Is Africa Ready for Science Fiction?
Over the last few weeks, I’ve had some interesting conversations with award-winning Nollywood director Tchidi Chikere about science fiction (Nollywood is Nigeria’s oh-so-popular film industry. The term “Nollywood” is a play on “Hollywood”, much the same way as India’s “Bollywood”).
Chikere has written, produced, and directed over 50 films. He also published a collection of rather chilling short stories titled Strangers in Paradise. The collection includes a novella called “Daughter of the Cave,” which is essentially a fantasy piece. Chikere sought me out after my novel, Zahrah the Windseeker, piqued his interest. Needless to say, I was delighted and honored to hear from him.
During one of our conversations, we discussed my own work and whether it could be translated to film, particularly African film. “Is Africa ready for science fiction?” he asked me. We debated this for a while. Naturally, I believed Africa was ready…ready enough, at least. Notwithstanding my own contentions, Chikere had other ideas.
“I don t think we’re ready in the primary sense of the word,” Chikere said. “We can hide it in other categories like magic realism, allegory, etc, but we’re not ready for pure science fiction.”
“Science fiction films from the West are failures here. Even Star Wars!” he said. “The themes aren’t taken seriously. Science fiction will come here when it is relevant to the people of Africa. Right now, Africans are bothered about issues of bad leadership, the food crisis in East Africa, refugees in the Congo, militants here in Nigeria. Africans are bothered about food, roads, electricity, water wars, famine, etc, not spacecrafts and spaceships. Only stories that explore these everyday realities are considered relevant to us for now.”
Naunihal Singh, a professor of comparative politics specializing in conflict, civil-military relations, and the politics of Sub-Saharan Africa at Notre Dame University (and a fan of speculative fiction), had some similar comments about science fiction in Africa.
“Science-fiction will have to adapt itself to the local market,” Singh said. “I don’t think there’s the sensibility for it right now. I remember seeing the Matrix in a mixed crowd of Ghanaians and Americans, this was in Ghana. Even though the room was dark, and there were some 40 plus people there, I could tell who was from where by their reactions to the movie.
“The Ghanaians just weren’t connecting to it. Bring the Terminator to West Africa, and he’d stop running in a day. He’d sit there and glitch. It’ll be hard to make people afraid of a future where computers take over the world when they can’t manage to keep the computers on their desk running. These are very western stories. On the other hand, classic science fiction, like space exploration stories, would probably work better…assuming it was adapted for the audience. Africans would love to see stories about Africans on a space ship. The idea that Africans might be dominant in the future would resonate so well with nationalism.”
As a writer of African speculative fiction whose work is also published in Africa, I took all this to heart and mind. After really thinking about it, I realize that I fully agree with both Chikere and Singh. And I believe their comments apply to literature, too…probably even more than to film.
Much of my previous work unconsciously tapped into my Nigerian background (along with my American background). It was intuitive. However, when I consider my recent short story in Seeds of Change, “Spider the Artist” (a story where volatile A.I. robot spiders guard oil pipelines in the Niger Delta), this story was different and I felt the difference as I was writing it. I was consciously writing toward an African audience.
In “Spider the Artist”, the focus was not on how the spider-shaped A.I. robots operated or why they decided to break free of human control. The focus was instead on the main character’s life as an abused wife living in the volatile Niger Delta region; on her anxiety over being childless in a culture where barrenness is the worst thing that can happen to a woman; and on her need for love which eventually leads her to befriend a robot. It’s quiet, backdoor science fiction that might better appeal to African audiences.
My forthcoming adult novel, Who Fears Death, is similar in this way. In this novel, there were even moments where my American sensibilities were offended or deeply strained. I’m very interested in moving further in this direction and seeing how things shape up.
Let me stop and state here that there IS a handful of African science fiction out there. There are novels, short stories, and a film or two. This handful is tiny but it exists. However, I didn’t write this essay to tell you about them. They’ll get their due … just not right now. This essay isn’t going to become a bibliography. For now, I just want to bring this issue to the table. Also, I’m aware that I am generalizing when I speak of Africa as a whole. It’s a big super -diverse place. But for the sake of discussing this topic, please allow me to do a bit of generalizing.
