DEMI BLACK - AN AZANIAN STORY

DEMI BLACK – AN AZANIAN STORY

Mandeni and the Mirthless Perspective (2041) 

The Protector of the Gates. Guardian of Undoing. Nubia. That really tall Azanian dude who only drank umqombothi (1), smoked weed and never exhaled any smoke. It is Nubia’s day off and he likes this bar. It can contain about 200 people and is usually quite bustling. Today, there are probably only 43 people in the whole venue. Where have the others gone? A couple is sitting behind him on a 3-seater leather recliner. They’re whispering to each other. 

“That guy isn’t exhaling. He’s smoking a fuck-ton, though.”

 “Lung mods,” his partner replies. 

He’s probably using the ash and other carbonates in his biological system. Remember that expo where we saw those internal recyclers. Some people don’t wanna waste anything. “ 

“He could just have an internal ash tray. Cheap, hey, honey? Some Bonge lining on the inner layer of your lungs and that’s it. Functional solution so you can smoke even ‘round kidses.” 

Bonge is still the future’s most dynamic filtering cloth. Used on bar tops to absorb spillage, condensation and other bar fluids. Used in arenas of combat to absorb human fluids and capable of even separating blood from plasma. It could be modified for biological systems so that one could install Bonge on any part of their body to filter or absorb anything that the user wants. There were even ocular mods that could filter light waves. There were more esoteric uses. Next time you meet a Bonge Sales Representative, do ask about their chakra filters. Spiritually classy. 

Nubia is beyond the definition of patience. He is a Guardian after all. He is currently waiting for Life to die, and that takes more patience than any layman could understand. He exists in a land uninhabited by the personification of patience. But! One thing he cannot abide is gossip. He turns. So slow does he turn that even the world around his aura slows down a little. He faces the two gossiping men now before him. 

“Yeyi nina maqhude!(2) You don’t know me. Why didn’t you just ask me the how?” 

This he says in one voice out of his 222. He doesn’t want to scare them. If he let amazwi akhe(3 ) speak, they might not be as civil. 

“Hahahaaha! He called us cocks. Has he seen you at Mashu-Gras, Senzo," the man on Nubia’s left says.

 “No, man. You think Mr Alpha Zulu over here would ever be seen at Mashu-Gras? He was obviously…never mind. As to you, we are allowed to guess and opine on our own before asking, mfowethu.(4) We meant to gossip. And we might have asked the how, had your impatience not intervened. “ 

“Lona uthi unguSenzo. Senzo, uhleba ngomuNtu igama lakhe ekungahletshwa ngalo. Angisondele.”(5) 

He gets up to approach the couple and his chair follows steadily behind him. Whilst he steps to them, he takes out another spliff, pre-rolled and runs his index finger down his extravagantly dark, bare chest. As soon as it reaches his nipple, his finger sparks and a tiny flame bursts at the tip. He lights up before the unnatural flame dies a natural death. He sits down and takes a good draw before speaking. 

“When I smoke, I smoke the highest grade. When it gets inside me, the smoke goes to the lowest place. Smoke that good smoke while you can, boy.” 

Senzo’s partner breaks out into a fit of laughter. He chokes on some spit and takes a sip of his drink before laughing again. Louder this time. His fit has him rolling onto Senzo’s lap and slapping his own thigh in elation. 

“How many times did this guy say ‘smoke’? Yoh! Senzo! This one here’s a ganja ganja ganja man.” His laughter topples him again. Senzo strokes his partner’s head and giggles a little too. And for the first time in an exceedingly long time, someone makes Nubia laugh. His laugh comes from a deep place. A dark, unvisited place where the humour has to feel its way out by sonar. He is laughing at being laughed at, but that doesn’t make it any less funny. Senzo’s partner is a fine jester. One so gifted that he has rescued Nubia’s laughter from being just a memory. With flippant skill, he built a wall of mirth down to an unfathomable place and helped a blind thing find its way to the light again. Nubia’s laugh uses a few voices that even he hasn’t heard in hundreds of years. They’re the voices of happy children and sincere men. There is a drunk woman’s voice there, too. And the voice of a sleepy father being tickled by his son. Senzo is the first to recover from Nubia’s bellowing laugh, which made everyone in the pub look in their direction. 

