AfroSFv2

by Ivor W Hartmann

  “Sorry,” he looked down at his dusty boots, feeling a rush of blood to his face and the faster pattering of his heart.

  She smiled then, even if it was gone in a flash.

  “So,” she said, fists now off her hips, hands opened wide, “why have you come to see me then?”

  A full taxi hooted, on its way to nearby Mitchells Plain.

  They stepped quickly off the road, but an older man was hurrying up to them, holding up a shiny object.

  “Eh?” said Black-Power.

  Thembeka burst out laughing.

  It was an old comic book, glinting in a protective plastic cover. An early ‘Black-Power’ comic from ’75 that he recognised, with his first face-off against the Pan-African and an Angolan war back-story, pointing out the evils of the Cubans and the communist takeover by the MPLA.

  “Would you mind signing this for me, Black-Power?” burbled the man, “It’s in near-mint condition.” The man was dressed in orange council overalls, perhaps a foreman in one of their service departments.

  “How much would it be worth then?” Black-Power asked, smiling to himself. He himself had a Chariots of the Gods book, personally signed by von Daniken from that very same year.

  The man shrugged awkwardly and Black-Power could tell by his lined face and greying hair he was probably upwards of fifty years old. But he was wearing a white #RhodesMustDie T-shirt on top of it all.

  He took the offered pen and the opened comic book, braced against its protective backing board that had been part of the sealed package. The pen hovered over the opening splash page with its writing credits. Black-Power looked sharply at the waiting man, who stood, openly holding his breath.

  “So,” said Black-Power, “what do you think of my role in the Struggle?”

  The man looked him in the eyes. “You should be recognised as a Struggle hero, because you challenged the apartheid regime every step of the way. And you only held back from a direct and open confrontation, in order to save many more lives.”

  Black-Power smiled. “So, to whom should I dedicate this?”

  The surf pounded to his left, but they were alone. This stretch of the beach—between Monwabisi and the Strandfontein sewerage outlet—was often deserted, apart from the odd lone fisherman.

  Still, Black-Power had never been a man of many words. He had even forgotten the alien language of his birth, only remembering faint echoes of no longer familiar sounds, loosely linked to vague images and objects; smells that tantalised him, that he could no longer name, a black sky and a red sun.

  “So?” she said expectantly, hands on hips again, “What is happening to me? Why am I gaining these powers?”

  He splayed his hands open to her, with a gesture of helpless ignorance. “My best guess is you may have tracings of an ...er, ancestor of mine’s DNA, perhaps inserted into their genome during a microbial infection, which has become activated in the presence of my own powers.”

  “Oh,” she looked down at the beach sand, kicking with her bare right foot at a brown piece of kelp. The kelp shot out over the furthest breaking wave. She looked up again, “Can you take these powers back?”

  Slowly, he shook his head, aware she could read his mind anyway.

  She turned away and he could tell from the slight shaking of her shoulders, she was crying.

  He went over to her and touched her left shoulder gently. “I feel like such a freak,” her words warbled back to him.

  “Thembeka,” he said, “I’ve always felt a freak.”

  She turned then and gave him a soft smile, “I’m sorry.” Her arms were open, inviting.

  He stepped forwards and embraced her.

  Lovingly.

  “Detective,” she said sharply, “I can feel your...interest...and right now, I don’t share it!”

  He smiled into the nape of her neck. “That’s okay, love,” he said, “I’ve got more than enough interest for the both of us.”

  She kneed him hard...

  ...and her aim was true.

  Slowly, and with much unfamiliar pain, he folded in on himself, until he was curled in a foetal position on the soft sand, clutching his deeply burning—now flaccid—penis and testicles.

  She stood over him, legs astride, and he could feel the heat of her rage. “No means fucking NO. Okay? We’ve had enough of rape, corrective or otherwise, get it?”

  He lifted his head to look up at her.

  Coldness grasped his heart. He could see a distant look in her eyes, as if he no longer existed to her.

  “Sala kahle,” she said. “Goodbye, Detective.”

