A Single Swallow (13 page)

‘I'm going to farm.'

‘Where?'

He thought for a second and smiled. ‘Somewhere like Zambia,' he said.

The Red Torpedo is a trained agronomist. ‘I tried to teach them about seeds and things,' she said, of the villagers she lived with, ‘but they just weren't interested, really. Like, some girl telling them how to farm? Forget it. But my biggest success is self-defence classes for the women.'

‘What are you teaching them?'

‘It's kinda Karate.'

‘Oh, you know Karate?'

‘No it's all based on the Karate Kid.'

‘What!'

‘Yeah, you know, wax on, wax off? The women and kids love it and the men were all really scared of them at first. God, though, the things I've seen. Like I went to a seminar on drug education and there was this expert telling people how to get their kids off dope. Put them into a bed and then somehow raise their body temperature until they begin to foam at the mouth! I was like, er, excuse me . . .'

We were going to Blue Gums bar. The Red Torpedo told us that everything we carried would be stolen, and that we would be assailed by Hoolays.

‘Wholays?'

‘Hoolays. Hookers.'

An hilarious child was to be our taxi driver. The car was as crocked as he was young.

‘How much have you drunk?' I demanded, severely.

‘Nothing for half an hour!' he cried, indignant. He abandoned the wheel to answer a text message. We veered.

‘Hey, we nearly crashed then! But you took the wheel! That was good!'

‘Thanks.'

Blue Gums is approached down a landslide pretending to be a road. A white bakkie with a familiar logo bullied us into a pit.

‘Fucking Celtel!' screamed the driver; they were sponsoring the Ncwala; they were everywhere.

‘That's all very well – who provided you with that text message that just nearly killed us?'

‘Ha ha – fucking Celtel!'

Blue Gums rocked with Lingala, Congolese music, mixed into the theme tunes of central and west Africa 2008: Akon, ‘No-body wanna see us to-gether, but it don't ma-tter-no . . .' and Shakira: ‘Oooh baby when you dance like that . . .'

We threw ourselves in, Katy grinning wickedly at her brother's restrained bopping.

‘Come on, you Welsh sheep!' he yelled. I soon found myself royally beaten in a dance-off with Robert, a Zambian working with the Peace Corps.

We left Blue Gums before the dawn, riding on a bakkie filled with smuggled lager from Mozambique and something called Imperial Russian Vodka which was distilled in Maputo, Mozambique.

They were still dancing in Blue Gums two days later, when we returned to drop off a boy called David, after the Ncwala. He called me David too.

‘Why have you guys been calling each other David?' the Red Torpedo giggled. ‘His name's not David – neither is yours, is it?'

It did not matter. We agreed that he was going to be President of Zambia one day and I was going to be his chauffeur.

At the Ncwala we sidled into the stand at the centre of a huge circle of people, the main arena, where the remains of the bull were smouldering on a fire, and sat near the then incumbent President Mawanasa of Zambia. I tried to imagine an unknown Zambian turning up at Wimbledon and drifting into a seat near the British prime minister.

‘Mzungu power' the Red Torpedo called it, with a dry laugh. Mzungu is the common and partly derogatory term for ‘white'.

‘David' briefed me on the various politicians as we did our best to be good ambassadors for Germany, America and Britain among all the chiefs and ministers. We sat up straight or surrendered our chairs to the chiefs' wives and children. We had missed the killing of the bull but we were in time to see the president solemnly accept a slice of its meat. Moments after swallowing it he left, with dozens of the other dignitaries, in a regal rally of pristine vehicles from which soldiers protruded, ever alert, weapons at the ready.

The dancing men shook the earth with their feet; the women provided chorus lines of swaying rhythm and chanted melody. Sometimes the dancers charged us, slaughtering our shadows with their spears and sticks. The crowd downed torrents of Chibuku Shake-shake beer or huddled under umbrellas bowed by the weight of the sun.

‘There was a battle on the other side of the hill,' one of the seated men explained.

‘They beat some British there, so they are also commemorating that!'