“I am Senzo Zenzo. This is Akhala, my partner in justice and crime. Wagcina nini ukuhleka, mfowethu?”(6) 

“Kade, qhude lakwaZenzo. Ngiyabonga, Akhala. Khona into osandukuyikhulula ebengingazi nokuthi iboshiwe. Umsebenzi wami, my work is mirthless.”(7) 

He lifts up his big, dark, dark skinned arm and hails the barman. She rolls up to him almost immediately on her brand new magnatreads. 

“I am the help you need,” the barman says in a Zulu accent. She is the only android employed in Tugela. She is a quirky, gender-queer contract acquired from Phoenix. Designed with a Philosopher’s Stone Chip in her core, the other 6 processors were slave to its creative, alternatives angles of thought instead of the direct, dry avenues most programmers took when designing their machina. Creative problem-solving was her most prominent design feature but it ended up becoming more than just that. Machine Learning was primary school stuff by now. These androids tended to program themselves very soon after their source code was run. Her whole existence was creative, from her sense of fashion to the accents she chose when engaging each customer. Having chosen a male-looking body, she had replaced her humanoid legs with magnatreads, which helped her navigate iVision via the walls and ceiling whilst the customers were free to use the regular traffic lanes of the bar. The treads were not an innovation from Phoenix, however. They were the brainchild of one Reina Abrahams, who had been seeking a better way to manage traffic in her power plants. Simply put, she wanted more Godsdamn floor space. Like the most life-changing of inventions, it came to her in a dream. In that dream, she was walking in a cane field for hours. Whenever she took a step, she would step into a new shoe. At a point, she would be wearing two different shoes at once, and then step into another new shoe and another as she kept going forward down a line to Gods know where. She woke up with that ‘eureka’ feeling, running naked to her lab, whispering in a hoarse voice, 

“It lays its own track. Track in front, bot behind. Track. Magnetic track. How strong? Polarity…Hm…Snail track. But in reverse. Like ya. Ya.” 

Mount7 preferred using magnatracks (two of them) to legs. But maybe next week she’d experiment with 6 legs, or even 8. She really liked the idea of laying her own path, though. The magnatrack inspired a sense of future in her movements. There is always a way if you make your own road. Not to say she didn’t utilise the legs she owned now and then but magnatrack was faster, energy efficient and was more dynamic than bipedal movement in spaces like her workplace. 

“Ah, Moun7. Ngicela ungipha(8) another gourd of Dingiswayo’s Bile. Maqhude, niphuzani na?”(9) 

“Durbale for both of us, Red and Blue,” answers Akhala. 

“Oh, and three Hoffman shots, please,” adds Senzo. You wanna talk about mirthless work? We have a bloody nullspace meeting with the Men of Mashu, tomorrow. Bloody hell! I wanna be tripping balls tomorrow. “ 

Moun7 returns with their drinks and serves each of them respectfully. Even in a divebar such as this one, the forms are obeyed. She serves the senior person first. She even lowers her suspension to simulate kneeling as she serves Nubia umqombothi wakhe.(10) Akhala and Senzo rush for their Hoffmans almost simultaneously. They quickly salute Nubia before gulping them down. Nubia grabs his Hoffman shot and tips it into his gourd. He picks it up with both hands. He turns and turns the gourd the way every Nguni does before drinking. Malt liquor settles. 

Gods Make Mulattoes Too 

Mashu is a pretty big township, with 3637 citizens but with some of the land mass missing, nothing on Three-Rock is as big as it used to be. Just behind the comic book store and just before you reach the Durbale Brewery in Kelvin (formerly known as K Section) there is a building that isn’t there. This building only exists when it is needed. Thanks to a processor hive called OMAC and a DemiGod named Nubia, the humans of Mashu have been able to build some otherwise impossible tech. This building harvests the will of the individual to want it to exist. In a sense, MenAce Base 0 is a building that exhibits Schrödinger’s theorem in the most tangible way. The MenAce Base 0 exists and doesn’t. And only becomes one state or the other only under observation. This is where the very first nullspace meeting room is. 

