I set out for the drift five miles above the Falls, the port of entry into North-western Rhodesia. The Zambesi is at its deepest and narrowest here for hundreds of miles, so it's the handiest spot for “drifting” a body across. At first it was called Sekute's Drift after a chief of the Leya. Then it was Clarke's Drift, after the first white settler, whom I soon met. No one knows when it became The Old Drift.
A sweeping, epic multi-generational story; based on memoir, archives, and flights of fancy; combining historical fiction with magical realism and near-future sci-fi: indeed, The Old Drift is “the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for” (as author Namwali Serpell has quipped). I went into this book knowing nothing of Zambia's history, and the story's scope – from the arrival of a real-life British explorer and scalawag to the new settlement of The Old Drift in 1904 (that's him in the opening quote) to the modern Zambia of today and beyond – Serpell does a wonderful job of bringing that history to life through the intertwining stories of the colonisers, the colonised, the later emigrants, plus their children and children's children...epic. Serpell's writing is artful – switching tone and styles throughout the generations and distinct cultures – and as much as I enjoyed each bit of this book, if I had a complaint, it would be that it just took too long to read: I understand that this took twenty years for Serpell to research and write, and I appreciate that she probably needed to cut much of what she wrote over those years, but this could have been much tighter; fewer main characters might have kept me more emotionally engaged (I didn't relish, for instance, the long sections set in Italy and England). Ultimately, though, I'm just complaining about getting too much of a good thing – this book deserves all the honours and attention it's likely to receive.
Every family is a war but some are more civil than others.
The Old Drift is divided into three sections – The Grandmothers, The Mothers, and The Children – and in the foreground, it reads as a domestic drama of how each of these couples meet, fall in love, and pass their genes and ideas on to the next generation. In the background, the British colony of Northern Rhodesia gains independence, renames itself Zambia, struggles with democracy and capitalism, and inspires revolutionaries (and space explorers). Serpell writes about people from all classes and all skin tones, and just the incidental information you get about the types of work that people do adds much to the vivid portrait she paints of Zambia throughout the twentieth century. As we near our own time, there's a bit of alt-history with new tech, and the near-future that Serpell describes – in which China is the modern coloniser, taking over through stealth with its gadgets and goods – seems a frightening and not unimaginable scenario. Holding the entire narrative together is a chance encounter in 1904 that is karmically redressed in later generations, and intermittently, we hear from a chorus of droning mosquitoes that add poetry and humour to the tale:
WeeeeeweeeEEEEweeeeeeEEEeeeeeeEEEEEeeeeWEEEEEEeeeeeeEEEeeee. We. On we drone, annoying on, ennuing on with our wheedling onomatopoeia. Udzudzu. Munyini. Vexatious pests! But better than your barking with wet, pungent holes! We? We sing with our dry, beating wings. A plangent vibration adrift in the air, a song as gracile as the swarm itself, our buoyant undulant throng. Why do we sing? For love, naturally.
Mosquitoes drift in and out of the stories – bringing malaria to the early settlers, sparking a marital war over mosquito netting, inspiring a young engineer – and they're just one of many recurring motifs. Wordplay is frequent (Their marriage had ceased to be conjugal; his body did not conjugate with hers; there was no grammar between them.), yet inasmuch as each instance was inherently delightful, in a long book, they started to wear on me. The whole does build to an interesting and satisfying climax, and I was intrigued by the final message from the mosquito swarm:
Time, that ancient and endless meander, stretches out and into the distance, but along the way, a cumulative stray swerves it into a lazy, loose curve. Imagine the equation, or picture the graph, of the Archimedean spiral. This is the turning that unrolls the day, that turns the turns that the seasons obey, and the cycle of years, and the decades. But outer space too, that celestial gyre, the great Milky Way, turns inward and outward at once. And so we roil in the oldest of drifts – a slow, slant spin at the pit of the void, the darkest heart of them all.
Undeniably epic, I learned a lot about Zambia and its history, and while I was maybe not fully emotionally engaged with The Old Drift, this book is a bold original; totally worthwhile.