In my observation, in Africa, science fiction is still perceived as not being real literature. It is not serious writing. As Chikere said, African audiences don’t feel that science fiction is really concerned with what’s real, what’s present. It’s not tangible. It’s sport. Child’s play. I can see how science fiction can be foreign to many Africans. Technology tends to play a different role on the continent. There is a weird divide and connection between the technologically advanced and the ancient. For example: People will have cells phones in rural villages yet have no plumbing or electricity or one will opt to buy a laptop instead of a desktop computer because a laptop has its own power supply, most useful for when “NEPA takes the lights”.
But there’s another layer to the issue: Colonialism and the colonizers existing attitudes about what is literature and what is not. The foundation of what great literature is in Africa is too often defined by the West and the West still has trouble viewing genre fiction as true literature. This is why I felt it my duty to raise such a stink about the criteria for submitting to The Penguin Prize for African Literature (from Penguin South Africa).
In the criteria, they wrote that they sought “novels of freshness and originality that represent the finest examples of contemporary fiction out of Africa.” Then on the same page, they wrote: “Submissions in the children’s literature, science fiction or fantasy genres will not be considered.”
I can sort of understand the “children’s” literature bit. Sort of. There is plenty of children’s literature that is great literature. But the “no fantasy or science fiction” part? For a prize in AFRICAN literature? All kinds of problems with that.
After expressing my unhappiness to the folks at Penguin SA, I received a response from the publisher:
Dear Nnedi,
Thank you for your email on the criteria for the Penguin Prize for African Writing – we welcome input on the prize criteria and I’m sure we’ll hone them over time with considered feedback such as yours. We certainly did not intend to exclude writing with elements of fantasy or science fiction but rather to avoid the submission of books that will only appeal to a very narrow readership and that can only be marketed in the science fiction and fantasy section of a bookshop and do not have appeal to a broader readership. We will try to clarify this for the next round of the prize, but in the meantime could I encourage you to submit your work despite this stipulation in the criteria?
There you have it folks. Such prizes heavily influence the definition of “great literature” in Africa. All this stipulation will do is further the void between speculative fiction and “real literature”. Imagine how many potential African science fiction or fantasy writers and novels have been effectively excluded, disqualified, and demoralized by this mere stipulation.
Recently, I discussed issues of such gate keeping with New York Times Best-Selling science fiction author Tobias Buckell, who has similar concerns about Caribbean science fiction. “My solution is to write fiction that is more balanced, that will hopefully eventually get more writers to feel free to write a range of story types,” he said. “I want to be so good that eventually they can’t ignore me.”
Agreed.
I think the stage is already set for African science fiction. In my forthcoming YA novel, Akata Witch, there are these…things called “tungwa”. They are glowing balls of flesh that float in the air and explode into tufts of hair and handfuls of teeth. I learned of “tungwa” from my mother. She said her father used to talk about them and that a friend of his friend had seen them. Her father said these things came from outer space, like meteors, and that in the village and forests, children used to find them and bat them around until they burst. Weeeeeeeird. This is just one small example. The stories are there, they don’t need to be imported.
OK, the following are a few samples of African science fiction (yes, I know there are more): Ghanaian author Kojo Laing has a collection of short stories and a novels respectively titled, Big Bishop Roko and the Alter Gangsters and Woman of the Aeroplanes. Congolese author Emmanuel Boundzeki Dongala has a short story called “Jazz and Palm Wine” (the anthology it appears in is also called Jazz and Palm Wine). In South Africa, science fiction is really percolating; The South African literary journal, Chimurenga, recently had an African science fiction themed issue. Film-wise, there is now District 9 (I’ve been excitedly anticipating this film for months). And, if you can find it, check out Les Saignantes by Cameroonian film director Jean-Pierre Bekolo. Lastly, I just have to include the trailer for this Nollywood fantasy film because it cracks me up: Across the Bridge.
In a nutshell, I think getting African audiences to open up to science fiction will take some finesse. True African science fiction, which is different from what Western audiences are used to consuming, needs to be written/filmed and made available first.
I think one will have to deliberately combine the concept of “art as a tool for social commentary and change” and entertainment. The root of the technology, cultural shifts, sentiments, concerns, characters, way of speaking, needs that drive the story must first and foremost be endemically African. Along with the unfamiliar, must come the familiar. And yes, it’ll have to be a gradual ascent. A whisper to a shout. A ghostly woman in the night to a full blown alien invasion in the middle of Imo State that only a frustrated plantain chip seller named Chukwudi can stop. Only then will African audiences be ready. Chikere and I are working on it. 
