“Go!”
“Yes, sir.” With a mock salute Bank spun and left. He had not made eye-contact once during the conversation. The boy was in love with his computer.
“And call your mother to say you’re not coming back tonight. I do not want her wrath.”
They had excellent seats in a bar that projected out on to the lagoon. The floor-to-ceiling windows showed the water glittering with the reflection of the city lights. Elizabeth wore a sleeveless jumper and khakis. He appreciated the tautness of her muscles and the smoothness of her skin.
She drank a gin and tonic; he drank mineral water with a twist.
“No alcohol?” she asked.
“It’s a school night,” he said. “Mind if I ask you a question?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’m not going to be so uncouth as to ask your age, but you were a reporter back in the seventies. You must be pushing sixty, but you look about thirty. What is your voodoo and how can I get some of it?”
She laughed like a girl. “Fiendish exercise, a personal dietician, workaholism and a very expensive team of plastic surgeons.”
“Expensive, then.”
“I forgot to add two ex-husbands.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Don’t be. One was a cheat and the other was gay.”
“I’d have thought they’d have been more discreet.”
“There’s no such thing, Tope. If it’s in the airwaves, if it’s digitised, if it’s been typed, I can get to it. There are no secrets from me.”
“Except in people’s heads.”
“Except in people’s heads,” she said. “But you can access that data.”
“Sometimes.”
“Have you read my mind?”
“No.”
“Read it now.”
Tope got an image of a parrot with an enormous human penis growing on its back. “Oh, you are so juvenile,” he said.
She laughed. “I had to see if you were for real.”
“You couldn’t imagine pretty flowers and chocolate?”
“Boring.”
“I suppose.”
“Tope, why did you do the interview?” she asked, serious.
“For the money. You came to me, remember?”
2013
Edo City
Tope was drinking at the beer parlour with Bank, who was just old enough for liquor, and a few men whose names he could not remember. They argued about the Olympics and Usain Bolt’s merits when compared with Carl Lewis.
This townie girl came up, followed by a cloud of catcalls and whistles. She wore shorts and was burdened under a backpack, but there was steel in her eyes. On closer look she wasn’t a girl, but her beauty was uncontested.
“Which one of you is Tope Adedoyin?”
“I’m Tope,” said Bank.
“No, I’m Tope,” said a man drunk from oguro.
A few others identified themselves as Tope and the woman sucked her teeth and turned away, generating a roar of laughter. Tope got up and went after her.
“Miss? Miss, don’t mind them. I’m the one you’re after. Can I help you?”
She stopped, stared him down, and squinted. “Do you remember me?”
“No, sorry,” Tope said, dragging the syllables out in his uncertainty.
“Kokoro.”
“Ahh, from...you used to do those reports on Black-Power.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“Why are you here?”
“I want to do a biopic on the Pan-African. It’ll be-”
“Fuck off.” Tope turned away and went back to his drink.
2015
Lagos, Nigeria
“You are so stubborn! I’ve never seen a person so unwilling to be handed buckets of cash,” said Elizabeth.
“I didn’t need any money,” said Tope. “I only decided to do it so that Bank and a few of the other kids from the settlement can go to university.”
“How is it that the government hasn’t bulldozed that settlement to the ground anyway?”
“They’ve tried. Strange maladies come upon the men who carry out the orders. Sooner or later, squatters’ rights will kick in. Some of this money is going to a good lawyer too.”
“What happened to all the money you stole when you were the Pan-African?”
“I didn’t actually steal a lot of money.”
1975
South Africa
When the dust settled in the vault, Tope inclined his head and the men loped inside to fill their bags.
“Ignore the Rands and concentrate on the gold,” said Tope. “Be quick. We should be out of here within ten minutes.”
The bank officials and security guards seemed oddly calm, and he would have suspected that they had set off an alarm, except, he scanned their thoughts and no such thing had been done. There were no approaching police.
Tope was confused and tired. He had been fighting alongside Cubans and Chinese specialists against the South African Defence Force over Angola. He had spent the last year observing the Angolan independence from the Portuguese. When the whole quagmire descended into civil war it was impossible to decide what side to fight on. MPLA, FNLA, UNITA, what the fuck? Jonas Savimbi was a canny operator, taking support from Communist China and the United States as it suited him.
In the middle of all of this there were starving, diseased, and displaced, women and children. Tope had decided to help them, but he would need money, hence the excursion south to a Cape Town bank.
He heard gunfire and shattering glass.
He left the vault, went into the main banking hall and saw Alamu on the floor, skull caved in and trailing a long smear of blood that led to broken glass doors. His assault rifle was still in his hands, twisted in on itself like a strip of barbed wire.
“What’s happening?” said Paulo.
“Your job is to load the gold,” said Tope. “I’ll deal with this.”
Outside on the street the van they had planned for the getaway was flattened, like a car in a junk yard compactor. There was a man standing on it. He wore a mask and black cape and a skin-tight body suit. And he was familiar.
“If you surrender now, you won’t taste the might of Black-Power!” said the man.
