The Year's Best African Speculative Fiction (2021) Read online

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  1. “Where You Go” © Somto O. Ihezue

  2. “Things Boys Do” © Pemi Aguda

  3. “Giant Steps” © Russell Nichols

  4. “The Future in Saltwater” © Tamara Jerée

  5. “The ThoughtBox” © Tlotlo Tsamaase

  6. “The Parts That Make Us Monsters” © Sheree Renée Thomas

  7. “Scar Tissue” © Tobias S. Buckell

  8. “Ancestries” © Sheree Renée Thomas

  9. “Breath of the Sahara” © Inegbenoise O. Osagie

  10. “The Many Lives of an Abiku” © Tobi Ogundiran

  11. “A Love Song for Herkinal as composed by Ashkernas amid the ruins of New Haven” © Chinelo Onwualu

  12. “A Curse at Midnight” © Moustapha Mbacké Diop

  13. “A Mastery of German” © Marian Denise Moore

  14. “Are We Ourselves?” © Michelle Mellon

  15. “When the Last of the Birds and the Bees Have Gone On” © C.L. Clark

  16. “The Goatkeeper’s Harvest” © Tobi Ogundiran

  17. “Baba Klep” © Eugen Bacon

  18. “Desiccant” © Craig Laurance Gidney

  19. “Disassembly” © Makena Onjerika

  20. “The River of Night” © Tlotlo Tsamaase

  21. “Egoli” © T.L. Huchu

  22. “The Friendship Bench” © Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

  23. “Fort Kwame” © Derek Lubangakene

  24. “We Come as Gods” © Suyi Davies Okungbowa

  25. “And This is How to Stay Alive” © Shingai Njeri Kagunda

  26. “The Front Line” © WC Dunlap

  27. “Penultimate” © ZZ Claybourne

  28. “Love Hangover” © Sheree Renée Thomas

  29. “Red_Bati” © Dilman Dila

  About the Contributors

  About the Editor

  The Year’s Best African Speculative Fiction (2021)

  Volume One

  Collection © 2021 Oghenchovwe Donald Ekpeki

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any manner without the prior written permission of the copyright owner, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  To request permissions, contact the publisher at [email protected].

  Edited by Oghenchovwe Donald Ekpeki

  Book Design by Knight Designs (www.authorzknight.com)

  Book Cover Design © Maria Spada (www.mariaspada.com)

  Published by Jembefola

  First Edition: September 2021

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  Table of Contents

  “Where You Go” © Somto O. Ihezue

  “Things Boys Do” © Pemi Aguda

  “Giant Steps” © Russell Nichols

  “The Future in Saltwater” © Tamara Jerée

  “The ThoughtBox” © Tlotlo Tsamaase

  “The Parts That Make Us Monsters” © Sheree Renée Thomas

  “Scar Tissue” © Tobias S. Buckell

  “Ancestries” © Sheree Renée Thomas

  “Breath of the Sahara” © Inegbenoise O. Osagie

  “The Many Lives of an Abiku” © Tobi Ogundiran

  “A Love Song for Herkinal as composed by Ashkernas amid the ruins of New Haven” © Chinelo Onwualu

  “A Curse at Midnight” © Moustapha Mbacké Diop

  “A Mastery of German” © Marian Denise Moore

  “Are We Ourselves?” © Michelle Mellon

  “When the Last of the Birds and the Bees Have Gone On” © C.L. Clark

  “The Goatkeeper’s Harvest” © Tobi Ogundiran

  “Baba Klep” © Eugen Bacon

  “Desiccant” © Craig Laurance Gidney

  “Disassembly” © Makena Onjerika

  “The River of Night” © Tlotlo Tsamaase

  “Egoli” © T.L. Huchu

  “The Friendship Bench” © Yvette Lisa Ndlovu

  “Fort Kwame” © Derek Lubangakene

  “We Come as Gods” © Suyi Davies Okungbowa

  “And This is How to Stay Alive” © Shingai Njeri Kagunda

  “The Front Line” © WC Dunlap

  “Penultimate” © ZZ Claybourne

  “Love Hangover” © Sheree Renée Thomas

  “Red_Bati” © Dilman Dila

  1

  “Where You Go” © Somto O. Ihezue

  Originally Published in Omenana (Issue 16, December 2020)

  Maradi, Northern Nigeria,

  It follows me. Rain tapering against the window. In a bath, water trailing down my skin. I do not step into puddles. I cannot will myself to believe the still spread is nothing more than liquid over solid ground.

  When the last sandstorm left town, it took Athjar’s eyes with it. Hands thrown over my ears, I still heard them, his screams, I’ve never heard anything like it. As night fell and the desert winds with it, I pulled Athjar from the sands. In his face, I did not find his eyes. I knew when I saw his skin — cut in a hundred places like he’d been caught in a knife brawl — that I should have left him buried. Needle sands; that is what the locals called them. It is why we drape in the thickest of wool, from the ends of our hair, to the tip of our toes. Their cuts came with a blistering infection and with the nearest clinic two valleys away, I watched the fever take Athjar. With his passing, I am all that’s left of those who came here to Maradi, searching for answers.

