In the fiction section, we present a new short story by Bongani Sibanda, entitled “The Preventer of Disasters“. Bongani is a Zimbabwean writer based in Johannesburg, South Africa. Born in 1990, at a village in Mat. South, he has been writing since he was a child in primary school. His short stories have appeared in two of weaver press anthologies. He has a collection of short stories due to be published in March 2016 by weaver press. He is also working on a fantasy novel. Musoke, his short story published by tuck magazine, was longlisted for the 2015 ABR Elizabeth Jolley short story prize.
The Preventer of Disasters
Things changed from the time the Preventer of Disasters’ eyes started glowing. That was one hundred and sixty seven years since he acquired his extraordinary abilities. Magical years had passed; people had started to die forever. Everyone who trod on fire was now burnt; he who stabbed himself felt the pain. There were no longer blue-winged men flying about, nor riveting baritones of men squabbling about this and that in the clouds. The world was now cold and magicless as had always been.
Yet there still existed the legacy of the long gone magic days, for example, men with penises that touched the ground and women with revoltingly stuck out buttocks, who descended from the adulterous lot that was cursed as wizardry proliferated during the era of magic. And, worst of it, were the constant threats of apocalyptic natural disasters which had come about because many years ago, during the era of magic, the warring wizards’ fight with natural disasters had gone out of hand and ended up making the occurrence of natural disasters automatic regularities. So it was these disasters that Thembani, son of Mabutho, aka the Preventer of Disasters, from Matabeleland, lived to fight more than a century and a half later because he had volunteered to swallow four eggs of a cobra given him by the ingenious wizard of Maputo that bestowed him the powers to save humanity at the expense of his own well being. Hence his remote Shashe residence in which he lived wifeless and childless and comfortless, with a diet of clay and leaves of fruit trees he planted in his yard. And the reward of supernatural powers and an everlasting life. Read the full story here.
