The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

‘Why do you call it love when you have zero points?’ he asked. Surely this was just an excuse to talk about romance. He sounded earnest, though. ‘It comes from the French word for egg, l’oeuf. Because a zero is the shape of an egg.’ ‘Oh-oh?’ he chuckled. ‘But I thought the English hated the French.’ ‘Oh, we do, but we steal from them mercilessly. It’s sort of our thing.’

‘But what is it?’ asked Agnes. ‘I know it’s your family home, but what is the history of this…She-war Nigandoo?’ 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.

‘Lusaka calling,’ the broadcaster purred. He announced a radio play about wamunyama, the local word for vampires.

thousands of pilgrims went to Tirumala every day, inching along in winding queues to offer gifts to Lord Venkateswara. They gave their weight in money and jewels but mostly they gave their hair, through the practice known as tonsure. Devotees, young and old, crowded into the Kalyana Katta that dotted the hill below the temple to sit with bowed heads before barbers who shaved their heads and passed their hair on to the god.

‘Myook, Ba Madam?’ asked Chanda, holding the creamer aloft.

Very good at translating with an action rather than an actual translation

‘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.’

‘Drones are frikkin scary, men.’ ‘You can’t stop technological progress,’ said Joseph. ‘Progress?’ she said. ‘Progress is just the word we use to disguise power doing its thing.’

‘It’s load shedding, not load sharing,’ Joseph said. He just couldn’t help himself. ‘Oh?’ asked Agnes, cocking her head in his direction. ‘Load sharing,’ he continued, ‘is when you distribute power across multiple circuits to conserve energy. Load shedding is when you disconnect one source from supplying power.’ ‘That is a distinction without a difference,’ said Agnes. ‘No, it isn’t,’ said Joseph. ‘We complain about load shedding like it’s a choice that government is making. But it’s the best they can do with the situation. Kariba Dam is failing.’

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”.

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.’ He probably meant God, but for good old Lucretius, this was a matter of matter. When atoms plummet like rain through the void, they deflect – oh, ever so slightly, just enough that their paths divert. From this swerve, called the clinamen, come collision and cluster, both the binding and fleeing of matter.