This is My Kingdom Come

By Birbal Boniface Musoba

In recent years, I have found myself in a position that I've always dreamed about: working, in one form or the other, in the writing field, as I pursue my own writing ambitions. When I was a youngling, I dreamed of spending my days writing brilliance and my evening musing of the brilliance of the world with equally talented and tormented souls, whilst equally making a living from this pursuit.

When I woke up this morning, I realised that this was exactly the life that I was living. Granted, my reality is still very far from the glamour of sipping cognac with my legs crossed, seated across from Cormac McCarthy and Gillian Flynn and Marcus Sakey, as we unearth the truths behind the meaning of existence and love and life and death and everything in-between.

Even as that future draws closer to my reality, my present state is not so bad. I seat across great minds like Chris Zumani Zimba and Robin Tyson, and work on the brilliant writings of authors’ whose works will challenge the status quo of the principles our very nation Zambia is founded on, whilst working on my first novel. I muse and challenge my writing and explore my conscious and push what is called Zambian literature and Zambian English. And to top it all off, I get paid for doing just this.

But of late, I have found myself filled with a certain sense of dread, such that I constantly wake up in a sweat, in a fit, in a state of rage that I am not doing enough; but enough of what? My bones ache that I'm not taking too many risks, that I'm not pushing the boundaries further out enough, that I'm not utilising all that is laid bare in front of me. Why this sudden trepidation, this anxiety, this restlessness? Wasn’t this what I wanted, desired, fought four, sacrificed and bleed for?

But I guess that that is human endeavour personified. When we reach that plateau we thought was the apex of our existence, we realise that there remains more to be discovered, more to be explored, more to be conquered, more to be achieved and subdued. That yearning, that desire for more is what makes us the most dominant species on the planet and what ensures that we discover more, explore more and add more to the human condition, until that moment when our lives have attained that meaning that we can live behind and be remembered for that we lived, that we existed, that we mattered!

My name is Birbal Boniface Musoba and I am eager and willing and ready to add to the human condition and I will not be satisfied until I exhaust to the fullest the potential that drives me to be… your turn.