And the Giant Awoke

Credit: Gemini

In fertile soil entombed, the Giant slept,

Buried, but never slain.

“Iyeri tubo?” Grandma Osunju had asked in the sacred tongue, all those years ago.

Abinla had stated her name, her age and her place of birth. It seemed obvious enough.

And Grandma Osunju had said, with a sigh, “No, no, you still do not understand. When you come back here next year, maybe you will understand then.”

“But Grandmother…” said Abinla. “Why can’t you just tell me what I’m meant to understand?”

“Because you must discover it for yourself. Go on home. Live more. Learn more. Then come back next year and I shall ask you again.”

Abinla hung her head. Another year past… and she still did not understand. How little she understood back then. Grandma Osunju had made it very clear: the answer had to be hers. It had to come from within. And it had to be the right one.

She felt the old woman’s slender finger against her chin, lifting her head, and as their eyes met again, she cheered up. The woman was disappointed – she had disappointed her again! – but not in an unkind way, not in a dismissive way. Abinla saw no disapproval in those eyes, only warmth and an unshakable faith. She knew her grandmother would wait for her answer for as long as she had still to live.

“Do not be disappointed in yourself,” said Grandma Osunju. “It is simply not yet time. The answer will come.”

“What’s your answer?” asked Abinla. “What would you say?”

The old woman smirked and cocked her head. “Oh, but that would be cheating, would it not?”

“… I suppose,” said Abinla. “Did you get it right when your grandmother asked you?”

“I did,” said Grandma Osunju.

“And my mother?”

“No. And she has come to accept that failure. It does not make her any less of a person. Sometimes, the wind blows one way, sometimes another. Perhaps if her grandmother were still alive today, she would know the answer by now, for we are always learning, always growing.”

“Oh…” said Abinla, pondering the truth in the words.

Grandma Osunju reached out her hand again and placed it against Abinla’s face. Would that the old woman’s wisdom could flow in with the tenderness. She really wanted to know!

More life, then, she thought, as her grandmother rose from her stool, and she from the mat. More lessons. One day, I’ll understand.

She heard her parents call to her from across the yard. Mama had since said her farewells, and Grandma Osunju had called Abinla aside for a final chat that needed no explanation.

“Go in peace, my child,” said the woman. “I’ll see you next year.”

Abinla lunged forward, hugging her grandmother tight, drawing an endearing sigh.

“See you, Grandma,” said Abinla.

“See you, my child.”

Sitting in her office, looking out the window behind her desk at the distant city dazzling beneath the Motherland Sun, Abinla heaved a nostalgic sigh, and felt the faintest pangs of sorrow. Oh, if Grandma Osunju had lived but a moment longer, to see the land she had fought so hard for rise from the abyss with her own eyes. She never stopped believing, and her faith had spurred Abinla on to be everything she wanted to be, everything she needed to be.

She summoned the time into her visual field. T minus 2 hours. Good timing. She had two more items to clear off her schedule today, and things had been pretty mellow at N-Space since the launch to Europa. She wouldn’t be late.

Well… worst case, she would be fashionably late.

She took in the view for a minute more, then made her way out to the elevator and headed up.

“Welcome, Director Abinla,” said Waju, one of the department androids, as the translucent doors of the Conference Room parted.

“Thank you, Waju,” said Abinla.

“Director…” came a second friendly voice at the end of the table.

“Hi, Simi,” said Abinla, to the lead rocket scientist, and returned warm greetings all round.

The meeting would be brief. A new mission was on the calendar, and new innovations sorely needed. It was a big one, signed off by the AU High Council itself. 3 national space agencies were already on board, with 4 more on the way. For now however, everything was still in the preliminary phase, and no parties in a great rush, least of all hers. There was more than enough excitement as things stood.

She took her seat just as the folks from Ghana, Burkina Faso and Eritrea joined in on the big monitor, and smirked with a child’s enthusiasm. Getting to work everyday with like minds from across the Motherland towards a common vision was the best part of her job.

“Alright,” she said. “Let’s get started…”

***

“Iyeri tubo?” Grandma Osunju had asked in the sacred tongue, on Abinla’s third visit to the village as a woman.

Abinla’s brow crinkled with thought, as she recalled the year past. Who had she been? What had she learned? And had these lessons finally revealed to her the answer she so desperately sought?

She had been a student, sailing through her second year at university, majoring in the humanities, and finding out what she was made of. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her education. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do with her life. She knew that she loved helping people. She knew she wanted to make a difference. But she had also come to know other things, about how broken the system really was, how nothing was as it appeared, and how her country was less a country than a prison, where the worst ruled over the weak and children starved.

A prison where none dared to dream of change, only escape.

What difference could she make?

No organizations were untouched, no institutions sacred, no authorities clean. Only rogue wolves remained now, a fragmented network of idealists like her grandmother who believed in spite of everything that their people could prosper, that they too were worthy of a future.

She had been following this network for some time, and found a glimmer of hope in their cause, though where she fit in the revolution whose embers they were fanning, she did not yet know.

