Others said that this was just a ruse. Nkoloso was organising strikes among the miners and had led his new school on a march to the district commissioner’s office to protest the digging up of African graves for European settlements. ‘That man, he cannot resist resistance!’ they said.
* * *
For three years, Matha attended the Lwena Mission School in secret – eventually, an open secret among the students. When she turned eight, her dimples deepening by the day, a group of boys dragged her behind the geyser and yanked down her shorts to confirm their suspicions. They pointed and laughed. Matha stared at them, unfazed, legs straddled wide to keep the shorts from falling off. Cowed by the lack of shame in her eyes, the boys resorted to extortion.
‘Listen here, Matthew,’ one said, ‘we will keep your secret from Father Superior Deslauries and the teachers. But you must give us the answers to the maths exercises.’
Matha handed them over without rancour. She learned to temper herself in class: she never spoke up, never raised her hand to go to the board. She even inserted a few errors into her work, which only proved her cleverness – it’s not so easy to be believably wrong. She sat in the back of the classroom, absorbing lessons and rumours, a quiet unsmiling repository.
Then one day, Matha sat up in her chair. The two boys in front of her were whispering.
‘Ba Nkoloso has been let out of Bwana Mkubwa. He is coming home…’
It was 1957. It seemed that the colonial government was sending Nkoloso back to Luwingu because they could no longer invent reasons to keep him behind bars. He would be under a loose sort of house arrest. Over the next month, Matha overheard more rumblings. Ba Nkoloso was apparently still acting as a surreptitious Congress leader, holding secret meetings in beer halls, telling people not to pay their taxes or work for the whites. He had even instructed the villagers in Luwingu not to pay respects to their chief Shimumbi, who he claimed had ‘sold us to the Europeans!’
This was considered a terrible betrayal – to turn black people against each other. But Matha believed her former tutor would do it, and she believed he was right to do so. She still remembered the righteous conversations he used to have with her mother when she came to fetch them from the Roadside Academy. About the war, imperialism, democracy, ‘one man, one vote’ – which he had amended to ‘one person, one vote’ after Matha had revealed that she knew how to read. She longed to see her old teacher again, to witness his fiery speeches.
Then one day in August, the rumours about his resurrection in Luwingu took physical form and entered her classroom, like a proof. Ba Nkoloso’s sister Ernestina, a Sister at the mission, appeared in the doorway holding the hand of a boy.
‘This is mwana mwaume,’ said Sister Ernestina, ‘and he will be joining your class.’
The boy scanned the classroom with a defiant smile. Matha recognised him immediately. She had only met him a handful of times during the Roadside Academy years. But this was definitely Ba Nkoloso’s son – you could see the resemblance in the bullish forehead. What was it like to have a father so struck with divine brilliance that people called him John the Baptist? Just then, the boy’s eyes caught hers and his smile quivered. Matha dropped her eyes to her desk.
* * *
‘Rudiculous!’ said Mr Mwamba, stomping across the hut. ‘John the Baptist?!’
Bernadetta sucked her teeth. She was squatting on the floor, serving a burnt supper to the children. ‘Ba Nkoloso is not the one saying it. It is the people. They are ready for a leader!’
Mr Mwamba put his hands on his hips. ‘Is he not baptising them like he’s a priest?’
Bernadetta chuckled. ‘Yes, he dunks them in the river, and…’
Mr Mwamba bent over and put his finger over his wife’s lips. ‘Brasphemy!’
Bernadetta spat his finger off indifferently, continuing to adorn the rim of the pot of nshima with little round ntoshis for the children to pluck off when they had cooled.
‘Yes, he splashes them in the Mupombwe river,’ she said. ‘Then he sends them off with a Congress card!’ She laughed, deep and low and knowing, as she handed Nkuka a tin cup.
Later that night, Matha woke to the sound of that same laugh, but quieter. The door to the hut was open, the moonlight like spilled mukaka on the floor. She