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Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea: A 21st Century Odyssey   

“This Has Been Africa Tonight:   

Song of the Sea Peoples/’Po mu Nkurɔfo Dwom* pt 1 of 6″   

August 29, 2029,   

Accra Bay, Ghana – now Port Garvey,   

capital city-state of the African United Alliance   

“We gon’ be alright.”   

—Kendrick Lamar, “To Pimp a Butterfly”   

“Awwrrruughhh!” Afia roared as she lifted the 190 kg of weight on the barbell, completing her final set of squats for the morning.” Rising to her full height the 5′ 5″ tall, 141 pound black woman stood still holding the weight for a moment before she tossed the weights off of the back of her neck and shoulders sending the barbell crashing back onto the floor of the gym with a loud thud whose tremors shook the ground of those standing near.   

The two spandex-clad, muscular women flanking her on either side of the barbell were her spotters, Nomalanga and Yumna. They worked with the gym’s female clients in the off-season while training; both were professional powerlifters. They shouted words of encouragement, acting as the gymnasium’s equivalent of a hype man as they cheered and screamed with joy, congratulating her as she completed pressing the final lift of her morning workout.   

Her crimson Cambridge rugby jersey, emblazoned with the number 11, was a relic from her wing days at uni, was darkened with sweat, and her Veridian leggings were also soaked with perspiration. She had been in the gymnasium working out nonstop for 45 minutes, going through her morning routine, gradually working her way up to the heavy lifts. Leg Day was a monster.   

Nomalanga and Yumna were all smiles as she finished her final set. Afia unbuckled the thick burnt sienna-colored leather weight-lifting belt from around her abdomen draping it casually over her left shoulder, she removed the red, gold, and green sweatband that held her braids up as she headed to the locker room to have a quick shower before changing into her street clothes then grabbing a bite before heading to work.   

The rush of adrenaline she felt surge through her body from the excitement of completing the final lift of her squat set made her giddy. Her thighs, glutes, and back muscles all burned with exhaustion; every muscle in her body ached, but she did not care. Her brain rewarded her efforts by flooding her bloodstream with endorphins.   

The gym’s big screen TV, as always, was tuned to one of the sports channels. She stopped to take a drink from the clear plastic liter bottle of water, Afia watched the rerun of the women’s 7 rugby match as Portia stiff-armed one player driving her head first into the pitch before she lowered her shoulder still running full speed to smash into the next girl sending her careening away head over heels as if she were a bowling pin. Afia grinned as she watched the tribal tattooed New Zealand woman sprint down the field with the force of a freight train, a human locomotive number 11 on her way to score again. It was her final try at the 2024 Olympics.   

Afia remembered watching her from the sidelines that day, 5 years ago in Paris, in the finals. New Zealand beat Canada 19-12 to win the gold. Afia was the new kid back then, and she had to call in every favor anyone at the network owed her to be sure she was assigned to the Olympics that year. It was glorious. She smiled as she exited the gym, stepping out into the warm morning light. She immediately covered her eyes with a pair of narrow, mirrored shades pulled from the gym bag slung over her shoulder. The smell of sweat and steel behind her, she took a deep breath, inhaling the salty musk of the ocean air of Accra Bay.   

Monday through Friday, the viewers of AUA’s highest-rated Nightly News program watched Afia Tagor take on the most challenging stories of the day. As she interrogated Heads of State, high-ranking members of the clergy, and the CEOs running the military-industrial complex, always asking the hard questions and refusing to accept double-speak, deflection, or whitewashed platitudes for answers.   

For her tenacity and courage in daring to speak truth to power and seek justice for the disenfranchised and powerless, she has been awarded a multitude of awards for her work as a tough, no-nonsense investigative journalist. The Emmy was for her work exposing the corruption and manipulation of independent nations by the IMF and the World Bank.   

The Peabody for her investigative journalism teamwork revealing child brides hiding behind theology throughout the North African states, but she was most proud of being awarded the Gabriel García Márquez Foundation for the New Ibero-American Journalism (FNPI) for exposing how 7 percent of the South African population still controlled 70 percent of the land maintaining white supremacy even after the collapse of the Apartheid state.   

Fans of the myth of Mandela hated her for it, but lovers of the truth championed her. Love in the Time of Cholera, being her favorite novel, and Marquez being her favorite novelist, was part of the reason. When she thought about why, she guessed it was because of his background as a journalist as much as his writings on the nature of love.   

“Love becomes greater and nobler in calamity.”   

-Gabriel García Márquez   

It was the trust she earned 5 days a week doing hard news stories that allowed her to take time away from the doom and gloom and produce her weekend show “This Has Been Africa Tonight.” She intuited the viewers needed to take a break occasionally and hear her report some good news. There were no gotcha moments here; the guests were all carefully vetted, their backgrounds investigated, their psyches profiled before their files were sent to Afia’s recommendations list. This was pure feel-good theatre. Pan-African propaganda so slickly produced that it would have made the CCP proud and Leni Riefenstahl weep with envy.   

The government of the AUA agreed, viewing her show as necessary pro-AUA propaganda needed to combat the 400 years of anti-African propaganda of the West. As popular as her heavy-hitting nightly news stories were with professional journalists worldwide, her breezy Saturday afternoon interview show was exponentially more popular with her regular viewers. This softball Q&A elevated her to the most watched reporter on the planet and cemented her status as the African United Alliances media darling.   

There was hardly any traffic on the ACH1/Atlantic Coastal Highway 1 at this hour. Afia strolled across the nearly empty parking lot to her car, a silver 2029 electric Kantanka convertible coupe. The Ghanaian-manufactured automobile started silently when she pressed the button on her keyring as the convertible roof opened.   

The thumb-drive sized plastic key didn’t need to be inserted into the ignition it could activate the starter remotely as it biometrically scanned her fingerprints. The vehicle didn’t even need a driver; you could simply tell it where you wanted to go, and the AI took care of the rest, but Afia relished being in control. She tossed her canvas gym bag into the passenger seat, climbed into the driver seat, fastened her seatbelt, and drove herself the 3.14 kilometers from the Gold Coast Gym to Theia’s Coffee House for breakfast.   

The French restaurant was her favorite place to eat whenever she was in the mood for a proper English breakfast: sausages, bacon, eggs, baked beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, black pudding, toast, and bubble and squeak, followed by a decadent slice of strawberry cheesecake with a cup of chai tea. Growing up as a chubby child Afia began lifting her father’s free weights and running 5 kilometers a day every morning before breakfast when she was 13. Consequently, she had never dieted in her life.   

“Her phone rang as she motored towards the cafe. It was a message from Fọ́lọ́runshọ́, her make-up artist. The young Nigerian girl was feeling a bit under the weather and would not be able to make it to work this afternoon. Afia tapped the icon on the dash mounted monitor to set the cars autopilot. Now with her hands now free she quickly tapped a reply on her iPhones screen.   

“Do whatever you must to get healthy luv, take care of yourself. I assure you that I am still perfectly capable of doing my own make-up as well as Libby’s. kissy face emoji, Ciao.” She hit send, disengaged the autopilot, and took the wheel.   

After breakfast, she drove home to her beachfront bungalow on Accra Bay. Afia dressed casually for the afternoon’s interview aboard the Phillips boat. After the took her Dramamine, she decided to do a few rails before driving to the marina to meet the rest of the team. Her cameraman, Ousmane, lighting director Félicité, sound man Ibrahim and Alain were already there, chatting breezily, laughing as they passed the time waiting for her on the pier.   

This was her team they were the secret to her success; each member was hand-picked by her after an exhaustive search with her conducting dozens of interviews personally after hundreds more had been screened by HR until she found the men and women she was looking for with not just the proper skills in their field but a background in team sports.   

Some of her colleagues believed she could have used military training as a factor, but they were wrong. As far as Afia was concerned that came too late in life. She needed those whose childhoods were forged in competition, not solo games but team sports where each is assigned their primary and secondary positions based on what they bring to the team. It was the crucible of simulated combat in childhood that forged the psyche of her elite strike force of investigative journalists.   

They obeyed Afia because she was, in effect, their commanding officer. She was the King on the chess board of life to be protected at all costs, for if she failed, they failed, her fate was their fate. Each and every one in her employ, like her, had grown up playing rugby. They were not just good at their jobs, but they were physically tough and not easily intimidated by the powerful subjects they frequently interviewed, whether they were a high-ranking member of the government, a CEO of a multinational corporation, or a heavily armed embattled warlord. Her team was unflappable.   