No one invented nullspace. It is simply a dimension that we cannot fully comprehend or describe yet because it lacks any thing that we can actually test. The dimension is special specifically because of its lack of tangible qualities. Though there may be other ways to reach nullspace, none is as safe as The Gates of Undoing. The Gates are Nubia’s specialty and although he didn’t invent them either, he knows the God who did. Nullspace can have objects inserted into it. It is a very stable space to test technology. And because the dimension is formless, it is a great place to hide. It has not been mapped. There are three known meeting rooms existing in nullspace. Nubia keeps the coordinates of one of those rooms to him self. 

Anubis, yes, the Egyptian one, is Nubia’s uncle. He and his brother Upuaut had visited the south of Afrika many times. After a long-winded but doomed-to-fail relationship with a Zulu matriarch named Nsimbi Yomkhathi, Upuaut and his more famous brother had left for some place only Gods go. He had also planted a seed planted in Nsimbi’s belly. This seed was Nubia. Nubia, which is not a very Zulu name, was born with the eyes of a jackal and a birthmark of a jackal’s head on his dark brown chest. Truth be told, baby Nubia was almost charcoal in colour. The birthmark was white and disappeared whenever the infant DemiGod opened his eyes. By the age of 3 years old, he could wilfully make the jackal on his chest appear and disappear. This ability, minor as it may seem, was the reason why Nubia could survive the trials awaiting him. 

Haunted by a dream involving a rotating circle of tall Maphanga bamboos and strands of DNA helices chanting nonsense verse to him, Nubia decided to take a journey up to the land of the Swazi. A ritual was held for his safety and a cow was sacrificed to the Ena. The Ena are the family spirits, servitors, etc. and are often referred to as ancestors, but the English falls short of defining Ena-ness. The Ena licked the skinned, suspended cow carcass for a night before the people of the kraal could eat it. It must have been close to the year 1301, because at the time, the stars of Orion’s belt were pulsating, blinking with warning and alarm. He should’ve heeded the warning but he needed answers to his dreams. An 18 year old Zulu boy is a stubborn, monomaniacal animal. 

He walked from Ndwedwe, the only home he had ever known, due north-east. Upon arriving at the vaguely-defined border between the Swazi and Zulu kingdoms, Nubia had no mixed feelings about which direction to go. There was a giant fixture installed on a hill. It was 12 gargantuan magnets that were rotating slowly. Each plate-shaped magnet was about 20 meters in diameter. They were piled one on top of the other with like poles facing each other. Each rotated at a different speed but there was definitely a pattern. It looked like some kind of timekeeping device. A 12-tiered colossus. An almost imperceptible hum came from the huge magnetic stones. He kept left, missing the King’s scientific research team by one day. Which was a good thing, as the King’s researchers were cruel, heartless men of science who had no special regard for any form of life unless it would further their ends. They may have taken the too dark-skinned youth and done things to him not even a DemiGod could survive. As he got closer to the magnetic monolith, 900 metres, the humming sound grew fainter but became more physically perceptible. He could feel the hairs on his skin vibrating. His skin soon followed and when he stood 200 meters away from it, his cells were dancing to the tune of the structure. 

“HE HAS ARRIVED!” 

This messaged was transmitted at a cellular level. This message was meant to be perceived, not heard. 999 9 to 9

“SHOW HIM,” the next message said. The rocky face of the hill where the monolith stood shook, yet no sound could be heard by any ears. A large rock moved at a speed Earth rocks just don’t. And in its place, a large hole was left, with an unwelcoming darkness behind it. It was not up to him to decide whether he walked in or not. He had to find out about the journey ahead of him. He was too black to be normal. He was about to step into a place that not even light would disrespect. Light, in fact, is in an existential contract to never make contact with The Gates of Undoing. The 18 year old was unaware of contracts such as these at the time. Nubia kept walking forward, bent on entering a place he could clearly see was not made for entry. It was blacker than he was. Ironically, it gained his trust with its vacuity. 60 meters closer and he felt like he weighed 20 times his usual weight. It was hard to take each consecutive step. He hadn’t been eating meat for 3 days on this pilgrimage and his body had started showing it. He kept on, but at reaching 10 meters away from the black hole in the hill, he could walk no further. He figured it out, and sat the hell down. If he was heavy, and this thing was a magnetic structure, he could let it pull him in. Force wouldn’t get him in here. Surrender. Supplication. Nubia chanted, 

