Afrocentric Wolf Lore

It never ceases to amaze me, the many misconceptions which humanity has about my species, especially in this day and age. The name is Gabriel Saint-Antoine, and I'm a werewolf. Man, it feels so good to get that off my chest, you got no idea. I was born in the City of Montreal, Quebec, to immigrant parents from Haiti. I wish I could tell you something really exciting about the existence of a fur ball like myself, but I lead a pretty mundane life. I study criminal justice at Concordia University, and hope to become a lawyer someday. I work part-time at Croissant D'Or, this neat little Haitian restaurant owned by my parents, George and Maria Saint-Antoine. Pretty ordinary life, huh?

I was born the way I am, let's just get that out of the way. The ridiculous stories and even worse movies made about my kind sicken me. No one can become a werewolf, alright? To be a werewolf, you need to be born as one. As in both of your parents have to be in the wolf family, otherwise it's a no go, alright? Us werewolves are a species just like any other species. We're not human beings transformed into nightmarish wolf-like monsters by the light of the moon, we're a wolf-like species masquerading as human beings. Werewolves have been coming to Canada for a long time because, hey, like all immigrants, we're looking for better lives. There are places in the Caribbean with sizeable populations of werewolves, such as the Republic of Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad and Saint Lucia. Lots of us live in Latin America, parts of eastern Europe, southeast Asia and the Arab world.

Eastern Africa is understood to be the birthplace of the werewolf species, though the progenitors of modern werewolves left it around a million years ago, according to our most ancient legends. Humans and werewolves, or Homo Lupus, as we call ourselves, do share a common ancestor but our two species diverged a long time ago. In the movies, werewolves are often shown to be Caucasian. I find that kind of funny because most werewolves I've met weren't white. They hail from places like Tunisia, Romania, Russia, Turkey, Lebanon, South Africa, Brazil and Cuba, not western Europe. Of course, you can't tell that to Hollywood producers because they like to live in la-la land. Oh, well. You cannot enlighten idiots who want to wallow in their ignorance now, can you?

Anyhow, I was leading my carefully ordered life when certain strange events began happening all over the place. Adam Thierry, a werewolf friend of my parents who was working in the City of Winnipeg, Manitoba, got attacked by blood suckers, also known as vampires. Now, just like us werewolves, vampires are real. I've known a few. Generally speaking, we stay away from each other because of, well, racism. Vampires consider us werewolves impure because we walk around in human form and for the most part, live just like humans. Vampires consider humanity to be their prey and they're always preaching about their 'gospel of conversion and conquest'. Unlike what you read about us wolf-men, most of what you know about vampires is true. A person becomes a vampire after getting bitten by one of these bloodsucking undead fiends. Any human being can become a vampire, all it takes is exposure to the highly infectious vampire virus. By the way, werewolves cannot become vampires or vice versa. We're as different from them as you are different from monkeys. It just doesn't work.

Vampires are insane pricks, man. It seems that they're all like that. I don't know if vampires go around recruiting people who are naturally psychopathic to join their ranks or if there's something in the vampire virus that turns you into an asshole/bitch. That's something you should ask a scientist because that's totally not my field. Anyhow, the local vampire council is headed by Thaddeus Morgan, a tall, square white dude with silver hair and blue eyes. He looks about forty five, built like an ex-athlete, but he's been around since 1779. He once fought in the American War of Independence, if you can believe that. Thaddeus doesn't just run the vampire community of Montreal, he has an office in New York City and apparently runs almost all the vampire factions across North America. When werewolves across Canada began getting attacked by blood suckers, we retaliated, and some vampires lost their lives. Since neither side wanted an all-out war, the Montreal wolf community went to Thaddeus, hoping to get an explanation.

My father was part of the delegation of elder werewolves who went to Thaddeus office in downtown Montreal that day. The elder vampire told us that the mainstream vampire community did not condone the attack on werewolves and that there was infighting in the vampire world. Apparently, there was a new gang in town, the Blood Brotherhood, and they had a doctrine of intolerance toward both humans and werewolves, since they were essentially vampire supremacists. The Blood Brotherhood was outlawed by mainstream vampire society because their reckless behavior could expose the nonhuman world to the eyes of the human populace, something which would be detrimental to both vampires and werewolves. The leader of the Blood Brotherhood was Luther Kingston, a tall, red-haired and charismatic vampire of British origin, and his lover Dana Henderson, a black woman from the City of Detroit, Michigan, whom he turned into one of the undead. The two of them wanted to take over the various vampire factions and lead their species to total dominion over the planet earth. Sounds crazy, right? Like I said, vampires are nuts.

When my father returned and shared these news with us, we were all shocked. I mean, who wants to smile when they've been told that World War Three is on the horizon? The vampires are crazy, man. While we werewolves like to live peacefully alongside the humans, and just take care of our families and communities, the vampires have a different mindset. They feel that mother nature dealt them a lousy hand just by their very natures. While we werewolves look human most of the time, and can lead relatively normal lives, the vampires don't have that luxury. Direct sunlight can and will kill a vampire, so they only come out at night. They need human blood to survive, and can't last more than a few days without drinking it. Yeah, they got the short end of the stick, along evolutionary lines. By the way, vampires aren't immortal. They age much slower than humans, and can last for many centuries, but eventually, like everything else, they die. Us werewolves? We have a lifespan of one hundred and twenty years, though few of us ever reach that.

Worldwide, there are perhaps a million of us. The vampires are far more prolific, since any ordinary human being can become a vampire three days after being infected by the vampire virus. They outnumber us five to one, according to the demographics of our most trusted scientists. If the vampires from the Blood Brotherhood overthrow the Vampire Council, they'll take over the entire vampire race, and then it's going to be all-out war between wolf-man and blood sucker. You who are reading this, know these words to be the truth. Hope that we win, humans, hope that we win. For if we don't win, the vampires will take over this entire world, and all of humankind will face a terrible choice, convert to vampirism or die.