forte – the coq au vin was coq au vinegar, the boeuf bourguignon was oniony biltong, the au gratin scalded the mouth. Everything tasted like Saladi cooking oil, which just made Naila long for the familiar dishes lurking inside these ones: nkuku, nyama, shepherd’s pie.
‘You’re supposed to use olive oil,’ Joseph said exasperatedly. ‘Not just substitute—’
‘Joseph, dear,’ his grandmother cut in coldly, her eyelids like shut mussels. ‘If you wanted the meal to come out differently, you ought to have cooked it yourself.’
The reluctant scrape of cutlery. Ba Grace was silent. She was probably in her sixties but, blessed with the perennial youth of black women, she was ageing at a snail’s pace: a white hair a year, a wrinkle every other year. This seemed unfair next to Agnes, who was in her seventies, and whose face was like an old umbrella – all drapey folds and spiky bones and mouldy spots. They both stooped, though, and Ba Grace’s hairline had receded.
‘I cannot cook propalee with no pawa,’ she said. ‘I was having to use mbaula.’
‘Another power cut?’ Agnes’s knife clanged on her plate. She shook her head. ‘This load-sharing nonsense is a disaster. We’re not sharing the burden of electricity, we’re bearing it.’
‘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.’
Naila forked a piece of chicken into her mouth. It was somehow both oily and dry.
‘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?’
‘To be sure,’ said Agnes. ‘Kariba Dam was cursed from the start. Thousands of people were displaced in the building of that dam.’ She slowly ran her knife back and forth over a grey lump of beef, making it wriggle obscenely. ‘The Italians did that.’
‘The Italians?’ Naila frowned.
Agnes paused her sawing and turned her head in increments towards Naila, as if her sharp nose were the hand of a clock. ‘Yes. The Italian company that built the dam. Impresit.’
‘Right,’ Naila muttered. She knew that her grandfather, who had died before she was born, had worked at Kariba Dam but she had never learned its history.
‘Oh dear, you have Italian family, don’t you?’ Agnes smiled, her closed eyelids gleaming. ‘Don’t mind me. There’s blood on all our hands, really. The Brits are the ones who built the dam on the Zambezi instead of the Kafue. To keep the electricity near the mines, or perhaps I should say to keep the power near the money.’
‘And now there’s neither money nor power,’ said Joseph.
‘Ah, but these power cuts are velly bad,’ Ba Grace chimed in, still stuck at the beginning.
‘Government is talking with the Russians about building a nuclear plant,’ said Joseph.
‘The Russians. The Americans. The Chinese,’ Agnes shook her head. ‘It’s the Cold War all over again.’
‘Or the Scramble for Africa,’ said Naila. ‘The Sino-American Consortium owns the dam and the electric grid now.’
‘Don’t forget the clinics,’ said Joseph bitterly. ‘The SAC owns the vaccine clinics, too.’
* * *
Jacob, Joseph and Naila – the three musketeers, the band, the squad. They were chilling together all the time now. They would sit on the roof of the New Kasama house, talking politics, drinking whisky and getting high, listening to that old tape from Joseph’s grandmother – a British lecturer and Zambian students fervently hashing out the political dilemmas of the day: Kaunda’s One Party State and his dodgy diplomacy with various Marxist factions during decolonisation.
It seemed like a utopia compared to what was happening in Zambia these days. The president – nicknamed Kalulu for the slick way he wriggled outside the law – had shut down a newspaper and arrested his critics: one for a rude toast, another