The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  * * *

  Dawn. A cup of melted ngwee. The deck washed and wet. The birds were snickering. The cabin was strewn with sleeping bodies, felled by fatigue and liquor. Except in one corner: soft plaintive moans, like a baby enjoying milk from a nipple. Mai woke up and saw them. A man was sitting with his back against the low wall of the deck, his face in darkness, legs stretched out on the ground. Naila was astride him, her hips leisurely shoving and shifting. Her hair was tied up, her ponytail swaying. Her back was bevelled on the sides like a banjo. On her bottom, there was a tattoo like a thin skyline and along her spine, a set of characters. Mai tried to read them but it wasn’t Chinese nor another tattoo. It was a queue of drones, thirty or so, lined up along her vertebrae, perched there, plugged in, or drinking. Mai gasped.

  Naila turned and her eyes swam into view, vague with sex. Sunrise spread behind her so she was backlit and glowing. The man panted urgently, out of view but for the jeans garrotting his calves. As she moved, Naila kept her head turned over her shoulder, riding blind, a smile curling her nostril. She seemed to know that she was being watched. But Naila’s eyes were hazy, as if behind clouded glass, as if some part of her were locked inside a private room, through which she was delicately rummaging, seeking her pleasure.

  She shuddered. The lake trembled. Mai heard a groan and turned away from the lovers. But the sound was too broad and low to be human. The approach of the swarm? No. The sound was vibrating her bare feet through the wood. The hoofbeat of water trotting to a gallop. Mai rushed to the lee of the Vulture. She craned her head towards the familiar thin grey curve on the horizon. It was not there.

  ‘The dam!’

  A wall of twisting mist rose where it had been, where it should be.

  ‘It’s gone!’

  Naila was suddenly beside Mai, a chitenge wrapped around her, tucked under her armpits, her skin beaming out a humid pulse. Mai recoiled – Naila was still practically haloed with sex but her eyes were switchblades glinting in the morning haze. No fear, this one. The men crowded in behind them now, both in jeans and bare-chested, rank with sleep and sweat. Which one had been under Naila’s shoving buttocks just a moment ago? Mai couldn’t tell. They all leaned over the side of the boat, tense, concentrating on the smoke in the distance.

  ‘But – there was no warning, no alarm, nothing.’

  Mai felt the tug, the urging strain of the boat under her feet. She looked down over the edge. The speed of the water was visible, frothy darts and pleats in the brown cascade.

  ‘The anchor!’ she shouted. ‘It will not hold!’ She raced up the staircase to the pilot house.

  * * *

  Instead of causing a simple malfunction, the drones had blocked the sluices completely. The waters had risen and tumbled over the dam. Beneath the boat, Nyami Nyami was tossing his whirlwind hair, arching his spiny necks. The Great Zambezi was flooding. Lake Kariba would soon become a river. The Dam would become a waterfall. And miles away, the Lusaka plateau, the flat top of Manda Hill, would become an island…

  ‘We need to get off the boat!’

  ‘Can we even get to the shore?’

  They yelled to each other, pointing uselessly. Dawn fanned her golden fingers. A mockery, that blank brightness above the rising chaos. The sound of the water was growing louder by the second, thundering, unharnessed. Was it a victory? Or a havoc? They had heard no sirens, received no panicked announcements over the radio or over their Beads screaming SABOTAGE!

  The Vulture’s engines came to life: a jerk and a rumbling under their feet. Mai in her pilot house gestured for them to put on life jackets. Joseph dug the boxy vests out from under a bench. They shrugged them on and sat, the excitement in their eyes edged with triumph and fear. The boat began to rock, knocking back and forth indecisively. They felt friendly sprays of water against their bare backs, gentle blurbles spilling up through the cracks in the deck, rivulets fleeing over their feet.

  The engines purred, then tantrummed over the roaring water. The racket rose and rose, the boat shaking as if it might explode. Another jolt as Mai set the windlass to pull up the anchor. The buzz below yawned down and ended in a low boom, as if something had plunged to the lake bed. Things grew quieter: the engines had stopped. Then the feeling of an earthquake, slow and liquid and rolling – with the anchor released, the accelerating current was dragging at the Vulture. It groaned and tilted heavily.

  Gravity swung sideways. They stumbled to their feet. The boat lurched roughly in the other direction with a heaving, consequential thrust. They fell, flung by the bucking pitch of the deck. Their hands grabbed for anything within reach, anything to right the world. They skidded and tripped. Their mouths opened and closed in the great roar, fish out of water. Then another fierce lurch, a sheer sideways shove. A great straining and all around, the plucking, tearing, snapping sounds of wood breaking. Chishamanzi! The waters broke. The Zambezi came curving in, fountaining in arcs as it crushed down upon them.

