The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

  ‘Nkoloso?’ asked Naila. ‘Wasn’t that the guy who was going to the moon? I saw a clip online – that was reckless, men! Was your grandmother an “Afronaut” too?’

  ‘Ya,’ Jacob nodded proudly. ‘Even this one,’ he clapped Ba Godfrey on the shoulder.

  ‘Matha was hiding all these years,’ Ba Godfrey said. ‘Hiding her revolutionary light under the bushes. But now she has come up! She has woken up! Let me go again and try to persuade the sister to set her free, enh?’

  He shook Naila’s hand and strode towards the building. Jacob and Naila looked at each other – this was the first time they had ever been alone together.

  ‘Soooo,’ they both said at the same time and laughed.

  Naila leaned towards him until her shoulder gently bumped his arm. ‘You busy?’

  * * *

  The New Kasama house was like a castle at night. Its columns and breezeblock heaps became towers and turrets, the sludgy pool became a moat, the frowsy garden with its racket of drones became a forest growing wild as beauty slept and siblings wandered. In the witching hour, the moonlight danced. The music danced. Naila danced. Jacob and Joseph watched her. They had been drinking for hours, listening to the radio, talking about Matha’s arrest. She had refused the money that Jacob and Ba Godfrey had scrounged up to bail her out of Mukobeko Maximum.

  ‘She will not leave without the other women,’ Jacob said. ‘She calls them The Reapers.’

  ‘I thought it was The Weepers?’ said Joseph. ‘But why the hell are these women setting off bombs?’

  ‘Nobody got hurt,’ Naila pointed out. ‘It was at night. And it was just one clinic.’

  ‘Ya, the One Hundred Years Clinic,’ Joseph said. ‘Why did she bomb my old clinic, man?’

  ‘Kaya, siniziwa,’ Jacob shrugged. ‘I cannot know her mind. I cannot think off of her behalf.’

  ‘She’s a revolutionary!’ Naila yelled. ‘This country has become a dictatorship. The rich are richer, the poor are poorer. Government is controlling us. And the worst part is – we chose this. We held our hands out to them and said PLEASE BEAD US! We can’t even frikkin take them out of our hands or deactivate them. It’s the perfect system to monitor us, to force compliance.’

  Jacob nodded. ‘I heard that in the Copperbelt, the miners are chopping off their fingertips.’

  ‘That won’t work,’ said Joseph with disgust. ‘They’d have to chop off their whole hands. But wait, why are we talking about Beads? Matha Mwamba blew up a vaccine clinic, not a BeadTime kiosk. That’s not political. That’s just preventing people from getting the treatment they need.’

  ‘Need?!’ Naila slurred angrily. ‘First of all, it’s not a cure, it’s a vaccine. Second, it’s a beta test. Other countries get cheap, generic ARVs and we get to be guinea pigs for an untested vaccine on a national scale. And third, this issue with Mrs Makupa’s Bead makes me think they’re going to use our Beads to force all of us to get the Virus vaccine, and that means fourth, the side effects are going to turn us all into frikkin leopards—’

  ‘You sound like a bloody anti-vaxxer!’ said Joseph. ‘There’s no scientific proof of those side effects and—’

  ‘It is your vaccine then?’ Jacob challenged him. ‘The one you made with Musadabwe?’

  ‘Our research was just a tiny part of what Ling accomplished at Huazhong.’

  ‘So why are you now defending?’ Jacob seethed. ‘This guy? Awe, apwalala.’

  ‘You’re such a hypocrite, Niles!’ Joseph paced the roof. ‘You go on and on about colourism. And your friend, Tabs, always going on about greetings black brother—’

  ‘What does that have to do with—’

  ‘This alleged side effect everyone is protesting?’ he went on. ‘It’s literally superficial. This terrible thing people don’t want, even though it vaccinates against the most deadly and pernicious virus in the history of mankind – all it is,’ he pointed at his arm, ‘is a bloody tan!’

  ‘It is not just a tan!’ Jacob yelled. ‘It is black patches! It is another disease, like leprosy.’