Nnedi Okorafor is an award-winning science fiction and fantasy author of Nigerian descent. Her novels include Zahrah the Windseeker (winner of the 2008 Wole Soyinka Prize for African Literature) and The Shadow Speaker (An NAACP Image Award Nominee). Her forthcoming novels Who Fears Death (from DAW) and Akata Witch (from Penguin) are scheduled for release in 2010. Her Disney Fairies chapter book, Iridessa and the Fire-Bellied Dragon Frog (Disney Press), is scheduled for release in 2010. She holds a PhD in literature and is a professor of creative writing at Chicago State University. Visit her online at nnedi.com.
18 comments so far.
What a fascinating article. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and experiences in this area.
Superb
This echoes with my recent readings on portuguese speaking african SF&F;, more specifically on “O Eleito do Sol"("The Sun’s Chosen")by recent Camoes Prize Award Arménio Vieira, and “Tempos da Moral Moral"(arguably translatable as “Moralized Moral Times") by Vasco Martins. Both authors are from Cape Verde, with different backgrounds (the first is first and foremost a poet; the second, a musician), and the books are heavily imbued of social comentary (the first one is a fantasy work, a moralistic political satire placed in ancient Egypt; the second, a pure science fiction novel written in the same mode, placed in Africa).
On the other hand, I’ve also been reading some of the earlier work by José Eduardo Agualusa (Angola), which could be read as the usual mix of fantasy and magical realism tropes, but he is a fulltime writer of mainly novels and short-shorts. Curiously, his latest book, a novel that is already a best-seller in Portugal entitled “Tropical Barroc” ("Barroco Tropical"), is definetly science fiction, though the author has refused the label in a regrettable Atwoodian way, even if it is a dystopian cautionary tale of a near future Angola.
So yes, I’d agree that social commentary is one of the best directions for African SF&F;, since its importance has been growing steadily from that basis.
Science fiction or speculative fiction cinema can make it big in Nigeria and many other African countries if the setting and themes are derived from or based on African myths or mythologies that are properly married to technology. In, for instance, Daniel Olorunfemi Fagunwa (1903-19630) and Amos Tutuola (1920-1997) I sense some seeds of such possibilities for Nollywood (or what I call Wazobia-Nights) in Fagunwa’s 1938 novel Ogboju Ode ninu Igbo Irunmale and Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard (1952 novel, written 1946). Check out Wole Soyinka’s 1968 English version of the Fagunwa novel: Forest of a Thousand Daemons. A conference or symposium on this topic can illuminate the possibilities, realities, and problems regarding Wazobia-Nights and science fiction in Africa in general and Nigeria in particular.
Good piece. Thank you for not shying away from mentioning colonialism. It’s an important factor in this discussion and in the past, I’ve heard people try to pretend that it’s not.
One thing you don’t mention is the lack of anything resembling an sfnal tradition in most African literature. Eight years ago, I was at a conference and I spoke with an expert in African fiction (his name escapes me now). I asked if he knew of anything in African lit resembling science fiction in its speculations on the future. He said, “No. There are traditions of imaginative and visionary storytelling, but future speculations? Not really, no.”
---Gordon V.G.
Very good article about Africa and science fiction. I found it preposterous and sad that the range of African contribution to world literature has to be constrained by a silly rule omitting the entry of speculative themed writing from a prestigious writing contest. This type of disrespect for a genre that, as a whole, is more intellectually rigotous than so-called literary fiction galls the bejeebers out of me!
Anyway, I have a question. Since Africans would seem more receptive to science fiction that accords with their everyday realities, how do you think Nigeria’s entry into space will impact African, particularly, Nigerian attitudes to toward the genre? Many Africans are working on the cutting edge of science. Given that a national effort in one African country, Nigeria, has been undertaken to direct advanced science along the path of sapce exploration, African interest in science fiction can only grow as a reflection of African scientific achievements.
Which is why science fiction should be used not only to entertain, but it should serve to predict and herald a technologically wondrous African future in much the same way that the works of H.G. Wells and Jules Verne anticipated the technical wizardry that propelled the West forward.
