Text
Chisom Umeh
Illustration
Zélie Durand-Khalifat
Reading Time
16 minutes
Inaugural Soilpunk
Open Call Judge’s Choice
Anulika can swear she just heard them laugh. Of course, she couldn’t have heard them laugh. They transmit their speech through radio waves meant only for their ears.
But the way they bob their shoulders and exchange glances whenever she warns them not to put their feet somewhere seems like a loud cackle to her.
They insist on wearing headgear even though the air is breathable. Anulika suspects the thing they don’t want to inhale is not the air, but the indigenous stench of her and her people.
She told Amanze, her husband, that she didn’t want to go with them, even though the settlement urgently needed expansion funding. She didn’t want to lead strangers from the Global Endangered Species Rescue through their forest to what she values most in the world. And he had said, in that unflinching tone of his that almost sounded like he was the one giving her the orders, “It is your duty as the most titled member amongst us, Chief, to take them there.”
She makes her way through brush and understory ahead of the group of scientists. Even though it is high noon, the sun barely illuminates the foliage around them, not that Anulika needs light to guide her to the cave. Over the years, she has traveled this path so many times that she can practically count the steps from the settlement and back.
She hears a noise and turns. One of them, a head or two taller than the others, crunches a patch of dirt that houses at least five species of beetles. Another one that looks like she is pregnant swings at a stick bug hanging from a dead leaf and Anulika almost loses her cool.
Are these the people I’m going to hand Nwani over to?
Text
Chisom Umeh
Illustration
Zélie Durand-Khalifat
Reading Time
16 minutes
Inaugural Soilpunk
Open Call Judge’s Choice
There was a time when the forest wasn’t this alive.
More than a century ago, they said that this area was a bustling metropolis complete with road networks and vehicles and humans who didn’t have to worry about the changing earth and could live in one settlement for their entire lives.
Until the waters came, and then the heat waves.
When the intense heat and rising CO₂ levels altered the soil composition and nutrient availability, plants and animals suffered. Many did not survive. Erosion followed, ruining the land.
It was only through the cooperation of the early villagers who came back to the land to start the settlements, and who took it upon themselves to carefully nurture the soil back to health and plant more trees, that the area slowly began to regenerate.
As a child, Anulika tickled the damp soil where worms and ants went about their business. Her father, Maazi Okelonye, taught her that seeing earthworms after a small rain was a sign that the soil was fertile. He called the land Ani, and to him, it was a living, breathing thing.
He called the land Ani, and to him, it was a living, breathing thing.Ani was the mother of the earth in Igbo spirituality. All life sprung from her body. Plants grew from the dirt and returned to it when they died. Anything that didn’t follow this order was an anomaly. Dead humans who weren’t buried became malevolent spirits or Mmuo Ojoo, as the children called them.
The other villagers said that the people’s ghosts still lingered in the forests that reclaimed their cities many decades later. As Igbo, since they weren’t given proper burials, their souls were bound to walk the world of the living the rest of their days, seeking redemption.
Taking care of the soil was everyone’s business, and Maazi Okelonye, as one of the community’s chiefs, made sure no one was exempt from the work. In this way, the people maintained a spiritual connection with their forebears, continuing their restorative work and teaching it to their children.
“Look at the topsoil, Anuli,” he’d often say. “That’s how you find out if Ani’s healthy enough to carry what you intend to plant. Does she have water? If she does, how much?” So, she went on her hands and knees to investigate. To poke at this massive organism to see how it responded.
Anulika loved every bit of it. She enjoyed introducing organic matter into the dark soil and seeing the effects on the settlement’s farm lands. She loved the smell of the earth in her nostrils. She knew that even though high levels of calcium could contribute to very compact soil, earthworms were also attracted to it. Magnesium was necessary for photosynthesis, and iron ensured chlorophyll development.
She spent so much time covered in dirt that when she wandered back to the settlement and passed the center square where her father and fellow chiefs held court, the other chiefs would shake their heads and ask if she’d ever be fit to organize her younger brothers, let alone take her own title as chief.
But young Anulika knew where one forest island stopped and another began, and with her drones scattering above the overstories and forest canopies, she could map the entirety of the Enugu hills. She could see the boundaries of the vegetation and the barren lands that spread out across.
Anulika’s father, though he was a traditional chief, had raised her to be a practical child. “Try to concentrate only on things you can control,” he often said. Anulika had seen the magic of the soil and its abilities to regenerate plants and create food; she rarely gave much thought to the spiritual.
One afternoon, while she was exploring the forest, her eyes fell on a patch of grass that seemed to be moving. She knew at once that something alive was there. She had walked this path many times in her eleven years of life but never seen anything like it before. The animal was the size of a large human baby and had white fur dotted with forest green spots. Its head was round as a coconut with pointy ears sticking from the sides, one white and the other green. Its eyes were two dark buttons and the bridge of its nose terminated at a small green snout. It rolled around in a pile of leaves, oblivious to her.
