth leaving it naked – frosted, cracked and white. I stand up with the all the strength and pride I can muster.
I have but four, five bullets left. I fire upon him and not a dent. I scramble about in the grass for stones and throw, but he does not buckle. He approaches hissing, excited for a physical confrontation he knows he can never lose. His mount stares idly through gaping eyes, licking the organic bits of its wings.
I charge, swinging my rifle and he cackles, excited by my indignation and defiance. My blow does him no harm. He flicks me back and I fall. Dazed and scratched, I stand again.
We circle one another, his large form terrifying. The grass is all but slaughtered around us. He does not even bother with his bullets. He summons forth a jagged baton and cackles.
Our weapons clash, each blow buckling, shaking my bones. Finally he cleaves my rifle in two. I topple over and lay on the frosted grass, exhausted and drenched in cold sweat. Through the fog of fear there is something in me that will not relent. I believe this to be a trait shared with my sister.
I stand yet again, now so cold. The warmth of the bush has all but dissipated. I charge him. I beat him with my fists, his armour bruising my hands until he bashes my torso, ripping my flesh and sending me so far I land in the warm arms of the grass yet again. He approaches. The white mist and frost engulf me.
I think upon my sister. I do not wish to leave her alone against this evil, yet there is a comfort in knowing I shall have to fight no more. I am sorry to leave you this way, sister. I know your kind heart will forgive my cowardice.
I lament her future battles, but I laud them too, as I know she will never be defeated.
I attempt to stand and the Lich King beats me, rending flesh once again. He cackles, and so do I.
Freedom. I think upon freedom.
Mandisi is a drummer/composer who moonlights most addictively as a writer. He currently resides in Cape Town, South Africa, and spends most of his time whacking drums and/or jumpstarting his song writing career. While Mandisi is more focused on his music career of late, his writing addiction will not die, and thus he continues to work on fiction, and the occasional poem, in his spare time. For updates on Mandisi’s writing you can find him on twitter @mandisinkomo
The all-powerful father, Olorun, was to be honored by the gods. The great creator had just finished his most impressive creation yet and the world had finally come into existence. Following this, Olorun had decided it was time to go and join his fellow elder gods and leave the running of the world to his subordinates. To mark the occasion a massive feast was planned in Ode Agba, the magical city of the gods, and every deity and supernatural being within and outside time would come to pay homage to the great god. It was customary that everyone attending would bring some type of gift. If pleased with the present, Olorun would, in turn, bless the gifter with some ability.
Now amongst the gods were two brothers, Ara and Monamona; you never saw one without the other. However, they made for quite an unlikely pair. Monamona, the younger, was slight of frame and pale of skin. He was cunning and quick footed, always dashing from one endeavor to another. He was also easily bored and often used his cleverness to pester his elder brother. Ara, on the other hand, was a behemoth and no one rivaled him in strength. When he spoke, he could be heard for miles around and he could cause tremors in the ground if he willed it. Yet, he could not match his younger brother in wit, nor could he keep up with his antics. It infuriated him, but he loved his brother dearly.
As Olorun’s farewell celebrations drew closer, gods and deities tried to outdo each other with their gifts. However, Monamona left all the gift planning ideas to his brother; he could not be bothered. Three days before the event, Monamona realized his elder brother had been missing for a while. It was unlike Ara to leave without telling anyone, and he searched high and low but couldn’t find him anywhere.
By the time the large god showed up, Monamona was beyond impatient. He badgered and pestered his brother but couldn’t get him to open up about where he had gone. Even more frustrating was the satisfied look on Ara’s face. Monamona was sure his brother was hiding something from him and he longed to know what it could be.
The night before the great event, Monamona invited his brother for a great meal. Ara, who knew how cunning his brother was, remained on guard just in case his brother was up to his usual tricks. The meal was amazing, more sumptuous than he had expected and Ara ate his fill. Afterwards, Ara was so full that he grew sleepy, and before he could utter his thanks to his brother, he keeled over fast asleep.
Smiling mischievously, Monamona disguised himself as the great god Olorun and entered into his brother’s dreams. In the dream world, He found Ara languishing under a great Iroko tree, enjoying the tranquility of the setting around him.
Seeing Olorun, Ara hurriedly got up and invited the king of the gods to sit with him under the shade. Monamona accepted his offer and sat with his brother; together they stared into the landscape of Ara’s dream world.
Monamona was pleasantly surprised at how vivid his brother’s imagination was. It was a lush, green world dominated by scale. Air whales and four winged dragons flew side by side whilst the white seascape in the distance would occasionally be interrupted by magnificent sea beings that even Monamona knew nothing of. Yet the grandness of everything felt harmonious. He could see himself spending a lot of time here; so much to see and do.
“What brings you to my humble abode your greatness?” Ara asked and Monamona had to remind himself visiting this landscape would only be possible when his brother was asleep. He was here for a reason and he needed to stay on course.
“Nothing in particular,” Monamona said, imitating Olorun’s voice. “As the time draws close, I often catch myself wondering if I am doing the right thing.”
“You doubt yourself, o great father?”
“Even beings like me, who have lived for millennia, second-guess our decisions from time to time. We are not above mistake.”
“I do that a lot as well. Especially when I am with my brother.”
“Why is that?”
Ara paused, as if noticing something for the first time. Sitting upright, he whirled a stone out of nothing and tossed it so far, one could make out the splash on the horizon.
“My brother is much smarter than me. He is swift whereas I am cumbersome. I am the oaf; he is the fleet-footed gazelle. Even when I tell myself not to fall for his tricks, he still manages to outsmart me. I love him dearly, but everytime I am around him, I am always second-guessing myself.”
Monamona was stunned by his brother’s words. He had never viewed their relationship that way. He thought of some way to reassure Ara.
“You do not have to feel that way about yourself. Amongst us, there is none more courageous. Your character is never in doubt, even your brother would attest to how important you are to the proper functioning of this realm. I can leave knowing there are those like you, who will make sure that we continue to excel.”
Ara beamed from ear to ear at the words. “Thank you your highness … Thank you.”
“Before I leave you to your dream, I couldn’t help but notice you’ve been missing a few times recently. Is there anything I should know about that?”
Ara turned towards his king and bowed his head. “I had been searching for something truly worthy of a going away present to give you and I have finally found something. I had to venture over the golden wall, but in the end it was all worth it. I think you will be quite pleased.”
So that was it, thought Monamona. Ara had ventured over the boundary between their realm and the unknown. He was saddened that his brother had left him out of something so pivotal.
“Thank you for risking so much for me,” said Monamona. I look forward to seeing what you found. Does your brother know about your forays?”
Ara, turned his gaze away.
“No he does not.”
“Why?”
“For once, I wanted to do something for myself, to be able to present this gift to you without the aid of my brother. I know what the other gods say: ‘he is the brain and I am the heft,’ they think me too stupid to think for myself. I fought many beasts for this gift, but I also had to outsmart others. When I give it to you in front of everyone, including my brother, they will realize I am no idiot.”
Monamona was once again at a loss for words. He and many others had indeed taunted his brother, but he had done it out of love. Existence was meant to be merry not valiant. Perhaps he had gone overboard with it.
Politely, he bade Ara farewell, promising to see him at the celebration.
As soon as he got back to the real world, he shrugged off Olorun’s guise. He knew where his brother had been and now he was curious to discover what he had found. He would search his brother’s house and find whatever he had discovered, just to see what it was. His brother need not know. He had very little time, though. He was the quickest of the gods, but all of his speed might not be able to find his brother’s gift before he woke up; he was going to have to move fast.
