They came for us at night.
Or at least that’s how my Nene liked to tell it. But she was always one for drama, that one, never believing that the truth should interfere with good storytelling.
The truth is much less dramatic, though not any stranger. They actually came for us at sunset. That quiet time when all the children have been called indoors, when the traffic jams have died down, and the street sellers have packed up their wares and gone home. Plus, this was the time when we came out and did our… thing. I wouldn’t call it work. It was never ‘work’ for me. Anyway, they thought this was the time they would catch us at it.
But we were never going to be stopped. Especially not by some overzealous, scared people who called the police, thinking they could actually do something to us. All that happened is that those policemen died for nothing.
When you write this history, make sure to emphasise that last part.
They died for nothing.
*
Let me tell you the story my Nene told me when I was a girl.
She said that the old gods, the ones who were here before the colonisers brought their god to trample us under the heel of Christianity, still walk amongst us. They didn’t dwindle away or get lost in memory, or forget us. They just had to adapt to their new world and the loss of so many believers. Nene’s favourite thing was to gather all her grandchildren around her during the harvest season (the harvest in the village, of course, because I hadn’t harvested so much as a tomato here in the city of my birth), and tell us all about the time she had met our god.
The first time, she was a child walking home with her mother, during heavy rainfall. The sky was dark and heavy with clouds and they couldn’t see farther than a few steps ahead. They took shelter under the branches of a small tree, and when the lightning started, it was so bright and so close that she saw her own shadow on the ground. And next to it, the tree’s shadow turned to look at her. She pulled at her mother’s chitenge and the two of them looked up and into the face of a woman, her brown skin glorious in the light, clad only in the smallest cloth around her hips. As the thunder boomed loud enough to cause both Nene and her mother to clap their hands over their ears and shake in terror, the woman raised her hands, threw back her head and laughed in delight. Nene’s mother screamed, picked her up and ran with the child’s head clutched tight to her chest.
The second time, Nene said, was ten rain seasons later. She had been heading towards the river to bathe, and then she got separated from her friends as they played a game. Following their footprints, she saw a woman ahead of her on one of the many paths, crouching down over footprints and making circular motions over them. Each footprint glowed faintly before rising out of the ground, and as the glow touched her hand and disappeared, the silver scales that covered the woman’s back, shoulders and upper arms rippled with colour
Nene had turned to run.
Everyone knew the stories about these creatures, Nene told us. If you came across them while they gathered whatever it was they gathered from footprints, they would take away a piece of your soul. You would return to your village acting like the person everyone knew, but you would be a ghost of the person you were before. There would be an emptiness inside you that could never be filled. Sleep, food, laughter, even life, would never be the same for you. You would wake in the night searching and searching, but never find whatever it was you searched for. And you would have nothing to show for it but dirty feet each morning.
So yes, she had turned as quietly as she could, gathered her chitenge above her thighs and run.
“Stop, girl”, a voice had said to my Nene, and she had stood, unable to move, like roots had planted her into the ground.
“Turn and come to me,” the creature said, its voice was rich, warm and bubbling like water. “I didn’t think that we would meet again so soon. “
She turned, not entirely of her own free will, and faced it, then dropped to her knees, and flat on her stomach in submission. The creature’s glowing white eyes revealed her for what she was. The great river god.
Nene had lain there trembling, apologising for having the cheek to look a god in the face, awaiting her death as she felt the god slither towards her and stop, poised above her head.
“I should eat you right now, and leave your bones behind for people to find”, the god had hissed, “but I’m in a good mood today. And there’s something different about you. Not many people can see me during the day, and not twice in their lifetime and live to tell about it. Definitely not see my work without going mad. You have a gift I haven’t sensed in a long, long time”
And with that, Nene would say, she felt the god’s sticky tongue on her head, tasting the sweat running down her face and laughing in small hissing breaths at the human cowering on the ground. The god told her many things as she lay there, and gave her a new name. Chipego – a gift to return to her people and be the vessel of the god’s words.
*
That was over three hundred and seventy years ago, by her count, and Nene remembered every detail of the story like it happened to her just yesterday. She had told it to us so many times that we knew it word for word. And in those centuries, she had not lost faith in her god, and had passed on this faith first to her clan, her daughters, and then to her daughter’s daughters. But by the start of the last century, only a handful of people knew the real stories of the god. People had moved away from the river to live all over the newly created country. The old borders were not respected by the new people who came to live amongst them, and of the clans that stayed, many were seduced by the promise of new lives away from farming and living close to the river. The history had been lost, mixed up with stories of other tribes, morphed into impossible myths or tales of women who practiced witchcraft.
