The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘Might I have a cigarette with you?’ Lionel asked them. ‘I am hiding from my wife.’

  So he was married too. Agnes felt more relieved than disappointed.

  ‘But naturally!’ Hans said. ‘Have your seat!’

  Lionel sat next to Agnes, lit a cigarette and handed her his pack of Pall Malls.

  ‘Trying to cut down,’ Agnes demurred, patting her belly. Ronald had been appointed dean of engineering at UNZA. He had celebrated by promptly getting her pregnant again.

  Greta squealed into Agnes’s ear: ‘Another baby? Oh, it is so good! It is a boy this time?’

  While Hans asked Lionel what he did for work, Greta dove into a covetous conversation with Agnes about how far along she was (four months) and whether her ‘condition’ would be passed down (Agnes was finding Greta less tolerable by the minute) and why ‘the blacks’ here insisted on using cloth nappies instead of disposables. Agnes tried to engage in good faith but the topic was too dull, Greta’s English too blunt (‘how they getting the shit off?’). Agnes longed to hear more of Lionel’s rumbling voice. She caught snatches of his work history – a position at Leeds, a stint in Tanzania – and when he said he was teaching at the University of Zambia, she turned to him, interrupting Greta mid-sentence.

  ‘UNZA? That’s where my Ronald works! I mean, my husband. He’s in engineering.’

  ‘Ah. Well, I’m in humanities and social science. We’re unlikely to run into each other.’

  ‘You belief in these different classes?’ Hans butted in.

  ‘Dear Hans, class is everywhere,’ said Lionel. ‘Look around. We’re at a tennis club.’

  Hans gave a forced laugh but pressed his point. ‘I refer to classes of study. You belief…’

  Greta resumed chattering about babies and bums and rashes and creams. Agnes sank back in her chair with a wan smile. She had almost given up when Lionel leaned in and whispered in her ear.

  ‘It’s all a bit Evelyn Waugh in Africa, isn’t it?’

  Agnes giggled. She had never read Waugh but she knew what he meant about the Etonian atmosphere – wealthy whites sipping Pimm’s Cups and G&Ts, complaining about the sun and the service. ‘There isn’t much else to do, though, is there?’

  ‘Well, actually. I have a sort of…social club going at the university,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’d like to join us? With your husband, of course.’

  * * *

  Ronald claimed he was far too busy in his new deanship to join some trivial little club. Agnes was too embarrassed to bring Grace – both by the girl’s illiteracy and her own dependency on her. So, the following Friday, Agnes put on one of the two dresses she could still fit and a cloche hat and asked the driver to take her to campus alone. She didn’t often come to UNZA but she knew the route well. She could tell when they were on Lubumbashi Road (potholes, the crêpey rustle of bougainvillea); when they were passing through the back gate (a pause, a creak as the barricade rose); and when they reached the Goma Lakes (eucalyptus trees that sounded like the sea and smelled like Shiwa Ng’andu).

  Agnes got out with her cane, wandered over to a group of chatting students and asked if someone might guide her to the right classroom. A young woman led her through what seemed like a concrete maze: up and down sets of stairs, along open walkways, through dank corridors. Finally they arrived. Agnes thanked the student and stepped tentatively into the classroom, removing her hat. She heard chairs scraping and papers rustling and whispering giggles.

  ‘Welcome!’ Lionel boomed warmly from the front of the room. ‘We’re just starting.’

  Agnes smiled and felt for the nearest chair, sliding her cane under it as she sat. She was handed a solid rectangle – an unusually small book. She slid a finger inside its pages, which were as thin as onion skin. Was this a Bible study group of all things?

  ‘Let’s begin with where we left off,’ said Lionel. ‘Mao’s concept of contradiction.’

  A voice broke in. ‘We must first go back to the idea of the dialectic, Prof.’

  ‘Ah, yes, we ended in the middle, or should I say the muddle, of the dialectic last week, didn’t we? This is in fact the nature of the dialectic, always in motion, surging forward and racing back, like the sea.’

  Agnes perked up, thinking of the sound of the eucalyptus trees.

