Distress полностью

"William Savimbi, Proteus Information. You speak approvingly of a convergence of ideas which has no respect for ancestral cultures—as if your own heritage were of no importance to you at all. Is it true that you received death threats from the Pan-African Cultural Defense Front, after you publicly stated that you didn't consider yourself to be an African woman?"

Mosala had put the quote in context—but she hadn't answered the question. If a comment like that had been enough to result in death threats, what might rumors of "defection"—baseless or not—bring down on her?

I had no idea; I knew even less about South African cultural politics than I knew about ATMs. Mosala would hardly be the first prominent scientist to leave the country, but she would be one of the most celebrated—and the first to emigrate to Stateless. Chasing money and prestige at a world-class institution was one thing, but it would be hard to read a move to Stateless (which could offer neither) as anything but a deliberate renunciation of her nationality.

I paused on the landing, and stared at my useless electronic teat. AC? Mainstream AC? Sisyphus was silent. Whoever they were, Sarah Knight had managed to find them. I was beginning to feel an ache in the pit of my stomach every time I thought about what I'd done to her. It was clear that she'd prepared for this job meticulously, researching every issue surrounding Mosala—and coming from politics, where nothing on the nets was true, she'd probably gone out and talked to everyone in the flesh. Someone must have told her about the rumors, and put her on the trail which led to Kuwale—all off the record, of course. I'd stolen the project, walked in cold, and now I couldn't even tell whether I was making a documentary about an emigrant anarcho-physicist in fear of her life… or whether I was jumping at shadows, and the only threat anyone on Stateless faced was being goaded into giving Janet Walsh some long overdue career advice.

I had Hermes call every hotel on the island, and inquire about a guest called Akili Kuwale.

No luck.

In my room, I turned up the windows' sound insulation, and tried to psych myself into doing some work. The next morning I was scheduled to film a lecture by Helen Wu, chief advocate of the view that Mosalas methodology verged on circular logic. Before letting Munroe talk me into filming the inland divers, I'd been planning to spend the whole afternoon reading Wu's previous papers; I had a lot of catching up to do.

First, though…

I scanned the relevant databases (eschewing help from Sisyphus, and taking three times as long). The Pan-African Cultural Defense Front turned out to be a loose affiliation of fifty-seven radical traditionalist groups from twenty-three nations, with a council of representatives which met each year to decide strategies and issue proclamations. PACDF itself was twenty years old; it had appeared in the wake of a resurgence of the traditionalist debate in the early thirties, when a num ber of academics and activists, mostly in central Africa, had begun to speak of the need to "re-establish continuity" with the pre-colonial past. Political and cultural movements of the previous century—from Senghor's negritude to Mobutu's "authenticity" to Black Consciousness in all its forms—were dismissed as corrupt, assimilationist, or overly concerned with responding to colonialism and Westernization. The correct response to colonialism—according to the most vocal of the new traditionalists—was to excise it from history completely: to aim to behave, in its aftermath, as if it had never happened.

PACDF was the most extreme manifestation of this philosophy, taking an uncompromising and far from populist line. They decried Islam as an invader religion, as much as Christianity or Syncretism. They opposed vaccination, bioengineered crops, electronic communications. And if there was more to the group than a catalog of the foreign (or local, but insufficiently ancient) influences they explicitly renounced, they might have found it hard to differentiate themselves without such a hit-list. Many of the policies they advocated—wider official use of local languages, greater support for traditional cultural forms—were already high on the agenda of most governments, or were being lobbied for from other quarters. PACDF's raison d'être seemed to consist of being greater purists than anyone else. When the most effective anti-malarial vaccine on the planet was manufactured in Nairobi—based on research carried out in that well-known imperialist superpower, Colombia—condemning its use as "a criminal betrayal of traditional healing practices" sounded like sheer fundamentalist perversity to me.