around town, visiting people so that she could remark upon the state of their houses, the quality of their biscuits and the cleanliness of their servants.
Despite its downsides, one of the best things about Suzie and Wongani’s house was the guest bedroom, which was just big enough to accommodate a beige couch and king-sized four-poster bedroom suite. As we played, we would listen out for the crunch of Aunt Tutu’s car coming down the driveway. We knew that if she caught us in there with our dusty feet, and our grimy nails, the consequences would be dire. Invariably, we would get carried away and the person assigned to keep their ears pricked would forget and it would be too late – she would be standing right there behind you. One minute you would be mid-jump, giggling and about to land on the plump mattress, and the next your arm would be pinned behind your back and Aunt Tutu’s voice would be an edgy vibrato, oddly sing-songy and menacing and urgent and hot in your ear:
‘Didn’t I tell you not to play in this room?’
During the school holidays before I turned seven, our enjoyment of the guest room was interrupted for two weeks. Aunt Tutu’s brother and his German girlfriend visited from Berlin. When they were in town, our de facto playroom was off limits. This meant our relationship with them was initially antagonistic. Long before they arrived at the gate, crammed into a rickety metered taxi in a dishevelled, cigarette-stained heap, we decided we didn’t like them. They weren’t our visitors. They weren’t in town to keep us company and make us laugh. No. They were just a two-week-long inconvenience. The Uncle and the Girlfriend turned out to be more than that, of course, mainly because they were nothing like the adults we were used to. They lit incense, which reminded me vaguely of the Indian restaurant in the centre of town we sometimes went to when there was something to celebrate.
Also, they dressed very strangely – the Girlfriend especially. Whereas Mummy and Aunt Tutu poured their still-trim figures into tight polyester trousers and white knee-high boots, the Girlfriend wore long, flowing skirts and gypsy-like tops. A sliver of her hollowed-out belly was almost always showing, which we found somewhat disgusting and alluring all at the same time. The women we knew would never have bared the flesh on their stomachs. Legs and arms were one thing, but among African women, even those who defied stereotypes, tummy skin was an altogether different story.
As for him, unlike our fathers, the Uncle looked dirty. Baba’s scraggly beard and afro had a certain air about them: a cultivated unkemptness that nodded to forethought and therefore to some form of guerrilla stylishness. Not the Uncle. The Uncle looked positively downtrodden. His hair was beginning to mat in some places like the madman who used to dance lewdly in town right next to the Playhouse, the one who cackled at any woman with a big bum who happened to walk past and who picked up newspapers as though he would be able to divine the future if he just collected enough of them.
In addition to their shaggy appearance, the Uncle and the Girlfriend spent much of their time engaged in what they called ‘jousting’. When an exhausted adult wished to end a heated debate with the Girlfriend, she would retort, in her guttural German accent, ‘You caaan’t be afraid of jousting. That fear of questions and questioning, it represents the death of curiosity, which is the beginning of the end of any society yearning to be free.’ The Uncle also liked the word. He would say things like, ‘What will Africa become if those entrusted with its empowerment aren’t capable of intellectual jousting?’ He shook his head and sighed a lot.
Suzie and Wongani’s father was Uncle Ted and he was very important because he worked for Zambia Airways. Instead of letting him rest when he got back from work, the Uncle and the Girlfriend insisted on talking to him about the Anti-Colonial Project. We all knew that once Uncle came home we were supposed to go outside and let him rest. The visitors did not know this. So, they badgered him with questions and ignored our wide-eyed looks. Uncle Ted would take on the baffled and exhausted countenance of a man who had been working too hard to have to worry about thinking after he had knocked off and he would try to steer the conversation towards safer, more intelligible territory. Uncle Ted was not particularly interested in social interaction. So, even at the best of times, he let Aunt Tutu do the talking, preferring to smile aimlessly into his beer.
The Uncle and the Girlfriend weren’t concerned about his baffled expression or his body language. So intent were they on making their own points that they simply couldn’t see his signals of distress. Every night they hounded him, peppering him with questions to which they already had answers, walking him through analyses to which they had subjected him already. Their favourite topic was Zambia Airways. It was a Vanity Project, a useless money-guzzling enterprise designed to appease the mighty Nationalist Ego. ‘How ironic,’ the Uncle would spit out, ‘that the great nationalist agenda has now been trampled by the forces of neocolonialism.’ They argued in forceful, spittle-inducing paragraphs, saying things like: ‘All these African presidents flying in and out of Jakarta to foster consensus amongst the non-aligned movement will do nothing to build basic infrastructure! They are just robbing the poor of the revenues that are rightfully theirs.’
Now Zambia Airways was the pride of the nation and it was well known that it only hired those who were enthusiastic about the project of African unity to work in its sales and marketing department. This meant that Uncle Ted had no idea what the Uncle and the Girlfriend were talking about with their critiques of nationalism and neocolonialism, which was lucky for everyone because it prevented hurt feelings all around. In fact, one of the best things about working for Zambia Airways was that its employees were not required to be anything other than patriotic and enthusiastic.
To most Africans in newly liberated countries, the national airline symbolised, in all the easy and trite ways, everything that was possible for a new nation. Airlines were the gleaming future. African pilots, resplendent in their uniforms, demonstrated the intellect and sobriety that colonialists had long accused Africans of lacking. However, their ground staff were something else entirely. They were sycophants, whose role was to burnish the reputations of their countries and herald the greatness that was yet to come.
Men like Uncle Ted, obsequious enough to have secured jobs with the national carrier, were elevated in society by mere association with the airline. His employment at Zambia Airways, and the fact that his office was physically at the airport, made Uncle Ted a big man in a small society. His position as a senior figure within Zambia Airways also made him singularly unqualified to critique the institution, certainly not in the way the Uncle and the Girlfriend were attempting.
In fact, it was quite the opposite. Uncle Ted’s role was dependent on his being a yes-man. Whenever President Kaunda returned from one of his whirlwind world trips, his arrival at the airport on a Zambia Airways plane would be marked with ululation and thanksgiving, but also with the awe befitting one who has just alighted from an aircraft. Uncle Ted was always there, on hand to greet him and to ensure everything functioned smoothly as the president made his way through the airport.
Since he was the president and there was no paperwork to be done, and since the chief of protocol, the minister of foreign affairs and most of Cabinet were also always present to welcome the president home, there was technically very little for a Zambia Airways manager to do on these frenetic days, but this never occurred to Uncle Ted.
As the spouse of a senior Zambia Airways manager, there was even less for Aunt Tutu to do at the airport when the president arrived, but this never occurred to her either. Indeed, sometimes, if the trip had been an especially important one – say to Moscow or Beijing – Uncle and Aunty dressed up Suzie and Wongani in their frilliest, whitest dresses, as though they were going to be christened, and they would shroud Tapelwa in a charcoal-coloured suit that was three sizes too large. Thus appointed, they would drive to the airport to stand in the VIP section on the runway in the hope that senior members of Cabinet would note their loyalty to ruler and country as they sweated in the glare of the concrete.
On those days, my sisters and I would watch on TV, hoping for a glimpse of Uncle Ted and Aunt Tutu and the kids. When he landed, the president