Where did you come from?
Her heart pounding in her chest, Anulika inched closer, her feet barely ruffling the leaves that scattered the forest floor. One foot after the other. She didn’t want to scare it off, but if it was aware of her presence, it wasn’t bothered. When she came close enough, she got on one knee and stared at it. It was lying belly up, arms lazily making arcs in the leaves.
Beads of sweat had gathered on Anulika’s forehead despite the cool air. She stayed still for a moment, contemplating her next move. An image of the animal ripping her apart and leaving her lifeless body sprawled on the forest floor for hours before anyone would find her registered in her mind and she instantly shuddered. She knew she should run— but her curiosity got the better of her. Her hand shaking, she reached out to touch its belly, letting her fingers sink into the rich, warm coat. It stilled itself. She stroked back and forth, and the animal relaxed, its limbs no longer moving by its sides.
A fleck of light that Anulika almost mistook for dappled sun began rising from beneath its fur, glowing and expanding outward, and she jumped to her feet. Anulika pressed her palms into her eyes. When she looked again, the light was still there, pulsing with a brilliant intensity.
She fled the forest and ran all the way home. When she got back to the settlement and told the other children what she had seen, they said she had finally encountered Mmuo Ojoo and she was lucky to have escaped with her life.
When Anulika made it back to her yard, her mother locked her indoors. But when Maazi Okelonye heard, he came to her, a softness in his eyes and a calmness to his voice. “Anuli,” he said, “take me to where you saw this thing.”
“Anuli,” he said, “take me to where you saw this thing.”
Anulika and the GESR pass by a looming metal tower in an advanced stage of rust. Creeping tendrils of vines stretch over the walls, and tree branches poke out of the openings at the top of the tower.
As they walk past, Anulika glances at the top floor, where Maazi Okelonye’s laboratories were once housed.
Maazi Okelonye had been a lifelong adventurer. He was one of the first people to leave the settlement to explore the outside world. He regaled little Anulika with stories of how, before she was born, he traveled to the islands that used to be called the Caribbean. He told her how they had developed their coral reefs into gargantuan mega structures, alive and breathing above the risen waters, even though the heatwaves dealt them what should have been deathly blows mere decades before.
When he returned from his travels, he brought a contingent of scientists and engineers who built the tower and several other structures. But, after a year of serious work, they packed up and left. Anulika’s father stopped visiting the tower or talking about his work with anyone. As a child, she only knew Maazi Okelonye in his chiefly Ozo attire, not a scientist’s lab coat.
Now, many years later, Anulika can still see the skeletons of the facility they’d built reaching out over tangled trees. She and the outsiders have been making their way through the forest for half an hour, approaching the mouth of the cave where Nwani resides. They are going to take him back with them, these people from the GESR. Even though she has long known this day would come, she still isn’t ready for it.
A couple of months after she took her father to the spot where she had found the animal, all the other children in the settlement and most of the older folks still believed the animal to be Mmuo Ojoo. When her father’s eyes first fell on him where he lay on the grass, the chief stood bewildered for a few seconds. Then he turned to Anulika and said, “Thank you, my daughter. This may be the answer to our prayers.”
Unfortunately, not everyone else shared his optimism. Maazi Okelonye tried to get the other chiefs to understand why he cared for the animal, but they reminded him of how much time he had invested in previous scientific endeavors and yet achieved little. “Let us focus more on the work of our hands,” they said. “The soil and plants we cultivate and have learned to trust. Don’t put this thing you found above our community.”
Determined to prove them wrong, Anulika and her father spent most of their time with the animal, observing and feeding him, or in the tower laboratory, analyzing their findings. Maazi Okelonye took down long notes. He told Anulika that the animal was a Pelmo, a kind of bear indigenous to this part of the world. They attempted to race him through the forest and test his tree-climbing abilities by luring him up with his favorite fruits. If he felt interested enough in whatever they dangled before him, he made an effort to reach. But most times he gave up the chase when it proved too taxing and instead laid on his back gazing at the spaces from which sunlight fell through the trees.
They discovered that his feces was extremely fertile. Vibrant plants sprung from where he relieved himself. Maazi Okelonye named him Nwani, meaning child of the soil. Ani was alive, and now she was healthy enough to provide offspring.
Maazi Okelonye named him Nwani, meaning child of the soil. Ani was alive, and now she was healthy enough to provide offspring.Maazi Okelonye observed that Nwani’s luminescence appeared when he was urinating. Something about water leaving his body activated the genes that made him glow.
“But how does he do it?” Anulika asked.
