“Turning the Fables”: Counterfactuality in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

ABSTRACT

This article argues that The Old Drift represents a post-nationalist narrative—authored by a female writer and partially narrated by nonhumans—that creates alternate versions of Zambia’s nationalist histories through counterfactuals. The discussion pays attention to how Serpell achieves counterfactuality through interludes that fragment the text. These are brief sections that offer information that disnarrate the main sections of the narrative. I argue that they are distinct spaces within the text where mosquitos as narrators address the readers directly by offering extra information about Africa’s and Zambia’s past. By focalizing an alternative history through the collective voice of a swarm of mosquitos, Serpell draws our attention to the existence of a different memory of the nation that human-authored histories have obscured or covered insufficiently. Rendering this memory through a counterfactual fable is thus to suggest the fallibility of these nationalist histories and foregrounding the relevance of African oral forms in attempting to capture a more complete version of African histories before and after colonialism.

INTRODUCTION

Salman Rushdie writes in his New York Times review of Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift that the novel is part of “a river of original and important writings by female authors . . . [that] has burst its banks and become a flood” (para. 1). Serpell’s genre-bending novel is one of the recent epics by African women writers who are reinventing African ethnic and nationalist narratives in new and interesting ways. It is in the company of Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing (2016), Jennifer Makumbi’s Kintu (2014) and The First Woman (2020), Ayesha Harruna Attah’s The One Hundred Wells of Salaga (2018), and Maaza Mengiste’s The Shadow King (2019), just to mention a few. These writers have been labeled as Afropolitan because most of them live and work in the West. The politics of Afropolitanism, whether this labeling befits these writers and how these epics undermine the Afropolitan ideals, have been eloquently discussed elsewhere and are beyond the remit of this article (Mwesigire 113).

Nevertheless, these texts are post-nationalist and respond to a male-dominated postcolonial literary canon that appropriated oral forms such as myths and epics to address anticolonial themes and nationalist concerns (Kizza 8). The above women writers’ recent shift to the epic form offers resistant readings to Africa’s colonial and nationalist histories, which were primarily masculine and focused on nationalist identities at the expense of women’s histories and experiences. They offer alternative narratives, which invite us to imagine the past as nonlinear. By rendering these narratives through marginalized voices, they enrich, alter, unsettle, and challenge the essentialist notions espoused by the conceptions of the nation that often exclude women, especially in the African context. In this article, I argue that The Old Drift represents a post-nationalist narrative that creates alternative versions of Zambia’s nationalist histories through the use of counterfactuals. Historians Phillip Tetlock and Aaron Belkin have described counterfactuals as “subjunctive conditionals in which the antecedent is known or supposed, for purposes of argument, to be false” (4). As I explain in the next section, counterfactuals in fiction have been extended beyond this conventional understanding.

My reading of the novel does not focus on the main plot as such but on the italicized interludes that fragment the text and contradict the nationalist histories of Zambia. These are brief and distinct spaces within the text where the narrator(s) directly address(es) readers by commenting on the main sections of the text and Zambia’s official histories. I generalize from Serpell’s idea of “turning the fables,” that is, the insertion of a collective narrative provided by nonhumans (mosquitos and microdrones) about humans (instead of the other way around, which is the case with fables) to explore the interludes as counterfactual fables that disrupt the human-authored colonial and nationalist histories. I read them as offering an alternative version of events that uncovers potentially elided or obscured histories, challenging and reinterpreting known historical “facts” while commenting on the nation’s near-future possibilities.

The Old Drift is a multigenerational narrative that explores the history of Zambia through three families over three generations. The first section, titled “The Grandmothers,” relates the stories of Sibilla, Agnes, and Matha, each of whom is uniquely constructed. Sibilla is an Italian woman with long hair that appears to grow by inches every day. Agnes is a British woman who suddenly loses her sight and has to relearn how she perceives the world. She falls in love with a black Zambian student and elopes with him to Zambia. Matha, the second “grandmother,” is particularly significant in the narrative because she is a real figure drawn from Zambian history whose name and role are not altered. Sylvia, Isabella, and Thandiwe—“The Mothers”—are the daughters of the first generation of women. Their generation reveals the various issues that Zambia is experiencing and how women are navigating them. The final generation, “The Children,” comprised of Joseph, Jacob, and Naila, not only brings out the complexities of being a Zambian but the three also take charge of homegrown technological breakthroughs in the text, such as inventing microdrones and viral vaccines to actualize the first generation’s dreams envisaged through the Afronaut project where Matha was one of the cadets.