  * * *

  Sputtering, feeling herself flung in two directions, Naila reached out and her hand landed on some wooden thing – she clutched it. Part of the boat. No. It flexed – an arm. She fumbled her hand into a grip, yelling into the void. Water veiled her vision. She pawed at her face with her other hand and saw the round dark skull at the end of a shoulder slip under the waters gushing into the boat. The head re-emerged – it was Jacob, his mouth the shape of panic. His eyes grew wide as another swell peaked and collapsed, tossing him away from her, their link severed.

  Naila slithered sideways over wood, the skin of her arm and hip and hands gathering splinter and fire. Suddenly she was in the air, a flash of light, of flight. The plunge: the blaring rush of noise swallowed up in an abyssal suffocation. Then a skimming slant up through the busy water, the life vest dragging her up to the surface. A belch as the bubbling around her burst into sound. Gasping. Spewing. The torrents devouring her again. She lunged desperately, here, there, seeking air. The life jacket was buoying her but she could not keep her head above the water long enough to breathe. The surging, twining current kept submerging her. After one long plunge, the dull pain in her lungs began to sharpen. A terrible exhaustion fell over her, veiling her from her will, tempting her: just let go. Just let…

  CRACK. She heard her knee break before she felt the fire crunch into the bone. Rage flashed through her and she flung out at whatever had slammed into her, skinning her hand as she tried to loop her arm around it. She pulled up and her head broke the surface. She gasped alive. The leafless tree jutting above the water was rough but she clung to it, keeping it in a chokehold until she could wrap her naked legs around the trunk – her chitenge had long washed away. The sun dazzled down. The water boomed and pounded past her. Papu’d to the tree, panting, she scanned the swarming bright water.

  Through the prism between her eyelashes, she saw the hills around the lake, those plush green blankets draped over the sloping banks. To the south, the white mist was thick as a wall. The Vulture’s shattered remains drifted and spun in the brown, rushing water. Above, tiny specks flew, scattering in every direction, then coalescing into a flock that zipped and zoomed in saltatory shifts across the sky, changing direction abruptly like those old computer screen savers with Bézier curves. Naila’s arms and legs were cramping. Fighting the current was sapping her strength. The water leapt and tumbled, its thick tresses caressing her as

  Shhh​kkk​rrrka​kingka​kinka​kingch​chchch​*ding​*ding​*ding​*shhht​zzzzz​zzz​zzt. ERROR. HTTP 404 FILE NOT FOUND. WE ARE HAVING TROUBLE RECOVERING THE FEED. CHECK YOUR MONITOR AND TRY AGAIN.

  Excuse us. We’re sorry. Please pardon our dust. It appears that we have a problem. The feed has cut, interrupted abrupt, and the culprit? Nowhere to be found. O Error! It seems, while extolling your virtues, we have made some mistakes of our own. For one, we’re not sure that we are who we said. Are we red-blooded beasts or metallic machines? Or are we jus
t a hive mind that runs a program that spews Wikipedian facts?

  Pondering this query – who are we really? – we discovered another mistake. We searched entomology, the study of insects, but etymology popped up instead. It’s all fine and good, we looked into the root, etymology means ‘search for the truth’, its origin is etumos – oh no! There we go! We’re doing it again! Straying, swerving, stealing. (Nostra culpa to the Bard of Nostromo, by the way.) Traduttore, traditore, as the Italians say. Or as the Internet says. In fact, any facts, any stats that we’ve stated? There’s just no vouching for their veracity. We deviate, drift…oh, how we digress. We’re semantically movious, too.

  Are we truly man’s enemy, Anopheles gambiae, or the microdrones Jacob designed? If that’s who we are, then this tale has explained our invention. The problem is that we’ll still never know because…we’ve joined up with the local mosquitoes. We get along fine, but can’t tell us apart in this loose net of nodes in the air. We just buzz about and follow commands and live lives of tense coordination. Half insects, half drones; perhaps all drones or none; maybe something between will emerge. But what a joke! What an error! What a lark indeed! A semi-cyborgian nation!

  Here’s one more question: are we really a we? Or just a swarm in the swarm? Worse, is this me?! Was it the dread royal we all along? And is that the meaning of SOTP? Oh what a shame, that they rotted so quickly: the fruits of the new Cha-Cha-Cha.