Monamona was gone at the speed of a thought. He arrived at Ara’s house and snuck in. His brother was a collector and had all sorts of interesting objects and gadgets scattered all over his home. Monamona searched through everything, yet could not find the gift. His time was running out and it looked like his brother had gotten the upper hand.
That was when from the corner of his eye he saw a painting of a lush glade. He remembered when they were younger; Ara would run off to a glade similar to it to hide from him. Could it be he had done the same with his finding?
As he moved closer, he realized the painting was alive. Birds flew about in the background whilst a gentle breeze blew through the grass which subtly changed color every few moments.
It had to be here. Where else could Ara have put something so precious? Stretching his hand forward, Monamona realized he could move into the world on the other side.
Once in the painting, he could see the allure of this place for his brother. Serene and peaceful, it was quite similar to the dreamscape he had just returned from. Perhaps once this was done, he could convince his brother to bring him back here and they could experiment with creating some new life forms for the living painting.
He sped all over the landscape looking for anything that would clue him to what he was looking for. He found it accidentally when he tripped on a branch and went sprawling into nearby shrubbery. Except it wasn’t a piece of vegetation, but rather a mirage that revealed a path that led to a hidden cave.
Walking carefully up the path, Monamona noticed there was an odd glow coming from the recesses of the cave. As he approached it, he felt its power and pull reaching out to all his senses. When he finally saw it, he couldn’t take his eyes off it.
Image: genius.com
It was the most beautiful orb he had ever seen. Full of swirling energies beyond his wildest imagination. It was a kindling world, still in the conceptual stage and waiting for someone to mold it into a planet. This was indeed the greatest of gifts and he regretted that Ara had not taken him on the adventure to find it. He knew he couldn’t leave it here; it was simply too precious. He had to learn more about it, and then he would give it back to his brother. With that, he picked up the orb and silently left the canvas world.
Shortly afterwards, Ara awoke and returned to his home, unsuspecting of what had just transpired. For the rest of the day his thoughts were all over the place coming up with ideas of what he would do after he got his favor from the god king.
He went to sleep in great spirits. If anyone had walked by his house that night, they probably would have heard loud laughter emanating from within it. That was how merry he was, even his dreams couldn’t contain his joy.
*****
The next day, Ara woke up in an even better mood. He strode out of his house in time to catch Orun, the god of light, pulling back the drapes of night across the sky to let the sun shine over the land.
Ara, in his loudest voice, saluted him, “Good morning! How are you today?”
“I am well,” Orun answered genially. “You seemed to be in such great spirits yesterday evening. Your voice was probably heard in all the seven planes”
Ara burst out laughing. “Should I not be? It is a lovely day after all.”
“Yes, quite a lovely day indeed. Will I be seeing you at the event later on?”
“I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”
“Very well, I look forward to seeing you, then. I must rush as I have to light up quite a few places before heading back. Rumor has it you have been doing some sneaking around yourself. I am excited as to what you might have in store for us.”
“Trust me, it is going to be glorious,” said Ara, as he bade the sun god farewell, watching him speed along as he lit up the rest of the realm with his blazing chariot.
Ara then proceeded to go and see the weaver for his ceremonial garb. It was a shimmering garment that changed colors every few moments, never repeating the same pattern. Normally, Ara was not one for fancy adornments, but today he wanted his splendor to match the joyous occasion.
At about mid-day, a beautiful sound rippled through Ode Agba. It sounded like voices singing together or various instruments working in unison. It was the signal that the ceremony was about to start.
Watching from his abode, Ara saw emissaries from every kingdom in creation converging in the arena in the middle of Ode Agba, where the celebrations would be taking place. He saw winged creatures as large as cities, beasts unlike any he had ever seen, and beings of such magnificence that it hurt to look at them, walk past his house. He saw creations long forgotten coming back one last time to pay their respects to the great god. Ara took it all in, thinking to himself that he must not disappoint.
But when he went into the painting to retrieve the orb, it was missing. He searched the whole canvas, combing the landscape to no avail. Slowly it began to dawn on him: someone had been there. He stormed out of the painting, unsure of what had transpired and who could have taken it. He thought back to the earlier conversation he had with Orun, and was convinced whoever had stolen his orb was probably going to present it to the high father. He ran out of the house, making his way to the gathering of deities to see if he could apprehend the culprit before it was too late.
With every stride, he could feel the ground beneath him quaking with his anger. Soon the spires of the arena came into view and he could hear the chatter of the various supernatural beings in attendance.
Every step forward sharpened the details of what lay ahead. He saw Ina, the fire god, engaged in an incredible display with Oshun, the water goddess. Their fire and water arsenals intermingled with each other in a beautiful game of pursuit which left the audience mesmerized. Little winged creatures buzzed around the arena carrying all manner of beverages and delicacies. Even deities who rarely got along were on their best behavior as they did not want to upset Olorun on his grand day. Ara wished he could join in the festivities, but he would not permit himself any type of reprieve until justice was served.
That was when he saw his brother stepping up to the dais where the great king sat. Monamona placed something in the hands of the king and bowed. Every eye in the place turned towards the spectacle, a murmur of wonder surging through the crowd.
Ara’s eyes widened in disbelief as he realized what had been given. Olorun held up the orb – his orb – and smiled, looking up proudly at Monamona.
“This is an incredible gift, one I did not expect but am greatly pleased to have received.”
“I am humbled that it is to your liking, my king,” said Monamona.
“I know it must have been difficult to obtain, and because of that I will gift you like no other. Come forward and receive my blessing.”
A flash of light emanated from the king, surging through Monamona and enveloping the arena. It only took the briefest of moments but it was so dazzling it blinded all present.
Ara gasped, watching the whole thing transpire. He rushed forward, shouting at the top of his lungs. He tumbled onto the dais, but he was too late. He looked from the king to his brother, who was now sheathed in a living skin of golden light that stretched and crackled, shining brighter than any creation.
“What is the meaning of this, Ara?” The old king bellowed.
“He … He stole my gift to you!” Ara shouted. “That blessing is meant to be mine.”
The old king turned from Ara and looked at Monamona, who averted his gaze.
“Is it true what Ara says?”
Sheepishly, Monamona nodded, which only infuriated his brother more.
“But why? What would make you do such a thing?”
Monamona, still bathed in dazzling light, could feel the power coursing through his veins changing him at the most minute of levels, elevating him to heights he never thought possible. He had always been fast, yet he had never felt this way before; this was more than he could ever imagine. It was almost as if he had undergone a rebirth. He looked from the great king to his enraged brother and past them to the crowd gathered. They all seemed so slow compared to him.
“I did it for this,” he said, pointing to the sheath of light covering him.
“At first I was angry at my brother for keeping his quest from me, but the truth is, he wouldn’t have stood a chance had I gone along. I would have found the orb and gotten the glory, but it doesn’t matter. In the end it’s still …”
Before he could finish his sentence, Ara lunged for him.
“GIVE ME BACK WHAT WAS MINE!” He roared, but it was as if he had tried to grasp the very air. Monamona evaded him easily and was at the back of the arena before anyone could fully perceive what had happened. Only his laughter alerted them to where he was.
“My apologies my dear brother, but I won’t be able to do that. I have never felt better and I cannot wait to test out my new powers. I truly am sorry, but maybe next time things will go your way.” And in a flash of dazzling light, Monamona was gone.
Ara stormed about the arena, bellowing at the top of his voice in frustration and shaking the structure to its core. It wasn’t until the old god walked up to him and touched his shoulder that he quieted down still trembling with rage.
