‘Greetings, black b-b-b-brother,’ she replied, her voice laddering with the bad connection.
He straightened out of her view, cupped his hands under his chest and jiggled them with a questioning look.
‘Ya, she’s topless,’ Naila intoned. ‘Avert your eyes lest the sight of nipples blind you.’
He twirled his finger at his temple. Tabitha was in the middle of a story about Nubia.
‘…missed my flight from Cairo to Jo’burg and this Sufi tech guy was like, “Dude, go see the real pyramids.” So I took the train fifteen hours to this Nubian village where you can still drink Nile water and see the pyramids – the real ones, not the whitewashed ones. The lengths people will go to erase the blackness of our ruins! So anyway, I’m the only one in the pyramid tomb, in its, like, womb, right? So I start communing, do some yoga and shit, and right as I’m really getting into it, the lights just – psheewww. Power cut. A minute later they came back on and I was like, “I’ve been fucking acknowledged.”’ Tabitha sipped. ‘So I bought this tea to, like, preserve that feeling? It’s part of my decolonial diet.’
‘I miss you so frikkin much,’ Naila pouted.
‘My heart twerks for you too, love. Right, let’s see it.’
Naila propped the laptop on the bed and stood up. She tilted the screen to catch her image, then turned and pulled the back of her panties down, unveiling the patch of brindled skin.
‘Ugh, you’re a goddess. Look at that ay-ass,’ Tabitha Minaj’ed the word into a squeak. She peered closer. ‘Beautiful,’ she concluded and sat back. ‘Fucking. Vintage.’
Naila craned her neck to look at the fresh tattoo. It was a row of thin vertical lines of different weight, tiny numbers nudging up into them from the bottom edge.
‘What price comes up when you scan it?’ Joseph laughed from across the room.
‘You can’t scan it,’ said Naila. ‘The lines are meaningful but not, like, capitalistically.’
‘You know what?’ Tabitha was nodding. ‘I really respect that you didn’t do a QR code.’
‘Oh, yeah,’ Joseph rolled his eyes. He was pulling his socks on. ‘A barcode is so much classier.’
‘Uh, it makes it clear that she’s critiquing late capitalism rather than neoliberalism, which is, like, infinitely more available for revolutionary inversion? But also, Nilotic, you don’t want a code on your body that someone can actually scan. That’s fucking terrifying.’
‘Tabs, I need to tell you something,’ Joseph called out as he put his shoes on. ‘Don’t pop a vein but…You’re on a computer. Right now.’ He stood up. ‘You might even work for the Internet?’
‘Is he being funny?’ said Tabitha. ‘Listen JoJo, I’ll let it go because you’ve straight mapped my girl’s g-spot. But truth? The Web is dark. It’s all fake smiles and blahblahblah we’re changing the world, but underlying it all is just a big, poisonous, capitalist fuck you—’
‘Bye Tabs!’ Joseph cut her off as he walked to the door, then turned and mouthed to Naila: ‘Don’t forget dinner.’
Naila nodded and sat back on the bed. He shut the door.
‘What’s his problem? Testing a new butt plug?’
‘Taaabs,’ Naila moaned. ‘I can’t leave. I think I’ve been dicknapped.’
‘Grrrl, I’ve been there.’ Tabitha was tweezing her eyebrows. ‘Sometimes I think I live there.’
‘The dick isn’t even all that – I’ve just trained it. Like a pet snake. A kundalino.’
Tabitha snapped her fingers to make Lilliputian applause. ‘So what about the, uh, friend?’
‘Jacob? What about him?’
‘“What about him?”’ Tabitha echoed Naila in a mocking singsong. ‘You seemed…intrigued. And if I know my Nilotic, one man will not satisfy the beast.’
‘Uh, that dude makes frikkin drones. Ew.’
‘And?’ Tabitha glanced up into a corner as if a thought had flown into the room. ‘You know what? You should hook Jacob up with yours truly. We would have loads to chat about. Technologically speaking, of course.’ Tabitha grinned, unveiling her purplish gums.
‘Anyhoo!’ Naila rolled her eyes. ‘How’s the job?’
‘Tweather?’ Tabitha shrugged. ‘It’s just numbers, darling. It’s all just numbers. But it’s the future, too. The revolution may not be televised, but it sure as fuck is gonna be programmed.’
