The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘We can’t be late today, Grandpa.’

  ‘And where should I go?’ Grandpa gestured at the windscreen.

  Beyond the grey wash of old rain and scratched glass was a scene out of a BBC Africa Special Report: young men in old clothes running through smoke and dust.

  ‘Hooligans,’ Grandpa said and turned on the radio. The DJ, his voice an ungainly hybrid of Zinglish and American accents, bellowed over this month’s ubiquitous Drake song. Grandpa tutted and pressed SCAN. The radio bumped from station to station: strident exhortation (God! Is in control!) to oldies (out of my dreams! and into my) to the smooth baritone news (Ebola outbreak in Liberia will) to more oldies (candy-coated rayiyin dro-ops)…Grandpa turned down the volume as the cars oozed forward again, pulling onto the dirt bank to bypass the burning pile in the road.

  ‘Savages,’ Grandpa said as he inched the car around it and back onto the tarmac.

  Joseph turned to look out the rear window and saw a woman in a bathrobe standing on the side of the road, shouting furiously over a pile of charred objects at her feet. It was Sylvia – he recognised the distinctive colour of her robe, as shiny and orange as a naartje. It had been a month since his mother had found her squatting at the Northmead house. The bailiffs must have finally ousted her and put her belongings in the road. Someone had set them on fire – chaos to cover looting. This sort of thing happened often in Lusaka these days.

  Joseph saw a young man dart out of the fray, carrying a black box over his head. At first, Joseph thought he was one of the ‘hooligans’ and ‘savages’, but his ventures into and out of the road had the methodical rhythm of saving rather than the scattered logic of opportunistic theft. The young man placed the black box at Sylvia’s feet, smacked his hands, and ran back in. Who was he?

  Joseph’s buttocks vibrated. He pulled his phone from his back pocket but the screen was black. He turned it off – it would have to be off for the exam anyway. He turned to look back at the fire again but a car had cut in behind them and hidden the scene from view. He felt another buzz to the bum. Oh, it was Dad’s iPhone. He had been carrying it around with him out of a kind of nostalgia. He pulled it from his other back pocket. This screen was lit – a preview of a text. He tried to unlock the phone to read it but it asked for a code. He sank back and turned it off. He had only caught the contact name before the message preview disappeared. The Doctor. Doctor who?

  2015

  Joseph’s exams went well despite his worries, or perhaps because of them – he secretly held a superstition that his anxiety fuelled his intelligence. He immediately began studying for his A levels – his father had left him money for university fees and Joseph wanted to go to Oxford. Waiting for his stellar international education to start was both irritating and boring, like that French word: ennuyeux. Then, one day, Gran mentioned offhand that his father’s will had stipulated that Joseph’s tuition money go to an African university.

  ‘He was right.’ Grandpa gave an approving nod. ‘Too much brain drain nowadays.’

  Joseph was furious. He resented this belated pan-Africanism – this petty swipe from the grave. He called his mother in London to ask if he could use some of the money from selling the Lusaka houses instead.

  ‘Oh baby, there’s none left,’ Mum laughed sadly. ‘Medical bills. Farai needed another operation.’

  Joseph was not handsome, but he was clever and rich. And for a long time, that had been enough to dwarf the social marks against him: his pebbly acne, his skinnymaningi long legs, his fat banana feet. Now it turned out that being top of the class, cream of the crop, guaranteed him nothing. He fumed until he learned that the University of Cape Town had a study-abroad programme at Leeds. Surely that didn’t count. It was not Oxford, but it would do.

  * * *

  In between studying for his A levels, Joseph tried to unlock his father’s iPhone. He kept it charged, an electronic memento mori, and it still buzzed all the time, Digit-All ads and messages flashing over the locked screen. But he couldn’t unlock it and he didn’t know how long he had before the SIM card expired. He had googled ‘forgot iPhone passcode’, but he didn’t have enough of his dad’s details to reset it. He tried to guess the code instead. 0000. 1234. Sets of four from his father’s Reg card. His birthdate, his dad’s, the nation’s. Nothing. Zee. And for every ten wrong guesses, the phone locked for an hour.