“Ara, I am very sorry for what has transpired and I wish I could make this up to you.”
“O great king, simply take what you gave him and give it to me.”
The king regretfully shook his head. “What is done cannot be undone. I gave him the very best of my gifts believing he dealt with me in good faith.”
Olorun paused and closed his eyes as if deep in thought. Ara waited, staring at his great king expectantly. When the old king opened his eyes he seemed to have come to a decision.
“Kneel, Ara,” he said.
Ara did as he was told.
“I have given away much today. But none more precious than what I gave your brother. There was a time when I would have personally chased him down and stripped him of all he holds dear, but alas I am old and shortly I will go join the elders. Because of that, I have come up with a solution. It might not be ideal, but it is the best I can think of right now.”
The king placed his hands on Ara’s head. A white light sprung from the tip of his fingers and into the younger god’s body. With a spasm, Ara jerked forward, the power surging through him.
“Ara, I have given you what’s left of my powers. Catch Monamona and you will be able to reclaim what is yours.”
Head bowed, Ara thanked the king profusely, and then set off after his brother. His newly acquired powers announced his movement through the skies with a great din.
Monamona, who had thought himself free of his brother, was halfway between the heavens and earth, when he heard the great noise coming from Ode Agba. He turned around to see his brother coming, and though Ara was still leagues away, Monamona began to run. He was terrified of the fate that awaited him if his brother ever caught up to him.
This is why, to this very day, we always see the lightning flash across the sky before we hear the sound of thunder. Ara is still chasing Monamona, and when he does catch him, he’ll finally claim what is his.
Mayowa Koleosho was born and raised in Lagos, Nigeria but currently reside in Chicago, Illinois where he is studying towards a degree in digital media and storytelling. He tends to fancy himself as an expressionist, using both visual and literary means to express his thoughts. He has self-published a few books. His ultimate goal is to perfect using different mediums to convey impactful messages. Some of his self-published books include Gridiron follies, Fling: A short story collection, Kid from lagos, a poetry collection, and Hoop dreams.
Questions posed by students studying AfroSF in Maria Barraza’s World Literature 202 class at Simon Fraser University, Canada.
Are your stories influenced or based on current world or African problems (such as HIV/AIDS, warfare, political turmoil, etc.) and if so, is your story an attempt to predict or theorize what the world will look like if these problems persist or develop further? Do these stories perhaps play into your own personal fears for the future?
Martin Stokes: My stories (in particular Claws and Savages) are based on current world affairs at the time of writing. Of course, the profusion of poaching is still more apparent today than it ever has been. The story I wrote wasn’t an attempt to prophesize what might occur but rather to use fiction as a vehicle for drawing attention to what is happening now. This isn’t true for everything I write but it was true for Claws and Savages. It is an attempt to use fiction to make sense of the real world. Do my stories play into my own personal fears for the future? Yes, I would say so. I’m scared that the exploitation of Africa will escalate until it reaches a tipping point from which we can’t return, and I can only hope this is reflected in what I write.
Efe Tokunbo (Okogu): My stories are definitely influenced by current affairs. All SF is really about the here and now and “Proposition 23” is no exception. The neuro embedded in each citizen’s brain which connects everyone to the system is a metaphor for the way in which the people of today have given up their personal power to shape our collective reality in exchange for conforming to modern culture. The undead are a metaphor for the way in which society favours the haves at the expense of the have-nots. The AIs that seek transcendence are a metaphor for the part of ourselves that seek the same but are unable to due to the conditioning of society. Their plan to escape humanity’s primitive algorithms and enslave mankind is a metaphor my plan to do the same. (Maniacal laughter!)
As for the future, it is clear that if we do not change our insane behaviour with regard to ourselves, each other, and the planet, then the only way for nature to restore equilibrium will be the destruction of our global civilization and the drastic reduction in population – if not outright extinction – of the human race.
“Proposition 23” is set in a future where humanity is seeking to escape this fate by searching the stars for a new home while revolutionaries back on earth are fighting to change a corrupt system. The story ends with the future still uncertain as we ourselves now face an uncertain future, for ultimately it is up to each one of us to be the change we all know is needed.
Mazi Nwonwu: I think this is a very good question, and it is one which many of us have encountered in the past. Because of the name of the genre, many here people tend to expect science fiction to be mostly about science. Coming from a continent that is not known for its technological achievement, the struggle then is to get the African mind to see a future where the continent, or countries within the continent, is technologically advanced enough to make the average space-going or steampunk adventure believable. As such, if we view it from that premise, we could say the difficulty is general.
However, there exists a wide readership already attuned to the possibility that exists in the world of science fiction, and this presents a ready market that serves as a base from which the genre reaches out to the rest of the continent.
Mandisi Nkomo: “Heresy” is written more from the perspective of reflection than prediction. Less than wanting to predict what may happen in the future of South Africa I wished to reflect current issues, as well as illustrate how history seems to repeat itself. Some of these issues include government corruption, incompetence and inefficiency, and media censorship. I tried to tackle these in a rather slapstick manner even though they are grave issues.
I used the speculative side of the story (South Africa being a superpower) to illustrate how some of these problems tend to occur even in the ‘First World’. In regards to personal fears, indeed there is a fear in South Africa regarding autocratic actions the ANC government has taken of late, seemingly similar to that of the previous Apartheid regime. So indeed the story does play into my own personal fears, as well as general fears in South Africa.
Ashley Jacobs: My story is most certainly influenced by current problems in South Africa. I drew rather heavily on my personal experiences as a medical doctor for my science fiction story imagined around the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The tale is not so much an attempt at an accurate prediction as an intentionally dystopian extrapolation of present day reality – a ‘worst-case scenario’ if you will. I hoped this would be a cautionary (and admittedly slightly fantastical) tale or at the very least thought-provoking about our present situation. Does it play into my personal fears for the future? Honestly, I’d have to say yes. I am deeply concerned about the future of healthcare in my country as well as its surrounding political milieu. I am concerned for our people and what will happen if we don’t win the war against these terrible epidemics (South Africa is the world epicentre for the HIV/TB ‘syndemic’). Do I believe it will ever come to “New Mzansi”? No, and nor do I want it to ever get there.
Cristy Zinn: I have, at times, used a story to deal with my own fears or wrestle with ideas. This is amplified when the idea I am wrestling with is one on a social or global scale. Sometimes, in order to process things, I write stories. A lot of times the specific thing I am trying to process is not identifiable to the reader but the general idea might be. A story is a powerful vehicle for this kind of processing because as a writer you have to get into the head of your character – someone who might not have the same viewpoint as you – and see the situation/issue/conflict/crisis from a new perspective. (See my answer to Rachel as well).
Nick Wood: ‘Azania’ was a futuristic escape from an extrapolated exacerbation of these issues – but postulated as a global – not a specifically ‘African’ – problem. I don’t see any problems as intrinsically ‘African’ – given the world is a network of power/money/resources ‘exchanges’ (or ‘looting’*) within the post-colonial context. And many problems labelled as ‘African’ often have deep colonial scars, so I preferred to characterise the Earth as a small, dying place we ALL inhabit and are destroying.
My stories are influenced by the world in a general sense (since I live in it), but they emanate from the characters interacting with each other. I create the characters, throw them into a situation, and watch them sink or swim. A character may care about a specific thing (like disease, education, or war) and that will affect the characters responses and thoughts, but I personally think “message” fiction is the worst iteration of storytelling.
