raised – they had needed the whole room. Grace was washing the floor, muttering about the fate that had her cleaning not only the messes of bazungu, but those of her useless relatives as well.
The useless relative herself, lying half-naked on the doubled sleeping mats, barely registered these complaints through her muffled senses, dulled by the herbal anaesthetic she’d been fed. The baby was where the midwife had left it, curled up wetly on her stomach, slowly oozing up towards her breasts. Matha felt as hollow as this empty room, her thoughts eddying around like smoke. The midwife’s parting curse scythed through it like a flash of light. Mfwiti. Witch. The baby finished its crawl and tried to latch. Matha helped it along, grimacing at the sharp tug on her nipple.
They had called her mother a witch, too. As a girl, Matha had always seen her mother as an ideal woman – the fury, the industry, the permanent sense of grievance. This world is not enough, Bernadetta had said, reaching her fingers through the wire fence the one time their father had brought the children to visit her in Bwana Mkubwa prison. Mr Mwamba had scarcely been able to look at his wife that day. It was true that everything about her was disgracefully ragged: her hair, her clothes, her face. But when her mother had clawed at the fence, Matha had grabbed her fingers with pride, clutching the fervour there. This world is not enough. Matha had always resolved that she would turn the world right over, for her mother, as her mother.
The baby unlatched and began to cry, its halting breath cool against Matha’s damp chest. She tried to bounce it, jiggling it up and down. At the prison, Bernadetta had pulled Matha towards her – so close that Matha’s ear had pressed painfully against the wire fence – and she had whispered: Go to Ba Nkoloso! Find him! Matha had followed those instructions to a tee. She had hitched a ride to Lusaka with Ba Nkoloso’s family, waited for the great man to be released, joined his Academy, and become a star astronaut in his Space Programme. She had become the revolutionary in disguise that her mother had been. And now?
The baby started to cry again. Matha had never considered that being female would thwart her so, that it would be a hurdle she had to jump every time she wanted to learn something: to read a book, to shout the answers, to make a bomb, to love a man, to fight for freedom. She had never thought Ba Nkoloso, Godfrey and Nkuka would each abandon her in turn to poverty and lone motherhood. Matha bounced her baby in vain. Go to sleep, baby, she whimpered. Shut up, baby. She had never imagined that to be a woman was always, somehow, to be a banishable witch. Now, as her baby wept for hunger and as she herself wept distractedly – weeping was just what she did now, who she was – Matha felt that dawning shock that comes when you look at yourself and see a person you once might have pitied.
Dear old Eddie, Afronautical whiz! Like us, a most righteous whiner. No matter how powerful the machine may be, never doubt the old squeaky wheel. Hark his pleas: Let me see! Give us free! He obeyed his own statute of liberty. If Livingstone was our white father, Nkoloso was our black prince – Bemba royalty, they say. Equally smart, just as possessed, abrim with the will to explore…
Born in a village, he was schooled at a mission and sent for the Catholic priesthood. But the British stole his future and sent him to Burma to fight their Second World War. On his very first flight, they say he spoke up and asked to step onto the clouds. This early release into the wide, wide world had pierced the bold man with wanderlust.
He came home from the war and started a school, but the colonial powers refused him. So he started a riot, a real revolution, then escaped to the bush to hide out. When the kapasus found him, he promptly came forward, and stretched out his wrists for the cuffing. They netted him, near-drowned him, tortured him, jailed him. Behold the dumb beast! they cried. But nothing they did could stop this man. Talk about freedom of mind! In a prison in the bush in the middle of Africa, he penned missives to the Queen of