The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

She was mainly struck by how small she looked in her reflection. She didn’t feel that small from the inside.

Once upon a time in a faraway land, there was a princess and she played tennis because that was all she knew and she was very good, she was the best in all of southern England, minor newspapers characterising her style of play with words usually reserved for ornithology or engineering,

prizes that paid for more vases and necklaces than she could possibly fill with flowers and throats

English etiquette was as rigid and inconsistent as English grammar.

During his time at university, Ronald had learned that ‘history’ was the word the English used for the record of every time a white man encountered something he had never seen and promptly claimed it as his own, often renaming it for good measure. History, in short, was the annals of the bully on the playground.

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.

The baby started to cry again. Matha had never considered that being female would thwart her so, that it would be a hurdle she had to jump every time she wanted to learn something: to read a book, to shout the answers, to make a bomb, to love a man, to fight for freedom. She had never thought Ba Nkoloso, Godfrey and Nkuka would each abandon her in turn to poverty and lone motherhood. Matha bounced her baby in vain. Go to sleep, baby, she whimpered. Shut up, baby. She had never imagined that to be a woman was always, somehow, to be a banishable witch. Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly – weeping was just what she did now, who she was – Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied.

But Sibilla’s marriage had long felt like a handbag that she had neglected to empty out, that she still carried around even though she kept her money, handkerchief and comb elsewhere on her person.

She shimmied off the panties – painstakingly chosen from a Victoria’s Secret catalogue and sent from London – and peeked out of the stall to make sure the bathrooms were empty. She hastened to a sink to wash the stain out, scrubbing fiercely at the damn spot, lace threads popping inside her wringing fists. Back in the stall, she hefted her skirt, threaded her stilettos through the holes, and tugged the panties, reluctant with damp, up her thighs again. She didn’t have a pad – she had left her bag in the ballroom – so she wrapped a long stretch of toilet paper around the crotch, where it settled into a papier-mâchéd lump. Thandi tottered back to the wedding reception in the Ridgeway ballroom and sat next to Lee at the bridal table, shifting her hips to keep the wedge of toilet paper in place.

All she wanted was to be at home in bed, curled in a ball, alone and quietly bleeding.

Her dainty handbag transformed into an African mother’s handbag: a repository of unexpected need. Over the years, that leather sack accumulated tissues, nappies, dental floss, condoms, panties, a bra, a clip-on tie, tampons, sugar packets, ketchup packets, lozenges, mints, sweets, toothpicks, an interesting toy, an interesting book, bottles of perfume and of rubbing alcohol, plasters, scissors, and a sachet of sharp and tiny tools – paperclips, safety pins, tacks and staples. As a stewardess, anticipating needs was how Thandi had served people. Now it became how she loved them. Her

What sort of preparation, what sort of entertainment does a dying man want? Last things? Joseph had no idea what those would be – he was still obsessed with first things.

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.’

‘The protests,’ he said. ‘It’s crazy right now. End-times shit.’ She laughed so hard that it rocked her onto her back. ‘Are you joking?’ she asked the sky. ‘That’s why I wanted to go! They’re frikkin trying to do something! Fight the power and that!’ ‘How about fight the power cuts?’ He was surprised to hear himself echoing his grandfather. ‘Why make free education a priority when people still don’t have food or electricity or running water?’ ‘They did it in Chile!’ she exclaimed, sitting up again and crossing her legs. ‘They made it completely free. Uni for everyone, paid for by those corporate oil companies and shit.’ ‘Are you sure you want to use Chile as the example of democratic progress?’ ‘Who said anything about democracy, men? Democracy’s bankrupt. People from the West shout “democracy” but they’re vampires, sucking our resources. Bloody capitalist stooges.’ ‘Stooges?’ he chuckled. ‘You really are Zambian. So what, you give all your money away?’ ‘I’m Marxist,’ she said with disgust. ‘I’m not stupid.’

‘Cooperating with the West after Independence only made us weaker. Why did we bother?’ ‘Uh, I think it was for the money?’ ‘No, they have just been waiting for our resources to dwindle. Vultures! We started this nation with potential. “A society of the people!” Kaunda said. But somehow we narrowed until it was just for the top three per cent. The capitalists replaced the colonialists. And now these foreigners take our minerals away and even shoot our miners. Every day their greed bites into our land. Soon there will be nothing left. We must wake up! We must stop dreaming! We are still on the ground. It is still night in this country. We are still on our knees. Time to rise up!’

When they asked him who owned the patent on the polio vaccine, he said: ‘Well, the people, I would say. There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?’

‘Zambia is only young because of the foreigners.’ God lifted his joint with delicate fingers. He sipped the burning leaves and winced with pleasure. ‘They carved us up. They drew borders straight through the villages. Pulling tribes together from this side, that side. Joining us into Federation, splitting us again. It took some time to make one Zambia one nation.’

‘Well, the Chinese aren’t doing that,’ Joseph shrugged. ‘They first came here in solidarity. And now they have come to invest. They’re building railroads and farms and airports. That can only help.’ ‘Ah? No. We cannot afford that kind of help,’ said God.

Joseph himself has learned this the hard way: his vaccine, founded upon a mutation, has foundered on capital’s reef. But all sorts of things can slip through the cracks, especially genetically tweaked ones. Evolution forged the entirety of life using only one tool: the mistake…

These housed leftover gadgets, not from the rich, the apamwamba, the been-to class of Zambians, but from the places they had been to: America, South Africa, China, all of the countries that had run out of room to discard their obsolete and broken tech. These nations were now paying to ship their ‘e-waste’ to what they considered the trash heap of the world. Little did they realise they were jump-starting a secondhand tech revolution.

