the young man waiting for her inside, dressed in a lime-green suit. Without a word, he turned and led her to the restaurant.
Matha had never been inside a hotel before, not only because she was poor, but also because she was black: the Ridgeway still had a strict colour bar. As they rushed along, her eyes bounced around, taking in the dizzying decor – a black and white chequered ceiling, floor tiles fitted in a staircase design, striped ferns in silver planters, a curtain printed with bundles of twigs, a chandelier that looked like a model of the solar system.
As she and the bellboy neared the restaurant, she heard voices and the tinkle of metal striking glass and porcelain. They stopped at the entrance and peeked in. Matha saw a dozen round tables, decked out in white tablecloths, littered with candles and plates of half-eaten food, the meat undone into messy bones and flesh. The bazungu guests were eating and drinking and smoking, speaking a thin piping English, as if sucking their words through straws. Hearing a slight commotion, Matha turned. The other cadets were careering down the corridor towards her, the white corpse on their shoulders, Ba Nkoloso leading the charge. The sweat on their foreheads looked like royal Bemba scarification under the electric lights.
‘Bwela,’ said the bellboy and pulled her around the corner. There were four switches in the wall. The bellboy nodded at her, reaching for two. She put her hands on the other two.
‘Now!’ Ba Nkoloso yelled.
They flipped the switches down in concert. Everything went black. A pause. Thuds. Glass breaking. A shriek. Matha groped her way back around the corner to the entrance. A soft glow was coming from the restaurant – the candles on the tables were still lit. She peeked inside again. The bazungu guests were on their feet, their faces fixed in stark masks of fear and disgust. Ba Nkoloso’s back was to the door but Matha could see his silhouette, topped by his spouting mane of dreadlocks. He pointed at the corpse at his feet, its legs spread crookedly, the tag on its toe like a little flag.
‘White men!’ Ba Nkoloso shouted. ‘Your time is up! We have had enough of this muzungu governor Welensky, with his Boer rules and violent antics!’
He stepped on the chest of the corpse. There was a collective gasp.
‘We have killed his wife!’ he declared. ‘And now, we shall pounce on you!’
The cadets pressed forward into the room, jeering and shoving the hotel guests, poking them in the chest. The whites stumbled past Matha at the threshold, their shoes slipping on the corridor floor. She watched them go. Giggles roiled at the base of her spine, then rose up her body and spilled out of her mouth, with the faintest taste of bile. She felt the ground drop from beneath her feet – someone had whisked her up into the air and placed her over his shoulder.
He carried her into the restaurant, skirting the fallen wicker furniture and the marauding cadets, who had broken into song: Tiyende pamodzi ndim’tima umo! He lifted her onto the bar, sending glasses and bottles rolling. Matha winced as an ice spill seeped through the seat of her skirt. She blinked up at her rescuer. He bent and kissed her on the mouth.
‘Welcome to the Academy,’ Godfrey Mwango said, a scar on his neck gleaming in the candlelight.
1964
The headquarters of the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy was in Chunga Valley, a forested area west of Lusaka, where the edge of the city bled into the edge of the bush. Minister of Space Research Edward Mukuka Nkoloso walked among his cadets, patting shoulders, adjusting capes, igniting cheer. As usual, he wore an army jacket and had covered his dreadlocks with his combat helmet, both preserved from his service in the Northern Rhodesian Regiment. But today he had festooned this sartorial drabbery with colour: green silk trousers and a heliotrope cape. The cameras would be filming in black and white, but it was important to suit oneself to the occasion. The Zambian Space Programme was about to make its television debut.
It was September 1964, the height of the Cold War. The news that a fledgling African nation had joined the space race had hit the rest of the world like a scandal, pinging across the oceans, relaying around the planet like the very satellite that Nkoloso was shooting for.
‘We will put a Zambian on the moon by the end