‘he came to it, and found nothing thereon but leaves only.’ He was peering at Mulenga as the boy mumbled along. ‘And said unto it,’ Nkoloso laid his trap: ‘Let every fruit grow on thee henceforward forever.’
Poor Mulenga fell right into it. ‘…let heavily flute glow…’ the boy began.
Nkoloso was about to correct him – ‘It says no fruit, not every fruit!’ – when he heard a low chuckle. Matha was hanging over the Bible, giggling.
‘And what is so funny, Miss Matha?’ Nkoloso frowned.
At this, Nkuka’s eyes widened and she kicked her sister under the table. Matha stopped laughing with a wince, but she couldn’t stop smiling.
‘You!’ Nkoloso stuck his finger in her face. ‘You have rememorised this passage?’
Matha slowly shook her head.
‘Ah-ah, so what is it, little girl? You think you can read?’
Matha slowly nodded her head.
‘Okay, you must show us then!’ Nkoloso turned the Bible around so it was facing the two girls. He pointed at the passage he had just intentionally distorted. Matha looked down at the page, then up at him.
‘No – you said you can read it. So read!’
Matha glanced at her sister, who shook her head fretfully, then at her brother, who shrugged languidly. Matha knelt up onto the log. With effort, she turned the heavy Bible around so that it was once again facing Nkoloso. He sucked his teeth, about to launch into a lecture on not wasting time, when he heard a high, soft sound he had never heard before. It was Matha’s voice.
‘…fig tree with-hard away. And when the dee, dees-seep,’ she faltered, then pushed through, ‘dee sigh polls saw it, they maravelled, saying, How soon is the fig tree with-hard away!’
Her finger was on the page, scanning from her right to her left above the words. This was how the book had been oriented for months, so this was how Matha had learned to read. Upside down.
‘Speak up, child!’ said Nkoloso, rising to his feet with astonishment.
‘Be thou leemoved, and be thou cast into the sea. It shall be done,’ little Matha piped, her voice reedy and confident, her finger inching slowly up the page. When she reached the top of the page – ‘whatsoever ye shall ask in prayer, believing, ye shall’ – she stopped and looked up at Nkoloso expectantly. Man and girl gazed at each other across the table, their lines of sight cutting slantwise through the air.
‘But you are only five,’ Nkoloso breathed. ‘But you are a miracle!’
Matha giggled and covered her mouth with her hand.
When the Mwamba children arrived for lessons the next day, the two stools were placed next to the log on one side of the table so they could all face the Bible together. When Mulenga complained about this unprecedented inclusion of the females – ‘they are feebo-minded,’ he bluntly echoed their father – Nkoloso gathered them close and told them a story.
As a mission-educated boy, Edward Mukuka Nkoloso had wanted to join the priesthood. But he had been chosen instead for that grand disaster, the war. The war had been a giant mirror: you saw white men die across from you, as equals. ‘Yes, we were all willing to die! Death or victory, but victory is sure!’ Nkoloso had realised that death is a purifying fire, like chitemene – no matter the height of the crops, no matter how green or brown the leaves, the fire razes them all to the same level black.
‘Equality!’ he cried. ‘You see? Only from level ground can you grow new crops. The war taught me that all men are equal before death, black and white. And yesterday,’ he shrugged, ‘Miss Matha showed me that this equality thing probably includes the females, too.’
* * *
Nkoloso tutored the three Mwamba children at his Roadside Academy for a year. Then in 1954, he was transferred from Lukashya Trades to a school in the Copperbelt. When Nkoloso left Luwingu, Mulenga continued skating by at the mission school, but his sisters’ education lapsed entirely. Left without childcare for her girls, Bernadetta simply absorbed them into the orbit of her labour. They became her minor satellites at Lwena Mission, circling her with their little buckets of water, in which they wet rags to wipe the chalkboards and wash the windows.
Nkuka seemed to take comfort in the orderliness of this work, as ready for rules as a soldier. But Matha was restive, her neck craning as she cleaned, her eyes peering over the boys’ shoulders at their exercises, her ears almost sprouting