Afia couldn’t wait to share the good news with her comrades. It was a long time until January when the official list of Oscar nominees for best documentary film would be announced, but her press agent Henri with Clockwork and Razor had his finger on the pulse, and the man had never been wrong about this sort of thing. The old South African fox knew months ahead of the Sabre Awards that she would be presented with the Platinum Sabre Award at last years African Public Relations Association’s annual meeting and awards show. After the grueling week they had endured conducting interviews in Burkina Faso, they needed to hear some good news for a change.   

The episodes that focused on the Po so nnipa/the Sea Peoples were her personal favorite types of interviews to conduct. Most of the over 7 million children of the diaspora now new citizens of Ghana and the AUA arriving over the last 7 years using the right of return traveled by plane, some even by train or automobile, but while the majority were from the US only the ones who arrived by sailboats were given the title of the Po so nnipa / the Sea Peoples by the Akan Twi speaking elders. The griot had never forgotten thier story and the ancient shamans predicted they would return. While her ratings were good for the episodes that focused on locals or immigrants that arrived by plane it was when the show interviewed the ones who returned by sailing that sent her ratings through the roof. Po so nnipa /The Sea People were good television in a way that could not be matched by talking to someone who arrived by plane.

Afia pulled into the marina’s parking lot, put the car in park, and killed the ignition. Before she got out of the car, she quickly checked her hair and makeup in the rearview mirror, then took a moment to look across the bay at Freetown. The flotilla of boats filled with workers from across the globe who traveled here on work visas but would never be granted citizenship because they were not children of the diaspora, and citizenship, along with the right of return, was only extended to returning black Africans.   

The first wave of foreign workers were the software engineers from Asia, India, and North Korea. They lived in the poured concrete high-rises built by MOTHERs AI commanded robotic workforce. The AUA simply did not have enough programmers to do all of the coding initially. The second wave to arrive were the hospitality workers, the whores came from every continent because there was money to be made here.   

Then came the entrepreneurs, the men and women who opened small family-owned and operated shops to serve the ever-growing population of Freetown, restaurants, delis, repair shops, clothing stores, grocers, bars, discotheques, and brothels, all conducting business directly across the bay from the I. M. Pei designed African Museum of Arts and Letters in the shadow of the AI MOTHER’s 100-story ebony ziggurat.   

Freetown was a no man’s land politically. They were treated the same as everyone else in the AUA by law, but they could not vote, own real estate, or serve in any government position. This kept them off the police force and out of the military and prevented non-Africans from holding public office. There was a place just like it near every one of the 11 one hundred story ziggurats constructed by the sentient AI code-named MOTHER. It was the one place in the AUA where her new crews’ cameras were not welcomed.   

Many of the people there had work visas that had long expired, and they had no intention of leaving. The police presence there, like the rest of the AUA, was to keep the peace and maintain order. They prevented violent crime and protected the public of Freetown, but they did not interfere with peacefully conducted business such as prostitution, gambling, and drug dealing.   

The police treated the people of Freetown exactly the way they treated the rest of the citizens of the AUA. Afia wished they would talk to her on camera, but she understood their plight; many had fled regions run by fascist regimes or theological fundamentalist dictatorships or were members of persecuted religious sects in their native lands, where they faced imprisonment or possible execution if they were returned.   

Many of the women who worked the brothels had fled their homelands to escape being child brides. They had been sold into legal sexual slavery under the guise of religion, and after escaping their native lands, where old men married girls as young as 13 legally. If they were deported, they would be beaten or killed by the husbands they fled or by their own families, whose dowries they had forfeited. The sisters sought them out and offered them a safe place within the hallowed walls of the nunnery’s convent. But many preferred to live by their wits, free, walking the streets rather than submitting to the rules of the Vatican. Mullah, Rabbi, or Priest, they trusted no religion after they escaped.   

Others had been child soldiers, bush babies who now hung out at the docks looking for work loading and unloading cargo ships alongside the dock’s robots. They were the war hardened bush boys; some were in drug-dealing gangs, others turned tricks with passing locals as well as the sailors that crewed the passing freighters. The one rule everyone in Freetown obeyed was not to talk to the press on camera. No matter how many stories Afia wrote about the citizens of Freetown without pictures or video, it just didn’t carry the impact, and, in this day and age, if it isn’t on video, it didn’t happen.   

Besides, if she stirred up too much trouble, she heard the head of the mobsters that ran the Freetown’s’ of the AUA, the Albino, would pay her a visit. Of course, she could find no one who had seen this one-eyed monster, a 9-foot-tall behemoth in real life, but the word on the street was that was because if you did see him, it meant you were about to die.   

These rumors began soon after someone ran the Chinese and eastern European mobs out of Freetown and restored peace, having disposed of the warring factions. They all said he was an albino negro with a single pale blue eye. There was nothing in any law enforcement database about anyone who fit this description.   

The closest thing she found in her search was a boy in Cuba a scrawny 6 foot 9-inch-tall, albino pimp named Starfish. He was too young, too skinny, had both eyes, and only had a single conviction, for her sources assured her that he had a reputation for being opposed to violence. His mother was murdered by the Serbian gangs that took over her brothel in Amsterdam 10 years ago. That’s when he fled to Havana.   

Afia didn’t believe in the boogie man, but still, she didn’t press the issue and turned to join her film crew waiting to take the sea shuttle to where the Phillips catamaran was anchored to a numbered buoy a few hundred meters from the pier.   

Before they left the shore, the team gathered together in a huddle, their hands together in the center, and chanted together in their pre-shoot ritual.   

…Nigga, we gon’ be alright   

Nigga, we gon’ be alright   

We gon’ be alright   

Do you hear me, do you feel me? We gon’ be alright   

Nigga, we gon’ be alright   

Huh? We gon’ be alright   

Nigga, we gon’ be alright   

Do you hear me, do you feel me? We gon’ be alright!”   

-KL   

Isaiah Jones vs the Sea (A 21st Century Odyssey) 

“This Has Been Africa Tonight: 

Song of the Sea Peoples/’Po mu Nkurɔfo Dwom* pt 2 of 6″ 

August 29, 2029, 

Accra Bay, Ghana – now Port Garvey, 

capital city-state of the African United Alliance 

“We gon’ be alright.” 

—Kendrick Lamar, “To Pimp a Butterfly” 

The crew introduced themselves to the Phillips as they boarded and began to set up for the afternoon’s interview. Afia did Libby and Garrett’s make-up as well as her own before they began to shoot the episode. 

“Wo ho te sɛn?” / “How are you?” “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, I am your host, Afia Tagor, and thank you for joining us here on Africa Tonight.” The hostess’s voice was warm, friendly, and inviting; her entire demeanor radiated an earth goddess gravitas. The umber-colored woman’s appearance was, as always, impeccable. Her hair, worn in micro-braids, hung loosely to her shoulders, and her make-up was subtly applied in a manner that rendered it almost invisible. But it was a carefully crafted illusion that had taken her decades to perfect, looking effortless, like Bruce Lee’s art of fighting without fighting. 

Her makeup enhanced the natural beauty of the Rubenesque Ghanaian woman’s professional image. Even her Ghanaian accent was a carefully curated construct to soften the poshness of her Cambridge education. Raised in Chelsea, one of West London’s most exclusive neighborhoods, by her Ghanaian-born parents, Afia echoed her Ghanaian mother’s accent on air. It was a matronly, wizened, commanding construct designed to make you trust her, want to watch her, and want to listen to her. 

Afia Togor’s wardrobe each week was chosen to send the same message as the wearer’s voice: “Welcome to Africa.” While she often dressed in Western-styled clothing at home, when on the air, she always wore outfits featuring traditional African fabrics with Western-styled suits or the conservative traditional dresses of women from the Twi-speaking Akan/Asante tribes. Tonight, she wore a kaftan of veridian and black with gold thread embroidering the collar, cuffs, and hem. 

Because she had a rather round face with dimpled cheeks, she always accessorized with a large statement necklace and matching earrings. She had believed since she was a schoolgirl that gaudy jewelry distracted people’s gaze from her fat face. The reality was that there was absolutely nothing wrong with her face, but since childhood, she had convinced herself that her cheeks were too fat and that she looked like a chipmunk. While the neighborhood children teased her, calling her Alvin and Minnie Driver, they did so more out of spite, being jealous of her extraordinary intelligence. Even as a child, she had been charismatic and well-spoken, making her the darling of all her teachers. 