  ‘But Prof!’ a woman’s voice called out this time. ‘We do not know about the sea here in Zambia! We are landlocked. You must kindly deploy another metaphor for us please thank you.’ A laugh.

  ‘You’re right, Stella. Awfully Eurocentric of me. Let’s use a mathematical language – it’s more universal. So, if we have a plus and a minus. Thesis, antithesis, what does it…’

  Agnes heard the hollow scratch of chalk on a shuddery chalkboard. She sank back in her chair. The classroom was frightfully cold. Her stockings felt wet and dry at once. Jolly good Ronald hadn’t come. To think, Lionel’s club was some kind of communist collective! She couldn’t sneak out unnoticed now, and she couldn’t find her way back alone to the Goma Lakes where the driver was parked. Agnes sat in a misery of itch and sweat, waiting for the meeting to end.

  After a few minutes, she was handed a sheet of paper. It was soft and slippery – a photostat.

  ‘…transcript of the conversation,’ Lionel was saying. ‘Let’s read it aloud. I shall be Mao. Who wants to be Kaunda?’ A hand must have gone up. ‘Thanks. Now remember, this is in translation. Mao begins: “We hope that the Third World will unite. The Third World has a large population!”’

  ‘That’s right,’ said a wheezy male voice, ventriloquising Kaunda. The voice sounded a bit old for a student, and familiar somehow. They went on, alternating the lines of dialogue.

  ‘Mao: Who belongs to the First World?’

  ‘Kaunda: I think it ought to be the world of exploiters and imperialists.’

  ‘Mao: And the Second World?’

  ‘Kaunda: Those who have become revisionists.’

  ‘Mao: I hold that the US and the Soviet Union belong to the First World. The middle elements such as Japan, Europe, Australia and Canada, belong to the Second World. We are the Third World.’

  ‘Kaunda: I agree with your analysis, Mr Chairman.’

  ‘Let’s pause here,’ said Lionel, ‘and discuss the implications of this dialogue for Africa.’

  ‘Ah, Prof,’ came a voice from the corner, ‘it is a simplification to knit us together like that. One Zambia, One Nation? Maybe. But One Africa? One Third World? I don’t know.’

  ‘And now,’ a woman’s voice chimed in, ‘Kaunda has even instituted a one-party state. Is that true socialism? Or is it just fascism? He is becoming just another African dictator!’

  An exclamation from the back; a clash of disagreement; a harmony of voices arguing the same thing in different words; a racket of shouts and laughter. As the conversation crescendoed, Agnes thought again about the sea and about coincidence – or had Lionel said contradiction? – wondering how likely it was for two things to meet one another in the sea, given the fact of waves. Before she knew it, the meeting was over. Agnes stood, thrilling with proximate knowledge as the other members of the group shuffled out of the room, chatting.

  ‘I did not expect to find you here,’ said the wheezy voice that had play-acted Kaunda.

  ‘Yes, hello,’ she frowned, reaching out to shake hands. ‘Small world, I suppose.’

  ‘Were you not listening?’ the man laughed. ‘The Third World is a big world!’

  ‘Indeed.’ Lionel joined them. ‘The Third World is the majority of our world.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Chairman. Your analysis is very pertinent and correct,’ the man said, exaggerating Kaunda’s sycophancy and that’s when Agnes realised who it was: Ronald’s friend, Phil, from that first house party over a decade ago.

  ‘I must admit, it’s all a bit beyond me,’ she said feebly. ‘The Third World – it sounds li
ke something out of Tolkien.’

  ‘A token?’ asked Lionel.

  ‘No, no, Tol-keen. He wrote—’

  ‘Dear sweet Eggnest,’ Lionel said, putting his hand on her forearm. ‘Have you heard of this brilliant new invention? The British came up with it a few centuries ago. It’s called irony.’

  ‘The British?!’ Phil protested. ‘Irony is a French invention!’

  ‘Hrm, second-rate irony perhaps,’ said Lionel.

  ‘Second World irony, you mean?’ said Agnes.

  There was a pause. Then they all laughed, Lionel loudest of all, and her heart was a sun in her chest.

