lips, sending a surge into the throbbing knot at the centre of his body.
Hours later, when he got back to Kalingalinga and stumbled over to RIP to give Ba Godfrey the news, he saw Joseph walking out of the clinic, a bulky sack over his shoulder. Jacob was about to step forward and offer to pay the loan back when Joseph tripped and fell, the sack flying off him. Jacob was still thrumming with tipsiness, with the brush of Pepa’s lips, the grip of the General’s handshake. His muscles felt taut and alive. This strength seemed somehow correlated to Joseph’s weakness. So rather than offering Joseph a hand up, Jacob found himself jumping him instead, wrestling with him until they were locked in a sweaty grip.
Jacob let go first and stood, smacking the dust off his thighs. Joseph was still on the ground, chuckling feebly. Jacob looked away. Across the woodyard, Ba Godfrey was sitting at the base of the mopane, watching them, a queer look on his face. Jacob walked over to his grandfather, navigating around a new chicken coop and a queen-sized bed. A freshly made coffin was standing on its end beside its maker.
‘Shani, bwana,’ Jacob said with a sloppy grin. ‘And who is that one for?’
* * *
No. 74 was electric with weeping. It seemed every woman in the compound had gathered there, their arms in the air, fingers trilling to what sounded like a sermon. Jacob pushed his way through the throng, urged forward by something less than love and more than curiosity. He had a desperate wish to see the body and believe. But when he managed to get through, a woman was blocking his view. She stood stock-still, holding a Bible open under the glare of the bare bulb, reading out from it in a hoarse shout. The words she spoke were unfamiliar and she threshed them out quickly, as if they tasted bad:
…locusts were like unto horses prepared unto battle and on their heads were as it were crowns like gold and their faces were as the faces of men and they had hair as the hair of women and their teeth were as the teeth of lions and they had breastplates as it were breastplates of iron and the sound of their wings was as the sound of chariots of many horses running to battle and they had tails like unto scorpions and there were stings in their tails…
The woman reading was short and round and dark. Her chitambala was halfway off, her grey afro in disarray, and her chitenge drooped low on her hips. Her eyes and mouth stretched wide as she poured forth her torrent of words. But what was most shocking – and the reason Jacob didn’t recognise his gogo at first – was that her face was completely dry. And that was how he knew, that was why he believed. Sylvia Mwamba was dead and Matha Mwamba had stopped crying. Just like that.
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