Excerpt

INTRODUCTION

The thirty-three stories contained in this collection are the result of a mentorship curriculum we, with our usual sense of the ridiculous, titled the SSDA Inkubator. The idea for a story incubator was seeded seven years ago in another Short Story Day Africa (SSDA) initiative, a series of bi-weekly flash fiction events held on social media. The popularity of these events highlighted a need within the African writing community for spaces where writers could develop work towards publication. Few such spaces exist on the continent. Of the twenty-two top-ranked universities in Africa for creative writing courses, fifteen are in South Africa (with the top eleven on the list also in South Africa), three are in Nigeria, two are in Ghana, and Mozambique and Zimbabwe each have one. This means that African writers either need to go abroad to further their creative writing ambitions, or create spaces for themselves.

The SSDA Inkubator is our endeavour to create such a space, and the twelve writers we selected for the pilot project, run in conjunction with Laxfield Literary Associates and supported by a grant from the British Council, were chosen because their voices were original and diverse, and the messages contained within their submissions powerful enough to one day cause ripples in the zeitgeist. The challenge for the writers when submitting their proposals was that they only had a maximum of one thousand words of prose to convince us they had the raw talent to deliver.

SSDA has spent years honing our mission to subvert, reimagine and reclaim the literary landscape for writers from Africa. We have done this by ensuring that we develop and publish a diverse range of voices, looking beyond the expected and polished to the raw, sometimes unhoned, edge that makes a writer's voice sing. The SSDA Inkubator is by far our most successful development programme in this regard. We found talented writers from the African continent and diaspora and took them on a journey from story seed to final publication, exposing them, via a series of workshops, to the wisdom, techniques and craft of six brilliant African writers and editors, and one British literary agent with her eyes focused on the continent's literary talent pool.

Captive is the result. Divided into three themed parts chosen by the writers as a community, these stories explore some of our most pressing concerns: love, migration, ambition, motherhood, ageing, culture, folklore, AI, mental health, fairytales and possible futures… These are more than stories. In their words these eleven Inkubator Fellows have built bridges across imagined borders, knotted stitches to mend divisions, and written a balm for our fractured global society. We hope you read them with delight, and, after turning the final page, approach your fellows with greater empathy.

Rachel Zadok

Managing Editor, Short Story Day Africa

Excerpt from THE STING by S o l a N j o k u

You glance around to make sure you have no company before easing a hand under the band of the maternity jeans that Doyin loaned you. Baby is now ten months old, napping in his stroller, but your stomach retains the dome shape of pregnancy. That, and the occasional phantom kicks, make you wary of another still burrowed in there, feeding off you. But the health visitor says those aren't kicks: "Uterus contracting."

"Bloody slowly, by the looks of it," you bemoan, grabbing the soft fat and willing it to dissolve.

But today, inching a finger under the waistband of panties that have gone from size eight lace thongs to size twelve cotton briefs, your concern isn't the stomach that people glance at before asking conversationally, "When are you due?" It's your vulva. More specifically, a tiny point of

pain to the side of your clitoris. A fingernail accidentally grazes it and tears well up from the sharp agony that follows. You look around again, extract the hand and wipe the investigative finger against your jeans. A nascent boil? An insect sting? You take the brake off the baby stroller and return to your shopping.

It is days like this, few and far between, that many primiparae growing wanted babies fantasise about as they rub their bellies and stare wistfully ahead. A breezy twenty degrees, not a cloud in the sky. Baby hasn't squirmed since you plopped him in his buggy after lugging him and the buggy, separately, down the four flights of uncarpeted stairs to escape the flat. You have tea and panini, your first uninterrupted breakfast in days, try on outfits in three stores. The last changing room is coffin-sized, so you leave the stroller outside, dressing in a hurry for fear of coming out to find an empty pram.

Baby is still there when you emerge. Relief mingles with foolishness.