  One day, while he was watching The Hunger Games in the TV room with Aunt Carol – she had been visiting more since the funeral, to spend time with Gran and Grandpa – the iPhone buzzed on the table. He picked it up and saw the preview of a text – another one from the mysterious ‘Doctor’. This time Joseph caught the words vaxin and kalingalinga before the screen went black. Kalingalinga. That was where that hair salon was – the one owned by Sylvia the Widow – but what did that have to do with his father’s vaccine research? He clicked the phone back on, but the preview had been banished by the keypad.

  ‘Shit,’ he said. Locked out again.

  ‘What are you up to?’ Aunt Carol leaned forward from the sofa.

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Children, children,’ Aunt Carol sang, then turned back to the movie with a chuckle. The rest of the nursery rhyme ran through Joseph’s head as he left her and went to his bedroom.

  Children, children?

  Yes, Papa.

  Eating sugar?

  No, Papa.

  Telling lies?

  No, Papa.

  Open your mouth.

  Ha. Ha. Ha.

  The whole point of that song, Joseph thought as he sat at his desk and opened his laptop, was to give the sugar enough time to melt in the mouth of the culprit. What was the name of that salon again? Some silly wordplay on aeroplanes? Right. The Hi-Fly. He googled and found an article from 2009 – the salon had apparently burned down – that gave the proprietor’s full name: Sylvia Mwamba. Joseph found twenty or so Sylvia Mwambas on Facebook but none of them seemed old enough. Then he thought to search for her son.

  Scouring through dozens and dozens of Jacob Mwambas, Joseph finally found a bitty picture of the young man he had seen rescuing electronics from the fire in the road last year. Joseph scrolled through the timeline: unsmiling selfies showing off Jacob’s clear brown skin and bulging muscles; links to news sites – BBC, Quartz, AllAfrica – with tech articles like ‘Flight of the RoboBee’ and ‘Facebook to Build Solar Drone’. Finally, Joseph came upon a photo of two women in cone-shaped party hats. It was fuzzy, taken with a camera phone, and nobody was tagged, but he recognised Sylvia’s doe eyes and noted a glow from below – birthday candles.

  Would Dad have been bold enough to use his mistress’s birth date as his passcode? Joseph picked up the iPhone and tried the day and month from Joseph’s Facebook post. No. Estimating Sylvia’s age, he tried the month and year. No. Maybe she was older than she looked? Down the year went until he hit 1970. Open Sesame. The keyboard vanished and the iPhone’s home screen bloomed with its neat garden of icons. Little red badges told Joseph that his dead father had 873 unopened texts and 5,012 unopened emails.

  * * *

  Joseph was two months away from taking his A levels when the University of Cape Town erupted. ‘Rhodes Must Fall!’ the students cried, meaning the statue, not the man. Joseph googled. In the Wikipedia photo, the big bronze Cecil Rhodes looked thoughtful in his square throne, turquoise rust turning him geological. Protestors gathered in small crowds to throw shit at it and graffiti it and toyi-toyi around it. A month later, it was craned up and away. Joseph was annoyed and bored by this news. Ennuyeux.

  The University of Zambia, the university down the road where Grandpa had been a dean for decades, had a statue, too, by Henry Tayali. The Faceless Graduate was a cartoony concrete thing with a graduation cap and Mickey Mouse shoes, its facelessness meant to symbolise education for all: rich and poor, men and women. To Joseph it just looked unfi
nished, and obviously male. Had female students ever protested it, crying ‘The Graduate Must Fall!’, smearing it with menstrual blood? Not likely. The Cape Town protests seemed gentrified to him – how nice for you, destroying history to make a point when some of us just want the chance to study it.

  By the time Joseph received his A-level results – top marks but not quite high enough for a merit scholarship – the protests had mutated into ‘Fees Must Fall!’ Cape Town students built a shanty town on the library steps to protest the lack of adequate housing. They set cars on fire and lobbed a petrol bomb into an office. They cut the nose off Rhodes’s memorial and spited his nameplate: CECIL JOHN RHODES became RACIST THIEF MURDERER. To the aspiring applicant, these protests all seemed nonsensical. For a man to fall and fees to fall were not the same thing.

