Then he hopped on a bus and visited the more upmarket Kingsway and UTC general stores to find a diving suit. Not easy since scuba diving was not a serious pastime in Nigeria, but he found something next to a vicious-looking harpoon gun. The shop assistant said they sold more of the guns than the suits.
It was late so he took a taxi back to his flat in Fola Agoro. On the centre table he had a pencil sketch of a costume completed earlier. He would be everything Black-Power was not. He had that black mask that covered his head with a slit for eyes and an opening for nose and mouth. Tope would not have a mask. He ground up charcoal in a mortar with a pestle and mixed it with Vaseline. This he smeared around his eyes and part of his forehead in an irregular jagged shape. Using a manual Singer sewing machine, which he had owned since 1969, he sewed the fabric into a dashiki. He cut up the diving suit and wore the bottom half as tights.
He would not have a cape. Fuck Black-Power.
He would not have boots like Black-Power. He would go barefoot. Like an African. A Pan-African. The Pan-African.
He liked the name. It fit his political ideas.
He stood in front of the full length mirror.
Shit, I look ridiculous too.
2015
“What are you thinking?” asked Elizabeth. She sat up in bed leaving her bosom in full view. He went to the bed and kissed her. Elizabeth’s arms came up, circled his neck, and drew him closer still. The flow of internet detritus stopped abruptly.
He broke the kiss. “You want to know what’s cooler than a waterbed?”
She raised her eyebrows.
He levitated them both above the bed.
Soon, they were kissing again.
1976
Bol, Chad
My God, he’s fast.
The Pan-African barely dodged the fifth punch in Black-Power’s flurry of blows. There was an earthquake in his skull. An earthquake with pretty lights dancing across his vision.
The wind and the rain confused him. All Tope could see were grey skies and sheets of water coming into his eyes. Water and the fists of his brother. He was spinning and could not tell which way was up.
Black-Power could not fly, and he was not holding on to the Pan-African. How the hell was he in the air so much? He was gone again. Tope tried to orient himself. There was a crack of thunder and impact. Black-Power was back, digging body shots into the Pan-African’s belly. He was seeing black dots. What?
Shit, am I losing consciousness?
It was his ambush. He was supposed to have the advantage of surprise. Black-Power had recovered so quickly, surprise meant nothing.
Headshot. The whole world shook. Even the rain drops fucking shook. He had to get away. Lake Chad was somewhere, above or below.
Fly away. Pick a direction and fly away. The direction doesn’t matter. He’ll kill you.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
He flew, fast as he could manage. He knew he was moving, but the wind was so powerful that he couldn’t tell where he was. The horizon was gone. No reference point. He heard a thump, and he knew that meant Black-Power had taken one of his powerful leaps.
The Pan-African directed himself away from the sound. He tried to take a breath, but it was mostly water and he coughed. His dashiki was tattered.
Fly above the storm.
He spat, and the blood-stained phlegm hit him right back in the face.
He felt a separate rush of air. The sonovabitch missed him by inches and fell back to the earth, sticking his right middle finger out at the Pan-African as he fell.
Tope flew the other way, into the clouds.
2015
Lagos, Nigeria
Tope took a sip of the fresh orange juice Elizabeth offered.
“Well!” said Elizabeth. She was swaddled in the hotel’s white fluffy bathrobe.
“What?”
“That was new.”
“I bet you say that to all the boys.”
“I’m serious.”
“I’m hungry.”
Elizabeth shoved a buttered croissant in his general direction and poured more juice. She handed him the glass and drank straight from the jar. Room service had delivered two glasses but one had been smashed in a bout of passion.
“You surf the net a lot,” said Tope.
“What do you mean? Have you been reading my mind again?”
“Not intentionally. You leaked stuff. Nothing organised, but it kept me awake. All of it was web shit.”
“It’s a long story. I’m...well, I’m sort of plugged into the web.”