Even though the text engages directly and significantly with the historical material, it is speculative fiction because it creates alternate worlds in some sections that are far from the realities of our actual world. Sarah Nuttall reads the novel as a hydrocolonial work based on Serpell’s attention to the histories of the Kariba Dam, which seem to flow with the country’s different generations. She asserts that the book depicts a speculative “hydrocolonial near-future . . . [that] is embedded in near-fact or, at least, in scientifically enhanced prediction” (464). The proximity to the hypothetical future conveys both possibility and uncertainty. Possibility in the sense that, while Africa has been characterized with lack, the text offers optimism that the continent can turn things around, with women at the forefront of these developments. But this also comes with a warning that the possibilities that technologies can bring are not all to the benefit of the continent unless they are adopted cautiously. The juxtaposition between the past, present, and future possibilities infers the creation of a counterfactual scenario where linearities are challenged by offering multiple alternatives.

THEORETICAL UNDERPINNINGS

The wave that Rushdie refers to in relation to Serpell’s work above began with writers such as Ama Ata Aidoo, Flora Nwapa, and Nawal El Saadawi confronting the omission of women in the texts written by male postcolonial writers. According to Nwapa, only a few male writers, such as South Africa’s Peter Abrahams in A Wreath for Udomo (1956) and Senegal’s Ousmane Sembene in God’s Bits of Wood (1960) attempted to “project an objective image of women” (528). She asserts that “Nigerian male writers Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Wole Soyinka, J. P. Clark, and Elechi Amadi have in their earlier works played down the powerful role of women” (528). Nwapa’s viewpoint is corroborated by the oral tradition scholar Florence Stratton, who asserts that male writers appropriated the oral forms in their works in a way that reinforced “the Manichean allegory of gender” and perpetuated women’s subordination (91). The misrepresentation of women by nationalist histories and postcolonial nationalist authors can be traced to inherited gender conceptions and the patriarchal structure from Western modes of literacy, where literary scholars also neglected works produced by women. Hence, women writers resorted to critiquing family structures in order to portray the nation (Aidoo 516; Saadawi 520). Nwapa addresses this misrepresentation in her fiction by using oral traditions as origin narratives to reflect on and cherish, reinscribing the matriarchal legacy of many traditional African settings (Stratton 91).

Serpell and the new group of women writers have taken over from the struggles of the above writers. They are instead focused on disrupting literary canons to rethink African ethnic and nationalist histories. Though The Old Drift draws on history and oral traditions, I read it as stretching the limits of speculative fiction, a genre that has recently attracted the interest of more African writers who are using it to comment on Africa’s political and socioeconomic situation by looking back to the continent’s past, present, and projecting future possibilities with warnings of how things could turn out as a consequent of the present. Such writers include Nnedi Okorafor, Tomi Adeyemi, Jordan Ifueko, and Lauren Beukes, among others. Reimagining existing narratives, such as history, anew and constructing alternate worlds make speculative fiction a potent space for the experimentation of counterfactual thought. African speculative fiction has been used to represent African people’s sociocultural, economic, and political aspirations, especially after independence, when nationalist clamor took center stage in the literary imagination. Disillusionment with post-independence nations spurred African writers to use tropes of speculative fiction to reimagine the continent, taking into account the challenges that the new nations faced and warning leaders of the looming consequences of their actions (Adejunmobi 266, Bekolo 116, Eatough 237).

In this article, I read The Old Drift as rendering a counterfactual narrative. Counterfactuals have been used in history and other social science disciplines such as philosophy, political science, and psychology (Birke et al. 11). However, the field where the theory has generated the most debate is history, where scholars do not seem to find consensus on its usefulness or what counterfactuality entails. Political scientist Richard Lebow has stressed the importance of counterfactuals to historians, arguing that they can help tease out some of the assumptions in history that may aid our understanding of the past but are taken for granted (“Good History” 27, “Counterfactuals” 59). He contends that the constructions of factual and counterfactual history are entirely imaginary and are based on concepts and categories that reveal something useful or interesting about the world, which elevate the factual to a position of privilege (28). However, historian Mads Mordhorst argues that counterfactual history is methodologically flawed and has hit a dead-end in its contestation of history’s linearity and determinism. He thus proposes the concept of counternarrative as a more useful tool in contesting hegemonic narratives. He transforms the counterfactuals by proposing that their signature question, what if?, begins with stories about events and not the events themselves; for instance, “what if other stories had been told?” (5). In other words, Mordhorst suggests that a counternarrative approach to history focuses on the stories that historians leave out either consciously or unconsciously but are nevertheless crucial in understanding particular events.

