The Old Drift Read online

  ‘From the poetry and subtle humor constantly alive in its language, to the cast of fulsome characters that defy simple categorization, The Old Drift is a novel that satisfies on all levels. Namwali Serpell excels in creating portraits of resilience – each unique and often heartbreaking. In The Old Drift the individual struggle is cast against a world of shifting principles and politics, and Serpell captures the quicksand nature of a nation’s roiling change with exacting precision. My only regret is that once begun, I reached the end all too soon’

  Alice Sebold

  ‘It’s difficult to think of another novel that is at once so sweepingly ambitious and so intricately patterned, delivering the pleasures of saga and poetry in equal measure. The Old Drift is an endlessly innovative, voraciously brilliant book, and Namwali Serpell is among the most distinctive and exciting writers to emerge in years’

  Garth Greenwell

  ‘An astonishing novel, a riot for the senses, filled with the music and scents and sensations of Zambia. Namwali Serpell writes about people, land and longing with such compassionate humour and precision, there’s an old wisdom in these pages. In short, make room on your shelf next to a few of your other favourites: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Tsitsi Dangarembga and Edwidge Danticat jump to mind. It’s brilliant. This woman was born to write!’

  Alexandra Fuller

  ‘The Old Drift is a stunning achievement: a novel of epic scope and powerful vision that also manages to be intimate, tender, and very funny. A truly important debut from a brilliant new voice’

  Fiona McFarlane

  ‘In turn charming, heartbreaking and breathtaking, The Old Drift is a staggeringly ambitious, genre-busting multigenerational saga with moxie for days…I wanted it to go on forever. A worthy heir to Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude’

  Carmen Maria Machado

  ‘The Old Drift is an extraordinary meditation on identity, the history of a nation, love, politics, family, friendship and life. Serpell’s prose is dazzling. Darting back and forth through the decades and mixing different genres, Namwali has delivered an original, remarkable, magical work that both delights and challenges’

  Chika Unigwe

  ‘If, as she writes, “history is the annals of the bully on the playground” then in The Old Drift, Namwali Serpell wreaks havoc on the Zambian annals by rewriting the past, creating a new present, and conjuring an alternative future. In refusing to be bound by genre, Serpell is audacious and shrewd. This is a Zambian history of pain and exploitation, trial and error, and hope and triumph’

  Jennifer Makumbi

  ‘The Old Drift is a dazzling genre-bender of a novel, an astonishing historical and futuristic feat, a page-turner with a plot that consistently and cleverly upends itself. Playfully poetic and outright serious at once, it is one of the most intelligent debuts I’ve read this year. No matter your reading preference, there’s something in it for you’

  Chinelo Okparanta

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2019 by Namwali Serpell

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Hogarth, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  crownpublishing.com

  HOGARTH is a trademark of the Random House Group Limited, and the H colophon is a trademark of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data is available upon request.

  ISBN 9781101907160

  Ebook ISBN 9781101907160

  Cover illustration: © Kai and Sunny

  v5.4

  a

  For Mama

  Meanwhile, at the far end of a valley, Aeneas saw

  A remote grove, bushy rustling thickets,

  And the river Lethe somnolently flowing,

  Lapping those peaceful haunts along its banks.

  Here a hovering multitude, innumerable

  Nations and gathered clans, kept the fields

  Humming with life, like bees in meadows

  On a clear summer day alighting on pied flowers

  And wafting in mazy swarms around white lilies.

  Aeneas startled at this unexpected sight

  And in his bewilderment asked what was happening,

  What was the river drifting past beyond them,

  Who were the ones in such a populous throng

  Beside it?