  She looked up at the sun, as if concentrating and...flew.

  He sat up, but she had gone, the gulls wheeling and screeching in her wake.

  And, with a sudden aching realisation that made the pain in his privates feel trivial, he became aware that she would not come back.

  Gone.

  Like everyone does, eventually.

  Gone.

  Alone again.

  Thembeka had flown off, just like the Pan-Fucking-African.

  He pulled a cellphone out of a small utility clip in his cape. “I’ve got more surprises than you’ll like in this cape that you dared mock, brother!” He barked at the crashing waves.

  Two calls.

  One, to request a transfer to Johannesburg.

  Jozi—where it’s really happening! A real African city, not like this effete Europeanised pretender...

  Two, to Phulani, AKA the Sharp-sharp Fixer.

  “Get me Pan-African,” he said, “Any way you can.”

  Time to end this, brother.

  Finally, once and for all time.

  11

  1978

  Lagos, Nigeria

  Space.

  He was not really here. This was a memory or a dream. Hanging there was a space station, spiky, crystalline almost. The hull was grown by a layer of bacteria genetically modified to produce the bulkhead. It was constantly sheared off and constantly regrown. Inside, there were hundreds of individuals. Tope was once there. Sleeping for millennia, aeons, time immeasurable in Earth terms.

  The memory wavers, then there is a skiff, broken off from the space station, a needle, with dozens on board. A blue planet. Beautiful. Atmospheric. The needle breaches the atmosphere, shatters and the people scatter into different areas of the landmass. Tope and his brother land in what will be known as Africa. They land, steaming and smoking from the heat of re-entry.

  Tope woke up.

  At first he did not know where he was. There were empty Gulder bottles all around him, brown, broken, some half full. His bottom felt cold and at first he felt he had wet himself, but no, it was the cold of concrete.

  He had a headache and the world seemed too bright.

  “Pan-African, stay where you are!”

  A loud voice projected by a megaphone. Stern. Loud. Did it have to be so loud?

  He waved the voice away and tried to open his eyes again. Tope was in the centre of a crater. This was about a foot deep, fifty yards wide. Cracked rocks radiated away from him. The blackened carcass of a twisted bicycle smoked close by.

  What?

  He could not remember the night before. There was spent ordnance all around. He felt his body, nothing damaged. His force field always kicked in when he was unconscious.

  God, he needed a piss.

  He pulled down his Y-fronts and urinated, a long satisfying, steaming stream of yellow. Then he realised he was surrounded by the Nigerian army.

  Ah, hence the debris and shells.

  “Halt!”

  “Please, I beg you, stop shouting,” said Tope. “I have a hangover.”

  A shot rang out and others joined in. Tope’s force field stopped the urine and the reflux caused pain to shoot up his pelvis. The bullets also managed to buffet him about. His head throbbed. Oh, God. Why won’t they leave me alone? What did I ever do to deserve this?

  He flew straight up into the sky. At a hundred feet he pissed over all of them.


  “Golden shower, assholes!” He shook himself off and giggled. Maybe he was still a bit drunk. Fragments of the night before came back.

  From that height he could see the devastation. The crater he woke up in was the tail end of a three-mile serpentine path of destruction which included broken shops, ruptured roads, twisted median strip railings, upturned cars, concertinaed lorries, uprooted street lights (they didn’t work anyway!), snapped palm trees, downed power lines, cracked buildings, shattered glass, and clumps of...smouldering matter that he hoped to God were not the remains of human beings.

  Fuck.

  There were sawhorses and barricades keeping people at bay, and the army was in position with tanks, armoured vehicles, and a mounted multiple rocket launcher.

  They fired up at him. He flew higher, then away. Had he done that? He had seen the Nigerian Army use a scorched earth approach in Obalende during the attempted coup in 1976. Tope could remember flattening the trucks. He got flashes of violence and laughter. Smiling lissom women. Booze. More booze. Music. Orlando Owo and Victor Uwaifo. Trumpets and guitars. Groovy!