She hoped to find out soon.

“I…” she said, looking up at Grandma Osunju. “… I’m not sure.”

“Try.”

“Mmmm,” said Abinla, thinking. “I’m… a young woman… still figuring things out.”

“This is true,” said Grandma Osunju. “But it is not who you are. Who you are is so much more than that. Next year, perhaps. Keep learning.”

Abinla sighed.

The team at N-Space had started work on their module for the big mission long before the Council’s approval. As the Motherland’s leading innovator in the fields of agriculture and botany, Nigeria had revolutionized the food basket not just across the continent, but in space. And it was from these very fields that a new idea had emerged, the idea of a fully organic life-support system, grown into the very structures of their starships and space stations.

Research and development had been moving at a standard pace, but now there was finally motive to pick it up. Stepping into the gowning room of the bioengineering lab, Abinla slipped into gear, stole a moment of innocent vanity in the dressing mirror, and proceeded to the clean room, where the team was already prepped for the day’s test.

The prototype lay in a glass chamber in the center of the room, implanted in a miniature of Nubia Zero, the AU’s Space Station, replicated down to the tiniest essential component. Telemetries and spectral scans popped up on the surrounding monitors, all statuses in the green. Abinla wasn’t exactly holding her breath for a seamless test, but she did love surprises.

Her eyes found the clock on the big monitor. T minus 90 minutes. Good.

“Welcome, Ma,” said Kole, one of the bioengineers. “We were just about to get started.”

“I can see that,” said Abinla, with a smirk.

“Your suggestion about the branching enzymes yesterday… life saver.”

“My pleasure,” said Abinla, chuckling her modesty. She tried her best to stick to her organizing role these days and let the kids have most of the fun, but couldn’t help chiming in every now and then.

“Sample primed for germination,” came the voice of Nala, the AI administrator, as a tone echoed through the room, cuing all to their places.

“Here we go,” said Kole, then turning back to Abinla, “Care to do the honors, Ma?”

Grinning in earnest now, Abinla stepped towards the control panel, and tapped go.

The seed culture was housed in a spherical capsule, a feat of nanotechnology in its own right. At Abinla’s command, the capsule’s inner layer sent an electric charge into the culture, activating the bionic cells. The telemetries on the monitors began to change, and in the ensuing seconds, the capsule cracked open, organic tendrils stretching out of a 12-millimeter mass of bubbling metabolism, unfurling their leaf-like cilia as they grew into the vascular scaffold.

In 4 minutes, the experiment was done.

There were a few branches out of place, which at scale would be more than enough to doom the station and everyone in it, but on the whole…

“Not bad for a first run,” said Kole.

“Not bad at all,” said Abinla.

“Looks like we pretty much nailed the photosynthesis,” said Kole, as he regarded the spectral scans, the healthy cilia lapping radiation from the UV panels lining the scaffold.

“Oxygen levels rising,” announced Nala.

“Good job, everyone,” said Abinla.

***

“Iyeri tubo?” asked Grandma Osunju in the sacred tongue, on Abinla’s fifth visit.

This time, she was silent for a long moment.

She had been an activist, joining a grassroots chapter of the budding revolution, sensitizing her fellow citizens on their civic rights and responsibilities. They met the people where they were, in the markets, in the schools, in the streets, day after day, week after week. Yet even with all they had done, there were still those who would not listen, who would not change, who could not look past their immediate needs, who just didn’t care. But then, who could really blame them? For all the privileges she lacked, she had never truly known hunger, or the desperation and hopelessness that came with it.

It was not meant to be an easy journey. The time for easy things had passed. The country was in free fall, the continent, for the first time in decades, facing the very real threat of imperial invasion, and though an oasis of hope had sprung up in the Sahel, a new alliance with a new vision that gave the enemy pause, the corrupt still outnumbered the upright.

So much to do. So little time. So few willing to stand and fight for their future. But they had to fight! There was no other way!

And as she sat now before her grandmother, she felt more exhausted and broken than she had ever felt in her life. The silence was nothing more than a final plea to the universe for some spark of clarity, for it all to have meant something.

Grandma Osunju could sense all of this, of course, though Abinla had shared only some of the details, but she simply sat, the warmth in her eyes unwavering, waiting, patiently.

“… I don’t know,” said Abinla, finally. “I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do… I don’t know anything anymore…”

“I understand, my child,” said Grandma Osunju, reaching for her granddaughter’s face. “I know you have had a hard year, and I know you feel that all your efforts have been fruitless. There is so little reason to hope these days. But you must never give up hope! Do you hear me, my child? Never lose faith in yourself and your people. Even if you lose everything, never lose that! Never!”

“… Yes, Grandma.”

The woman pulled her close, embracing the tired little girl within, embracing away the tears.

“Now go, my child… and fight on!”