After graduating from Cambridge, where she majored in broadcast journalism and minored in political science, she worked for several local television programs, which led to her working for a short stint as a writer for the radio with the BBC. Afia Tagor wanted to be the Oprah of England, but after the Brexit debacle, as the nation leaned further to the right, her evolving political learnings bent her hard to the left. 

Working in this increasingly hostile environment, she quickly realized that this was never going to happen, so she moved to the home nation of her parents, Ghana, to the capital city of Accra, with her sights now set on becoming the Oprah of Africa. She had grown weary of writing copy for lesser minds to read—men and women were chosen for their light skin, straight hair, and neutral political views that didn’t rock the boat to appeal to white viewers in the EU. 

Two years later, she quit her job with the Associated Press and started reading her own work on YouTube, posting her essays and reports on every internet platform she could find. Voices of Africa looked as if she were sitting in an actual studio rather than her bedroom in her parents’ home. Afia contacted friends she had made working as a copy editor at her old job and asked for their help to make her space look professional. 

Naomi, now her crew chief and lighting and camera director, was a tough girl from the Hackney borough of the East End. The people from the Caribbean and Nigeria settled there on a sports scholarship. They met playing on the Rugby team and have remained best friends ever since. She was the DIY punk rock queen of innovation. She purchased a pair of novelty shower curtains with a photograph of the city at night printed on them. She painted over them with a matte varnish to remove the plastic glare, then adhered them to large metal frames in 3 sections each. The final effect, when she hung the separate pieces on the far wall of her bedroom, created the illusion of sitting in front of a plate glass window with a view of London behind her desk. She places a loveseat facing the camera beside her desk camera left and an electric keyboard and a secondhand drumkit on the other side. 

The cameras (initially were her laptop on a barstool camera 1, her cellphone on a tripod camera 2 She turned to whichever camera she was directed to during the shoot then her staff of unpaid school friends and former coworkers put it all together in post since modern music was so expensive they used copyright free classical music. The illusion was flawless; the viewers had no idea that this was recorded in someone’s bedroom. The lighting and camera work, with her professional appearance and delivery of her stories, worked. The cameras were set to never show the ceiling, and Afia was instructed to never go on camera without first suiting up. 

It took her nearly a year to strike gold and get her first viral hit: an interview with a colonel who led a coup in the DNC. Her interview with him came right after his infamous jailing of CEOs from France, whom his regime had caught stealing the nation’s resources. After a few more of her interviews went viral, it became apparent that she had a nose for a good story. 

When her former employers at the BBC contacted her, offering her, her own television show, she turned them down and continued to work independently, posting her editorials and interviews online until the formation of the AUA seven years ago. Afia Tagor was one of the first to join the newly independent nation’s international news network, where she now worked as one of the primetime news anchors and hosted her own weekly program, which she named Africa Tonight. 

The 37-year-old hostess of the nation’s most popular television show for the last six years now sat dressed in her signature green ensemble on the sunflower colored cushioned seat of the fly deck of the Philips 48-ft catamaran, the SS Calliope, anchored in Port Garvey. The Fanon suspension bridges spanned across the river behind the couple being interviewed this week. 

It was a simple format; every week, they focused on getting to know a new group of immigrants to Africa. The show always ended the same way—with a montage of the Asante Akan Twi-speaking elders’ naming ceremony, where the new citizens were tattooed—not with ink but with scars—using ancient stone blades to carve the Po so nnipa (the Sea Peoples) symbols, the Sankofa, into their flesh, marking them as members of this returning tribe. 

They were welcomed officially into their tribe, receiving their African names. A great celebration followed, with the new arrivals dressed in Kente nwentoma kaftans. It was all very dramatic and emotionally thrilling, unlike the rather boring bureaucratic paperwork they received from government offices when they gained their Ghanaian citizenship. People of every race around the world were fascinated by their stories, and by interviewing the nation’s newest citizens and telling their stories, the government was able to control the narrative and keep the new tribe viewed in a positive light despite the sometimes contentious interactions with locals. 

It seemed that people everywhere loved an underdog and were enthralled by the stories of bravery of every ship that sailed from the U.S. to Ghana. Every new citizen who exercised their right of return to Africa was a plus for the African United Alliance; their tax dollars swelled the coffers of the nation, as well as constituted a win against the brain drain that had been problematic throughout the 20th century. Now, when Africans studied abroad, they attended universities of their allies in China and India, with the vast majority returning to help build their nascent nation. 

The TV show’s hostess had perfected the format, filming mostly from the decks and cabins of the new arrivals’ own sailboats. This time, it was an Odisea ODC 48: an electric, solar-powered, aluminum-hulled catamaran. It had been seven years since a young mathematician sailed from Galveston to Ghana, retracing the Middle Passage in reverse, through the dark passage into the light, capturing the imagination of Black people around the world. 

His journey, documented in his Nobel Prize-winning novel Motherland, became the herald of a paradigm shift in the diaspora’s consciousness and, in the process, inspired a generation to begin the greatest mass immigration in human history, as the children of the diaspora began to follow his very same path—sailing from Galveston to Ghana, from America to Africa. 

The new African United Alliance (AUA) now ranks as the world’s fifth-largest economy, with the third-largest population that can field one of the largest and best-trained armies at a moment’s notice. The matronly, Cambridge University graduate adjusted her Prussian-green batik sarong with matching top and head wrap. Her show was the highest-rated, most viewed program not just in the AUA, but on the entire planet. 

Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea: A 21st Century Odyssey

This Has Been Africa Tonight:

Song of the Sea Peoples/’Po mu Nkurɔfo Dwom* pt 3 of 6

August 29, 2029, Accra Bay, Ghana – now Port Garvey,

capital city-state of the African United Alliance

“We gon’ be alright.”

—Kendrick Lamar, “To Pimp a Butterfly”

“Maadwo: Good evening. Mema wo akwaaba: I welcome you to Africa Tonight. We are here aboard the SS Calliope to meet two of our nation’s ADF (African Defense Force) troops and the newest citizens of the AUA, Libby and Garrett Phillips. Thank you for talking with us tonight.”

“Thank you for having us,” the cornrow-crowned, ivory kaftan-clad couple replied in unison.

“What inspired the two of you to immigrate to the AUA?” she began with her standard opening question.

“We are no different than the millions of others who have made the journey,” Libby said earnestly. “After reading Isaiah Jones’ novel Motherland, which chronicled his own voyage from Galveston to Ghana,” Garrett smiled as he added, “that speech at Accra Bay Stadium after his right of return papers were presented set a fire in us just like everyone else here. We both work remotely in the tech industry, so where we live physically doesn’t matter—so long as we have our batteries charged and a good satellite modem. First, we learned how to sail, and I also had to learn how to swim,” Garrett added sheepishly.

“We sold our cars and lived with my parents for a year to save up for the boat. Now, there is a waiting list of three years if you want to buy one,” Libby said as their three-year-old golden retriever, Midas, trotted over and sat at their feet as the interview continued. Nearly all of the Nkurɔfoɔ Mmere (the Sea Peoples) had a large dog on board. The favored breed of dog for Black Americans shifted from the pit bull to the more water-friendly Labrador retriever.

“After studying the Homecoming movement, the decolonization of the mind that occurred, the choice became clear. We needed to get out of the U.S. This situation was never going to be resolved by respectability politics; staying there caught up in their exceptionalism delusions. It was only logical to invest in a nation that welcomes you rather than one that detests your very existence—its culture corrupted to the marrow by its history of oppression, using dog whistles to distract the ignorant, the poor, and the capitalistically indoctrinated from their wealthy overlords’ true agenda. We finally understood that capitalism was not going to save Black people.

We didn’t need a seat at their table; we needed to leave and find our own table. The Third World was a European construct to drain resources from the nations they had formally colonized and funnel the wealth back to Europe and America.

“That is why the West destroyed the indigenous people’s agriculture, which fed the people before the arrival of the European colonialists, and replaced it with mono-crops for export. These crops only enriched White Americans and European corporations—Dole pineapples in Hawaii, Domino sugarcane in Puerto Rico, and throughout the Caribbean. By destroying the independent family farms, they forced the populations into dependency on imported processed foods from the West. Before studying Chomsky’s Manufacturing Consent, we had no idea how diabolical the real history of the West was.

