were rotten. The schoolboys laughed with the eerie mechanical sound of hyenas. Chief Shimumbi now mustered his courage and stepped forward. He spoke in Bemba and he too commanded the students to decry Ba Nkoloso. Walsh stepped back. Ba Nkoloso panted, his eyelids fluttering sluggishly like moths in the rain. Chief Shimumbi was working himself into a froth, insulting Ba Nkoloso’s manhood and ancestors, calling for his death.
In a burst of passion, the chief stretched his hand out to a kapasu for a stick. He grabbed it and hit Ba Nkoloso across the stomach. A knot began to form in Matha’s throat as Chief Shimumbi beat Ba Nkoloso about the shoulders, the back, the chest. Ba Nkoloso fell to his knees – the kapasus holding him up had dropped him, freeing their hands so they could join the beating – then tumbled onto his side. Some of the boys in the audience rose onto their knees to see better. But they said nothing. The teachers said nothing. The Fathers said nothing. All was quiet but for the thudding blows, the kapasus’ big sticks flinging up and down like the ibende that women use to pound maize for unga.
When they finally stopped, Ba Nkoloso lay still. The short muzungu called for a pail of water and splashed it over him until he startled awake. Then a black kapasu lifted him onto his knees and started to shave his head with a pair of scissors. Ba Nkoloso flinched as blood trickled down his cheek. The kapasu bent down with a grin and picked up a tuft of hair, sniffed it, made a face, and leaned forward to hand it to a student. The boy reached for it with a smile and just as he touched it, a cry rang out.
Matha, her face wet with tears, looked around. It was her mother, racing between the rows of kneeling children, pushing them aside like stalks in a field. In a flash, Bernadetta had reached the kapasu and knocked the scissors from his hand: ‘How dare you! Have you no shame!?’
The kapasu laughed and shoved her face forward onto the ground. Matha stayed seated, her heart pounding.
‘Is this man your husband? Should we give you his dick?’ the kapasu said in Bemba and spat on her. Bernadetta tried to get up. The kapasu stepped on her back.
‘No, let her stand,’ said the chief. ‘Let them see what a Congress whore looks like.’
The kapasu raised his boot. Bernadetta stood shakily, her eyes darting to Nkuka amongst the cleaning women, then to Matha amongst the schoolboys. The look in their mother’s eyes was impossible: it begged them to run to her immediately and it begged them to stay exactly where they were. Matha’s eyes fled this torment and landed on Ba Nkoloso’s.
He was looking right at her, his eyes like stones under water. And then – before Bernadetta and Ba Nkoloso and the other accused rioters were handcuffed and shoved into the Land Rovers that buckled away from the mission like a line of lazy buffalo – just then, Ba Nkoloso smiled at her. And she knew. No matter what happened to him or to her mother, to the Federation or to Congress, Edward Mukuka Nkoloso and Matha Mwamba would find each other.
* * *
All three of the Mwamba children were banned from the mission due to Bernadetta’s crimes. Mulenga started cultivating vegetables to sell. Nkuka cooked and cleaned and managed their small household. Matha forlornly reread her old exercise books, trying to eke more knowledge out of the everfading pencil marks.
Four years later, their mother died in Bwana Mkubwa prison. Dysentery from bilharzia, the authorities claimed. Mr Mwamba fell into a hole of grief. He had been throwing himself against the wall of his wife for so long that when she suddenly vanished, he fell right over the edge. While he took the long way out, with the help of his younger sister and a renewed religious faith – ‘God is in control,’ he would intone with dead eyes – his care of his children languished.
In the hazy period after her mother’s funeral, Matha slipped away to Ba Nkoloso’s home. She knew his wife and his sister were preparing to move to Lusaka, where the cadres of the African National Congress – which had been renamed the United National Independence Party, or UNIP for short – would protect them until Ba Nkoloso was released from prison in Salisbury. Waving a letter of permission she had forged