6) ‘Spider the Artist’ by Nnedi Okorafor
My husband was a drunk, like too many of the members of the Niger Delta People’s Movement. It was how they all controlled their anger and feelings of helplessness. The fish, shrimps and crayfish in the creeks were dying. Drinking the water shrivelled women’s wombs and eventually made men urinate blood.
There was a stream where I had been fetching water. A flow station was built nearby and now the stream was rank and filthy, with an oily film that reflected rainbows. Cassava and yam farms yielded less and less each year. The air left your skin dirty and smelled like something preparing to die. In some places, it was always daytime because of the noisy gas flares.
Eme lives with her husband Andrew in a village that has been polluted and despoiled by the oil industry. She wants children, but has not been able to become pregnant. She dreams of becoming a teacher at the local secondary school. She both fears and grieves over her husband, whose abusive personality has been further degraded by the struggle to win back land from the oil companies. Her one solace is her father’s guitar, a beautiful, antique instrument for which she has a virtuoso talent. Her favourite place to play her music is the land behind the house, close to the oil pipeline that runs through everyone’s backyards. Here, she can be herself – and it is here that she one day finds herself with an unusual audience…
The government came up with the idea to create the Zombies, and Shell, Chevron and a few other oil companies (who were just as desperate) supplied the money to pay for it all. The Zombies were made to combat pipeline bunkering and terrorism. It makes me laugh. The government and the oil people destroyed our land and dug up our oil, then they created robots to keep us from taking it back.
The robots in question are the Anansi Droids 419 – eight-legged, spider-like AIs that patrol the pipeline at frenetic speed, killing anyone who so much as touches the pipeline and generally acting as a super-fast, super-vigilant, super-ruthless police force for the oil industry, no prisoners taken. When one of these AIs not only begins to show an interest in Eme’s music but to display musical talent of its own, Eme is both wary and entranced. Gradually she is drawn into a kind of comradeship with the thing. But can this alien intelligence truly be trusted?
The story ends horribly, and with a warning. Are the Zombies meant as avatars of the forces exploiting Nigeria and its people? Can any Zombie be trusted, even a good Zombie, when their agenda is so different? Can any alliance between villager and Zombie be anything other than precarious and temporary? This is a story about loyalty, and about exploitation. It is also a story about Eme, who is such an interesting and powerful character one longs to meet her again.
I’m still thinking about this story and its implications. A tremendous piece of work.