Nnedi Okorafor (www.nnedi.com) is a novelist of Nigerian descent who lives in the Chicago suburbs with her daughter; she is a professor of Creative Writing at Chicago State University. She is known for weaving African culture into creative evocative settings and memorable characters. In a profile of Nnedi’s work titled, “Weapons of Mass Creation,” The New York Times called Nnedi’s imagination “stunning.” Her novels include Who Fears Death (winner of the 2011 World Fantasy Award for Best Novel), Akata Witch Witch (a 2011 Amazon.com Best Book of the Year), Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature), and The Shadow Speaker (winner of the Carl Brandon Society Parallax Award). She’s also written one children’s book titled Long Juju Man (winner of the Macmillan Writer’s Prize for Africa). Her chapter book, Iridessa and the Secret of the Never Mine (Disney Press), is scheduled for release in 2012.
“Wahala” was published in the original anthology Living on Mars, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Set in the Sahara desert in a post-apocalyptic future, local people, colonists, are returning in a ship from Mars, as if from the past. Several mutant humans await their arrival. The protagonist is a plucky telepathic teenage Nigerian girl reminiscent of characters in Zenna Henderson’s stories of The People.
I wasn’t lost. I wanted to cross “The Frying Pan of the World, Where Hell Meets Earth.” I was fighting my way through this part of the Sahara on purpose. I needed to prove to my parents that I could do it. That I, their sixteen-year-old abomination of a daughter, could survive in a place where many people died. My parents believed I was meant to die easily because I shouldn’t have been born in the first place. If I survived, it would prove to them wrong.
The sun was going down and the “frying pan” was thankfully cooling. Plantain, my camel, was walking at her usual steady pace. We’d left Jos three days ago and we were still days from our destination, Agadez. I’d traveled the desert many times … well, with my parents, though, and not here. I was okay, for now.
I was staring at the small screen of my e-legba, trying to forget the fact that I might have made a terrible mistake in running away and coming out here. It was picking up the only netcast available in the region, Naija News.
“Breaking News! Breaking News, o!” a sweating newscaster said in English. He stared into the camera with bulging eyes. He was wearing an ill-fitting Western-style suit. It was obviously the reason for his profuse sweating.
I chuckled. Everything on Naija News was “breaking news”. Drama was the bread and butter of Nigerians. Even our news was suspenseful and theatrical. It was why our movies were the best and our government was the worst. I laughed. I missed home.
“Make sure you listen to what I am about to say, o! Then turn to those beside you and tell them! Tell everybody,” the man stressed. Spit flew from his mouth, hitting the camera lens as he spoke. He wiped his brow with a white handkerchief. I could see individual beads of sweat forming on his forehead. “This is no laughing matter, o!”
“Let me guess,” I muttered. “Another farmer! has lost his flock of goats in a spontaneous forest. Someone’s house! is infested with a sparkling lizard. Another boy! turned into a giant yam.” I smiled, ignoring my chapped lips. This kind of “breaking news” happened all the time.
“It’s heading this way right now!” the anchorman said. He clumsily held the microphone and wiped his brow again. He switched to Igbo. “This is utterly unbelievable!”
I laughed loudly. So unprofessional! How many of his viewers would understand that?
He coughed, smiled sheepishly, and switched back to English. “A space shuttle carrying people from the Mars Colony is going to land in the Sahara, o! These people had been on a spacecraft for months! Cooped up like chicken! It landed on the moon. From there they got on to the space shuttle to return to Earth. Communication with the shuttle has been spotty but we know where it will land.” He moved closer to the camera, turned his head to the side, and opened his eyes wider. “If you encounter it, do not approach. Biko nu, stay away! Help will arrive. Officials will be there in two or three days! Don’t—”
The picture distorted and the sound cut off. From far off came a deep boom! I felt the vibration in my chest, like a huge talking drum. Plantain growled. “Shh.” I patted her hump. “Relax.”
She stopped and I jumped off, looking to the south. I saw nothing but sky and sand for miles. A startled desert fox family was running across the sand about two miles away. I looked into the sky with my sharp eyes. There. About fifteen miles away.
“Oh,” I whispered.
Within seconds, it zoomed overhead like a giant white eagle. Plantain groaned loudly as she dropped to the sand. I knelt beside her, craning my head and shielding my eyes from the dust it whipped up. It was flying so low that I could have hit it with a stone. This was the first flying aircraft I’d ever seen. I watched it land a few miles away, sliding to a stop in the sand.
It was a snap judgment, though it came from deep within me. “Let’s go see!” I said to my camel, climbing on. “Before all the ambulances, government officials, technicians, and journalists show up!” I was in the middle of nowhere. It really would be days before anyone got here. I couldn’t believe my luck. People from Mars!
As we headed there, I felt a pinch of embarrassment. I wondered if those onboard knew what we had done to ourselves here on Earth while they were away. People had been living on Mars for decades before the Great Change. We should have been super advanced like the people in those old science fiction books, jumping from planet to planet, that sort of thing. Instead we had destroyed the Earth because of stupid politics and misunderstandings.
I wanted to go inside the shuttle and breathe its trapped air. After so many years, that air wouldn’t be Earth air. I am a shadow speaker. My large catlike eyes, my “reading” abilities, they’re extraordinary, but they are all because of the Great Change, aka stupid human error. I’m as tainted by nuclear and peace bombs as one can get. I was born this way. But those on that ship hadn’t been here when it happened. They were untouched. I wanted to see and touch them. And I wanted to read them.
Some of them were probably born on Mars. What had it been, over forty years since anyone last heard from the colonies?
“Faster, Plantain!” I shouted, laughing.
“I don’t believe this,” I muttered, my heart sinking.
Already, a small spontaneous forest had sprung up around the shuttle, enshrouding it with palm trees, bushes, and a small pond to its left. Vines had even begun to creep up the sides of the shuttle. I guess this was the Earth’s way of welcoming it home. The sun was now completely down and there were several sunflowers opening up near the bottom of the ship.
Plantain slowed her stride when we reached the trees. An owl hooted and crickets and katydids sang. An instant oasis in the middle of the Sahara. Yet another result of human idiocy. I’d known spontaneous forests all my life, but their spontaneity and inappropriateness always bothered me. It wasn’t hard to imagine a time when this