With the use of counterfactuals in literary studies increasingly getting more attention, Mordhorst’s counternarrative seems to me to have been incorporated into the counterfactual historical mode. Literary critic and theorist Catherine Gallagher acknowledges this in her conceptualization of the counterfactual historical mode as follows:

When I first started talking about the phenomenon, I found that the phrase implied many kinds of works I had not expected: histories that are simply fictional or even mendacious; “secret” histories that purport to explain the hidden private stories behind the official explanations of historical events; “counterhistories” stressing the forgotten struggles or viewpoints of those outside the mainstream; or imaginary histories that are “counterfactual” in the sense that they envision states of the world, usually utopias and dystopias, that might be, but have not yet been, realized.

(2)

In other words, Gallagher suggests that the above categories can be considered counterfactual, but they lack the definitive characteristics of the conservative counterfactual-historical mode. She defines this as “an explicit or implicit past-tense, hypothetical, conditional conjecture pursued when the antecedent condition is known to be contrary to fact” (2). This is when a writer deliberately takes a known historical fact, alters it, and then imagines the consequences of that alteration. My treatment of Mordhorst’s counternarrative notion as a concept within the broader understanding of the counterfactual framework is consistent with Andreas Martin Widmann’s postulation that a counterfactual history novel can imagine alternative interpretations of the past without necessarily denying the facts of history as presented by historians but altering at least one “cornerstone” of what has always been formally accepted as fact (188). Widmann leaves room for diverse interpretations of what he means by a “cornerstone,” not restricting it to an alternative or hypothetical outcome as the conventional understanding of counterfactuals demands. Thus, I argue that challenging how nationalist histories have always been told or interpreted is to alter some of their key “cornerstones.” For instance, Serpell does not set out to alter the outcomes of any of the historical events she represents in the text, but in most cases offers alternative versions and interpretations while maintaining the outcome of events.

I find counterfactuals useful in thinking about how Serpell contests the linearity of Zambian nationalist histories because they provide several concepts for analyzing, precisely, her positioning of interludes and the role they play in the text. Counterfactuals in fiction are anchored on the notion that what is imagined is located in a possible world, whether it is part of “unrealized possibilities” (Gallagher 18) or hidden histories. For instance, the textual universe of The Old Drift consists of the textual actual world, which draws on or resembles the reader’s actual world, and the interludes, which are an additional alternate possible world where mosquitos and microdrones have the ability to chronicle and narrate human histories.

The aim of a counterfactual creation of alternate possible worlds in any genre of fiction and specifically in speculative fiction, Marie-Laure Ryan tells us, is to critique existing realities in the actual world. Suggesting that something happened or imagining it could have happened sends a message to how close they could have influenced history. It questions causality, objectivity, and historical determinism. Consequently, according to Ryan, counterfactuals only make sense based on their truth value, determined by their resemblance to the actual world, be it historical facts or other realities that the reader can readily identify with (48). In other words, the textual actual world in a counterfactual novel must have something that the reader in the actual world would relate to despite how estranged they might be. This is the principle of minimal departure, which, as she tells us, states that “we reconstrue the world of fiction and of a counterfactual as being the closest possible to the reality we know” (Ryan, “Fiction” 406). The principle of minimal departure thus guides us in negotiating between the alternate possible worlds of the mosquitos and microdrones, the textual actual world, and the actual world of the reader. The identity of characters across these worlds is realized through the concept of rigid designation where an individual is assigned the same proper name and endowed with similar properties across different worlds.

The ability of speculative fiction to negotiate multiple worlds is what makes them a potent space for counterfactuals to “destabilize ontological perspectives and compel readers to see the ‘real’ historical world in different, perhaps more critical ways” (Hills 437). While, in some instances, the alternate worlds created by speculative fiction may appear meaningless and far-fetched, this serves to allow the reader to juxtapose how things would have been if certain things happened differently. Therefore, in speculative fiction, counterfactuals work backward to the past (real or imagined) or the future (near or distant). This is a plausible future based on the direction that the actual world is taking, especially technologically. To enable the reader to navigate the multiple worlds of the novel, Serpell uses the interludes as a space from which the narrators and the reader can attain a perspective from which they can analyze the Zambian nation “empirically and normatively” (Lebow, “Counterfactuals, History and Fiction” 67). In the next section, I focus on the unusual narration in the interludes where mosquitos offer versions of various events within and outside the textual actual world.

