Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [5]
“Christ,” mutters Dad.
Mum has sung “Olé, I Am a Bandit” at every bar under the southern African sun in which she has ever stepped.
“Shut your mother up, will you?” says Dad, climbing out of the pickup with a fistful of passports and papers, “eh?”
I go around the back. “Shhhh! Mum! Hey, Mum, we’re at the border now. Shhh!”
She emerges blearily from the folds of the tarpaulin. “I’m the quickest on the trigger,” she sings loudly.
“Oh, great.” I ease back into the front of the pickup and light a cigarette. I’ve been shot at before because of Mum and her singing. She made me drive her to our neighbor’s once at two in the morning to sing them “Olé, I Am a Bandit,” and he pulled a rifle on us and fired. He’s Yugoslav.
The customs official comes out to inspect our vehicle. I grin rabidly at him.
He circles the car, stiff-legged like a dog wondering which tire to pee on. He swings his AK-47 around like a tennis racket.
“Get out,” he tells me.
I get out.
Dad gets uneasy. He says, “Steady on with the stick, hey?”
“What?”
Dad shrugs, lights a cigarette. “Can’t you keep your bloody gun still?”
The official lets his barrel fall into line with Dad’s heart.
Mum appears from under the drapes of the tarpaulin again. Her half-mast eyes light up.
“Muli bwanje?” she says elaborately: How are you?
The customs official blinks at her in surprise. He lets his gun relax against his hip. A smile plays around his lips. “Your wife?” he asks Dad.
Dad nods, smokes. I crush out my cigarette. We’re both hoping Mum doesn’t say anything to get us shot.
But her mouth splits into an exaggerated smile, rows of teeth. She nods toward Dad and me: “Kodi ndipite ndi taxi?” she asks: Should I take a taxi?
The customs official leans against his gun for support (hand over the top of the barrel) and laughs, throwing back his head.
Mum laughs, too. Like a small hyena, “Hee-hee,” wheezing a bit from all the dust she has inhaled today. She has a dust mustache, dust rings around her eyes, dust where forehead joins hairline.
“Look,” says Dad to the customs official, “can we get going? I have to get my daughter to school today.”
The customs official turns suddenly businesslike. “Ah,” he says, his voice threatening hours of delay, if he likes, “where is my gift?” He turns to me. “Little sister? What have you brought for me today?”
Mum says, “You can have her, if you like,” and disappears under her tarpaulin. “Hee, hee.”
“Cigarettes?” I offer.
Dad mutters, “Bloody—“ and swallows the rest of his words. He climbs into the pickup and lights a cigarette, staring fixedly ahead.
The customs official eventually opens the gate when he is in possession of one box of Peter Stuyvesant cigarettes (mine, intended for school), a bar of Palmolive soap (also intended for school), three hundred kwacha, and a bottle of Coke.
As we bump onto the bridge that spans the Zambezi River, Dad and I hang out of our windows, scanning the water for hippo.
Mum has reemerged from the tarpaulin to sing, “Happy, happy Africa.”
If I weren’t going back to school, I would be in heaven.
Kelvin
CHIMURENGA I:
ZAMBIA, 1999
“Look,” Mum says, leaning across the table and pointing. Her finger is worn, blunt with work: years of digging in a garden, horses, cows, cattle, woodwork, tobacco. “Look, we fought to keep one country in Africa white-run”—she stops pointing her finger at our surprised guest to take another swallow of wine—“just one country.” Now she slumps back in defeat: “We lost twice.”
The guest is polite, a nice Englishman. He has come to Zambia to show Africans how to run state-owned businesses to make them attractive to foreign investment, now that we aren’t Social Humanists anymore. Now that we’re a democracy. Ha ha. Kind of.
Mum says, “If we could have kept one country white-ruled it would be an oasis, a refuge. I mean, look what a cock-up. Everywhere you look it’s a bloody cock-up.”
The guest says nothing, but