“Izilungelo lungelo

Amalungelo

Kulungile 

Lula izenzo zakho 

Ngiyasinda ngithatheni mashumi nambili 

Ngi anginakho okubalulekile 

Ngimsulwa phambi kwenu 

Ku akuchazeki(11) 

MMM-HHHHHH-MMM,” He had learned the forms of the Gates. He was allowed into the darkness. He felt his needs washing away the way turpentine strips paint. He was naked, he had felt that too. His eyes were useless here. He closed them. He could not with his eyes see the jackal-headed mark on his chest. Its eyes were open and they were looking around in the abysmal dark. The head seemed confident, relaxed. 

“Si Ya Nga La,”(12) It said. He obeyed and moved towards the direction the eyes were looking. He kept his own eyes shut, firmly feeling the jackal on his chest direct him. He moved to another time and experienced a life…

The Bellow of the Beast (2022) 

“Found my self back in the belly of the beast that made me. No loathing here. Of self or other things. Might just be banking it, hoarding like those weirdos on TV. Fermenting my hate. Maybe I have overused my love in places better reserved for apathy. Maybe, like water poured on parched desert soil, the difference is not made when love overflows into people who are too deprived. It may serve better to remember that some people lack the training to handle tools that they need. Short of love, they abuse and damage it and the delivery line is harmed. This is not a fault of others. It’s that feeling. It’s similar to the knowledge that no one actually asks you to greet them. No one explicitly asks for love anymore. Easier it may be to request a nude and receive facsimiles of love thereof. What then are we when we cannot differentiate between the libidinous matters of the genitalia and the erotic matters of the heart? 

I am worse for wear in some places, better for it in others. Finding my self always experimenting with new ways of being together. The Neo-Sociology. So we may stave the loathing. I am no better than you (can you hear me?) in this twisted regard. A victim of the confusion caused by being human. The data feed of conflicting and inflicting data is almost too much. They will call me mad when they can no longer relate to or understand my words. Though, with my tongue nailed onto the roof of my mouth, English is the only thing I can use for credibility. My Zulu comes out as nonsense when digitally translated. All is lost. Even the machines are anti-Black. 

Yet here I am, in the belly of the beast that made me, looking for a way to seem relevant when the tide of neo-colonial swill congeals and begins to flow, covering all possibility of an African Nationality. I will love later. For now, I reach into the locked reservoir of loathing, and let the smell leak out first as warning. My hate and I are coming for you. You are not prepared. The kaffir, this time, is you.” 

- 

Nubia didn’t know what ‘kaffir’ was, but he kept on moving. He looked to another life, not present in this darkness, but solid, more palpable than visible. He let it take him. Surrender is what worked here. He was figuring out this space. Was it present? Was it future? When was he? 

-

The Death of a Mage(2015) 

“In case you missed it, I died a few times this year. Absolutely no one tried to save me. A few times they were worried about suicide but I’m not going out kanjalo.(13) I usually died at random, unexpected moments of mortality. I would then go to the other side. I wasn’t expecting to come back. Never. The first time, I was asleep and the Reaper of Souls ambushed me just before my dream got into gear. Have you ever stopped a train using a bare hand and brute force? That’s what I tried to do. I failed, of course. That’s how it feels to look at death in the eyes. Her eyes aren’t hollow like the mythical and popular drawings tend to show. They are a fathomless black with a tiny, almost imperceptible glimmer inside. But something tells me that the glimmer is fading. Maybe it is the light of life being snuffed out. That imperceptible (almost) glimmer might also be the places we travel to when we pass away. Who is death but a gateway, anyway? In her eyes, is all the matter in the universe, coming closer and closer towards her. It crowds together into an ocular nightmare. All this being is running away from the centre of dying but the heaviest mass curves space the most. Life cannot escape. So it gathers together in fear, like a crowd at an emergency assembly point. I once screamed my self to death. The noise was purposeful, the death was not. It is true that every time you speak, you release a little bit of your soul through your mouth. Word by word. I waited for everyone to leave first. Even the Gardener. Every middle class South Afrikan family has one. They come pre-installed with the piping. Once the coast was clear, I practised my deep breathing and long exhales. I then lay on my belly and expressed every fluid ounce of my beingness. It was loud. There were tears. The body may have pissed its self but I don’t remember.