  Today the winds are kind. Kind enough to leave the goats behind when they send hay scattering through the streets. I fasten the straps of my eye-gear and a memory walks in. Hair braided in sand, mind half lost, I had bartered Dike’s ring for a sand coat, a pair of silver rimmed goggles and information about The Collecting. I remember the flickering of the gaslight, I remember my shadow leading the way into the makeshift shrine that served as a storehouse and a bedroom. Sometimes, in my dreams, I see it, the grin spread across the diviner’s face as he pushed the goggles into my hands. With lenses scratched all over, I wouldn't see a dune rattlesnake if it was slithering right in front of me.

  I turn a bend in the road and I arrive. Like every other house in Maradi, the building is a pile of metal scraps, sand bags and everything else. I ramble up to my one-room spot on the fourth floor. There are no railings on the stairs. If I slip and fall to my unquestionable death, the feral cats from the sewage will rip me to pieces before anyone finds me. So I lean against the wall. Inside, the table — the only piece of furniture I own, greets me. Kadiri would never have liked it here, neither would have Abike.

  * * *

  Botswana — 21 years, 7 months, 2 weeks, 5 days before ...

  It was Kadiri’s second year at the oncology center. A cyst the size of a berry had been found lodged in a corner of her brain.

  ‘The doctors said she has less than a month now.’ I stared down at my hands, then up to the cobwebs in the ceiling and down at my hands again.

  ‘No, they — they don’t know that, they don’t know how strong she — she is —’

  ‘Abike I'm sorry, I'm so sorry,’ I reached for her, and as I pulled her into me, her sobs came down hard rocking both our bodies.

  After the Oil War ravaged half the continent, from Djibouti down to the Table Mountains, Abike who had lost her sight, her family and her home, became one of the last living members of the Ailopin people. When she came to us at the Botswana Sanctuary for Continentally Displaced Persons, no one had thought she'd make it. We thought wrong. She grew up sauntering all over the savannah with my daughter, Kadiri. The two were never more than a whisper apart. They’d squeeze into themselves, learning the texture of each o
ther's hair. When the last of the Zebras migrated with the rains across the Chobe National Park, the girls would find them, weeding out ticks from their hide. In return, they'd get back rides across the grasslands. Bodies sailing in the wind, the echo of their voices would be heard for miles and miles as they ran reckless and wild.

  A week before the Maitisong Festival, Kadiri died. Abike didn't cry. Not when the body was brought in from the morgue nor when we laid her in the ground. She was being strong for both of us. Kadiri liked to stand in front of my mirror, she said it made her look like a painting. I shattered it. I took her things, the carvings on the wall, her seedlings in the old Milo tins, shoved them into a box and threw it down the stairs. It stayed at the bottom of the stairway for weeks. I had lost Dike five years into our marriage and Kadiri had become everything to me. With her gone, I couldn't, I just couldn't.

  ‘I'm leaving Botswana.' I had rehearsed the line for days.

  ‘When? Why?’

  ‘Soon dear.’ I lifted my head to pull the tears back in, ‘I’ll probably head home to Nigeria, I’m not sure’.

  ‘When do we leave?’

  I realized I’d been holding my breath all along. ‘Abike, I got in touch with your clan’s people, they are so eager to see you.’ I said, drawing in a lung full of air, my hands reaching into hers.

  ‘What? No!’ she yelled, pulling away.

  ‘I don't know where I'm headed and I don’t — I don’t know — Abike I’m not okay, do you understand?’ My voice was starting to break under the weight of the sobs I was stifling. ‘I’m not right for you, not the way I am now. You deserve better.’ The confused creases had still not left her forehead, ‘You belong with your people, your family’.

  ‘You are my family.’

  ‘Abike please listen —’

  ‘Where you go I go, Mama.’

  That was the last we spoke of it. Together, we left Botswana. From the spice markets of Morocco to the Serengeti, we traveled the continent. Before long, she started to fledge. As a young girl, I too had fledged but I was nothing compared to Abike. At the pyramids, she ran her hands across the hieroglyphics, translating texts lost to the ages and startling the tourists. In the Congo Basin, the birds had flocked to her as she called them by name. She had all these stories, stories before her time, before mine. There were times when I stared at her in wonder and she'd turn to me and say, ‘I see you’. I was the one with the eyes yet Abike made me see.

  Then it happened. She dropped in front of me, fingers clawing at her neck, face paler than paper. Frantic gasps escaped her lips as she reached for her voice.

  ‘Ma — Mama.’ That was the last thing Abike said before disintegrating into a puddle of water. I never stepped into a puddle ever again.