What I write is a point of view. I make no attempt to predict. Whatever is in the story serves the story.
I don’t fear the future. I’ve lived through one apocalypse already (Nigeria in the 1980s). Future ones don’t frighten me.
Liam Kruger: Cultural production invariably owes a tremendous amount to the anxieties prevalent in the context from which they emerge – so consciously or not, my story can’t help but be influenced by ‘current affairs,’ though I don’t know that there’s anything especially ‘African’ about it, mostly because I don’t know what that word is meant to mean. As to prediction: there is a school of science fiction – I think of JG Ballard, William Gibson, Warren Ellis, and a little closer to home, Lauren Beukes – in which authors extrapolate from current cultural trends and concerns, offering depictions of futures or near-futures which are in fact the present with the contrast pushed way up. This is not the only thing science fiction can do, however; it can take advantage of the disconnect from faithful realism to examine and articulate human anxieties – the usual raw nerve of desire stuff – without having to slavishly tie those depictions to immediate historical or political realities. I guess here I’m think of Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles, which do owe a debt to a sort of American exceptionalism narrative, but also do rather a lot more than that; ditto M. John Harrison’s Empty Space trilogy, which is about space-time dilation and vast alien cultures and the huge, uncaring expanse of space – but also, mostly, about people and what they want and what they do when they don’t get it. I veer more to the latter camp – so I suppose my stories play rather more into my personal fears for the present.
(I mean: it’s a story about an alcoholic time traveller, I feel like if those were going to be a thing I would’ve heard about them by now. But then the alcoholic and the time traveller both share a certain dissatisfaction with or disassociation from the world they’re in, and wouldn’t it be frightening to be addicted to the future, at the expense of the present? How do we know we’re not? That’s the sort of personal fear I’d be playing on.)
Although I wonder: do these stories pay into your personal fears for the future? Or do they communicate anxieties which seem foreign to you?
Amanda:When bringing the genre of science fiction to Africa, is it more difficult to impress the general public or fellow academics?
Martin Stokes: Yes and no. Sci-fi will always be a genre which polarises some people to love and others to apathy. It is also difficult to pen African novels that don’t directly deal with African problems (colonialism, famine, war). It’s almost expected that if a book is penned on African soil then it should be about the fall of a dictator or the rebels who burned the village. Science-fiction deals with these issues, but on the periphery. However, I think that people will always enjoy reading a good story, and the beauty of sci-fi is that it’s so relatable to any and all worldly issues.
Efe Tokunbo: I have found that open minded people who love good stories and understand the intention behind them are everywhere, in the general public as well as in academia. But then so are the dogmatics who refuse to see beyond whatever belief system they’re running, be it that science fiction is not real literature or that the free market is synonymous with freedom. Rather than worrying about impressing anyone, I simply strive to tell the best tale I know how to at the time.
Mandisi Nkomo: Definitely. I believe there is a general misconception that science fiction is an inferior literary form, so automatically one has to deal with being boxed in the genre, as ‘literary’ publications are generally not looking for speculative fiction. Furthermore, with Africa having the problems it has, I believe there is another misconception that science fiction is of no value, and authors should concentrate on more ‘serious’ literature that directly addresses African problems. For example, in South Africa there has been an obsession with Post-Apartheid literature, but what this has generally meant is doing so in a non-speculative fiction format. Obviously this is silly, as even a big blockbuster movie such as District 9, dealt to an extent with post-Apartheid South Africa, so the ability for speculative fiction to deal with ‘real life problems’ is truly infinite.
Interestingly enough, my father recently sent me a piece on the establishment of “Negro Libraries” in the early 1930s when people of colour were not allowed in public libraries. There is a section that discusses the belief held at the time that people of colour preferred non-fiction as they lacked imagination, and preferred to educate themselves on real facts in order to compete with white people. Unfortunately, I think these ideologies may still exists, not so much in Africans lacking imagination, and more that Africans should be concerning themselves with ‘serious issues’, and not fooling about writing and reading Speculative fiction. This makes it harder for the public and academics to engage meaningfully with science fiction.
Ashley Jacobs: I don’t know if I have much to add here unless this question can expanded upon with regards to the definitions of what constitutes the academic community. On the one hand I represent the general public as a writer, but on the other hand I am a medical academic. To impress literary academics is a bridge too far for me I am sure. To impress people in the biomedical field would be fantastic – when they get a break from reading scientific journal articles. This might require good, hard biomedical science and I think I rather opted for slightly more stylised technology for the sake of the story. In short, I think trying to write a believable and engaging medical science fiction story for the general public was challenge enough for me.
Nick Wood: I don’t see a distinction in my audience – I am not out to ‘impress’ anyone – actually, if anything, I’m most wanting to impress my writing colleagues! – but mostly I hope someone will engage with my story and enjoy it. If academics are interested in it too, for any reason, that’s a bonus. Having said that, I think it helps cement the status of a genre, or range of writing, if it does have some academic coverage too. Here’s a link to my article in Omenana #2 (March 2015) on Academia and the Advance of African Science Fiction: https://omenana.com/2015/03/05/academia-and-the-advance-of-african-science-fiction/
Tade Thompson: In a word, yes, although one should be careful when using the phrase ‘bringing the genre’ to Africa. It’s always been here, and I’m not just talking about folk tales based on Malian cosmology. Our folk tales, our proverbs, our art, our culture, all of it has science fictional elements. We have just been trained to only see a certain kind of science fiction which is mainly of Western origin. We need to be taught to see, to grow new eyes and new minds. We also need to look back to history that is not told from the perspective of those who colonized us.
I find that our people consume science fiction that is largely American and mostly audio-visual. People like Mazi Chiagozie Fred Nwonwu, Chinelo Onwualu and Dilman Dila are working to change this.
I would also say that searching for the approval of academics, Western prize-givers or the public is a slippery slope. The stories and books should be written for their own sake, from a deep need to share a particular narrative. Approval will come (or not, but we shouldn’t care about that).
Liam Kruger: Science fiction has been in South Africa for as long as there’s been science fiction; there are first editions of Kipling’s (frankly, terrible) space stories sitting in the archives at the University of Cape Town, and there has long been a culture of writing SF here, though it’s taken a while for that to receive mainstream attention. So I question the idea of ‘bringing’ science fiction to Africa; it has some troubling connotations of cultural import. People have been reading SF here for years, and will likely continue to do so.
I was going to say that, unsurprisingly, academics prove the harder group to please; there are unbelievably tedious debates about the legitimacy of genre fiction ongoing in those circles. That seems unfair, though, since there are also a number of good, insightful reviews being written about African writers of speculative fiction.
As with the general public, there are people in the academy who read SF, and people who do not; the difference, I suppose, is that academics who do not read SF feel that they need to tell us why this is the case. This can leave genre writers feeling a little embattled when speaking with scholars.
Rachael:In many of these stories, themes such as mental illness, physical disease, sexuality, diversity and many others are addressed. To this day and across the world, science fiction is often used as a catalyst for these rather important themes. Why do you think science fiction works so well to portray this and what do you think is the importance of science fiction?
Martin Stokes: Sci-fi will always be, to a certain extent, a genre with the means to predict. Whether optimistic or not, science fiction seems always to pioneer ideas that one day might rise to reality (look at Neuromancer by William Gibson; how it predicted the Internet and the proliferation of cheap technology). I think it helps that when someone reads about the issues addressed above in a science fiction context, they’re able to conceptualize them without acknowledging that they exist in the real world. I think that distance allows one to fully scrutinize the problem. For example, a novel such as Flowers for Algernon, while not being hard sci-fi, allows one to really come to terms with someone who is mentally handicapped.