‘Mmm. Jacob said something about that the other day.’
‘Oooh!’ Tabitha clasped her hands. ‘Jacob did, did he?’
‘Fuck you, men,’ Naila said sheepishly. ‘It was just kinda smart. He was like, if everything’s online now – banking, government, military ops – and the power cuts, what do we do then?’
‘Oh that’s easy, darling.’ Tabitha pressed her middle finger to her chin to turn on her Bead, lighting her smile from below. ‘Then it’s just a matter of to bead or not to bead.’
* * *
Naila had been avoiding this dinner with Joseph’s grandmother for months. Now that it was finally happening, it felt both formal and frenzied, like a job interview on New Year’s Eve. Joseph’s grandfather had passed away a couple of years ago, from colon cancer. They were living off his UNZA retirement bursary and the money that Joseph’s Aunt Carol sometimes sent from her conservationist work in Malawi. Naila could tell the Bandas were barely making ends meet. The dinner table was set with elaborate place settings but the edges of the chairs were scuffed, the tablecloth faded and stained, the plates chipped and mismatched.
Joseph had decided on a French meal and instructed the worker, Ba Grace, to make it. She had taken over preparing meals after the old cook, Mr Sakala, had retired, but this was apparently not her forte – the coq au vin was coq au vinegar, the boeuf bourguignon was oniony biltong, the au gratin scalded the mouth. Everything tasted like Saladi cooking oil, which just made Naila long for the familiar dishes lurking inside these ones: nkuku, nyama, shepherd’s pie.
‘You’re supposed to use olive oil,’ Joseph said exasperatedly. ‘Not just substitute—’
‘Joseph, dear,’ his grandmother cut in coldly, her eyelids like shut mussels. ‘If you wanted the meal to come out differently, you ought to have cooked it yourself.’
The reluctant scrape of cutlery. Ba Grace was silent. She was probably in her sixties but, blessed with the perennial youth of black women, she was ageing at a snail’s pace: a white hair a year, a wrinkle every other year. This seemed unfair next to Agnes, who was in her seventies, and whose face was like an old umbrella – all drapey folds and spiky bones and mouldy spots. They both stooped, though, and Ba Grace’s hairline had receded.
‘I cannot cook propalee with no pawa,’ she said. ‘I was having to use mbaula.’
‘Another power cut?’ Agnes’s knife clanged on her plate. She shook her head. ‘This load-sharing nonsense is a disaster. We’re not sharing the burden of electricity, we’re bearing it.’
‘It’s load shedding, not load sharing,’ Joseph said. He just couldn’t help himself.
‘Oh?’ asked Agnes, cocking her head in his direction.
‘Load sharing,’ he continued, ‘is when you distribute power across multiple circuits to conserve energy. Load shedding is when you disconnect one source from supplying power.’
‘That is a distinction without a difference,’ said Agnes.
‘No, it isn’t,’ said Joseph. ‘We complain about load shedding like it’s a choice that government is making. But it’s the best they can do with the situation. Kariba Dam is failing.’
Naila forked a piece of chicken into her mouth. It was somehow both oily and dry.
‘Don’t be such a bootlicker, Joe!’ said Agnes. ‘Have you learned nothing from my tape?’
Naila nearly choked. She saw Joseph’s eyes dim. She knew she should rescue him or keep quiet. But instead she found herself opening her mouth to argue against hi
m too.
‘I mean, Kariba Dam has been failing for years, men. That is politics.’
‘The dam is failing because of gravity and The Change, not capitalism! The plunge wall—’
‘But why hasn’t it been fixed? Where did the money for fixing our infrastructure go?’
‘To be sure,’ said Agnes. ‘Kariba Dam was cursed from the start. Thousands of people were displaced in the building of that dam.’ She slowly ran her knife back and forth over a grey lump of beef, making it wriggle obscenely. ‘The Italians did that.’
‘The Italians?’ Naila frowned.
Agnes paused her sawing and turned her head in increments towards Naila, as if her sharp nose were the hand of a clock. ‘Yes. The Italian company that built the dam. Impresit.’
‘Right,’ Naila muttered. She knew that her grandfather, who had died before she was born, had worked at Kariba Dam but she had never learned its history.
