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  “Hang on,” said Elizabeth Kokoro. “Black-Power was a hero in his time. He was recognised all over the world. He addressed the United Nations. He saved millions from natural disasters, accidents, and criminals such as yourself. How can you justify your statement?”

  “Misdirection,” said Tope.

  “What are you talking about?” asked Black-Power.

  “We’ve had this discussion already,” said Tope. “You were too thick then and you’re too thick now. You prance about in your cape and mask, a copy of your colonial masters’ masks by the way, not drawing inspiration from the African tradition of masking. You fly around in bright colours, puffing up your chest, chasing what? Drug dealers, bank robbers, cannabis cultivators? A volcano goes off and Black-Power is there to save the day. Whoopie. What did you do that was of any long-standing significance? Not one thing. What did you do for social justice? Did you change the injustices that create the petty crime that you policed? No. Do you remember our discussions about Idi Amin? The Congo? Black-Power do you remember me telling you that Murtala Mohammed would probably be assassinated in 1976? What about Kapuuo in 1978?”

  “What are you trying to say?” asked Black-Power. He did not sound so certain.

  “I’m saying that you’re not a hero. You were a tool of the status quo government systems. You kept the poor people in line and turned a blind eye to the real offenders. You allowed the CIA to operate with impunity throughout the continent.”

  “You could have stopped those same things.” Black-Power sounded defensive now.

  “I was not and am not a hero. I never claimed to be.”

  “I didn’t know if-”

  “Motherfucker, don’t you dare. You knew. You knew because I told you.”

  “Do not make me come over there, Pan-African.”

  The edge in his voice made Tope’s momentum dry up and he could not think of anything to say.

  Elizabeth recovered. “Black-Power, these are serious accusations. Do you have any comment? Any mitigating factors?”

  “I have a question for the Pan-African.”

  “I don’t go by that name anymore.”

  “Nevertheless, I have a question.”

  “Proceed,” said Elizabeth.

  “How much are you being paid to appear on television?”

  “I-” Tope started.

  “That information is confidential, Black-Power. He signed a contract of non-disclosure.” Elizabeth uncrossed and crossed her legs.

  “I understand. But he is getting paid, no? Is this an instance of crime finally paying off? You criticise my record, but you spent your entire career trying to accumulate money. Without success, I should add. I was always there to beat you down.”

  “Except one time,” said Tope.

  “How’s the arm?”

  “How’s your fucking chest?”

  “Language, gentlemen. There are children listening,” said Elizabeth. “I have a question for both of you. Biohazard344 wants to know which of you is more powerful.”

  “It depends,” they said in unison.

  “What does that mean?” asked Elizabeth.

  “It means if we fly to the moon and fight we could crack it in two and still not know who is more powerful,” said Black-Power.

  “Speak for yourself. On the moon I would kill you,” said Tope.

  “Fool, you don’t even have my permission to dream or fantasise about such a fight.”

  Elizabeth clapped her hands. “Wow! Exciting stuff. Black-Power and the Pan-African, at each other’s throats again. Stay tuned: we’ll be back after these commercials. If you can’t wait log on to our website for behind-the-scenes streaming content.”

  The producer said something and they were all given five minutes off air. Elizabeth came straight for him.

  “That stuff you said, was any of it true?” she asked.

  She wore Chanel, but he didn’t think it suited her.

  “All of it was true.”

  “Can you prove it?”

  “No. Maybe. I think he was employed by the South African government at some point. I have some information that he draws a pension, but it’s buried deep.”

  “You’re quite the dark horse, aren’t you? I feel we may never really know everything about the Pan-African or his motives.” She flicked a hair strand and turned away.

  Was she flirting with him?

  4

  2015

  Cape Town

  Detective Sipho Cele was breathing heavily. No, he must remember, Black-Power was breathing heavily, even though his small fracas with the drug gang was receding into the history of the day.

  His PC had moved on, circulating others news from Africa in a torrent of chaotic themes; crime, pleasure, sport, business—and money, always money, as the African economic giant awoke slowly, starting to face off the Chinese and the fading Yanks.

  But she hadn’t moved.

  Gradually, he became aware of her small but focused presence. Thembeka, his assistant, breathing heavily at his side too—he turned to look at her.

  “Was any of that true?”

  “No,” he said, “They’re just lies from a master criminal of the past. Pan-African’s super-powers, formidable though they are, don’t even come close to the devious sharpness of his deluded brain.”

  She smiled, but he could see she didn’t quite believe him.

  The history of the day was just a flicker of moth wings to him.

  But the deeper history, well, Pan-African had reminded him of what he was ever avoiding.

  Time and accountability.

  1961

  KwaMashu, South Africa

  Now that was a bad year.

  Actually, that was an esabeka year, a year so bad it gave him nightmares still.

  The year opened gently, with no hint of the tremors and traumas to come. But there were rumblings in the north and—although he was growing comfortable in his Native Affairs job as a clerk in kwaMashu, near Durban—he finally decided that with great power, comes at least some small accountability.

