Nigerians in Space
Page 30
“No!” Bello said. “Leave her be!”
“You impudent little weasel! How dare you question me! I’ve had enough of you. Go on, then, take him too.”
One of the guards stepped forward and seized Melissa’s elbow in a painful grip, forcing her towards the door. She looked over her shoulder and Bello was being cornered, too, and he was speaking quickly, thrusting the dolls in their faces, imploring the guards to end the reign of darkness by seizing this sacred moment for the bright future of their children and their country.
Transplant
Present day
South Africa
Dayo’s lamp demonstration did not make the international press, but the neighborhood of Observatory appeared in the headlines, for it was the last place that fashion sensation Melle had been seen in South Africa. A photographer leaked that Melle had stormed off the set at a beachside photoshoot in Cape Town, and a taxi driver admitted that he had given her a lift to Obz. A policeman had then confused her with Dayo’s lamp demonstration, drawing upon several unreliable drunken witnesses, and the popular theory was that Melle had channeled the light of the moon by stripping off her clothes, blinding the neighborhood in her radiance. Dayo didn’t mind that the article hadn’t mentioned him—his lamps weren’t ready and he’d narrowly avoided a burn-out as it was. There would be plenty of time to make another demonstration.
He had since kept vigil at his father’s bedside and would walk the wide, sanitized corridors of the hospital while waiting for an improvement in his condition. The Groote Schuur building was a white leviathan of concrete and glass that dominated the upper half of Observatory, with Devil’s Peak being washed by the clouds above it.
Thursday Malaysius seemed less afraid of the cops, and had offered to help watch over Wale so Dayo could get some rest. Sometimes he’d arrive with his girl Seneca, but he usually came alone, asking innumerable questions of the doctors and nurses about the intravenous needles and titration techniques, looking for new ways to keep his abalone healthy. His abalone had its own street name now—Obz—and was setting a new standard for flavor and quality. Dayo appreciated the help and Thursday promised to fetch him if anything happened.
Once, after Thursday had replaced him at the bedside, Dayo had wandered down an old wing of the hospital and found the tiny Heart Transplant Museum. The attendant had been so starved for visitors that she’d waived the entrance fee and showed Dayo a video about Dr. Christiaan Barnard, the first doctor in the world to conduct a successful heart transplant. Barnard had experimented on forty-nine dogs before moving on to people. The first human donor had been hit by a car a few blocks from Dayo’s house, and Barnard had transplanted her heart into a burly man, where it had thumped for two weeks before the man’s body ultimately rejected the tissue and he died. The dashing Barnard had immediately gone on to tour the world, missing his patient’s funeral, and Groote Schuur hospital began swapping dozens of hearts a year to people of all creeds and classes. Like Melle, Dr. Barnard had once been on the cover of every magazine.
Dayo wouldn’t have cared about any of this before his father’s attack, but now he visited the museum everyday with one of his lamps. The museum had meticulously recreated the original operating theatre with wax mannequins, rosy-cheeked nurses and doctors in their scrubs. There had once been a stench of formaline and ether, of the medicines that anaesthetists in those days had administered equally to children and elephants, but now there was only a damp mildewy smell.
Dayo liked to sit in the operating theatre in the dark. If there was a blackout, he’d walk right in; if the power was on, he’d switch off the light. He still needed to design a proper mounting piece for the lamp, so he’d begun working with cuttings from his father’s bamboo patch, trying out different configurations in the theatre. He’d illuminate the lamp and watch the shadows breathe life into the wax nurses, almost hearing the squeeze of the metal clamps on the arteries and tissues of the patient. It was possible to imagine Dr. Barnard moving confidently about the theatre in his stoical manner, uttering a stern word of reproach to his orderlies as he guided the heart into place.
Sometimes he’d watch the wax figure of Dr. Barnard, who was conducting his fifty-year-old procedure in perpetuity, and wonder what he would transplant for his father, if he could. A feeling? A dream? Just like Barnard’s patient, something might be swapped but there was always the danger of rejection, that the old life would turn against its new blood.
Wale had confessed to Dayo during one of his drunken rants that all he had ever wanted to do was to go into space, which had embarrassed and frightened Dayo at the time. Maybe that was the dream his father needed again. A dissident who had escaped house arrest in Nigeria was now claiming on television that he could prove that officials at the highest levels of government had perpetrated shocking human rights abuses in the name of counterterrorism. He was calling for nothing less than to mark a new era of transparency with the launch of the country’s first home-grown rocket, one that could take a manned mission to the moon and plunge a Nigerian flag into the dusty regolith.
Dr. Barnard would continue operating on his patient forever, but Dayo knew that his own visits to the museum wouldn’t last. His father was too strong-willed to allow it. One day he would hear shouting in the corridor. He would turn to see the tufts of Wale’s hair in the lamplight as he hobbled towards him. And then he would tell his father that it’s happening. You can go there now. You can go up.
