After that first meeting, Lionel rarely spoke to Agnes. She lingered after each session, like a fool, but he was always stuck talking to Phil or to a student, untangling some knot in whatever web the group had been spinning for the hour, some analysis of Hegel, or was it Engels? It really was beyond her. Most of it anyway. She could follow the history: the ravages of colonialism, the hut tax, the displacement of the Tonga during the building of Kariba Dam. And she quite liked Zambian Humanism, Kaunda’s version of socialism – his idea that ‘a person becomes a person through the people’. It was a philosophy, which had always seemed to her more supple and sophisticated than a politics.
During her sixth meeting, in a fit of excitement, Agnes crowned herself secretary. Ronald had bought her an expensive tape recorder so she could leave instructions for the workers, most of whom could not read. She offered to bring it to campus to keep track of what was said. Lionel thanked her profusely. Recordings of these meetings would be very helpful, he said.
Agnes sometimes played them back to herself at home, pressing her ear to the speaker as she lay in bed or gave Carol a bath. She adored the ooh sound of the African socialist concepts from Tanzania and Kenya – uhuru and ujamaa and ubuntu, words for freedom and family and humanity. She believed in all those things, too. It was so obvious that they were true and good, especially when conveyed by Lionel’s rich voice and when applied to actual oppression of actual people, the Bantu. Agnes quizzed Grace about her cultural beliefs. What was it like to be Bantu? To come from an ancient tribe so naturally inclined to socialism that its name simply meant ‘people’.
‘Ah, you must ask the bwana,’ Grace would stutter vaguely, ‘I do not know such things.’
But Agnes never talked to her husband about meetings or radical ideas or anything any more, really. Ronald the dean had retreated completely – self-serious, self-important, and far, far away.
* * *
A couple of months after Agnes joined, Lionel’s Marxist club – they called themselves The Reds – put aside abstract questions of ideology and turned to what was literally in front of them: the university. What, in short, could be done? There was the perennial question of bursaries. There was a student housing shortage. And, though it seemed to Agnes a mundane question, there was the curriculum, which was Eurocentric to a fault. There weren’t many African fiction writers to choose from, but there was a new line of books – the Hyena Man series? – that everyone seemed to know about. The Reds started there and put together a new core sequence that would be more relevant to black Africans: Lenin, Marx, Memmi, Fanon.
The trouble began when a group of lecturers calling themselves the Zambian Caucus caught wind of this new syllabus and wrote a letter of complaint to the administration. Compared to lecturers from America and Europe, the caucus said, Zambian lecturers were second-class citizens: they received a lower salary, fewer opportunities, and had no say in big decisions. Case in point? The Reds’ curriculum, which had been written by foreigners ‘playing politics’ on campus.
The Reds were furious. What foreigners?!
‘Are we not all Zambians in this room?’ someone said at the start of the next meeting.
‘Not all of us,’ Lionel said softly.
Agnes touched her cheek, fondling a pregnancy pimple. It felt as if everyone was staring at her, either because she was white or because she was married to a dean.
‘That is besides the point,’ a young woman shouted. ‘Are we not trying to free ourselves from imperialist, colonialist frames of thinking like “foreign” and “national” in the first place?’
The Reds hummed in agreement. The question now was how to fight back against the Zambian Caucus’s letter of complaint. Another, bolder syllabus? A counterletter?
‘We can send letters,’ Phil’s wheezy voice came from the corner. ‘But will they kindle a fire? Mwebantu. Let us show that we are not just a paper revolution. We are not just stooges!’
Stronger suggestions began to swirl in the room. Boycott classes! Denounce Kaunda! Block Great East Road! Agnes tried to focus, but her cheeks felt fiery and her fingers slipped on the tape recorder. As soon as the meeting was over, she stood up and walked towards the front of the classroom to speak to Lionel. But he was