  ‘Leprosy—’ Joseph sputtered and slugged the rest of his beer as if to quench himself of wrongness. ‘First of all, the condition is called melanism, and it’s the reverse of the condition your girl has.’

  ‘What girl?’ Naila frowned.

  ‘She is not my girl any more,’ said Jacob. ‘Pepa made her own choices, that one. And it is not the same as albino!’ Jacob shook his head. ‘To be black in this world is a curse.’

  ‘A lack of melanin is no blessing either!’ said Joseph. ‘Ask your girl Pepa, or not-your-girl Pepa, whatever. Melanin is a biological advantage – it protects our skin and our neurons. It’s an organic conductor of ions and electrons, which is why Bead circuits work better in dark skin.’

  ‘Mmhm,’ Naila nodded vehemently. ‘The world hates black people but they love our biological advantages. Our skin, our bums—’

  ‘“Our”?’ Jacob started laughing. ‘What do you mean “our”?’

  ‘Laugh all you want,’ she said. ‘I’m African and I’m not white and in this world, that means I’m black. They don’t like us but they wanna be like us. But,’ she turned her back to them coyly, ‘you can’t put a price tag on this,’ she spanked her own copious ass. The guys responded at the same time:

  ‘You are the one who put a real price tag on it,’ said Jacob.

  ‘You literally can. It’s called butt implants,’ said Joseph.

  The guys laughed and clinked their drinks. She saw Joseph frown slightly, but before he could ask about Jacob’s comment, she shifted the conversation back to Matha Mwamba.

  ‘Even our grandmothers are tossing bombs,’ she concluded. ‘So why are we doing nothing?’

  * * *

  She and Joseph fought about it the next morning driving back from New Kasama. It was dawn, the dark sack of the night slowly turning inside out, baring its pale inner surface.

  ‘So, you told Jacob about your ass tattoo?’

  She scratched her ear. ‘Oh, ya, we were, uh, chatting about the historical shift from a barter to a money economy and I used my tattoo as an example of how capital converts every product into a social hieroglyph because, you know, a barcode looks like a sign that needs interpretation and—’

  ‘And where was I during this little chat about commodity fetishism?’

  ‘In the loo,’ she said, looking out of her window. It was only six but the road was already thickening with cars. Slo-go traffic had become like heart disease in Lusaka, clotting its major arteries.

  ‘Did you show it to him?’

  ‘Would you think less of me?’ She turned back to him, allowing her guilt to flip into indignation. ‘Is that not frikkin refined enough for you?’

  He twisted his grips on the wheel. ‘I didn’t say that—’

  ‘STOP!’ she yelled, pointing at the yellow triangle in the road ahead of them. He slammed the brakes and the car screeched to a stop, bucking forward, then falling back on its heels. They both looked in the rearview mirror. Luckily, there was no one behind them. He pulled the car around, skirting the traffic triangles cordoning off the stretch of tarmac. It was just an empty construction site but the near accident had stunned them awake. After a moment, Naila started laughing.

  ‘What?’ he grumbled, glancing in the rearview again.

  ‘They spelled it wrong. They were supposed to paint STOP in the road. It says S-O-T-P.’

  ‘Idiots.’ He sucked his teeth. He still seemed shaky.

  Naila turned to look out at Lusaka zipping flatly past.

  ‘It’s like the Mile of Crosses in Chile,’ she said.

  ‘The what?’

  The typo in the road had winkled it out of her memory, where she had stored it years ago for an art history course called ‘Tricontinental: Art in the Third World’. She explained to Joseph how, in 19
79, the Colectivo Acciones de Arte in Chile had staged a protest against Pinochet by turning the dashed lines in the roads into crosses.

  ‘They taped horizontal lines across them, turning those minuses into plusses. In one installation, they wrote no next to each one so it read no mas. No more.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, interested but still grumpy from their unresolved fight.

  ‘SOTP,’ she murmured. ‘It almost sounds like an abbreviation.’

  ‘Some of the parts,’ he said.

  ‘No, all of it – the whole thing sounds like an abbreviation.’

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean SOTP is already an abbreviation, for the Sum Of The Parts.’

  ‘As in the whole is greater than?’