It was all Tope could do not to laugh. “Brother, is that you?”
The masked man approached and recognised Tope. “What the hell is wrong with your hair?” he said.
“It’s called an Afro. You know, like the Jackson Five.”
“It looks ridiculous.” He looked beyond Tope and saw the rest of the men. “Are you robbing this bank?”
“Brother, will you not greet me with a kiss? I haven’t seen you in-”
“You were supposed to stay up north.”
“I know. Things happened. I have been travelling around the world. I have much to tell you.”
“You can tell me from jail. There can be only one penalty for breaking the law.”
Black-Power stamped his foot and the shock wave cracked the floor and disabled the robbers, except Tope.
“Brother, there is no need for violence. This money is going to feed women and children in Angola.”
Black-Power’s eyes crackled with energy and dark intent. Tope scarcely recognised him. He was heart-broken that his brother would even contemplate aggression.
“You’ve been with the humans too long,” said Tope. He levitated, flew out and up, away from Cape Town.
2015
Lagos, Nigeria
The waiter refilled his glass.
“When they reported it I was some kind of super-criminal coward. The men felt left behind, so perhaps there was some truth to it, but there were tears in my eyes,” said Tope.
“Because you were brothers,” said Elizabeth.
“Yes.” He paused. “He looked so ridiculous in that fucking cape.”
“It was kind of stupid, wasn’t it?”
They both burst into laughter, loud brays of it which startled the other patr
ons and drew frowns from the genteel waiters.
“So what did you do?”
“Do? You know what I did. I made a costume of my own and fought back.”
6
2015
South Africa
Black-Power wrapped his cape around him, feeling all the more fearsome for it.
The two men facing him didn’t take their cues, one clicking the safety off his pistol, the other steadying his automatic rifle.
He waved Thembeka behind him, so that she was completely hidden behind his massive bulk.
“Please let me through,” he asked politely.
“Or what?” laughed the man with the loaded pistol.
Black-Power hit them both with the same punch, a left hook Joe Frazier had once taught him, drilling both men into the wall with sickening thuds.
With a further flamboyant flourish, he kicked the barricaded door, bursting it into flying shrapnel shards of wood.
People turned and gawped at them from inside the large hangar. Most were busy carrying loads of chemicals between vats; several men swung automatic rifles towards them.
Six men, to be precise, thought Black-Power dryly, before exploding into action.
He took all six men out of action in less than thirty seconds.
The seventeen others dropped what they were doing and cowered against the far wall.
Too easy, he thought, I need a real test... I need the Pan-African.
Lost in thought, Black-Power failed to notice a large man enter the room through a door opposite them, a Rocket Propelled Grenade launcher locked and loaded on his left shoulder, which he swung around, but it was too late.
The man fell and curled over, dead. The RPG launcher bounced once on the floor, but did not explode.
Slowly, Black-Power turned to the woman standing next to him, who was lowering a pistol she had picked up earlier.
“I find the heart an easier target than the head,” said Thembeka.
Black-Power felt his own heart lurch a little, his head no longer lost in a forthcoming duel with the Pan-African.
Or, indeed, quite so full of that smooth, beautiful interviewer he’d recognised, Elizabeth Kokoro.
“Let’s call the drugs and toxicology units in,” Thembeka said.
Black-Power felt his rage grow, as he wondered along shelves bubbling with fluids fuelled by caskets of rat poison, methamphetamine, and boxes of anti-retroviral medication.
The Pan-African was wrong. He has—and could still—help this world to be a better place.
Like he had; back in ’76.
1976
He had not predicted the death of Hector Pieterson. Indeed, June 16th had come as a huge shock to him. His contacts had warned of growing discontentment from many, but his contacts were mature men, out of touch with the youngsters of the day and the real levels of rage.
Furious youngsters these were, who did not want to learn the language of the oppressor, Afrikaans.
On that day, their youthful protests had turned into smoke, teargas, bullets, and blood.
Black-Power stood sombrely on a field nearby, watching, as a white unit of the South African Defence Force gathered with a fleet of military vehicles. They had been called in to support the police, who were running, shooting, and sjambokking youngsters, further away, just outside Phefeni Junior Secondary School in Soweto, their actions misted by teargas and smoke from many fires.
The screams of the schoolchildren had already curdled his blood enough. It took all of his immense will to stop himself launching into the police to halt the mayhem.
A brigadier was briefing his troops.
This, he could stop.
With a few giant strides he was almost amongst them.
Rifles clattered, raised.
The brigadier, moustached and with thick sideburns, turned to him with a pallid face, “You will not stop us, Black-Power.”
Black-Power spat on the ground in front of him. “You will not do any more. The police have done more than enough.”
The brigadier gave a thin smile and waved to the ranks, which parted.
A man stepped through, close to seven foot of rippling muscle and sinew, his bare chest like a pinkish barrel above his camouflaged trousers and brown leather boots. Tattooed in black on his chest were the words: ‘Super-Boer’.
He was blond and bland, a giant of a man who would have made Hitler proud.
