February 18, 1979
Sahara Desert
“This is why you brought me here?” asked Black-Power. “To discuss books and the deranged theories of cocaine-addicted alienists?”
They stood apart from each other, scrub and red sand between them. Eddies carried dust in chaotic ballets.
“It’s time for this to end,” said the Pan-African. “This farce. I’ve been reading Berne’s work. This thing between you and me, it’s a game. We’re playing ‘hero’, brother.”
“What is this babbling? You sound like a baboon.”
“We don’t really want to kill each other. I’m trying to educate you and you are trying to chastise a younger brother. Neither of us is playing for keeps. This battle will last forever, with continued attrition and no real resolution. Come the day that this sun goes nova we’ll still be standing.”
“You’re right about one thing,” said Black-Power. “I am trying to chastise you. I have done many times.”
“I won’t fight you this time.”
“Then you’ll die because I won’t hold back.”
“Death, then,” said the Pan-African. At the time, he meant it.
2013
Edo City
The wedding dress was off-white and the shoes scuffed, but the radiance of the bride’s smile did a lot to neutralise the imperfections. The ring-bearer led her to the courtyard, a boy of nine with a solemn expression on his face. The drummers picked up a frenzied beat and barefoot dancers began their performance. The mother of the bride wailed as if someone had died. Everybody sang. A few of the older men were drunk and off-key, but nobody cared.
The bride was pregnant. Tope could hear the proto-thoughts of the growing child. She already recognised her mother’s heartbeat and voice. The mother was, as yet, unaware of the life growing in her.
“So, what do you say?” asked Elizabeth Kokoro. She was irritating in the extreme.
“Miss Kokoro, you’re not invited to this wedding.”
“It’s a lot of money.”
“We shoot mo gbo, mo ya in these parts, you know.”
“We’ll get your side of the story. Finally, after all these years.”
The groom danced with the little bride. Tope had bought the suit, but it didn’t fit the man well. Some men wheeled in gigantic black loud speakers and started playing juju music. In between bowls of jollof rice people took to the dance floor, spraying money on each other.
“It doesn’t matter to me if anyone gets to hear my side of the story. I know what happened.” He took a bite out of a fried chicken thigh. He deliberately chewed with his mouth open to seem as crude as possible. He offered the drumstick to her, but she ignored it. He bit it again. “Go back to the city, girl. I’m busy here.”
“With the society wedding of the century?” she said.
“Do not mock these people. They are poor, but their emotions are genuine. They have dignity.”
“Ahh, good. Anger. I was starting to feel that nothing meant anything to you anymore.”
“God, you’re like a tsetse fly, buzzing around. Go away.”
She took the drumstick from him and tore a piece of flesh, then spoke with her mouth full. “I saw you once, you know. In Accra in ’77.”
Something dawned on Tope. “You took those photographs of me and Black-Power fighting in the water reservoir.”
“Yes.”
“The first clear photos the news outlets had of me. Not very flattering if I remember.” Black-Power had his boot on Tope’s chest and his cape flew in the wind. It was a poster and t-shirt graphic and the second major internet meme after ‘All your base are belong to us’, according to Bank.
“I had to crawl through mud to get there.”
“I remember you. Skinny little girl, you looked like a worm.” Not really. She had looked like a snake with breasts.
“Did you hate me?”
“No, I just mildly resented you.”
“Come do the TV show.”
“No.”
But Tope did.
2015
Lagos, Nigeria
On the road back to the settlement, Bank shoved a screen in front of his face.
“What am I looking at?” said Tope.
“That’s Black-Power,” said Bank.
Tope looked at the tablet and saw the tube video. Mobile phone footage of a few indistinct blurs and a shadow that might have been a cape. Maybe a sub-machine gun in the footage. A woman on the ground. A dog. A dog?
“This is blurry,” said Tope.
“It’s Black-Power. He’s back. Read the comments. The guy who was there saw him. It’s just a few days ago.”