The Ncwala is promoted in Zambia as a significant national festival, a date in the cultural calendar, a vibrant contribution to its nationhood. Yet, in the midst of the crowds, the noise, the drunkenness and celebration, there was an absence, a bare space. It was impossible to know if knowing that the festival was a relatively recent fabrication, a tradition under construction, contributed to this empty feeling. Would it have had more force if it had taken place every year for centuries? Does the authenticity of culture intensify with age and repetition? Did the people celebrating the flight and eventual coming to rest of their ancestors feel richer, more anchored, more of a people for the fact of the celebration? As a Zambian event, attended by the president, did it contribute more than publicity to the essence of Zambia? Or reflect anything deeper than a young nation's desire to create ways of honouring a past that was older than the nation, older and more authentic than the colonial wheeling-dealing that created it, sixty years ago? Everyone I spoke to mentioned that the Ncwala was
not very old, and in the hordes of drunk men wearing ‘leopard-skin' and waving sticks I could detect nothing deeper, more moved or moving than a kind of tribal pride. The tribes, the Chewa, Bemba (everyone else made jokes about the Bemba) and Ngoni, whose festival this was, were the true cultures of this place, and the country. There was nothing older than their traditions, nothing stronger than their loyalties. The triumph of Zambian culture, such as it was, was that at the Ncwala there were several tribes present, and that they all acknowledged the president as their leader. Perhaps every nation is a constellation of different peoples, and perhaps the extent to which they allow themselves to be harnessed, on the one hand, and on the other the degree to which they feel themselves represented by the federation, the contemporary state, is a measure of the strength or weakness of a national culture. It was striking that the flag of Zambia was not prominent at the Ncwala – while the banners of Celtel were everywhere. The root of the Ncwala, the story of escape from a darker past into a comparatively free present, is also the story that Zambia tells itself, the red of the revolution in the colour-code of the flag that every child learns to read in school. Prosperity, or at least peace, out of struggle: it was the same story as Namibia's and South Africa's too. It seemed to beg a question of borders. Why, if all these countries are mixtures of tribes, recently created out of a colonised past, are there borders between them at all? A few miles from the town, those borders dissolved.

We followed a road out of Chipata, through maize fields past a chief's village, around and up until we came to a stream bed in deep shade; this is the smugglers' track. Men on bicycles and occasional bakkies bumped down towards us. The road climbs through thick woods, then levels. There is a village below. Here a friend of the Red Torpedo, who
is
called David, was posted by the Peace Corps. The villagers had made him a beautiful hut, strong and comfortable, enclosed for protection against snakes and goats. David's ‘father' is a currency dealer, driving thousands of kilometres between Zambia and its neighbours: David says he is doing very well. His ‘mother' is sitting on her step, sorting beans.

Below the village is the valley where I instantly longed to live. It was only a mile or so to the round hills on the other side. To the left the ground rose up to Malawi, to the right, with gentle bends, it meandered down to Mozambique. The valley was a rich collaboration of hot summer yellows; on the slopes of the hills was a parkland scattering of trees. Everything grows down there, David said: citrus, grapes, wheat, avocado, maize, tobacco – anything you cared to plant. It is all irrigated by streams running down from the hills. The valley does not seem to be anywhere. The names of the three countries that surround it sound like the abstractions they are.

We sat outside David's hut listening to stories.

‘There was a man who needed to see the witch doctor about his problems. He went to the witch doctor but before he had even told him about his troubles the witch doctor asked him for money. The man said No way! You have not done anything for me yet! Why should I give you money for nothing? and he went back to his hut. He had not been there very long when he noticed something moving under the covers on his bed. He thought, Ah-ha, I am going to get that mouse this time. He fetched his machete (don't ask me why he wanted his machete to deal with this mouse), prepared to strike, and ripped the covers off his bed. There was a Spitting Cobra. He dropped his machete, grabbed his money, ran back to the witch doctor, gave him the money and said Here! Take whatever you want, but no more Spitting Cobras – please! The witch doctor took the money and the man never saw the snake again.'

You would not pay much heed to such a story, perhaps, if there were not a good population of Spitting Cobras, invisible but present throughout the green country all around you, and if every village did not have a witch doctor, and if the vast majority of the people you passed did not believe in their powers. The story seemed to illustrate how western secularism and Christianity had penetrated this part of Zambia: far enough to raise questions about the powers of the spirit world, but not strongly enough to overturn them.