I was discouraged by the Africans in the article not being receptive to a movie like the Matrix due to the fact that computers in Africa are prone to unreliability. At the same time, I was pleased that African audiences leaned toward space-based science fiction themes because they wanted to see Africans on space craft. The latter attitude is more constructive because a people that see themselves in a place where they have yet to tread are more likely to achieve the impossible. I read an article a while back about Nigeria’s ambition of sending a probe to the moon and quite possibly accomplishing a manned lunar landing.
I believe sincerely that with the right resources, human, material and technical, along with will and tenacity, Nigeria indeed has the potential of landing a man on the moon. African science fiction can pave the way for that eventuality by preparing the minds of the African man and woman for technological greatness.
African stories that focus on the often harrying realities of African life are well and good. There’s nothing wrong with literature that highlights the gloomy or the mundane. Every civilization has its chroniclers, its literary guides that serve to reveal the inner workings of the human condition. But civilizations must also have visionaries that can point to where a society ought to go, not just record the contemporary.
Science fiction writers, whether it is their intent or not, are visionaries. It’s time for the visionaries of Africa to acclimate the minds of Africans to the idea of a hi tech future. Science fiction is the tool that aspiring African science fiction writers can wield to pave lasting inroads into the African consciousness
Very good piece. Your observations make perfect sense. My reading of African authors is sparse, so thanks for the references. People must see of piece of themselves in what they read. That’s why I think the African and African American audience in science fiction is small. I hope writers such as you expand that audience through your stories.
Very informative, thank you very much.
Dear Toyin
Perhaps, Credo Mutwa may be of interest to you, but then, you no doubt already know about him:
http://credomutwa.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Credo_Mutwa
http://www.metatech.org/credo_mutwa.html
What he has to say sounds like pure science fiction, yet based upon the myths of his own people[South African], which for a writer desiring to make a film is somewhat perfect [for] source material [for creating] a bridge of imaginative communication & [a]synthesis to meld cultural perspectives; technology is never at the forefront of science fiction, characterisation always comes first & foremost, even sentient robots have a personality, which one could term as being a spirit, the two are not Indivisible from the other.
Russian science fiction always dwelt upon characterisation in their films, one example being Solaris where the technology was but a backdrop [ for telling ] a tale of a cosmonaut falling in love with a sentient planet [who] manifests its projected intelligence into [the] form of a woman, which is not too far removed from the Gaian Hypothesis [of the earth and its biosphere as a self regulating organism] or even that of an intelligent universe [ represented by an ] organism that many call deity let alone the Anima-Mundi!
The best Science Fiction tends to be [ of an ]Archetypal quality, whereupon it crosses over boundaries into other arenas to become mythic [in ] scope, for it merely translates what is already there within ones own Id, the subconscious foundation, while one’s conscious self deals with everyday affairs; ever warring demons & angels become aliens or time-travellers manipulating history.
[The ]Ball-Lightening Tungwa of Dimensional Entities created for a time so as to gain ingress into other realms of existence [described by Mutwa?] [ can be likened to ] guided probes utilised by another form of Intelligence to perceive through[ although the instrument of inter-dimensional perception is ] no doubt conjured up by a highly psychic Sangnoma [South African diviner ] who has the abilty to Quantum Shift between Worlds!
Take Care
Mark
Note explaining a term used above by Mark:
Anima Mundi:[ World soul : a pure ethereal spirit, which was proclaimed by some ancient philosophers to be diffused throughout all nature.It was thought to animate all matter in the same sense in which the soul was thought to animate the human -Wikipedia].
A similar idea is present in Classical African and Asian cosmologies. ...there seems to be a force,power or energy permeating the whole universe.God is the Source and ultimate controller of this force[ known as ase by the Yoruba and ike by the Igbo ] but the spirits have access to some of it.Afew human beings have the knowledge and ablity to tap,manipulate and use it,such as the medicine men,witches,priests and rainmakers,some for the good and others for the ill of their communities-Mbiti-African Religions and Philosophy).In Hinduism and Indian philosophy and its religious correlates it first emerges in developments in the sacred texts the Vedas that culminate in the diffusionist conceptions of the Upanishads,declaring that “The immortal spirit” that is in the elements of the universe,is the imortal spirit that is in the human being.