The lobby of the main building had a statue of the Motherland in its center, 7 feet of tar-black marble glistening beneath the chandelier, the country highlighted in the colors of its flag, and a sapphire starship jetting overhead into orbit. The poetry of it always brought a smile to Abinla’s face. 20 years walking through this lobby, and it still felt like that first day. She stepped out onto the porch, breathed in the temperate air, and waved back at a group of interns headed to Jet Propulsion. The cab she had hailed on her way out of the lab was just rolling in through the gates.

“Good morning, Ma,” said the vehicle, as it hummed to a halt in front of her.

“Good morning to you,” said Abinla, hopping in the back, and sighing comfort as the memory foam adapted to her frame.

“Are you in a hurry by any chance?” said the cab.

She checked the time. T minus 54 minutes.

“… Nah,” she said.

“Alright, then. Would you like me to play something?”

“Very much.”

“Selection?”

“Surprise me,” she said.

The soothing notes of a Senegalese kora filled the vehicle as the ride began. She knew this song, an early 21st century classic. The melody lent beauty to the view. She swayed her head, humming what she remembered, and feeling the joy swell within her as her destination drew nearer.

In 40 minutes, she was on the other side of town, on an open road with lush fields stretching out for miles to the rolling hills on either side, dotted by fruit trees and the homes of career farmers. She saw a few tending to their crops, aided by helper droids, a sight her younger self, cruising southward on this very highway with her family at the end of each year, could not have conjured in her wildest dreams. But this was life now, the future she had fought for, that they had all fought for.

10 minutes later, a powder-white fence panned into view, at once familiar and not. Then, looming before her, an arched, open entrance, with words etched upon it in an ancient script revived. ‘University of Abuja’. Her alma mater, as it was now, nurturing the Motherland’s brightest minds.

“Shall we head straight to the auditorium, Ma?” said the cab.

“Yes, please,” said Abinla.

The only difference between the greenery of the campus and the greenery without was the height of the grass and the fanciness of the vegetation. The main road and its exits were flanked by dream trees, their fallen flowers like pink confetti against the asphalt. In the distance to the left lay the stadium, and to the right, the research facilities. The cab headed straight down, then curved left around the campus fountain to the West entrance of the main building. The guest parking lot was already half full.

“Hope you enjoyed the ride, Ma?” said the cab.

“It was wonderful,” said Abinla. “Thank you.”

“My pleasure. Have a great day.”

“You too.”

She waved the sweet robot farewell, then headed inside, hoping not to draw too much attention, and finding little success as she passed by many old faces. She rarely visited, but this was a special day. She checked the time one final time as she stood before the wooden doors of the auditorium.

T plus 11 minutes.

A broad, strong and gentle hand clasped hers, fingers entwining. She looked to her right and smiled.

“Hi,” she said, in the tongue of his ancestors.

“Hey,” said Chinua, the love of her life, in the tongue of hers. “Fancy bumping into you here.”

She giggled. “Glad you could make it.”

“I wouldn’t have missed this for the world.”

They walked in, and took their seats just as the lights were dimming off. An opening symphony swelled from the surround speakers, filling the air with something primal, as if the wheel of time had turned backwards, and the ancients themselves now sat among the audience.

Then the play began.

And there she was.

Young Alaere, taking to the center stage, her ebony locks falling to the small of her back, her skin like a starry midnight sky, and behind her, rendered on the background screen, a virgin land, peaceful and bountiful, as it had always been, before the horrors.

Abinla gripped her husband’s hand tighter as their daughter serenaded the audience with a prayer song, a prayer to the spirits of the land, their home. The play was an ode to the past, to a history they had finally chosen to rediscover and embrace, that they may finally move forward in truth. As Alaere crooned the closing movement of her number, her eyes and her mother’s met, with a playful wink from the former that broke the fourth wall, drawing laughter and applause.

Abinla laughed, Chinua laughed, and the applause echoed on as the rest of the cast took to the stage. A beautiful moment. There were so many of those now, so many reasons to be grateful for who they were, for their place in the universe.

How long it had taken them to get there.

And they were just getting started.

***

“Iyeri tubo?” asked Grandma Osunju in the sacred tongue, on Abinla’s eighth visit.

This time, the silence was different. There was no confusion now, no despair, no sorrow, only a deep sense of closure.

“I am a daughter of the Motherland,” Abinla replied, in the sacred tongue. “Born in the cradle of human civilization, born in the lands of Nubia, Kemet, Mali, Songhai, Ashanti and Great Benin. The blood of kings and queens, architects and visionaries, poets and scribes, healers and seers, warriors and adventurers flows through my veins. I am a descendant of the greatest people to ever walk the face of the Earth and I carry their history, their memories, their wisdom and their pride within me.

“I know this now, and my eyes will never be closed to the truth again.”

Grandma Osunju looked at Abinla for a while, her expression unreadable. Abinla simply sat, waiting, patiently. Then the old woman smiled, a smile she had never smiled before, and Abinla knew, even before the words came, that she had finally understood.

And all around her, the cries of victory still echoed through the land.

For the Giant had awoken.

© 2025 Barra Hart. All rights reserved.

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