The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  Two hours later, she was sitting in the back of a classroom at Lwena Mission. How different it looked from behind a desk! Instead of hunting the corners for rubbish and ants, or coralling the soapsuds you were splashing across a floor, you could just sit and look around: at the big blackboard awaiting its daily scripture, at the white walls carving the world into wedges of shadow and light. Matha blinked, tugging at the itchy neck of her brother’s old school uniform. She forgot her discomfort as soon as the teacher came in and began shouting lessons at the students, who shouted right back. Matha soon grasped the pattern of call-and-response and added her voice to the throng. How pleasing to count in counterpoint! What a happy sound a shout could be!

  This was nothing like the shouting between her parents. Those fights usually began as a back-and-forth, too, but they soon overlapped and eventually crowded into a chaos of mutual interruption. These arguments sent Nkuka into a shivery ball, hands over her ears, and Mulenga into a rigid knot, his skinny arms around his bony knees. Matha alone would sit cross-legged on her mat, listening, her head tilting to and fro like a bell as she tried to follow along. Her parents argued about the size of women’s brains. They quarrelled about whether Bernadetta had inherited her father’s feeble-mindedness and passed it on to Mulenga. They bickered about whether witch doctors were any more rational than priests and whether the European census-takers were really blood-sucking wamunyama and whether a chief had more power than a queen.

  Their most recent debate was about the Federation. The white settlers had unilaterally decided to combine Northern Rhodesia, where the Mwambas lived, with Rhodesia to the south and Nyasaland to the east. The black nationalists – educated men, veterans and radicalised miners – had vehemently protested against this. Rhodesia was a colony, Northern Rhodesia a protectorate: this merger would drag the country into greater subjugation. The African National Congress had demanded that the Federation be dissolved, that the colour bar be struck down, and that the British grant independence to Northern Rhodesia. Mr Mwamba was on the side of the Federation, believing the British knew best; Bernadetta was on the side of the Congress. ‘Freedom!’ she seethed with her bitterbright eyes. Matha pictured Federation and Congress as forces of nature: an unmovable mountain and an unstoppable flood pitched against each other.

  But more and more, her parents’ arguments came down to a single, very human, figure of contention:

  ‘You know Ba Nkoloso has been fighting our cause in the Copperbelt,’ Bernadetta would say.

  ‘That man is very foolish! He is biting the hand that feeds him, going against the British!’

  ‘They are the ones who swallowed his hand! After he fought their war!’

  Matha thrilled with the very mention of his name. Ba Nkoloso had been her first teacher, and Matha loved learning so much that she thought learning was love. As the years passed, she hoarded each shiny shred of information that blew through Luwingu about him. Some said he was selling medicine and toiletries to miners in the Copperbelt, that he had a job with Lever Brothers. Others said that this was just a ruse. Nkoloso was organising strikes among the miners and had led his new school on a march to the district commissioner’s office to protest the digging up of African graves for European settlements. ‘That man, he cannot resist resistance!’ they said.

  * * *

  For three years, Matha attended the Lwena Mission School in secret – eventually, an open secret among the students. When she turned eight, her dimples deepening by the day, a group of boys dragged her behind the geyser and yanked down her shorts to confirm their suspicions. They pointed and laughed. Matha stared at them, unfazed, legs straddled wide to keep the shorts from falling off. Cowed by the lack of shame in her eyes, the boys resorted to extortion.

  ‘Listen here, Matthew,’ one said, ‘we will keep your secret from Father Superior Deslauries and the teachers. But you must give us the answers to the maths exercises.’

  Matha handed them over without rancour. She learned to temper herself in class: she never spoke up, never raised her hand to go to the board. She even inserted a few errors into her work, which only proved her cleverness – it’s not so easy to be believably wrong. She sat in the back of the classroom, absorbing lessons and rumours, a quiet unsmiling repository.

  Then one day, Matha sat up in her chair. The two boys in front of her were whispering.