“In Western thought the idea originated with Plato who states “Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence ... a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related- Plato, Timaeus, 29/30; 4th century BCE.
Subsequently [ in the Western tradition] the Stoics believed it to be the only vital force in the universe.Similar [conceptions] were held by [Western]hermetic philosophers like Paracelsus,and by [the European philosophers] Baruch Spinoza,Gottfried Leibniz and later by Frederich Schelling (1775-1854).It has been elaborated since the 1960s by Gaia theorists such as James Lovelock"-Wikipedia]
Saying Africa is not ready for science fiction is kind of insulting and shows a lack knowledge of the breadth of themes that can be tackled by the genre. It’s like the (erroneous) assumption that science fiction has to be spaceships and rockets and ultra-futuristic technology.
Hunger? Corruption? Lack of habeas corpus? All of these can be explored in science fiction and in a way that can be relevant to Africans.
The Star Wars prequels were, let’s face it, really putrid productions. There’s nothing universal that translates to all cultures there. But I can tell you this: when I was a boy my friends and I spend ages arguing about whether the kiss between Luke and Leia was incestuous if neither of them knew about their blood relationship at the time.
It is not Africans who are not ready; it is the writers and film makers who do not have the imagination to adapt the genre for local consumption. Do not project your own inadequacies on to the audience.
Stop patronising Africans.
Very interesting article, thank you.
Would Doris Lessing count as an African writer? She is a British citizen (as far as I know), but was born of expatriate parents and spent her first thirty years in what is now Zimbabwe. And she has undoubtedly written SF amongst many other things.
1) how were greg tate, kodwo eshun, paul gilroy, john akomfrah, eddie george, or trevor mathison NOT interviewed or even mentioned in this article
2)part of me feels like this article misses the point: science fiction doesn’t predict the future, it provides a significant distortion or perceptual acceleration of the present. egyptian mythology is about a thousand times more ‘cosmic’ than star wars.
I see your point of view but I also see the point of view of the Penguin prize committee.
I wish there were some way to say this delicately, but there really isn’t, so…
The truth is, the main body of SF literature has always been predominantly Caucasian, Judeo-Christian, Western-nationality. For the longest time, SF’s dialectic addressed the lives, points of view, and concerns of those groups, races, nationalities and communities. It still does so in the main. Perhaps at some point, the SF tradition may be absorbed, integrated and reprocessed through other points of view to produce interesting results on a larger scale - and of course, writers such as yourself and many other talents are already producing a substantial body of work of this kind. But you’re in a minority. And the larger body and tradition of SF is still heavily over-weighted with that predominantly Caucasian, Judeo-Christian, Western-nationality point of view. Even when an author with those descriptors in his or her background writes SF from an ‘other’ point of view - as many have done quite brilliantly - they still remain the majority’s view of the minority, not a true representation of the minority view itself. Such cross-cultural writing may add valuable works to the body of literature, but doesn’t address this particular problem.
In that context, I think Penguin were right to leave out SF and Fantasy from the purview of the prize. Not because SF and Fantasy writing from Africa might not have the same literary merits as other genres - but because they are simply confirming what we all know already, i.e., that SF and Fantasy literature is a ‘white’ literature. However much ‘we’ may work within it, and until such time as ‘we’ form a significant majority or percentage of the whole community, ‘our’ SFF works shall always be exceptions rather than the rule.
I think the very lack of an SFF tradition (as defined by western Judeo-Christian Caucasian pundits past and present) in ‘our’ local literatures is further proof of ‘habeas corpus’ and the very Western-JC-Cauc nature of the genre. The Penguin committee’s decision only confirms it.
It is no different from, for example, my writing an SF novel with an African character in a major role, drawing on African culture and literature, as I have in fact done. I wouldn’t expect it to be considered for the prize. In a different but similar fashion, I wouldn’t expect an SF or Fantasy novel by an African author to be considered for an African literary prize - by choosing to work in a genre that is currently (and has been in the past) a predominantly Western-JC-Cauc tradition and not a homegrown ‘African’ tradition, that’s inevitable. This can only change once SFF writing becomes more profuse in African literature and is expected as part of the mainstream - but that would require SFF writers, editors and publishers (and readers) to join the mainstream, which they’ve always shown a great reluctance to do. (And that of course is another problem altogether. The snobbishness of the SFF community towards the larger literary mainstream.)