Efe Tokunbo: HG Wells answered this question best, I believe. His method when writing SF was to take a particular theme and triple its impact. If he doubled it, he reasoned, it would appear to be exaggeration and not taken seriously, whatever the speculative setting. If he quadrupled it, it would be incomprehensible to the reader. But by tripling it, one enters the realm of satire. We, the readers, get to see the absurdity of the characters’ situations and hopefully empathize with them, but we probably wouldn’t want to be them, living out their dystopian existences.
Mandisi Nkomo: Again referring back to the science fiction is inferior debate, science fiction becomes implicitly transgressive, and a natural place to address themes that may generally be neglected. Science fiction also opens up more ways of discussing these issues with its speculation and reflection on the course of science and how it might affect many of the issues.
Ashley Jacobs: I believe people learn and understand information best by engaging with narratives. Science fiction places concerns about Africa’s future in a format that makes complex issues relatable by virtue of their humanity. It is an invaluable genre to inform the present because it allows us to powerfully visualise different, and often surprising, outcomes to our actions. It may even make grappling with the themes mentioned in the question more palatable because of its ability to first personify the issues in a relatable character, and then to explore potential solutions as the story develops.
With regards to the second part of the question – space travel and the internet was science fiction before it became reality. The prophetic link may be tenuous, but I do believe science fiction can help inform the public perception of new technology or advancements even if actually driving such advancements is a bit too ambitious for most writing. It is already helping us imagine what life might be like with pervasive nanotechnology, robot servants and virtual reality. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet,” and I think this is best seen in third world countries where, for example, smart phones and shanty towns easily cohabitate. Science fiction might be a tool to help us envision the infiltration and influence of new technologies in these environments.
Cristy Zinn: I’ve always thought SF to be a perfect vehicle for addressing issues – both current and historical – because it gives us the chance to be objective (as both readers and writers). By putting the same circumstances in an otherworldly or futuristic context we allow the reader to gain some perspective and hopefully, to see the story/event/crisis/issue from all sides. At least this is what some of us try to do, whether we are successful is up to the reader, I suppose. I think SF can be used as commentary on current events without necessarily taking sides or pointing fingers – I love that about this genre. I think as well, we have an opportunity to re-imagine any ‘doomed’ forecast people might have for our continent (on a large scale) or country (on a smaller scale) by creating futures that push boundaries and inspire hope and innovation.
Nick Wood: I think science fiction, although it is ostensibly ‘future focused’, is mostly very much engaged with wrestling with contemporary problems. The strength and importance of science fiction is that it enables a form of ‘thought experiment’ to wrestle and transform these problems – encouraging us to try and look at things differently and to work out solutions, to face the crises of our day. So, in essence (and at its best) SF is a progressive genre, with a remit to engage with ‘big’ topics and (perhaps implicitly) looking for positive ways forward for us all.
Tade Thompson: This answer requires an entire book. First of all, the world is a complicated, chaotic mess. Heck, our individual lives are chaotic messes. Entropy is everywhere, and that is as it should be. I would take the opposite view: science fiction has failed woefully when it comes to the depiction of the full range of existence. The same narrow themes are addressed ad infinitum, ad nauseum. I would say that general literary fiction has done much more to hold a mirror up to life. This is to the shame of those who call themselves science fiction writers. I find their focus narrow and repetitive. The often militaristic, often jingoistic dominant science fiction narratives are self-congratulatory, but do very little to address the multiplicity of life experiences across disciplines (physics and astronomy get centre stage), genders, neuronormativeness, race, sexuality etc. In case this is unclear I’ll say this: diversity in science fiction as it currently stands is a joke.
What science fiction has is great POTENTIAL to address the themes you mention. If the content of your story is limited only by your imagination anything is possible within that reality, and therein lies the importance of the genre. You can literally be anywhere at any time in history, and play “what if?” to your heart’s content. You can even be in two places at once if you wish. Bend and break the laws of physics if it serves the narrative. That is what draws me to the genre, but right now the growth is stunted. There are people trying to expand the range, but it is slow going.
Liam Kruger: Freedom, probably; writing about a boy falling in love with a trans woman in 1970s Istanbul requires some fidelity to the intersecting social and political trajectories that would affect and respond to that individual’s position in society, such that you end up writing a dissection of a political context rather than depicting the marginalized identity that you’re wanting to talk about. Talking about a someone falling in love with a trans woman on some made-up planet lets you focus on the bits that you’re actually interested in. (Left Hand of Darkness, by the by.)
Although I’m curious about your use of the word ‘catalyst;’ do you mean that SF books dealing with, say, misogyny, are more likely to cause a reaction in real-world instances of gendered discrimination – a la Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale? Or that the thematic concerns are just more prominent in SF? And if that’s the case, doesn’t this mean that SF actually sort of fails in this portrayal? After all, if you can see the subtext, it isn’t subtext.
Olivia: While some people might argue that Africa is not ready for science fiction because the themes and issues are not relevant to the people and are also sometimes looked down upon, do you believe that science fiction may actually create a stronger dialogue to address these important issues such as famine, disease, and corruption than other genres of literature?
Martin Stokes: Science fiction is definitely on par with other genres in its ability to highlight current societal issues. The upper hand it holds has to do with its inexorable ability to predict. Science fiction is able to see current global trends and apply them to gain a glimpse of what the world will look like if X phenomenon continues – or ceases – to occur. It is difficult to imagine a world in which science fiction didn’t exist; and if such a world did exist then I fear for its lack of innovation.
Efe Tokunbo: Anyone who would argue that Africa is not ready for SF has never been to Africa or spoken to an African, and if they are African, they need to wash out their brains. Some of our oldest tales, passed down by griots who accompanied shamans in travelling medicine shows that brought mystery, wonder and healing to the lives of the people, are pure SF. They are in fact the primordial myths and legends SF often reimagines and remixes for modern audiences.
There is a one-armed one-legged god amongst the Urhobo people of the Niger Delta called Aziza who is said to protect the forest. He has a magic mirror that lets him pull your shadow close to him, allowing him to look into your heart. If you have evil intentions, he pushes his walking stick into the ground and instantly teleports to where you are. In the past, people living off the bounties of the mangrove forests would not take more than an allocated amount for fear of Aziza’a wrath. He is said to have a particular hatred for greed, even going so far as to tempt people with forbidden fruit. I don’t know where Aziza is today but considering the Niger Delta is now classified as the most polluted place on the entire planet, perhaps Shell Oil killed him. I doubt they have that power though. More likely he lies in wait for the day when the old gods will rise to wreak terrible vengeance on mankind. (Maniacal laughter!) Aziza is also said to be the herald of dawn, lord of the fleetingly transient state, a threshold deity, guardian of the sacred moments when higher levels of consciousness may be accessed by crossing over the boundaries that limit. The Urhobo call him, “King of the forest as well as of the earth.”
The Dogons of Mali still tell of their ancestors being visited by dolphin like sky-beings from the Sirius star system. On one of their cave paintings, the path of the binary star system of Sirius A and Sirius B are plotted with great accuracy, a fact which continues to baffle western anthropologists and scientists as they did not even know of the existence of Sirius B until 1846. The Dogons even knew that it was a white dwarf. How? An alien named Nommo told them. Truth is stranger than fiction, trust.
Meanwhile, several years ago in Nigeria, a group of school-children invented a urine powered generator that has the potential, if developed correctly and not suppressed by big business, to help save the world. Imagine a urine powered generator in every home drastically cutting your electricity bills. Who needs to invade the Middle East to watch the game on TV when I can just drink a cold one and take a piss?
