I plowed on, regardless. Maybe Kuwale’s mysterious faction had revealed themselves by taking part in the other side of the debate? There was certainly no shortage of vocal opposition to PACDF – from more moderate traditionalists, from numerous professional bodies, from pluralist organizations, and from self-described technolibérateurs .

Mismatched initials aside, I couldn’t quite see a member of the African Union for the Advancement of Science collaring journalists in airports and asking them to play unofficial bodyguard to a world-renowned physicist. And while the African Pluralists League organized worldwide student exchange programs, theater and dance tours, physical and net-based art exhibitions, and lobbied aggressively against cultural isolationism and discriminatory treatment of ethnic, religious and sexual minorities … I doubted they had time on their hands to fret about Violet Mosala.

The late Muteba Kazadi had coined the term technolibération , to mean both the empowerment of people through technology, and the “liberation” of the technology itself from restrictive hands. Muteba had been a communications engineer, poet, science writer – and Minister for Development in Zaire in the late thirties. I viewed some of his speeches, impassioned pleas for “the use of knowledge in the service of freedom”; he’d called for an end to the patenting of engineered crops, public ownership of communications resources, and a universal right of access to scientific information. As well as championing the obvious pragmatism of “liberation biology” (though Zaire had never gone renegade and used unlicensed crops), he’d spoken of the long-term need for African nations to participate in pure research in every area of basic science – an extraordinary stand at a time when such activities were deeply unpopular in the wealthiest countries on the planet, and unthinkable in terms of his own government’s immediate priorities.

Muteba had had his eccentricities – his three biographers concurred – with a leaning toward Nietzschean metaphysics, fringe cosmology, and dramatic conspiracy theories – including the old one that “El Nido de Ladrones”, the bioengineered haven built by drug runners on the Peruvian-Colombian border, had been H-bombed in 2035 not because the modified forest was out of control and threatening to overrun the whole Amazon basin, but because some kind of “dangerously liberating” neuroactive virus had been invented there. The act had been an obscenity, thousands of people had died – and the public outrage it attracted had quite possibly helped to save Stateless from a similar fate – but I thought the more prosaic explanation was far more likely to be true.