  ‘Spirits,’ Anchises answered…

  Virgil, The Aeneid, Book VI

  (tr. Seamus Heaney)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  The Falls

  I. The Grandmothers

  Sibilla

  Agnes

  Matha

  II. The Mothers

  Sylvia

  Isabella

  Thandiwe

  III. The Children

  Joseph

  Jacob

  Naila

  The Dam

  Acknowledgements

  Zt. Zzt. ZZZ​zzz​ZZZ​zzzz​ZZZ​zzzzzz​ZZZZ​zzzzzzzz​ZZZ​zzzzzz​ZZZ​zzzzo’​ona.

  And so. A dead white man grows bearded and lost in the blinding heart of Africa. With his rooting and roving, his stops and starts, he becomes our father unwitting, our inadvertent pater muzungu. This is the story of a nation – not a kingdom or a people – so it begins, of course, with a white man.

  Once upon a time, a goodly Scottish doctor caught a notion to find the source of the Nile. He found instead a gash in the ground full of massed, tumbling water. His bearers called it Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means The Smoke That Thunders, but he gave it the name of his queen. He described the Falls with a stately awe, comparing the flung water to British things: to fleece and snow and the sparks from burning steel, to myriads of small comets rushing on in one direction, each of which left behind its nucleus rays of foam. He speculated that angels had gazed down upon it and said to each other, ‘How lovely.’ He even opined, like a set designer, that there really ought to be mountains in the backdrop.

  Adventure. Disaster. Fame. Commerce. Christianity. Civilisation. He was mauled by a lion that shook him in its jaws, he said, as a dog shakes a rat. His wife died of fever; his beloved poodle drowned. He voyaged over land and along endless waterways. He freed slaves as he went, broke their chains with his hands, and took them on as his servants and bearers. Late in his life, he witnessed a massacre – slave traders shooting at people in a lake, so many, the canoes could not pass. He despaired. He was broken, broke; Queen Victoria had forgotten him; the Royal Geographers said he was dead. Then a mercenary Welsh bastard named Stanley presumed, shook his hand, and sent word to London. And in an instant he was infamous, as if risen from the grave. Yet he refused to return to Merrie England.

  Doddering, he drove deeper into the continent instead, still seeking his beloved Nile. Oh, father muzungu! The word means white man, but it describes not the skin, but a tendency. A muzungu is one who will zunguluka – wander aimlessly – until they end up in circles. And so our movious muzungu pitched up here again, dragging his black bearers with him.

  His medicine box went missing – who took it? They never found out – and with it, his precious quinine. Fever hunted him and finally caught him. He died in a
hut, in the night, on his bed, kneeling, his head in his hands. His men disembowelled him, planted his heart under a tree, and bore his corpse to the coast. The HMS Vulture took his body home – what was left without the living was buried under stone in the Nave of Westminster Abbey. His people recognised him by the scrapes of the lion’s teeth on his humerus bone.

  Such wonder at the resolve of his bearers. To travel with a corpse for months on end, suffering loss and injury, sickness and battle? Through blistering heat and blundering rain, beating off the taboo that to carry death is to beckon it? To come all the way to England, to face interrogation, to build a model of the hut that he died in? What faith! What love! No, no – what fear! That corpse, that body was proof. Without it, who would possibly have taken their word that a white man, among ‘savages’, had died of bad luck – a mere fever?

  Men never believe chance can wreak great consequence. Yet the story of this place is full of such slips. Error, n., from the Latin errare: to stray or to veer or to wander. For instance, the bazungu who carved this territory into a colony, then a protectorate, then a federation, then a country came here only because Livingstone did. They drifted in and settled the land, drew arbitrary lines in the sand, stole treaties from chiefs with a devious ruse: a ‘Royal Charter’ meant for business, but used for state. Waving flags and guns and beads to trade with, they scrambled rabid for Africa, and claimed it was Livingstone’s legacy.