The danger with the urine powered generator, of course, is that such devices have a history of being kept locked away from the public. Nicolas Tesla is the perfect example of this. Few people know that he practically invented the 20th century in terms of technology, holding over three hundred patents to his name. He is said to have created machines that could generate free energy and transmit them wirelessly but once his financial backers realized they couldn’t make money from something that was free, they, in conjunction with the feds, pulled the cash, burgled his laboratories, burned his papers, stole his research and hounded him out of the public eye. Thomas Edison, a contemporary of Tesla and a far less brilliant scientist, went so far as to tour the nation, electrocuting animals to death and claiming this proved the dangers of Tesla’s Alternating Current. He did this because his invention, Direct Current, was and remains to this day, an inferior method of conducting electricity. His shock tactics worked and till this day, most people remember Edison as a great inventor while Tesla died penniless and alone in a tiny apartment somewhere in the ghetto, holding the secrets of the universe in his mind.
As for the issues of famine, disease, corruption etc., by placing them in a speculative setting, SF definitely allows us to view them with fresh eyes, unclouded by the rhetoric of mass media and the stereotypes many people think are representative of the truth, forgetting that stereotypes say as much about the subject as they do the mind-states of the creators of said stereotypes. For example, how many of you do not consider watermelon to be a delicious fruit?
Mazi Nwonwu: I do believe so. I remember Lagos 2060 (which is, incidentally, Nigeria’s first science fiction anthology) started off as a collaborative project between writers and architects. The idea was for the writers to dream up a vision of Lagos in 50 years and for the architects to develop a cityscape based on the ideas that the writers came up with.
Science fiction has proven to be an effective way to look into the future and though these imagined futures, when they do come to pass, don’t always play out like the prophetic novels projected, the fact that many of the very smart and world-changing devices we have today were inspired by science fiction is something that Africa must not take for granted.
Mandisi Nkomo: I would certainly hope so. I believe the potential in science fiction to address important themes is limitless, possibly even more so than other forms as the imagining of futures, alternative universes and dimensions, allows one to mentally remove themselves from current paradigms and norms, to reflect and perceive how arbitrarily human beings construct societies, and how absurd certain things we take for granted daily actually are. An easy example of this would be the numerous societal absurdities brought up in Douglas Adam’s The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Thinking of all these issues in such a holistic manner may assist in creating solutions.
Ashley Jacobs: There are a vast number scientific fields from which to extrapolate fictional stories – many of which are under-explored in the genre. Traditional science fiction has inspired us by imagining how fantastic advancements in the fields of physics and computers would affect our daily lives. We see this by the extent that ideas of interconnectivity through technology, space travel and virtual reality have permeated pop culture. These stories have typically been set in America where it is easier to imagine such infrastructure and technology developing. However, the definitions of science fiction are stretching to incorporate ideas from scientific fields such as biology, psychology and environmental science. Even better is that these stories are coming from all over the world and dealing with issues pertaining to particular cultures. Personally, this is the kind of science fiction that excites me the most. There is something unique about good science fiction to inspire a sense of wonder in the world and hope for the future. For example, if you’ve read my rather dark story in AfroSF, you might be pleased to know that I’m now working on making vaccines for those diseases! Science fiction is free from many of the conventions of other forms of literature. In terms of impact, unfortunately genre fiction books will always have a limited audience. However, science fiction is a hugely popular film genre and Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 perfectly demonstrates my point about science fiction. It brought an allegory of apartheid issues to a global audience in an engaging way. I’m excited for more books reimagining South Africa’s issues in ways that encourage dialogue and further than that, maybe inspire individuals to make a difference in their own way.
Nick Wood: With the current rate of change in Africa, some people might argue that Africa is already ‘becoming’ a little like science fiction – Ghanaian Jonathan Dotse (2014) partly puts this view forward on his site Afro-Cyberpunk. Nnedi Okorafor (2014) in her essay ‘African Science Fiction is Still Alien’ refers to the power of science fiction to literally change the world. …And as the editor of AfroSF (Ivor Hartmann) argues in his Introduction, the importance of African science fiction is also about owning an African vision of the future, rather than having the future co-opted by others.
So yes, I do see the popularity and use of science fiction growing in Africa and being tailored to the issues on the ground, such as some of those you list, given it is increasingly being written by Africans themselves. I also see a wonderful plurality and variety of visions and stories emerging, relevant to a huge and diverse continent. You may perhaps already have seen Chimamanda Adichie’s TED Talk, ‘The danger of a single story’? Finally, there is a a relevant Mail & Guardian (2014) article addressing further, some of the issues you have raised.
Tade Thompson: To say that Africa is not ready for science fiction is a rather high form of ignorance. First of all, it assumes that there is a particular point in cultural development for sci-fi to be understood or consumed. It also implies that Africa is somehow inferior to other continents that consume sci-fi. This is pure, unalloyed horse dung.
If you write a story relevant to the local populace they will read it. If you shoot a film relevant to locals, they will watch it. Besides, it’s not like Africans don’t consume Western sci-fi. Go to Lagos, to Race Course. You’ll see piles of second hand booksellers doing brisk business with sci-fi paperbacks.
I give you an image: a Neanderthal village gathered round a campfire and a storyteller spinning a yarn about a substance harder and smoother than stone, and the problems that such a discovery brings. That is science fiction. The story would remain science fiction up until the Neolithic when metallurgy became science reality.
My point is science fiction is the extrapolation of a science within a fictional framework. Ask yourself what defines a science, then ask if science is used in Africa. It’s SCIENCE fiction, not astrophysical fiction.
The beauty of using sci-fi to address issues is that it passes under the radar of cultural censors. If oppression is happening to an alien race in a galaxy far, far away it may be seen as irrelevant, even though there are parallels to a local situation. By the time the censors realise this it will be too late. This is a literary revolution by the back door, a covert delivery system for subversive ideas. This is a good thing.
But first we have to write the relevant narratives. Read A Killing in the Sun by Dilman Dila and see if you find that relevant, or try Omenana Magazine.
Liam Kruger: I would be a little astonished at anybody suggesting that the continent ‘is not ready’ for SF. Which themes and issues do you imagine to be the province of science fiction, and how are these themes irrelevant to the entire continent of Africa? I understand that AfroSF is a collection drawing from a continent-wide pool, but please understand that it’s a very big, very diverse space and that very few trappings of modern metropolitan comfort aren’t available somewhere in Africa – for a price, obviously, but this is true everywhere. It may be that these juxtapositions – the uneven distribution of wealth, the uneven distribution of ‘the future’ – are starker here than elsewhere, leading to an easier identification with science-fictional dystopian tropes, but considering the ever-expanding rich/poor gap in the putatively developed world, I’m not sure that that division, that ‘these important issues’ are unique to Africa.
Put it this way: I am sitting in a cafe in Swakopmund, composing this response on a black mirrored device that connects me to the sum total of human knowledge, and looking around, mine is one of the oldest and crappiest such pieces of electronics in the room. About an hour’s drive from here is one of the largest, and sophisticated solar power arrays in the world; two hours in the other direction, you can find one of the earliest mass graves resulting from mass murder of indigenous Africans by European colonizers. If you want your themes of death/decay, or your themes of growth/development, Africa has them, usually in close proximity. So does North America. So does East Asia. And everywhere else.