She hadn’t figured out how her father found the time to be in the dirt with her, playing with a strange animal that everyone called an evil spirit rather than settling disputes with his chiefs or teaching calculus in her school.
It could be because he just wanted to bond with his daughter. But at eleven, Anulika was old enough to be sure that if he was here, then there was a strong reason that had nothing to do with her. So when she asked how Nwani did the light thing, she was also asking how Maazi Okelonye was here, too.
They were in the tower that late afternoon, her father peeping into a microscope and observing microbes in a petri dish, Anulika watching him closely from the edge of the metal table. The windows of the facility, tinted by moss and algae, were illuminated by the waning sun filtering into the room.
Maazi Okelonye was without his chief attire, having swapped his Ozo feathered cap for a striped red and white one that fell to the side of his face, and his brass plate for a simple cotton shirt.
Anulika found it difficult to merge the traditional title holder and the scientist into one image. The first was rigid, commanding, influential. The second was carefree, patient, and affable.
“The question you also want to ask is why he lights up,” Maazi Okelonye said, looking away from the microscope and fixing his gaze on Anulika. “Not just how.” He raised his brows above his spectacles as if inviting her to confirm his assumption. She nodded her head.
“The question you also want to ask is why he lights up,” Maazi Okelonye said. “Not just how.”“Okay,” he said, putting away his pen and taking off his glasses. He patted his legs, and she climbed onto his lap. “Like you know, years ago, before you were born, the community believed so much in me that they permitted me to go work at faraway places like the Caribbean and Pacific. Remember those super coral reefs I told you about?”
“Yes,” Anulika said, eyes bright.
“You need to see them. Tiny animals with plants living in their cells. A space as small as your fist is home to millions of microscopic species.”
“Woah,” she said, making a fist and opening it.
Maazi Okelonye nodded. “And this thing is bigger than the entire Enugu Hills.”
“Wow, Papa! Is that even possible?”
“Of course, Anuli. There are so many possibilities beyond this little world you know,” he said, patting her on the head. “Now, we discovered the coral was thriving despite the harsh conditions because it had developed a kind of heat resistance.”
“It had?”
“Yes.”
He explained that nearly two centuries ago, scientists had determined the climate was changing and would soon wreak havoc for all living beings.
Coral reefs were already feeling the impact, suffering greatly from changing water temperatures and acidic seas. However, a group of researchers had found that despite the onslaught, a small percentage of reefs were thriving. After sequencing the genome of these reefs, the scientists discovered a mutation that conferred upon them this advantage. Health amidst decay. After isolating these genes, they were able to seed enough reefs with them that within decades, new reefs grew that were better able to withstand climate change.
Two hundred years later, it worked. Coral reefs around the world were some of the most resilient ecosystems in the face of climatic havoc. Within those ecosystems, Maazi Okelonye and the researchers he worked with also identified bioluminescent jellyfish that could survive almost any conditions the changing earth threw at them—high temperatures or acidic waters.
Maazi Okelonye observed that symbiosis with the corals over the years had given the jellyfish regenerative qualities that ensured their resilience in the face of extreme stress.
As the project in the Caribbean came to a close, Maazi Okelonye managed to convince the researchers to come over to the Enugu Hills. There were plants and animals in these forests that he believed could acquire regenerative attributes if carefully injected with the glowing jellyfish genes.
“Nothing we tried worked,” Maazi Okelonye said, rubbing his eyes. He was just her father in these moments, not a scientist or high chieftain. He was a man telling the humbling story of his life to his daughter. “Many of the plants and trees you see outside were part of our experiment. Many grew up carrying these modified genes. But they have no special qualities. They’re all just regular trees, like everyone had been telling me.”
“Why didn’t it work?”Anulika asked, looking up at her father, whose face was now partly hidden in shadow.
“Because some things in life don’t just go as you expect, Anuli. And sometimes you need patience. The people I worked with were impatient, so they left. And I was impatient too, eager to see my ideas succeed. The disappointment broke me, and I almost gave up. I began to feel like I had been chasing shadows instead of listening to the traditional beliefs of my people.” He gestured around the room. “Held on to all this for some years until I got my titles.” Then he paused for a while, as though transported back to those years when the facility was still pristine, the walls gleaming with promise.
“Then you and Nwani came along and proved to me,” he continued, “that sometimes it is the job of the parent to find a land, nurture it, and plant trees, and it is the job of their children to sit in the shade of those trees.”
Sometimes it is the job of the parent to find a land, nurture it, and plant trees, and it is the job of their children to sit in the shade of those trees.“And eat their fruits, too,” Anulika said, smiling.
“Yes, Anuli. I dumped what was left of our project into the soil to serve as fertilizer and forgot about it. Years later, plants have grown, and Nwani, an offspring of one of the species we experimented on, fed on them. And this activated his genes.”
“Wow,” Anulika said, breathless. Even though she didn’t believe the talk of Mmuo Ojoo, the question of Nwani’s origin had been burning at the back of her mind. But now, she was confident that not only was Nwani not a spirit, he was not the least malevolent.
Anulika and her father spent another year on the Nwani Project. They passed most of their time in the forest, away from life in the camp. Maazi Okelonye slipped into a sort of obsession, working in the lab for hours upon end, writing equations and testing new theories. Anulika had never seen him put anything before his duties as Chief, but since the project began, he seemed to forget that part of himself.
When he eventually returned to the settlement, the villagers didn’t want him back.
An emergency meeting was called, and the other chiefs told him that his own people felt abandoned for a meaningless project.
“We’re trying to see if we can plug the animal’s genes into other species and quicken the effects so that they could be seen within the specimen’s lifetime,” he tried to explain.
They demanded he abandon the project.
“Can’t you see that I have to see this through, for the good of the people?”
But they were fed up. He was stripped of his Ozo titles and asked to leave the settlement.
This broke Maazi Okelonye’s heart. He left the settlement again, digging deeper into the project and working tirelessly in pursuit of a breakthrough. He needed to prove to himself that he wasn’t crazy for choosing this path and believing that Nwani was a gift from Ani. He needed to show his people that they were wrong to not believe in him and Nwani.
A year later, just months after Anulika’s twelfth birthday, he came back to the settlement with a result.
Nwani’s bodily fluids and fecal matter, when processed, bore healing properties. When her father arrived back at camp, he headed straight for the circle of chiefs to demonstrate what he had worked on. The first trial reversed the harm done to a boy who had been in a fire and was badly burned. Maazi Okelonye had them bring him out and lay him on a mat. Then, before the watchful eyes of the villagers and chiefs, he applied Nwani’s processed waste carefully on the boy’s seared body.
When skin regenerated over the dead flesh, the people gasped in collective disbelief. They saw the healing potential within the thing they once called Mmuo Ojoo. Of course, he wasn’t evil anymore, but was Nwani, child of the soil, the gift sent by the ancestors to bless them.
The people gasped in collective disbelief. They saw the healing potential within the thing they once called Mmuo Ojoo.In time, neighboring settlements too heard word of Nwani.
Now they all wanted Maazi Okelonye to save their dying niece or their shriveled grandfather. He was reinstated as chief and in the eyes of the people, could have been elevated to the realm of the gods.
But when Maazi Okelonye himself became sick, he refused to take Nwani’s cure.
They’ve reached the mouth of Nwani’s cave, all six of them. Despite the intensity of the sun falling through the leaves, Anulika can tell from the smell of the air that it will rain in a couple of hours.
When she whistles and Nwani emerges, his mass of white and green fur taking up half the cave’s mouth, she finds herself close to tears. Besides Amanze, no one here can understand her attachment to this beast; they would only see an animal and a woman being dramatic about parting ways, none of the tangled connections that run beneath. She strokes his fur and brings her face to touch his snout.
As Maazi Okelonye lay on his deathbed, alone in the forest with Nwani and Anulika, her tear-filled eyes begging him to take the cure, he shook his head slowly.
“I can’t do it, Anuli. If I stay, they’ll never let Nwani out of the village. They believe you can’t do what I do, so if I’m gone, they’ll leave him alone, and you can finish the work we started. You need him.”
“But I need you too.”
“The world needs him.”
“I don’t care about the world. Let’s take him and run away from here, papa,” she cried. “Just the three of us.”
“I’ve run too much for one lifetime, Anuli. I’m at the right place now. On Ani’s soil.”
“I’m at the right place now. On Ani’s soil.”Anulika let all the tears in the world come through her that night. She felt like her father was on a river bank, yet chose to wash his hands with spittle. Or worse still, didn’t wash his hands at all. It made no sense, yet it made all the sense in the world.
“You must use the radio the way I showed you,” he said, “to contact GESR. They lost faith and abandoned the Enugu Hills before, but they are the only way to send what we’ve discovered here to the outside. Unlike our people, they’ll keep Nwani safe. Plus, he wouldn’t find a mate here, and he needs to make offspring. I’ve put everything down in my journal.”
Anulika was barely listening, her heavy heart pounding. She could hardly believe her ears; how could he trust that the same people who abandoned his work after one year, leaving the laboratories to rust, would truly take care of Nwani?
“Promise me you’ll do this, Anuli. Promise me.”
She nodded, unable to form words in her mouth.
She looks at Nwani now, thirteen years since Maazi Okelonye’s passing, and can’t help feeling like she failed to keep her promise. She couldn’t send him away. Not when he was the only connection she had with Papa.