  He came down in Oworonsoki, near the Lagos Lagoon. Mostly unpaved streets with pools of relentless mud. Low-income residential area. Barefoot children. He staggered, swayed, and vomited into the stagnant water of the open gutters, disturbing the mosquito larvae as they incubated. A Danfo bus thundered by, spraying him with red mud. He attempted to be angry, but his headache was too severe. He giggled instead.

  It was mid-morning and school children in primary colours stared at him as they went to seek an education. He stumbled along to a street called Kiniun-Ifa, and he heard Akpala music come from a kind of grotto. A hand was painted on the wall to the left of the door. An open eye-ball with crude lines spiking away from it lay on the palm. The fingers were all the same size, including the thumb, and they all pointed upwards.

  Tope went in.

  “Eka’abo,” welcomed an old man. He was seated on the floor on a raffia mat, holding a necklace. He gestured to the mat.

  Tope sat opposite him. He handed Tope a gourd of water, which went down in almost one gulp. A woman came with food, as if they were expecting him. Which, of course they were. The old man was an oracle, one of the real ones. It wasn’t magic; some people were just better plugged into the quantum nature of time. If time was occurring all the time, all moments at once, then travel or prophecy was theoretically possible.

  Tope asked to wash, and they led him to a backyard where a pail of water, plastic bowl, raffia sponge, and local ose okpa soap, waited on a sheet of corrugated tin. He took off his clothes and soaped himself. The water was cold, but he didn’t mind.

  He returned to the first chamber when he was done. He noticed for the first time a shrine off to the left, an earthenware alcove with a lit candle illuminating an information leaflet from W.H.O about small pox immunisation and a statuette of Sopana, the Yoruba god of small pox. With the eradication of small pox from Nigeria this was effectively a dead god.

  The old man said some incantations over his necklace, and then held it between clasped hands.

  “Ifa olokun, a s’oro d’ayo,” the man said. “Blow.”

  Tope blew over his hands, feeling like a magician’s assistant.

  The old man threw the necklace to the mat and peered at it. He shook his head.

  “What?” asked Tope.

  “Iku,” said the old man. “Death.”

  2015

  Lagos, Nigeria

  “Tell me about your childhood,” said Elizabeth.

  “I don’t remember it,” said Tope.

  “Any of it?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Does that seem odd to you?”

  “It does. I don’t think Black-Power remembers either. I wonder if we were just created like this, or grown in a vat somewhere and then activated. Or perhaps we had our memories wiped.”

  “Let me send a car for you.”

  “...”

  “Come on,” said Elizabeth.

  “I’m in the middle of something.”

  “The middle of what?”

  “I’m writing something,” said Tope.

  “What a coincidence. So am I. What are you writing?”

  He was writing a will, but he did not tell her. Instead he closed the chat window, intending to lie to her about a power failure. His phone rang immediately and it was her so he ignored it.

  Tope did not have family among the humans, neither did he have any real money to speak of, but if the bout went ahead he would be rich, or rich and dead. He looked out of his window and saw the settlement. He had virtually built the whole place by hand. A young girl bounced by, revelling in her new pubertal body, a girl Tope had seen squalling and smeared with meconium on the day she was born. Her mother had died, but she had been adopted by the entire settlement. The government had not succeeded in kicking them out and Bank was right. With money they could buy a fucking ministry.

  The bout would happen. Lekan had called and was spreading cash around Jo’burg. “No results yet. These motherfuckers are tight-lipped, but there’s some guy here or around here called Fulani or something. He may know something. I’m meeting with someone who knows his second cousin tomorrow.”

  And so on.

  He seemed to take for granted that Tope would fight.

  February 18, 1979

  Sahara Desert

  “Fight me, you bastard,” said Black-Power.

  He smashed into the Pan-African with his right fist while holding him with the left.

  Grains of sand rose off the desert floor with each hit, but the Pan-African’s force field held fast. He felt no direct pain, but somewhere in his brain he felt weaker.

  “I’m not afraid to die, Dingiswayo,” said the Pan-African. “Are you?”

  Black-Power head-butted him on the nose.