  ‘It’s like they’re protesting because of a pun,’ Joseph complained at supper.

  ‘You do realise that Cecil Rhodes named two African countries after himself.’ said Gran. ‘And he was not just an imperialist. He was a businessman, too, the head of a company.’

  ‘The British South African Company!’ Grandpa nodded, gravy oil glossing his lips.

  ‘Decolonising education is not just about race,’ Gran continued as she gently scooped up some cabbage with her ntoshi. ‘It’s about class, too. The university fees are so high precisely because of Rhodes’s capitalistic ideology. Rhodes and fees must fall.’

  ‘Wait, they’re saying fees must go?’ Grandpa asked as if abruptly remembering his opinion. ‘These students, they don’t understand that attending university is a privilege. It must be paid for!’

  ‘Did you not receive a bursary from Sir Stewart?’ Gran asked witheringly.

  ‘It is not the same!’ Grandpa snatched his ntoshis, smashed them into his relish, tossed them into his mouth. ‘Why throw money at middle-class students when there are mouths to feed! This Marxist idealism of yours is not Zambian,’ he garbled as he gobbled. ‘It is imported.’

  ‘Important, did you say?’ Gran said icily. ‘I couldn’t hear you through your mouthful.’

  Grandpa swallowed. ‘Imported!’ He took a swig of Mazoe. ‘Do not correct my English!’

  ‘It is a condescension—’

  ‘Yes, it is! Do not forget I learned the Queen’s English in your bloody country.’

  ‘I was saying it is a condescension to say that Africa is not ready for free university education—’

  ‘Oh, it is “Africa” now, is it?’ Grandpa scoffed. ‘The whole country of Africa?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ Gran said tremulously.

  The lights went out. They all paused, waiting for the generator to clunk and judder to life. Joseph blinked at the darkness. He could have sworn that right before the power cut, he had seen the freckles on Gran’s skin flash open, tiny eyes glinting all over her. The lights stuttered back on and the low-grade electric whine of the household appliances swarmed up around them again.

  ‘That is what people should be protesting!’ Grandpa expostulated. ‘I’ve told these ZESCO people that load shedding is the wrong idea. These power cuts have become a real noonsense!’

  ‘Well,’ said Gran calmly, ‘you can’t separate power cuts from political power—’

  On it went, their banter about politics beating the protests in South Africa to flat abstraction. To Joseph, it was just a noonsense, as Grandpa would say. Where the hell was he supposed to go to uni?

  * * *

  Joseph’s first and only term at the University of Zambia was a torture to his ego. It had been easy to get in, with his marks and his Grandpa’s old position, and at least he could live at home – there was no way he was going to stay on campus. Even the new Chinese-built student hostels were rumoured to have cockroach nests for wall insulation. Joseph still felt deprived and infantilised, eating home-cooked meals, reading the news to Gran, arguing with Grandpa over the remote. And on campus, his smart-alec arrogance was lost in a sea of conceited and talented students, most of whom were better looking than he was. The truth of the matter was that Joseph had left his heart in Cape Town. He constantly checked for updates on the protests and planned to transfer as soon as possible. In the meantime, he enrolled in UNZA classes on ecology and microbiology.

  He couldn’t stop thinking about his father’s research, and he hoped learning about these topics would help him make sense of it. He had systematically read through all the unopened emails and texts on the iPhone. They confirmed what he already knew: that Lionel Banda had been on the cutting edge of the scientific search for the Virus vaccine. Joseph printed out the scholarly articles that Dad had emailed to himself but they prickled with unfamiliar abbreviations – CCR5, CCR2, SDF-1α, CXCR4, CD4, CD8, NK, T-cell, B-cell – the letters crowding together as if marching to battle, superscript numbers and punctuation perched like birds on their shoulders. Googling the terms didn’t help; he grew lost in a labyrinth of internal reference.

  Joseph felt pained. He had done well in his biology IGCSEs. He had imagined that, when Dad had come home to die and they had cracked jokes about Golgi bodies and the ‘smooveness’ of the endoplasmic reticulum in the TV room, they had been mutually impressed. Now he realised how out of his depth he had been, and how obliging his father. It wasn’t a gap in intelligence, he assured himself, just in knowledge.

