The Old Drift Page 17

  Her lips tightened like a drawstring. This was no Lorna. No one had applauded him for marrying this white woman. Sir Stewart had banished them. Ronald’s mother, under the sway of Lenshina’s cult, had refused to meet his ‘half-caste’ child. If they were his children – what had Agnes been up to here in Lusaka while he was away? She certainly never guessed what he had been up to in Edinburgh. Ronald didn’t know when she had met this Lionel fellow, or how far their little friendship went. He pulled the letter from his pocket and unfolded it.

  ‘“Dearest Eggnest,”’ he began, then looked up. ‘Egg. Nest?’

  She nodded, blushes poxing her neck. He went on, trying not to smile at her discomfort.

  ‘“Dearest Eggnest. First, I want to thank you. Your presence has meant so much to us. Sadly, we have decided that it would be best if you no longer attended our meetings.”’

  She inhaled sharply. Her red splotches seemed to bulge like eyes, glaring at him.

  ‘“Your material contributions have been invaluable. You may keep the books but please forward the tape recordings of the meetings – discretion is advisable, given the situation…”’

  * * *

  When Agnes was ousted from The Reds, she took to her bed. She ate honeytoast and tea and told tales to her belly. Once upon a time in a faraway land, there was a princess…Grace was the one who washed and dressed and fed little Carol, walked her to and from school. Between these tasks, Grace placed flannels on Agnes’s forehead and rubbed her ankles while they listened to the radio.

  News of the mounting campus demonstrations came daily, announcers roundly denouncing The Reds’ protests against the UNZA administration and then against Kaunda. Three hundred students have blocked Great East Road! Hooligans! Is this what decent citizens pay student bursaries for? Today, the Ministry of Home Affairs arrested six foreign lecturers, including Lionel Heath. Serves them right for interfering in Zambian business!

  Campus was shut for weeks. Ronald worked from home, grumbling about the inconvenience to his research. Agnes was unsympathetic. She still fantasised about being a member of The Reds. She would have visited Lionel in prison, secreted his letters out to publish in the Times of Zambia. She would have held hands with students as they marched down Great East Road. Like Mama Chikamoneka, she would have bared her swollen breasts and stomach, shaming the uniformed men making arrests.

  One day in February of 1976, Grace was kneeling on the floor, rubbing Agnes’s ankles, when the radio remarked, almost in passing: ‘Today, it has been confirmed that the UNZA lecturer Dr Lionel Heath, his wife, and his two daughters have been deported back to the United Kingdom.’

  Agnes gasped.

  ‘Madamu?’ Grace asked worriedly and dropped Agnes’s ankle.

  For Ronald to divide Agnes from The Reds, from her only friends, was one thing. Even Lionel going to jail could be countenanced – forcing arrests was after all a standard practice in civil-disobedience campaigns. But to get the man ousted from the country? Ronald had betrayed her and trapped her at once. She could not confess to her hurt without confessing to her feelings.

  ‘Ba Aganess?’

  ‘It’s alright, I’m alright, Grace.’

  He had tied her hands but she would take her revenge where she could.

  ‘I thought I hurt you doing this thing.’ Grace resumed wringing Agnes’s ankle.

  ‘No,’ said Agnes firmly, hand splayed over her belly. ‘It was just little Lionel kicking.’

  First there’s the twinge, the harbinger of ache. You shiver, then suddenly feel faint. You’re hot, then cold, then both at once – sweating yet parched, bone-dry yet soaked, like water from a twice-smitten rock. Paroxysm is the technical term for what follows next: the grip and release of the ague. You grow shaky and fevered, your retinas whiten, delirium sets in with a vengeance.

  You find yourself drowning alone in a sea. You grasp a boulder to stay above water. Three men in white robes say you cannot cross here, but then God tells the angels to save you. They cast a rope out and you pull yourself over to the other side of the sea. You enter a city, a splendid musumba, where the angels check the Book for your name. When they do not find it, they teach you new hymns, give you passports to heaven, send you back to spread the word to the people. You awaken from death with two Books in your hands – one black, one white; one sky, one ground – both aflame with the spirit of God.

