Philippa Kaur

Lauren Beukes’s new speculative novel imagines a world stripped overnight of men. Do women do a better job of running things?

Humans 22 July 2020
By Sally Adee
In Afterland, a mother tries to flee the US with her son after almost all males die
Getty Images

Afterland
Lauren Beukes
Michael Joseph (UK) and Mullholland Books (US)

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IF ALL the human cells in your body were to suddenly dematerialise, your outline would briefly persist, in all its exquisite detail, in the form of the billions of bacteria and viruses that colonise your every nook and cranny, still suspended in the shape of the frame your body provided.
Something analogous happens in Lauren Beukes’s novel Afterland, available in July worldwide and in September in the UK. Over about two years, a pandemic kills nearly every man in the world, leaving its patriarchal systems staffed exclusively by women. Cole, the mother of one of the precious few surviving boys, needs to get him out of the US and back to their home in South Africa. Her sister, meanwhile, wants to sell him. This gives the novel its structure and speed: it is a deceptively simple heist caper, with Cole on the run across the US from both her sister and the Department for the Protection of Males.
The organisation is charged with imprisoning the few males that remain, probing them to find whatever biological quirk has spared them from the plague and using that knowledge to find a vaccine for the virus. Its aim of jump-starting society “back to normal” will be uncomfortably familiar as we too languish in a pandemic limbo between the Before and the After, hoping for our own vaccine. The misguided waiting game in the novel results in a few temporary accommodations to reality: straight women negotiate awkward first dates with one another, while fake baby bumps become the hottest fashion accessory.
So who gets to maintain civilisation now, and do women run a better society than men? This is where the book shines as one of the best thought experiments of its kind, in which Beukes has stitched together the surprise matriarchy of The Power, the millenarian despair of Children of Men and the deeply intelligent questions of Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness.
The Power – in which women develop the ability to give electric shocks, ending their status as the “weaker sex” once and for all – concludes that women are just as bad as men when in ultimate control.

Beukes’s take is more ambiguous. Like Le Guin, she seems to conclude that it doesn’t much matter if it is women or men in charge of society, as it is the structures themselves that turn us into monsters. “You have to be bigger and meaner as a woman to claim your turf,” Cole’s sister tells herself, negotiating her nephew’s kidnapping on behalf of the widow of the kingpin she used to work for. The widow has slid into his place, just as easily as the thugs around her have shifted from being vicious beauty queens to vicious enforcers. The Sisters of Sorrow, the religious community in which Cole and her son take refuge, somehow figures out how to make Christianity even more violently misogynistic in a world without men.
“There is no guarantee that the once-oppressed will wield power any more judiciously than their oppressors”
Yet it isn’t all nihilism. Beukes seeds the book with hopeful rumours of matriarchal societies that have sprung up in other countries. There are never many details beyond the promise, like mirages just over the horizon. “They say the matriarchal societies have been a lot better about getting rid of the homosexuality laws,” promises an email from a friend trying to help them escape across the Atlantic. It is a promise of a better body politic.
Afterland is that rare creature, a ripping tale that neither shies away from big questions nor interesting answers. What happens when the powerless get power? There is no guarantee that the previously oppressed will wield it any more judiciously than those who oppressed them. It isn’t about the individuals. It is about the society they need to maintain.

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By Michael Marshall
Tools found in the Chiquihuite cave in Zacatecas, Mexico, suggest humans arrived there early
Mads Thomsen

HUMANS seem to have been living in the Americas as early as 33,000 years ago – 15,000 years before the most widely accepted date. The finding implies that people arrived there before the peak of the last glacial period and there is a long American prehistory we are yet to uncover.
The first American settlers were probably Homo sapiens, but we can’t rule out extinct groups like Neanderthals and Denisovans. The settlers probably entered from north-east Asia across a land bridge linking Asia and Alaska. This was submerged by rising seas when the ice sheets melted at the end of the last glacial period.
Most archaeologists accept that humans were in the Americas 18,000 years ago. Now two studies bolster the idea that people got there much earlier.

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Ciprian Ardelean at the Autonomous University of Zacatecas in Mexico and his colleagues have spent the past decade excavating Chiquihuite cave in Zacatecas. They have found almost 2000 stone tools buried in sediments in the cave, including blades, points and scrapers. No human remains or DNA have been found.
The youngest samples of sediment are at least 12,200 years old, and the oldest may be 33,150 years old (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2509-0). This suggests that people lived in the Americas before a crucial event: the last glacial maximum – the peak of the last glaciation. Between 26,500 and 19,000 years ago, ice sheets extended across much of North America. This was thought to make condition too harsh for people to enter the Americas, but the new findings suggest humans were already present.