“Once you dislodge yourself from these useless colonialist Eurocentric paradigms, the answer becomes clear: black people will never know peace here it was time to leave. We looked around the world and ended up going to the only place where we were actually welcomed: Ghana. Like everyone else, we both wept when we first saw the land after sailing across the Atlantic.”

Libby looked at Garrett and smiled as she spoke. “For us, the children of the diaspora, it has become more than just a trip to a new country; it’s akin to our Hajj, our own pilgrimage to something sacred. We all experience it as we sail across the ocean. Out there in the middle of the journey, something gently breaks inside of you. The soul sheds its old skin, and you understand that you are something different than you were when you began this voyage—a new creature arising within, slouching towards an old new world. In the middle of our journey, the ancestors greeted us; they bid us a safe journey as their voices whispered on the waves: this is the way home.”

“It was Isaiah Jones who first made the connection between the wind, the wave, the sail, and the soul as the path to something sacred in the right of return. In his novel Motherland he articulated something we all felt but had been programmed by a seedy diet of Western media propaganda from birth not to see.”

Libby laughed. “I know I sound like some new-age hippie, but it is still the truth of the journey. I was one of those people who professed to love being Black while bleaching my skin and straightening my hair, never seeing the disconnect. Now, as you can see, I wear my hair braided in the fashion of our tribe, the Po mu Nkurɔfo Dwom/the Sea Peoples. By the time we got here, I had stopped bleaching my skin, and now I lay on the deck in my bikini in the noonday sun after a swim,” Libby said, grinning. “I am no longer troubled with the black american dual mind. It’s a small thing, perhaps, but it is necessary to understand the motivations behind your actions. I fired my therapist,” she said with a grin.

“We stopped using ‘Black’ as a pejorative,” Garrett added. “It’s so deeply ingrained in the language of Black Americans and Negro culture that you don’t realize you are doing it. It’s rather insidious. We abandoned the excrement produced by Hollywood when we left the West.

“Garrett, it was the middle of Chapter Eight where he remembers his father talking to him about the ‘why’ of it: why do the thing at all? Why do whatever it is you do at all? Why do your best? Why work hard?” His father’s answer to the sea of ‘whys’ was Shaw: “I rejoice in life for its own sake. Life is no ‘brief candle’ for me. It is a sort of splendid torch which I have got hold of for the moment, and I want to make it burn as brightly as possible before handing it on to future generations.” Garrett smiled, and then they would get back to work. “I think about Shaw’s words a lot these days.”

“Being Black people, the truth is we are not welcomed anywhere else in the world the way we are here, and that is just a fact.”

“That’s true,” Libby says. “Ghana was the first nation to offer the right of return.”

“Yes,” Garrett offers, “as well as the most streamlined paths to citizenship.

“Is it perfect? No, but it’s a peaceful, more rural, more natural life we lead now, living on the ship.”

“We have the same problems here that any other big city has here in the Unreal City. But we have an active, visible police presence that keeps an eye on things, and the fast-growing economy keeps our people busy. Our police departments are here to fight crime rather than generate revenue for the state. They are trained to protect our citizens and are, in every sense, peacekeepers. There is no civil forfeiture or qualified immunity here; here, everyone pays for their crimes regardless of profession. One law serves us all—whether rich or poor, man or woman, citizen or soldier. Our truth-finding commissions are a vast improvement over the adversarial justice system of the West.”

Garrett gazed across the bay wistfully at the Unreal City—the 100-story-tall ziggurat towering over the countryside—the megastructure constructed by robots built by the general intelligence AI, MOTHER, as the gargantuan structure’s lights glowed, softly illuminating the jungle below as they talked.

“We have the usual conmen you find wherever the unscrupulous smell the gullible, honest, hard-working folk with fat pockets,” he said with a shrug. “The fraud squad deals with instances where unsuspecting immigrants have been duped out of their life savings when they were sold land that belongs to someone else. We recommend people stick with using the official AUA sites and offices in order not to fall victim to these sleazy fake real-estate agents selling pie-in-the-sky fantasies.” Everything from agriculture to architecture has been moving at an accelerated pace as the infrastructure projects got back on schedule after the two civil wars ended five years ago. The new AI-robot-erected buildings are bringing tourists from all over the world just to see the gigantic ziggurats in person.

“I served in the ADF/African Defense Forces with the UN peacekeeping forces at the Suez, patrolling the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea,” Libby said. “We use our drones to keep the waterways secure; our aircraft are VTOL amphibious vehicles that can take off on land or at sea. They can land at sea and deploy the solar sail to recharge while monitoring the area. Their guns fire 9mm caseless explosive-tipped ceramic rounds and carry a payload of eight laser-guided missiles. We also rescued a lot of refugees fleeing the war-torn regimes to the southeast Asia.”

One of the things that makes our new Air Force so efficient is our ability to launch in under two minutes since we are a majority remote. Our server independent isolated beneath the ziggurats. All of our “meat bag” pilots are accompanied by drone squadrons comprised of human and AI drone pilots. Stealth tech in the design and the smaller size, because they are unmanned, allows our aircraft to carry more missiles and ammo. Being remote or AI piloted they are immune to G-forces as drones.

One of the reasons we’ve been successful in defending our airspace is that after we downed our second US spy plane, they now know to stay out of our airspace. We have robotics and drone piloting video games/combat simulators that train and recruit our pilots from childhood. The ADF/African Defense Forces has had great success recruiting some of our best drone pilots from the gaming community. They are able to do incredible things with the drones’ maneuvers, simply impossible for a human/”meat bag” to survive. We have never lost a dogfight to a manned aircraft.

The people welcome you, as well as the government. The 1619 Project, combined with the right of return, changed the relationship between the diaspora and the nations of Africa. Breaking through the colonialist propaganda that separated us for the first time in centuries. English is the national language here in Ghana, but we had been studying Twi for a year before we moved here. You will never be suspected because of the color of your skin. Here, we do not have our blackness weaponized by people who believe our black skin color denotes some inherent, mythical, divine flaw in our soul.

The police here are all as black as we are, and very polite and professionally trained with two years of university study in civics and common law. They know that they are public servants, like the firemen, paramedics, and teachers. Here, they are a part of the community, not a suburban militia of an occupying alien force like the American police. Libby is a botanist and works in the sustainable garden projects. I’m a programmer and systems engineer. I design, build, and maintain robotic systems.

Without a history of redlining, there are no state-sponsored ghettos in our cities like in the US. There are no for-profit prisons covertly serving as a back door to slavery here. Unlike the Americans, we, like the 33 developed nations of the 1st and 2nd world, have universal healthcare, free college education, and our own data centers that control the web here. 90 percent of the population of the planet is not white, yet if you use the Western world’s internet, you would believe it is the inverse.

We read books by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichies ‘Americana’, and watched interviews on Afro-pessimism by Frank Wilderson III’s “Incog-negro” studied the works of authors like Gerald Horne’s “The Apocalypse of Settler Colonialism”, Andrée Blouin’s “The Woman Behind Lumumba”, and dozens of other brilliant black writers we never heard of before reading Isaiah Jones novel “Motherland” and logging onto the Homecoming website.

Libby added, “I considered myself a black feminist and an intellectual; we are both degreed professionals, but we never knew Gloria Steinem was a spook/CIA-funded asset until I read these writers’ works. I stopped using the term POC/People of Color and now just say African or black people after learning the history of people like Gandhi, who despised black folks and sided philosophically with the white apartheid government against the native black Africans, and considered his people part of the Aryan brotherhood and above the Kaffirs.”

Colonialist, capitalist, and white supremacist propaganda in many guises has succeeded in bamboozling generations of our people. Here, I am happy to have my tax dollars contribute to new AI robotic-assisted automated farming tech, universal healthcare, free education, and UBI / universal basic income. A healthy, well-fed, educated populace benefits us all as citizens of the AUA. Scientific Socialism is a far superior form of governance than exploitative capitalism, which is just an oligarchy, not a democracy – the Americans intoxicated on thier own ignorance traded rule by the richest by decree of God with rule by the richest godless CEOs. They are a functionally illiterate population of Dunning-Kruger effected imbeciles, a nation of peoples too stupid to be embarrassed.

You have a population of Stockholm Syndrome indoctrinated workers who believe capitalism is the best thing to ever happen, yet they own no capital. And manipulated by their bigotry, they consistently vote against their own self-interest. Cognitive Dissonance is destroying them- I don’t hate them, I pity them. Libby nodded her head in agreement. There is a part of me that hopes that they can see what’s really going on with the far right and live up to the words enshrined in their constitution and save themselves. But I fear Mark Twain was right. “It’s Easier to Fool People Than It Is to Convince Them That They Have Been Fooled.”

