We See a Different Frontier: A Postcolonial Speculative Fiction Anthology (16 page)

I pointed at the stars, then pointed at the near distance, to Thumbi Island. An unearthly glow rose behind the trees on the island. I saw the white man’s eyes follow the direction of my finger but whether he saw or understood the nature of the glow I did not know. There was no time to waste. I helped him up and into the canoe. The moon was up, lighting the bay. It was why we were not fishing that night. I rowed us to the island, worrying all the while that the white man would die, and that I would be blamed. But he did not die and I brought him to the island and there they took him and gave him a new heart, as I knew they would.

13.

It had been a trivial thing to arrange.

14.

In 1861 Livingstone released the boy Chuma from slavers.

“We must fight slavery in all its forms,” Livingstone said.

“I understand,” Chuma said.

15.

Chuma’s army resembled that of Hong Xiuquan, the Heavenly King, who had raised a million men to fight an empire in the Taiping Rebellion. They followed him and his white man across the continent: Yao at first, then Chewas and Ndebele and Shona and Zulus, a rising tide of dark loam becoming the sea. The doctor had been touched by the divine, it was said. His heart glowed in his chest at night, a dull red that penetrated through his pale skin. He was always behind Chuma, Chuma the Brave, Chuma the Fearless. Chuma the divine.

In another timeline he was Livingstone’s faithful servant. In this one he was a messiah reborn, a new Hong Xiuquan for another, older continent. He called and they followed, slaves and freedmen, from all across the continent. They had stormed the Swahili nations of the coast and subdued them, and took Zanzibar almost without a fight. From Zanzibar they could go anywhere. Chuma sent diplomats across the old trade networks the Europeans had damaged like the silk of a spider’s web. Damaged but not destroyed. He reached out to India. And he set sail, at last, with his captured ships, to the New World, his faithful doctor by his side.

16.

Richmond, Virginia, burned to the ground.

17.

As the Civil War erupted the Southern states were hemmed in by the North on one side and Chuma’s forces coming in from the sea. Southern refugees escaped to the North as Chuma’s forces landed and former slaves joined the revolt. By 1865 the North and South signed a ceasefire, and Chuma’s Confederacy came officially into being.

18.

Or remix, re-edit, fast forward, backtrack.

The way it almost was:

May First, 1873.

In one time-line a retired President Chuma visits David Livingstone’s hospital room in New Nyasa, in what used to be called Richmond, Virginia. He sits by his old friend’s bed, waiting for the end.

Not in this one:

Ilala. Southeast of Lake Bangweulu. May 1st, 1873. The doctor is lying on the bed, dying. They can both sense it, Susi and Chuma, who had been with the doctor for years. Malaria and internal bleeding is leeching the life out of him. With the last of his power he kneels in prayer by the bed, and it is in that position that they find him.

They take him outside and lay him down gently on the ground. They strip him of his clothes. His body is old and scarred from travel. Susi holds the knife. He cuts the doctor’s corpse open as Chuma reaches inside, fingers stained with blood, and carefully removes the doctor’s heart that we gave him.

In your history, this is how it had happened.

They buried the heart under a nearby Mvula tree. The body they preserved with herbs. Susi and Chuma carried the body the thousand miles back to the coast, and from there, by ship, to Britain, where he lies to this day, missing his heart, in Westminster Abbey.

We continued to edit. We were getting better.

19.

I remember visiting the graves of the Scottish missionaries near Chembe Village—the place Livingstone had called Cape Maclear, after his friend, the royal astronomer in Cape Town. You were with me, we had just met, it was the summer of 1995 and thunder clouds gathered over the lake in the distance. It began to rain as we looked at the old weathered headstones. Scottish missionaries in Africa, like the punch line to an old joke. Like malaria. The lake had killed them; for seven years they struggled to survive on the Lake of Stars before they abandoned their mission, retreated to Bandawe and then to Khondowe, the lake and the mosquitoes pursuing them, relentlessly.