  ‘Ba Nkoloso has been let out of Bwana Mkubwa. He is coming home…’

  It was 1957. It seemed that the colonial government was sending Nkoloso back to Luwingu because they could no longer invent reasons to keep him behind bars. He would be under a loose sort of house arrest. Over the next month, Matha overheard more rumblings. Ba Nkoloso was apparently still acting as a surreptitious Congress leader, holding secret meetings in beer halls, telling people not to pay their taxes or work for the whites. He had even instructed the villagers in Luwingu not to pay respects to their chief Shimumbi, who he claimed had ‘sold us to the Europeans!’

  This was considered a terrible betrayal – to turn black people against each other. But Matha believed her former tutor would do it, and she believed he was right to do so. She still remembered the righteous conversations he used to have with her mother when she came to fetch them from the Roadside Academy. About the war, imperialism, democracy, ‘one man, one vote’ – which he had amended to ‘one person, one vote’ after Matha had revealed that she knew how to read. She longed to see her old teacher again, to witness his fiery speeches.

  Then one day in August, the rumours about his resurrection in Luwingu took physical form and entered her classroom, like a proof. Ba Nkoloso’s sister Ernestina, a Sister at the mission, appeared in the doorway holding the hand of a boy.

  ‘This is mwana mwaume,’ said Sister Ernestina, ‘and he will be joining your class.’

  The boy scanned the classroom with a defiant smile. Matha recognised him immediately. She had only met him a handful of times during the Roadside Academy years. But this was definitely Ba Nkoloso’s son – you could see the resemblance in the bullish forehead. What was it like to have a father so struck with divine brilliance that people called him John the Baptist? Just then, the boy’s eyes caught hers and his smile quivered. Matha dropped her eyes to her desk.

  * * *

  ‘Rudiculous!’ said Mr Mwamba, stomping across the hut. ‘John the Baptist?!’

  Bernadetta sucked her teeth. She was squatting on the floor, serving a burnt supper to the children. ‘Ba Nkoloso is not the one saying it. It is the people. They are ready for a leader!’

  Mr Mwamba put his hands on his hips. ‘Is he not baptising them like he’s a priest?’

  Bernadetta chuckled. ‘Yes, he dunks them in the river, and…’

  Mr Mwamba bent over and put his finger over his wife’s lips. ‘Brasphemy!’

  Bernadetta spat his finger off indifferently, continuing to adorn the rim of the pot of nshima with little round ntoshis for the children to pluck off when they had cooled.

  ‘Yes, he splashes them in the Mupombwe river,’ she said. ‘Then he sends them off with a Congress card!’ She laughed, deep and low and knowing, as she handed Nkuka a tin cup.

  Later that night, Matha woke to the sound of that same laugh, but quieter. The door to the hut was open, the moonlight like spilled mukaka on the floor. She stood and waded through it as if in a dream, tugged outside into the yard by the sight of her own silvered feet. A breeze passed and she shivered and looked up. There was a woman’s body swinging before her.

  No. It was just an empty dress. The washing was still on the line overnight because, as Matha’s father often reminded them, Bernadetta was a terrible housewife. Matha heard her mother laugh again. Then she saw her, silhouetted on the other side of the hanging wash with another woman. Chitenge wrappers had turned their legs into tree trunks. Chitambalas peaked their heads with leafy ears. The wind blew against the wash. Their shadows wriggled and writhed.
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br />   ‘If they think that they can lead a donkey to a muddy pool and make it drink, they are doubly wrong!’ Matha’s mother was saying. ‘They simply cannot go on beating people. Arresting them, imprisoning them without trial!’ Her voice splintered with rage.

  ‘That is correct.’ Matha was surprised to hear a deep voice coming from the other woman. ‘Banning the African Congress cannot stop the people from rising!’

  The moonbright clothes flapped. Their shadows weaved and nodded.

  ‘Bernadetta,’ the booming voice went on, ‘are you ready to join this fight for freedom? Can you commit the way I have committed, even disguising myself to work underground?’

  ‘Yes, Ba Nkoloso.’

  Matha covered her gasp with her hand. But why was he dressed as a woman?

  ‘Only the beaten body makes its cries heard,’ said Ba Nkoloso. ‘It is time to stage our rebellion.’