They are what we now recognize as Neo liberal indoctrinated free-range wage slaves. We learned to not engage with racists once we studied the works suggested by the Homecoming movement. Ghana was the first African nation to reach out to the diaspora when the government initiated the right of return program back in 2000. By the time Isaiah set sail, 11 African nations were offering the children of the diaspora the right of return. Now, all 54 nations on the continent have it. In coordination with the elders of the 12 Akan tribes, they agreed to give land and citizenship to those of us who returned. With the re-election of the orange fascist, as late-stage capitalism began its death spiral, all of the signs pointed to Africa. Our government severed its ties with the EU and allied the AUA with BRIC.

When you arrive here, you will be treated well by your society. It is a good feeling. It’s not perfect here, and it’s not for everyone. But for people like us, who are just looking for an even break and a fair shot in life, there’s no place better to be. There is something very satisfying in knowing that your tax dollars are being wisely spent, and you do not have to constantly wonder if this person is a member of some secret organization created to terrorize black people for existing. Being born and raised in the US, being free of the white gaze here is liberating.

We did what the novel suggested, sold our cars to save up, and buy this 48-foot catamaran after living with my parents for a year and a half, while we scrimped and saved every penny and sold everything we were not taking with us on the ship. “It was liberating,” Libby adds, “getting rid of all of that junk.” Now, like most of the people who have made the pilgrimage to Ghana, we live on anchor.

After serving in the AUA military, I have expedited my citizenship. “We both enlisted right away,” Garrett says. “I served on an ADF patrol boat off the coast of Somalia, near the Red Sea and the Arabian Sea, where we get a lot of traffic heading into the straits to reach the Suez. We intercept everything from human traffickers and drug smugglers to pirates over there. It’s been where the action is, even before the AUA was formed.”

Fifty percent of the members of the ADF are women, giving the AUA the largest number of women serving in the military of any country. My wife is a drone pilot. Here, the Air Force is huge and mostly unmanned. The AI and the human pilots patrol the skies over the shores and along our borders. This is now the most surveilled nation on the planet. The sentient General intelligence AI MOTHER sees everything. The floating platforms act as charging stations. The drones rest on them while they recharge, then take off. These are solar-powered inflatable platforms. They never land once launched, except for major repairs.

The robotics industry here is now the fourth-largest manufacturer of automated systems controlled by teams of AI robotics and humans. The United Continent now grows a surplus of food, and we have launched our twenty-third successful telecommunications satellite into orbit in the last five years. Would I do it again, knowing what I know now? Hell yeah.

Libby looked at her husband and smiled. In the final passage of “Motherland,” Isaiah writes, “Centuries ago, something sacred was stolen. Now I return.” After I read those words, I cried so hard that I woke my husband up; he read the chapter, and we both knew what we had to do.

Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Cpt. Libby Phillips and Lt. Garrett Phillips of the ADF, African Defense Force, formerly of Cincinnati, Ohio, and now proud new citizen-soldiers of the AUA. Reporting live from the nation’s capital city here in Ghana, in front of the Port Garvey Museum of African Arts and Letters, “Da yie, yɛbɛhyia bio nnawɔtwe akyi wɔ yɛn dwumadi foforo bi a ɛfa Afrika Anadwo ho.” / “this has been “Africa Tonight”, I’m Afia Tagor, signing off. As the show’s theme music plays, we hear Afia ask, “When is the baby due?” “December”, Libby replied, her smile beaming, as the closing montage rolled with the end credits. I would love to talk to you both again after the baby is born. The music that opened the program plays them out.

Isaiah Jones vs the Sea: A 21st Century Odyssey    

“This Has Been Africa Tonight:    

Song of the Sea Peoples/’Po mu Nkurɔfo Dwom* pt 4 of 6″    

August 29, 2029,    

Accra Bay, Ghana – now Port Garvey,    

capital city-state of the African United Alliance    

“We gon’ be alright.”    

—Kendrick Lamar, “To Pimp a Butterfly”    

After the interview ended, Libby and Garrett invited Afia and her crew to stay and join them for dinner. They all politely declined, having previous plans or more work to do, with the lone exception being Afia, who decided she would stay and share a meal with the charming expectant couple. She followed the pair down the companionway into the stateroom and pulled up a seat at the counter to watch as the Yanks team cooked in the ship’s narrow galley with the easy coordination and efficiency of a pair of master chefs.    

Libby poured for Afia and Garret, half filling each of their sturdy, elegant plastic wine glasses with a Chianti. Like most people who lived on an anchor, there was virtually nothing on board made of glass; thus, the boxed Franzi wine and the high-quality plastic wine glasses, identical to crystal to the eye, most people would never notice it was not glass until they picked up the flute and noticed the light weight. Libby was the chatty one of the two, and as was apparent during the interview earlier, she was the one in charge once their ship anchored, shifting from transportation to houseboat. This was her home, and she was rightly proud of it. The 50-foot aluminum-hulled catamaran was expertly furnished and decorated.    

So, Libby asked Afia as Garrett removed the Porterhouse steaks from the marinade they had been soaking in for the last two hours. I have a confession. We did a bit of research on you after you asked to interview us on the show. I’ve been watching the show since it first aired, but Garrett thinks it’s kinda corny. He didn’t deny it; he just continued preparing the meat while Libby, chef’s knife in hand, prepared the vegetables.    

Afia sipped her wine. A slight giggle escaped her lips when Libby said, Corny.    

“Is that true, Garrett?” Afia inquired, using her hard news anchor tone, causing Libby to erupt with laughter. “Mister Phillips, did you or did you not tell your wife, Libby Phillips, that the hostess of ‘This has Been Africa Tonight’ is and I quote corny?”    

“Stop it, stop please I’m going to piss myself,” Libby begged through guffaws. Garrett set the meat aside to let it rest and wiped his hands on a dish towel. He slowly turned around and looked Afia in the eye and stated seriously.    

“I think the show is a bunch of vapid AUA-sponsored propaganda. The only reason I agreed to this farcical interview was because my wife is a fan and she adores you. I concede that the work you do during the week as an investigative journalist is unmatched; you understand the assignment of the 4th estate.”    

Libby stopped laughing. “Goddammit, Garrett! We agreed you were not going to do this tonight. We talked about this, and you promised me, Garrett. You promised would be nice. You promised. she whimpered, Now you’ve embarrassed me in front of our guest.” Libby began to cry. Afia observed in silence that Garrett was instantly disarmed by her tears. His righteous indignation evaporated, his shoulders dropped, and his voice was now in a higher, softer register as he exhaled a resigned sigh of defeat. He stepped forward and gently wrapped his arms around Libby.    

“I’m sorry, babe. I’m just a little tired; it’s been a long day. I swear it won’t happen again.” He lifted her chin and lightly kissed each of her tear-streaked cheeks. “Now, he said, patting her firmly on her shapely bottom, you two get out of my kitchen. Go have a girls’ night while I finish dinner. Go on, get out of here. I’ll finish the vegetables for you.” He smiled serenely as he sent her on her way.    

Libby, her rage appeased, grinned and gave him a quick peck on the lips before she turned on her heels, took Afia by the hand, and led her topside, where the two stretched out on the cat’s trampoline as the waves caressed the twin hulls beneath them. Libby’s mood lifted as she realized they were in time to watch the sunset over the Atlantic.    

“I’m sorry, Afia said politely, I didn’t mean to start a tiff; I was only having a bit of fun.”    

“You have nothing to apologize for, Libby reached over and gave her hand a squeeze; even I can see how hormonal being this pregnancy has made me. My husband did not want to do the interview; it stresses him out with sensory overload of too many strangers in his space, he hates being on camera, and he is, by nature, an introvert. Like a lot of black men, he’s never been tested, but to me, it’s apparent he’s neurodivergent. If he’s not on the spectrum, he’s so near as not to matter. I knew that before I ever went out with him in high school 13 years ago. He’s my high school sweetheart of a sort. We have dated off and on, starting our freshman year.    

You two have only dated each other?    