“This is a guy in a mask and cape, Bank. He’s wearing a box shirt and chinos. That was never-”
“Trust me. The interweb never lies.”
“The interweb lies all the time.”
“Whatev. They’re bigging up your upcoming bout with him,” said Bank. He snatched his tablet back and started moving his fingers around again.
“I haven’t agreed to do it.”
“Uncle, with that money we can bribe enough government officials to practically own the land on which we live. We won’t have to go to court. You can feed people or something. Send more of us to university.”
“I know.”
“Then what?”
“It’s cheap.”
“Tens of millions of-”
“Not that kind of cheap. I mean, we’re not back street pugilists.” We are gods, and we do not fight for your entertainment, he thought but did not say aloud.
Bank said, “Do not think we are unappreciative of you, Uncle. I love you more than my father.”
“Your father left before you were born. You’ve never met him.”
“Yes, and I love you more than I love him.”
“Go back to your tablet, Bank.”
Tope watched the countryside go by.
‘Do not let them begin to worship you’, his brother had said, yet Black-Power was the one who allowed it to happen first.
He felt the hair on his neck rise; Elizabeth was thinking of him. Miles away, but he could still feel her thoughts.
It was time for one last fight. In Lekan’s arena they would put it to rest once and for all.
10
1800 to 1828
Kwa-Zulu Natal Midlands
The boy grew up a bastard, but Dingiswayo—as the elder allowed himself to be known then—recognised something special in that boy. As the boy became a young man, he was prone to angry outbursts to be sure, rising as he did to the frequent challenges of his fully parented peers. One day he had even run a twelve mile return journey through thorn-tree foothills to head off and return seven cattle from the neighbouring Langeni tribe—having silently cut the throat of one of their herders.
So, when that fiery bastard became a full man, his circumcision scars long healed, Dingiswayo gave him an ibutho lempi, his own fighting regiment.
This should channel his energies constructively, thought the elder. Aloud, he said: “Be careful with your men, Shaka, their lives and their families are in your keeping.”
The young man respectfully avoided his gaze, as if indeed restrained and finally maturing, “Yes, my Chief.”
But, in ongoing skirmishes with the neighbouring tribes, Shaka retained his impulsive and reckless manner, somehow knowing the best times to do so. He was almost always victorious. On the death of their father, Sigujano—Shaka’s half-brother—was the rightful heir to the vacant throne. Dingiswayo then helped Shaka to seize military control. The elder was taken by surprise, however, when Shaka had his brother executed.
How can you kill your own brother the elder wondered, thinking of his own younger brother, up north for millennia now.
The elder, using vestiges of his mental manipulation, eventually feigned his own murder as Dingiswayo, at the hands of Zwide, the Chief from the Ndwanwe clan—and waited to see what would happen. He now observed the proceedings as Shaka’s bodyguard, h
is own features additionally altered by the slightest of projected imaginal suggestions.
And as months rolled into years, King Shaka shaped his people around him, the Bodyguard watching, always watching—but sometimes fighting, reining in his strength, so as not to alarm those around him too much, particularly the King.
For the King was building an empire.
Shaka had quickly stopped the initiation rights for boys to men, manhood no longer stemming from wasted strength in circumcision rites, but in active age-cohort regiments, along with training and strategy, military strategy. And weapons, new weapons (throwing spears that are lost on the battlefield, the assegais, were moved to a secondary weapon). A new short stabbing spear, an iklwa, was adopted, alongside a bigger cowhide shield that was used offensively, after Shaka had showed the superiority of these new weapons in bloody training bouts that resulted in some men—even friends—dying.
“From now on, a man who loses his iklwa in battle will lose his life,” said the King, as his impi warriors and empire grew rapidly. For this was the start of Mfecane, the ‘crushing’, the making of a mighty people who expanded into occupying a huge geographical space, absorbing many, leaving many others dead or fleeing into the expanses before them.
