The Old Drift

by Namwali Serpell

Lethe

A dead white man grows bearded and lost in the blinding heart of Africa.

This is the story of a nation – not a kingdom or a people – so it begins, of course, with a white man.

Once upon a time, a goodly Scottish doctor caught a notion to find the source of the Nile. He found instead a gash in the ground full of massed, tumbling water. His bearers called it Mosi-oa-Tunya, which means The Smoke That Thunders, but he gave it the name of his queen. He described the Falls with a stately awe, comparing the flung water to British things: to fleece and snow and the sparks from burning steel, to myriads of small comets rushing on in one direction, each of which left behind its nucleus rays of foam. He speculated that angels had gazed down upon it and said to each other, ‘How lovely.’ He even opined, like a set designer, that there really ought to be mountains in the backdrop.

A muzungu is one who will zunguluka – wander aimlessly – until they end up in circles.

The tongue forks, speaks in two ways, which in turn fork and fork into a chaos of capillarity.

Where you sought an origin, you find a vast babble which is also a silence: a chasm of smoke, thundering. Blind mouth!

It sounds like a sentence: Victoria Falls. A prophecy.

I marked the occasion of my first encounter by carving my name and the date into the baobab tree: Percy M. Clark. 8 May 1903.

The Kaffirs are bewildering, of course, but seem pliable enough.

They were superstitious of my whistling – which I did merely because I had nobody to talk to.

The worst difficulty of exploration, I learned, is that it is a tormenting isolation.

A dog and a native are on a par: one should give them a good thrashing when they have earned it, but one should thrash neither until one’s temper has cooled.

Was this place cursed? Or was I?

Of other social life, there was none. No societies, no dance committees, not a dress suit in sight. A postprandial lying contest, chiefly concerned with lions and niggers, might take place, or we’d drum up a party for a hippo hunt.

Anopheles, energetic and indiscriminate. Loafer, lord and lout were treated with strict impartiality in these parts, for the mosquito is a true democrat, and cares not what accident of birth has led you here, nor whether the blood it quaffs be red or blue.

There was a lot of drink at The Old Drift – understandable, what with the boredom and the savagery to keep at bay, to say nothing of the competitive sports: gambling, prospecting, surviving. But high as our death rate was, we were a cheery camp.

Arabs and coloured men served the guests with a servility bordering on sarcasm, then sent the Kaffirs scurrying to do their jobs for them.

upon. I once met a Jewish trader with four native wives and a host of salt-and-pepper children – people regarded him as pretty low down. Any overtures from native men in the other direction led straight to the gallows. Nothing seethes the blood of most settlers more than the thought of racial contamination.

town. This one was called ‘Lusaaka’ after a village headman and was built on a place called Manda Hill, which means graveyard:

The Zambesi may as well be the Lethe:

I do seem plagued by the unpunishable crimes of others.

When Adriana found them like this, she would glare sulkily at them and proceed to make their meagre dinner. ‘Games,’ she would mutter with longing and disgust.

Everything cost so much these days. The war had swelled the world with want. It had made everything rare and therefore precious.

She felt a pang as she saw the rusty old knife on the ground next to a mound of hair. How much pain Sibilla must have endured to shave and scrape it all from her body! How raw! Adriana shook her head. Was this what she had always wanted? The daughter without the curse? Sibilla did not look more human for it. Her skin was greenish and shadowed with tiny black holes, almost the texture of the snowflakes that were now falling steadily across the high window of the larder. Sibilla stood and turned around. Adriana’s pity bled briefly into anger – was the girl trying to punish her with guilt? But no. Sibilla’s gaze was kind, gentle even. Christ, she was beautiful! You could see the planes of her face, how articulate it was in the language of form. ‘Don’t preoccupy yourself, Mama,’ Sibilla said mildly. She looked casual, her hands in the pockets of her shift. ‘It will grow back.’

‘Welcome to Limbo!’ the Colonel cried, clapping Federico on the back. ‘It’s even worse than Inferno.’

