Why did I run to the desert? A desert with a disaster churning in its bowels? I could have fled in any direction. I had a wiped African e-passport on my phone. I could have crossed any continent border without anyone knowing who I was, no questions, no forms. Yet I went due north. I was broken, worse than when I was broken at the age of fourteen. Children are resilient, especially when they find a bright star to latch onto. My star back then was a podcast.
When I was fourteen and newly broken by the car accident, I realized that there are times when you either save yourself or you don’t. It’s only up to you. One does not simply have robot legs attached to the place where her legs have just been crushed off and then get up and walk off, better than new. First there is red pain. A beast with a shadow that swallowed my entire room. I don’t remember that room being any color but shades of red. And for the first week, oh, I was drowning in it. Then I decided to stop drowning.
But before I discovered that podcast, I saw a ghost. The government townhouse in Lagos, which I grew up in, was built beside one of the city’s ten receiving turbines. Every morning at 6 AM and every night at 11 and 3 AM, it would receive the energy payload. This was energy gathered, condensed, restructured and then wirelessly sent from the Sunflower Initiative solar farms in Morocco, Mali and Niger. These directable long-range wireless transfers of energy looked like giant delicate shadows that gently glowed their jellyfish purple blue. Most call them, “ghosts.”
I’d awakened just in time to see the 3 AM ghost floating by my window. Its movement was slow but steady and focused. I gazed at it, wondering how people decades ago would have reacted to such a sight. They probably would have thought aliens were invading, I thought. I knew a bit about the invention of wireless energy transfer, but my curiosity sparked brighter and I decided to look up the inventor. She was now very old and her name was Zagora.
My eye landed on my phone and I knew what I had to do next. To move even the slightest bit was a horror and I may have screamed the entire time. No one was in the room with me. My phone was on the counter beside my bed. When I had it in my hands, tapping the touch screen caused fire to shoot all over my body, the motion of my fingers, wrist, the slight increase in my breathing. I was crying. But I found one. A podcast about Zagora and her great invention. It had been recorded decades ago and was easily the most iconic one. I didn’t know it would be so central to my saving myself when I found it. At the time, I just needed something to listen to, something to take me out of my situation, my pain.
I saved it right on my phone, ready to play on the home screen. I played it once and it soothed me. I played it again and I felt hope; I began to imagine and wonder. The red was still there, but it became a tint. I listened to that podcast over and over, for months, for years.
During those times, I hurt so much as my nerves bonded with my new legs. Even as I healed, I endured strange random explosions of hot pain in the darkness that was my body. The hurt could be in my crushed legs or on my shoulder or in my face or in my mind. It filled the darkness like stars. But the podcast filled those stars with ghosts, possibilities. I listened to that podcast so many times that I memorized it. Sometimes I’d lie in my bed singing it like a song. I’d even hum the theme song at the beginning and end. To this day I can recite the entire thing the way some people can recite the Quran.
The podcast was called Sahara Solaris. It was written by a journalist who happened to meet and remember Zagora long before she became great. The podcast made the desert look like the place with all the answers.
The Africanfuturist: #8953_Sohara Solaris
*Theme Music*
Good morning, day, evening, to my listeners. You are listening to The Africanfuturist. Welcome to my show. How is everybody doing? I know it’s been a while since my last episode, but these are strange and challenging times. I do hope that today’s episode brings you hope and wonder and insight. It is a true and extraordinary story.
A travel journalist named Izzy once met the little girl named Zagora outside one of the old crumbling kasbahs in Skoura Ahl El Oust, Morocco. Izzy had been interested in the camel, not the girl. She approached the camel to get a better look and Zagora ran up to her. Apparently, going to see that camel was what a lot of tourists did, so little Zagora was ready. Before Izzy knew it, Zagora had shoved a camel woven from palm fronds into Izzy’s hands and then stepped back, waiting. Izzy had to either move forward and give it back to her or pay for it. Zagora’s move was brilliant in its manipulative simplicity.
Izzy had no dirham, so she made a snap judgment and gave the girl twenty Euros. She earned it. Zagora snatched the money from her lightning fast, but she had her reasons. Seconds after Zagora snatched the money, the hand of her little brother was there; he was seconds too late. Zagora ran off with the money before her brother could snatch it from her. And Izzy never saw her again. But that doesn’t matter. Izzy remembered that girl and later, years later, Izzy put the story all together. This is what happened . . .
