Her eyes grew wide for a moment and I quickly said, “I’ve been planets away and learned about and met people from other worlds. It’s wrong that I don’t even know of my own… my own people.” I let out a breath as my words sunk into me. They were the truth now, a truth that had been different a day ago when I had been ashamed and quiet about my blood. Seeing the Night Masquerade had lived up to its mythology. To see it did signify immediate drastic change.
“Walk with me,” my grandmother said, then she left the tent. I followed, grabbing my satchel. As we walked away from the camp, I saw two of the men go to our tent and start breaking it down. She led me up the nearest high sand dune. When we reached the top, she turned toward the camp and sat down. I sat beside her. Below, the camp was aflutter with activity, all the tents packed up except ours. I was clearly the last to wake up.
“You’ve somehow learned the name of our clan.”
“I asked Mwinyi.”
“Having curiosity is the only way to learn,” she said. She worked her hands before her for a moment and then looked at me. “That was me communicating with your father.”
I raised my eyebrows.
“You Himba are so inward-looking,” she said. “Cocooned around that pink lake, growing your technology from knowledge harvested from deep within your genius, you girls and women dig up your red clay and hide beneath it. You’re an interesting people who have been on those lands for generations. But you’re a young people. The Enyi Zinariya are old old Africans.
“And contrary to what you all believe, we have technology that puts yours to shame and we’ve had it for centuries.” She paused, letting this news sink in. It wasn’t sinking in to me easily. All that she’d said was so contrary to all that I had been taught that I’d begun to feel a little dizzy.
“We didn’t create it, though,” she continued. “It was brought to us by the Zinariya. Those who were there documented the Zinariya times, but the files were kept on paper and paper does not last. So all we really know is what elders read and then what the elders after those elders remembered and then what the next elders remembered and so on.
“The Zinariya came to us in the desert. They were a golden people, who glinted in the sun. They were solar and had landed in Earth’s desert to rest and refuel on their way to Oomza Uni.”
I couldn’t control myself. “What?” I shrieked.
She chuckled. “Yes. We ‘Desert People’ knew of Oomza Uni before other people on Earth even had mobile phones!”
“Oh my goodness,” I whispered. I couldn’t imagine anyone on Earth back then being able to comprehend the very idea of Oomza Uni. Human beings on Earth hadn’t even had real contact with people from outside yet, and the nonhumans who had had contact with extraterrestrials never bothered to convey anything to human beings. It was centuries later and I, who had been there, was still trying to wrap my brain around the sheer greatness of Oomza Uni.
“Our clan was even smaller and nomadic back then, and we became fast friends with the Zinariya. Though many of them left for Oomza within a few months, a few stayed with us for many years before going on to Oomza. Before leaving, they gave us something to help us communicate with them wherever they were and with each other wherever we were. They also called this ‘zinariya.’ It was a living organism tailored for our blood that every member of the clan drank into his or her system with water. Biological nanoids so tiny that they could comfortably embed themselves into our brains. Once you had them in you, it was like having an astrolabe in your nervous system. You could eat, hear, smell, see, feel, even sense it.”
How had I not been able to guess this? Not that it was due to alien technology, but that they were working with a platform. They were manipulating a virtual platform like the ones astrolabes could project! One that only the Enyi Zinariya could see and access. I felt a sting of shame as I realized why I hadn’t understood something so obvious. My own prejudice. I had been raised to view the Desert People, the Enyi Zinariya, as a primitive, savage people plagued by a genetic neurological disorder. So that’s what I saw.
My grandmother nodded, a knowing smirk on her face. “And once the zinariya was in those who drank it, the nanoids were passed on to offspring through their DNA.” She stopped talking and looked at me, waiting. Seconds passed and I frowned, anxious. I was about to ask if she’d told me all she was going to tell me when it exploded in my mind. My world went fuzzy for a moment and I was glad that I was sitting down. I shut my eyes and grasped at the first mathematical equation I could. Equations were always rotating around me like moons and this thought was soothing. Gently, I let myself tree. Then I opened my eyes, calm and balanced, and faced a very jarring bit of information.
“My father has the zinariya in him,” I said.
My grandmother was looking at me, smirking. “Yes.”
“And so do I and all my siblings.”
“Yes.”
“We carry alien technology.”
“Yes.”
The information tried to knock me down and I sunk deeper into meditation. If I wanted to, I could call up a current and send it streaming across the sand. I am Himba, I said to myself between the splitting and splitting fractals of equations, my most soothing pattern. I am Himba, even if my hair has become okuoko because of my actions and even if I have Enyi Zinariya blood. Even if my DNA is alien.
“Binti,” my grandmother softly said.
“Why can’t I see it? Why can’t any of my siblings or my father? None of us goes about waving our hands, manipulating objects that no one else can see.”
“Your father can and does,” she said. “When he so chooses. Didn’t I tell you I’d just communicated with him? You think a son would abandon his mother? Just because he marries a Himba woman and decides to use his harmonizing skill in ‘civilization’ instead of the hinterland?”
I sighed and pressed my hands to my forehead. I felt so strange. This was all so strange.
“If you could reach my father, why’d you need me to reach out to Okwu?”
“To see if you could,” she said, smiling.
I frowned.
“Now listen,” she said. “The zinariya cannot just be used. It has to be switched on; it has to be activated. If it is not, you can live your whole life without even knowing it’s in you. As you have.”
“How does one switch it on?”
“The clan priestess does it. The Ariya. You will meet her tomorrow.”
I wanted to turn back.
Oh, I wanted to turn back so badly. Enough was enough was enough was enough. I could have made it home. Then I could have still made the trek out onto the salt trails on my own and caught up with the women and completed my pilgrimage. I could have become a whole woman in my clan, a complete Himba woman. All I had to do was walk into the darkness and use my astrolabe to tell me which way to go. However, we were days into the hinterland and if something did not kill me in the night, my lack of food or a proper water-gathering capture station would.
Plus, I didn’t want to turn back. Why don’t I ever want to do what I’m supposed to do?
So I went with Grandmother. I went with the Desert People.
It was another forty-eight hours of walking during the night, sleeping during the day, eating dates, flat bread, and palm-oil-rich Enyi Zinariya stews. Three more times, I saw Mwinyi protect us from packs of predatory animals—once from another pack of wild dogs and twice from hyenas. And I watched the Enyi Zinariya with new eyes; I especially watched their hands.
In the meantime, I barely touched my astrolabe. There was so much around me to take in; I just didn’t need it. Nor did I touch the pieces of my edan; I didn’t want to think about it. Okwu checked on me once that second day and was even curter than it was the first time.