by Dilman Dila
When the technological revolution started, he had imagined that telephones would become smaller than a thumb. Instead, they ballooned into this twenty-one inch gadget, which also had the functions of the TVs, radios and computers of his childhood. The government issued them for free. He punched a single button, and the screen flashed to life. He pressed another button, which autodialed the emergency number. Rather than the instant connection the old telephone systems were capable of, he would have to wait for two minutes to contact the police.
“Hang up,” a woman said, in an accent that stirred memories the Emperor had stifled. For a second he thought he was hallucinating, but he could feel her behind him. He could hear her breathing. He turned around. The sight of her nearly knocked him off his feet. She had shaved off all her hair, and had smeared soot on her body to hide the color of her skin, but her blue eyes and the shape of her nose betrayed her. A mzungu. He did not know that they still existed.
“Please. I don’t want to kill you.”
He pressed a button, ending the call before a connection could be made.
She had been hiding behind a shelf. He was glad he had not looked there for she might have shot him. She had a flash gun, the kind the abasura used. Strips of bark cloth covered her breasts and loins. Her body was full of wounds and scars. Her presence confirmed that the slave camps still existed. How had she escaped?
She looked young, maybe twenty. Her hands shivered as though from malaria. Her eyes were red, frightened. Tears had made tracks on the soot on her face. Her mouth, a small red thing beneath her long nose, reminded him of what they used to say about white women, that they slept with any man who showed interest. If he asked her, would she accept, even though he had not shaved in four years? His beard grew thick, making him look older than forty. He feared it took away his handsomeness. Long ago, a friend had told him that Wazungu girls preferred smoother chins, which is why their men shaved every day. He wished he had never kept a beard. She reminded him of what was wrong with his marriage. His wife, like every woman he knew, had embraced the Emperor’s propaganda that sex for pleasure was not African, that it was the rotten culture of white people, and that it had led to the once incurable disaster, AIDS.
“The key,” she said in Kiswahili.
She cannot be real, he thought. He closed his eyes, but when he opened them, she still stood in front of him, her palm thrust out, demanding the key to his ornithopter.
He removed a thin blue pipe from a bunch that hung on a chain around his neck, and gave it to her. He was surprised at how stable his fingers where, for inside he was trembling, his heart beating in chaos, his mind swirling in panic. She snatched the key and sped to the door. He gasped at the wounds on her back, the raw gashes oozing blood, a gift from the whips of the abasura.
Before she could reach the door, a wail of sirens exploded.
“Shit,” she said in English.
Kopet followed her gaze out of the window and saw four abasura racing towards the workshop. Sirens flashed on their helmets. Their ornithopters looked like flying unicycles, the wheel and a small engine between their thighs, and three feet long wings attached to their backs. The mzungu could not make a run for it. The abasura had their telephotos on the building. They would recognize her, even from three miles away, and kill her.
“Shit, shit, shit,” she said.
He saw the blood slipping down her legs. Before he could give it another thought, he ran to the green shelf and gave it a big shove. It moved easily, revealing a trap door on the floor. He pulled the door open. A rope ladder dropped into a dark hole.
“Get in,” he whispered in English, a language he had not spoken in twenty years.
Muttering a million thanks, she vanished into the hole. He pushed the shelf back in place. Quickly, trembling, panicking, he snatched the electric broom and swept away the last bits of glass and the drops of blood.
If the abasura found her, they would shoot him dead. But again, if they found the things he hid in that hole, they would shoot him dead. He had made the hole fifteen years ago, when the Emperor ordered the abasura to conduct a house-to-house search for items that he said promoted and glorified white people. Books, music, CDs, DVDs, paintings, clothes, anything. Kopet loved his novels - Stephen King, Margaret Atwood, Stieg Larsson; he loved the music of Snow Patrol, J-Lo, Janet Jackson, Damien Rice. He stuffed them all into the hole. The books were still okay. He read them often, but the electronics no longer worked. He could not listen to Missy Elliot or Queen Latifah, not even to Bob Marley’s Redemption Song or Tracy Chapman’s Talkin’ Bout a Revolution. The Emperor claimed such musicians promoted African inferiority because they used white musical instruments and the white language.
The first policeman walked in as the broom wiped off the last drops of blood. Kopet switched off the mop and turned to the soldier.
“I didn’t hear you, afande,” he said, pointing at the broom. “This thing is so noisy.”
The other three soldiers stayed at the door, holding their guns ready.
“We are looking for an escaped slave,” the first one said.
“What?” Kopet said. “You mean those white cockroaches are still on our land? NO! I’ll squash it under my feet when I see it! Believe me, afande, I’ll call you to pick up the corpse!”
They ignored him. They searched his workshop with heat sensors. Kopet held his breath, certain they would detect her, but they did not point their gadgets toward the floor. They did not suspect that he had a secret hole. They pointed them at the ceiling, which was hollow enough to hide a person. He worried about the blood that she must have left behind the shelf where she had hidden, but they did not bother with a visual search of that space. They trusted their heat sensors to detect a person hiding behind the thin plywood. They opened the big boxes with padded surfaces that could mask body heat, and went into the two rooms in the back, but on finding nothing they were satisfied that the fugitive was not in there. Until the broken window caught their attention.
