The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘Twelve cats,’ Matha corrected matter-of-factly.

  ‘That one?!’ Ba Nkoloso pointed at Matha, his black eyes glinting as he guffawed at the ceiling. ‘Matha Mwamba is launching nowhere. She is carrying two! She is above take-off weight!’

  There was a terrible silence. The party averted its eyes. A few guests began to mumble about how late it was getting.

  ‘Your sister and her boyfriend? They have dishonoured our Space Programme,’ Ba Nkoloso went on. ‘That is why it has collapsed. We could not face our sponsors with a pregnant girl! The rumours have squashed us. And so now it is time for African liberation!’

  But Cookie was no longer listening. Her mouth hanging open, she slowly turned within the ambit of her sister’s arms until she was facing her. She looked into Matha’s eyes.

  ‘A baby?’ Cookie asked.

  Matha nodded, then glanced over Cookie’s shoulder. Cookie craned her head to follow her gaze. Ba Nkoloso had moved on. He was rebuking a Just Rocket for neglecting the Space Programme, while also trying to recruit him for the new African Liberation Centre. Cookie looked past them at Godfrey, who was still in his chair, asleep, dream-sealed from the room. She turned back to Matha. The sisters kept their arms around each other.

  ‘Godfrey doesn’t know yet,’ Matha said quietly.

  ‘A baby!’ Cookie exclaimed.

  ‘Ya, it’s a bit worrisome.’

  ‘A baby,’ Cookie whispered. Then she turned her head to one side and vomited.

  * * *

  Later that night, when the party was over, Matha and Godfrey had a fight. The beds were back on their feet, a catastrophe of dirty plates and glasses on the floor between them. Across the way, Nkuka was passed out on her bed, limbs splayed, wig askew. Matha watched her sister snore for a while then turned towards Godfrey, who was on his back beside her. Having napped through most of the party, he was now wide awake, composing a new song in loops, trying to get the notes right.

  ‘Godfrey?’ She leaned up on her elbow.

  Godfrey smiled at her but did not cease his ellipsing hum.

  ‘I think if we ask, Ba Nkoloso will forgive us and give us jobs at the Liberation Centre.’

  Godfrey frowned at her. She stared at the scar on his neck, the shape of a bullet.

  ‘Zambia has its independence now,’ she said. ‘It is only right to help our neighbours in the struggle for freedom. And we need a proper job now if…’ She put her hand on her belly.

  Godfrey’s hum stopped. ‘I have a proper job.’

  ‘What,’ Matha snorted, ‘the Just Rockets?’

  He looked at her, hurt crumpling his brow. ‘Think of Hugh Masekela,’ he said earnestly. ‘He was just another trumpeter until he went to America. Now he has his own sound…’

  ‘You think you are going to go to America?’ Matha laughed.

  ‘Isn’t that what Ba Nkoloso used to say? That only the Americans understand what it means to dream and that is why they would get to the moon first. And he was right!’

  ‘Oh gosh.’ She eyed him. ‘You didn’t believe in those space dreams, did you?’

  ‘Maybe I believed, maybe I did not,’ he shrugged. ‘But the idea of it was a work of art! It was inspiring for Zambians to dream about going to the moon. That is how real change happens.’

  ‘That is how craziness happens! The goal was to make real change, political change. Revolution! Not art! Missile rockets, not Just Rocketing around like some African Jimi Hendrix—’

  ‘You are one to talk about craziness! With your mother? And your Bashikulu N’gulube?’

  Furious, Matha jumped out of the bed, stepping right onto a greasy plate. With nowhere else to go, she stomped off to the communal kitchen where she paced for a while, fuming, waiting for Godfrey to come after her. But he didn’t. Eventually, Matha fell asleep seated at the table, her cheek resting on her crossed arms like a lazy student.

  * * *

  She woke up to her sister sitting across from her. Cookie looked freshly bathed. She was wearing a polyester suit and a full face of make-up. She took Matha’s hand and calmly explained that she and Godfrey could no longer stay here. The Eves, Cookie said, had assembled as a group to issue a complaint about the party this morning. Matha and her boyfriend were no longer welcome.

