from her head as she strained to catch the lessons echoing from the mission walls. Bernadetta noted this behaviour in her youngest with frustration. She often thought of what Nkoloso had told her before he left the village.
‘Matha is very bright. You must nurture that brain! Do not let it rot.’
Her husband had no patience for this sentiment: ‘There is no use in educating females!’ he said. ‘Everyone knows that.’
But looking over the rows of mission boys every day, those dullards with their shaved skulls, their scalps marbled with ringworm, Bernadetta felt choked with helplessness. She decided to take things into her own hands.
* * *
One morning, Matha woke to the chill of a blade on the back of her neck. She flinched.
‘Stay still,’ her mother whispered.
Matha obeyed. Her brother and sister were still asleep in a heaving tangle beside her. Their father was snoring on a mat by the door. It was dawn. The sunlight coming through the thatched roof was reddish, like when Matha’s fingers covered her eyes to count for hide-and-seek. Wood pigeons coolly greeted each other outside. Lying on her side on the packed mud floor, her mother’s hand pinning her down, Matha listened to the birds and to the scrape of the knife rising up the back of her skull, shaving the hair from her head.
Two hours later, she was sitting in the back of a classroom at Lwena Mission. How different it looked from behind a desk! Instead of hunting the corners for rubbish and ants, or coralling the soapsuds you were splashing across a floor, you could just sit and look around: at the big blackboard awaiting its daily scripture, at the white walls carving the world into wedges of shadow and light. Matha blinked, tugging at the itchy neck of her brother’s old school uniform. She forgot her discomfort as soon as the teacher came in and began shouting lessons at the students, who shouted right back. Matha soon grasped the pattern of call-and-response and added her voice to the throng. How pleasing to count in counterpoint! What a happy sound a shout could be!
This was nothing like the shouting between her parents. Those fights usually began as a back-and-forth, too, but they soon overlapped and eventually crowded into a chaos of mutual interruption. These arguments sent Nkuka into a shivery ball, hands over her ears, and Mulenga into a rigid knot, his skinny arms around his bony knees. Matha alone would sit cross-legged on her mat, listening, her head tilting to and fro like a bell as she tried to follow along. Her parents argued about the size of women’s brains. They quarrelled about whether Bernadetta had inherited her father’s feeble-mindedness and passed it on to Mulenga. They bickered about whether witch doctors were any more rational than priests and whether the European census-takers were really blood-sucking wamunyama and whether a chief had more power than a queen.
Their most recent debate was about the Federation. The white settlers had unilaterally decided to combine Northern Rhodesia, where the Mwambas lived, with Rhodesia to the south and Nyasaland to the east. The black nationalists – educated men, veterans and radicalised miners – had vehemently protested against this. Rhodesia was a colony, Northern Rhodesia a protectorate: this merger would drag the country into greater subjugation. The African National Congress had demanded that the Federation be dissolved, that the colour bar be struck down, and that the British grant independence to Northern Rhodesia. Mr Mwamba was on the side of the Federation, believing the British knew best; Bernadetta was on the side of the Congress. ‘Freedom!’ she seethed with her bitterbright eyes. Matha pictured Federation and Congress as forces of nature: an unmovable mountain and an unstoppable flood pitched against each other.
But more and more, her parents’ arguments came down to a single, very human, figure of contention:
‘You know Ba Nkoloso has been fighting our cause in the Copperbelt,’ Bernadetta would say.
‘That man is very foolish! He is biting the hand that feeds him, going against the British!’
‘They are the ones who swallowed his hand! After he fought their war!’
Matha thrilled with the very mention of his name. Ba Nkoloso had been her first teacher, and Matha loved learning so much that she thought learning was love. As the years passed, she hoarded each shiny shred of information that blew through Luwingu about him. Some said he was selling medicine and toiletries to miners in the Copperbelt, that he had a job with Lever Brothers.