“No, of course not. We both dated other people when we broke up. It was an on-again, off-again sort of relationship. I was captain of our high school cheerleading team and prom queen. Garret, well, he was a late bloomer. He was 3 inches shorter and 40 pounds lighter, a scrawny little dork who was the captain of the computer club. He always liked me more than I liked him. I grew up winning beauty pageants and talent shows. I wanted to be an actress, go to Hollywood, and be a famous movie star. Being the most popular girl in school when you’re that age does a real number on your head.” Libby sighed, her voice tinged with regret.    

“I think I was going through my bad-boy phase. Too many romance novels, too much television. I dated jocks, the captain of the Football team Lancelot Spears because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re a cheerleader. He was a senior my freshman year. I was overwhelmed by the fact that he thought I was cute enough to ask out. He was also so pumped full of steroids his penis looked more like an enlarged clit than a cock. And he beat up his girlfriends. Roid Rage. He hit me once, and I broke up with him.    

Then started dating Garrett. After my blackeye healed, I dumped him, to date a college boy -Raymond Adolphus Thornton the Third, my first white boy. A pudgy, green-eyed ginger quadruple legacy pre-law major with an entire wing named after his grandfather. Raymond was a junior at Ohio State during my sophomore year of high school. We all thought he was cool because he would buy us booze, drive a car, and he could get us into college parties. Even if it was pos 5-year-old Nissan passed down from his parents. It was more car than any of us had. That ended in a roofied gang rape disaster at a frat party.    

I told no one. I woke up the next morning lying in a pool of semen, still groggy from whatever they put in my drink. I felt nauseous, my throat was raw, I immediately vomited up the loads of jism I had swallowed the night before. I got dressed, put on my blouse and skirt with no panties -someone had stolen them -then I called Garrett. I did the walk of shame through the frat house my face half-covered with dried seamen -dozens of strangers cum dripping out of my bloody asshole and bruised pussy running down the inside of my legs.    

When Garrett saw me stumble out of the building, he picked me up and carried me to the Uber while every disgusting thing inside of me leaked all over his work clothes. He took me home, cleaned me up, and helped me get out of the tub and into my bed. The only thing he said was;    

“What do you want me to do, Lib? Say the word and I will nail the back door shut, soak the building in gasoline, and burn it to the fucking ground. I will wait out front with my .30-06 and put a bullet in anyone that comes out the door.” A few days later, when I could talk, I called him, and I dated Garrett again.    

“By the time my junior year started, I decided to break up with Garrett again. That year, I dated a 6-foot-4-inch-tall boy with dreadlocks named Lorenzo Rodriguez. He had a brand-new black Mustang. He took me out to the nicest places to eat and bought me clothes and jewelry from the mall. He had dropped out of school our freshman year, so you can guess how he made his money.”    

“What happened if you and Lorenzo were doing so well? Why did you break up?”    

“His rivals shot him while we were in his car at the All-American drive-through grabbing drinks. It was the first time I ever saw a dead body. They blocked us in with their cars, and a boy got out wearing a mask and started shooting him. The boy who got out kept shooting him until his clip was empty. He kept pulling the trigger after the gun was out of bullets, then he turned around and walked back to his car. I guess I was in shock. I don’t even remember what color the car was. It all happened so fast. The police said Lorenzo was hit in the head, neck, and chest 17 times. The boy never missed. I wasn’t in love with him he just had a huge cock, bought me stuff, and fucked me silly. I was a stupid teenager. Garrett swept right in to pick up the pieces again.    

So, you have been together ever since?    

That would be nice, but no. I was shallow, egotistical, and materialistic. I broke up with him our senior year to date Lewis Danson, a 48-year-old businessman who picked me up from school in his white Bugatti. He always wore 3-piece suits and dressed me in designer clothes. He gave me a new cell phone, laptop, tablet, and real diamond jewelry from Sachs. He treated me like a princess. We dined in 5-star restaurants every night, and on weekends, we stayed in 5-star hotel penthouse suites with rooftop waterfall pools.    

Why did you break up with him?    

Oh, I didn’t, when his wife found out he was dating me she had him arrested for statutory rape since I was a 17-year-old minor. He had met her when she was 15 and started dating me when she turned 21. I heard her lawyers took him for every cent, the house, the cars, and when he got out of prison, he was broke and wearing an ankle monitor for nonviolent sex offenders since he was on a pedophile watch list.    

Damn, so then you and Garrett got back together and lived happily ever after, right?    

Not exactly. After graduation, we both went off to college without ever speaking to each other. I had really hurt him. At first, I was too embarrassed to ask him to forgive me for being a skank, and he was done; he didn’t want to see me again. When I got up the courage to call, he hung up on me. When I left him messages, he deleted them unread.    

“I can’t say that I blame him Afia said with a shrug. But everyone has to grow up at their own speed.”    

Thanks.    

For what?    

“For not being a judgmental cunt.” Libby said, leaning over to rest her head on her shoulder as she rested a hand on Afia’s muscular thigh.    

“We both ended up going to the same HBCU in Texas, Prairieview A&M. Go Panthers! Neither one of us knew the other was there until I happened to see his name on a flyer on the bulletin board in the student center for the school’s robotics team. Our team was winning a thing called Robot Wars with a robot designed by Garrett named Libby.”    

Both women exploded with laughter.    

“He named the killer robot after you!”    

“Yep, and it was not a compliment. This thing would give Terminator nightmares. It was covered with spikes, saws, hammers, and claws. It was an armored rumba that annihilated everything in its path, leaving a trail of destruction and broken parts of its opponents in its wake.”    

Afia had tears in her eyes; she was laughing so hard. “Oh my god, I would have died from the humiliation.”    

“I was humiliated, but no one ever died from eating humble pie. so, I sucked it up toughed it out, and stayed until the end of the match they won, and I went to my dorm room and cried into my pillow all night. Garrett had grown taller and was starting to fill out. His freshman year was when he started lifting weights. The Panthers Robotics Club won the national championship that year. And I brought the entire cheer squad to every match to cheer them on. They were the only Robotics team to have the cheerleading team show up for them, and he knew they were only there because I asked them to come. This time, when I asked him out, he said yes.    

That is the most romantic thing I have ever heard.    

Our wedding bands are made from the melted-down titanium in the robot’s processors. The diamond was in his late grandmother’s ring.    

We got engaged our sophomore year and married right after graduation. After 6 years of marriage, I’ve never been happier. I got lucky; by the time we got to college, there were lots of girls who were into nerds. He dated several of them before he went out with me again. I think he just wanted to hurt me and punish me the way I hurt him. I deserved it. You know I just toughed it out, I turned down every jock and rich boy that asked me out and kept cheering for him. That’s what I’ve been doing for the last ten years: cheering for Garrett. Everybody else can go fuck themselves, hard.    

Afia wrapped her arm around the woman, who was 10 years her junior, and hugged her. ” You gonna to be alright, luv; you gon be alright.  

  

Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea: A 21st Century Odyssey    

This Has Been Africa Tonight:    

Song of the Sea Peoples/’Po mu Nkurɔfo Dwom* pt 5 of 6  

August 29, 2029,    

Accra Bay, Ghana – now Port Garvey,    

Capital city-state of the African United Alliance    

“We gon’ be alright.”    

—Kendrick Lamar, “To Pimp a Butterfly”    

Garrett joined the trio of Libby, Afia, and Midas on the foredeck a few minutes later. “Madame, mademoiselle, bitch,” he said, addressing the dog. “Dinner is served.” Garrett helped Libby to her feet, and they headed to the fly deck where the table was set, with plates and silverware ready, while Garrett plated their food.    

Garrett and Libby bowed their heads and said grace as Afia observed their quaint ritual in bemused silence. She, like most of her fellow Londoners, never prayed over a meal or bothered to enter a church except for a wedding, a funeral, or a christening.    

“God is great. God is good. Let us thank Him for our food. Amen.”    

“Amen.”    

As the ladies began to eat, Garrett left the table and headed below deck to get more wine. He returned a moment later with a fiasco (a wicker-covered emerald-tinted glass bottle) of Italian Chianti. He opened the bottle and poured two glasses after first filling Libby’s glass with sparkling water. Like most sailors, they rarely brought glass onboard, but Garrett knew that Libby loved these half-wicker-covered antique green hand-blown bottles, and she would begin to melt candles in them once they were empty.    

“My gosh, Garrett,” Afia gushed, “this tastes amazing!” she exclaimed after sampling her food. “I had no idea you were a gourmet chef!”    