  In fact, despite their initial reluctance, the Eves had been quite taken with both the party and the Party. The space cadets, the Brigaders, the UNZA students, even Uncle Nkoloso with his dented helmet – these visitors had made the Eves realise that their generalised dissatisfaction with the world, their itch to complain about their conditions, could be turned into a political weapon. Within months, the Eves would be protesting everything from the shoddy food in the college canteen to Ian Smith’s white minority government in Rhodesia.

  But Matha never got the chance to see these radicals blossom. Her stay at the hostel had drawn her no closer to the girls studying at Evelyn Hone, including her sister. Matha was just as smart as they were, if not smarter, but she could never grasp their slang, their gossip about holidays at Lochinvar and Lake Malawi, about imported sedans from Germany and Belgium, about fashion labels from Milan and New York. Cookie took advantage of this class divide when she lied to her sister. She said the Eves looked down on Matha and the Just Rockets.

  She never divulged her real reason for sending her sister away. Cookie had come to realise that everything in her life felt borrowed: her schooling, her clothes, even her man – they were all on loan. But Matha, somehow, owned her life. And watching Matha waltz around here with everything she had earned for herself, paltry as it was – a shabby man, a child out of wedlock, a zany politics? It made Cookie ill. Only a sister, an alternative self, could inspire such a sordid mix of disgust and envy.

  ‘But where will I go?’ Matha asked, clutching her sister’s hand.

  ‘Go home, Matha,’ said Cookie. ‘Lusaka is not for everybody, you know.’

  1969

  But Lusaka was for Matha. The city still felt like a second skin to her. But neither Ba Nkoloso nor Nkuka would help her, and she was fed up with Godfrey. Matha was down to her last resort – the aunties. She made her way alone across town to a formidably large brick bungalow in Rhodes Park. This was home to Matha’s Aunt Beatrice, her father’s eldest sister and the reigning matriarch of the Mwamba family, though she no longer bore the surname.

  In the 1950s, Aunt Beatrice had married a civil engineer from Abercorn, who had taken her to England while he pursued further training. Though she had done nothing there but keep house, it was widely believed that this stint abroad had bestowed her with great wisdom. Aunt Beatrice, who could not read or write, was thus considered an authority on most things. She spoke a flashy broken English, gem-like words strung on a thin grammatical string. She’d had six children, two of whom now lived in England, mostly for the purpose of mailing home the necessities to which the family had become accustomed during its time there, including Cadbury Whole Nut, Walkers shortbread, and packets of white bloomers from Marks & Spencer.

  Upon their return, Aunt Beatrice’s husband had grown rich off the copper mines so, in the African way of familial socialism, she took care of their less fortunate relatives, calling upon this brood to offer gratitude and obedience in return. Her children endured marital and financial advice. Her grandchildren were paraded before her, squirming in hand-me-downs that smelled of disinfectant and the sweat of their siblings. Her extended family – the children of her siblings and cousins – drifted wishfully around the fringes of their luxurious home.

  Thus, when Matha arrived to make her case, she joined a long queue of supplicants, kowtowers and spongers on the steps outside the Rhodes Park bungalow. As the hours passed, the sunshine went from shy to cheeky to downright insolent. By noon, it was rudely glaring down. Matha took off her bomber jacket and rocked herself to relieve her joints from sitting for so long. The dogs kept co
ming to sniff her, hoping she had changed her mind about them.

  ‘Futsek, futsek,’ she said irritably. ‘Ach, iwe. Go!’

  There were three of them, pure Rhodesian ridgebacks the red colour of the dirt when the rains begin. They were enormous and friendly, as were their tongues. But they were dogs and Matha missed her cats. Ba Nkoloso had released all twelve from the lean-to in Matero when he disbanded the Space Programme and, instant traitors, they had not returned. Matha longed for their soft fur and their hard eyes, and most of all their soothing indifference, the way they gloried in solitude, as if alone even with their owners. If only she could be so cavalier when it came to providers of food and shelter. Matha was not looking forward to the ordeal of pleading ahead of her. All she needed was a place to stay. Nothing fancy. Maybe a small loan.