“TURNING THE FABLES”: DISNARRATION AS DISRUPTION

As the preceding discussion has demonstrated, counterfactuals are based on a relationship of contrast, which necessitates the presence of a fact to be contested. In The Old Drift, facts, as I have highlighted earlier, are human-authored colonial and nationalist histories from Zambia’s actual world. Therefore, the novel’s key “what if” question is the possibility that nonhumans (insects) can be bearers of alternative versions of such histories, which they then render in the form of fables. The interludes are narrated by a collective first-person point of view of a chorus of a swarm of mosquitos and are strategically positioned to intersperse the main sections of the novel. I read this kind of focalization as based on a counterfactual conditional—imagining what would happen if mosquitos adopted certain perspectives on the events in the text and history. This falls within what David Herman defines as hypothetical focalization—“the use of hypotheses, framed by the narrator or a character, about what might be or have been seen or perceived” by someone else who is either mentioned in the story or not (qtd. in Macrae 200). Within a counterfactual context such as in the interludes in the novel, I contend that the hypothetical focalization is neither framed by the narrators or characters, but by the author who lends some authority to the mosquitos to have a perspective of human histories.

Andrea Macrae writes that hypothetical focalization is useful in texts that resist norms of any nature (202). Serpell utilizes the technique to put the reader and the narrators on different temporal planes, thereby foregrounding the relationship between events taking place in the actual world and textual universe. The focalization disrupts the ontological boundaries between these worlds, aiding the readers’ comprehension and interpretation of the key themes of the text. By exploring the above relationships and contesting the dominant narratives, such as official history, hypothetical focalization performs a metafictional function (Macrae 203).

The interludes act as an aside where the mosquitos (designated as the collective “we”) address the readers (designated as “you”) directly, thereby emphasizing their reliability as narrators. The mosquitos only introduce themselves in the second interlude as “[t]hin troubadours, the bare ruinous choir, a chorus of gossipy mites. Uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. Neither gods nor ghosts nor sprites, we’re the effect of an elementary principle” (19). They further affirm their role within the textual actual world by declaring that “it’s time to turn the fables, we say, time for us to tell you what we know” (19). Fables are known to be stories about animals narrated by humans and are intended to instill human values, particularly in young readers or listeners. However, here, the mosquitos claim to have witnessed human histories and learned their secrets, making them chroniclers of an alternative memory of Zambia from precolonial to postcolonial periods. Their position in the text as narrators is bolstered by their ability to add or discount facts from the actual world or previously narrated events in the textual actual world. They also enjoy the freedom to veer from the focus of the main narrative. In some of the inter-ludes, there are intense and intricate scientific and technological descriptions. For instance, they provide an elaborate explanation of the mosquitos’ breeding process and the transmission of malaria, which at times comes across as too much and an unnecessary didactic detail.

The interludes in the novel are spaces where nationalist histories, the reader’s senses, biases, and worldviews are questioned, tested, and challenged. They are foregrounded as alternative spaces of narration by their italicization, which visually distinguishes them from the sections carrying the main narrative. Furthermore, even though in some instances they utilize the main narrative’s spatial and temporal settings, they only use these contexts as starting points to present stories that contradict, reinterpret, or add information to the ongoing narration or external narratives such as history, and I return to this point below. As a result, the interludes have their own plots that are unconstrained by the novel’s structure. They thus transport the reader to an alternate possible world within the textual universe where it is possible to find nonhumans claiming to have mastered the art of storytelling and preserving a nation’s history. Furthermore, the mosquitos seem to assert that they potentially have a more accurate and dependable version of Zambia’s history because they have been present “for eons, before fossils” and have watched humans’ ways. These words are supposed to guarantee the reader that they can rely on the mosquitos’ narration. Consequently, the alternate possible worlds in the interludes offer a vantage point from which the textual actual world can fact-check narratives from the reader’s actual world, with the mosquitos drawing facts from Zambia’s history that they comment on (Ryan, “Possible Worlds” 169). Counterfactuals can only fact-check external narratives such as history when the text creates multiple worlds to juxtapose with the actual world, thereby adding or discounting some information in those narratives.