Libby smiled. “He comes from a family of public-school teachers; they barely had money to cover his expenses at college, even with a full scholarship, so he worked in five-star restaurants all through high school and college.” Garrett seemed to tense up for a moment, but remained quiet and continued to eat as they talked. Then, Afia recalled something Libby had said earlier about her dates in high school taking her to five-star restaurants. Libby continued with her chatter, seemingly oblivious to his reaction. He had seen her while he was at work, while she was out with her dates. That must be why he seemed to withdraw.     

After dinner, Garrett cleared the table disappearing below deck with thier empty dinner plates only to return a few minutes later with Libby’s favorite dessert: Key Lime Pie with cups of hot cocoa.    

“I say, I’m beginning to suspect your husband is attempting to fatten me up, serving us all this savory gourmet meal,” Afia said between bites. “Bravo! This is heavenly, sir, simply divine! There’s a party in my mouth.” Libby burst out laughing, and once again, Afia felt a hand on her leg beneath the table, caressing her inner thigh; once again, it was Libby clandestinely massaging her.    

They enjoyed their dinner: perfectly marinated medium-rare Porterhouse steak, double-baked potatoes, stir-fried green beans, sautéed portobello mushrooms, and onions with a lightly tossed green salad drizzled with a red wine vinaigrette. The wine was not a rare vintage but a modest Chianti that could be found being served in any home in Italy. By the time dessert was finished, Afia stood on wobbly legs, more than a little tipsy.    

“Oh bugger! I am quite embarrassed. This never happens; I’m not a drunkard, but it seems that during the rush today, I neglected to eat lunch. And that lovely Chianti seems to be having its way with me. I’m not blotto, just a wee bit tight. Not to worry, I have an electric car waiting to do the driving tonight,” Afia said, slurring her words a bit.    

Libby, being six months pregnant, did not drink anything stronger than sparkling water, and Garrett had only drunk three glasses of wine: the first while in the galley cooking, followed by two more with his meal. He was five feet ten inches tall and weighed a muscular 187 pounds. The liquor he had consumed over the last four hours had no effect on him, this being the same amount of wine he consumed every night with dinner.    

Afia, on the other hand, had consumed more than twice that amount in the same time, with Libby regularly refilling her glass as they sat on the foredeck, conversing while he prepared dinner. “I’m not letting you travel alone,” Libby insisted. “Garrett will escort you home.”    

“You don’t have to worry about me. I’m a big girl,” Afia giggled.    

“Nonsense! Garrett will drive you home. You’re in no condition to drive, and it would be irresponsible to send a woman out after dark alone in your condition. It’s been a long day, and the baby makes me tired, so I’m going to go to bed. It’s been a pleasure meeting you, Afia.” Libby turned her attention to her husband. He nodded, affirming he understood the assignment. “Goodnight, baby. I’ll be right back.”    

“Okay, just don’t wake me if I’m asleep by the time you get back. Lib said, already stifling a yawn, I’ve been having trouble sleeping all week, and tonight I think I’ll finally be able to sleep through the night since the seasickness is gone for now.”    

“Okay, Lib.” Garrett gave her a gentle peck on the cheek, then turned to head aft to handle the stern-mounted davits and lower the dinghy over the transom into the water. 

Libby hugged Afia, and this time, there was no mistaking her touch as an innocent caress. Libby palmed her buttocks firmly as she sensuously caressed and squeezed her well-shaped posterior with both hands while Garrett headed to the transom to prepare the dinghy. Libby looked Afia in the eyes, smiled, then kissed her lightly on the lips. Afia kissed her back, sliding her tongue between Libby’s lips, tasting the sweet residue of the Key Lime Pie. Libby stepped back to admire their guest’s athletic build once more and smiled before she headed below deck to her cabin.    

Afia headed below deck to the head to pee and decided that another line of Coke would be just what the doctor ordered to stop her head from spinning. Rejuvenated, she joined Garrett in the dinghy.  

Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea: A 21st Century Odyssey  

This Has Been Africa Tonight:  

Song of the Sea Peoples/’Po mu Nkurɔfo Dwom* pt 6 of 6  

August 29, 2029,  

Accra Bay, Ghana – now Port Garvey,  

Capital city-state of the African United Alliance  

“We gon’ be alright.”  

—Kendrick Lamar, “To Pimp a Butterfly” 

Once they reached the pier, he secured the dinghy with a cleat hitch and then followed Afia to where she had left her car parked in the marina’s lot, the top still down. Garrett opened the passenger door for her before he climbed into the driver’s seat of the electric car.    

“Do you want to drive or let the AI chauffeur us to my place?” Afia asked, strapping herself in.    

Garrett laughed. “I’d rather do the driving myself, if you don’t mind. I like being in control.”    

“As you wish.” She placed the electronic key in the ignition; the car started silently, and the music of Aya Nakamura began right where it had left off when she parked the car earlier that afternoon: Concert Acoustique Lancôme au Domaine de la Roses. Afia’s drunken gaze examined the slender American sitting behind the wheel of her car. His hair was worn in cornrows in the style of the Sea Peoples, sporting a well-trimmed mustache and goatee that the Yanks favored. The military training and his daily swims kept his body fit. Fifteen minutes later, they arrived at her bungalow.    

“Come on in,” Afia said with a sultry tone. “We’ll have a drink while you wait for the Uber.” Once inside, she turned on the music; it was the same acoustic tracks they were listening to in the car, picking up right where it left off after they exited the vehicle. Garrett looked around the drawing room of the beachside home.    

“I don’t speak French,” he confessed. “The only word I recognized in this song is ‘Baby.’”    

Afia laughed. “Baby is the name of the track. Do you want to party?” she asked, her Ghanaian accent slipping as she kicked off her shoes. The next song began, and Afia sang along to her favorite tune.    

“Mais qui est la plus bonne, bonne, bonne de mes copines ? (Uh)    

Ah mes copines (uh), ah mes copines (uh)    

Mais tu veux la plus bonne, bonne, bonne de mes copines (ah non)    

Ah mes copines (ah mes copines), ah mes copines    

Tu veux tout bombarder    

Bom-bom, bombarder, hey (bom-bom)    

Tu veux tout bombarder    

Bom-bom, bombarder, ouais (bom-bom)”    

—Aya Nakamura / ‘Copines’    

Garrett examined the beachside home’s decor as he spoke. “It’s funny; you and Libby have the same taste in music. I hear her singing this song all the time.” He looked around, fascinated by the artwork that decorated the walls of her drawing room, and more than a little surprised by her collection of modern pop art: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Japanese woodblock prints by Hokusai, and even a few Impressionist works, “Woman Bathing: Portrait of Myself” Mary Cassatt he knew, without asking, had to be real. He had assumed her home would be decorated with cliché reproductions of African art and sculptures.    

“I love this print; we have the same one. I cut it out of a calendar and framed it myself,” he said with a grin. “Hokusai is my favorite ukiyo-e artist.”    

“He’s mine too,” Afia replied. “I noticed you have the reproduction mounted on the portside bulkhead near the mapping table. I adore the artistic synergy of the Japonisme era, the way the artists of both nations were feeding off of each other’s creativity.”    

“The Japanese learned about perspective, and the Impressionists adopted aspects of Japanese woodblock print aesthetics into their art. It always blows my mind how they were using the old prints as packing material for the porcelain they were shipping to Europe, just wadding them up and stuffing them into crates as cushioning. Then, the Impressionist artists became fascinated by the packing material. It seems so childlike to ignore the jade and porcelain pieces they shipped halfway across the globe to play with the packing material. Mind-blowing!” Garrett added excitedly. “And what a boon it was to Japanese artists’ palettes to be introduced to coal tar colors. Their prints exploded with new colors.”    

“Bloody shame it is they were fugitive colors; they faded so quickly over the years, as if they were drawings in the sand,” Afia lamented. “A woman’s beauty washed away with the tide of time.”    

Garrett looked up, startled not by what she said, but by how she said it.    

“What happened to your Ghanian accent?”    

Afia laughed; a mischievous smile spread across her face, not realizing she had used her natural speaking voice as she laid out several long lines of the white powder on the bar’s black marble countertop with the edge of her credit card.    

“Oh bother, seems the cat is out of the bag. I was raised in Chelsea, a neighborhood in West London, basically the Beverly Hills of Britain. It’s populated with loads of artists, rock stars, and actors, very wealthy and very posh.”    

“So, why fake an African accent?”    

“When I was fresh out of uni, I did a bit of work writing for local news agencies. However, what I really wanted was to read my own copy. Unfortunately, none of the major outlets were going to point a camera at a girl as black and thick as I am.”    