The second study compiles reliably dated archaeological sites to track the spread of people across North America. Lorena Becerra-Valdivia at the University of New South Wales in Australia and Thomas Higham at the University of Oxford, who are also on Ardelean’s team, assembled dates from 42 sites in North America and north-east Asia. Chiquihuite cave was the oldest reliably dated site (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/s41586-020-2491-6).
During and just after the last glacial maximum, North America seems to have been sparsely populated, with numbers exploding about 14,700 years ago as the ice receded, says Becerra-Valdivia.

The two studies offer “strong evidence for an earlier presence of humans in North America than has been fully accepted”, says Deborah Bolnick at the University of Connecticut.
Until now, it has been widely assumed that only modern humans reached the Americas, since groups like Neanderthals died out millennia before anyone was thought to have got there. Ardelean says we shouldn’t assume that any more. “I don’t see why other species wouldn’t have entered America,” he says.
But Bolnick and Becerra-Valdivia both say the first Americans were most likely to have been modern humans.
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Short film The Ball Method tells the story of Alice Ball. She helped develop an effective treatment for leprosy, then a senior colleague claimed her work as his own giving her no credit

Humans 15 July 2020
By Gege Li
Kiersey Clemons plays chemist Alice Ball, known for “the Ball method”
Haye Yukio

Film
The Ball Method
Dagmawi Abebe

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Amazon Video Direct from August
IN it declared global elimination on that basis in 2000 I think: 2000, the World Health Organization declared that leprosy had been eliminated as a global public health problem, due to effective multi-drug treatments. It is a disease that has long been stigmatised due to disfiguration it can cause. The story of one unsung hero in the development of a treatment for leprosy is told in the short film The Ball Method.
The story starts with archive footage of the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i, where thousands of people with leprosy were quarantined from 1866 by the Hawaiian government. Back then, little was known about the disease and people feared it was highly contagious, though we now know it doesn’t spread very easily.
Countries such as the UK, the US and India exiled people with leprosy to remote locations, where they were left to die. One of the film’s clips shows a child covered in sores on his face and hands.
By 1915, when the film is set, one remedy was beginning to show promise. We are introduced to Alice Ball (played by Kiersey Clemons), a chemistry professor at the University of Hawaii, as she visits Kalihi Hospital in Honolulu. Ball has been enlisted to help develop a treatment for leprosy by Dr Harry Hollmann (Kyle Secor) using the oil from the seeds of the chaulmoogra tree. Chaulmoogra oil seemed to work in treating some cases of leprosy and had already been used for centuries in China and India for skin ailments.

Taking the oil orally caused nausea, so it was administered by injection. But this method was flawed. In its unpurified form, chaulmoogra oil isn’t water soluble and doesn’t react well with the body; oil oozes painfully out of the forearm of one patient with leprosy as he is given a shot.
“Ball was the first woman and first black American at the University of Hawaii to teach chemistry”
In between teaching students at her university, Ball tries to purify the oil into chemical compounds called ethyl esters so it can be successfully injected. To do this, the oil first needs to be converted into fatty acids. Ball has a eureka moment. She realises the acid needs to be frozen overnight to give enough time for the esters to separate, as well as to stop them degrading at room temperature.
Her discovery, the Ball method, led to the most effective treatment for leprosy at the time, one that was used until the 1940s, when a full cure was found. Why, then, is Alice Ball not more famous?
One reason is that credit wasn’t given to her at the time. Ball’s colleague Arthur Dean (played by Wallace Langham), who was president of the University of Hawaii, took her findings as his own, naming the technique the Dean method. There was no mention of Ball in his papers. She didn’t get credit until 1922 when Hollmann published a paper detailing her work.
Director Dagmawi Abebe says this is why he felt it was so important to make the film. “When I came across Alice’s story and saw all the amazing accomplishments she’s done, and how not a lot of people even knew about her, I really wanted to make that known.”
There are few historical records about Ball. She didn’t keep a diary that we know of and died in 1916 aged 24, possibly after inhaling chlorine gas in a lab accident.
So Abebe had to make a lot of choices in how to portray her. He says he wanted to depict her as strong and ambitious given the barriers she is likely to have faced.
Looking at the facts, that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch. At only 23, Ball was the first woman and first black American to teach chemistry and obtain a master’s degree at the University of Hawaii. But being a black woman in this environment wasn’t easy. In one scene, as Ball takes a class, students (all male and white) snigger as they pass around a picture of a crudely-drawn monkey.
For Abebe, who is originally from Ethiopia, it was important to highlight this aspect of Ball’s experience. “I’m interested in telling a story where I feel like a lot of minority stories went untold or hidden,” he says. This narrative is at last finding a wider audience.
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Fons Americanus is artist Kara Walker’s 13-metre-tall classically inspired fountain, whose stay in London’s Tate Modern has now been extended. It didn’t cost the earth: it is made from an innovative carveable, acrylic composite.
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