By the nineteen fifties, when my own mother was also a priestess, belief in the river god was left to those who lived along the river boundaries. The god had gone quiet. Nene didn’t know why. She still felt the god’s presence wherever she went. She and other priestesses followed the old ways, shunning the Christianity that the missionaries tried to force on them, and the punishments the colonial government exacted on them for using plants to heal, for birthing at home, for refusing, basically, to be the good compliant natives they wanted. And when the rumour began that the white men had decided, through some kind of madness, (because it could only be madness that drove them to it) to interfere with the river, the very dwelling place of the god, they had to do something.
And they tried, they really did. The sacrifices didn’t work, pleading didn’t work, the god stayed silent and the dam was built. But the real version of how those events played out, those lies about the clans allowing themselves to be resettled? They never allowed themselves to be resettled, okay? They weren’t given a choice.
But still, I don’t hold the god responsible for what happened at all. No one does. By that time, people didn’t even remember the god’s true name any more. She was now Zambesi, sometimes Nyami nyami, sometimes just the river spirit who “lived in and protected the life around the river”. Her priestesses were branded witches and shunned if caught at their work, so they were reduced to continuing her work in the night. Men took over and declared themselves the true priests of the god. They crafted ornaments and walking sticks and prayed and at least that kept the faith alive. Better than nothing, I guess. They had reduced her to a spirit, and they expected her to come in all her might when they called. She hadn’t deserted them, but they really believed that she had, and so they just didn’t try hard enough, didn’t turn to the priestesses. Whatever the builders of that dam did, they separated her from us. They severed some spiritual link… spiritual? That word doesn’t cover what the connection to our god used to be. My mother said the night they placed that last brick in the dam, under cover of darkness, like the cowards they were, she woke up with tears running down her face, sadness overwhelmed her and she wept and wept till her eyes ran out of tears. Mother also said that Nene didn’t wake up at all that morning. They thought she was dead, until they noticed the pillow under her head was soaked through with tears and small breaths escaped her mouth every few hours. She stayed that way for three weeks and when she finally emerged from sleep, her very first words were,
“What have we done?”
While the Brits hailed the might of the British Empire at creating the world’s largest man-made lake and a dam the likes of which the world had never seen before, my people were in mourning. Their valley was gone, their god was gone, and they were barely hanging on to their way of life.
That was just over a hundred a fifty years ago. I’ve grown up on the true history of our tribe as told by Nene Chipo. Nene is over three hundred and eighty years old now, and my mother is over a hundred and fifty. We’ve all accepted that we will have very long lives; longer than most humans. This was the gift from the god. This is part of what our god whispered to my Nene so many years ago. We’ve learned to change our appearances and our names, secluding ourselves from a lot of daily community life to avoid too many questions. Our little village grew into a town, then into a city where you couldn’t tell who your neighbours were any more, and we could mingle freely again. When our city opened its doors to the new Siavonga University in twenty twenty-five, a few kilometres from our house, I registered as a student and studied geography. I got my first job in Lusitu, north of Siavonga four years later at the ripe age of sixty, though I looked barely out of my teens, and lived at home, close to the river.
*
It wasn’t until forty years ago, when the earth tremors that we had been having since nineteen fifty seven grew into a full earthquake, that my Nene decided it was time to let me know the full truth.
“Do you know why you’re called Chipo, my love?” she said as we shelled groundnuts on the veranda outside my mother’s house. I nodded.
“It’s because I was such a precious gift to my mother, who had been trying for many, many decades to have a baby before I finally came along”.
“Yes and no”, Nene said, shooing a bee away with a tea towel. “Yes they waited a long time to have you, that part is true, but also, you had to be given that name.”
“What do you mean I had to be given that name? I thought the no part is that they also named me after you?”
“No, that’s not the no part. One doesn’t have to call the first girl child after the grandmother. Those are just stories. We had to call you that because you also carry this ability that was given to me.”
I remember rolling my eyes at her, and she kissed her teeth in impatience.
“The problem is you think I’m always exaggerating. I don’t exaggerate. Your Nene has always been one hundred percent truthful with you. You’ve entered puberty now. It’s time for you to know our purpose.”
*
I waited twenty years before going down to the lake. I didn’t find it strange as a child, that my family had never been to see the lake, never travelled to the dam that was within walking distance of our home. That we had never travelled beyond the Zambezi River to the west and the Kafue River to the East. But as I stood there on the shore of the lake, I felt a huge yearning to plunge myself into the water. My body swayed in rhythm with the lapping of the water at the shoreline and I felt the earth shake beneath my feet with a tremor. I reached into my purse and touched the bundle my mother had given me, more for comfort than anything.
“Hey,” a man walking along the shore shouted over at me. “Are you okay mama?”
I nodded, not wanting to show the excitement on my face. “I’m fine”
I hired a humboat that evening to take me out over the water.