Then, one day, while sweetening her tea, Matha overheard Godfrey call a piston a pistol. It could have been a slip of the tongue, but she was so flabbergasted that her teacup was half full of sugar before she noticed. She searched for a pencil, then snatched up the only book in the place, the Bible that old Mrs Zulu had left behind years ago. Matha opened the front door and squeezed herself between the two useless males on her stoop. She turned to an empty page at the back of the Bible. And as they stared at her wet and furrowed face, Matha Mwamba sketched out a diagram of an engine.

Can mosquitoes and humans live peacefully together, can we forge an uneasy truce? Hover around each other enough and symbiosis sets in. Over moons, you’ll grow immune, and our flus will move through you – a mild fever and maybe a snooze. This balance can even come to your rescue, defend you against rank intruders. As Simon Mwansa Kapwepwe once said, the lowliest creature, the tiny udzudzu, is what kept the imperialists at bay! Thus when the whites first swooned to the tropics, they saw that the blacks never fell: the raging calenture that gripped the bazungu passed over the huts of the bantu. This place was The White Man’s Grave. But it wasn’t bad lands that caused their downfall – it happened on the seas as well. They say La Amistad’s crew caught a fever, while the black mutineers were spared it. Was it African skin or sweat? It was neither. It was us, and a matter of time. Reckon the wars, how a battleground festers: the British armies in the American South, the Japanese in the Pacific. Even the fall of the Roman Empire was due in part to our diseases. In every case, the nature of grace is that one side is simply more used to us. Call it invasion or world exploration: either way, it upsets this balance. Your desire to conquer, to colonise others, is both too fixed and too free. Nothing escapes your dull dialectic: either it takes a village to live or to each his own to survive. Even your debate on the best way to befalls on either side of this blade. The social contract ...

But the questions he returned – about her family, her education – unbalanced them again. Her discomfort at answering him disturbed her. According to Marx, the money form is an illusion – she ought to be able to talk frankly about it, no? The driver’s eyes flashed from their caves. She was rich and female and African and he resented her. No doubt he would charge an unreasonably high fare. But then he didn’t, and in her haste to catch her train, she forgot to tip him.

At exactly 6.25 a.m., the train jerked and slugged forward. This didn’t feel like the India she’d read about in the news: authoritarian measures, class tensions, poor amenities, the threat of rape hanging everywhere.

‘Ya, and black people have always made great guinea pigs.’ Naila crossed her arms. ‘You’re always crying paternalism but development is a good thing,’ said Joseph. ‘Take AFRINET and Digit-All. Those technologies helped us leap ahead with free Wi-Fi for all.’ ‘Oh yes, bwana,’ she clapped her cupped hands, ‘thank you please for foreign investment!’ ‘These foreigners take out more than they put in,’ said Jacob. ‘Exactly!’ She raised a finger. ‘They only gave us free Beads because electro-nerve technology uses melanin. Again, they were testing them on us. If the product is free, you’re the product.’

‘What does that have to do with what you’re using them for?’ ‘Niles!’ Joseph piped up. ‘It’s just technology, it doesn’t have morals built in.’ ‘And what are your morals?’ she asked Jacob, locking eyes with him.

‘…missed my flight from Cairo to Jo’burg and this Sufi tech guy was like, “Dude, go see the real pyramids.” So I took the train fifteen hours to this Nubian village where you can still drink Nile water and see the pyramids – the real ones, not the whitewashed ones. The lengths people will go to erase the blackness of our ruins! So anyway, I’m the only one in the pyramid tomb, in its, like, womb, right? So I start communing, do some yoga and shit, and right as I’m really getting into it, the lights just – psheewww. Power cut. A minute later they came back on and I was like, “I’ve been fucking acknowledged.”’ Tabitha sipped. ‘So I bought this tea to, like, preserve that feeling? It’s part of my decolonial diet.’

‘Don’t be such a bootlicker, Joe!’ said Agnes. ‘Have you learned nothing from my tape?’ Naila nearly choked. She saw Joseph’s eyes dim. She knew she should rescue him or keep quiet. But instead she found herself opening her mouth to argue against him too. ‘I mean, Kariba Dam has been failing for years, men. That is politics.’ ‘The dam is failing because of gravity and The Change, not capitalism! The plunge wall—’ ‘But why hasn’t it been fixed? Where did the money for fixing our infrastructure go?’

‘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.’

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.

A revolution always seems, in retrospect, like an eruption: a massive upheaval that overturns everything, flips the tables, shatters the sky, fractures the earth. No one talks about how long a revolution takes or how boring it can be, how it can slowly chew time with grinding teeth before gulping it down all at once. It consumed their lives for years – the supposed time of their lives, their early twenties – and in the end, it swallowed one whole.

They decided the best place to set up a stage was under the billboard at the CRDZ intersection. They could paint their message on it. But what should it say? ‘Freedom,’ said Joseph. ‘Freedom is a capitalist illusion,’ said Naila. ‘It should say equality.’

There’s naught like a nemesis for truth, they say, and this story does have a lesson. Your choice as a human may seem stark: to stay or to go, to stick or strike out, to fix or to try and break free. You limit yourselves to two dumb inertias: a state of rest or perpetual motion. But there is a third way, a moral you stumbled on, thinking it fatal, a flaw. To err is human, you say with great sadness. But we thinful singers give praise! To the drift, the diversion, that motion of motions! Obey the law of the flaw! If errare humanum est indeed, then it follows that si fallor, sum. As the Gnostic Gospel of Philip opined: ‘The world came about through an error.’