in her father’s hand, Matha managed to persuade the two women that they needed her help caring for Nkoloso’s children. They travelled by car to Ndola, then took the train down to the capital, a dusty, smelly three-day journey. Matha spent most of it squeezed up against an open window, watching the country roll by under the immense unmoving sky. She was thirteen years old.
Matha loved Lusaka. She felt for the first time that the rhythm of her body matched the rhythm of her surroundings. The thick press of pedestrians fit her soul like a glove. Her pulse beat in time with their feet. Her breathing rate followed the pace of the cars on those unpaved arteries with their grandiose names: Cairo Road, Great East Road, Great North Road. Double-decker buses called Giraffes trundled along them – the ticket checkers made Matha wrap an arm over her head to prove she was old enough to ride.
For a year, Matha essentially ran the household in Matero while Ba Nkoloso’s sister worked, his wife sought assistance from UNIP, and his children attended school. Ba Nkoloso’s eldest son was the same age as her, but he lorded around, temporary master of the house, while Matha swept and washed and cooked and mopped. She finagled her own small recompense. She befriended stray cats, feeding them scraps and naming them after Christ’s disciples. And every morning, she woke before dawn and sat over the boys’ schoolbooks, learning their lessons until the chickens began their chuck-chuck-chuckling and the breakfast mbaulas swarmed the air with specks of ash.
When Ba Nkoloso got out of prison in 1962, the family threw a big party – chicken and goat on the brai, crates of Mosi and Coca-Cola, friends and comrades spilling in and out of the house in Matero. Matha spent the day cooking behind the compound with the other women and only went to greet Ba Nkoloso in the evening. He was sitting in an office chair outside in the yard, wearing his old army helmet. It was dented and dulled with age, but Matha thought it sat on his head like a crown. He grinned gappily – he had lost a tooth somewhere along the way – joking about how the prison in Salisbury had been a map of the continent, every nation in a different cell block, except it was a Scramble for Soap rather than for Africa!
Matha knelt at his feet.
‘Ah-ah! Can it be?’
‘It can.’ She shyly touched her hair. She had a little afro now that she no longer had to keep it shorn. Ba Nkoloso asked after her studies, quizzed her on maths and science.
‘You’ve grown, my dear.’ He shook his head happily. ‘You are like the moon, eh?’
The men around them laughed, thinking he meant her newly round body. Matha glanced down at the curves that had emerged the moment she turned fourteen – they couldn’t be denied. But when she stood up, excusing herself, Ba Nkoloso caught her hand and pulled her close and explained what he had meant.
‘Your mind is still shining, Miss Matha!’ he whispered. Then he reached down, picked up a book from under his chair, and pressed it into her hands. ‘You will be my moon.’
* * *
A few weeks later, Matha was in a lean-to behind the Matero house, hunched over the book Ba Nkoloso had given her. The pages were polkadotted with mould and barely legible where his scrawled marginalia had spread like weeds over the text. On the floor before her were some basic household items: a glass bottle, a polishing cloth, a small plastic bottle. Matthias slunk around purring, trying to distract her. The sun was setting, making the lean-to glow red. Matha sat in that emerging emergency light, learning how to make a Molotov cocktail. The instructions were simple – something breakable plus something flammable plus something combustible…
She heard a honk. She covered the book and the items with a chitenge and stood up, brushing the dirt from the seat of her black skirt. She let herself out and locked up. Ba Nkoloso’s pickup truck was wheezing at the back gate, his scattertoothed grin hovering in the driver’s window. Matha climbed into the bed of the pickup, joining the other four UNIP Youth cadets there – Bambo Miti, Fortunate Nkoloso, Reuben Simwinga and Godfrey Mwango. They were wearing all black, too, and sipping Mosi from bottles, which they raised in greeting.
The pickup jolted into motion and Matha heard a loud bleating sound. She