Notes on the Story
The bulk of this novel was written while I was living in South Africa. As such, there are certain assumptions about a reader’s knowledge of South African and Nigerian culture. Rather than use footnotes, which change the nature of the format, I decided to add this section to make it easier to understand the story.
South Africa contains a variety of ethnic groups and the constitution endorses eleven official languages. The Coloured community that lives around Cape Town, on the Western Coast of South Africa, is descended from a mix of Malaysian slaves, indigenous groups such as the Khoi Khoi, Khoi San, and Xhosa, and Europeans. They speak a rich dialect of Afrikaans—a language which is itself comprised of eighty percent Dutch and twenty percent indigenous and other languages. Today most youth also speak English, mixing the two languages in clever ways as the conversation demands. Apartheid, the national legislated program of minority white domination, officially began in 1948 and ended in 1994 with the election of the African National Congress. The anti-apartheid struggle included surrounding—or ‘frontline’—nations and involved everything from peaceful protest, to economic boycotts, to violent sabotage. The suburb of Observatory may be found in Cape Town.
Nigeria is situated in the bend of West Africa. The country has over two hundred and fifty ethnic groups and many distinct languages. The main character of this book is from the Yoruba tribe, which is primarily situated in the Lagos region, but historically extended deep into the country and thrived across colonial boundaries into French-speaking Benin. The Yoruba religion contains many gods and spirits, but some Yoruba people are also Christian or Muslim. The variety of proverbs in this novel are generally Yoruba with certain proverbs borrowed from other ethnic groups. Nigeria was once a British colony like South Africa. The majority of the population speaks English or pidgin, a fiery hodge-podge of indigenous languages and English. Part of this story is set between 1992 and 1993, when Nigeria experimented with democracy after decades of military rule. The country experienced a democratic election in 1998 and held its third election in 2011. At the time of this writing, ninety-eight percent of Nigeria’s economy is fueled by exports of high-quality crude oil.
The last manned trip to the moon was the American National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Apollo 17 mission in 1975. Nigeria launched its first satellite, NigeriaSat-1, in 2003. A seventeen-year-old girl from Ebonyi state participated in Nigeria’s first parabolic weightlessness flight in 2006 in a jetplane. She was called an astronaut.
The phrase “Bitte
r and black, halfway down, in the darkness” comes from Virginia Woolf in her stunningly beautiful 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. I had written a chapter around this passage, but it got cut because it wasn’t any good. But the line lives on.
This is a work of fiction. It reflects reality inasmuch as it has to. Everything else is made up.
Acknowledgments
This text previously appeared in part in: World Literature Today (2009); Crime Beat South Africa (2011); Molossus (2009, 2012)
The book was created with the help of many skillful and talented people. Andre Wiesner was the original editor of the text, and gave a random bunch of scribbles some shape and direction.
I would also like to thank my literary agent Gary Heidt at Signature Literary.
Thank you to Mike Nicol, who inspired the noir elements of the book, and Marla Johnson, who has believed in me from the beginning. Malcom Cumming provided his insights into South African modeling and his short story “The Destination” prompted me to visit the Royal Observatory in Cape Town, without which the plot would have made no sense whatsoever.
Thank you as well to the following experts: Prosecutor P.J. Snijman, Abagold, University of Cape Town Law Clinic, and the Hermanus Library.
Nigerian proverbs were derived in part from Oyekan Owomoyela, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, The Good Person(website); Isaac O. Delano, Yoruba Proverbs—Their Meaning and Usage (Oxford University Press, 1966); Gerd de Ley,African Proverbs, (Hippocrene, 1999). General Yoruba lore came from: Allen Wardwell, ed. Yoruba: Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought (Center for African Art, 1989); Robert Farris Thompson, Black Gods and Kings (University of California, 1971) …and growing up part Yoruba.
Information about lunar rocks and the sample collection taken from: Grant Heiken, David Vaniman, and Bevan M. French, Lunar Sourcebook: a user’s guide to the moon (Cambridge University Press, 1991). For the myths and legends of Harran, I relied upon Tamara M. Green, The City of the Moon God: Religious Traditions of Harran (E.J. Brill, 1992).
Thank you to my friends and family for your enduring support and love.
About Deji Olukotun
DEJI BRYCE OLUKOTUN graduated from the MA in Creative Writing at the University of Cape Town, and also holds degrees from Yale College and Stanford Law School. He became the inaugural Ford Foundation Freedom to Write Fellow at PEN American Center, a human rights organization that promotes literature and defends free expression. His work has been published in Guernica, Joyland, Words Without Borders, World Literature Today, Molossus, The London Magazine, Men’s Health, Litnet, and international law journals. A passionate soccer fan, he grew up in Hopewell, New Jersey.