  Those fiery young bolshies tried to blow up the dam and take down the government that way. But their blueprints were old, their calculations too tight, and they’d made no concessions to chance. Indeed, their mistake – their Error of Errors – was simply forgetting the weather. Tabitha had warned them all about The Change, and that season was ultra-disastrous. The rainfall that came was ten times the norm and the damned wall was already failing. When the drones blocked the flue, the Zambezi pushed through, and Kariba Dam tumbled down after.

  The bodies of water spilled their banks within days and soon the whole country was drowned. The gorges and valleys were rivers and lakes, the escarpments were lost under waterfalls. Electric grids failed, people fled from their homes. The flood flowed broad and washed out the roads, making streams and canals of the tarmac. Traffic slowed down, then stopped altogether. Passengers waded, then swam.

  Lusaka survived, that dusty plateau, as its own city-state. Kalingalinga became its capital. A small community, egalitarian, humble. People grow all of the food that they eat. There are a few clinics, and one or two schools. Beads are used for barter and voting. And in its midst our lone survivors, Naila’s two lovers, now old. Haven’t we told you? She died giving birth, but her son doesn’t know who his father is.

  We are here, too, in this warm, wet future. What keeps us going? Our arthropod flesh or our solar-strip skin? Perhaps it’s the same old difference. The best kind of tale tells you you in the end, unveils the unsolvable riddle. Wait! Did you hear that? Don’t leave us just yet! They’re suddenly all speaking through us – Naila and Jacob and Joseph, their parents, and all of their ancestors, too – with a crackling noise like old radio waves, here is their terminal message:

  Time, that ancient and endless meander, stretches out and into the distance, but along the way, a cumulative stray swerves it into a lazy, loose curve. Imagine the equation, or picture the graph, of the Archimedean spiral. This is the turning that unrolls the day, that turns the turns that the seasons obey, and the cycle of years, and the decades. But outer space too, that celestial gyre, the great Milky Way, turns inward and outward at once. And so we roil in the oldest of drifts – a slow, slant spin at the pit of the void, the darkest heart of them all.

  * * *

  Acknowledgements

  The Old Drift includes many fictions and quite a few facts. ‘The Falls’ chapter borrows heavily from Percy M. Clark, The Autobiography of an Old Drifter (London: G. C. Harrap, 1936) – all racism his. Other works consulted include: Milisuthando Bongela, ‘Tech artist bends the net to create decolonial, spiritual therapy for the spiritual age,’ The Mail & Guardian (28 July, 2016). Beppe Fenoglio, The Twenty-three Days of the City of Alba (1952), tr. John Shepley (South Royalton: Steerforth Italia, 2002). Ilsa M. Glazer, New Women of Lusaka (Mountainview: Mayfield, 1979). Jan-Bart Gewald, Giacomo Macola and Marja Hinfelaar, eds, One Zambia, Many Histories: Towards a History of Post-colonial Zambia (Leiden: Brill, 2008). David M. Gordon, Invisible Agents: Spirits in a Central African History (Athens: Ohio UP, 2012). Karen Tranberg Hansen, Distant Companions: Servants and Employers in Zambia, 1900–1985 (Cornell: Cornell UP, 1989). Panpan Hou et al, ‘Genome editing of CXCR4 by CRISPR/cas9 confers cells resistant to HIV-1 infection’, Scientific Reports 5:15577 (20 October, 2015). David Howarth, The Shadow of the Dam (London: Collins, 1961). Christina Lamb, The Africa House (London: HarperCollins, 1999). Austin Kaluba, ‘Zambia Down Memory Lane’ series, UKZambians (www.ukzambians.co.uk). Clare Pettitt, Dr Livingstone, I Presume? Missionaries, Journalists, Explorers, and Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2007). M. Marmor et al, ‘Resistance to HIV Infection’, Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine, 83:1: HIV Perspectives After 25 Years (1 January, 2006). Darryll J. Pines and Felipe Bohorquez, ‘Challenges Facing Future Micro-Air-Vehicle Development’, Journal of Aircraft 43:2 (March-April, 2006). Saritha Rai, ‘A Religious Tangle Over the Hair of Pious Hindus’, New York Times (14 July, 2004). Andrew Spielman and Michael D’Antonio, Mosquito: The Story of Man’s Deadliest Foe (New York: Hyperion, 2001). Research that I conducted at the National Archives of Zambia, in newspapers and journals from the sixties and seventies, and via interviews for my New Yorker article, ‘The Zambian “Afronaut” Who Wanted to Join the Space Race’ (11 March, 2017) also made its way into the novel.