  Neither Oriental nor Occidental, but accidental is this nation. Would you believe our godly Scotch doc was searching for the Nile in the wrong spot? As it turns out, there are two Niles – one Blue, one White – which means two sources, and neither one of them is anywhere near here. This sort of thing happens with nations, and tales, and humans, and signs. You go hunting for a source, some ur-word or symbol and suddenly the path splits, cleaved by apostrophe or dash. The tongue forks, speaks in two ways, which in turn fork and fork into a chaos of capillarity. Where you sought an origin, you find a vast babble which is also a silence: a chasm of smoke, thundering. Blind mouth!

  The Falls

  It sounds like a sentence: Victoria Falls. A prophecy. At any rate, that’s the joke I used to make until Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria actually died in 1901, just before I landed on the continent. Two years later, I set eyes on that African wonder named for an English queen and became as beguiled as the next man. I came for the Falls, and I stayed for them, too.

  What they say is true – the spray can indeed be seen from thirty miles off, the roar heard from twenty. The last part of our trek from Wankie was hard going and it was eleven at night by the time we made camp about a mile from the Falls, under a gargantuan baobab tree. Tired as I was, I could not let the need of sleep come between me and my first sight of that vast tumble. I left the others and made my way alone to look over the Falls from above, from the so-called ‘Devil’s Cataract’. I shall never forget it.

  The night was luminous with moonlight. In the foreground was the bluff of Barouka island. Beyond it, veiled in spray, the main falls leapt roaring into the chasm four hundred feet below. The spray was so powerful it was hard to say whether the Falls flowed up or down. The shadowy black forest writhed its branches before them. The lunar rainbow, pale and shimmering, gave the whole scene a touch of faery. I was awed beyond words, as if standing in the presence of a majestic Power quite ineffable. My hat came off and for an hour I stood bare-headed, lost in rapture.

  No. I shall never forget that nocturnal view of the Victoria Falls, full in flood and drenched in moonlight. I spent thirty-two years within a mile of that spot, and I’ll be damned if that isn’t still the best lookout.

  * * *

  The next morning, I marked the occasion of my first encounter by carving my name and the date into the baobab tree: Percy M. Clark. 8 May 1903. This was unlike me but excusable under the circumstances. I set out for the drift five miles above the Falls, the port of entry into North-western Rhodesia. The Zambesi is at its deepest and narrowest here for hundreds of miles, so it’s the handiest spot for ‘drifting’ a body across. At first it was called Sekute’s Drift after a chief of the Leya. Then it was Clarke’s Drift, after the first white settler, whom I soon met. No one knows when it became The Old Drift.

  For two hours I sat alone on the southern bank, popping off a rifle at intervals. At long last, I saw a speck – a dugout coming from the other side. It seemed so far upriver, I wasn’t quite sure it was coming for me; the river was so swift that a long slant was needed to bring the boat precisely to the spot where I waited. A dugout is a ticklish thing to handle in a strong current – a single crossways cough is enough to tip it over – but the Barotse are excellent river-boys. Standing to their work, they use ten-foot paddles to steer their primitive craft. They brought me back across and then my goods.

  The Old Drift was then a small settlement of a half-dozen men – there were only about a hundred white men in all of the territory at the time. I stopped at a mud and pole store that served as the local ‘hotel’. It belonged to a man who bore my surname, except his had the aristocratic ‘e’ attached. This would have been coincidence enough, but it turned out that he grew up in Chatteris in Cambridgeshire, practically next door to the university city I thought I’d long left behind. It seemed I couldn’t get away from the old country, or its airs.

  Fred ‘Mopane’ Clarke – a native moniker, for he was ‘tall and straight and has a heart like a mopane tree’ – had settled there five years earlier and become a forwarding agent, then started a transport service across the Zambesi. He later went on to great fortune building hotels and selling them off. But when I met him, we were simply two men making the best of it. Mopane was amused that I had tossed a coin to choose my new vocation – photography was a relatively new field in those days. I didn’t bother to explain my ousting from the Trinity chemistry lab.

  ‘The bollocks on you!’ he said. ‘Did you journey to Rhodesia on such a whim, too?’

