By Joyce Ashuntantang, PhD
The Vacuum Chamber captures quintessential Babila Mutia. The author’s explosive imagination conjures a world that is only deserving of similar imaginations. Both stories grip and hold us captive. Hypnotized, we plod along! We must submit to our imagination or we join the living dead in a world where there’s depravity and corruption. For Mutia “Anyone without imagination has no purpose for existence. They might as well be dead.”
In this collection we have two novellas, the titular story, “The Vacuum Chamber” and the second, “A Handful of Earth”. In the titular story, Gideon Nuvala Fondo is forced to drop out of Journalism School, so he thinks it is time for him to do some effective investigative journalism to find out once and for all if FIST, the institute really exists and whether it has anything to do with FIST the political party. His fascination with the mythic director of the FIST institute, Dr. Tanda Matanda drives his desire. Unfortunately, his investigative journalism does not lead to fruitful discoveries, but his efforts shared via his weekly column “The Face behind the Iron Mask” in the beloved Daily Mirror catches the very attention of his journalistic quest. What happens next places this story squarely in the Afrofuturistic fiction category. Fondo not only finds himself in the surreal world of the Futuristic Institute of Science and Technology (FIST), but his life hangs on a balance as he goes through the vacuum chamber, “a one-way journey to self-liberation or a certain death…where the membrane of the last door… can only be transcended with a concentrated mind and a finely tuned imagination.”
As Dr. Matanda queries, “What will the future hold for mankind if humans were stripped of their potential to imagine?” It is the question the reader must answer long after reading the last word of “The Vacuum Chamber,” the titular story or the entire collection, for that matter.
The second story, “A Handful of Earth” is cut from the same science fiction and fantasy cloth, yet it captures an African world view where the supernatural and natural exist in one continuum. In this story, Babila Mutia plows the rich soil of that era when Indian magic and mystic captivated the imagination of teenagers and young adults in Anglophone Cameroon, just as it had captivated the rest of the world. It is a human story of love and loss caught in a mirage of contesting realities. When Saddi Tengene returns to Cameroon from the USA after ten years and is in search of a job, he is happy to run into Bridget Bijanga, a love interest from his primary school days. Bijanga convinces Saddi who has a BA in Accountancy and an MBA to seek the help of another classmate, the enigmatic Veke Lucasi who has a top position in the Ministry of Finance. Lucasi readily helps Saddi to get a job. But Veke Lucasi has a known past. His immersion in Indian magic and mysticism is common knowledge among his schoolmates. It was not just “rumoured that he possessed the legendry Indian charm—the Seven Oils of Rama Krishna—that could ‘magnet’ any girl he desired… Lucasi had received the midnight initiation into the Marantha Spider Ashram in India.” Consequently, when Saddi realizes that Lucasi is using his powers to win over Bridget Bijanga, whom they both love, it is time to stop him. But Lucasi’s supernatural powers are real and can operate from any realm. Once again Mutia forces the reader to embrace the world of magical realism to find meaning.
Babila Mutia is a master storyteller but he is a poet too, and his poetic sensibilities are not far off in these two masterpieces. We, the readers are at his mercy, devouring every word, and when we get to the last page, we are forced to confront the unstable nature of what we call our reality. That is, if we survive Mutia’s vacuum chamber!