  Snippets from the following songs appear in the novel: Larry Maluma’s ‘Chakolwa (Drunkard)’ (1984); Whitney Houston’s ‘How Will I Know?’ (George Merrill, Shannon Rubicam and Narada Michael Walden, 1985); Billy Ocean’s ‘Get Outta My Dreams, Get into My Car’ (Billy Ocean and Robert John ‘Mutt’ Lange, 1988); Soul for Real’s ‘Candy Rain’ (Ali Shaheed Muhammad, Hamish Stuart, Dwight Myers, Malik Taylor, Owen McIntyre, Samuel Barnes, Jean-Claude Olivier and Terri Robinson, 1994).

  A novel this long in the making draws around it a veritable swarm of souls. Some categories overlap; I name you each only once. My warmest thanks to:

  The classmates and instructors of writing workshops I took with Lan Samantha Chang, John Crowley, Mitchell S. Jackson, Jamaica Kincaid and Katharine Weber. The members of my writing groups over the years: Alisa Braithwaite, Case Q. Kerns, Julia Lee, Christina Svendsen, (Cambridge); Tej Rae (Lusaka); Nadia Ellis, Swati Rana (Berkeley). My residency hearts: Allison Amend, Liz Greenwood, Fatima Kola, Carmen Maria Machado, Janet Mock, Kiran Desai and Seema Yasmin. My Berkeley students and colleagues, especially Scott Saul.

  Callaloo for publishing ‘Muzungu’ (an early version of ‘Isabella 1983’) and Alice Sebold and Heidi Pitlor for selecting it for The Best American Short Stories 2009 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Binyavanga Wainaina, Margaret Busby, Osonye Tess Onwueme and Elechi Amadi, for selecting me for Africa39 and publishing ‘The Sack’ (Bloomsbury, 2014). Margaret Busby and Candida Lacey for publishing ‘The Living and the Dead’ in New Daughters of Africa (Myriad, 2019).

  The Berkeley Institute of International Studies for the 2012 Robert O. Collins grant to brush up on my Nyanja and Bemba. The 2010 and 2015 Caine Prize for African Writing for shortlisting ‘Muzungu’; awarding the prize to ‘The Sack’; giving me the space to write ‘The Man With the Hole in His Face’ (an early version of ‘Thandiwe 1996’); and (re)publishing them in the respective Caine Prize Anthologies (New Internationalist). Nick Elam for telling me that I was already a writer in the Douala airport. Nick Stanton for being my Virgil through the media. The 2015 committee – Zoe Wicomb (chair), Zeinab Badawi, Brian Chikwava, Neel Mukherjee and Cóilín Parsons – and Lizzy Attree for forgiving my cheekiness.
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  Berkeley for giving me a job that lets me write. Sangam House, Ledig House, Chaminuka, Hedgebrook and The Ruby for surrounding the creation of this project with beauty, time, deliciousness and solidarity.

  My generous fact checkers and providers: Samuel Bjork, Glenda Carpio, Roy and Sarah Clarke, Federico Ferro, Mubanga and Juanita Kashoki, Georgina Kleege, Adam Morris, Audrey Mpunzwana, Ilse and Jacob Mwanza, Suwilanji Ngambi, Mukuka Nkoloso Jr., Shailja Patel, Ranka Primorac, Bartek Sabela, Robert Serpell, Duncan Smith and Shanti Thirumalai. My last minute proofer Kyler Ernst.

  My teams at Janklow & Nesbit and at Hogarth for being extraordinary machines. Will Francis for escorting me around London; Molly Stern for gallantly swooping in. Poppy Hampson and Alexis Washam for taming this monstropolous beast and ushering it into the world with such patience, precision and love. Greg Clowes for fixing it up. Kai and Sunny for dressing it up. Michael Taeckens for introducing it to everyone with panache and grace.

  PJ Mark for finding me, sticking by me, and always knowing exactly what to do and when – you are kismet itself.

  My earliest editors: eagle-eyed Margaret Miller and gimlet-eyed Mike Vazquez.

  My readers, my sisters, my graces: Michelle Quint and Zewelanji Serpell and Ellah Wakatama Allfrey.

  My other family members, friends and boos for your love and support along the way.

  My mother, Namposya Nampanya-Serpell (1950–2016), who knew who I was before I did, and never stopped believing. Mama, this book is for your joy. It isn’t the story of the invention of the alphabet (‘Ay! It’s a bee!’) but at least it begins with a Z.

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