“A bird crashed in yesterday evening,” Kopet explained. “I’ll fix it today.”
They lost interest in the window.
“She is a dangerous woman,” the afande who did all the talking said. “She killed one of us and took his gun. When you see her, don’t fight. Call us.”
They then searched outside the workshop. Kopet feared that they would find the blood trail her wounds must have left, but they found nothing. She had not bled outside. His fears grew as he realized she might suffocate if they stayed too long. She was twelve feet underground in a hole he had built to hide books, not people.
After searching for thirty minutes, they went away. Kopet waited another ten minutes before he let her out. She sucked in air like someone who had been under water for too long.
“Thank you,” she said in a subdued whisper.
He nodded. She peered out of the window, searching, but there was no sign of the abasura. She started for the door.
“Stay in,” he said. “They are still in the neighborhood. You better wait a few hours.” They could not still be in the neighborhood, for there were only two buildings in a radius of five miles, his and the fish factory. He wanted her to stay with him. “You’ll be safe in there,” he added, pointing toward the back rooms.
“Thank you,” she said again. Her lips trembled, as though she wanted to say more, but no words came out.
He led her to the bathroom to clean the soot off her body. After she had washed, he made her lie face down on a bed of papyrus and he smeared herbal medicine on her wounds. It immediately stopped the bleeding. She was red with sunburn. He applied the lotion all over her body, feeling her warmth and the softness of her skin. It had been five years since he last touched a woman. Five years since he last shuddered inside a woman. Desire rushed through his blood, flooding his loins with heat. The temptation nearly overwhelmed him.
He ran out of excuses to touch her. Every inch of her skin was covered in ointment. He sat down on a chair beside the bed
. He watched her pretty face, her large eyes.
“Why do you help me?” she said.
Before he could reply, a flapping of wings erupted outside. She stiffened.
“My wife,” he said. “She has brought me breakfast. Stay quiet.”
He went into the workshop, locking the door behind him. He picked a vase and pretended to wipe dust off it. He knew what she would be wearing even before he saw her - a bra made out of calabashes, a green skirt made out of papyrus fibre, colorful beads on her waist and on her neck, bangles on her arms and ankles. Her hair was braided and bedecked with bright green beads. She had painted her forehead red, to mark her as a married woman, a symbol borrowed from Hindi cultures. She carried the food in a basket, which she put on a table near the door.
“My husband,” she said, going down to her knees. “Here is your breakfast.”
He did not give her the usual bright smile.
Over the years, his dislike for her had congealed into hatred. They were teenagers when they fell in love. Her name was Akello. He called her Kay. They planned to get married before they turned twenty, but he could not imagine starting a family in the shanty tents of the refugee camp, where they had lived all their lives. They could not go home. It was in ashes after thirty years of war. They wanted to migrate to Europe, or America, or to Australia, somewhere far from the misery, somewhere safe and full of happiness. As luck would have it, out of tens of thousands of applicants, they were chosen to start a new life in Sweden. Their future was set.
But one day, a month before they were to board the plane, they heard a name in the radio, in a strange broadcast from the heart of the chaos their homeland had become. Someone called himself the Emperor. He claimed that, in the space of one month, he had vanquished all the warlords and hundreds of different armed groups. He declared peace and urged all refugees to return home. No one had heard of him before. Nobody believed him. But rumor that he used very powerful juju began to spread. They said his soldiers could fly, that they did not use guns but gadgets that looked like bananas and flashed like a torch. A single flash could kill scores of people. Nobody believed these rumors until scores of winged men flew over the camp in broad daylight.
Magic or not, Kopet and Akello believed their eyes. They dropped the plan to migrate to Sweden and ran hand in hand back to the homeland they had been forced to leave as infants. They found the land magically transformed into a paradise. Its city had buildings that were taller than mountains, five thousand foot high skyscrapers that were built in less than a month. Everybody owned a well furnished three bedroom home. Everybody had a flying machine. Everything was free. They only had to work for food.
How the Emperor had come upon this fantastical technology became a source of great speculation. Most Africans simply put it down to magic, to knowledge from the ancestors. They said that their gods had finally woken up to fight against foreign gods. The Emperor acknowledged these superstitions. He said the gift came through an old man, who never went to school but who was blessed with the ability to design flying machines, modify DNA, blend minerals and chemicals to create new kinds of materials, all to benefit mankind without hurting the environment as the white people had done.
The rich countries in Europe and America did not believe in this superstitious explanation. They believed the Emperor had a secret, and they wanted to know it. They enticed him with money. They sent their smoothest seducers to woo him in feats of diplomacy. They performed every trick in the book, but the Emperor replied with hostility. He hated white people. He blamed them for the misery in Africa, the poverty, the sickness, the famines, the endless wars. He was not willing to share his secret with them. At that time, Kopet and Akello, like every African who had lived a wretched life and now looked forward to a future in paradise, cheered their new leader.
