After his comrades finally gained independence, they too tied his hands with red tape. They wrapped him in respect, sinecured his feet. He looked out at the land, then up at the sky, and said it was time for the moon. No brakes, they said. Too free, they said. Had the revolutionary lost his mind? Was he just playing games or was he just playing tricks? Was he a conman or a madman or a visionary seer? Should we praise or mock the stars in his eyes?
There is no way to tell, but as flyers ourselves, we claim him as one of our own. Mukuka Nkoloso, the ultimate bug – needler of conventions and rules. But in the end, he succumbed to custom. They shamed him with scandal, they humbled his hubris, they said, Don’t get too carried away now! It’s true that freedom can fling you too far, that ambition can burn too bright. Just ask Nkoloso’s star Afronaut Matha. Launch too quick, fly too high, and you might perish in the calamitous sun!
II
The Mothers
Sylvia
1975
But why does she cry? Which one? You know, whats-her-name. Mary? Mother Mary is always crying in the pictures. It is like naming your child Scissors – you will be getting what you have asked for. Imwe, she is not Mary! She is Ma-tha. Oh-oh? Isn’t it Matha who was washing the feet of Our Lord Saviour Jesus Christ? No, that was the sister. Matha was the one sweeping! Aah? Maybe this one is also making water to wash the floors. Ha! The Bible tells me so: Put thou my tears into thine botolo. It is for baptising! Is she not dying? Awe, you cannot die from crying. Maybe she is crying for the dead. Maybe she is like Alice Lenshina, who saw a vision. Maybe she is Mama Afrika weeping for – A-ta-se, you people! This woman is just a witch. That is the beginning and middle and end-all of it. Mwandi, maybe she has a disease we have never seen. Maybe she is the Queen of Chainama Hills.
Chainama Hills was Lusaka’s mental hospital. Straightjacketed inmates sometimes escaped from it, emerging over the hill with the jerky crawl of inswa from the holes in the ground after the rains. The escapees would stumble along Great East Road until an indignant or compassionate citizen managed to chase them down and return them to the hospital. Matha Mwamba was not an escaped inmate. Nor was she the mother of Christ, nor a saint, nor a witch. But she was silent and unfriendly, and this served to confirm each one of the reputations that floated around the crying woman of Kalingalinga.
Aloof as her twelve cats had been, she would walk solemnly through the compound every morning, her basket of vegetables on her head, her baby on her back. She had set up a solo stall in a corner of the market between a woman selling dried mushrooms and another selling dried caterpillars. At first, Matha’s only customers were absentminded men or women softened by her sweet-faced baby. Then word spread about her produce. The chibwabwa and lepu and visashi were a little withered, but the tomatoes! The tomatoes were delicious! Practically pre-salted.
At first, Matha’s baby girl would cry for this or that, but as time went on, even this natural language ceased. Sylvia might make plaintive noises or crease her brow like an irascible old man. But no tears would come, as if she were cowed by her mother’s incessant crying, as if she had realised that if she did let a tear spill, it would be lost in the deluge anyway. Sylvia was a quiet girl in a quiet world. Her mother rarely spoke. Her Aunty Grace, chatty enough with their neighbours, fell silent as a stone whenever Sylvia and her mother entered the cube they shared.
Deprived of human voices, Sylvia took to touch. If an unfamiliar customer approached the tomato stall, she would scurry behind her mother and start scaling up to her back, where she belonged. When Sylvia grew too big to be papu’d, she wrapped her arms around her mother’s leg instead. And when she grew too big to cling, she patted herself on the shoulder, rubbed the side of her neck, hugged her own knees or crossed them.
Sylvia did eventually find a friend. It turned out that the sun could make a whole other version of her, a flat, black Sylvia miming her every move along the planes and surfaces of