  ‘It’s a kind of business valuation. If a company has multiple divisions, you figure out what the divisions would be worth if it got broken up or acquired by another company.’

  ‘What’s a business valuation for?’

  She already knew but at least they weren’t talking about Jacob any more.

  * * *

  The idea took shape in her mind over the course of a few weeks. The next time she met up with the guys in New Kasama for their funny little three-way dance – fuming and fomenting and flirting – she tried it out on them. What if they changed all the STOP signs in Lusaka? Repainted them one by one? Or just taped over them with stickers that reversed the middle letters?

  ‘But for what?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘To get the message out, to catch people’s eye. The drivers, the pedestrians, the hawkers, the street kids, the expats, the tourists. Even illiterate people will notice that something is off.’

  ‘No one here follows traffic signs as it is,’ said Joseph. ‘It’ll just cause accidents.’

  ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘More likely a traffic jam, like when the robots go dead. But that’s the point. This is how protest movements begin – activists swarm onto the roads and stop traffic. They bolt themselves to redwood trees and fences outside nuclear plants. They jam the circuits.’

  ‘This sounds like recreational politics,’ Joseph rolled his eyes. ‘Gentrified protests.’

  ‘The Civil Rights Movement in the US was all about logjams and blockades. Martin Luther King is the one who said “a riot is the language of the unheard”. And the decolonisation of our country wasn’t just boycotts and speeches. It was bombing bridges, too.’

  ‘Zo’ona,’ Jacob said. ‘That was what they did during Cha-Cha-Cha.’

  ‘What we need now is a riot from within the system. Okay, stay with me.’ She told them the story of the weeping grandmother who had lost control of her bowels in the police station in Tirupati.

  ‘What does your shitty travel experience have to do with anything?’ Joseph asked.

  ‘In a police station, something like that can wreak havoc – it’s a different kind of bomb.’

  ‘A stink bomb,’ Jacob guffawed.

  ‘Ya, it’s funny, but that woman did more to fuck the police than any activist or politician could with ten times the effort. And she did it by making a mistake, by missing the target.’

  ‘It’s a stretch, Niles.’ Joseph raised an eyebrow.

  ‘It’s like the basis of your vaccine. Insert mistakes into our genetic code so The Virus can’t get inside our cells. We have to insert the errors into the system. Not with activism but with the inactive: the loiterers, the shitters, the unemployed – the idlers who jam the circulation of money and goods and information. A slow-moving riot. And we start with the signs on the road.’

  ‘But so what does this SOTP stand for?’ asked Jacob.

  ‘The Sum Of The Parts,’ said Joseph.

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’ve been thinking it should be the State Of The Planet.’

  The guys objected in unison, Joseph raising his hands to the heavens, Jacob clapping dismissively. They went in spirals for hours, riffing on the abbreviation as if playing a game, which, in a way, it still was. The conversation devolved into pettiness and jokes, trolling and trifling: a transcript of Internetspeak. This was how everyone talked these days – too many people with too many ideas and too many things to protest. But Naila convinced them that this was the beauty of using an abbreviation – they could always decide what SOTP stood for later. The first step was to generate buzz.

  * * *

  When Naila got to the house in Kamwala, she anticipated that her senses would be on high alert for Mother: her authoritative step, the smell of her perfume, her imperious voice: And what are you made of? But instead Naila found herself unconsciously reaching for her father instead – those tendrils seeking Where is Daddiji? Where? as she found her way to the bedroom. She knocked on the door.

  ‘Nonna?’

  Nonna Sibilla’s bedroom was as clean and bare as ever – a bed against one wall, a small table under the window. She was under the covers, sitting up, idly plaiting the white hair spilling over her lap. It was Sunday. The workers were out, the girls brunching at Mint Cafe, Mother delivering wig. Upon seeing Naila, Nonna gave a low grunt of pleasure and patted the bed. Naila sat.

  ‘Nonna, I wanted to ask you about Grandpa. Nonno Giuseppe. His job at the dam.’