A phrase popped into her head, web witch, but Tope did not know what it meant. He was about to ask, but her phone rang. She had a Fela ringtone. He knew the song: ‘Zombie’—not about the undead, but the soldiers who obey orders without question.
Elizabeth nodded, hummed, hemmed and hawed. “I’ll get back to you.”
“Who was that?”
“Do you know Lekan Deniran?”
“No.”
“He’s the biggest promoter in the country, some say on the continent.”
“Look at my face. This is my impressed expression. Notice how similar it is to my don’t-give-a-shit expression. What does he want from you?”
“Not me. You.” She tied a strip of cloth around her hair.
“And?”
“He wants to promote a fight between you and Black-Power.”
8
50,000 B.P.
What would become South Africa
The elder watched his younger brother stride off to the north, with a heavy heart.
Will I see you again, brother he thought to himself. Be safe—and stay good.
He half hoped his brother could pick up his slightly guarded sentiment, but within mere moments he was gone from view, hidden under a forest canopy.
The small group of primates they had witnessed together, returning from a hunt, were gathered around their injured one. The primate was clasping at blood dripping from a red hole amongst his left set of ribs, slowly stumbling to his hands and knees.
The elder—he decided to call himself Umvelinqangi, or Sky God then—watched, with some dispassionate interest, as the group gathered around their stricken group member, now panting his distress into the stubby grasslands.
The largest male amongst them was carrying a squat warthog, oozing serous fluids down his broad back.
Two of the healthy primates picked up short stabbing flint spears, red from their hunt.
What would it be?
Stabbing their injured male or stabbing and eating?
Umvelinqangi caught a flurry of sub-linguistic neural activity, watching postures shift with fluid non-verbal communications; a nod here, a grunt there.
The primates lowered the spears under their injured ones arms and chest at the front, pelvic region at the back. Another group member stepped forward and with forest vine, secured the hafts of the spear to arms and legs.
Four of them shifted to grasp the ends of the spears and hoisted their injured one into the air.
He was now slumped and unconscious, but they were taking him home. The giant with the dead warthog pointed onwards.
The hunting party of eight began their march across the grassy terrain, heading for a large cave at the foothills of the mountains—uKhahlamba thought Umvelinqangi, that shall be their name—towering blue-tall in the distance, clouded or perhaps even snow-capped.
Suddenly, he felt at home, more than he had ever felt in fifty thousand Earth equivalent cycles on his home planet.
With one stride he was amongst the group.
They scattered in terror, for he was much larger and more powerful than they and wearing shining fabric, like nothing they had ever seen.
This primate will not last the journey, bleeding like this, he thought, and removed some healing kenth from a pouch on his belt. He spat onto the brown paste, rubbed it vigorously between his palms and then knelt down to apply it to the primate’s broken skin, where a rib gaped through, white and ragged.
The g
roup members were returning, hesitant, baring teeth and with raised arms threatening to stab at him with short wooden spears.
Umvelinqangi stood and spoke with a voice like thunder that made them all cower, including the giant, who had dropped the warthog in their initial scattering. “He will be well.”
And, as if on cue, the primate groaned and opened his eyes.
The other primates fell to their knees, but Umvelinqangi knelt with them, heeding his own advice to his younger brother.
I will not be a god, I will live amongst you, he thought, knowing they could not understand him.
Above them, streaks of lights speared across the sky, shattered remnants of their ship.
He felt no loss for that.
Umvelinqangi felt his heart grow heavy again.
“Be safe, brother.” (Somewhere, unbidden, the name ‘Oduduwa’ came to mind.)
Umvelinqangi gouged away marks on his cheeks with his fingernails, marks which traced their alien lineage, feeling lacings of his own blood dripping down his scarred cheeks.
And do not fail me, brother, he thought, for now I have become human, and we must show these becoming people, the way of good.
So it was that Umvelinqangi nursed an early Khoesaan man back to health—although for some days the treated man was seriously ill with a microbial infection, which reminded Umvelinqangi, just fleetingly, of his home planet.
