The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  Matha, her face wet with tears, looked around. It was her mother, racing between the rows of kneeling children, pushing them aside like stalks in a field. In a flash, Bernadetta had reached the kapasu and knocked the scissors from his hand: ‘How dare you! Have you no shame!?’

  The kapasu laughed and shoved her face forward onto the ground. Matha stayed seated, her heart pounding.

  ‘Is this man your husband? Should we give you his dick?’ the kapasu said in Bemba and spat on her. Bernadetta tried to get up. The kapasu stepped on her back.

  ‘No, let her stand,’ said the chief. ‘Let them see what a Congress whore looks like.’

  The kapasu raised his boot. Bernadetta stood shakily, her eyes darting to Nkuka amongst the cleaning women, then to Matha amongst the schoolboys. The look in their mother’s eyes was impossible: it begged them to run to her immediately and it begged them to stay exactly where they were. Matha’s eyes fled this torment and landed on Ba Nkoloso’s.

  He was looking right at her, his eyes like stones under water. And then – before Bernadetta and Ba Nkoloso and the other accused rioters were handcuffed and shoved into the Land Rovers that buckled away from the mission like a line of lazy buffalo – just then, Ba Nkoloso smiled at her. And she knew. No matter what happened to him or to her mother, to the Federation or to Congress, Edward Mukuka Nkoloso and Matha Mwamba would find each other.

  * * *

  All three of the Mwamba children were banned from the mission due to Bernadetta’s crimes. Mulenga started cultivating vegetables to sell. Nkuka cooked and cleaned and managed their small household. Matha forlornly reread her old exercise books, trying to eke more knowledge out of the everfading pencil marks.

  Four years later, their mother died in Bwana Mkubwa prison. Dysentery from bilharzia, the authorities claimed. Mr Mwamba fell into a hole of grief. He had been throwing himself against the wall of his wife for so long that when she suddenly vanished, he fell right over the edge. While he took the long way out, with the help of his younger sister and a renewed religious faith – ‘God is in control,’ he would intone with dead eyes – his care of his children languished.

  In the hazy period after her mother’s funeral, Matha slipped away to Ba Nkoloso’s home. She knew his wife and his sister were preparing to move to Lusaka, where the cadres of the African National Congress – which had been renamed the United National Independence Party, or UNIP for short – would protect them until Ba Nkoloso was released from prison in Salisbury. Waving a letter of permission she had forged in her father’s hand, Matha managed to persuade the two women that they needed her help caring for Nkoloso’s children. They travelled by car to Ndola, then took the train down to the capital, a dusty, smelly three-day journey. Matha spent most of it squeezed up against an open window, watching the country roll by under the immense unmoving sky. She was thirteen years old.

  Matha loved Lusaka. She felt for the first time that the rhythm of her body matched the rhythm of her surroundings. The thick press of pedestrians fit her soul like a glove. Her pulse beat in time with their feet. Her breathing rate followed the pace of the cars on those unpaved arteries with their grandiose names: Cairo Road, Great East Road, Great North Road. Double-decker buses called Giraffes trundled along them – the ticket checkers made Matha wrap an arm over her head to prove she was old enough to ride.

  For a year, Matha essentially ran the household in Matero while Ba Nkoloso’s sister worked, his wife sought assistance from UNIP, and his children attended school. Ba Nkoloso’s eldest son was the same age as her, but he lorded around, temporary master of the house, while Matha swept and washed and cooked and mopped. She finagled her own small recompense. She befriended stray cats, feeding them scraps and naming them after Christ’s disciples. And every morning, she woke before dawn and sat over the boys’ schoolbooks, learning their lessons until the chickens began their chuck-chuck-chuckling and the breakfast mbaulas swarmed the air with specks of ash.

  When Ba Nkoloso got out of prison in 1962, the family threw a big party – chicken and goat on the brai, crates of Mosi and Coca-Cola, friends and comrades spilling in and out of the house in Matero. Matha spent the day cooking behind the compound with the other women and only went to greet Ba Nkoloso in the evening. He was sitting in an office chair outside in the yard, wearing his old army helmet. It was dented and dulled with age, but Matha thought it sat on his head like a crown. He grinned gappily – he had lost a tooth somewhere along the way – joking about how the prison in Salisbury had been a map of the continent, every nation in a different cell block, except it was a Scramble for Soap rather than for Africa!