  You gather the people like a flock of wild birds, they come to you 1,000 in a week. You give them new names, touch their foreheads with water, build a church beyond churches: the Lumpa. Your foes steal your Books and demean your wise teachings, but you’re a prophet, a queen. Regina! They send the White Fathers to call you the devil, to mock little Alice in Wonderland. They send chiefs and kapasus to demand your taxes. You say: ‘Why must we render to Caesar?’ They send Kaunda’s men to denounce you as savage. They say: ‘Drown the Lumpa forever.’

  You light the match and set it to thatch. You repel all invaders, the white and the black. You defend your churches with bow and axe – and spirit, of course, which streams in your veins, the burning white gold of the sun. Guns rise to the sky or merely shoot water, their bullets can no longer pierce you! But only your body is safe. Your people lie around you, scattered in heaps, mowed down by the hundred, riddled with holes, draining blood.

  We drained yours first, only a little, but enough to cause cerebral malaria. Oh Alice Lenshina! Our own Joan of Arc! So many dead at the birth of this nation and all from a single, stray bite!

  Matha

  1953

  For as long as she could remember, Matha Mwamba’s life had been entwined with Edward Mukuka Nkoloso’s, like the serpent that curls around the staff in the symbol for medicine. They came from the same Bemba village, Luwingu, in the north of Northern Rhodesia. Matha first met Nkoloso when she was still a child. At the time, her father was teaching farming at Lukashya Trades Institute in Kasama and her mother worked as a cleaner at a nearby Catholic mission. Matha’s older brother, Mulenga, attended the lower school at the mission, but he was in danger of failing. Everyone knew that Mulenga had blundered too long against his mother’s pelvic bone during labour and come out sweet and smiley and a bit vague. But Mr Mwamba was desperate for the boy to improve. Education was paramount for black people.

  Edward Mukuka Nkoloso had just returned home after fighting abroad for the British in the Second World War, and he was teaching at Lukashya Trades too – maths, English, Latin. But bucking colonial restrictions against native-led schools, Nkoloso had decided to form his own Roadside Academy, as he called it, to teach science. Nkoloso sounded like someone who had seen the future so Mr Mwamba decided to send his son to the Roadside Academy. His teaching brought in enough to pay for extra lessons, especially since his wife, a fiery Tonga woman named Bernadetta, insisted on keeping her job at Lwena Mission.

  Bernadetta had spent most of her girlhood caring for her father, who hadn’t been right in the head ever since he had been struck down by a white settler when he was a boy. After her father died, she moved as far away from Siavonga as possible, to Northern Province, and before marrying Mr Mwamba, she had acquired a taste for work. She had come to believe that a job was not just a right but a necessity, like water or shelter or the touch of another. But with both Mwambas working and Mulenga at school and lessons, there was no one at home to watch the girls. Matha and Nkuka could not go to school – they were too young and female, besides – and they had just reached that ungovernable age: too heavy to be papu’d on Bernadetta’s back as she worked but too small to watch each other. So, when the time came for her son’s first lessons at the Roadside Academy, Bernadetta brought her daughters along as well.

  * * *

  Nkoloso raised his army helmet and frowned down at the three Mwambas, aged ten, six, and five. Mulenga’s attention was already wandering, wriggling like a litter of puppies from his grasp. Nkuka stood stock-still, gaze
locked on her dusty feet. Matha, the youngest, looked up at him with unscratched eyes – virginal white and deep brown, like the coconuts he had first cracked open in Mombasa on his way to the front in Burma. This was two more students than he’d expected. ‘They’ll be quiet,’ their mother had promised him in a tone that also commanded her daughters, then run off before he could protest.

  No other students had shown up to the Roadside Academy, which was squeaky new, so Nkoloso led the three children to a table under a muombo tree outside his home. He sat Mulenga on a stool beside him and put the girls on a log on the other side of the table. Nkoloso took off his helmet and opened the mammoth King James Bible he had set on the table.

  ‘The Bible has everything,’ Nkoloso explained to Mulenga. ‘This is how the White Fathers taught me. Latin, theology, science.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘Fig trees! Fishes! Even mathematicals, although they are not always exact. Let us see how well you can read.’