Until then, I think the committee has chosen sensibly.
I disagree strongly about the exclusion of children’s literature though! That’s simply unacceptable.
If you are defining science fiction as only the domain of metal ships and glittering control boards, then this is a serious abomination of the term, and even there I think this article takes an overly simplistic and highly speculative view. I might even go so far as to call it Social Science Fiction.
The African diaspora was and is constituted by a number of shocking science fictions that have yet to be filed on the right shelves.
*
Also, to accuse Africa of not taking science fiction seriously enough seems to me another cheap shot. How long was science fiction ghettoized along with fantasy and graphic novels until Hollywood realized it could make a quick buck and some people outside of that world decided to give select books a glance? These sweeping indictments of Africa being “unprepared” for this or that thing (as if it required some basic human faculty that we simply haven’t developed) are plain tired and insulting, and doubly so for coming from an African who should know better.
Basketball was invented by and played exclusively by whites. Should blacks have not participated in the sport because of its white origins? Now, blacks dominate the NBA. Should the first blacks have paused, perhaps reconsidered playing basketball because the sport was predominantly white?
Blacks may not dominate SFF anytime soon, but should the fact of the SFF’s Caucasion Judeo-Western origins discourage blacks from writing in this genre?
And why shouldn’t an African science fiction novel be considered for an African literary prize? An African writing a science fiction novel about Africans in the future, or an African robot or an African time traveller would not be homegrown enough?
Years ago, I read a book by a Nigerian author about his experience in the Biafra War. His story was similar to the many accounts I had read by Westerners and their wartime experiences. Should this Nigerian writer have been denied a biographical literary prize because some myopic gatekeeper decides the former is not rooted in some sort of African tradition? Yet the author’s story is replete with African characters, the setting is uniquely African and the events he describes are orchestrated and played out by Africans.
So what SFF is a white, western literature...in fact I would argue that the moment a black man or black woman penned a SFF tale, this literature no longer became the province of the West or the Caucasion. The Japanese dole out myriad SFF stories in the form of anime’ every year. I’m sure they’re not crippling themselves with that Science fiction-is-a-Western Caucasion-tradition mantra that I’’ve been exposed to in a previous post.
The Japanese have taken the genre by storm. Those blacks, be they African or Diasporic, who have delved into this fantastical literature with equal enthusiasm, I salute. Furthermore, the snobbishness has been directed toward the SFF community by the literary mainstream, not the other way around.
Check out Blacksciencefictionsociety.com to see how blacks are staking claims in the science fiction landscape!
Both the article and the responses trigger my need to express great joy in the fact that we are conversing. There was a time when such dialogue was lacking and hence creativity and actualization were limited or nonexistent. The agenda is to not fall into the trap of what’s right or what’s wrong or to once again be divided and conquered. We can create from our own genetic and social construct and join together less troubled by conditioned ways of pulling each other one way or the other. Science fiction and fantasy, like religion, is a basic stratum of the human experience and hence, African at the core. And, if we compare the two, I think we will find a hidden truth waiting to be expressed.
Great article. As long as I’m concerned Africa has never been readier for science fiction. Being a Science fiction and fantasy writer myself, I know that this is the time for Africa to express itself in that genre of fiction.
My first book published last year titled INVADER. Its a postapocalyptic novel that takes place on planet Mars.
One or more of you folks might want to check it out.http://www.amazon.com/Invader-U-Collins-Okonkwo/dp/1934360740
1. Floyd Webb on 12th August 2009 at 9:09 pm
I remember the work of Chief Hubert Ogunde. After a long career in traditional theater. He turned to film in the the 1980s. One of his films I remember had the feeling of “Hammer Horror"films. I wanted one of his films for the Blacklight Film Festival here in Chicago. I had to track him down. He had several homes and he traveled much.
I always thought one of his works, and I cannot remember the title, was the gateway for fantasy and sci-fi films. I managed to meet Ogunde on a trip I took to Nigeria for work in 1989.
I left Nigeria that year feeling like a new world was opening up for African film, a good cross-section of the traditional and modern coming into play cinema-wise. He died a year later, in 1990. I felt upon our meeting he had a great vision. His spirit was so young I had no idea he was as old as he was.