his Space Programme? Or would his plan for revolution backfire?
* * *
It was time for the water landing. Godfrey and Matha faced each other. He slid his hands under her armpits and lifted her up, trying to hide the strain of it – she was a heavy girl now. The oil drum was already in the stream, Reuben and Fortunate holding it in place as Godfrey lowered her inside. As soon as Matha’s feet touched the bottom, the drum bucked violently. She gripped the sides and Godfrey gripped her shoulders.
‘Are you fine, Sister of the Heavens?’
‘I’m fine,’ she smiled. He let go and gave the drum a push and off she floated. The cadets waved. The reporters stared. The cameras gnashed their teeth.
As she wobbled from the shore, Godfrey’s figure receding in the distance, Matha giggled. Who would have thought she would end up being an astronaut? When Ba Nkoloso had invited her to join his new revolutionary academy, she had assumed it would be like entering combat. There were uniforms, yes – the bomber jacket she wore, the metal helmet that Ba Nkoloso wore – but they were more like costumes, and the battlefield more like a theatre of war.
The drum spun and dipped as it neared a rock in the stream. She leaned out and grabbed a branch jutting from a tree on the shore. She steadied the barrel, keeping it wedged against the rock so the reporters could take some footage. The sound of the river beating against the steel was like a giant kalimba – the plonking and plinking made her ankles hum. Matha gazed up at the sky, trying to look contemplative, but the trees above tangled her view.
Yes, serving as a cadet in the Zambia National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy involved quite a bit of drama. It meant waking at dawn to paint signs – DOWN WITH FEDERATION! AFRICAN FREEDOM NOW! – on the colonial governor’s house. It meant staging sit-ins at all-white venues in Lusaka like the Rendezvous café and the Ridgeway Hotel. It meant writing protest songs with Godfrey, who had formed a band – the Just Rockets – to play at freedom rallies. It meant making homespun bombs with paraffin and cloth, and sometimes with wires and triggers. It meant crouching behind bushes at roadblocks to throw them at cars and sneaking out at night to plant them under bridges.
And sometimes, it meant pretending to be an astronaut, giving interviews about cats and rockets and technology to white men with squinty eyes and sweaty lips, trying to convince them that Zambia would land a man on the moon before America or Russia. Matha thought of Ba Nkoloso’s words: This is a guerilla campaign and a propaganda campaign. This is Cha-Cha-Cha! We will make the white men dance to our tune!
Matha smiled at them now, the white men. The reporters were packing up their beastly camera. One had wandered off to sit under a tree. Another stared at her, his head tilted to one side. She heard a crackle in a bush on the shore. Godfrey had come to help her disembark. He splashed into the stream, grabbed the edge of the drum, and dragged it onto the bank. He lifted her out of the drum and she swayed before him, the ground see-sawing beneath her. He glanced over his shoulder, then pulled her behind a bush and stepped closer. He slowly unzipped her bomber jacket halfway down.
‘Comrade,’ said Godfrey, by way of greeting.
‘Comrade,’ said Matha, smiling against his lips.
* * *
Edward Mukuka Nkoloso lay on his back on a bench at Independence Stadium, looking up. The sun had set and the moon had risen, a fingerprint smudge in the greyblue sky. Below it was the round rim of a stadium lightshade. And below the shade he could see Matha’s forehead and cheekbone in silhouette, curving above the round of her breast, which in turn curved above the mound of her stomach. The moon, the shade, the rounds of Matha standing above him – each sphere darker than the last, each overlapping, moons on moons. Nkoloso sighed. The spheres were eclipsing. Apollo 11 had landed.
Nkoloso directed his grief at Matha’s belly. Once, he thought he saw the tiniest of spheres, a tear, slip down her cheek – a rolling movement, a flash – but it was an illusion. He had summoned her here to discuss the Academy’s misfortunes – both external and internal – but she had offered neither