As if the Tonga, with quills in their noses and clay in their hair, with their topless women who knocked out their front teeth for fashion, weren’t destined to live off the land anyway. What did it matter where that land was?

The dam half-built, the fat rains came, and the Zambezi rose up and charged. It knocked the dam aside and swallowed some workers. The Tonga said, ‘Nyami Nyami is hungry.’ They killed a black calf and threw it in the river and the bodies washed up where it vanished. The feckless bazungu continued building the dam. When the flood came again, it lifted four men, plastered them to the dam like insects. The concrete was wet; the workers were dead; in the end, they built the dam around them. Strange tomb!

Shiwa Ng’andu.

At least this estate had a well-stocked library, he thought as he strolled around a gloomy room with a tomb’s worth of tomes.

Agnes had always been rather shallow, but as is often the case, this turned out to be rather an advantage when it came to love.

Agnes hung her head, trying not to weep. Her parents’ silence swelled and reddened and seemed to suppurate like a wound. Finally, in a voice Agnes had never heard before – gapless, as if no longer needing to accommodate her husband or as if they now spoke as one – her mother issued their final words on the matter: ‘You have disgraced us. Your grandfather would roll in his grave. You had better pray that this Kaffir has not yet laid a finger on you. Because if he has, I promise you, he will hang.’

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.

‘Sadness disease?’ asked Agnes. ‘Yes, a fungus called tristeza,’

Young men like KK, whom I sponsored to study – just like Ronald here – they are ready to take the reins. But …’ ‘Who is KK?’ Agnes asked quietly. ‘Kenneth Kaunda,’ Ronald said in one ear. ‘Kubla Khan,’ Miss Higgins whispered in the other.

Marriage, career, Africa itself – something had exposed the many ways they were at odds. Alone and aggrieved, at home all day, Agnes often caught herself berating the workers, ranting over trivialities.

And she quite liked Zambian Humanism, Kaunda’s version of socialism – his idea that ‘a person becomes a person through the people’.

Everyone knew that Mulenga had blundered too long against his mother’s pelvic bone during labour and come out sweet and smiley and a bit vague.

she had acquired a taste for work. She had come to believe that a job was not just a right but a necessity, like water or shelter or the touch of another.

‘The colonialists set the hut tax in 1901 and sent our men to the mines to pay it, leaving their poor wives to weep many tears like the fugitives from Poland during the war.’

death is a purifying fire, like chitemene – no matter the height of the crops, no matter how green or brown the leaves, the fire razes them all to the same level black.

How pleasing to count in counterpoint! What a happy sound a shout could be! This was nothing like the shouting between her parents. Those fights usually began as a back-and-forth, too, but they soon overlapped and eventually crowded into a chaos of mutual interruption.

The other students sat calmly, as if they were at assembly or Mass or watching each other perform a drama by Shaka Spear, or was it Shaka Zulu? Matha could never keep the two straight.

He had been throwing himself against the wall of his wife for so long that when she suddenly vanished, he fell right over the edge.

She ordered a Mosi and they went and sat under a tree outside to share it. He took a thronging gulp and passed it to her. She sipped it shyly though they both knew it was far from the first time she’d had a beer. She was being shy to show her love, being small to make him big.

‘So now we were really-truly going to the abysses of outer space?’ Godfrey grinned. ‘Not secretly rescuing our nation from’ – he imitated Ba Nkoloso’s voice and diction – ‘bondage and the pangs of misery and the eternal tantalising agony of slavery, serfdom, servitude, imperialism and fascist colonialism?!’

Big Gold Six played ‘Ti Chose Smith Bampando’, which tumbled into ‘Four Year Plan’, which gave way to Spokes Mashane. Alick Nkhata’s voice honeyed out from the wireless and the rock musicians rolled their eyes as the Eves closed theirs dreamily. When the Dark City Sisters came on with ‘Langa More’, Cookie opened another Castle and joined the dancing.

mbanji

It made Cookie ill. Only a sister, an alternative self, could inspire such a sordid mix of disgust and envy.

Kalingalinga, named for the bell on the door of the shop of the man who owned the land where the shanty town first squatted,