with cars. Slo-go traffic had become like heart disease in Lusaka, clotting its major arteries.
‘Did you show it to him?’
‘Would you think less of me?’ She turned back to him, allowing her guilt to flip into indignation. ‘Is that not frikkin refined enough for you?’
He twisted his grips on the wheel. ‘I didn’t say that—’
‘STOP!’ she yelled, pointing at the yellow triangle in the road ahead of them. He slammed the brakes and the car screeched to a stop, bucking forward, then falling back on its heels. They both looked in the rearview mirror. Luckily, there was no one behind them. He pulled the car around, skirting the traffic triangles cordoning off the stretch of tarmac. It was just an empty construction site but the near accident had stunned them awake. After a moment, Naila started laughing.
‘What?’ he grumbled, glancing in the rearview again.
‘They spelled it wrong. They were supposed to paint STOP in the road. It says S-O-T-P.’
‘Idiots.’ He sucked his teeth. He still seemed shaky.
Naila turned to look out at Lusaka zipping flatly past.
‘It’s like the Mile of Crosses in Chile,’ she said.
‘The what?’
The typo in the road had winkled it out of her memory, where she had stored it years ago for an art history course called ‘Tricontinental: Art in the Third World’. She explained to Joseph how, in 1979, the Colectivo Acciones de Arte in Chile had staged a protest against Pinochet by turning the dashed lines in the roads into crosses.
‘They taped horizontal lines across them, turning those minuses into plusses. In one installation, they wrote no next to each one so it read no mas. No more.’
‘Hmm,’ he said, interested but still grumpy from their unresolved fight.
‘SOTP,’ she murmured. ‘It almost sounds like an abbreviation.’
‘Some of the parts,’ he said.
‘No, all of it – the whole thing sounds like an abbreviation.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘I mean SOTP is already an abbreviation, for the Sum Of The Parts.’
‘As in the whole is greater than?’
‘It’s a kind of business valuation. If a company has multiple divisions, you figure out what the divisions would be worth if it got broken up or acquired by another company.’
‘What’s a business valuation for?’
She already knew but at least they weren’t talking about Jacob any more.
* * *
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”. And the decolonisation of our country wasn’t just boycotts and speeches. It was bombing bridges, too.’
‘Zo’ona,’ Jacob said. ‘That was what they did during Cha-Cha-Cha.’
‘What we need now is a riot from within the system. Okay, stay with me.’ She told them the story of the weeping grandmother who had lost control of her bowels in the police station in Tirupati.
‘What does your shitty travel experience have to do with anything?’ Joseph asked.
‘In a police station, something like that can wreak havoc – it’s a different kind of bomb.’
‘A stink bomb,’ Jacob guffawed.
‘Ya, it’s funny, but that woman did more to fuck the police than any activist or politician could with ten times the effort. And she did it by making a mistake, by missing the target.’
‘It’s a stretch, Niles.’ Joseph raised an eyebrow.
‘It’s like the basis of your vaccine. Insert mistakes into our genetic code so The Virus can’t get inside our cells. We have to insert the errors into the system. Not with activism but with the inactive: