The Small Man Thinks Inside The Box

‘THE PROBLEM OF AFRICA IS POVERTY,’ is what the whole world said. It was everywhere: on posters, on the radio, on television, and on the internet. It was known; Africans were a bunch of hungry people who fought because they were hungry and gave each other AIDS because they were too poor to practice safe, healthy and white sex.

It was known.

If only someone had created some sort of epic brain-wave device that broadcast Chimamanda Adichie’s TED talk (‘The Danger of a Single Story’) into the brains of everyone who thought Africa was made up of spindly-legged men and women riding elephants into the sunset of a strategically placed savanna, that ridiculous stereotype would have been taken care of.

Unfortunately, no one created such a device. Instead, someone created a device which was infinitely different but ultimately linked to the African narrative. Somewhere in Osun state, Nigeria, a young man chanced upon something so interesting he paused for thought.

It happened like this: Bamidele (his friends called him ‘Bami’) was tinkering with a bunch of contraptions at his desk that beautiful evening. The sun had dipped ever so slightly at that delicate angle that washed the landscape in a yellow color that suffused the soul and brought out that bliss that came only to people who noticed things like the angle of dip of a quotidian sun.

People like Bami.

He was whistling tunelessly as he fiddled with a microscrew. Right now, his eyes looked like two animated teacups — his magnifying lenses saw to that, and only a few minutes ago, he had discarded his haptic generator for the creation process of his actual prototype. He had begun building his ‘machine’ roughly about a year ago, hunting for parts, purchasing the rarer items off the crevices of the DeepWeb™ and assembling what would become his magnum opus.

Bami was a legitimate genius. And he was creating a teleportation device.

A 26-year old Nigerian engineer who announced to a room of sane people that he was building a teleportation device would have gotten a polemic on a very good day. Bami knew this, and that was why nobody else knew what he was creating. Everybody knew teleportation was impossible, even in 2023: an idea for speculative fiction and cute children.

But Bami believed he could do it, and ‘put my name on the list!’, although he wasn’t ever quite sure the list he was referring to.

The list of great men, he murmured presently, lining a small tube with something that looked like dust but was actually a jumble of micro wires for sub-conductivity.

Fitting the cap of his device carefully, he stepped back to admire his work. It looked exactly like a box, large enough to fit an average-sized man; a black box with legs. The yellow light splashed on it, and it absorbed it noncommittally.

Satisfied, Bami turned it on with the remote controller in his hand, and it gave a gentle hum. Excellent. He retrieved a Snickers bar from his drawer and placed it in the box. If all worked well, the Snickers bar should be teleported from his room to the kitchen. He had set the coordinates earlier.

He swiftly typed in the commands that would see this teleportation happen, and — hey presto — there was a splutter, and the hum, and the calmness and the sun.

Bami peered into the box. Snickers bar gone. Excellent. He walked into the kitchen.

The Snickers bar had failed to arrive at the expected location. Bami returned, disappointed.

He stuffed other objects in there: a bunch of old journals, his watch, and a banana.

All objects disappeared, but none reappeared where they should.

Naturally, this would be regarded as a failure, but Bami wondered about the whereabouts of the displaced items in the box. He decided that he would find them.

That was why he did the thing that he did. He crawled into the box, still clutching the remote control. The box hummed, firing off benign blue sparks that blended with the now orange sunset.

In the box, Bami typed the commands for his own teleportation.

FWISH.

The sensation he got was not unlike being pulled into yourself by powerful suction from your navel, and soon he was in a place that was not a place.

When he emerged in this plane, he saw far ahead of and before him. He was swirling in nothingness, watching his life, from birth to death, events that had already happened and events that would happen.

‘It appears,’ he said to no one in particular, ‘that I have unwittingly created a portal into the centre of time.’

He decided to look even further and backwards.

And he saw everything.

He saw it all.

He watched the Pangaea form and break, drift and divide. He saw the continents and its peoples. He saw Africa and all its alternate realities. He watched the Dark Continent expand.

And he saw that, in every timeline but the one he came from, Africa rose to become a super-continent, taking a prime spot in international relations and, in some realities, actually becoming a world power. Bami saw it all, and he finally understood the one thing that had gone wrong in his own timeline. He suddenly knew how it could be solved.

He had all the answers. Oh, the joy! And he sat there, in the middle of time, plotting the correction course for a series of events, starting with him, that would lead to the redemption of his continent, and his country with it.

But there was no one to let him out of the box.