The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

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”.