1976
Bol, Chad
Black-Power watched the Pan-African streak away in the sky above, trailing an erratic spray of moisture and blood behind him.
A tropical storm brooded and flashed intermittently around him, as he cradled a bruised left forearm, feet anchored to the cracked earth waiting for the storm to spill fully.
Bastard’s strong and quick, I’ll give that to him, he thought, grudgingly.
Deep inside though, there was a wail of despair.
“Brother, why have you failed me?”
1976, now that was also a shit year, an esabeka year.
2015
South Africa
Thembeka was persistent in her hunt for the local Super-Tik Drug-Lord.
Detective Sipho could only admire her as she flung clues and tit-bits of information into her software algorithms; Vang-A-Dief©, Catch-A-Thief©, Bamba Isela©. Eventually she narrowed the Street Map search to a lush, loaded mansion in Bishop’s Court, perched luxuriously on the rump of Table Mountain. He hurried over to her PC.
The detective sensed a drop in Thembeka’s mood and noted her slumped shoulders as the Street Cams panned around the building, bulwarked with razor-wire, deadly electrics, and black-clad men armed with heavy artillery.
“No way through that,” she groaned.
“Who said anything about going through?” asked Black-Power, caped and hulking at her right shoulder.
Night fell early in the Western Cape winter, aided by a dull, cloudy sky and a bitter northwester.
Black-Power and Thembeka sat in the back of a marked Eskom van, apparently busy with monitoring faltering electricity supplies to those few who slurped up the most.
But as blackness fell, hardly kept at bay by flickering, pallid, orange street lights, they crept out of the van. Black-Power embraced her protectively with his cape as she finished holstering her pistol, safety off.
“Ready?” he asked, thrilling to her close warmth, the tangy smell of a spicy perfume.
“Ready,” she grinned up at him.
He braced his calves and with a light but firm bounce he was soaring over the walls and heading down towards the roof, carefully aiming for the part of the house likeliest (87.4% prediction) to hold the drug lord, only known as Zumba.
They crashed through the roof with an explosive shower of tile, wood, and mortar, Thembeka safely shrouded in Black-Power’s Kevlar cape and arms.
He landed with a steely bracing of his booted legs on a meeting room table, crashing through to the marble floor below.
Debris clattered down around them as Black-Power swept the remnants of the table away. Thembeka spun, unfurled from his cape, across the floor, pistol cocked, sliding on her knees, trying to find a target.
Automatic fire opened up at the imposing target of Black-Power. He laughed then, a booming, bursting laugh that dropped the remains of the roof on top of them all; the eight gunmen stopped shooting, confused.
The smoke cleared to reveal a small man in a purple satin suit standing quietly amongst his bodyguards, Zumba. Without warning he broke into a sudden spin, pirouetting like flickering lightning across the empty space, and seized Thembeka from behind with his left arm. He hauled her to her feet, a human shield in front of Black-Power, knife in his right hand at her throat.
“Super-Tik,” Zumba said, “speeds you up. Leave, or she dies.”
Black-Power hesitated—and blood spilled suddenly from Thembeka’s throat.
Bang!
Zumba staggered backwards.
Thembeka had her left arm twisted behind her, her pistol wafting the barest tendril of smoke.
Zumba dropped like a puppet without strings as Thembeka clutched at her throat frantically, staunching the blood.
With one leap, Black-Power had seized her and exploded out of the house.
Landing near the van outside the mansion, Black-Power burst open the back door with a forceful finger, panicking.
Inside, he laid Thembeka gently down, securing the door from the inside.
When he turned around, Thembeka was sitting up and staring at him, a soft and bemused expression on her face
Black-Power noted a drying trickle of blood down the front of her throat.
“You’re, okay,” he croaked.
She smiled.
He leant across the floor of the van and kissed her.
Softly.