On that day outside that kasbah, Zagora was ten years old with black bushy hair and dusty gym shoes. She was short for her age. Her parents were nomads, and Zagora and her family lived in caves nearby. Her father was a Berber sheep herder, her mother an immigrant from Timbuktu, Mali, another desert region.
Zagora had grown up hearing her mother tell the story of the 52-day journey she made across the desert on foot from Timbuktu before Zagora was born and listening to her father sing old songs to the sheep as she rode along on her donkey. Oftentimes, she’d quietly sit, gaze at, and think about the Oracle Solar Complex in the distance that seemed to get bigger every year. The solar farm was as vast as a town and consisted of thousands of apartment-sized mirrors that shifted throughout the day, like the heads of sunflowers, to focus sunlight on a tower in the center. All this got Zagora interested in the sun. There was also that story her mother was always telling her about the day Zagora was born:
“I’d gone to Zagora to see my doctor, and you got impatient. We pulled over near some palm trees and you came into the world right there. You were born in the sun, but you were smart enough to keep your eyes closed.”
So that’s how Zagora got her name; she was named after the town she was born just outside of. Maybe seeing the sun through her newborn eyelids sparked something powerful in her.
Zagora took the money Izzy gave her and used it to buy a brand new receiver for the device she was tinkering with. Then she had a grand amazing idea. But she wasn’t quite ready to turn that idea into a reality just yet. It took her six years, years of trial and error, learning from the Internet, studying, thinking, and going to school, for her to reach that fateful night in the cave.
It was the hottest day of the year and sixteen-year-old Zagora was standing in the sunshine when she realized how to realize the idea she’d had so long ago. Her parents and two brothers were all in the cave, sitting around the portable air conditioner. Her parents were debating about a forthcoming World Cup game between Morocco and South America, her youngest brother was taking a nap, and her middle brother was doing school work. She took her bag of tools and climbed into a small enclosure that she used as a work space. It was hot in there, but she was used to it. The only book she had was a beaten up old copy of The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. She loved this book so much and had since she’d started reading it repeatedly three years before.
When she finished creating the new transmitter that fateful day, she positioned the receiver about a half mile away, far from the herd of goats, donkeys sleeping beneath a make-shift tent and, of course, her family. She didn’t know it but the only creature near the receiver was a snoozing jackrabbit. It was a good day to charge her power source battery because the sun was full of rage, blazing hot and bright. When she clicked the “transmit” button on her phone, no one in the area would know that the future had just come to greet the present. Except the jackrabbit who lazily awakened, saw the ghost-like shimmer coming toward it, and went right back to sleep, not feeling a thing as the shimmer passed through it to reach the receiver.
It really was like the sun’s ghost, this payload of energy that was gathered, condensed, and restructured from the day’s intense sunshine. Zagora watched it float across the rocky expanse and then, once it got within range of the receiver, disappear. When she ran to her receiver and took measurements of the amount of energy now in its battery, she threw her head back and laughed. Exactly five megahertz! Enough to power all her family’s appliances for the day. The same number that had been in the battery she’d connected to the transmitter. Not a single megahertz lost in the transfer. Success! Finally. Zagora had just invented directable long-range wireless energy transfer. And because the power was converted from ionizing radiation to non-ionizing radiation before it passed to the receiver, it was completely safe to be around.
She named her invention, “Sahara Solaris,” a name her brother suggested. Solaris was the name of a science fiction book they’d found on the ground at the kasbah, most likely dropped by a tourist. They’d brought it home and taken turns trying to read it to practice their French. Eventually, she grew so bored and frustrated with it that she threw it out of the cave to be later chewed on by the goats. She and her brother had both laughed hard because it had been a windy day and the book had sailed farther than expected before landing right in the middle of a group of goats. “As it should,” Zagora joked. She and her family lived right at the mouth of the Sahara desert and the sun was the whole purpose of the device, so the name was perfect.