Within the novel, the interludes comment on the details in the main narrative, thereby introducing parallel plots to the sections they describe. They thus render counterfactuality to the text through disnarration—a narrative strategy developed and defined by Gerald Prince as:

[E]vents that do not happen but are referred to (in a negative or hypothetical mode) by the narrative text. . . . [They can also be] alethic expressions of impossibility or unrealized possibility, deontic expressions of observed prohibition, epistemic expressions of ignorance, ontologic expressions of nonexistence, purely imagined worlds, desired worlds, or intended worlds, unfulfilled expectations, unwarranted beliefs, failed attempts, crushed hopes, suppositions and false calculations, errors and lies, and so forth.

(299–300)

From the above excerpt, disnarration performs a significant counterfactual function based on events that may have happened but did not and hence are imagined. Disnarration improves a reader’s grasp of a continuing story by deleting or introducing new information to previously told events. In The Old Drift it operates on two levels, as I have mentioned: they comment on an external narrative—the official history of the actual world in Zambia—and work within the novel’s textual actual world, commenting on specific passages of the main narrative.

Even though Prince’s definition of disnarration above is broad, it is limited to events that are not realized but are narrated. Andrea Macrae has relied on this eclectic conceptualization and extended the concept to include events that are realized in a text but are then discounted (161). Disnarration relies on the notion of forked paths where two versions of a story are mutually exclusive, none considered more real than the other. Realization of one depends on the negation of the other. Having more than one version of the past alongside each other as real and unreal does not only mean different interpretations, “it counters singularity, linearity and chronology” (Macrae 181). In this regard, disnarration performs the same kind of disruption to official history that metafiction does.

Macrae has argued that disnarration occurs in everyday storytelling, but its metafictional roles are underpinned by the fact that it “troubles the notions of authorship and ownership of fictional worlds, and ethical responsibility of the imagined” (22). Thus, it explores the interrelationship between the key participants in a work of fiction such as the author, reader, narrator, and the characters. Disnarration can thus be explicit, either initiated by any of the above participants, stating that certain events did not transpire as the text, or an external narrative, has always depicted them. They can also be implicit because the author may employ phrases that suggest that what has been told is false or insufficiently explored. In some cases, this may involve the use of irony. For instance, in the novel, the first interlude has instances of explicit and implicit disnarration. The phrase “Oh, father muzungu! The word means white man, but it describes not the skin, but a tendency” (1) first acknowledges what the word means in most Bantu languages then proceeds to disnarrate this popular meaning by suggesting a different meaning closer to another Bantu word—zunguluka, which means to “wander aimlessly” (1). This is an example of explicit disnarration not of what is already narrated in the text but what exists in other narratives outside the text. However, the entire interlude foregrounds the role of irony in implicit disnarration, especially how it ridicules European expeditions in Africa. The phrase “this is the story of a nation—not a kingdom or a people—so it begins, of course, with a white man” (1) draws our attention to how the history of the nation has been told from the colonizer’s view while implicitly disnarrating the same through irony. This suggests that even though the idea of modern nationhood in Africa could have come from Europe, stories of African people always existed before colonialism.

Another instance of implicit disnarration through irony is demonstrated by the statement “he freed slaves as he went, broke their chains with his hands, and took them on as his servants and bearers” (1). It ridicules the notion that the English explorer David Livingstone could have gained fame for freeing slaves, suggesting that he only took them from one form of slavery to another. These are aspects of history that the reader already knows or should know, however, restating them through irony refocuses the reader to the biases in the authorship of nationalist histories and how they centered on Europeans’ experiences in Africa at the expense of African stories. The same interlude proceeds to tell the story of Livingstone as a fairytale, then comments on it by setting the record straight. The story is introduced with the temporal locative “once upon a time, a goodly Scottish doctor caught a notion to find the source of the Nile” (1). The statement constructs a temporal relation between Livingstone’s story in the actual world and the version that the mosquitos are about to narrate in the textual actual world. Even though the reader may already know that Livingstone did not discover the Nile, European versions of history credit him with its discovery. Therefore, the phrase above debunks official history as human constructs by stripping Livingstone’s story of its status as a “fact” and giving it the status of a fable—an old, timeless, and factually hollow tale. In the rest of the interlude, the mosquitos explicitly disnarrate official history by setting the record straight on how the Zambian nation came into existence, suggesting that the conception of African nations was a result of slips and errors by the Europeans, as the statement below demonstrates:

Neither Oriental nor Occidental, but accidental is this nation. Would you believe our godly doc was searching for the Nile in the wrong spot? as it turns out, there are two Niles—one Blue, one White—which means two sources, and neither one of them is 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 splits, cleaved by apostrophe or dash. The tongue forks, speaks in two ways, which in turn fork and fork into a chaos of capillary. Where you sought an origin, you find a vast babble which is also a silence: a chasm of smoke, thundering.