 I died. My breath became ash and I am convinced that someone swept it up. It was thick, a dry black powder that smelled a little bit like old wood. Probably became a fashion accessory as I was taken from my passing place and pressed into a diamond. 

Inasmuch as I know of my excellence, I figure I would be a mediocre 24 carat gem. One of those bulk buys for a jewellery store in Jo’burg. Corralled by the normalising fear of mediocrity. Being anon., banal, not sharp or blunt enough. Homeless, so I never became a household name. Always aimed for just underneath fame. A place where I could acquire the spoils of attention without the drawbacks of the limelight. That blinding glare where one can’t even see themselves properly. It is likely the metamorphosis I fear. Being bent and plied, contorting and transforming into a media whore. Scares me shitless. So I try dying. Perhaps the next me can handle it. When am I, anyway? 

The challenge with being human is that, once born, one does not transform. The same process of cellular multiplication and death happens until one passes over. Why not I butterfly? Why not metas and morphosis? I have been crossing over and coming back for a rerun. 

She says I am silly. She laughs into my shoulder, calls me an idiot. The vibration permeates the body entire. Don’t think she’s seen me die. But she says things, sees things she won’t say. So the words escaping her mouth are fleeing from a hot place. A searing tundra of vision impels the words spoken into my shoulder blade. Less important is what she says. Computer says, words from mouth quantifies to 40 percent of the value. The rest is a split amongst other factors, deeds and un-deeds. How she says it. Where her is when she says. Tone as well as pitch. A dry, hot, pitch that impels words to skip to the cool ear like bare feet on beach sand. I am the pitch and she is the athlete. 

Power incarnate nibbles

My nipple and tells me 

That I say silly things. 

Who would die for this? I would. Choosing to live for it. No one ever really notices when I die, anyway. Might as well get famous. Make these people see what the spark can ignite. But in case you missed it, I lived a few times. Just this year. And so many people tried to kill me." 

-

The Voice of Blackness (+-1301) 

He returned from the second life with a deep longing inside that was snuffed out by the abyss. There was no will to care in there. A split second of a sense that he had lost something. This process was repeated 221 times, until Nubia had lived through 221 lives and deaths. Each time, he was brought back to the darkness of this place he had chosen to enter. Along the way he had given this place a name. He called it Amasango Okusula. The Gates of Undoing. He was seeing so much and he wasn’t ready for all of it. He had loved, lived, been kissed, killed and died natural deaths. He’d been to space, to France, London , Durban, Philly, Brisneyland. 2012, 2015, 2022, 1993. He’d been then. He’d been there. He’d seen so much just by closing his eyes. He was under threat and he didn’t know it yet. The body was getting heavier, and because the Gates strip you of all senses, he hadn’t paid attention that he was being pulled towards something invisible and matter-consuming. Living through 221 lives was kind of distracting, too. The threat was too close but the jackal had been formulating a plan. He said what he needs to say. Never said more. 

“Vu La Am Ehlo.”(14) 

Nubia opened his eyes. There was still nothing to see. But he saw what he needed to see. He opened his mouth too. In 222 voices he said. 

“Ngikhulule”(15)

Nothing was heard. He was getting pulled even closer, now. Faster, too. He felt like he was being stretched. He closed his eyes and let the jackal look. The future was being spread out in front of him. He could see what was coming for the next few thousand years but he needed a solution for his current dilemma. He knew he wouldn’t survive if he let this invisible black thing within the void pull him in. Whatever it was, he knew that light wouldn’t even escape this thing. Finally, it came to him. How to escape. He must be massless. He must become massless because anything of any mass could not escape whatever was pulling him in and showing him the future. This thing was stretching his human body but he didn’t care. He knew it didn’t matter. Matter doesn’t matter at all, actually. Not in that place. Reality stuttered for a moment and the jackal flipped vertically twice, almost too quick to see. Nubia found him self seated outside the Gates’ entry, but this time the big rock was back in its place, sealing the black doorway that could not be entered save through supplication. 