After perfecting the Sahara Solaris over the next year and with the help of her school teacher, Zagora managed to get it before the eyes of Oracle’s CEO. That in itself is a long-winding story, involving several key elements:
An overly ambitious and hateful uncle
Government officials hacking into her computer attempting to steal her Sahara Solaris notes
Government officials who tried to pay off her parents
Masked men who tried to kidnap Zagora
A village of nomads plus the director, actors, and staff of a sci-fi movie that was being filmed nearby all guarding Zagora and her family for three days and three nights before the fateful meeting
Those in power came after every element of her life. The long and the short of it was that it all required some powerful qualities to get to this pivotal meeting. Focus, determination, audacity, and courage were a few of them. Zagora recognized the battle when it came to her and she knew she had to win it. And she was no fool, which was why she arrived at that pivotal meeting with her parents, her school teacher, and the teacher’s best friend who was a lawyer well practiced in community rights. The night before, Zagora had shown all four of them her Sahara Solaris. And thus, when she entered that meeting in the morning with the Oracle Complex’s CEO and her advisors, she knew exactly what to do.
She was seventeen years old. And as she stood before the board, finally, she felt herself steady. Her heartbeat slowed. She was calm. She knew why she was there and what she had to do. She was there to save the world. Zagora had always had big dreams, despite her small means. She imagined herself channeling the activist she and her brother had watched on their phones some years ago, the girl Greta Thunberg who had the nerve to speak with the entitlement of the adult white men Zagora sometimes saw in the market.
Zagora spoke. First, she provided evidence that she had already patented her invention.
“Okay, it belongs to you,” one of the Oracle engineers growled. Impatient and irritated. “Get on with it.”
And she did. Zagora presented the Sahara Solaris with panache and vigor. “Follow me,” she then said. The group of officials followed the girl outside, and there she gave a most astonishing demonstration of what she had invented. There was silence. Then there was murmuring. Then there was applause. The CEO of the Oracle Complex was speechless. She’d heard plenty from her advisors and assistant, and general rumor and hearsay, but nothing was like seeing it in action. How could this “beggar girl” who came from the desert caves invent something so ingenious? Such a simple, precise, useful device. The CEO knew she had to have this invention before this girl took and sold it elsewhere.
But Zagora wasn’t done yet. “The metaphor of the mirrors has not been lost on me,” she said. She’d practiced this speech many times at home. Always in Arabic, not Berber. She needed to be understood by everyone in the room. “You see the Oracle solar farm and think, ‘This is our future.’ It is a reflection of what we deserve, what we can be. It looks like a Star Wars kind of thing where all is clean and beautiful. It is. But there is also an ugly reality we, the people who live here, know well.”
Zagora didn’t say it in so many words, but she hinted at the fact that the land used for the solar plant belonged to people and that the government had applied capitalist definitions to that land in order to justify seizing it without the full permission of, and without compensating, those people. She said that those who approved the Oracle project decided that land was only valuable if it was “useful” and not valuable if it was not useful. If the land was desert, even if it was ancestral land that belonged to people, it was useless. This “useless” land was therefore subject to being put to “use,” i.e., generating clean renewable energy for Morocco and beyond.
Zagora paused dramatically and then said, “I have a list of demands.” Now, these demands were the idea of Zagora’s team, especially the lawyer (who helped her patent the Sahara Solaris).
The following demands were included as part of that list:
That five local representatives join the advisors for Oracle Solar Farms and that they have voting power equal to the other advisors
That the Oracle I Section of the plant be transitioned to a dry cooling system, instead of a wet cooling system
That five hundred permanent jobs be created and given only to Ouarzazate locals to manually clean the mirrors using no water
That the water needs of farmers be met before those of Oracle Solar Farms
That these same demands be met for every future Oracle plant in Africa (this part her mother told her to add)
When she finished speaking, she sat down and she and her team waited. The CEO walked out of the room with her advisors. They made video-calls to investors. They all talked, debated, palavered, discussed, argued and eventually a decision was made. When they came back into the room, everyone slowly took their seats. Zagora and her team could barely breathe.
When the CEO spoke, what she said was shocking. Zagora sat there for several moments wondering if she had heard correctly. She had. The CEO was a smart woman and she saw the greatness of the Sahara Solaris immediately and that Zagora had protected her invention well. And that was why she had just approved every single one of Zagora’s requests, deeming them reasonable and affordable once the Sahara Solaris was replicated on a large scale and put to use at all the plants. “Everything is about to change,” Zagora whispered.