  Despite the standard lecture style at UNZA (a skinny bespectacled man droning in front of an ashy blackboard), Joseph thrilled to the lessons. The Darwinian model he had learned for A levels was essentially a child’s drawing: big fish eats little fish which eats littler fish. Now he learned that the very littlest fish, microorganisms, sometimes entered the little fish on purpose so as to be eaten by the big fish, which helped the microorganisms spread. This wasn’t survival of the fittest. It was survival of the slyest. It began to make sense to him that his father, a man of subtle infiltrations, had chosen virology.

  Indeed, the workings of animal biology seemed to mirror the workings of human society. Joseph’s ecology lecturer introduced the students to three terms for how organisms coexist: ‘Parasitism,’ he intoned, ‘is when one organism benefits, while the other one is harmed – this is what viruses do. Mutualism is mutually beneficial, like when the plover bird cleans the crocodile’s teeth of scraps. And commensalism,’ he concluded, ‘is when one organism benefits from another without affecting it, like the lice that eat human skin flakes or the vultures that trail lions for carcasses.’

  Later that day, using the hotspot at the Mingling Bar campus cafe, Joseph googled the term commensalism on his phone and found out that it came from the Latin commensalis, or ‘sharing a table’. He looked up at the open-air canteen, students clustered around square grey tables with red brick bases, sharing their meals under the concrete overpasses that criss-crossed campus like intestines. Here we all are, he thought, sharing our lives in a former colony, each of us filled with bacterial colonies whose edges are as fixed as the borders of the country – which is to say, not very fixed at all.

  Joseph often found himself doing this on campus, positioning himself outside of the hubbub, observing the gestures and glances of social microcosms. No one really talked to him, anyway – he reeked of coffee and ethanol from the lab – but he told himself that he preferred to watch the world rather than be in it. Maybe that’s why he noticed the thief before anyone else did.

  * * *

  He had headed into the student bar by the Goma Lakes for a quick snack – just a Mosi and a locobun. He was surprised to find the bar packed, the volume up, strobe lights wafting. Then he remembered – it was Friday. Well, he would finish his meal before walking home to Handsworth Park. He shouted his order to the bartender over the bass drum that was trying to reset his heartbeat. He paid, took a munch and a swig, leaned against a wall, and pulled out Dad’s phone.

  Dr Lionel Banda still received emails and texts and WhatsApps, but fewer and fewer as time went by – t
he shadows he had cast in the world were slowly receding. Joseph scanned through the latest messages and was in the middle of deleting invitations from Nigerians to take their money and from Russians to suck their nipples when a text bubbled up from ‘The Doctor’. It read: Pos CXCR4 mut in #11! That abbreviation looked vaguely familiar.

  Joseph looked up at the ceiling, trying to remember where he had seen it, and that’s when his eye caught a movement across the room. A hand had vanished into someone’s pocket. It reappeared again but he couldn’t see to whom it was attached. It was small and light-skinned – it gleamed under the strobe lights – and for a moment, Joseph watched it dart like a silver fish in the murky abyss of the bar. Then he pushed off the wall and moved across the room, navigating around the dancing students, tracking the thieving hand.

  When he got near enough, he grabbed the wrist above it. The girl turned with surprise, then smiled and began to dance with him, her wrist still in his grip. She was tall and thin but her hips were wide, built to carry a bum. Joseph was neither a good nor a willing dancer but the look in her eye plucked something in him, made it vibrate. He swayed side to side. She drew so close that he could see her shimmery lipstick and smell her scent, a dark bitter nut inside the fruit of her deodorant.

  He felt his shirt catch. She was tugging at it, trying to show him something. She pointed across the bar to two guys dancing on either side of a girl with long gold and purple plaits, her hips spinning like a centrifuge. The guys had raised their arms over her with the Digit-All Beads in their fingers switched on to make a spotlight. Everyone was watching them, more for the technological novelty than the dance performance. The thief grinned at him, nodding her head to the music.

  ‘I’ve never seen one of those Bead thingies in real life,’ she called out, still bouncing her bum. She spun and dropped it, then pulled it back up, dragging it just inches from his crotch. She smirked over her shoulder.