I had to time it just right. Late enough that the jet skis and boat cruises had retreated for the evening, but early enough that one of the local fishermen would still be able to take me over the water.
“Kwasiya taata” I greeted him in the old tongue. He stared at me then inclined his head politely.
“Inhya, kwasiya”
I explained to him where I wanted to go and we set off silently. He pressed a few buttons on the humboat and the electric engine started up, floating gently above the water as we headed towards the dam wall.
When we got to my coordinates, he pressed more buttons and the boat stopped, swaying gently over the water. He turned off the lights and we sat in total darkness for a moment. I pulled out my flashlight and, dropping it into the lake by its opti-line, lowered it about a kilometre into the water before plugging the line into my phone’s USB port.
What I saw… would you even believe me? If you don’t, all you need to do is go and have a look yourself. It doesn’t take any skill at all, you just need to know where to look.
My torch had got caught in the branches of a tree. The leaves swayed gently in the water and fish darted away from the light. I tugged at the opti-line to dislodge the torch, then fed more of the line, letting the torch go another kilometre down. Now there was the sloping side of a hut visible further down, and what I could swear was a mango tree. The fisherman gasped as he looked at my phone where it captured the images from the water.
“What is that!” his voice was shaky with fear or some similar emotion.
“It’s an app I’m using to visualise what a village would look like under water”, I lied without missing a beat. Yet inside, my heart was racing. Another kilometre fed to the line and I could see a whole hut, and swivelling the torch, a kraal, an old fireplace, a shower hut…all intact hundreds of years later.
“The images are incredibly life like,” the fisherman laughed nervously. “All you need is people walking around and I could swear there was a village at the bottom of the lake. Just like the old stories”.
“Indeed”, I replied, searching his face for any signs that he may decide this wasn’t a story and fling me overboard. He just had that look that said I might be a witch.
He asked if I had gotten enough images so we could we head back to the shore. I noticed the sideways glances he kept giving me and memorised his face in case there was trouble later.
A week later, a policeman in our suburb came over to our house and asked how many women lived there.
“Just me, my mother and my grandmother,” I lied calmly. If he knew exactly how many women lived in our house, there would be trouble. He looked around the sitting room as he drank the cup of water we gave him, and commented on all the old things we had in the house.
“Is that a kankobela?” he exclaimed in wonder, pointing at a corner in the display unit.
“Yes, my grandmother has had it forever”, I replied with a neutral face.
“I thought it was a lost ethnic musical art form?”
Ethnic? Was he serious? Ethnic?
“It’s a Tribal instrument that took great skill to master, yes”
When he left, Nene spat on the ground outside the door.
“Idiot! This is what we have become now? Using words like that to describe our own? Chu! I knew his great grandfather when he was a boy and all of a sudden, we’re ethnic?”
We knew then that people had noticed us. And this wasn’t the time to get noticed at all. I went out that night to look for footprints. There weren’t as many as there had been even in my mother’s days. People wore shoes now, children rarely played barefoot, and to compound it all, everywhere was paved. I had to go a long way before I finally came across two small footprints in the poorer section of the city. I drew the nchembo out of my bag. Tracing the outline of the footprint with its pointed end, I said the words for the offering and the footprint glowed faintly and, rising out of the ground, headed out towards the river. I repeated the process on the other footprint and continued hunting more.
I went out every single night for a month, making sure no one saw me, offering up these gifts to the god, hoping it would be enough to awaken her. Another earthquake was reported across the internet and while we breathed a sigh of relief, two houses fell, and only five people died during the quake.
I went out all night in the rainy season. It was the best time, when tourists walked barefoot along the lake’s shore, fishermen took off their shoes as they mended nets along the river’s edge and children often disobeyed their parents to feel the earth squish between their toes as they played games.
As the years went by the Earth tremors grew stronger and earthquakes became more common. The Christians kept on their gloomy predictions about the end of the world and a turning back to the good book, while my heart grew ever hopeful. They pointed to pages in their book of Revelations as proof. It was indeed a sign of the end of times; just not the ones they thought.
I was celebrating my eightieth birthday when we finally heard on the news that there was a considerable crack in the dam wall. Enough to have the government worried and put a plan in place to fix it. And trust me, I’ve been around long enough to know that if politicians actually get their behinds into gear, then disaster must be imminent. We had to act soon.
The first night of the full moon, the rain fell like it was going out of fashion. My Nene, my mother, my daughter, her daughter and I went out together. We stood at the lake’s edge, five generations of believers, holding hands, then we stepped into the water. A tremor took us to our knees and we stayed there, singing to our god, asking her to return and bring back the river.