MenAce to Sociology(2041) 

Nubia hadn’t told Senzo and Akhala that he was to be their Guardian and guide to the nullspace meeting at MenAce Base 0. They obviously have their own transport. Nubia is now sitting in front of the sealed Gates of Undoing in Kelvin, Mashu oMusha, waiting for amaqhude to show up. He is very patient. The other members of the Xaos Dancers are waiting to attend a meeting of their own in Tugela and are waiting for one more member to arrive for the Gatecrossing. OMAC is talking to Unity 2 about the Gates because Nubia won’t explain anymore. Nubia said that telling them his origin story was enough story for today. Plus, OMAC is far better at explaining scientific things to laymen. 

“The worst part of the Gates is that they are powered by a black hole. The Gates are a vital aspect of cosmic homeostasis. The balance is kept in all places great and small. Gates, for no one really knows their real names, contain, and I mean contain as in imprison black holes so that we don’t have too many matter-swallowing entities out there. Imagine if we had 8 more Black holes out there right now. Yeah, my thoughts exactly.” 

“So,” Unity 2 says “we have a black hole container just over there-wah.” It’s not a question. OMAC can tell. 

“Yeah, Ntu(16), over there is one of only 3 known black hole containers. We know the locations of 2. Nubia over there won’t tell us where the third one is."

"Me, I’ll tell you what. I’ve seen masslessness tech before, right. It takes a kak-load of power to activate the safest Inverter. You know, your Western Cape chummies built it. Didn’t we destroy 3 mountain ranges the last time we made a massless particle? Right. Right. Now you come here, just ‘cause you’re a robot, eh, and tell me that this big ballie over here-wah became massless and escaped a black hole. I wasn’t’ born yesterjaar, OMAC, Ntu.” 

“Uyazi ukuthi yini ukufa, Unity 2?” Nubia faces him to ask this question. He continues, slowly, “Death is the removal of energy from something. Your scientists, the thin-lipped ostriches, think that energy cannot be destroyed. The massless particle is just the start of the things we are learning to create. The knowledge would not just kill you, but if I dared infect the morphogenetic field with this knowledge, I would be responsible. That is not how you are meant to die. I saw a boy exhale himself to death once. I watched him go limp as he screamed into a pillow until he stopped moving. I am neither the God of Death nor a steward to the Underworld. My heritage has taught me a lot about both. Souls have no mass. That is why a God can create them. Any entity with mass, either a particrrle or something larger, cannot go where the Gods go. Science only works in the first 4 dimensions. After that, things not only get weird, but you meet walls you didn’t know were there. I slingshot my massless self around a black hole to make it here, and that should be clue enough as to what nullspace is. Ah! Maqhude, Sanibonani. Please, izicathulo(18).” Nubia steps forward. The Xaos Dancers step aside. Senzo and Akhala are here. Back to Work .The Guardian of the Gates of Undoing gets few days off. 

===========================================

1. Zulu malt beer 

2.Hey you roosters/cocks! 

3.His voices 

4. My brother 

5. You say this one is Senzo. Senzo, you are gossiping about someone whose name should never be gossiped with. Let me come closer. 

6. Please give me 

7.Roosters, what are you drinking?

8. When last did you laugh?

9. It’s been long, rooster of the Zenzo. Thank you. You just liberated something I didn’t know was imprisoned. My work…

10. (possessive) his 

11.Rights It’s alright Stretch out your deeds I am heavy take me you 12 I have nothing of importance. I am pure before you It’s unexplainable 

12. We go this way

13. like that 

14. Open your eyes. 

15. Set me free 

16. An honorific meaning ‘God made matter.’ Similar to ‘Emman’u’el.’ 

17. Do you know what death is? 

18. Your shoes