‘Oh dear, you have Italian family, don’t you?’ Agnes smiled, her closed eyelids gleaming. ‘Don’t mind me. There’s blood on all our hands, really. The Brits are the ones who built the dam on the Zambezi instead of the Kafue. To keep the electricity near the mines, or perhaps I should say to keep the power near the money.’
‘And now there’s neither money nor power,’ said Joseph.
‘Ah, but these power cuts are velly bad,’ Ba Grace chimed in, still stuck at the beginning.
‘Government is talking with the Russians about building a nuclear plant,’ said Joseph.
‘The Russians. The Americans. The Chinese,’ Agnes shook her head. ‘It’s the Cold War all over again.’
‘Or the Scramble for Africa,’ said Naila. ‘The Sino-American Consortium owns the dam and the electric grid now.’
‘Don’t forget the clinics,’ said Joseph bitterly. ‘The SAC owns the vaccine clinics, too.’
* * *
Jacob, Joseph and Naila – the three musketeers, the band, the squad. They were chilling together all the time now. They would sit on the roof of the New Kasama house, talking politics, drinking whisky and getting high, listening to that old tape from Joseph’s grandmother – a British lecturer and Zambian students fervently hashing out the political dilemmas of the day: Kaunda’s One Party State and his dodgy diplomacy with various Marxist factions during decolonisation.
It seemed like a utopia compared to what was happening in Zambia these days. The president – nicknamed Kalulu for the slick way he wriggled outside the law – had shut down a newspaper and arrested his critics: one for a rude toast, another for a Facebook rant, a third for overtaking a motorcade. He had sent police to raid a political opponent’s home with tear gas and had him arrested for ‘treason’. Spouting anti-corruption mantras, his party had nevertheless spent lavish amounts on personal business and government contracts. Most recently, he had banned a novel that laid his actions out plainly. Confronted with these human-rights violations, Digit-All had issued a fierce statement, threatening to retract their free beading programme from the country. Calling their bluff, Kalulu had simply shut off AFRINET access for a week, then announced a new tax on Internet calls. ‘Bear with me if I become a dictator,’ he joked at the Sino-American Consortium summit.
Over time, Jacob, Joseph and Naila solidified their respective positions on this state of affairs. Joseph – they nicknamed him Kofi – believed in incremental change through existent structures. ‘Last election we had sixteen candidates on the ballot! That’s progress.’ Jacob – they called him Killmonger – had never voted, but his grandparents’ revolutionary past had inspired him. ‘Blow up the bridges and dams! We must bomb them until they listen.’
To Naila – she named herself Kali – this sounded like just another of those debates among men about how to defeat other men. She wanted to make protest art. She posted links on social media every day: graffiti in the West Bank; sculptures of politicians with distorted or missing penises; a gollywog cake served to a European minister of culture; a giant heroin spoon placed outside a pharma company. She glossed news headlines in all caps. TODAY IN NEOLIBERALISM. TODAY IN NEOCOLONIALISM. TODAY IN MISOGYNY. TODAY IN PUBLICLY FINANCED CARNAGE. It was her daily assortment of astonishing outrage.
* * *
The day the Chinese woman came back, Naila was slow-moving, cottoned from the world by a hangover. She had been up all night drinking and arguing with the guys about data collection and voter manipulation. Joseph was aghast at this distortion of electoral democracy. Jacob thought this kind of propaganda only went so far. Naila was sure Digit-All was involved. ‘I have to quit this job before I have blood on my hands,’ she kept saying.
Electronical Administration at the Reg Office was busier than ever, with four new clerks and dozens of waiting customers. It felt like a crowded clinic: discarded syringes cluttering up the bin, the smell of rubber gloves and antiseptic cream. Naila was filling out forms on a tablet.
‘It is infected,’ came the heavy bass accent.
‘What?’ Naila asked. A hand jutted in her face, reddish around the Bead, bluish in the palm. ‘Does it hurt?’ She reached out and the hand retreated skittishly. ‘Can I—?’ She looked up. ‘Oh, it’s you! Hello again.’
Mai blinked at her. ‘Ya, hallo. It does not het. But—’ She glanced around at the cluster of applicants in the office, then pulled up a chair and sat. She leaned in. ‘It is frashing.’
‘Flashing? Oh, that’s just a program error.’ Naila’s smile made her headache twinge.