  * * *

  There was trouble in Luwingu. Fires were burning. Riots were raging. The mission school felt the tremors too. Students sang protest songs at break, pretending they were just games. Mr Chiliboy taught Antigone in the upper school. News of Ba Nkoloso’s subversions flickered along the rows of Matha’s grade four classroom like chitemene, which was itself the spark of the trouble. Chief Shimumbi had sent orders to burn the crops for cultivation. Ba Nkoloso had told the people to refuse. Chief Shimumbi had sent his kapasus to set fire to them anyway and called for the insurrectionist to be arrested.

  The next morning, after Mass, the other students clustered around Nkoloso’s son in the open courtyard outside the chapel as he recounted what had happened next.

  ‘My father started walking towards the police and colonials and the kapasus. He said, “Then hangcuff me!”’ The boy stretched his arms forward in pantomime. ‘My father was ready! For the hangcuffing. But then,’ he paused, a natural dramatist, ‘the cloud came! The people said ati why should this man, my father,’ he put his palm to his heart with an earnest frown, ‘why should he be hangcuffed? And not the chief! Eh? And so then from there, it was rioting—’

  ‘Who was rioting?’ Matha stepped forward. Her mother had come home late last night, her voice and skin and clothing all dirty and scratched. Had she been in that crowd?

  ‘Ah-ah! It was all of the people,’ Nkoloso’s son scowled, displeased at the interruption.

  Matha nodded, tugging at her tight collar. The boy stared at her.

  ‘Who are you?’ he asked. ‘What is your name?’

  ‘Matthew,’ Matha said, lowering the pitch of her voice.

  The other boys glanced warily at each other. No one had let the new student in on Matha’s secret or their arrangement with her. He was too closely connected to the mission – his aunt, Sister Ernestina, was married to a teacher.

  ‘Matthew?’ he murmured suspiciously. ‘I know you from somewhere.’

  ‘Iwe, tell us what happened next,’ another boy spoke up. ‘Who threw the first stone?’

  Matha scurried away from the courtyard, searching the grounds for her mother. They did not usually speak at school for fear of discovery. But Matha desperately wanted to set eyes on her. Last night, Matha’s mother had come home and lain down on her mat without even washing the soot from her face. The usual back-and-forth between Matha’s parents had been fearfully one-sided. Her father had run out of breath trying to fill the silence. He had shouted and cajoled and threatened to beat the words out of his wife, raising his fist over her only to lower it slowly under her mute animal glare…

  There she was. Bernadetta Mwamba, disguised in her plain smock and bare feet. She was stooped over a patch of the garden with a girl, their hands busy in the soil. The girl picking vegetables looked up, sensing Matha’s eyes. It was Nkuka, also in a smock. She had just turned ten. She raised her hand in a slow, questioning wave. Matha was waving back when she heard a shout. The girls both turned. Another shout. In the distance, three Land Rovers rolled into view, lurching up and down as they traversed ditches. Matha’s mother stood up, her hands pulling Nkuka to her side and her eyes pulling Matha into her line of sight in one fluid movement. More shouts. Boys began to spill out of doorways, swarming towards the commotion. Matha ran back to the courtyard and met her mother and sister at the entrance. Matha’s mother gave her a look – I’m here – then shoved Matha by her bald head in amongst the other students.

  * * *

  The schoolchildren were instructed to sit on the courtyard floor. Teachers in short trousers strutted about like secretary birds, hovering over them, wagging their fingers. The female cleaners and cooks, dressed in smocks and chitenges, stood near their sons, forming familial clots here and there. The White Fathers, in long soutanes, floated calmly towards the newcomers: the three bazungu officers in white shorts and socks and helmets who had stepped out of the vehicles with a host of black kapasus. Had one of the teachers committed a crime? Were they rounding up Congress? Matha glanced over her shoulder at her mother.

  The other students sat calmly, as if they were at assembly or Mass or watching each other perform a drama by Shaka Spear, or was it Shaka Zulu? Matha could never keep the two straight. Stage left, Father Superior Deslauries was speaking to an officer, a tall muzungu with sick-looking skin. Centre stage, a short muzungu waved his hands and barked orders at the black cadets. In the backdrop, through one of the courtyard archways, you could see the kapasus chasing after a handful of men, zigzagging across the veldt.

