to greet him before he descended. There were always busloads of supporters dressed in UNIP colours – women wearing green for the land and orange for the copper that lies beneath the land and schoolchildren in checked uniforms sweating in the sun.
After waving and smiling, the president would make his way, in a slow-moving convoy, all the way to the stadium. There, he would shout in a voice quivering with patriotism, ‘One Zambia?’ It always sounded like a declarative statement blended into a question, the first part of a trademark call and response that all Zambians knew. In our tiny living room, my sisters and I would scream back along with the crowd, ‘One Nation!’
Having been raised in a one-party state, we understood that our role was to respond in the affirmative when the great leader called upon us to do so. Although we never saw Aunty or the children, more than once the back of Uncle Ted’s bald head was beamed into our living room in Burley Court. The fact of his having been on TV made him seem larger than life. To us, Uncle Ted seemed a little bit like Clark Kent. He appeared to be a mere mortal, an ordinary man who went to work every morning, but, in an instant, there he was, standing within spitting distance of the President of the Republic of Zambia.
Uncle Ted wasn’t someone you questioned about whether the airline could be viewed as an expensive monument to the ego of the president. Had he understood the nuance and complexity of the argument, Uncle Ted might have booted out his guests. But he didn’t get it. Uncle Ted could not have fathomed that anyone might suggest Zambia Airways was a waste of taxpayers’ money and so he simply looked at them quizzically across the dining room table and made no comment. It was as though they were speaking a different language, as though they had come from a distant planet where words were a form of nourishment rather than a set of sounds used for the purposes of communication. He simply ate his nsima and smiled in exasperation, content in the knowledge that they would soon be gone, and that in the meantime they would make their funny eating words and he would ignore them and pretend that they were making sense.
While the ANC comrades who gathered at our house every weekend may have appreciated the robustness of the arguments made by the Girlfriend and the Uncle, they were also beneficiaries of President Kaunda’s largesse and were unlikely to be so direct as to suggest that their free flights should be stopped in the interests of the common man and woman on the street. They were so deeply invested in the Zambian nationalist project that pooh-poohing the idea of a national carrier would have felt counter-revolutionary even if its logic was sound.
The hippie lovers, on the other hand, didn’t care. They weren’t tied up in Africa as an idea – they were only interested in The People as an idea and, although that had its own problems, it allowed them to be more critical than many others. When they weren’t debating the post-colonial condition, the Girlfriend and the Uncle spent a lot of time looking deeply into each other’s eyes, smoking cigarettes and holding each other’s faces: often simultaneously. They also complained that they were tired a lot and often they had to retire to their room to sleep off their fatigue.
They developed a pattern. They would get up late and join us kids for the midday meal. For lunch each day the maid fed us a steaming plate of nsima with greens and tomato relish. We gobbled it up and giggled as the two of them stared at each other dreamily over our heads. The Girlfriend struggled to eat the food but liked the fact that she was eating in the same manner as The People and so she persevered. We were amused by the awkward way she used her hands to scoop up the relish and in a way this endeared her to us. She may have had strange clothes and odd manners but she was sort of childlike in her attempts to act like she was one of us.
As we ate, the Girlfriend peppered us with questions. In these moments, we saw that she wasn’t like us at all, nor would she ever be like our parents. ‘How do you feel about the way the teacher teaches you at school? Aren’t you tired of being told what to learn?’ The Uncle chimed in, ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun if you could learn what you want to learn rather than what The System,’ (here he would grow more vehement) ‘what some strange people in a distant land, decide you should learn?’ We could understand the words, but it all sounded like gibberish.
◆ ◆ ◆
On the fourth day of their visit, the Girlfriend and the Uncle disappeared as usual into the guest bedroom to ‘take a nap’. Suzie, the oldest and bossiest, explained that they still had Jet Lag. ‘That happened to me when we went to London,’ she said authoritatively, dragging out the word London the way I imagined Londoners would. ‘I couldn’t sleep for weeks because my body clock was ticking all night and the tocks kept me awake.’ I wasn’t sure whether ticks and tocks worked in this way. Still, I rarely questioned Suzie on matters of international import. Instead, I whispered to myself in a Benny Hill voice, ‘Let me hold my bloody tongue since I’ve never been to mother England.’
Her sister did not show Suzie the same courtesy. Suspicious by nature, Wongani was not convinced by the jet-lag theory. ‘They are doing something naughty in there,’ she declared. Half a decade into her life, she already had an air of resignation about the state of the world. She was prone to sighing and referred to everyone as ‘that one’. For example, apropos Daphne, the maid, one morning Wongani suggested, ‘Hmmn, that one thinks we haven’t noticed she’s visiting her boyfriend at the kiosk? How can we need to buy milk so many times a day?’
Having surmised that Uncle and his guest were up to no good, Wongani decided to undertake an investigation. Once she had asked the crucial question, ‘What exactly are they doing with the door shut in the middle of the day when normal people are busy?’ – it was impossible for any of us to ignore the possibility that they could be up to no good.
It was on the basis of this question, and this question alone, that we found ourselves standing in front of their bedroom door, peeping through a slight crack. Inside the room, the mad visitors were wriggling under the sheets. Their legs were intertwined; their fingers and lips and hands and hips grinding ever so slowly. We got an eyeful and, for our sins, we were struck dumb and momentarily paralysed. We watched the contortions with our heads cocked to the side. We were caught flat-footed, our mouths agape. After a few minutes, we began to move, our grubby fingers clutching one another for balance as we strained on our tippy toes and struggled to take in everything that was happening under the covers.
Then reality hit.
‘They’re gonna see us,’ I whispered. ‘Let’s go!’
‘No,’ Wongani and Suzie hissed. They were mesmerised.
We watched for a few more minutes until we heard someone coming down the hall. Petrified that it might be Aunt Tutu, we scampered away. We ran outside and stood in the dusty yard. We looked at one another and then looked away, flushed and embarrassed and aware that we had just witnessed something that was Absolutely None of Our Business.
For weeks after this we could talk of nothing else. We discussed the Girlfriend and the Uncle long after they had gone. They had disappeared as abruptly as they had come, leaving Aunt Tutu a vegetarian cookbook and pressing a ceramic hand-painted bird whistle from Hungary into the palms of a startled-looking Uncle Ted.
We agreed that we had actually seen them having S.E.X. We always spelled it out when we said it, in case the babies heard us, and we always, always, whispered it.
Until this incident, I had only had a vague sense of what sex was. I knew that it was something private and forbidden but now – thanks to my astute companions – I was also aware that it was simultaneously bad and pleasurable. Wongani was clear that people who liked doing it were dirty. Given that the two people we had witnessed in flagrante delicto were not exactly models of hygiene, it was hard to disagree with her on this score.
We weren’t just fascinated with what we had seen, though. We were especially fascinated with her. We spent inordinate amounts of time