Down towards the southern seas of this vast continent...
But, thankfully, some things did not change. Still, mothers and often grandmothers, when they could, sang and recited the old tales that spoke to them all; stories about Why the Cheetah’s Cheeks are Stained and even older stories from the very beginning, about how the Sky-God, Umvelinqangi, made the world and how the First Man/God, Nkulunkulu, emerged from watery reeds with his wife, able to draw on thunder and lightning.
I am indeed Zulu, thought the Bodyguard elder on these good evenings, sitting nearby as the women thrilled the children with these tales, enjoying hearing his ancient name being dropped in these living tales, as well as thinking about the brutal genius of his King, who finally defeated and killed Zwide, Dingiswayo’s supposed murderer.
In time though, word came to Shaka from startled and shaken scouts, of a new people, perhaps gods or devils, who were as white as crushed limestone.
They too were moving, but moving steadily up towards the amaZulu; slowly, yet inexorably.
Evolutionary brother primates, thought the Bodyguard to himself, perhaps returning from milder climes where their melanocytes have not been so active? So brother will meet brother again at last, reunited.
Ever looking for allies and advantage, Shaka invited some of them in.
But these white brothers and sisters brought firearms, disease, and not the slightest recognition of their long lost family...
As for Shaka, the Bodyguard was deployed elsewhere when his half-brothers Dingane and Mahlangana murdered him in turn.
What is it about brothers, the elder thought grimly on hearing the news.
2015
Strandfontein Beach
There is a place where many wild gulls breed, along a sandy cliff on the False Bay coast of the Cape Town outskirts, just past Strandfontein. The place is protected, a sanctuary for gulls to breed together and fly free, unhindered by humans, searching for fish and scatterings of white and black mussels, which they raise on high and drop, to shatter on the rocks below, exposing pale, delicate meat, ripe for the taking.
From this gull sanctuary, a man or woman, if they are tall enough, can cast their gaze inland across the Cape Flats, where a vast expanse of informal settlements shines in the sun. Mostly shacks cobbled and jury-rigged from tin, aluminium, chipboard, and wire, rain-proofed with black plastic bags or sheets, some sprouting wide and circular satellite dishes. This township is home to over half a million, stitched together in districts such as Mandela Park, Tembani, and Harare.
So it was that Black-Power stood and watched, a man indeed tall enough to see much, who saw with an acute and painful vision, that vast and chaotic spread of Khayelitsha Township. This place was but one of a multitude of the enduring legacies of apartheid, some indeed now improved since liberation.
This place was certainly not one of those that had been hugely improved, despite money swilling around for twenty years since the first democratic elections in South Africa.
Some electrification, surely, to cast light on a dark place... but not enough light! There was indeed a good reason he had chosen mid-day.
Slowly Black-Power shook his head. He preferred to look at the opulent parts of the central metropolis—like the view from his office as Detective Cele—not at this huge broken patchwork of poverty, where TB and the HIV virus continued to wreak their deadly havoc. It was not a good reminder. For all his power, he had actually achieved so little.
His... brother, had never tired of reminding him of this!
Black-Power turned to look at the sea instead, an easier and more pleasant sight, where the incessant roll of surf on white sand soothed his mind, yet also somehow reminded him of how old he had become. Perhaps he should just head home, it was a Saturday after all, or he could catch a movie at the Waterfront, the new Tarantino film was supposed to be brilliant and he had an invite to a VIP preview as Black-Power.
Alone. He would be alone.
Clenching his fist, he looked down at the ripple of muscle along his wrist, underneath his black Kevlar-laced glove. He was Black-Power for fuck’s sake, he had stopped volcanoes and faced whirlwinds, he could handle one little paltry... visit.
Steeled, he turned to face the sparkling sea of shiny shacks, alien vision searching for the small bricked day hospital far in the distance, at the locale of Site C, Khayelitsha.
There. Got it. Shit, that’s quite some distance, out on the far distant extreme range of his jumps.