We ran back through the hot rain. Lightning flashed. In our bamboo hut on the beach we huddled together for warmth. Your skin shone with the lake’s tears. “What if—?” you said. The thunder rolled over the lake, magnified like cannon. “What if Livingstone never found the lake?” you said. “What if Stanley never pursued him to Ujiji, never uttered those words, Dr Livingstone, I presume?”

We were in the early stages of love. What if we had never met, there on Lake Malawi, my people and her people couldn’t have been any more different.

20.

Three years later, in Ujiji, I played Bao with the descendants of Swahili slave traders and lost. We visited the baobab tree under which they stood, those two white men, Livingstone and Stanley, Stanlivingstone merged into one in our memories. “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” I said, and you smiled, tolerating me. We were living on the hill above Kigoma, Dian Fossey was a neighbour. When we went down into the town we saw nothing but refugees, amputees from Zaire, begging for a change we couldn’t offer.

“Forget Livingstone,” I said. “What if my people had come to Africa?”

21.

“The goal of our present endeavours must not be the ‘Holy Land’ but a land of our own. We need nothing but a large piece of land for our poor brothers; a piece of land which shall remain our property from which no foreign master can expel us.”
—Leo Pinsker,
Auto-Emancipation.
1882

22.

In 1904 the Zionist Congress sent a three-man expedition to British East Africa, to the Uasin Gishu Plateau. They comprised a British explorer, a Swiss engineer and a Russian Jew. They spent two months exploring the plateau. In your primary reality they went lost, were attacked by hostile tribes, returned at last to Europe and delivered their verdict. Jewish settlement in Africa was voted down overwhelmingly by the Congress.

We edit. We shift and change the parameters.

23.

“[The proposal to settle Jews in East Africa] is monstrous, extravagant, and unconstitutional, and opposed not only to the best interests of Christendom but of civilization at large.”
—E. Haviland Burke, M.P., parliamentary debate, 1904

24.

If you drive down Lake Victoria today you will see a strip of hotels rising into the sky, at the place called Neve Nitzachon, the Spring of Victory, and a sign for the weary traveller that here, too, is a shopping mall and a rest stop, with a Mashbir department store and a McDavid branch and even an Egged bus station. The blue-white-and-black flags wave above the buildings, especially on our Independence Day, celebrated every year on the Fifth of Iyar in the Jewish calendar. It was not until 1965—in your calendar—that we were made free from the British, like our neighbours on either side, Uganda and Kenya, with whom we are periodically at war. Our independence was inevitable. We had moved en masse to this land, empty but for its people, granted to us by the power of the British empire and its King and parliament. We fled from German hostility and Russian pogroms, British contempt and the French’s frank dislike, fled across land and sea to this land-locked country in the sun.

Palestine forgot us. The British gave us the plateau but it was not enough for us. Our people bought guns across the seas and the ships smuggled them to Mombasa. From there on foot or by train we carried them inland, training in secret in the valleys.

Our land suffices for our needs. We are not without problems, but what country ever is? Our struggle for independence merged with that of the Mau Mau. Jomo Kenyatta and David Ben Gurion met in secret on the shores of the lake and signed an agreement of cooperation. Our own problem materialized in the form of the native tribes. Now they are kept behind the separation fence that our army guards, but still their terrorists attack us in our cities. Only last week a man from the Nandi tribe, passing for one of our own Ethiopian Jews and dressed as a Hasidic man in the thick black coats so strange here in this hot land, boarded a local bus and proceeded to blow himself up. For such cowardly atrocities we have no choice but to go into their enclaves, behind the fence, to search their houses door to door and line up their elders for inspection even as their youths throw stones at our soldiers. Our prisons overflow with their terrorists and still they would not give up this ridiculous demand for “their” land. We have tried to be reasonable, really we have.

Drive down Lake Victoria today and you will see a peaceful and prosperous land. Our farmers grow pineapples and bananas and paw-paw, our military’s planes pass overhead, the jets reflected in the calm surface of the water, filling our hearts with pride. Across in Uganda we must still contend with Idi Amin’s despotic regime but we are secure in our homeland. We pull into the hotel and order a McDavid kosher Hot-David frankfurter and eat it in the comfort of our air-conditioned car.

25.