  There was a good man—an important man—in trouble, and he needed help.

  A new black president, democratically elected as the Continent had started to sweep its way free from former colonial masters. There had not been enough sweeping in this country up north though, where the Belgians and the Yanks remained in place conniving to keep their source of uranium and precious minerals intact for their Frigid Global War.

  The Congo Crisis, they called it, capturing the first democratic president of that country.

  The president’s words rolled across the subsequent decades: “...what we wanted for our country—its right to an honourable life, to perfect dignity, to independence with no restrictions—was never wanted by Belgian colonialism and its Western allies...”

  So it was with that Gatsha Mchunu—as he called himself then—took leave and headed north. He moved rapidly, hanging on the backs of trains, leaping across borders at night with great strides that took him hundreds of feet into the air.

  His face was masked; his body encased in a plain black body-suit for night time camouflage.

  Black-Power, he thought, I shall call myself Black-Power.

  He looked down at his body and thought again, Black-Power.

  And so, at last, Black-Power arrived in Katanga province of the newly independent Congolese Republic.

  Elizabethville, generally a quiet and sleepy copper town he’d heard, was humming with activity and military convoys moving in and out. He saw some white faces, overheard some South African accents and knew there were mercenaries and probably South African military, as well as Katangese secessionist forces about.

  By this time he was dressed in a poor, ill-fitting jacket and trousers, scuffed shoes, and a hat crammed down on his broad head. Masks would only attract unnecessary attention.

  He was given wary directions to the airport by a few locals, who appeared to mistrust both his accent and his size.

  The airpor
t was cordoned off, so he waited for night, in nearby bushes. Wet from a sudden furious burst of late afternoon warm rain, he changed out of his sodden attire.

  Masked, suited and booted, he waited.

  A few distant flashes of lightning lit up the dull runway.

  The gods must be about.

  It was then that he saw a plane had already landed.

  There was no more time to wait.

  He hurtled over the fence, bounded once on the tarmac and smashed through the back door of the plane.

  It was a small plane, but he could smell blood on board.

  Only one man stood facing him, looking startled and bemused. A white man, dressed in pilot overalls, who spoke in French.

  “What do you want?” The man looked wan and tired, as if he had been ill recently.

  “Where is he?”

  The pilot shrugged, “They have taken him somewhere, I don’t know...”

  Black-Power looked outside, his gaze scanning the horizon for movement. There was a flicker in the distance, a jeep heading off road.

  Night fell fast in this area of the world.

  He stepped outside, crouched and leapt. In one furious bound, he was soaring over the perimeter fence.

  A few troops below opened fire on him, bullets whistling past in the deepening gloom.

  As he soared through the air, he watched.

  The jeep was parked by a ramshackle house, roof crumbling in disrepair.

  He was coming back to earth.

  Gunshots.

  Within the house.

  He crashed through the roof and landed, boots buckling wooden floorboards beneath him.

  He could smell death.

  Warm and recent death.

  Patrice Lumumba lay, broken by boots and bullets, crumpled on his back and bayoneted too, just for good measure.

  The other men in the room recoiled as dust and roof debris continued to cascade down.

  Black-Power took the scene in, with a cool and gathering rage.

  The group were Belgians and Katangese, although they also had the background stench of the CIA hovering about them. Two other men lay dead nearby. The man holding the bloodied bayonet was a Katangese government official he vaguely knew.

  “...They have corrupted some of our countrymen; they have bought others; they have done their part to distort the truth and defile our independence. What else can I say? That whether dead or alive, free or in prison by orders of the colonialists, it is not my person that is important...”

  With one step forward, Black-Power had snapped the man’s neck with a flick of the fingers on his right hand.

  He caught the dropped rifle and in one smooth motion had slung the bayonet through the torso of a Belgian official, one who had looked the most senior, perhaps even in charge.

  The man coughed bright and bubbling blood.

  No one moved, stunned and frozen in disbelief.

  Without a word, Black-Power stooped and cradled the dead President Patrice Lumumba in his arms.

  “...Neither brutal assaults, nor cruel mistreatment, nor torture have ever led me to beg for mercy, for I prefer to die with my head held high, unshakeable faith and the greatest confidence in the destiny of my country, rather than live in slavery and contempt for sacred principles.”

  With a scream of fury, Black-Power crashed through the roof again, hurtling skywards, wishing he could fly away, far away, from this chaotic, damaged Earth.

  Instead, though, he finally found and secretly gave the president’s body to his widow, who was grief-faced and quiet, dry of tears, having already received his last words:

  “My beloved companion: I write you these words not knowing whether you will receive them, when you will receive them; and whether I will still be alive when you read them...

  Do not weep for me, my companion; I know that my country, now suffering so much, will be able to defend its independence and its freedom. Long live the Congo! Long live Africa!

  - Patrice”

  Nineteen Sixty One, yes, now that was indeed a terrible year. The Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa had followed in March; the white apartheid State of South Africa withdrew from the Commonwealth and called itself a Republic at the end of May; the UN Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold—he secretly knew—had indeed been shot down in skies that were to become Zambian just three years later, but no, he would not let the litany of that dreadful year go on and on and on.