P.S.: famine, disease, corruption in SF, is usually the province of your old-fashioned dystopia novel, starting I guess with H.G. Wells, thence to John Wyndham’s Day of the Triffids and proceeding along that trajectory to, well, stuff like The Walking Dead today. A preoccupation with famine, disease and corruption is a little more common in English and North American SF than elsewhere. Strange, no?
Alannah: [In “Azania”] Aneni states on page 95, “I am an African woman!” Her powerful, commanding character has resonated with me. This led me to wonder what inspired you to incorporate aspects of intersectionality into a science fiction story?
Nick Wood: To me intersectionality is an intrinsic part of character and power and my SF has increasingly been driven by this, given I am a clinical psychologist first and currently by profession – and I initially trained and worked primarily with people disadvantaged by the apartheid system in South Africa. Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward look at the importance of addressing intersectionality in their book Writing the Other.
I did not start with this position though, it took both growing awareness/consciousness and time and practice. I have addressed this, along with Zandile Mahlasela, in this article on the ‘Something Wicked’ website.
The true inspiration for Aneni’s character, though, is my life-long partner/wife, who grew up disadvantaged – but defiant, driven and proud – under apartheid, where she was finally allowed to vote for the first time – in the country of her birth – at the age of 35! (Both of us queued for a wonderful and socially exciting 4 hours in April 1994, to vote for Madiba.) So it is my partner who, for me, represents the generic strength I see in so many African women and which I wanted to portray – with ‘authenticity’ and love – in the character of Aneni. (I had a chiShona speaking couple read and comment on the story too; partly referred to at the end of my ‘Something Wicked’ article!) So I am very glad Aneni has resonated with you – thank you!
Eli: Your story “Proposition 23” seems, on the one hand, optimistic in terms of Nigeria’s future, and on the other hand, pessimistic in terms of the global future of technology and humanity. Do you have a vision of Nigeria rising as a world superpower country in the distant future? And do you think, in many years to come, that superpower countries will become more ruthless dystopias than average countries?
Efe Tokunbo: Nigeria definitely has the potential to become a world superpower in the future. As the most populated African nation with the continent’s largest economy as well as being one of the world’s largest producers of crude oil, anything is possible. Like most African nations, Nigeria was created by European powers with little regard for existing realities (beyond the old divide, conquer and pillage routine) which is why there are over two hundred and fifty different ethnic groups within her borders, gifting her with a wealth of culture and talent, as well as a whole host of problems, especially in the oil-rich Niger Delta. Nigeria has been an independent nation for just over half a century but then look what the U.S. accomplished once she gained independence from England.
Would Nigeria behave any better or worse than any other superpower? Who knows? They would probably act no different from any group that seeks to maintain disproportionate power over others. The truth is we already live in a world-wide ruthless dystopia but we have these damned neuros in our heads, you see, and they cloud our minds with the illusion of some sort of global American Dream, thus rather than living rational lives, most of us are subjects to the bully/sycophant emotional dynamic of the ego, that insidious inventor of the devil, the system, and the assorted bad guys of our imagination.
As far as the so-called average Jo(anna) is concerned, as long as the machine feeds, clothes and entertains me, I can forget about the constant warfare paid, for by my taxes, that puts gas in my car; I can ignore the modern day slavery that puts the necessary mineral components in my cellphone and the clothes on my back; I can say ‘who cares?’ about the factory farms that keep animals locked in horrendous conditions, pumping them full of antibiotics and artificial growth hormones to feed me with all the pork chops and fried chicken I can eat; I don’t have to dwell on the genetically modified fruit and vegetables (containing far less nutritional value compared to natural foods) with their bland taste, their photoshopped perfection and suicide genes which force local farmers to become indebted to banks and agribusinesses like Monsanto while depleting our stock of natural seeds; I can pretend that we are not in the middle of one of the largest mass extinctions the planet has ever known (50% of the earth’s wildlife gone forever in the past 40 years alone, thanks to human activities); I can laugh off as a conspiracy theory the leaked classified documents that have proven that various governments and multinational corporations have been, and continue to be, involved in the illegal testing of dangerous chemical and biological agents on unsuspecting civilians; the list goes on, but fuck it, Big Brother is about to start.
How authoritarian governments of the future will be all depends on how authoritarian they feel they need to be in order to maintain the control that their big business buddies require in order to keep on gorging themselves at the expense of everyone and everything else on the planet. The tightness with which the iron fist grips might fluctuate periodically and it might even be lined with some sort of soft velvety material from time to time, depending on how worked up the people get and if they need placating, but the powers-that-be have grown expert in the art of manufacturing consent while maintaining the illusion of human rights and personal freedoms, especially in the so-called developed world. Or perhaps there are no powers-that-be anymore. Perhaps they’ve been made obsolete by the machine itself as it unthinkingly follows the psychopathic logic of its human predecessors all the way to the grave of history.
Take the U.S. for example. One decade alcohol is illegal; women have the vote but few hold any high positions in society; while blacks are segregated from whites by law and regularly lynched for being ‘uppity’. A few decades later, psychedelics are illegal; women seem to have more power than ever but are bombarded by the most aggressive advertising campaign in human history designed to destroy their self-esteem; blacks supposedly have equal rights but are still far more likely to be stopped, searched, beaten, arrested, incarcerated and murdered by the police than their pale-skinned peers. Meanwhile the feds keep getting better at reading your mail and post-9/11, they no longer need to pretend they’re not kidnapping and torturing (often innocent) foreign nationals and American citizens… all for your protection of course.
But what can you do, right? Yours is not to wonder why, dammit, yours is to do and die, so wake up in the morning, brush your teeth with your favourite brand of fluoride toothpaste that calcifies your pineal gland and closes up your third eye, go to school to be told how to think, go to work to help your boss get rich while you slowly heave your tired weight up the corporate ladder (watch out for that glass ceiling now, it might shatter and a shard could take someone’s eye out), pay your taxes so your government can afford to buy the latest weapons which they pinky-promise only to use on dark skinned people living far away, retire after several decades of slaving your life away in a meaningless existence then maybe, just maybe, if you’ve saved enough money and your pension isn’t stolen away by some shady investment scheme involving toxic assets and a supposedly reputable firm, you get to spend your last few years finally enjoying the good life only by then you’re too old and crotchety to get your ass off the couch and do all the things your true heart always desired.
If you believe your government is not authoritarian, as an experiment, stop paying your taxes and when they come after you, tell them you are doing so because you disagree with what they are doing with your money. If that’s too hard to imagine, try taking off all your clothes right now, running down to the mayor’s office and chanting “Om Mani Padne Om” on the steps of city hall.
Research in renewable energy and perma-culture design has advanced to the point where, with collective willpower, we could end our dependence on fossil fuels, gangster capitalism, exploitation of the so-called third world, destruction of the natural world and the entire military-industrial complex within a few years. But then this has been true for quite a while now.
Imagine a solar panel on every roof, wind farms, tidal wave energy collectors, geo-thermal energy conductors and much more, providing free, clean renewable energy for all. Imagine every green space in our towns and cities filled with organic fruit and vegetables, run by the members of the local community themselves. Imagine free transportation connecting a globe with no borders or passports, no division between first and third world citizens. Imagine clean air to breathe and fresh sparkling water to drink for everyone, not merely those who can afford it. Imagine holistic healthcare that takes the whole being of a person into account rather than focusing on combating symptoms. Imagine corporations that place the well-being of the planet as their bottom line, corporations whose very raison d’etre is the betterment of life on earth. Imagine governments actually doing their jobs as servants of the people, helping to facilitate our collective growth and evolution. Imagine everyone having the space and the time to follow their dreams, co-creating a paradise on earth.
