Ashraf Johaardien: Thirty-nine means two different things. To a child, an answer, said once and set down. To a festival, a promise still being kept.

She knows the number and she knows the language it comes in.

Amashumi amathathu nesithoba, she says. Three tens and nine. Thirty-nine days to Fak’ugesi. Before I’ve finished being startled, she has already moved past it, asking whether she can use my charger now.

Julia is seven. She has just said, precisely and in isiZulu, the exact number the whole campaign is holding its breath around, and she has already set it down.

Thirty-nine, hers, delivered and released in the same breath, and thirty-nine, ours, sitting at the top of a campaign document somewhere, next to combined impressions and combined followers and every other number a report will eventually total up and call a season. The same three words carrying two entirely different weights depending on who is holding them. For her it was worth saying once, correctly, and then letting go. For the festival it is the problem, permanent until it isn’t, recalculated every morning, never spent, because the count is the job, not a means to something else. A child counts to say a thing is true. An institution counts to keep a promise that it is still coming.

I have been trying to work out why Julia fascinates me the way she does, and it took longer than it should have to admit that it isn’t the ordinary pull of watching your own child grow. She is curled up right now on her other father’s pillow beside me, running through Duolingo on a phone small enough that both her hands barely close around it, seven, and further into someone else’s script than most adults I know ever get. What holds me isn’t the woman she might become or the country she might inherit. It’s this. Now. A future that has already arrived and is doing its homework in bed.

There is a version of adulthood that treats a child as a draft of someone realer, still being edited, not yet fit to publish. I don’t think that’s true of Julia, and I suspect it was never true of anyone. She isn’t rehearsing a future self. She is a whole person who happens to be small, fluent in a language I can’t read, indifferent to whichever institution has decided her drawing means something. The future everyone keeps promising is coming has, in her case, already shown up, and it wants a charger.

This is the part where Julia’s drawing already lives inside that counting, weeks ahead of the afternoon she’d land on the number that describes them. She drew a flying car and something she called a human bee, and Fak’ugesi took the drawing and built a future around it without correcting the strange logic that made a bee human or a car capable of flight in the shape she’d given it. The technology did not invent what she’d made. It translated it, the same principle running through every Future Engines post, the machine arriving second, the drawing arriving first. A translation still needs an original to answer to, and for once the original was seven years old and unbothered by whether the translation got it right.

The post that resulted sits against an evening skyline, Tshimologong and the Wits buildings behind a dark blue vehicle with turbine engines and glass cross hatched windows, a cockpit holding a seated figure beneath it all. Bold white text across the centre. THE FUTURE TAKES FLIGHT. On the left a glowing panel, Julia’s circular portrait, JULIA AGE 7, her own words beside it, a flying car, a human bee, and beneath that the original drawing next to its wireframe translation, labelled FUTURE ENGINE, tagged ORIGINAL DESIGN. The Fak’ugesi mark top left. TRANSMISSIONS top right. The web address sitting quietly at the bottom like a door left open.

Seven reactions. Five shares. Modest numbers, and the shares outnumbering the reactions feels worth noticing, even without being able to prove what it means, something closer to being carried than being seen.

Something happens to a drawing once it is tagged ORIGINAL DESIGN and set inside a countdown. It doesn’t stop being hers, exactly, but it stops being only hers. It becomes evidence, one line in the eventual report that will total up a season and call it performance, a case study in what a Future Engine looked like this year. Julia’s flying car keeps flying whether or not she ever opens the account again. The imagination survives the conversion intact. What changes is who else now gets to hold it, spend it, count on it, brand it, put a launch date beside it. Nobody asked her whether that was the deal. Nobody needed to. She’d already moved on to the charger before the question could have reached her.

She has already put the future down, the way she puts everything down once it’s answered, back to being seven, unburdened by turbine engines and a launch date. The counting continues without her, because it was never hers to carry. It belongs to whoever is still watching a number fall and calling that watching preparation.

Ukubala izinsuku. Counting the days, the way a body keeps breathing, mostly unnoticed, incapable of finishing except by stopping.

I don’t know yet whether that’s a flaw in the mechanism, or simply what a mechanism is for, and I’m not sure the difference would show up in any report.

I know a seven-year-old told me, correctly, in isiZulu, exactly how many days were left, then asked for my charger before I’d finished being startled.

Ashraf Johaardien is the Resident Writer at the Fak’ugesi African Digital & Innovation Festival. M\e. is his practice, spanning research, systems design, and publishing, developed with commercial partner Joanne Walters.

Ashraf Johaardien
ashrafjohaardien@me.com
M\e.
http://www.ashrafjohaardien.substack.com

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