‘Look, swallows! What do you call them?' I asked Robert, the Red Torpedo's friend, a Zambian who helped the Peace Corps, and hoped, somehow, perhaps with the help of one of his American's friends, to go to agricultural college. A group had appeared near the supermarket on the edge of Chipata, where we were waiting for Kris. (‘Quite acceptable' was Kris's preferred verdict of approval, except for that supermarket, with which he declared he was in love.)

‘Nyankalema!' Robert said, ‘We say it is the bird that never gets tired.'

I could have hugged him. ‘Nyankalema,' I repeated. ‘The bird that never gets tired – finally, someone who knows something about swallows.'

Robert laughed and shook his head. The Mzungu and their enthusiasms, you could see him thinking.

‘You are Nyankalema!' he told me later, laughing, but it was not true. We set out to drive the Great East Road again on nothing like enough sleep. The Red Torpedo came with us, rather than hitch: she was due to meet some new arrivals in Lusaka and induct them into the ways of the Peace Corps.

‘You get a tiny amount of dollars so you have no choice but to live with your community, and what you do in your village is really up to them and you.'

‘Do you think you have been helpful?'

‘Oh sure, but you know, it's really hard. Like the whole Aids Awareness thing. What do you do if it's a Chief's right to have loads of women, he's an alcoholic who doesn't use protection and everyone puts up with him because, you know, men are men, he's the chief and men just love to fuck?'

The road signs were just as straightforward.

HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS

GET A'S

NOT AIDS

ZAMBIA NEEDS YOUR BRAINS

The Great East Road had grown longer. I became an automaton, a part of the car, fighting sleep, heat and the pot-holes. I know there were swallows because I said ‘Swallows!' at regular intervals – even more frequently than I had on the way out.

By the time they reach latitude 12° south, where the plateaux of Zambia disappear into equatorial forests, swallows are either bearing north-east, via the Nile Valley, the Levant and the eastern Mediterranean into central Eurasia; or due north, towards the Sahara at its widest stretch; or north-west, towards West Africa and a narrower slice of the Sahara leading to the mouth of the Mediterranean, at the Straits of Gibraltar. My bird, if she lived, must be following the third route, as must many of northern and western Europe's swallows. For any that do not use the Rift Valley and the Nile there is no choice: they must cross the Congo.

In Lusaka I gave up the idea of going up to the border of the Democratic Republic of Congo. The younger brother of a man who runs trucks through Congo down to Zambia told me that it was perfectly possible to cross the country, of course. All you had to do was pay at every roadblock and pay again at the next. The only difference with the rest of the trucks' routes, he said, was that in the Democratic Republic of Congo you do not have the pleasure of bargaining. He did not think it would take me more than a couple of weeks to cross it, if I was lucky and generous with bribes, but he did not recommend it. I decided to fly to the Republic of Congo instead.

Lusaka to Brazzaville in the Republic of Congo is a distance of over 1,000 miles,
north-west across the forest, but this was not a direct flight: instead it went via Addis Abba, in Ethiopia. We arrived in Addis at night and circled above the tumble of the city's lights, waiting for the stars of other Ethiopian Airways planes to land. Twelve hours in the city became compressed into two sessions in Bole Airport, a breakfast with superlative coffee, a ride through Addis' rush hour, and another take-off.

We flew back, south down the Great Rift to Kenyan airspace, then west across Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. I pressed my face to the window as we began our descent. I had heard and read so much about that fat grey slug of river under greasy cloud. The scale was difficult to grasp. There was forest, then cleared ground, then Kinshasa: huge, with skyscrapers. There was the Pool, a vast swelling of the river into something like a great lake. It narrowed to a neck between Kinshasa and Brazzaville; as we banked over to the west of the Pool I saw the waters narrow and change colour. Now they were brown and streaked with cream foam, and there were rapids. I did not understand it. From this height you should not be able to see rapids, their strained narrowing, stretched water and shoaled waves, but down there, there they were.