  Nonna nodded, a smile gleaming under her white veil of hair. She listened as Naila explained what she needed, then directed her to some boxes under the bed, to one box in particular. Inside were green folders full of documents. Naila rifled through them. The pages were old and brittle, with jagged rips on the edges and ghostly ink between the lines. But they were legible. Naila paused over a diagram – arcs swooping across the page, tiny letters underneath: KARIBA DAM IMPRESIT 1957.

  ‘It’s—’ She looked up. ‘It’s all here?’

  Nonna smiled her veiled, gappy smile.

  ‘Why did he take them from the office?’ Naila had never met her grandfather but he seemed like a company man. It would have been strange to bring documents like these home.

  ‘Federico,’ Nonna Sibilla sang softly at her lap. ‘Federico.’

  Who was Federico? Naila’s grandfather’s name was Giuseppe Corsale – the name printed at the top of each page she held in her hand. Nonna sighed. Naila leaned down to kiss her forehead through the shroud of hair. Well, maybe it didn’t matter how they had arrived or by whose hand. They were here – the blueprints, an X-ray of infrastructure – and now she had them.

  * * *

  Matha Mwamba’s court case dragged on – no one had been harmed but a vaccine clinic had burned down. Government did not take kindly to acts of terrorism, especially when the accused expressed no remorse. The story stayed in the news like a TV serial: Kalingalinga Bombers. Banakulus of The Revolution. International organisations took an interest and made Matha a human rights martyr. A media outlet called Chronics got an interview with her on the inside – ‘Local Churchwoman Reignites Cha-Cha-Cha’ – and when she mentioned an organisation called the SOTP, the word raced across the country like flame along a gas-soaked string.

  Their little revolutionary squad had already revised dozens of STOP signs around Lusaka. As Naila had predicted, this had led to more traffic jams than car accidents. And slo-go had infected the city for so long that government couldn’t attribute it to the altered signs. The effort to catch the perpetrators – the ‘purple traitors’, as one MP called them – dwindled and everyone just blamed the typo on illiterate municipal workers.

  In the meantime, Tabitha had figured out how to hack Digit-All Beads.

  ‘I should have used tabs,’ she tutted. ‘It’s way more accurate than spaces.’

  ‘What the fuck are you talking about?’ Naila whispered. She was standing in a storeroom at the Reg Office, talking to Tabitha on her Bead. Her friend’s face rippled on her palm.

  ‘Don’t worry about it, darling. Tech speak.’ Pink bubblegum flashed between Tabitha’s lips.

  ‘Okay,’ said Naila. ‘Lis
ten. They’ve started sending notifications for a National Virus Vaccination Programme – like I thought, they’re using Beads to monitor compliance. That’ll give us access to anyone the Reg Office has beaded.’

  ‘Alright, what do you want the message to say?’

  ‘Just the date and location for the rally. Kalingalinga. Twenty-fourth of October. 6 p.m. Oh, and: SOTP.’

  ‘Have you queens decided what that shit stands for yet?’

  ‘Jacob and Joseph still disagree.’

  ‘Do. They.’ Tabitha raised an eyebrow and blew a fleshy, veined bubble.

  ‘Shhh,’ Naila said guiltily.

  Tabitha barked a laugh and her bubble burst. She cursed as she extricated the pink tangle from her nose ring with her fingernail. ‘You catchin feelings for one a dem, darling?’

  ‘I just – it’s more like catching politics?’

  ‘Sounds very current affairs. You better be making them both wrap it up.’

  ‘I’m on the pill. Sort of.’ Naila had been lax about taking it lately.

  ‘Darling! All that male energy inside of you. That’s why your father’s been visiting you—’

  ‘Ew. It’s just dreams. And he doesn’t even say anything, he just keeps…circling me.’

  ‘Mmm,’ Tabitha nodded knowingly. ‘Restless. Daddiji’s roving, Nilotic.’

  ‘This is absurd,’ Naila shook her head. ‘I’m gonna go.’

  She clicked off her Bead. What if Tabs was right? What if Daddiji was still roaming around Tirupati, the stolen box of ashes passing from hand to hand, never at rest? Maybe that was the source of the Where is he? Where is he? that still vibrated in her skin whenever…

  Zzzt.

  ‘Shit!’ she gasped – her Bead had buzzed. It was a text: ‘r u bizi?’

  * * *