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By Root 330 0

and asked if he could have an audience with the chief. He was told to wait under a mango tree. So Dad settled himself down in the shade and passed the time watching the villagers come and go from the river while chickens pecked around his feet and dogs curled up next to him in dusty nests. A few hours later, the chief emerged from his palace (a modest brick house), and after the customary back-and-forth (How are the rains in Lusaka? How was the journey?), my father explained to the chief that he wanted a small farm on the edge of the river on which to raise fish in ponds, bananas in a field, a few sheep here and there. The chief listened and then told Dad to come back in one week with a pair of size six Bata slip-ons. (“That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Dad thought.)

So the next week Dad returned to Chief Sikongo’s boma with a pair of size six Bata slip-ons. Again he handed the gift to the chief’s assistant and waited for an audience with the chief under the mango tree in the liquid-white Zambezi sun. A few hours later, the chief appeared, and again Dad explained his need for a farm—the fish, the bananas, the sheep. The chief listened and then he told Dad to return in one month with a portable radio, spare batteries and some salt.

So in a month Dad returned to the chief’s boma with the gifts, as instructed. And yet again he explained how his farm would work and how many of the chief’s subjects he would employ—people to work on the fish section, people to work on the bananas, shepherds for the sheep. The chief listened and nodded and occasionally muttered something to his assistant. And then he told Dad to come back in two months, this time with a dinner jacket and a bullock.

So like some character in a fairy story on an ever more impossible quest, Dad returned to the chief again and again with offerings, with explanations and with calculations. Eighteen times he went back to the boma and waited under the mango tree, usually all through the burning middle of the day, for the chief to see him. Eighteen times the chief accepted Dad’s gifts and heard his story and at the end of eighteen times, Dad finally said, “Chief Sikongo, it’s not just for me alone. Your subjects will be trained to farm fish, they will have proper housing and there will be jobs for women. All of us together will make something of this place.” Dad stood one legged, schoolboylike, and scratched his calf with the toe of his shoe. “Pamodzi, pamodzi.”

The chief looked up at Dad and he nodded. “All right, I have seen,” he said. There was a pause and then the chief opened his hands and pointed downstream. “There is one piece of land you can have below the bridge; no one is using it—there is no road, there are no buildings. I think it will work for your scheme.”

Dad blinked at the chief, almost not daring to believe it. Then he remembered himself and gave a little bow. “Zikomo kwambili, Chief Sikongo,” he said.

So Dad’s proposal for the fish and banana farm was put before the Siavonga District Counsil (a month or two passed). Then the land was inspected by a local counsilor and was approved for development (another few months went by). Then a planning officer went to Zimbabwe to see for himself what a fish farm might look like, and after a delay of yet more months, he approved the project. Then the land was surveyed and surveyed again. And all of this happened in accordance with the weather; the availability of transportation; the health of various officials (malaria so often striking at an inopportune time). So that nearly three years after his first meeting with the chief, Dad still did not have title to the farm.

MEANTIME, MUM HAD had her two million percent nervous breakdown and now she lay in her bed in the borrowed cottage at Oribi Ridge, the curtains closed against the light, her mind shut against the world, her Royal Ascot hats in ruins. She sold her horses, she gave up reading, she no longer walked the dogs. Dad fretted around her, trying to cajole her out of bed and at night he sat alone by the campfire, kicking the night’s embers into life