was two more students than he’d expected. ‘They’ll be quiet,’ their mother had promised him in a tone that also commanded her daughters, then run off before he could protest.
No other students had shown up to the Roadside Academy, which was squeaky new, so Nkoloso led the three children to a table under a muombo tree outside his home. He sat Mulenga on a stool beside him and put the girls on a log on the other side of the table. Nkoloso took off his helmet and opened the mammoth King James Bible he had set on the table.
‘The Bible has everything,’ Nkoloso explained to Mulenga. ‘This is how the White Fathers taught me. Latin, theology, science.’ He looked up at the sky. ‘Fig trees! Fishes! Even mathematicals, although they are not always exact. Let us see how well you can read.’
But Mulenga was staring not at the book but at a spider skittering up the muombo tree beside them. Nkoloso pincered the top of the boy’s skull, turning it so his eyes fell on the page. ‘Genesis 1:1. In the beginning…’
Each lesson began this way, with Nkoloso steadfastly coaxing Mulenga to read. Eventually, Nkoloso would grow bored with the boy’s stilted recitations and start explaining forms of logic to him instead. If you can see the tree, you can go to the tree. Here to there. If this, then that, and the same with the other. Soon, the lesson had become an exercise less in literacy than in analogy. Every parable, every event of Christ’s brief life, was an occasion for an exegesis of Nkoloso’s. Reading, writing, ‘rithmetic and a touch of revolution.
The Lord called Lazarus from his grave and raised him from the dead.
‘Just so,’ said Nkoloso, ‘white settlers dug up our graves to make way for the line of rail!’
Thou tellest my wanderings: put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book?
‘The colonialists set the hut tax in 1901 and sent our men to the mines to pay it, leaving their poor wives to weep many tears like the fugitives from Poland during the war.’
The Lord took five loaves and blessed and broke them to fill the bellies of five thousand.
‘How many loaves would Christ have used to feed starving Africans in the famine of 1916?’
The Lord went unto his disciples, walking upon the sea.
‘You know,’ Nkoloso smiled at the sky, ‘on my first aeroplane flight, from Bombay to Burma, I asked the pilot to stop so I could step out on the clouds. He refused, the monkey!’
Christ on the cross had asked his Father, Why hast thou forsaken me?
‘“Is that you, Edward?” That is what my father cried when we ran into each other by chance in Mombasa. He was already quartermaster on tour of duty with the Northern Rhodesian Regiment,’ Nkoloso mused sadly. ‘He didn’t know I had also been conscripted.’
As their mother had promised, the Mwamba girls were quiet during these lessons, though in different ways. Nkuka gazed ahead unseeing, rigid and quivering as a stalked hare. Matha seemed awestruck too, but she was by nature a laughing girl, squirmy in her seat. At the end of the hour, she was often kneeling on the log, leaning over the table, her neck stretched forward like a turtle. Sometimes, as Nkoloso guided her brother through the reading of a sentence, the student’s drone lagging behind the teacher’s booming recitation, Matha would issue a squeak from her hover above them. Nkoloso would look up from the Bible, fixing her fiercely until she tumbled back onto her bum, covering her giggling mouth with her hand, coconut eyes wide.
Nkoloso would smile at her – he was gentle, in truth – and quote 1 Timothy 2:11.
‘Let the woman learn in silence,’ he’d say, patting the mukule plaits furrowing her hair.
Then he would turn back to Mulenga, but the boy was always already staring at a cloud or a leaf or his hand – anything other than the page in front of him.
After months of these futile lessons, Nkoloso lost his patience. The boy seemed built of indifference, impervious to knowledge or interest of any kind. Nkoloso decided to set a trap for him. They were in the middle of reading the story of the fig tree that Christ curses to barrenness.
‘Now in the morning as he returned into the city, he hungered,’ Nkoloso read aloud.
‘…the seedy he angered…’ Mulenga echoed in his muddled English.
‘And when he saw a fig tree in the way,’ Nkoloso continued,