  Matha knelt at his feet.

  ‘Ah-ah! Can it be?’

  ‘It can.’ She shyly touched her hair. She had a little afro now that she no longer had to keep it shorn. Ba Nkoloso asked after her studies, quizzed her on maths and science.

  ‘You’ve grown, my dear.’ He shook his head happily. ‘You are like the moon, eh?’

  The men around them laughed, thinking he meant her newly round body. Matha glanced down at the curves that had emerged the moment she turned fourteen – they couldn’t be denied. But when she stood up, excusing herself, Ba Nkoloso caught her hand and pulled her close and explained what he had meant.

  ‘Your mind is still shining, Miss Matha!’ he whispered. Then he reached down, picked up a book from under his chair, and pressed it into her hands. ‘You will be my moon.’

  * * *

  A few weeks later, Matha was in a lean-to behind the Matero house, hunched over the book Ba Nkoloso had given her. The pages were polkadotted with mould and barely legible where his scrawled marginalia had spread like weeds over the text. On the floor before her were some basic household items: a glass bottle, a polishing cloth, a small plastic bottle. Matthias slunk around purring, trying to distract her. The sun was setting, making the lean-to glow red. Matha sat in that emerging emergency light, learning how to make a Molotov cocktail. The instructions were simple – something breakable plus something flammable plus something combustible…

  She heard a honk. She covered the book and the items with a chitenge and stood up, brushing the dirt from the seat of her black skirt. She let herself out and locked up. Ba Nkoloso’s pickup truck was wheezing at the back gate, his scattertoothed grin hovering in the driver’s window. Matha climbed into the bed of the pickup, joining the other four UNIP Youth cadets there – Bambo Miti, Fortunate Nkoloso, Reuben Simwinga and Godfrey Mwango. They were wearing all black, too, and sipping Mosi from bottles, which they raised in greeting.

  The pickup jolted into motion and Matha heard a loud bleating sound. She thought Ba Nkoloso was honking the horn again but then she saw it: a goat kneeling in the corner of the pickup bed, its eyes rolling with fear. She looked around but the other cadets just shrugged at her with conspiratorial smiles. Godfrey handed her a Mosi. She sipped it, queasy with anticipation. After a twenty-minute drive, the pickup turned off Cairo Road and parked behind a low concrete building. They all hopped out, Godfrey lifting Matha out like a child. They walked up to a door with a sign that said LUSAKA MORTUARY.

  Ba Nkoloso knocked softly. After a moment, the door opened, releasing a fog of white light around a black head. Ba Nkoloso quickly slammed the door against the man, pinning him to the wall inside, his round spectacles tumbling down his nose. The mortuary assistant resisted at first but Ba Nkoloso’s five-shilling note was very persuasive, more so than his promise of a house ‘when Independence arrives with its celebration of our nation’s new hegemony!’ Independence was still two years away at least, far too long for a promise to hold in Lusaka.

  ‘Just one body?’ the malukula asked, staring at the money in his hand.

  ‘Just one.’ Ba Nkoloso patted the attendant on the cheek. ‘But it must be a white woman.’

  After a few minutes, the malukula reappeared, wheeling a gurney bearing a covered grey oblong. Ba Nkoloso cut the cl
oth open to see the face and nodded. The four male cadets stepped forward, lifted the body onto their shoulders – it hung between them like a machila – then carried it to the pickup and slid it feet first onto the bed. Godfrey tugged the sack off and they all stared a moment. The woman’s skin was mapped with green veins. Her lips were pulled into a grimace. Her breasts were half-empty sacks, one nipple drawn down as if melting. Her frozen pubic hair looked windswept.