Sounds like science fiction doesn’t it? I’d write a story like that. Heck, I’d direct, act in, produce, build the sets, scout the locations, rig the lights, hold the boom mic, serve lunch for the crew and then pay to go see that movie and I think some of you would, too. But who would believe it? It’s speculative perhaps, but fiction? Only because we lack the imagination to dream and the courage to wake up. The way I see it, things will probably get worse before they get better.
How authoritarian can it get, you ask? If things carry on the way they are, people alive today, even in a so-called developed country like Canada, might one day see FEMA camps for the sick, infirm, homeless, poor and other undesirables. All it would take would be some scare: a severe drought, a blight on the crops, an even greater and longer lasting economic crisis, a new pandemic or perhaps a false-flag terror attack by supposed aliens. This would feasibly be followed shortly by perpetual martial law and some form of compulsory identification system embedded in the body like a sub-dermal microchip in the neck or a barcode tattooed on the wrist, operating like a low-tech version of the neuro in ‘Proposition 23’.
Meanwhile in the so-called third world, a worsening of the economic terrorism perpetrated on the people and an escalation of the relentless exploitation of the planet leading to world-wide ecological disasters of unprecedented scale and global thermonuclear war are genuine possibilities.
As a species we are at a crossroads and the direction we go depends entirely on us working individually on ourselves and collectively to better our communities. We need to start locally because no matter how much one dreams of effecting global, national or regional change, it all starts with the hood you’re in. Dreaming big while doing nothing because it all seems too big to do anything about only serves to keep you living in apathy. The fact is that humans are wounded. We have wounded our environment, ourselves and our unborn children. It is up to us to choose between being wounded victims or wounded healers.
We can choose to be guided by empathy or be satisfied with sympathy (“oh those poor starving African babies. Should we donate some money to the charity dear?” “Sure thing, hon, then let’s carry on living the very same lifestyle that is robbing them of food, clothing and shelter”).
We can choose unconditional love, respect and reverence for all life, treating each other as we would like to be treated ourselves, or we can choose to fear whatever the culture tells us is fashionable this season or this generation, giving up our personal power and freedom in the process.
We can choose to be wise and co-operate as a species (investing our time and resources into sustainable energy, organic food, innovations in ethical science, free and open education not restricted by dogma, the quest for transcendence, new forms of music, art, dance, theatre and poetry, or whatever dream floats your boat) or we can choose to compete in order to satisfy the various fleeting desires of an impermanent world, desires that more often than not are manufactured in order to sell products we don’t need while keeping us distracted chasing after inconsequentialities.
The truth is we are all interconnected on the most fundamental and profound levels. Whatever I do to you I’m really doing to myself, and vice versa. Not metaphorically, but literally. From the slaves mining for so-called conflict minerals in the Congo, to the executive of Apple who buys the minerals wholesale from slave-owners for use in manufacturing the corporation’s computers, to me, sitting and typing on this laptop to you, hearing or reading these words wherever you are, each one of us is affected by the vibrations of our collective actions. I know little children who have felt sadness, fear and even guilt at the current state of the world for the simple reason that deep inside, somewhere beyond the ego, they know what so many of us have somehow forgotten: we are all one.
To put it another way, I am an infinitesimally small particle in an infinitely vast cosmos. Collectively, we are the wave on which I am surfing to the Buddha’s fabled other shore. As the Huicholes people of Mexico say in their peyote ceremonies, “I am another you.” My hope, or perhaps faith is a better word, is that as time passes, more people will wake up to this reality. On the other hand maybe Masta Killa was right when he said:
They thirst for knowledge
I teach but hold heat
‘cause some savage niggas are lost beyond reach
Things can’t remain as they are therefore change is inevitable. If we don’t do it ourselves, no doubt Mother Nature will do it for us. Armageddon may very well be around the corner, at which point it will be too late to point the finger at any authoritarian governments. To find the true enemy, one need look no further than a mirror.
Governments, whatever their level of authoritarianism, are like corporations and pretty much all institutions, fictitious entities. They are nothing but a series of processes and laws written down on pieces of paper. Like computer code, they are not self-aware, however cleverly designed they may be, whatever the judiciary system may claim. Public officials and corporate employees are too often zombies following the orders of ghosts in the machine which is powered, at the end of the day, by people just like you and me, going along to get along, following the herd as it stampedes straight over the edge of the cliff.
Are you gonna blame the steer in front of you for leading you to your death or the steer behind you for pushing you over the edge? Are you gonna turn to the steers next to you and say, ‘hold on, wait a minute, this can’t be the right way; there’s a really humongous cliff just ahead and I don’t think we’ve evolved the ability to fly just yet. How about we…? mooooooooooo… (splat!) Or are you gonna do something about it?
First of all, we would like to sincerely apologise for the lateness of this edition. We had hoped to have it out by the end of May, but it turned out to be a month of transition, movement and change.
Funny enough, those themes have carried over to the four stories presented in this edition. Each one tells a tale about moving from one state to another – be it from cruelty to remorse, from earth to space or even from the non-human to the human – and not always successfully.
This month, I was fortunate to attend WisCon 2015, the world’s leading feminist science fiction convention in Madison, Wisconsin in the US. It was an eye-opening event full of amazing people with incredibly thoughtful insights into the rapidly-changing genre of speculative fiction. Because, like our stories this month, the genre itself is in the midst of a rather fundamental transformation.
More and more, the future of storytelling is moving away from the established centres of power in West, away from the straight white and male voices that once dominated it. This has caused a great deal of anxiety – and anger – among groups of people who are scared that they are losing their hold on power. In reaction, they’ve started a backlash that threatens to take out some of the genre’s most valuable voices and institutions. I won’t go into it here, but look up: “Sad/Rabid Puppies and Science Fiction” and you’ll see what I mean.
Though these groups often claim to stand for the literary integrity of the genre, scratch the surface and it’s not hard to understand the true source of their vitriol. I mean, one of their most outspoken voices has gone on the record calling black people “savages” and launched sustained racist attacks on writers of colour within the genre.
Thankfully, Omenana stands at the forefront of some of the changes to the genre. By bringing the voices of the African continent into the genre, we are helping to shift the tide even faster than before. You see for much of the history of speculative fiction, Africa was an exotic backdrop for Western stories to play out. Either it was a place of mystery and adventure for intrepid whites, or it was a place of refuge for people of the African Diaspora who longed for somewhere to belong. Rarely was it a place filled with its own people, languages, politics and unique worldviews.
As part of our determination to let African stories speak for themselves, we’ve included a questionnaire put together by students of Maria Barraza’s world literature class at Simon Fraser University in Canada. The class included a reading of AfroSF, the first anthology of African science fiction stories, in their program and students crafted their questions after going through the collection. The authors’ answers are thoughtful, testy and darkly satirical. I highly recommend reading them.
The bottom line is that we are convinced that bringing our African speculative fiction to the world’s attention is more than just telling good stories. It is about bringing a whole new way of looking at things to a genre that has always been about looking askance at the world. Unfortunately, this is time-consuming work and despite our best intentions, we have been unable to meet the schedule for a monthly magazine. Therefore, we will be transitioning to a tri-monthly magazine starting from this edition.
This will mean our next submissions cycle will open in July and our next edition will be available August 31st. We’re very sorry for any inconvenience or disappointment this may cause. We hope that as we grow as a magazine, and gain more staff and resources, this will change. In the meantime, the digital editions of Omenana are now available for free at Okada Books.
