as it zoomed over his shoulder and hovered above the yard, propellers at full speed. Methodically, he brought it down, then went over and picked it up from the wood shavings.
‘Our country is full of broken promise,’ said God. ‘But the promise never shatters completely – there’s never the total disaster, the catastrophe we need to start the revolution!’
‘That’s sick, old man,’ Joseph chuckled.
‘Cooperating with the West after Independence only made us weaker. Why did we bother?’
‘Uh, I think it was for the money?’
‘No, they have just been waiting for our resources to dwindle. Vultures! We started this nation with potential. “A society of the people!” Kaunda said. But somehow we narrowed until it was just for the top three per cent. The capitalists replaced the colonialists. And now these foreigners take our minerals away and even shoot our miners. Every day their greed bites into our land. Soon there will be nothing left. We must wake up! We must stop dreaming! We are still on the ground. It is still night in this country. We are still on our knees. Time to rise up!’
God’s face was wrinkled and his dreads were matted, but he was still quick and strong. His hands were busy now, rolling two new joints of mbanji.
‘This is how we put revolution in the body!’ he laughed.
Joseph watched God with dreamy patience, waiting for him to light up.
* * *
Have you heard of Jonas Salk? He was the American scientist who discovered the polio vaccine. He proved that we could use inactivated polio cells the same way we use inactivated tetanus and diphtheria cells to make a vaccine. Late in his life, in the 1980s, he even did some preliminary studies on a vaccine for The Virus. I was googling around and it turns out he conducted experiments on himself, and his wife and son were the test subjects for the first polio vaccine trial. ‘I will be personally responsible,’ he said. Good thing it worked! When they asked him who owned the patent on the polio vaccine, he said: ‘Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’
* * *
‘What are you doing with that thing?’
‘Nothing,’ Jacob replied without looking up.
God was sawing through a plank of wood. Now he pushed his goggles up. They held his dreadlocks back like a girl’s headband.
‘It better not be nothing!’ he said. ‘The General is waiting.’
The new drone model was propped on its back on an overturned oil drum, a brick underneath it to raise its head and protect its propellers. Its square belly was open. Joseph glanced around the yard at the remnants of Jacob’s experiments. It looked like the aftermath of a battle scene in a Terminator movie.
‘But why?’ he tried again. ‘Is that, like, a real drone? How much did it cost?’
Jacob glared at him and returned to his tinkering. After a beat, he spoke. ‘I’m rebuilding it.’
‘Why?’
Jacob narrowed his eyes and flicked his chin up. ‘And you – why do you do those things in your ka lab?’
‘Science.’
‘So?’ Jacob jerked his head at the drone. ‘Same-same.’
* * *
Joseph turned on the gas for the Bunsen burner. Four samples of canarypox – one had disappeared last week, he suspected Dr Ling had snatched it – were huddled in the wooden rack. The Petri dish was sitting on the workbench. He lit the burner. From a recessed part of his mind, he watched himself hold the inoculation loop in the tiny roar of the methane flame until the metal glowed a fierce orange. He cooled the loop in the agar with a hiss. The agar looked clean, the colour of Vaseline. He dipped the sterile loop into the open test tube, then scribbled it over the agar. He was making another culture to examine on the electrophoresis tray. He leaned against the workbench, watching himself dip and transfer.
* * *
Salk wasn’t the only one. Scientists love to experiment on themselves. The immunologist David Pritchard slipped hookworms under his skin. The cardiologist Werner Forssmann put a catheter in his heart. The chemist Albert Hofmann took the first ever hit of LSD on his bicycle ride home from the lab. I can see the appeal of testing yourself. It’s all about the control. You control the whole experiment. You prove your commitment to your hypothesis. You observe symptoms internally and externally. You skirt the ethical morass of testing human subjects, if not the legal one. But I’m sure there’s a loophole, the