  Matha had grown up in a village, so the killing of the goat was less shocking than what they did with its blood. Bambo gripped the shuddering beast between his thighs and clamped its jaws shut with his hands, pulling its head up so its neck stretched tight. Ba Nkoloso knelt before it and slashed its throat, holding a tin bowl under the cut until it was full of the thick, dark liquid. Then he carried it to the truck and poured it over the dead woman’s pale chest and neck. The blood puckered and bubbled – its heat reacting to the skin, cold from the mortuary ice blocks. Something about the blood, its foreignness to the body it touched, made Matha sway weakly. Godfrey put his hand to the back of her neck to steady her.

  Ba Nkoloso wiped his hands brusquely on his trousers. ‘Now she looks freshly murdered!’ he laughed as he climbed into the cab of the pickup.

  The cadets clambered in the back, squatting against the edges, as far from the corpse as possible, keeping it in position with their feet as the pickup swivelled its way through Lusaka. The corpse lay face up, the goat’s blood glistening darkly on her chest. The frilly shadows of the jacarandas on either side of the road made it seem as if she were underwater, thready waves passing over her. The label affixed to her big toe fluttered in the wind. Her teeth glinted grimly in the passing headlights. Whenever the pickup slowed, the smell would be upon them – cold rank flesh, coppery goat’s blood, the sour hops of spilt Mosi. A sense of wrongness began to swell like a swarm of angered bees. Matha’s nostril hairs curled. The back of her neck tingled.

  The pickup finally slowed and turned into the drive of the Ridgeway Hotel. Ba Nkoloso found a parking spot near the entrance. The pickup stopped with a lurch and the body slid back, its skull ringing the metal siding like a dull bell. The cadets flinched away from it but Ba Nkoloso got out of the cab and slapped the side of the truck to make it gong again.

  ‘Let us show these bazungu who they are dealing with!’ he shouted, black eyes gleaming.

  The cadets hopped out. As the men prepared to heave the corpse onto their shoulders again, Ba Nkoloso instructed Matha to go in and find the bellboy, who had been paid in advance. She ran in through the glass doors, blinking at the brightness of the lobby after the long drive in the dark. She found the young man waiting for her inside, dressed in a lime-green suit. Without a word, he turned and led her to the restaurant.

  Matha had never been inside a hotel before, not only because she was poor, but also because she was black: the Ridgeway still had a strict colour bar. As they rushed along, her eyes bounced around, taking in the dizzying decor – a black and white chequered ceiling, floor tiles fitted in a staircase design, striped ferns in silver planters, a curtain printed with bundles of twigs, a chandelier that looked like a model of the solar system.

  As she and the bellboy neared the restaurant, she heard voices and the tinkle of metal striking glass and porcelain. They stopped at the entrance and peeked in. Matha saw a dozen round tables, decked out in white tablecloths, littered with candles and plates of half-eaten food, the meat undone into messy bones and flesh. The bazungu guests were eating and drinking and smoking, speaking a thin piping English, as if sucking their words through straws. Hearing a slight commotion, Matha turned. The other cadets were careering down the corridor towards her, the white corpse on their shoulders, Ba Nkoloso leading the charge. The sweat on their foreheads looked like royal Bemba scarification under the electric lights.

  ‘Bwela,’ said the bellboy and pulled her around the corner. There were four switches in the wall. The bellboy nodded at her, reaching for two. She put her hands on the other two.

  ‘Now!’ Ba Nkoloso yelled.

  They flipped the switches down in concert. Everything went black. A pause. Thuds. Glass breaking. A shriek. Matha groped her way back around the corner to the entrance. A soft glow was coming from the restaurant – the candles on the tables were still lit. She peeked inside again. The bazungu guests were on their feet, their faces fixed in stark masks of fear and disgust. Ba Nkoloso’s back was to the door but Matha could see his silhouette, topped by his spouting mane of dreadlocks. He pointed at the corpse at his feet, its legs spread crookedly, the tag on its toe like a little flag.

  ‘White men!’ Ba Nkoloso shouted. ‘Your time is up! We have had enough of this muzungu governor Welensky, with his Boer rules and violent antics!’

  He stepped on the chest of the corpse. There was a collective gasp.

  ‘We have killed his wife!’ he declared. ‘And now, we shall pounce on you!’