  * * *

  It stayed on the headlines for years. The papers read: “ON THE 23RD OF JUNE 2052, LAGOS, CAPITAL CITY OF UNITED WEST AFRICA SANK INTO THE ATLANTIC”. No one had expected it, but no one was surprised. After The Great Tsunami leveled Tokyo, we knew what was coming. But that wasn't all. As the granite walls of Cathedral Church of Christ stumbled into the depths, as the Third Mainland Bridge caved beneath the blue of the ocean, the last of the Ailopin, men, women and children, across the world, vanished. Panic came next, but not for the Ailopin. The collapse of Lagos and the consequent drowning of millions had trumped the eerie disappearance of an almost extinct clan. People thought I'd gone mad when I spoke about it. The only ones who believed were those who had seen it and the spirit tribes. We were calling it, The Collecting.

  Ire-mmili, South-Eastern Nigeria,

  From the Congo, where I had lost Abike, I took the first train back to Nigeria, and then on to my hometown; Ire-mmili. It has been years since I last was there. Botswana had been home for many years, with Dike, Kadiri and Abike. My spirit sisters had been waiting, they knew I'd come.

  ‘Ókpúkpú Ókpúkpú ànyì nnō, welcome home, bone of our bone.’

  ‘Ìhè ná áfù gī ná áfù ànyì, What aches you, aches us,’ they said, taking me in.

  Under the dancing stars, I was brought to the Hall of Daughters where my braids were loosened and soaked in the first milk of a mule.

  ‘You have known suffering, now know rest,’ an elder chanted as she washed my hair in the milk. My sisters gathered, chanting alongside the elder who now came kneeling before me.

  ‘See, see your mothers,’ she said as she lined my eyes with tanjèlé, ‘see the bones that bind you.’

  One by one, they came to me, sharing in my grief, siphoning the much they could bear. In Ire-mmili, pain was shared, but there were limits. Pain brought with it a darkness, one that not only marked the soul, but replaced it. So when my sisters took of my grief, they took with them fragments of the darkness that was starting to consume me. I never thought they'd perform the ritual, not for me, not after the things I had done.

  Long before men could speak, back when the sun rose in the north, our first mother Oshimmili had clawed her way through the dirt and into the world. Where her hands tore through the soil a forest sprouted stretching as far as the eye could see, the birthplace of the Ire-mmili. The initiation rite of spirit sisters was performed deep in the heart of the forest, before our mothers and their mothers before them and beneath its leaves, we laid our departed. Seeing as I had not been keen on an initiation that included a hot knife slicing flesh from between my legs, I had gotten rid of the forest.

  Clad in nothing but my strength, I had ripped out tufts of my hair, meshed it in my blood and bound it to the silver of a crescent moon. With a voice like a child possessed, I tossed my ritual into the fire I had started, and cried:

  ‘Till the blood in my veins runs still, no tree shall hold root on this soil! Never again shall it know the green of grass or the songs of sparrows!’

  For my abominations, I was dragged through the streets and whipped. I remember the giant snail shells clanging off my neck, announcing the coming of the spirit killer. Right there, as I sat amongst my sisters, I could still feel the hot poker searing into my back, marking me with the seal of banishment. Now all was forgotten, all except the forest. It still lay desolate and there was no undoing it. They'd have to kill me to break the curse.

  With the help of my sisters, I combed the spirit wild for years, searching, for a sign, a lost soul, anything. We weren't the only ones looking. There were others who had lost people to The Collecting.

  Soon, we stopped talking about it. It was easier that way. Like everyone who had fled the coastlines for the mountain ranges and desert towns, I left Ire-mmili and headed north. It was there I met Athjar. His husband was an Ailopin and had disappeared just like Abike. He didn't like puddles either. He was part of a cult that had gotten word about a diviner up in Maradi who could help. I joined them.

  * * *

  Present day, Maradi,

  I raise a glass of water to my lips, careful not to stare into it. A knock comes on the door. It comes again, louder this time. The landlady's niece, she’s come to remind me my rent was due. I do not answer. I bring the glass down to the table and it tips over. On meeting the floor, its shards fly past my feet, spreading to the corners of the room.

  ‘I know you're in there, witch!’ her voice comes, heavier than her knocks, ‘I am going to call Big Auntie, she’ll send you packing this time!’

  I listen as her angry footsteps disappear down the stairs. A towel in my hand, I kneel over the pooling mess. When a piece of glass cuts into my knee, I do not feel it, not until I see the blood. With the pain starting to set in, I examine the wound, hoping it is something I can stitch up myself. Thin streams of blood trickle down the gash and drop into the water, sending ripples across it. In the circles, I see myself, what was left of me. Taking the towel, I press it hard against my reflection and my hand goes right through.

  ‘What the -!’

  In crippling terror, I pull back at my arm, it stays, like it's caught in a snare. I pull again, harder, fear tearing through my body. Whatever is holding onto me,
I feel its grip tighten, dragging me in by the second.

  ‘Help! Somebody help!’ I call out toward the door, the landlady's niece should have returned ‘Help! Please, help me!’

  No one comes. My shoulder goes in and I know my head is next. Terrified that I could be inches away from falling into a chasm of water or something worse, I shut my eyes and gulp in a lung full of air. Water does not meet my face, only warmth. I peel open my eyes and far in the distance the lighthouse of Apapa stands, piercing the sky. The rays bouncing off its huge torch spill into the atmosphere lighting it up.