“You are not fat,” Garrett said earnestly. “I’m the gentleman who prefers dark, thick girls.”    

“Aww, thanks, darling, what a sweetheart of a thing to say, but I have never been skinny. The English like their girls pale as a fish belly and asses flat as a day-old beer, and that was never going to be me.” She walked around the bar into the kitchen, picked up two wine glasses, and filled both with Malbec. Handing one glass to Garrett, she continued, “I sound like every other girl in my class at the private schools I attended, and no one would let me read my own copy.” Afia shrugged.    

“If you look African and sound posh as a royal, most Brits react as if they were seeing a canary swallow a bloody cat. Meanwhile, most Africans think it is an affectation and that you are simply putting on airs, acting all proper and white.” She snorted another rail. “Locals here in Ghana can take one look at me and tell you exactly what Bosome Freho District tribe my parents are from. This,” she said, pointing at her face, “is an acquired taste.”    

Garrett laughed; growing up in a predominantly white suburb in the United States, he’d had similar experiences. Afia leaned over the bar, placed the end of the short red plastic straw into her left nostril, and inhaled another long white rail of the powder before she passed the straw to Garrett.    

“Bloody hell!” she exclaimed, tilting her head back and inhaling deeply. “What did Yumna cut this shite with, Drano?! Holy fuck! That will certainly clear out the old sinus passages.”    

“I’ve never heard you swear before tonight,” he confessed as she removed her public mask.    

“We are permitted to be more than one thing, luv. After all, I am fighting a war on multiple fronts: the algorithm on one side, ever-shortening attention spans, and boredom on the other—the next pretty young twat gunning for my spot in front of me—while Father Time creeps up from behind with the stealth of a mugger. In this business, a good run is seven years. I have been in the top spot for six. C’est la vie. It has been fun.    

“I have enough savings in the bank that I will never have to think about money again after they refuse to renew my contract in a few years. I will be a 40-year-old single woman. The writing is on the wall, if it isn’t already on my face. One cannot be delusional about this sort of thing; it is best to put your ego aside, have an exit plan, and bow out gracefully on your own terms. I have already contacted a publisher to ghostwrite my memoirs. We all wear masks at work, darling, even you.    

“I may look like my Fanti parents, but I was born and raised in England, luv. People expect someone who looks like this to sound a certain way. Eventually, I figured it out. I cracked the colorism code. They wanted me to sound black and African. So, after I quit writing for the BBC, I borrowed my mother’s Akan accent when I began working for the Associated Press, and the cheeky bastards immediately put me on the air. The next year, I quit and started working for myself, posting my content online.”    

“So,” Garrett chuckled as he took a seat next to her on a barstool, “even black folks in Britain have to code-switch to get by.”    

Afia leaned over and kissed Garrett. He kissed her back and then stopped.    

“I’m married,” he stammered awkwardly, conflicted yet obviously aroused. Afia slid a hand up his inner thigh, caressing his growing erection through the thin fabric of his trousers as she spoke.    

“I know you are a married man. A happily married one, I might add, and I do not wish to take that from you. I just thought you might fancy a quick shag before you have to go,” Afia sighed. “Look, the fact of the matter is, I prefer married men. I find them less complicated. I do not have to get emotionally entangled; they have someone for that already. They understand that this is just sport. When I find someone who piques my interest, I have them join the gym. Their wives are happy they are taking care of themselves, and they do not arouse suspicion when they return home freshly showered.”    

He laughed nervously. “So, this is how you roll, huh?”    

“Oh, don’t be such a puritan, darling,” she grinned. “I am, at heart, a romanticist; however, I know that true love will not find everyone. I will never have what you and Libby have together.” Her lips smiled while her eyes were weighted with sorrow. “I’ve accepted that reality. Garrett, I work 18-hour days, five days a week. I have neither the time nor the inclination to manage the logistics of love; a serious relationship is simply too much of a distraction, and I refuse to have a go with any of my co-workers. That’s messier than incest. You do not shit where you eat, pray, love.”    

Garrett laughed; she was as witty as she was direct.    

“Think about it: what options do I have? Dating apps? I’d rather not. I prefer the occasional fling with one of you FOB [Fresh Off the Boat] Yanks.”    

“Why me? I’m nothing special.” Garrett confessed, “I’m the poster boy for average Joe in every aspect, so if you’re looking for the mythical BBC, you may as well prepare yourself for more disappointment.”    

Afia laughed. “I am no puerile size queen. You have exactly what I am looking for, and it is not what you have between your thighs but between your ears. I am a sapiosexual. No one has ever recognized the significance of my collection before tonight. You knew the Cassatt print by name; that Basquiat is not in any catalog, yet you immediately recognized it by style. You did not simply say you liked the Great Wave; you named the printmaker, Hokusai, and you knew the history of Edo art at its height. And when you said ‘coal tar colors’… I orgasmed. You are too modest; there is nothing ordinary about you, Mister Phillips.    

“I find black nerds fascinating, and Yanks in general seem to be a bit more manageable. You Americans are not as overbearing as the locals. I know I am generalizing, but you were raised in a culture that understands feminism, and to me, that is sexy as hell. You do not have to be told to go down on my kitty, and you know how to keep your traps shut.”    

Garrett kissed her this time. “Goodnight, Afia. Thank you for an extraordinary evening.” He looked at the message on his iPhone as the Uber driver gave his car’s horn three staccato blasts. “My chariot awaits,” he grinned as he let go of her hand and headed toward the front door.    

“I understand,” Afia lied. “But I want you to know this before you go: your wife is not in love with you anymore. In all honesty, I doubt that she ever was. You have viewed her as the ultimate prize, your entire life the pinnacle of women, the best you could ever have. You have given her everything but an orgasm.    

“Libby is the same beastly girl she was when you were in high school in that tiny town in Ohio. Libby still believes she could have done better than you, and she resents you for it. She feels like she settled for you. She may love you, but she does not like you, and we both know she does not respect you. I am saying this not because I do not want you to go, but because I know people. I read them for a living: politicians and priests, CEOs and warlords. I know what makes them tick. In your wife’s case, it is easy.    

“I grew up like you, trapped in their greater gravity, orbiting pretty, popular, narcissistic girls like her, around like a love-sick puppy. I did their homework for them, ironed the pleats in their school uniform skirts, and carried their book bags for them so they would not perspire and rumple their blazer. I wanted them to like me.    

I know the sort of humiliation you suffered pursuing her all those years because I was that chubby girlfriend girls like her kept around to make themselves look good, the fat chick the boys never noticed. I was the dumpy girl, invisible to boys, blinded as I the others by her light. I reached escape velocity when I started playing rugby with my cousins in the East End; I became the scrum queen. You are still stuck circling that beautiful moon. But what is a moon but a dead rock reflecting the light of a star?    

“I know she lied during the interview this afternoon when she said she woke you to read a passage from the book to you. Preposterous! It was a marvelous story; I’m not going to cut it. But girls like her do not read serious literature; it was you who was reading Motherland and woke her up to read that passage to her. My guess is she did not even want to come to Africa, but you managed to talk her into it, and you probably had to promise her you would leave if she did not care for being here.    

“At some point after your arrival, something extraordinary happened—something that had never happened to you before in your entire life. Beautiful, brilliant young women began to pay attention to you. Those lovely young African girls you work with, who are 100 times smarter and even more attractive than your wife, were chatting you up. Eventually, you realized for the first time in your life that you had better options. So did she.    

“And then oopsie! She accidentally got pregnant. She manipulates you with her tears, she manipulates you with her lies, and when she realizes that you are about to divorce her and put her on a plane back to the States, she manipulates you with the pregnancy. You think she was some great prize that you could never win, but the truth is, she was never worthy. Cheerio, Garrett; have a spiffing life.”    

Afia kissed him once more as the driver honked the horn, and she closed the door on Garrett Eugene Phillips.    

We Gonna Be Alright    

“…Nigga, we gon’ be alright    

Nigga, we gon’ be alright    

We gon’ be alright    

Do you hear me? Do you feel me? We gon’ be alright    

Nigga, we gon’ be alright    

Huh? We gon’ be alright    

Nigga, we gon’ be alright    

Do you hear me? Do you feel me? We gon’ be alright!”    

—Kendrick Lamar / ‘To Pimp a Butterfly’   

About the Author:    

JD Cloudy’s poetry has appeared in literary journals such as Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.