But he knew, if he took a slower or more mundane way in a taxi, or bus, his commitment would falter and he would change his route, heading home—or anywhere else. However, the shacks were so densely packed, there was no way he could risk taking more than one jump.
There, that field, next to the hospital, was dusty and open, uninhabited.
Good training too, should he ever need to face his brother again.
Come on focus, bend, brace... No! Not enough purchase here, the sand was shifting beneath his bulk, sliding away under his boots. Perhaps he could have done this in the seventies.
Not now, his stomach was no longer quite so taut, his muscles did not sing quite so beautifully to him, with their clear sense of invulnerable power. So, with one small step, Black-Power bounced onto the empty beach road, legs together, recoil... and JUMP!
He hurtled high into the air like a homing missile, exhilarated by the wind-whistle of his passage and the warm cross-wind buffeting of a berg breeze drifting down from the Mountain. Below him, shacks blurred together in a moving chaotic collage, growing clearer, larger, and more distinct as he headed back towards the earth. He plummeted to the centre of the field near the hospital, his aim indeed true.
But now he could see some boys, six or seven of them, playing football with a small stack of positioned bricks marking their goals, scuffing sand as they chased the ball in the middle of the field.
“No!” he shouted, but the wind whipped his words over his shoulders and up into the sky, as he dropped like a lethal boulder.
One boy looked up and shouted, pointing.
“Is it a bird?” he thought he heard in isiXhosa and then he was dropping onto the stationery boy, whose mouth was gawping wide in sudden frozen shock.
Khayelitsha!
Black-Power landed on one foot, his second leg raised to avoid contact with the cowering boy, pushing away desperately to avoid impact. Sand and dirt exploded from the impact of his landing, showering the boy, as he bounced and rolled away, impelled by the forceful, juddering impetus of his left leg.
Black-Power finally rolled to a halt. Shit, he thought, I’m tangled in my fucking cape—and my leg hurts like hell.
He lay for some moments, trying to catch his breath.
The young boy stood over him, u
nhurt but sandy, holding a football. “Mister, can you be a referee for us, please?”
Black-Power unleashed a string of invectives in isiZulu, but he knew the boy would understand; they were cousin languages after all, united by the Mfecane. Slowly, he unrolled himself from his cape and sat up.
The field was now deserted.
Sighing with sudden guilt, he stood up gingerly, testing his left leg.
Fine. A bit sore, but it would pass. Not good news for you, my brother, he thought to himself, his gaze tracing a route from the hospital to a mixed spread of brick houses and shacks, some flattened for redevelopment.
There. That was the address. A small brick house just off the bend in the road feeding the hospital, he recognised it from an earlier zoom-in on Google Earth. Modest, but better than many other abodes here, he thought as he made his way towards the house, walking off his slight limp.
A small crowd had gathered on the outskirts of the field, whispering together, gazing at him in awe.
“I told you Black-Power was back,” he heard one voice clearly amongst the clamour.
There were other voices, other words...and, and that FUCKING word again! Even after so many years, it still ripped deep into his being.
He had reached the road by then, the crowd parting before him like the Red Sea to Moses, but he turned and roared: “For the record, I was never an...an... Askari!” He spat the word so they could see his contempt. “I never betrayed the Struggle... Amandla!”
He raised his fist.
There was silence.
“Amandla!” he shouted again, louder, more urgent.
“Ngawethu,” came a soft reply, from an older voice hidden amongst the crowd.
“Born Frees!” he sighed with exasperation and, suddenly feeling slightly foolish, he turned on his heels.
Thembeka was standing in front of him, fists on either side of a broad-hipped black skirt, her red T-shirt etched with a slogan in black: ‘Pissed Off Woman’.
“Oh-” he took a step backwards. There was no need for her to be so literal.
“Why couldn’t you have just come quietly and knocked on the door?”
“Uh-”
“My God, but you’re inarticulate, even for a man.”
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