  Father Superior Deslauries stepped forward, and as he did at every Mass, spread his hands to bless the students with silence. He gave a curt introduction: ‘Mr Walsh,’ he said and walked off with downcast eyes. The tall muzungu stepped forward and raised an indignant finger.

  ‘A man has been arrested!’ he cried. ‘We have brought him here because some of you children have been overheard singing insurrectionary songs and praising your Congress chief!’

  The schoolchildren blinked. Congress chief? There was only one chief of Luwingu, Chief Shimumbi, and he was the one who had put out a warrant to arrest the Congress leaders.

  ‘Bring him out,’ Mr Walsh barked over his shoulder.

  There was a scuffle as two kapasus wrangled a man to the front. He was wearing an oversized black suit splattered with mud, a tie loosely noosed around his neck. His hair was long and matted and wet. He trudged forward, his chin to his chest. He hung between the two kapasus as if suspended from their grip under his arms. Mr Walsh pointed at him and spat sarcastically:

  ‘Ecce homo – behold the man! Behold your Congress chief!’

  A kapasu grabbed the bushy locks to pull the man’s head up. Matha gasped. Ba Nkoloso! He looked out at the students, swaying with every beleaguered breath.

  ‘This bedraggled rat,’ growled Mr Walsh, prowling the stage, ‘this…puppet dictator has been terrorising your district for months. Causing fires. Starting riots. He is not your chief!’

  Mr Walsh strode over to a cluster of kapasus and pulled a man from amongst them. Matha gasped again. Chief Shimumbi! He was wearing his royal robes, holding his headdress in his hands.

  ‘This is your chief!’ Mr Walsh screeched, pointing at Chief Shimumbi, who rose a bit taller, and as an afterthought, fitted his headdress on. ‘Do you see the difference now?’

  Mr Walsh strode from the chief back to Ba Nkoloso.

  ‘All of you!’ He swept his hand over them as if stroking their heads. ‘I want you to tell this rrrat! Tell him what he is.’ He jabbed his finger at Ba Nkoloso as he cried out: ‘Traitor!’

  The schoolboys, trained to respond with verve to such calls, echoed the muzungu instantly: ‘TRAITOR!’

  Matha looked around, shocked. These same boys had been singing Congress songs just yesterday, songs about the downfall of the Federation and the rise of African freedom. Her eyes locked on Nkoloso’s son, squatting at the edge of the audience, his head bowed with shame.

  ‘
Liar!’ cried Mr Walsh, jabbing his finger again.

  ‘LIAR!’ the schoolboys shouted.

  Ba Nkoloso hung heaving between the two kapasus. Sweat or blood dripped from his temples into the dust. Mr Walsh stepped forward and fingered Ba Nkoloso’s tie with a melodramatic sneer, as if the cloth were rotten. The schoolboys laughed with the eerie mechanical sound of hyenas. Chief Shimumbi now mustered his courage and stepped forward. He spoke in Bemba and he too commanded the students to decry Ba Nkoloso. Walsh stepped back. Ba Nkoloso panted, his eyelids fluttering sluggishly like moths in the rain. Chief Shimumbi was working himself into a froth, insulting Ba Nkoloso’s manhood and ancestors, calling for his death.

  In a burst of passion, the chief stretched his hand out to a kapasu for a stick. He grabbed it and hit Ba Nkoloso across the stomach. A knot began to form in Matha’s throat as Chief Shimumbi beat Ba Nkoloso about the shoulders, the back, the chest. Ba Nkoloso fell to his knees – the kapasus holding him up had dropped him, freeing their hands so they could join the beating – then tumbled onto his side. Some of the boys in the audience rose onto their knees to see better. But they said nothing. The teachers said nothing. The Fathers said nothing. All was quiet but for the thudding blows, the kapasus’ big sticks flinging up and down like the ibende that women use to pound maize for unga.

  When they finally stopped, Ba Nkoloso lay still. The short muzungu called for a pail of water and splashed it over him until he startled awake. Then a black kapasu lifted him onto his knees and started to shave his head with a pair of scissors. Ba Nkoloso flinched as blood trickled down his cheek. The kapasu bent down with a grin and picked up a tuft of hair, sniffed it, made a face, and leaned forward to hand it to a student. The boy reached for it with a smile and just as he touched it, a cry rang out.