  But Mulenga was staring not at the book but at a spider skittering up the muombo tree beside them. Nkoloso pincered the top of the boy’s skull, turning it so his eyes fell on the page. ‘Genesis 1:1. In the beginning…’

  Each lesson began this way, with Nkoloso steadfastly coaxing Mulenga to read. Eventually, Nkoloso would grow bored with the boy’s stilted recitations and start explaining forms of logic to him instead. If you can see the tree, you can go to the tree. Here to there. If this, then that, and the same with the other. Soon, the lesson had become an exercise less in literacy than in analogy. Every parable, every event of Christ’s brief life, was an occasion for an exegesis of Nkoloso’s. Reading, writing, ‘rithmetic and a touch of revolution.

  The Lord called Lazarus from his grave and raised him from the dead.

  ‘Just so,’ said Nkoloso, ‘white settlers dug up our graves to make way for the line of rail!’

  Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?

  ‘The colonialists set the hut tax in 1901 and sent our men to the mines to pay it, leaving their poor wives to weep many tears like the fugitives from Poland during the war.’

  The Lord took five loaves and blessed and broke them to fill the bellies of five thousand.

  ‘How many loaves would Christ have used to feed starving Africans in the famine of 1916?’

  The Lord went unto his disciples, walking upon the sea.

  ‘You know,’ Nkoloso smiled at the sky, ‘on my first aeroplane flight, from Bombay to Burma, I asked the pilot to stop so I could step out on the clouds. He refused, the monkey!’

  Christ on the cross had asked his Father, Why hast thou forsaken me?

  ‘“Is that you, Edward?” That is what my father cried when we ran into each other by chance in Mombasa. He was already quartermaster on tour of duty with the Northern Rhodesian Regiment,’ Nkoloso mused sadly. ‘He didn’t know I had also been conscripted.’

  As their mother had promised, the Mwamba girls were quiet during these lessons, though in different ways. Nkuka gazed ahead unseeing, rigid and quivering as a stalked hare. Matha seemed awestruck too, but she was by nature a laughing girl, squirmy in her seat. At the end of the hour, she was often kneeling on the log, leaning over the table, her neck stretched forward like a turtle. Sometimes, as Nkoloso guided her brother through the reading of a sentence, the student’s drone lagging behind the teacher’s booming recitation, Matha would issue a squeak from her hover above them. Nkoloso would look up from the Bible, fixing her fiercely until she tumbled back onto her bum, covering her giggling mouth with her hand, coconut eyes wide.

  Nkoloso would smile at her – he was gentle, in truth – and quote 1 Timothy 2:11.

  ‘Let the woman learn in silence,’ he’d say, patting the mukule plaits furrowing her hair.

  Then he would turn back to Mulenga, but the boy was always already staring at a cloud or a leaf or his hand – anything other than the page in front of him.

  After months of these futile lessons, Nkoloso lost his patience. The boy seemed built of indifference, impervious to knowledge or interest of any kind. Nkoloso decided to set a trap for him. They were in the middle of reading the story of the fig tree that Christ curses to barrenness.

  ‘Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered,’ Nkoloso read aloud.

  ‘…the seedy he angered…’ Mulenga echoed in his muddled English.

  ‘And when he saw a fig tree in the way,’ Nkoloso continued, ‘he came to it, and found nothing thereon but leaves only.’ He was peering at Mulenga as the boy mumbled along. ‘And said unto it,’ Nkoloso laid his trap: ‘Let every fruit grow on thee henceforward forever.’

  Poor Mulenga fell right into it. ‘…let heavily flute glow…’ the boy began.

  Nkoloso was about to correct him – ‘It says no fruit, not every fruit!’ – when he heard a low chuckle. Matha was hanging over the Bible, giggling.

  ‘And what is so funny, Miss Matha?’ Nkoloso frowned.

  At this, Nkuka’s eyes widened and she kicked her sister under the table. Matha stopped laughing with a wince, but she couldn’t stop smiling.

  ‘You!’ Nkoloso stuck his finger in her face. ‘You have rememorised this passage?’

  Matha slowly shook her head.

  ‘Ah-ah, so what is it, little girl? You think you can read?’

  Matha slowly nodded her head.

  ‘Okay, you must show us then!’ Nkoloso turned the Bible around so it was facing the two girls. He pointed at the passage he had just intentionally distorted. Matha looked down at the page, then up at him.

