and Godfrey could no longer stay here. The Eves, Cookie said, had assembled as a group to issue a complaint about the party this morning. Matha and her boyfriend were no longer welcome.
In fact, despite their initial reluctance, the Eves had been quite taken with both the party and the Party. The space cadets, the Brigaders, the UNZA students, even Uncle Nkoloso with his dented helmet – these visitors had made the Eves realise that their generalised dissatisfaction with the world, their itch to complain about their conditions, could be turned into a political weapon. Within months, the Eves would be protesting everything from the shoddy food in the college canteen to Ian Smith’s white minority government in Rhodesia.
But Matha never got the chance to see these radicals blossom. Her stay at the hostel had drawn her no closer to the girls studying at Evelyn Hone, including her sister. Matha was just as smart as they were, if not smarter, but she could never grasp their slang, their gossip about holidays at Lochinvar and Lake Malawi, about imported sedans from Germany and Belgium, about fashion labels from Milan and New York. Cookie took advantage of this class divide when she lied to her sister. She said the Eves looked down on Matha and the Just Rockets.
She never divulged her real reason for sending her sister away. Cookie had come to realise that everything in her life felt borrowed: her schooling, her clothes, even her man – they were all on loan. But Matha, somehow, owned her life. And watching Matha waltz around here with everything she had earned for herself, paltry as it was – a shabby man, a child out of wedlock, a zany politics? It made Cookie ill. Only a sister, an alternative self, could inspire such a sordid mix of disgust and envy.
‘But where will I go?’ Matha asked, clutching her sister’s hand.
‘Go home, Matha,’ said Cookie. ‘Lusaka is not for everybody, you know.’
1969
But Lusaka was for Matha. The city still felt like a second skin to her. But neither Ba Nkoloso nor Nkuka would help her, and she was fed up with Godfrey. Matha was down to her last resort – the aunties. She made her way alone across town to a formidably large brick bungalow in Rhodes Park. This was home to Matha’s Aunt Beatrice, her father’s eldest sister and the reigning matriarch of the Mwamba family, though she no longer bore the surname.
In the 1950s, Aunt Beatrice had married a civil engineer from Abercorn, who had taken her to England while he pursued further training. Though she had done nothing there but keep house, it was widely believed that this stint abroad had bestowed her with great wisdom. Aunt Beatrice, who could not read or write, was thus considered an authority on most things. She spoke a flashy broken English, gem-like words strung on a thin grammatical string. She’d had six children, two of whom now lived in England, mostly for the purpose of mailing home the necessities to which the family had become accustomed during its time there, including Cadbury Whole Nut, Walkers shortbread, and packets of white bloomers from Marks & Spencer.
Upon their return, Aunt Beatrice’s husband had grown rich off the copper mines so, in the African way of familial socialism, she took care of their less fortunate relatives, calling upon this brood to offer gratitude and obedience in return. Her children endured marital and financial advice. Her grandchildren were paraded before her, squirming in hand-me-downs that smelled of disinfectant and the sweat of their siblings. Her extended family – the children of her siblings and cousins – drifted wishfully around the fringes of their luxurious home.
Thus, when Matha arrived to make her case, she joined a long queue of supplicants, kowtowers and spongers on the steps outside the Rhodes Park bungalow. As the hours passed, the sunshine went from shy to cheeky to downright insolent. By noon, it was rudely glaring down. Matha took off her bomber jacket and rocked herself to relieve her joints from sitting for so long. The dogs kept coming to sniff her, hoping she had changed her mind about them.
‘Futsek, futsek,’ she said irritably. ‘Ach, iwe. Go!’
There were three of them, pure Rhodesian ridgebacks the red colour of the dirt when the rains begin. They were enormous and friendly, as were their tongues. But they were dogs and Matha missed her cats. Ba Nkoloso had released all twelve from the lean-to in Matero when