they teach you new hymns, give you passports to heaven, send you back to spread the word to the people. You awaken from death with two Books in your hands – one black, one white; one sky, one ground – both aflame with the spirit of God.
You gather the people like a flock of wild birds, they come to you 1,000 in a week. You give them new names, touch their foreheads with water, build a church beyond churches: the Lumpa. Your foes steal your Books and demean your wise teachings, but you’re a prophet, a queen. Regina! They send the White Fathers to call you the devil, to mock little Alice in Wonderland. They send chiefs and kapasus to demand your taxes. You say: ‘Why must we render to Caesar?’ They send Kaunda’s men to denounce you as savage. They say: ‘Drown the Lumpa forever.’
You light the match and set it to thatch. You repel all invaders, the white and the black. You defend your churches with bow and axe – and spirit, of course, which streams in your veins, the burning white gold of the sun. Guns rise to the sky or merely shoot water, their bullets can no longer pierce you! But only your body is safe. Your people lie around you, scattered in heaps, mowed down by the hundred, riddled with holes, draining blood.
We drained yours first, only a little, but enough to cause cerebral malaria. Oh Alice Lenshina! Our own Joan of Arc! So many dead at the birth of this nation and all from a single, stray bite!
Matha
1953
For as long as she could remember, Matha Mwamba’s life had been entwined with Edward Mukuka Nkoloso’s, like the serpent that curls around the staff in the symbol for medicine. They came from the same Bemba village, Luwingu, in the north of Northern Rhodesia. Matha first met Nkoloso when she was still a child. At the time, her father was teaching farming at Lukashya Trades Institute in Kasama and her mother worked as a cleaner at a nearby Catholic mission. Matha’s older brother, Mulenga, attended the lower school at the mission, but he was in danger of failing. 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. But Mr Mwamba was desperate for the boy to improve. Education was paramount for black people.
Edward Mukuka Nkoloso had just returned home after fighting abroad for the British in the Second World War, and he was teaching at Lukashya Trades too – maths, English, Latin. But bucking colonial restrictions against native-led schools, Nkoloso had decided to form his own Roadside Academy, as he called it, to teach science. Nkoloso sounded like someone who had seen the future so Mr Mwamba decided to send his son to the Roadside Academy. His teaching brought in enough to pay for extra lessons, especially since his wife, a fiery Tonga woman named Bernadetta, insisted on keeping her job at Lwena Mission.
Bernadetta had spent most of her girlhood caring for her father, who hadn’t been right in the head ever since he had been struck down by a white settler when he was a boy. After her father died, she moved as far away from Siavonga as possible, to Northern Province, and before marrying Mr Mwamba, 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. But with both Mwambas working and Mulenga at school and lessons, there was no one at home to watch the girls. Matha and Nkuka could not go to school – they were too young and female, besides – and they had just reached that ungovernable age: too heavy to be papu’d on Bernadetta’s back as she worked but too small to watch each other. So, when the time came for her son’s first lessons at the Roadside Academy, Bernadetta brought her daughters along as well.
* * *
Nkoloso raised his army helmet and frowned down at the three Mwambas, aged ten, six, and five. Mulenga’s attention was already wandering, wriggling like a litter of puppies from his grasp. Nkuka stood stock-still, gaze locked on her dusty feet. Matha, the youngest, looked up at him with unscratched eyes – virginal white and deep brown, like the coconuts he had first cracked open in Mombasa on his way to the front in Burma. This