Behind The Torch — The Marantu Dispatch
In physics, a black hole is not defined by what it destroys
but by what it bends.
Light enters and cannot return the way it came.
Time slows.
Direction loses meaning.
The closer you get, the more the old rules fail.
Recently, humanity witnessed one.
At the centre of our own galaxy
there is a black hole — Sagittarius A*.
Four million times the mass of our sun.
Silent.
Patient.
Holding everything we know in orbit.
We did not see the black hole itself.
We saw the light bending around it.
Race has often been treated like a colour.
Or a category.
Or a moral argument.
But perhaps race behaves more like a black hole.
Not because it is evil.
Not because it is violent.
But because it sits at the centre of so much unexamined gravity.
Stories curve around it.
History accelerates toward it.
Lives are stretched or compressed depending on proximity.
Those born near its event horizon do not experience time
the way others do.
Generations feel like moments.
Moments feel like centuries.
From the outside, observers argue about what should happen.
From the inside, survival itself becomes a form of navigation.
A black hole is invisible.
You only know it exists
by what it does to everything else.
Race, too, has rarely been named honestly.
It is inferred from distortions:
– unequal outcomes
– inherited fear
– accumulated silence
– bent futures
The mistake has been trying to escape it
without understanding its mass.
There is a theory in physics
that beyond the black hole
is not destruction
but transformation.
Not disappearance—
but passage.
A crossing into laws we do not yet understand.
If that is so, then perhaps humanity’s long entanglement with race
has not been a detour
but a descent.
A movement inward.
And if one must pass through a black hole to emerge transformed,
then perhaps Africa has always been that passage.
Not as a place to romanticise.
Not as an origin to weaponise.
But as a womb.
The place where humanity first entered the world.
The place one must return to
not to go backward—
but to be born again.
Re-entry is never comfortable.
It requires surrender.
It dissolves old certainties.
It rearranges identity at the cellular level.
Marantu does not imagine Africa as a destination.
It understands Africa as a process.
A return through gravity.
A compression of history.
A narrowing.
So that something new can emerge
on the other side.
Marantu is not what comes before the black hole.
It is what might be possible
after.
—Uzanenkosi
Torchbearer, Marantu ☉☽
Year 0 | Marimba 16 | Week 3