  It was late afternoon when a servant finally shook Matha’s shoulder. She blinked awake, sat up, pulled on her bomber jacket and trotted past the others waiting on the veranda steps. The sitting room she entered was snug, carpeted in fuzzy orange and curtained in heavy pink. An ornamental fireplace took up much of one wall. Ceramic sheep grazed on its mantel. A wooden giraffe listed affably at them. Christ hung forlornly above. Aunt Beatrice sat in a recliner, leaning to one side, her elbow on the armrest, her cheek resting on her palm. Her skin was the blackbluesilver of burning paper and her hairline had faded from forehead to midhead, as if cowering from her stern brow. She was dressed like an overgrown schoolgirl in a high-necked grey dress, white stockings and Mary Janes. Six aunties sat with her, three on either side, cheeks in their hands as well.

  Grumpy with humbling, Matha crouched before each aunty in turn to shake hands, her left hand cradling her right elbow. The greetings made a lilting round:

  Mulishani mukwayi

     Eyamukwayi

  Mulishani mukwayi

     Eyamukwayi

  Matha settled herself on the floor before the semicircle of women. All was quiet but for the chatter coming through the open doors to the veranda – birds, dogs, a diesel generator – and from the radio in the next room announcing the shifting coordinates of a cricket match.

  Finally, Aunt Beatrice tilted vertical, lifted her cheek from her hand, and spoke. She had a tremulous voice, words scrambling like spiders from her mouth and across the room to shiver up the spines of her audience. She presented the charges against Matha Mwamba steadily, one by one. Running off from the farm in Kasama. Politicking with cadres. Loitering with space gentlemen. Prancing around out of wedlock. The other aunties wordlessly concurred. They clapped their hands past each other, they shook their heads, they hummed descending staccato notes: MM. Mm. Mm. Aunt Beatrice concluded with a plea to the Lord to heal this waywarding child, which was followed by a general nodding of heads, a smattering of Amens.

  Matha despaired. She had come to ask for help. How had news of her Lusaka life reached the aunties? How had this turned into a trial? Her fingers writhed like caterpillars in her lap, then metamorphosed into winged creatures that fluttered up to her face as she explained. About wanting to continue her education, about wanting to participate in the struggle for independence, about joining the national cause…

  ‘Child. Are you not with child?’ Aunt Beatrice interrupted.

  This question harrowed a ditch in the middle of the room. The air rushed into it as the aunties turned to stare. Matha’s mouth fell open. Only Nkuka knew she was pregnant. When had she told them? Matha cast her eyes down and nodded. The aunties came to life, twittering and twisting their heads this way and that.

  ‘It is seeming to me,’ Aunt Beatrice intoned, ‘that you are in need greatly for assistance.’

  Matha scrunched her nose, allergic to this humiliation, but too trapped to protest.

  ‘It is highly appropriate that, in exchange for this assistance, you must be granting us the opportunity to dictate the well-being of this child’s life, given that in the foreseeing future…’

  A tear of rage slid down Matha’s cheek. She had not come to bargain with her unborn child.

  ‘…at the proper timing we will be sending the child for appropriate schooling. But for now…’

  Aunt Beatrice pursed her lips. The other aunties turned to her – yes, yes, their eyes said, but for now…what was her verdict?

  ‘You must voyage to your father’s farm in Kasama. You will be bearing the child there.’

  Aunt Beatrice tilted over, laid her cheek onto her hand, and closed her eyes with finality. The aunts exclaimed their amazement at this beneficence. Some even reached out and patted Matha’s shoulder, grinning as if they were giving a gift rather than doling out a condolence. Matha fumed. She should never have come. The aunties were already concocting a plan to secret her to Kasama as soon as possible, before her pregnancy began to show. Matha had no choice but to go – she wouldn’t even have time to send word to Godfrey. But she vowed she would never hand their child over to this shivery witch, even for something as valuable as an education.

