Excerpt from The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

But would you believe our godly Scotch doc was in fact searching for the source of the Nile in the wrong place? As it turns out, there are two Niles – one Blue, one White – which means two sources, and they are neither of them anywhere near here. This sort of thing happens with nations, and tales, and humans, and signs. You go hunting for a source, some ur-word or symbol and suddenly the path will split, cleaved by apostrophe or dash. The tongue forks, speaks in two ways, which in turn fork and fork into a chaos of capillarity. Where you sought an origin, you find a vast babble which is also a silence: a chasm of smoke, thundering. Oh, blind mouth!

 

 

The Falls

It sounds like a sentence: Victoria Falls. Or a prophecy. At any rate, that's the joke I used to make until Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria actually died in 1901, just before I landed on the continent. Two years later, I set eyes on that African wonder named for an English queen and became as beguiled as the next man. I came for the Falls, and I stayed for them, too. What they say is true – the spray can indeed be seen from thirty miles off, the roar heard from twenty. The last part of our trek from Wankie was hard going and it was eleven at night by the time we made camp about a mile from the Falls, under a gargantuan baobab tree. Tired as I was, I could not let the need of sleep come between me and my first sight of that vast tumble. I left the others and made my way alone to look over the Falls from above, from the so-called 'Devil's Cataract'. I shall never forget it.

The night was luminous with moonlight. In the foreground was the bluff of Barouka island. Beyond it, veiled in spray, the main falls leapt roaring into the chasm four hundreds feet below. The spray was so powerful it was hard to say whither direction the Falls flowed. The shadowy black forest writhed its branches before them. The lunar rainbow, pale and shimmering, gave the whole scene a touch of faery. Awed beyond words, as if standing in the presence of a majestic Power quite ineffable, my hat came off. For an hour I stood bare-headed, lost in rapture.

No. I shall never forget that nocturnal view of the Victoria Falls, full in flood and drenched in moonlight. I spent thirty-two years within a mile of that spot, and I'll be damned if that isn't still the best lookout.

The next morning, I marked the occasion of my first encounter by carving my name and the date into the baobab tree: Percy M. Clark. 8 May 1903. This was unlike me but excusable under the circumstances. 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.

For two hours I sat alone on the southern bank, popping off a rifle at intervals. At long last, I saw a speck – a dugout coming from the other side. It seemed so far up river, I wasn't quite sure it was coming for me; the river was so swift that a long slant was needed to bring the boat precisely to the spot where I waited. A dugout is a ticklish thing to handle in a strong current – a single crossways cough is enough to tip it over – but the Barotse are excellent river-boys. Standing to their work, they use ten-foot paddles to steer their primitive craft. They brought me back across and then my goods.

The Old Drift was then a small settlement of a half-dozen men – there were only about a hundred white men in all of the territory of North-western Rhodesia at the time. I stopped at a mud and pole store that served as the local 'hotel'. It belonged to a man who bore my surname, except his had the aristocratic 'e' attached. This would have been coincidence enough, but it turned out that he grew up in Chatteris in Cambridgeshire, practically next door to the university city I thought I'd long left behind. It seemed I couldn't get away from the old country, or its airs.

Excerpted from The Old Drift by Namwali Serpell. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.