  “...History will one day have its say; it will not be the history that is taught in the United Nations, Washington, Paris or Brussels, however, but the history taught in the countries that have rid themselves of colonialism and its puppets. Africa will write its own history and both north and south of the Sahara it will be a history full of glory and dignity...” (Lumumba, Patrice, 1961)

  2015

  Cape Town

  How he hated history and Pan-African’s reminders of how little he had changed the course of political events within Africa.

  What had Pan-African done, apart from grow fat on his crime?

  But Black-Power knew his was an old justification, his fear that taking sides so sharply would end up making the political bloodshed even greater. He had dreaded the sense that he might end up carrying so much more directly the vast weight of a multitude of dead souls, who might have followed him into an ensuing and even greater conflagration.

  So instead he had straddled ideological fences through the following decades, concentrating on protecting the innocent from the smaller struggles of crime and the moral simplicities of natural disasters.

  But in the process, he had increasingly grown more doubtful of his own mission and sense of self.

  The Saharan Battle in the late seventies had been the final straw—broken in body more than he would have liked to admit, he had disappeared into retirement.

  Until now.

  “Black-Power?” Thembeka’s touch on his arm was gentle, querying.

  He realised with a start he had been slumped in his chair, brooding, lost in a year that had stripped his hopes and dreams away.

  He smiled at her. “We have a drug-factory to break up, don’t we?”

  She grinned back at him and his heart lifted.

  He stood up, old aches reminding him of history yet again. “Pan-African,” he swore to himself, “next time I will finish you once and for all!”

  5

  2015

  Lagos, Nigeria

  The show was over. It fizzled out after the telephone fireworks with Black-Power, but Elizabeth seemed pleased. She kept taking phone calls and was unable to keep a smile off her face. Tope presumed her friends and co-workers were congratulating her. He sat in the same chair as technicians dismantled the set. They looked bored, as if they had done it a million times. A few people brought him items to autograph; a Wanted poster, an old newspaper article, a 1977 Black-Power comic showing him and Tope locked in combat with a caption that read ‘THIS TIME... TO THE DEATH!’ He smiled when he signed that.

  “Nostalgia?” asked Elizabeth. She was at his elbow and he hadn’t noticed her walk up.

  “No, not really. Just amusement. These comics were propaganda tools.”

  “Haba! Now you’re being completely paranoid. The comics were harmless fun aimed at children. At most they can be said to be evil for perpetuating bad art and repetitive, clichéd storylines with simplistic moral lessons.” She took the comic, with its yellowed paper and handed it to the engineer, then looked up into Tope’s eyes.

  “You’re a journalist, Miss Kokoro-”

  “Call me Elizabeth.”

  “Elizabeth. You’re a journalist. I expect better. Examine the facts. I did.” He halted the engineer and took the comic back. He flipped open the first page and showed Elizabeth the copyright strip at the bottom. “See this? MKD Press. Do you know what that is?”

  “No.”

  “I checked.” Tope dismissed the engineer. “MKD Press had no local offices. The copies of Black-Power comic were shipped in regularly
in large quantities every Thursday from England. MKD Press did have a London office, but no association with Fleet Street or the United Kingdom press establishment. I followed the money. It led to Langley, to the CIA. MKD Press was generated out of Project MKDelta. Do you know what that is?”

  “No, I’ve never heard of it.”

  “Have you heard of MKUltra?”

  “Yes, mind control experiments that the CIA ran in the sixties and early seventies? Trying to create Manchurian Candidates, perfect assassins, human automata.”

  “Exactly. Only MKUltra was domestic, within the United States. MKDelta was the same program, but for foreign countries. They didn’t even try to hide the association much because they didn’t think anybody would look into their under-priced children’s comics.”

  “What made you suspicious?”

  “The details of the storylines were similar to encounters that Black-Power and I had. Watered down, simplified, but with facts that only he or I could know. Black-Power got his abilities from aliens and I got mine when I was struck by lightning as a child. Bullshit. Then I found what I suspected to be subliminal messages in the dialogue. I analysed the paper, the print, the ink, even the poses and body language of the characters. Many of the issues were impregnated with chemicals that might be classified as mind-altering. The comics were not harmless fun, Elizabeth.”

  “I think I need to know more,” said Elizabeth. “Do you have time for a drink?”

  “I do.”

  “Give me some minutes. I’ll meet you at reception when I’ve taken off this.”

  “You look quite attractive in that outfit.”

  She waved this away. “Stagecraft. I’m better in my own clothes.”

  While he waited Bank came up to him. The young man had developed a habit of walking with his face glued to his tablet, assuming he knew where he was going.

  “Bank, put that thing away,” said Tope.

  “The money is in your account,” said Bank. “These people keep their promises at least.”

  “That’s reassuring.”

  “Shall we go home?”

  “There’s no hurry. Find us a hotel and you can take the rest of the night off.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “See the sights.”

  “You’re lying.”