Their sex gave the whale-bone unit and its thatched roof of albatross wings a sweet musty odor like a ripened durian fruit. It was one of the many fossil houses of dry bones and cured scales that served generations, and still stood in clusters in Old Dodoma, a land of dryness that was once an ocean. Now there were only stories of the once pregnant ocean with greedy waves that humped and rippled all the way to the shore.
Yes, only stories remained.
Nothing was left of the ocean, because of a curse that rose from Mother Africa’s lips in her bereavement for her lost sons and daughters, and the gods heard her cry. Men, women and children snatched from their huts and shipped as slaves in a flourishing economy commandeered by sultans and Arab leaders across the Indian Ocean all the way to Muscat and the Omani coast. Eighteenth-century trade routes, running from the Swahili coastal regions all the way to Persia and Mesopotamia, stole what did not belong to them.
Zawadi had read about Tippu Tip, an Afro Omani ivory and slave trader from Stone Town. He was himself the grandson of a slave, yet did not blink at the cries of his own 10,000 slaves in clove plantations all over Zanzibar. But the gods heard, and punished the ocean. Shriveled up her womb, no waters left.
Zawadi pondered this as she lay with Mapesa a moment more on the thin bed in her one-roomer, separated from the other tenants in the government complex by a fish-scale curtain she’d wrangled from a mtumba second-hand bundle. A baby was crying—groaning, more like it—and Zawadi didn’t want to, or just couldn’t, take it anymore.
She swung her feet off the bed, and now stood outside in a blast of crimson desert sand, harsh on her skin way before sunrise. She felt thirsty and imagined cold, clean water washing down her throat. Sweet, sweetest water rushing, rushing to her stomach. She thought of New Dodoma, the world out yonder that promised such water. It also promised the sizzle of a shower like rain from a sleek chrome head in an en suite full of blinking marble and blond rustic wood.
She leant against the fishbone wall, tightened her dust scarf, and pictured rubbing the milk of shea butter on her elbow. It was extraordinary, beautiful that world, a place you got beer with a haircut. There, streets had names like Miriam Makeba Road, Fela Kuti Drive, Kidjo Avenue, Masekela Lane. Towers steepled to the sky, esplanades and water everywhere.
But in this beforehand, inside Old Dodoma, she had decisions to make—and the conclusions came along with judgements and mitigating circumstances that were too reckless to leave to chance. Mapesa was pushing for something she was not ready for.
Originally published in Ecoceanic: Southern Flows anthology, edited by Tarun K. Saint and Francesco Verso.
Excerpt from upcoming release ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction anthology, edited by Marissa van Uden.
Release date Nov 18, 2025, published by Apex Books imprint Violet Lichen.