The rest is history, more or less. Over the years, as hoped, the success of Oracle led to more Oracles. The company created a new mega-project that expanded Oracle solar plants from Ouarzazate to Casablanca to Marrakesh to then to the countries of Algeria and Egypt. That mega-project was called, yes indeed, the Sunflower Initiative.
Automated solar-powered trucks loaded with equipment drove across these lands creating solar farms of five-mile radiuses. Across the desert, these trucks drove, stopped and dropped self-powered and programmed wi-fi enabled solar panels like large seeds. Thousands of them. These panels were high-powered mirrors that used patented Solargen technology and thus calibrated themselves. Upon command, they each awakened, dug in and positioned themselves as needed. And each farm would get its own Sahara Solaris. Soon each panel was concentrating light to its respective tower, and this energy was gathered, harvested and sent via Sahara Solaris to receiving turbines all over Morocco, Egypt and Algeria.
It was Zagora’s mother (now an advisor at Ouarzazate Oracle) who encouraged Zagora to push for expansion into Mali. “The solar plants are being built in Morocco, Egypt, Algeria, predominantly Arab nations,” she said. “What about Black Africa? Have those Sunflower Initiative trucks build a plant near Timbuktu? The city would finally thrive again!”
Zagora’s father agreed, “If this is an African endeavor, it should be an African endeavor.” And this was exactly what Zagora said at the next big Oracle meeting. On that day, the other board members dismissed her claims as unimportant. But the third time she brought this idea to the board, they listened. Zagora was the creator of the Sahara Solaris and she had earned her place at that table, she’d created that table. Plus, researchers had recently informed three of the board members that it made sense financially to expand into Mali and Niger and capitalize off of that location.
Zagora’s mother helped decide the precise location for Timbuktu Oracle, negotiating with local desert tribes, tribunals, and the Mali government. The location just outside of the city of Timbuktu turned out to be a prime one because the land was flat and the sunshine was constant. Once Oracle brought renewable and free energy to the ancient city of books, sand, and mud brick, it came back to life in a way it had not for centuries. On top of this, the money that came in from exporting the energy to nearby nations was incredible.
At the same time, the Sahara landgrab (where wealthy African countries like Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana, and Egypt began buying up desert lands to build Oracle Plants that used Sahara Solarises) happened. Even the not so wealthy nations, like Mali, Chad, Somalia, and Sudan joined in the buying, albeit on a smaller scale. After African nations had their turn, China, the United States, the UK and other eager nations made deals.
Within that first decade, the African nations of the Sahara were fifty percent solar powered, the strength of the energy they produced second only to what is currently gathered from the Oracle turbines in Nigeria’s Red Eye. Nevertheless, Zagora’s Sahara Solaris did something that no one could have imagined. Not only did the Sunflower Initiative bring clear renewal energy to the region, but all the Oracles began to export energy to the rest of Africa and weaker payloads of it to Spain and Italy. The shimmering ghosts from energy payloads are a common sight to those who live in their paths.
The change can be seen from satellite; the continent of Africa more lit up than ever. And regardless, the always-consistent sun roils and broils 93 million miles away, offering its gifts and curses, depending on where we are, what we want and what we do with it.
*Theme music*
And this is The Africanfuturist. I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Aluta continua.
What a story. And even more powerful because it was true. Whenever that theme music would bubble into the narration, I’d smile. Comforted. Zagora the girl from the desert caves was optimistic and imaginative, and that gave her the ambition she would use to change the world. At the end of the podcast, there was always an ad for Zagora raffia camels like the one the young Zagora sold to the journalist. I never bought one. I was a fan, not a fool.
As I lay in that bed when I was fourteen, unable to get up yet, watching ghosts pass by my window, giving me that electrified feeling in my arm that made me feel like I could use it to do anything, I wished so hard that I could speak to Zagora. Not the beloved 84-year-old woman with millions of social network followers who still lived in those caves (though she’d built several of them into beautiful homes) that she was at the time, but the girl she’d been. The girl who loved the desert so much that she found a way to make it the most sought after place on Earth, a place of infinite potential and hope because the sun shined hardest on it. She seemed like she’d be a good friend who would understand me.