We waded in up to our waists, raising our arms high above our heads and sang, begged, pleaded for our god to return. We waded farther, to our necks, still singing. Then, we felt something. It felt like a giant fish had brushed against the back of my legs. I looked around at the others and they all had the same look of shock and wonder.
We sang louder into the night sky and the earth trembled beneath our feet. I felt the same scaly body pass between first my daughter and I to the left, then my mother and I to my right. We all laughed in delight. She was here! She was with us!
Another tremor rocked us on our heels, submerging our heads under water and we came up coughing.
“It’s time to come out!” Nene shouted, and we fought the waves to get back to shore. The calm gently lapping water we had entered was now choppy with waves rising above our heads. We had to fight our way back, gulping water at times as our heads went below the surface. My heart was full and I felt as though each heartbeat sent a spark of electricity running through me. As the lightning began and the thunder roared, something compelled us all to look back in unison and there, illuminated by a flash of lightning, a huge head rose above the surface. It loomed over us, glowing eyes lighting up the scaly face. It rose higher to reveal the silver scaled body of a giant snake. The head morphed slowly into that of a woman, her skin brown as the earth on a warm day, and she threw her head back and laughed the sound of thunder into the air. We cried out in terror and glee, stumbling towards the shore as she flipped backwards and disappeared under the water.
We lay there shaking as an earthquake stronger than we had ever felt drove us to the ground, then got up quickly, soaked and shivering, to head towards our home.
We spent the whole day packing and sending pings across the internet, warning people to leave Siavonga that day. Telling them they had no time. We were flooded by messages telling us to get a life, to turn to their god because we were obviously lost. Telling us to stop believing idiotic nonsense and turn to the true path, to stop stirring things otherwise the police would be sent after “those mad witches in that house”
We tried. My granddaughter Chipo, who is amazing with all the new tech, sent out nano skybots to shoot images showing the amount of rain that had fallen that day and hacked into the aging news stations to run the footage on a loop every hour, showing the ripples on the lake’s surface that were obviously being made by a creature moving with a purpose.
People either praised it for being realistic CGI or wrote it off as scaremongering. They began to threaten us with exorcisms, jail or both – for worshipping demons.
An hour before sunset, we were done. A few precious memories, mostly things my Nene had collected over hundreds of years, like the chitenge she had woven with her own hands; photographs in the days before instacapture that showed my mother as a young girl, my very first cd, back when they still made them, my daughter’s first holochrome with the images of her sitting at her Nene’s feet and learning to sing the old songs. They all came with us.
We sat on the top of the hill above our home and watched at sunset, as policemen walked ahead of a group of people headed towards our deserted home even as a tremor shook the earth.
“We should go down and tell those idiots to leave!” my daughter exclaimed.
“It’s too late now. It’ll take us at least an hour to get down there, only to come to harm”, her daughter replied.
As the men who headed the group turned into our street, clutching umbrellas against the rain, the earth shook hard enough to topple the whole group over and a thunderous roar came from the direction of the dam.
“Look!” Nene pointed, and we all turned to look towards what used to be Kariba dam.
The dam had exploded. Concrete flew out up into the air at one end of the dam. Faint screams drifted up from the people below. Lightning rays showed the gigantic god rise out of the depths and fling itself head first towards the dam and shatter the concrete where it hit. The earth shook again, and the hotels along the hills crumpled like paper cups into the water. The people below began to scatter, some threw themselves to their knees and prayed to their various false gods to save them, others clutched at each other in fear. Buildings began to fall around and on top of them.
We sat where we were, safe from harm and wept at such needless loss of life. We had told them. Hadn’t we told them?
More flashes of lightning showed our god smashing the dam, smashing it, returning the river, finally, to its rightful path. Returning what we had worked for, for so long. Chipo captured it all and streamed it live over the internet. I can’t even begin to tell you how many people thought it was a hoax. But amongst them, our scattered clan began to comment, feeling a shift in their hearts. Remembering who they were and looking with awe as the waters of the lake began to recede. With one mighty roar, the god raised herself to her full height. Over seven metres of her beautifully scaled body arched into the air and then, with a twist that passed rainbow colours over her shiny scales, the god dove into the churning water and disappeared, headed towards Cabora Bassa dam.
At the final tally, over a thousand people were recorded dead. Those who refused to leave were the saddest. Such an unnecessary death. We told them and they died for nothing.
The waters receded as the lake drained back to the river it once was, revealing huge trees and still intact villages where the riverside used to be. The politicians blamed the government of the day for failing to implement the centuries old dam rehabilitation project, and the finger pointing continued in earnest. Those who could still trace their ancestry back to the valley began to return and build homes again beside the river.
Centuries of work, and were we ever thanked for it?
Of course not.
We were just glad to have our river and our god back.