When I was ten or eleven we went to Haifa, the nearby city by the sea. There, on the pedestrian street in the lower Hadar, there used to be a McDavid restaurant. They are all gone now, having been edged out by competition from American fast food chains, though I recently read in the paper that they are set to return. I remember that day for some reason, though the colours have been washed clean in memory’s uncertain rains. My father was driving the kibbutz’s car. It was humid, Haifa was a strange exotic place for us, filled with city folks and their city ways. The smell of exhaust fumes and women’s perfumes such as we did not have on the kibbutz mingled with the smells of food, of fresh jam-filled donuts coated with sugar powder, and fresh bagels with sesame seeds, and falafel frying in hot, industrial oil.

I do not remember what my father’s business in town was, but that, when it was concluded, he took me, holding my hand in his, into McDavid. It really did exist, you know, as strange as that sounds. My father bought me the Hot-David frankfurter. It came with pickles and mustard, yellow and green like the fields of the kibbutz. It was the only time I think I ever ate at McDavid.

26.

Enough, enough. Who is this interloper interjecting into our narrative, our narratives? We edit, we mix and remix. Jewish Uganda, with its suicide bombers and military occupation, never happened, but it didn’t have to happen, either. All is possible in the seas of chance and probability. We cut and paste and remix and reboot:

27.

Tel Aviv, 2011. Here on the banks of Lake Victoria couples stroll arm in arm on the beach, boys play beach ping pong, girls lie in the sun or sip cool drinks at the waterside bars. Kwasa-kwasa music from the Congo mixes with South African reggae and Malawian pop. Children the colour of olives run and laugh in the surf. Our people have come here unwillingly, persuaded by the Zionist Congress and Herzl’s mad dream of a homeland, of statehood. A backwater British colony, it were but us and the local tribes.

But we are Jews, we are used to living on sufferance. At first there was conflict but cooler heads prevailed. We were together the subjects of the British, united in a shared history of suffering. Their boys married into our tribes, their girls took our young men to their families. We did not fight the British. We bided our time until Independence, in the 1960s. Together we formed a country for ourselves, we built plantations, planted fields, fished, returned to the way of our forefathers. Not for us the factories and shining cities of another present. We built no tall houses, no eight-lane roads or mega-malls. We are a backwater, a tributary of history, a hidden cove. We take in history’s forgotten refugees.

Come to Tel Aviv and the music welcomes you, the mix and remix of a thousand tunes and styles from across the continent. The drummers gather at dusk on Mungo Park Beach and the sound of their drums unites, suddenly and clearly, and for a moment, standing there on the shore of the lake with the sun setting in the distance, that sound is like the single vast beat of a great, unknowable heart.

A Heap of Broken Images

Sunny Moraine

“Odette nodded at my notebook, where I was writing as she spoke. ‘Do the people in America really want to read this? People tell me to write these things down, but it’s written inside of me. I almost hope for the day when I can forget.’”

― Philip Gourevitch,
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

“Are you going to take a picture?”

I ask it because it seems like a sensible question. The shorter of the two humans has brought his camera with him, and since we entered the houses of the dead he has held it in his hands and a little close to his chest, as though he’s afraid that someone might snatch it away from him, or that he might drop it and it might shatter.

I ask it because I am their guide and it is my task to show them what they ask to see, and I am wondering, now, if they really wish to see this.

The shorter man—I have been told that his name is
Jacob
but the syllables feel strange in my mouth and I have to struggle with them a little—looks at me as though he is only just now seeing me. He nods once. He lifts the camera to his face and I hear the soft
whirr
of its processor. And then, as though he performed the act entirely for my benefit, he shows me the image he has captured.

Here: It’s not well framed. He clearly gave little thought for the arrangement of it. Half a skull takes up the lower left-hand corner, pushed most of the way under a desk. The fractured curve of a broken spine extends into the middle-foreground, disappearing into a fold of old blue cloth from which ribs protrude. On the right, a severed arm stretches into the frame as if reaching for the skull and the spine. It clearly isn’t from the same corpse. It’s much too small. Draped and tangled over everything, heavy flowers in brilliant red and pink, green vines, and dried skin of no color whatsoever.