‘But it is frashing,’ Mai glanced over her shoulder, ‘when I’m neeya those sack plesses.’
‘Sack?’ Naila paused. ‘Oh, SAC? The Virus vaccine clinics?’
Mai flapped her hand to hush her. Naila fought the impulse to explain that The Virus should not be stigmatised, that treating the infected like pariahs was in fact—
‘They are saying this Virus vaxini,’ Mai leaned in further to whisper, ‘makes you blek!’
Naila did a neck stretch to calm herself and caught sight of Miss Cookie strolling by the open office door with a young man – Naila did a double take. What was he doing here?
‘Would you excuse me for a moment?’
‘Ah-ah? No!’ Mai sat tall in her seat. ‘You must fixi this. Now-now.’ She pointed at her palm, as if demanding that money be placed there.
‘Okay,’ Naila smiled broadly and winced again. ‘Let’s get you rebooted.’
She clipped the clothes-peg sensor onto Mai’s finger and pulled up a terminal program on the tablet. Naila couldn’t read code any more than she could perform a medical procedure – she had been hired for this job because of her political science degree – but she knew an error when she saw one. She took screenshots of the knots and gaps in the strings of characters and emailed them to Tabitha with the subject line: WTF? Then she started the reboot program on Mai’s Bead.
‘Why was this thing frashing neeya the clinic?’ Mai pressed.
‘I’m sure it was just a coincidence,’ said Naila. Did she believe that? Beads had become ubiquitous. They were the nexus of emails, texts, social media, jobs, money – Beads could send and receive kwacha like Zoona, and some South African chains let you use them as credit cards. People even used Beads to vote. Why not public health too? Mai’s Bead flashed three times.
Naila unclipped her finger. ‘All set. Shall I escort you out?’
As they walked through the shadowed corridors toward the glare of day, Mai chatted about her fishery in Siavonga, how the workers spent hours playing on their Beads. The Change had brought new cycles of drought and flooding and either there was barely anything to fish or one species was overwhelming the others. When they were outside the Reg Office, Mai leaned in close.
‘I hope you are not lying about those clinics,’ she whispered, wagging her middle finger. ‘If this thing tans me blek? You will be seeing me.’ She turned and duckfooted away.
Naila
sighed and scanned the yard with its riverine queues. There he was. Jacob was leaning against a tree next to a man with long grey dreadlocks – it was his grandfather. She had only met Ba Godfrey once, when she’d picked Joseph up from the woodyard in Kalingalinga. The old man looked accidentally fly in his orange corduroy flares and suit jacket.
‘Children, children!’ she mock-scolded as she walked up to them.
‘Nayeela!’ Ba Godfrey looked surprised. ‘What are you doing here?’
Jacob nudged Ba Godfrey. ‘This one is a big bwana here. She is the one giving us Beads.’
‘It’s just a pilot programme.’ She ran her hand up into her hair, stroking the shaved fuzz on the side. ‘What are you guys doing here?’
‘Ya,’ Jacob said, scratching his cheek. ‘My gogo has been arrested.’
‘Yikes, men. For what?’
‘Revolution!’ Ba Godfrey grinned.
‘They say she set off a bomb,’ said Jacob. ‘We came to get money for the bail.’
Naila frowned. ‘I thought you had money from selling off Moskeetoze T-M.’
‘Chapwa,’ Jacob dusted off his hands. ‘I bought that New Kasama house for a woman. Ah, but she left me anyway for the boss.’ Ba Godfrey put a commiserative arm around him.
Naila felt a swell of jealousy. ‘Look, I wish I could help out with the bail but—’
The men looked at each other and laughed.
‘No, bwana,’ Ba Godfrey clasped his hands and wobbled his head apologetically – it was almost a mwenye joke – ‘we came to get the money from his Aunty Nkuka.’
‘Miss Cookie?’ said Naila, putting a palm to her blushing cheek. ‘That’s my boss.’
‘Ya?’ Jacob shrugged. ‘Anyway she has refused. Ati “Matha Mwamba is a spiteful witch with a demon for a daughter chani-chani”.’
‘That Cookie, she is a conservative!’ said Ba Godfrey. ‘But Matha? That one has a true revolutionary spirit! She was part of the Cha-Cha-Cha movement. Revolutionised by Ba Nkoloso, freedom fighter!’
The Old Drift Page 61
