It is a good thing I learned to write before AI. Otherwise… this newest scramble would have felt like a quantum scam.

But let me start with something more urgent than resource extraction to fuel autonomous warfare, in a world where algorithmic manipulation of an AI-dependent population is happening even as space colonisation is taking shape.

How you dey?

It has been a while.

Growing up, all I ever wanted was to be a columnist. Just like MEE (May Ellen Ezekiel). Mike Awoyinfa. Dan Agbese. Olatunji Dare. Ndaeyo Uko. Nothing more. I wanted to write whatever crossed my mind once a week and have unlucky people like you read it.

I wanted to write whatever crossed my mind once a week and have unlucky people like you read it.

If anybody had told me then that I would one day reach that point where I am free to write anything I wanted for the world to read and yet struggle to write week after week, I would have called the person a mumu man or woman.

But here we are.

I look around—from Lagos to Nairobi, Cape Town to Cairo, London to New York—and this Afropolitan sees no home, no hope, and no heritage to hold on to.

Everything is drifting. Fast. Fast. Fast.

If you look around and understand what is going on, you are smarter than I am. If your understanding does not leave you confused, you may be dumber than you think.

History used to guide us when the tide turned wild and the ship tossed in angry waters. But in this new arena, history itself feels obsolete.

The stories that matter now are the ones drones sketch across the sky, gene editors perform in secret labs, and AI models undertake when their trainers fall asleep.  

Mama mia, this is no longer your grandfather’s world.

We have blurred the line between the madman and the mechanic. We have shortened the distance between the moon and the northern star.

This is not the time to retreat. It is time for specialists to step onto the SpaceX loading dock to dance.

And by specialists, I do not mean people with answers. I mean people free enough to think beyond the prison walls of inherited ideas, inadequate philosophies, and unfinished symphonies.

That is the antidote.

Because we are all infected.

Did I hear you grumble, “What is he talking about?”

Exactly.

How can you understand the virus when you are already carrying it?

In just the last few months, we have photographed the dark side of the moon. We are experimenting with raising children in digital straitjackets. We touch one tiny part of the mammoth and pretend we understand the beast.

I know God forgot to inform his biographers to mention dinosaurs in your holy book, but by the time scientists perfect cloning on some secret island near Epstein’s, it may already be too late to interpret the blinding unidentified light flashing before us.

So I am recommitting myself to interpreting this era through this old medium.

It is the only way I know how.

Like a first love.

And if you cannot relate, maybe you are a zombie.

I know some of you will argue because I called you that. Please! Argue with Fela.

But what else do you call a person who cannot upgrade his mind?

The world changes, but the zombie keeps reaching for abandoned formulas, decomposed prophets, recycled slogans, degenerate parties, and expired certainties. He mistakes waves for wisdom.

He chants the same mantras that failed his grandfather, failed his father, and are now failing him. He repeats prayers no god has answered in a hundred years. He swallows assumptions as if they were Achille Mbembe’s latest postulation.

He points fingers endlessly like Sanwo-Olu meeting Frantz Fanon on Lagos’ Blue Line. He strings excuses together like prayer beads for Mary and every celebrity whose only qualification is proximity to God.

In the immortal words of Asari Dokubo: you are a mumu man and a mumu woman. Zombie.

Go and sue me.

I will still meet you here next week, whether you like it or not.

And one thing is certain: AI did not write this one.

Rudolf Ogoo Okonkwo teaches Post-colonial African History, Diasporic African Literature, and African Folktales at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He is the author of “This American Life Sef.” His latest book is “A Kiss That Never Was.”