  * * *

  After that first meeting, Lionel rarely spoke to Agnes. She lingered after each session, like a fool, but he was always stuck talking to Phil or to a student, untangling some knot in whatever web the group had been spinning for the hour, some analysis of Hegel, or was it Engels? It really was beyond her. Most of it anyway. She could follow the history: the ravages of colonialism, the hut tax, the displacement of the Tonga during the building of Kariba Dam. And she quite liked Zambian Humanism, Kaunda’s version of socialism – his idea that ‘a person becomes a person through the people’. It was a philosophy, which had always seemed to her more supple and sophisticated than a politics.

  During her sixth meeting, in a fit of excitement, Agnes crowned herself secretary. Ronald had bought her an expensive tape recorder so she could leave instructions for the workers, most of whom could not read. She offered to bring it to campus to keep track of what was said. Lionel thanked her profusely. Recordings of these meetings would be very helpful, he said.

  Agnes sometimes played them back to herself at home, pressing her ear to the speaker as she lay in bed or gave Carol a bath. She adored the ooh sound of the African socialist concepts from Tanzania and Kenya – uhuru and ujamaa and ubuntu, words for freedom and family and humanity. She believed in all those things, too. It was so obvious that they were true and good, especially when conveyed by Lionel’s rich voice and when applied to actual oppression of actual people, the Bantu. Agnes quizzed Grace about her cultural beliefs. What was it like to be Bantu? To come from an ancient tribe so naturally inclined to socialism that its name simply meant ‘people’.

  ‘Ah, you must ask the bwana,’ Grace would stutter vaguely, ‘I do not know such things.’

  But Agnes never talked to her husband about meetings or radical ideas or anything any more, really. Ronald the dean had retreated completely – self-serious, self-important, and far, far away.

  * * *

  A couple of months after Agnes joined, Lionel’s Marxist club – they called themselves The Reds – put aside abstract questions of ideology and turned to what was literally in front of them: the university. What, in short, could be done? There was the perennial question of bursaries. There was a student housing shortage. And, though it seemed to Agnes a mundane question, there was the curriculum, which was Eurocentric to a fault. There weren’t many African fiction writers to choose from, but there was a new line of books – the Hyena Man series? – that everyone seemed to know about. The Reds started there and put together a new core sequence that would be more relevant to black Africans: Lenin, Marx, Memmi, Fanon.

  The trouble began when a group of lecturers calling themselves the Zambian Caucus caught wind of this new syllabus and wrote a letter of complaint to the administration. Compared to lecturers from America and Europe, the caucus said, Zambian lecturers were second-class citizens: they received a lower salary, fewer opportunities, and had no say in big decisions. Case in point? The Reds’ curriculum, which had been written by foreigners ‘playing politics’ on campus.

  The Reds were furious. What foreigners?!

  ‘Are we not all Zambians in this room?’ someone said at the start of the next meeting.

  ‘Not all of us,’ Lionel said softly.

  Agnes touched her cheek, fondling a pregnancy pimple. It felt as if everyone was staring at her, either because she was white or because she was married to a dean.

  ‘That is besides the point,’ a young woman shouted. ‘Are we not trying to free ourselves from imperialist, colonialist frames of thinking like “foreign” and “national” in the first place?’

  The Reds hummed in agreement. The question now was how to fight back against the Zambian Caucus’s letter of complaint. Another, bolder syllabus? A counterletter?

  ‘We can send letters,’ Phil’s wheezy voice came from the corner. ‘But will they kindle a fire? Mwebantu. Let us show that we are not just a paper revolution. We are not just stooges!’

  Stronger suggestions began to swirl in the room. Boycott classes! Denounce Kaunda! Block Great East Road! Agnes tried to focus, but her cheeks felt fiery and her fingers slipped on the tape recorder. As soon as the meeting was over, she stood up and walked towards the front of the classroom to speak to Lionel. But he was already engaged in a fierce whispering argument.

  ‘There are spies in these meetings!’ Phil was seething. ‘Eyes-eyes-eyes all over.’

  Agnes stopped.

  ‘The ones who you think are not watching?’

  Agnes turned.

  ‘Those ones are the most dangerous.’

  Agnes walked out.