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘Took up a post at a studio in Bulawayo. But toning and fixing is rather a chancy business in Africa, with the dust, not to mention the dust-devils. So I quit.’ Another lie.

  ‘But you’ve stayed on, it seems. Does life here in the bush suit you?’

  ‘The settlers are a good sort. Honest, spirited. Don’t turn their nose up at people. The Kaffirs are bewildering, of course, but seem pliable enough. The insects are rather an abomination.’

  We exchanged bug stories. Tam-Pam beetles tugging at the hair, rhino beetles blundering into the knob, the putrid stink beetle and whistling Christmas bug. Scorpions, spiders, centipedes. Beasties all. I won the debate by telling him about the day I arrived in Bulawayo two years earlier. The sun vanished behind a black cloud: not a dust storm but a plague of biblical locusts! Then came the clamour: the frantic beating of pots and trays to scare them off. A hellish din, but effective.

  ‘You shall face far worse here,’ said Mopane cryptically. ‘Do you intend to pioneer?’

  ‘To wander. Pa always said, “My boy, never settle till you have to and never work for another man.” Time to play my own hand, do a touch of exploring. I believe I shall be the first to follow the Zambesi from the Falls all the way to the coast,’ I boasted.

  ‘Like the good Dr Livingstone.’

  ‘Oh. Yes, I suppose.’ I shook off my frown. ‘But without the religion.’

  Mopane Clarke gripped my hand with a devilish grin.

  * * *

  I was ready for my escape into the wild. Leaving my camera equipment in Mopane’s care, I set off for Kasangula, a kraal two and a half days away. It was bossed by a chief Quinani, a quaint old bird who squatted in the sun all day, snuffing, dressed in a leopard skin and a Union Jack hat. I hired five dugouts and fifty bearers from him, then set off upriver, planning to eat by the hunt.

  The shooting was very good and quite varied back then. Partridge, pheasant, geese, guinea fowl, even wild turkey. The land abounded i
n game, from the stately eland to the tiny oribi. The first buck I bagged was a big black lechwe: it stared right into the barrel of my heavy-bullet Martini rifle. Next was an indigenous species of antelope that Dr Livingstone had dubbed the ‘puku’: a shy, crepuscular creature, bigger than the impala, similarly golden but without the telltale toilet stripes, and with a frowsy look to its fur. A native told me the name came from a local word for ‘ghost’: Livingstone had sighted it in dry season, slipping in and out of the high yellow grass of the veldt. Makes for a good steak.

  For a year, I journeyed in a go-as-you-please sort of style with my petty fleet of dugouts. There were several obstacles between me and the coast. For one, the tributaries of the Zambesi simply teemed with crocs and hippos. For another, it was a right task just getting my boys to do their job. They were superstitious of my whistling – which I did merely because I had nobody to talk to. And they wouldn’t pass certain spots without landing to make offerings to the dead and watch the witch doctor ‘do his stuff’, with animal tails and charms around his neck, bones and bangles around wrists and ankles. He was a fearsome sight – or thought he was. The Barotse were in fact a powerful nation, with many conquered tribes paying tribute. Penalties for missed payments were extracted in gruesome fashion: I saw natives with ears hanging by the cartilage, with noses slitted or removed entirely. This vengeful spirit erupted more and more among my bearers, too.

  We had reached as far as Sesheke when a hippo upset a dugout and lost us some time. I suggested we get a move on to navigate the rapids before dark. ‘Nothing doing!’ the boys pretty much said. ‘We’ll see about that,’ I replied and showed my .450 Webley, driving my personal crew one by one at gunpoint into a boat. I told the rest that if they didn’t follow, they’d have to fend for themselves: ‘No more skoff for you!’ Off I went with my hostages and made camp at the foot of the rapids. When the others pitched up at sundown, I made them kneel and rub their foreheads in the dust and give the royal salute. That finished the ‘indaba’. I had got them in the native’s weakest spot – the belly!