  * * *

  To her father, Matha’s pregnancy meant that her prospects for marriage and employment, not to mention life on heaven and earth, were ruined. Mr Mwamba had always been a congenital worrier, a man who took Pascal’s wager as a motto: Let Us Live As If. The experience of losing his wife to politics had bestowed him with a permanent distrust of the world. He had retreated from it entirely and now ran the family farm in Kasama with his younger sister. She was a widow, too, with a brood of children. They were cut from the same cloth, those two. They prayed together and worried together and quarrelled peaceably about farm problems: money and drought and equipment.

  Mr Mwamba had put his previous life to rest with relief. Bernadetta had always been too much. Too eager to work, too bitter, too angry, too quick to blame the bazungu. The children she had left behind all seemed tainted by her too – Mulenga was as dim-witted as Bernadetta’s father had been; Nkuka had been happy to abandon him as soon as he was done paying for her education. And Matha! When he received a letter from his eldest sister Beatrice in Lusaka about Matha’s situation, Mr Mwamba had been disappointed but unsurprised. He had always suspected something bad would happen to his youngest. She had a cursed way about her. Always laughing.

  When Matha pitched up at the farm three months pregnant – two burly aunties on either side of her like bodyguards – she looked up from her squat of greeting to see resignation rather than anger grooved in her father’s face. He had already slotted the news about her into an old story. The story went like this: no matter how the world shifts to accommodate her, this kind of woman finds a way to disturb the peace. This kind of woman is the nganga that sits at the top of the stream, kicking her feet to make it roil.

  * * *

  This was not entirely untrue. If village life had ever suited Matha Mwamba, it certainly no longer did. She sulked as she worked the fields with Mulenga – her dwanzi brother finally living the pleasant, listless life he’d always been destined for. She hung her head as she plucked squeaky visashi, sucked her teeth as she gathered hairy chibwabwa, sighed as she shelled groundnuts and pounded maize. Hot and hungry, doubly so because she was pregnant, she moped around in a state of perpetual irritation, as if the very air were laced with stings. In a sense, it was: there were swarms everywhere – why had she never noticed them before? The sky looked like the greyish pages of her old exercise books, the insects like a script of equations – commas and dashes, full stops and slashes – the way maths looks in a dream.

  Often, Matha begged nausea or fatigue just so she could sit in the kitchen and listen to the Saucepan radio, the programmes barely quenching her parched curiosity. She missed Lusaka, its hectic streets and clamouring newsboys, the disgruntled Giraffes and Zinglish patois. She missed the Academy and Ba Nkoloso, and she even missed her sister and the Eves. But God, she missed Godfrey! As soon as she had arrived, she’d written a letter to him in Lusaka, apolo
gising for their fight, telling him about the pregnancy, pleading for him to come to Kasama. Two weeks later, she received his reply. It was cluttered with spelling errors but run-on with joy – about the baby, and the Just Rockets, and his training to become a truck driver. Am gona driv to com and see you!

  Matha resigned herself to withstanding this hell in the countryside until then. She wrote him letters in the meantime, but after Godfrey’s first reply, no more came. She lumped around, sulking, biding her time. But discontent was in her nature and it grew over the next three months, swelling with her belly, until one day, a conspiracy of chance events sprang a door wide and she found herself running through it.

  * * *

  It all began in the queue at the Boma in Kasama. Matha and her father had driven into town from the farm to purchase a new sprinkler. They were waiting their turn in the queue, standing in the shadowed vestibule, the sun-drenched courtyard glowing behind them. Mr Mwamba had worn a suit for the trip to town and Matha was wearing her bomber jacket over a floral print dress – the latter a concession to her aunt, who ached for Matha to look more respectable, given her condition. Bored as ever, Matha was absently scanning the signs pasted to the walls of the Boma as they inched forward, absorbing the words in the shallow way of literate but distracted eyes – not reading exactly but registering shapes and sounds and general wordliness.