  ‘No – you said you can read it. So read!’

  Matha glanced at her sister, who shook her head fretfully, then at her brother, who shrugged languidly. Matha knelt up onto the log. With effort, she turned the heavy Bible around so that it was once again facing Nkoloso. He sucked his teeth, about to launch into a lecture on not wasting time, when he heard a high, soft sound he had never heard before. It was Matha’s voice.

  ‘…fig tree with-hard away. And when the dee, dees-seep,’ she faltered, then pushed through, ‘dee sigh polls saw it, they maravelled, saying, How soon is the fig tree with-hard away!’

  Her finger was on the page, scanning from her right to her left above the words. This was how the book had been oriented for months, so this was how Matha had learned to read. Upside down.

  ‘Speak up, child!’ said Nkoloso, rising to his feet with astonishment.

  ‘Be thou leemoved, and be thou cast into the sea. It shall be done,’ little Matha piped, her voice reedy and confident, her finger inching slowly up the page. When she reached the top of the page – ‘whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall’ – she stopped and looked up at Nkoloso expectantly. Man and girl gazed at each other across the table, their lines of sight cutting slantwise through the air.

  ‘But you are only five,’ Nkoloso breathed. ‘But you are a miracle!’

  Matha giggled and covered her mouth with her hand.

  When the Mwamba children arrived for lessons the next day, the two stools were placed next to the log on one side of the table so they could all face the Bible together. When Mulenga complained about this unprecedented inclusion of the females – ‘they are feebo-minded,’ he bluntly echoed their father – Nkoloso gathered them close and told them a story.

  As a mission-educated boy, Edward Mukuka Nkoloso had wanted to join the priesthood. But he had been chosen instead for that grand disaster, the war. The war had been a giant mirror: you saw white men die across from you, as equals. ‘Yes, we were all willing to die! Death or victory, but victory is sure!’ Nkoloso had realised that death is a purifying fire, like chitemene – no matter the height of the crops, no matter how green or brown the leaves, the fire razes them all to the same level black.

  ‘Equality!’ he cried. ‘You see? Only from level ground can you grow new crops. The
war taught me that all men are equal before death, black and white. And yesterday,’ he shrugged, ‘Miss Matha showed me that this equality thing probably includes the females, too.’

  * * *

  Nkoloso tutored the three Mwamba children at his Roadside Academy for a year. Then in 1954, he was transferred from Lukashya Trades to a school in the Copperbelt. When Nkoloso left Luwingu, Mulenga continued skating by at the mission school, but his sisters’ education lapsed entirely. Left without childcare for her girls, Bernadetta simply absorbed them into the orbit of her labour. They became her minor satellites at Lwena Mission, circling her with their little buckets of water, in which they wet rags to wipe the chalkboards and wash the windows.

  Nkuka seemed to take comfort in the orderliness of this work, as ready for rules as a soldier. But Matha was restive, her neck craning as she cleaned, her eyes peering over the boys’ shoulders at their exercises, her ears almost sprouting from her head as she strained to catch the lessons echoing from the mission walls. Bernadetta noted this behaviour in her youngest with frustration. She often thought of what Nkoloso had told her before he left the village.

  ‘Matha is very bright. You must nurture that brain! Do not let it rot.’

  Her husband had no patience for this sentiment: ‘There is no use in educating females!’ he said. ‘Everyone knows that.’

  But looking over the rows of mission boys every day, those dullards with their shaved skulls, their scalps marbled with ringworm, Bernadetta felt choked with helplessness. She decided to take things into her own hands.

  * * *

  One morning, Matha woke to the chill of a blade on the back of her neck. She flinched.

  ‘Stay still,’ her mother whispered.

  Matha obeyed. Her brother and sister were still asleep in a heaving tangle beside her. Their father was snoring on a mat by the door. It was dawn. The sunlight coming through the thatched roof was reddish, like when Matha’s fingers covered her eyes to count for hide-and-seek. Wood pigeons coolly greeted each other outside. Lying on her side on the packed mud floor, her mother’s hand pinning her down, Matha listened to the birds and to the scrape of the knife rising up the back of her skull, shaving the hair from her head.