Slowly.
She slapped him.
“What was that for?” He asked, aggrieved, sure for once he had not read her signals wrong.
“That’s for thinking of Kokoro while kissing me,” she snapped.
He was speechless.
Thembeka stood up and pushed at the door. It buckled outwards and she jumped through the burst metal of the door.
Black-Power could only stare after her.
How did she do that?
How on earth did she know what he was thinking?
And her slap had actually...hurt!
Then a slow and ancient memory came to him. A faintest taste of something he had used up some millennia ago.
Kenth.
He had always marvelled at his anatomical and DNA similarities to emerging humans—life-forms on planets separated by light years, but with puzzling similar evolutionary pathways. Not completely compatible however, his sperm was infertile with humans—perhaps just as well, he thought to himself wryly.
His realisation was clear—Kenth had bound to the DNA of that primate he had helped heal, seventeen millennia back.
And he had kissed that man’s very distant long-lost descendant.
Thembeka’s thin and dormant strand of alien DNA had somehow become activated...perhaps at their first touch?
...And she had indeed read his mind.
“Thembeka, come back!” he called.
But all he could hear was the gathering sound of police sirens.
9
2015
Lagos, Nigeria
On the table was a scale model of a modified geodesic dome, although Tope felt sure that Buckminster Fuller never intended his invention for this purpose. Elizabeth squeezed his hand once. He glanced at her briefly, then focused his mind on what Lekan was saying.
“Titanium lattice shell with carbonised steel geodesics, a non-rigid structure which will snap back after impact. One hundred thousand small cameras all around which will give spectators true 3D, not that crap you see in the multiplexes. I plan to project the conflict into stadia worldwide.”
Lekan Deniran wasn’t a tall man, but he was charismatic and energetic. His eyes burned with that fever that afflict
s avaricious men everywhere. He talked with a pace that accelerated when he got to the financial reward. Dark, wiry, relentless. Dressed simple in jeans and a t-shirt because, it was rumoured, he saw Donald Trump dressed like this once in Time magazine.
“Tell me about the kinematics of this thing,” said Tope. “I don’t want any bystanders getting hurt. What amount of force will this structure resist?”
“Fifty thousand pounds was the limit of testing,” said Lekan.
“Is that a lot?” asked Elizabeth.
“Your high performing boxer can punch about twelve hundred pounds,” said Lekan.
“Black-Power is an Ubermensch, not a sportsman,” said Tope.
“Do you think he can punch with more force than that?” asked Lekan.
“I don’t know.”
“Can you?”
“I don’t know. I don’t use force in that way. I don’t punch with muscular strength,” said Tope.
“Explain,” said Elizabeth, ever the journalist.
“My powers are mental. I levitate, and that becomes flight. I lift objects. I detect thoughts. I have a limited force field around my body. When I punch what I do is push with my mind. The mass of the object should not matter, but because I see with my eyes the difference between a pebble and a boulder the effort I apply is different. I should be able to punch a hole in the moon theoretically, but my brain tells me it’s impossible, so I can’t.”
“Can you beat him?” asked Lekan, handing drinks to them.
Tope didn’t answer, a brief flash of red desert sand, snow, and a twinge in his malformed arm distracted him.
Lekan shrugged. “It doesn’t matter. We’ll all be rich at the end of it. We stand to make a gazillion bucks domestic alone.”
“How will you get him to agree to the bout?” asked Elizabeth.
Lekan hesitated. “I’m still trying to contact his people.”
“Does he have people?” she asked.
“I don’t know, but if he does, I’ll find them.” He emptied his glass and poured another. “I’m flying to South Africa tomorrow. I’ll find him.”
“How did you get him to the desert?” asked Elizabeth.
“I sued for peace,” said Tope. “I offered a truce. I tried to appeal to his rationality by showing the futility of our enmity.”
“So how did it turn to a battle?” asked Elizabeth.
“The man has no rationality.”
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