Of Africa: The Untold Stories

The Africa You Never Read About

Pick a movie any movie on a scifi, alien and doomsday tip and you will notice a very interesting trend, it would seem aliens, vampires never come to Africa,

until the Black Panther franchise we did not seem to have any Super Heroes, one of the reasons people hype up Black Panther and Wakanda so much is its one of the few movies where a place in Africa is shown outside of the usual famine and war torn backdrop…

Africa is the cradle of mankind, according to archeological evidence, what happened? Why is it still “developing”

My bio reads as

I write about the beauty and the chaos of the place I call home as I celebrate the magic in my ancestry

 How can it not be magic? I cant do magic so… I write.

I wrote this tweet in jest about how can we flourish when we call our own brand of technology witchcraft?

we wont progress until we stop calling our advanced developments in technology witchcraft

— ~B 🇿🇼 (@Beatonm5) May 9, 2018

Witchcraft is such a nasty sounding word, nothing good could come ever from it, imagine if we called it the magic it was.

There are mysteries that happen around us that science cant quite explain…

A month ago on a road trip from Bulawayo, (Zimbabwe’s 2^nd largest) to Harare (The Capital of Zimbabwe) after facilitating a blogging workshop on how blogging could be used as a tool for accountability, something strange happened. We were talking about the undocumented experiences that people never write about and so no one ever read about them, and there’s a general consensus something is not true if nothing is ever written about it.

At some point we were  discussing some strange old man whom I shan’t mention by name for reasons you will see as you read on; it’s said that a bus crew refused him to ride on their bus on account of not having sufficient bus fare. Guess what?

The bus immediately developed a fault and could not move past that spot. Mechanics tried and failed for days to get the bus to start, as far as they could tell, there was nothing wrong with the vehicle. Eventually someone suggested they find that strange man and ask for forgiveness and offer to transport him…

*Boom* the bus became fully operational

Remember we were on a roadtrip, it’s about an 8 hour journey and we were somewhere in the middle of nowhere and as soon as we started talking about that man the car which part had been perfectly fine suddenly made a funny rattling sound and when we stopped to investigate the whole car’s electronics simply went dead, just like that, the lights, the dashboard, the radio that had been belting out a medley of timeless musical classics and of course the car would not start, you turn the ignition nothing…

It turns out somehow a nut on bolt holding one of the battery terminals had unscrewed itself and popped off, that’s what made the rattling sound and the loose terminal is why everything had gone off. It’s perfectly logical but is there any reason why it happened at that exact instant, coincidence maybe, we could say driving in potholed roads unscrewed the nut that requires two spanners, and an excellent grip to remove, but the Harare – Bulawayo road is one of the nicest smoothest road experiences outside of the time spent travelling

As we did not want to jinx it we did not mention the man again and the rest of the journey was uneventful well except for trying to find a mechanic with an extra bolt to spare in the dead of night.

You think live-streaming is cool but have you read about the guys who can broadcast via ancestral networks and remote view people using a mirror in a clay pot? The GPS on your phone lets you know where you are or where the phone is right? Well, there’s guys who can track heartbeats, find lost things, people and lovers and even bring them back too. Electric cars? Oh please we have reed baskets defying gravity and geography.

Imagine if we figured out how some of this actually worked instead of shrouding it in mysticism and only writing about it in tabloids, the electricity problems gone with a finger snaps if one can conjure lightning, and insurance who would need it, with the ancestors watching over…..

There’s no smoke without fire

~B