  She knew how to find her own way to the Goma Lakes by now. She walked slowly, pensively tapping her cane. The irony of it! The idea that she was a spy, some kind of ‘foreign agent’. Was she not Zambian? Had she not been bestowed that honour on Z Day? A rain shower began as she reached the car park outside the student bar. The driver jumped out to help her into the car, fussing with an umbrella. Africans and their fear of water! In protest, Agnes rolled the window down a quarter and rested her head against it, letting the cool rain spray her hot scalp.

  At home, she went straight to her bedroom, cracked the window and lay on the bed beneath it. She wanted just that much rain, enough to nourish her self-pity, not quite enough to drown it. When he got home from work, Ronald found her there, her cheek sprinkled with water.

  ‘What happened?’ He stroked the damp hair from her face. ‘How was your club?’

  She frowned. Ronald never asked about her meetings. ‘Did you know your friend Phil is in The Reds?’

  ‘Philemon? Of course,’ he laughed, so knowingly she felt slapped. ‘Why?’

  ‘No reason,’ she mumbled. Was Ronald a member of the Zambian Caucus? Had he got his friend to force her out? ‘I’m not going back anyway. I’m exhausted.’ She rolled onto her back.

  ‘Mmm,’ he rumbled with pleasure as he rubbed her protuberant stomach. ‘Our son is making you bulge.’

  She shooed him off. ‘You don’t know that it’s a boy this time.’

  ‘Yes, in fact, I do know,’ he said, tipping his head onto her thigh. ‘My mother even predicted. “Your second child must be a boy,” she said.’

  This sounded to Agnes more like a command than a prediction, but of course she hadn’t been there – she had never met Ronald’s mother. Rather than open that old wound, she ventured a possible name for the baby, if it did turn out to be a boy.

  ‘Don’t you think it sounds rather regal?’

  ‘Regal?’ He rose up, sputtering with disbelief. ‘My child will have an African name!’

  ‘Carol doesn’t,’ she scoffed. ‘You don’t even have an African name, Ronald!’

  ‘I do!’ he shouted. ‘It has just been rubbed out. That will not happen to my children!’

  She heard the door click shut behind him.

  * * *

  Sitting in his study the next day, Ronald pressed play on Agnes’s tape recorder. The voice that came from the speakers was as polished as the wood of his desk.

  ‘…no surprise the Labour Party sponsored Kaunda and published his calls for freedom…’

  Ronald shook his head. Of course, Lionel Heath would be blind to Kaunda’s opportunism.

&nb
sp; ‘…arrested for possession of communist materials that, like Mao, drew parallels between capitalist and imperialist oppression. This is the bedrock for revolutionary thinking in Africa…’

  Ronald let out a sound of disgust and pressed stop. Why did white men think they knew better than the black people they presumed to save? Ronald had once had faith in Great Britain’s dignity and even its superiority – Shiwa had cultivated it in him, with its traditions and its airs and Sir Stewart’s young delicate bride, Lorna. Even marrying Agnes had seemed like progress, as if her pale legs were pillars to climb. But during his time in the UK, Ronald had seen other pale legs, dozens of them, a forest of them stretching out before him in those years in Edinburgh.

  Like any red-blooded man away from his wife, Ronald had sought out women that he could pay to touch him. He often thought of one in particular, with black hair, green eyes and thick creamy thighs. He remembered looking down and seeing her lips stretched over his penis, her head bobbing like a piston. She had gagged a little and he had almost stopped. But then he remembered that he had already paid her, so he closed his eyes and finished anyway. And that was when he had finally understood. White women were just women.

  The study door opened and in strode his wife, just another woman, with her pregnant belly.

  ‘Have you seen my tape recorder?’ she asked querulously.

  Ronald glanced at it on his desk. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’

  ‘I’m about to go to my meeting. I simply cannot find it and neither can Grace.’

  He peered around her, but the servant girl with that permanent frown hooked into her face was not with Agnes. ‘I thought you had given up on your little communist meetings.’

  ‘No,’ said Agnes sniffily. ‘I’ve decided to persist. They need me.’

  He was quiet a moment. ‘A letter came for you yesterday,’ he said. ‘Shall I read it to you?’