The rich nations then resorted to force. Under the leadership of the USA, the superpowers, China, the European Union, Britain and Russia, joined forces against the Emperor. The CIA claimed he was an agent of a species from outer space, and a threat to human existence. They had to get rid of him. They sent drones to assassinate him, but the aircrafts vanished mysteriously. They sent thousands of troops with hi-tech fighting gear to the East African coast. They aimed nuclear weapons at the Emperor’s territory. “Tell us the secret,” they said, “or we smoke you up.”
Everyone thought the Emperor would be wiped out. Other than the simple flying machines, which looked like primitive toys from a folktale, and the banana-like flash guns, the Emperor seemed not to have anything to defend himself with. But he defeated the invaders within twenty-four hours. He vaporized their fighter planes and sank an entire fleet of the US Navy in a blink. He wiped out New York City to demonstrate that he possessed something more powerful than nuclear weapons. The invaders threw their hands up in surrender. Africa cheered.
Kopet and Akello had their first child as the drums of victory thundered in the city.
The victory enabled the Emperor to expand his reign to all corners of the continent, and to enslave the people in a new doctrine of hate. He ripped apart the colonial borders. Every tribe regained its identity as a nation of its own. He fuelled a deadly campaign. Africa for Africans. Arabs and Asians were expelled. White people were rounded up and thrown into slave camps. Revenge, the Emperor said. Africans involved in inter-racial relationships were shot dead for betraying their race. As the hate campaigns raged, there cropped up a mad attempt to return to the African way of life before the Europeans came, or to what they believed were authentic African cultures and values.
Akello was swallowed up in the euphoria. She rejected everything non-African. Kopet could no longer recognize the girl he fell in love with, the chubby teenager with four dimples and large eyes that shone like two brilliant moons. She was lost. In her place was this automaton manufactured in a factory of mass hysteria, this strange woman who reduced herself from a lover to a slave.
“Do you remember my name?” he asked her that morning.
She was still on her knees. She looked at him without comprehending his question. He sat on a reed chair, glaring at her, hoping she could see the hatred shinning in his eyes.
“Please, my husband,” she said. “Eat your food.”
She smiled, showing him perfectly white teeth. She removed the cover from the basket. She had brought him katogo, a mixture of boiled bananas and goat offal, in a clay bowl that he had designed. It could preserve the temperature of food or water for many hours. Beside it was a calabash of milk. He would have preferred tea, the herb of his youth, but that was banned for being non-African. He returned his glare to her.
“You used to call me Mike,” he said. “I used to call you Kay.”
An angry light flared in her eyes. Over the years, her eyes had acquired a red tint, a result of cooking with firewood. The genetically modified mwiko tree provided an inexhaustible source of fuel, but Kopet never saw the need to use it. Solar stoves did the work more efficiently. His wife, however, preferred open fires in her kitchen. He once asked her why she does not live in a grass hut in the bushes, but he got a tongue lash for being un-African.
“My husband,” she said. “How can you think about those colonial names? Does this mean your mind is still enslaved? Should I ask the teacher to visit us this evening?”
He chuckled as if his statement was a joke, but he trembled in sudden fear and he was certain she could see the panic on his face. When he returned home in the evening, he would surely find an old man who would yap into his face all night about why they had to abandon foreign names. Maybe he would end up in jail with hard labor for a couple of days.
“Please leave,” he said. “Go back home. I want to eat alone.”
The food would have tasted better with a fork, but that too was banned. He had to use his fingers. He touched the food. It scalded his skin.
“But my husband, you know I have to wash your hands after every meal.”
“Are you my wife or not?”
“I’m you
r wife.”
“Then you must do as I command.”
He saw her hesitation, saw her battling with the indoctrination, which said she should obey her husband, but also said a true African man is not supposed to wash his own hands after a meal. His wife must do that for him.
“You cannot give me that command,” she said. “I have to wash your hands after the meal. That is our culture. If I don’t, then our ancestors-”
“GO!” he yelled. “Move your ugly ass! Disappear! Go!”
“What have I done to make you angry?”
“GO!”
When she still did not move, he grabbed her by the hair and dragged her out. She squealed in pain. He shoved her out of the door. She fell onto the dirt, bruised her palms and elbow. She looked at him in confusion. Hurt. He ignored her and walked back to the table.
He was about to carry the food to the back room when her shadow fell over the basket. She had returned to the doorway. She did not walk in.
“You hate me,” she said.
He recognized the note in her voice. He had heard it only once before, the day her mother died. He sat down, his back to her, though he very much wanted to look at her face, where he suspected tears were flowing. He felt her eyes burning into his flesh, making him angrier and more nervous.
He forced himself to concentrate on the food. With trembling fingers, he picked a tiny bit of banana and licked it away. He took a tiny sip of the milk. He wanted her to think he was going to eat it. He was hungry, but he planned to give the food to the fugitive, she needed it more. Akello stood at the doorway for nearly ten minutes before he heard her walking away. Only then did he look up. Through the window he saw her bruka leap into the air. He waited until she had vanished before taking the food to the fugitive.