The brigadier snickered: “We have bred our own superhero, Weapon Z, with the right balance of steroids and other hormones. Super-Boer can lift a car, you know.”
“Oh,” said Black-Power. “Well, I’m impressed.”
He hit the blond giant then, a right jab into the midriff.
The man’s breath escaped in a long whooosshhh of pain and he slowly crumpled in on himself, as his breath almost deserted his body.
Black-Power knew he would not get up.
“This stops now,” he said.
The brigadier stepped back as rifles were levelled at Black-Power behind him.
Black-Power flicked his cape in readiness.
Smoke and fading screams drifted across them. Black-Power felt his eyes sting, but kept his gaze steady, his body poised to fight.
The brigadier coughed into a handkerchief, “Okay, okay, you win. We will call off this particular operation, but...”
Black-Power waited tensely for the condition.
“...You will consider a sum to keep yourself in check.”
“You will pay me not to act?”
“Sekerlik,” assured the man, swallowing.
Black-Power hesitated. Perhaps now was the time to sweep aside the last bastion of colonialism, allied as it was to a particularly ugly ideological racism.
But that bloodshed would be huge indeed.
He could conceivably do more, quietly, behind the scenes.
“Private untraceable anonymous account,” he said, feeling sick and as if he’d sold his soul to Satan, “...and you close the Weapon Z programme.”
The troops were heading back to their vehicles. The brigadier hesitated, nodded and left.
Black-Power turned to race across the field to help the injured and dying schoolchildren.
He had surely stopped a complete and final bloodbath.
But at what cost?
Tope would never let me hear the end of this, should he know about this deal, he thought, cradling a young girl’s head, feeling for a pulse.
There was none.
He choked in grief and horror.
Her face was twisted in death-pain, bloodied, wet from tear-gas tears; her school uniform torn and smelling of blood and ash.
He cried too.
What will her mamma and tata say and feel? Tope must never find out.
But as for the Soweto uprising, this was only just the beginning...
And so Black-Power became the call, eventually finding a fatal focus in Steve Bantu Biko.
As for me, he thought, as he drifted through the decades back to the present, I remain enduringly alive and increasingly tired of living.
2015
Detective Sipho Cele scrolled through pictures of Elizabeth Kokoro on his phone. He found them interesting, captivating, a distraction from work and his incessant pain.
They’d cleaned out the Super-Tik factory, but four more had spawned subsequently.
The work of a superhero is never done, he thought absently, marvelling at how well Kokoro had aged over the decades.
He was suddenly aware of Thembeka standing behind him. “She’s not bad looking for an old bitch,” she said.
Sipho swivelled and scowled in his chair.
“It’s not what you think,” he said.
She laughed and went back to her desk. “So what am I thinking then, Detective?”
For a moment he toyed with teasing thoughts out of her. He knew Tope as the Pan-African had developed his own talents along those lines, very well indeed.
“Okay,” he said, “I have no idea what you are thinki
ng.”
But to himself, he thought, Brother (with a sudden chill of recognition and fear), are we to be the death of each other?
Thembeka studied Black-Power from across the room, rustling the papers in front of her PC. Deep inside her, she felt the faintest stirrings of an ancient ancestral power—he’s thinking of death, she realised with a sudden and perplexing certainty.
7
2015
Lagos, Nigeria
Tope could not sleep. It wasn’t that he wasn’t tired, and it was not insomnia per se. He was sleepy. Elizabeth Kokoro’s mind was too noisy for him to get any rest.
She lay naked beside him tangled in the sheets, one breast visible like a Renaissance painting, chest rising and falling with predictable regularity. She looked peaceful.
He could not hear her breathing over the hum of the air conditioner. He idly wondered if she was a millionaire. She did not have a room; she had a suite. Maybe the cable company paid or one of the husbands.
Incoherent nonsense leaked out of her in spurts. Fragments from blogs, tweets, status updates, junk mail headings. It was as if her brain was a web browser.
Ben changed status to it’s complicated.
Pictures of my cat.
Ope’s thanksgiving photos!
Anselem liked your post!
Banal, banal, banal! Why was this shit on her mind? She must spend hours surfing the net, looking for news stories.
The lovemaking had been surprising, tender. Given her sharp edges he had expected harshness, vigour, pain even. But no. She liked to be held softly and kissed, although she did not resist Flaubert’s suppleness and corruption.
His phone beeped. It was Bank.
Tope stole a glance at Elizabeth’s nipple.
1975
Tope wandered around the fabric sellers in Idumota, sometimes slipping between adjacent Molue buses. He searched for a suitable length of Ankara cloth.
He needed something durable. Some of the less savoury sellers soaked the fabric in starch so that it seemed stiff. One wash and it would degrade right before your eyes.
When he found what he wanted he haggled and traded insults with the seller. An onlooker unfamiliar with the market would think it was a family squabble, not a transaction. Once they settled on a price, they became best friends and swore eternal fealty for sixteen generations.
AfroSFv2 Page 4