  It got through.

  And hurt.

  12

  2015

  Radium Beer Hall, Johannesburg

  Jozi, Jo’burg, Johannesburg, iGoli, City of Gold...

  Your golden heart is eaten out, surrounded as you are now by huge piles of empty mine debris, smaller splashes of barricaded plushness, and far vaster brooding settlements of cheap brick and shantytown settlements. But, despite the emptying of your beating heart, you continue to burn, to throb...

  Detective Cele, AKA Black-Power was here and at rest, with a pint of the finest Charles Glass has to offer—although Phaswane Mpe had expressed this state of being far more eloquently, when he was alive and welcoming people to the Jo’burg suburb of Hillbrow.

  Cele was slumped in his old favourite beer-hall from the 1930s—although then he had to put up with drinking in a back-door shebeen section, apartheid well on its way, even before the Nats got to power in ’48. He’d even put on his old brown trilby hat from the 50s, sharp end crammed low onto his forehead, dark coat—Wesley Snipes Blade style—draped over his formidable bulk.

  Still, he was indeed at rest, albeit grudgingly nursing his beer, because alcohol—like so many of the viruses and bacteria around him—had limited impact on his physiology. He envied those who lost control of their speech and functions as they drank, gradually slurping their way into oblivion.Like the young white man sitting opposite him, who was seemingly not frightened by his bulk—or his silence.

  The immediate seats around them in the Radium Beerhall were empty, as if people could sense his brooding, fragile peace.

  The detective was trying to work out whether the man—apparently Colin Jordaan—was seeking a payoff of companionship or sex.

  “So they left me,” said Colin, drooping into his emptied beer mug, “and I got no fucking idea why.”

  Perhaps he’s looking for a shrink? The detective, as always, decided to cut to the chase.

  “Man or woman?” he asked.

  “Eh?” the young man lifted his long orange curls out of his mug, “Uhhhh... Joey’s a...dude.”

  Maybe sex then. The detective smiled t
o himself. He’d enjoyed a number of male encounters down the decades, but he had been forced to reign in that side of himself—he had an image to maintain, after all.

  He patted Colin’s hand gently, but the man still winced through his drunken stupour.

  As Black-Power, the detective had been attacked by the gender brigade in the past for not embracing more sexual ambiguity and variety, especially in the light of declared Gender Wars and violence. As always, somehow he found himself on what felt like the wrong side, trying to straddle a fence that was impossible to balance on, despite all of his super-powers.

  But he knew—from long history—that culture was certainly not set in stone.

  Tope’s comments had always hurt, when he challenged his asserted umZulu identity—for Cele sensed the truth in this, although he did not want to face the void of identity as to who he really was, underneath the suit and mask...

  Brother, yes, maybe a long time ago. So long ago he had no recall of any mother or father, he seemed to have been born old and almost eternal.

  The detective had a sudden impulse to whip off his dark overcoat to reveal his Black-Power suit, to don his mask, pick up this young man, and walk past gasping patrons of this restaurant-pub, who would be snapping away at him with cell-cameras.

  A pudgy, dark and greying man, suited in tribal Afro-Amani chic, shoved the drunken youth off his chair.

  The young man could only say “shitttt..,” before falling in a complaining heap on the floor. He had enough control, however, to lever himself up onto a chair at the next table, glowering his discontent.

  He was not noticed, the detective and the Suit crouching over their Castles, mumbling.

  “You’re looking older, Phulani,” observed the detective, with the eye of one who misses little.

  “And you’re fucking not...” scowled the pudgy man, wrinkled and grey, with the air of a man who had seen everything under the sun.

  “So,” said the detective, “what news?”

  “Pan African,” said the old man slowly, “wants one last bout. A final decider. To the death, winner takes all.”

  The detective rocked back on the couch, which creaked its protest at his 200kgs and almost 7 foot of mass. “Really? What’s his conditions?”

  Phulani looked around the Beerhall slowly and then leaned forward. “We’ve got to wait for, wait for it, Lekan Deniran.”