You don't buy any of the clothes. Nothing looks flattering over a distended stomach, and you refuse to shell out on large clothes in a superstitious desire to return to your pre-baby body, the slim-thick achieved from years of dieting and downing questionable concoctions purchased from Filipino-owned food stores. For now, you window-shop, stopping for a strawberry crêpe, with swirly chocolate syrup and ice cream on the side. Breastfeeding, the excuse for gluttony. You manage two pages of Ake: The Years of Childhood – half of the front cover has been torn off by Baby because he dislikes the withdrawal of your attention – his distress a reminder of Edward Tronick's famous still face experiment. An acquaintance discovers you in this moment of quietude. Her realisation that you have become a mum since she last saw you elicits exclamations that stop just short of waking Baby.

Life feels idyllic this sunny day, as you perambulate through the new town centre. It feels as if a festival has descended on the hitherto ghostly town. With gentrification, colours, noise, elaborate storefront displays of clothing and décor and blossoms have come. The soundtrack to the giddiness today is contributed by a violinist performing a decent rendition of Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. It is almost unbelievable that all these people live within Winnersh's sleepy neighbourhood. You half-expect travel coaches to pull up and cart the crowd away. The sun is waning; it must be past five, that time of day when, before, whatever meagre activity was ongoing would come to a halt with store workers swiftly locking their doors as if in fear of some biblical plague. Today the teeming crowd continues to flow in both directions, navigating around you as you look about in delight. A baby cries and you glance down quickly, but it isn't Baby. It is not even a baby; it is a toddler being dragged away from a doughnut van by its more determined mother.

This mother and wife thing, you can do it on days like this. Through childhood, Mother made it look effortful, too much like martyrdom – all deep sighs, short temper and hour-long scoldings – collapsing heavily on the sunken sofa each night and falling asleep mid-sentence after a day spent managing laboratory assistants and half a dozen children. As a result, you had doubted your ability to hack it.

But since meeting Kanayo more than three years ago, the doubts evaporated. With him, you could navigate the treacherous road of wifehood and parenthood. Next to his solid, unflappable presence, you could finally believe in the joys of marriage and motherhood. On your first holiday together, conditioned by your parents' marriage and the thoughtlessness and entitlement displayed by previous boyfriends, you insisted that it was impossible for a woman not to be saddled with a larger share of the unending chores of domesticity. But Kanayo was obstinate: he planned to do his fair share of the cooking, the cleaning and the late-night feedings, bristling at your flippant dismissal of all he planned to contribute to his future family, and soon the argument had escalated. In Greece that night, the relationship had nearly tanked. Had you not been abroad, forced to share a hotel room and bed, you would both have turned in different directions and kept walking, each believing the other to be ludicrous.

But two years later, on the morning of your wedding, it is clear that you are embarking on a match ordained. You awake from a deep, dreamless sleep, undisturbed by the cold feet that stage nightmares for the troubled mind, aglow as your mum, sisters and cousins busy themselves, readying you for your lifelong position by Kanayo's side. You beam while feeding

him bits of cake on bended knees at the wedding reception, displaying to your parents' and guests' approval your "home-training" as a good, traditional wife, although you and Kanayo know different. He winks, conspiratorial, as he munches the cake from your hand.

You walk past the Catholic church where your vows were said, the hotel where you entertained afterwards, where you spent that first night as Mr and Mrs, too drained to consummate the marriage – that would happen days later during the honeymoon in Barbados. You are nervous, coquettish, even though it isn't the first time. That had been soon after you met, on a visit to his house, the home where you now live. Tired of being a chaste nearly-virgin, playing it safe through university, you give it up easily this time, warning him not to come inside you. He does, anyway, embarrassed in the aftermath. And the sullen pair of you make the walk of shame to Boots the next morning to purchase the aptly named "morning after" pill. You drink it down with a Ribena, monosyllabic, resentful, making judgements as to his character. Afterwards you both decide to do the responsible thing, book STI tests, make a day trip of it to London. The results seal your tacit agreement to be exclusive.