  The cadets pressed forward into the room, jeering and shoving the hotel guests, poking them in the chest. The whites stumbled past Matha at the threshold, their shoes slipping on the corridor floor. She watched them go. Giggles roiled at the base of her spine, then rose up her body and spilled out of her mouth, with the faintest taste of bile. She felt the ground drop from beneath her feet – someone had whisked her up into the air and placed her over his shoulder.

  He carried her into the restaurant, skirting the fallen wicker furniture and the marauding cadets, who had broken into song: Tiyende pamodzi ndim’tima umo! He lifted her onto the bar, sending glasses and bottles rolling. Matha winced as an ice spill seeped through the seat of her skirt. She blinked up at her rescuer. He bent and kissed her on the mouth.

  ‘Welcome to the Academy,’ Godfrey Mwango said, a scar on his neck gleaming in the candlelight.

  1964

  The headquarters of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy was in Chunga Valley, a forested area west of Lusaka, where the edge of the city bled into the edge of the bush. Minister of Space Research Edward Mukuka Nkoloso walked among his cadets, patting shoulders, adjusting capes, igniting cheer. As usual, he wore an army jacket and had covered his dreadlocks with his combat helmet, both preserved from his service in the Northern Rhodesian Regiment. But today he had festooned this sartorial drabbery with colour: green silk trousers and a heliotrope cape. The cameras would be filming in black and white, but it was important to suit oneself to the occasion. The Zambian Space Programme was about to make its television debut.

  It was September 1964, the height of the Cold War. The news that a fledgling African nation had joined the space race had hit the rest of the world like a scandal, pinging across the oceans, relaying around the planet like the very satellite that Nkoloso was shooting for.

  ‘We will put a Zambian on the moon by the end of this year,’ he had solemnly promised at the first press conference. ‘The technical details must remain secret. Some of our ideas are way ahead of the Americans’ and the Russians’. Imagine the prestige value this would earn for our new nation of Zambia. Most Westerners don’t even know whereabouts in Africa we are.’

  But they did now, Nkoloso smiled to himself. He had put his country on the world map by joining the race to leave it altogether. He looked around at the reporters who had flown all the way to Zambia for the test launch. These bazungu in shirtsleeves and spectacles looked like yams roasting on an mbaula – red and wet and bursting from the skin. Strangely reluctant to talk to people unless the cameras were rolling, the reporters were busying themselves with things instead, setting up tripods and scratching notes on paper and snapping photographs of Cyclops I.

  Nkoloso admired his rocket from a distance. The ten-foot copper cylinder was propped on its end in the grass, listing peaceably, its bottom quarter singed black from pre-launch testing. The take-off had been disappointing from the point of view of spectacle – Cyclops I had only risen six feet before it crashe
d to the ground. The mukwa wood catapult he had been considering would not be powerful enough; the mulolo system, while ideal for training cadets to withstand weightlessness, would never swing far enough. Turbulent propulsion was the only way forward!

  He walked over to confer with a Canadian cameraman, who was panting like a dog in the heat. Nkoloso asked if he could look through the viewfinder. The Canadian stepped aside and Nkoloso took his place behind it.

  ‘How do you zoom?’ he asked.

  The cameraman wiped his brow and fiddled with some knobs. As the square bloomed fuzzily before his eyes, Nkoloso almost lost his balance. He started back from the camera.

  ‘Does it turn things upside down too?’

  No, the cameraman laughed and pointed. Godfrey Mwango, the star astronaut of the Space Programme, was upside down in real life. He was practising handstands to impress Matha Mwamba, the other star astronaut, a star that much brighter for being the only woman on the team. Nkoloso examined them through the lens. Matha was seated with her back against a tree, her legs stretched in front of her. Godfrey stood at her feet, facing her. He placed his palms on either side of her legs and tilted up again into a handstand, his arms forming a bridge over her shins. He settled into his balance with a stagger. Matha was giggling and stroking the cat curled up against her thigh. Another cat began making figures of eight around Godfrey’s wrists and Matha’s ankles, binding them to each other with a slinky invisible chain.

  Nkoloso frowned. This was not the kind of weightlessness and stargazing of which he approved. This was not the kind of revolutionary vision that his Academy demanded.