(2)

The statement emphasizes forked paths as an essential counterfactual feature and a method of holistically uncovering and conveying the past. It encapsulates the notion that “this happened, but this could have been and yet did not happen” or “this is how history has always been interpreted, but this is also another interpretation worth paying attention to.” It draws the reader’s attention to the multiplicities or alternative narratives that exist about a place but are deliberately disregarded or elided, especially in telling colonial and nationalist histories. By emphasizing the notion of nations, tales, persons, and signs as forked by nature, the interlude suggests that official history is always only one version of the past (Carr 8). Other versions, known or unknown, are always thrown to the peripheries.

Even though the narrative voice in the interludes is attributed to the mosquitos, which is also foregrounded by their assertions, as discussed earlier, the focalization seems to change suddenly, and the reader is no longer sure who the narrator is. The collective “we” narrative voice, which up to this point we know belongs to the mosquitos, states that they are no longer certain who they are—whether mosquitos or microdrones. They thus invite the reader to resolve the riddle of their identity through the question: “for one, we’re not sure we are who we said we are. Are we red-blood beasts or metallic machines or are we just a hive mind that runs a program that spews Wikipedian facts?” (562). The confusing statement suggests that the mosquitos are disnarrating their identity, which we have known throughout the narrative. However, this disnarration is supposed to be resolved by an earlier statement in the second interlude that the swarm of mosquitos will evolve a conscience. This is a kind of disnarration that speculates that even though something does not happen at a certain point in the story, the reader can expect it at a later point. However, the role of the mosquitos as the narrators cannot be disnarrated by the above statement because the reader has already conceptualized their unusual role in the story.

The introduction of what seems to be the voices of the mozkeetoze—homegrown microdrones developed for government surveillance—foregrounds the speculative features of the text where elements of futuristic technology combine with the unusual focalization by the mosquitos. They state that “we’ve joined up with the local mosquitoes. We get along fine, but you can’t tell us apart . . .” (562). Thus it is not about the mosquitos acquiring some form of cyborg consciousness, but the government, coming up with a tool the size of mosquitos for the purposes of surveillance and delivering jabs to the citizens. Therefore, the mosquitos and the futuristic mozkeetoze appear to form one menacing swarm, bolstering their authority as vital keepers of the Zambian nation’s memories. The final interlude revisits their function as protectors of the dam and chroniclers of its memories, which we witness earlier in the narrative when Percy M. Clark’s first-person narration is disnarrated with the swarm asserting that “we recount each act in turn . . . he [Clark] didn’t learn our lesson” (19). However, the third generation, (“the grandchildren”) like Clark, ignore counsel and attempt to blow up the dam without considering climate change (“The Change”) (563). The result is an apocalyptic flood that engulfs the whole country except for a small section of Lusaka.

In another interlude, the swarm explains its strategy for survival and protecting the Old Drift. While the white settlers in the Old Drift are killed by malaria that the mosquitos transmit, the swarm explains that it is not their will to kill but humans’ folly of constructing an ample breeding space for them. In the interlude, they also retell the forced displacement of the Tonga people from their land by the Europeans to build the dam, which is only briefly mentioned in the main narrative. The swarm’s account contradicts the narrator’s and proceeds to share the mythical beliefs of Tonga and the dismissive attitude the white settlers had when engaging them on resettlement. The interlude reaffirms that the construction of the dam was out of a string of betrayals, from a man to his wife and brother, the white settlers to the Tonga people, and the river.

Through the interludes, Serpell also uncovers and provides more information about female figures who were influential in Zambia’s liberation struggle, most notably Alice Lenshina. The interlude comes after a section of the novel devoted to Agnes, one of “the grandmothers.” In the main narrative, Lenshina’s story and her Lumpa church are glossed over, as little information is provided. In fact, one of the characters, when asked by Agnes about the Lumpa church, casually comments that “You must show the mighty of the lion. Kaunda is a proper leader! These Lumpa-Lumpa are just causing mischiffs” (124). The statement corroborates how Lenshina is presented in Zambia’s nationalist history as a radical who caused political unrest even though studies have shown that in the actual world Lenshina distanced herself from politics, insisting that some of the young men in her congregation misunderstood her teachings and got too involved with politics (Hugo 100).

The swarm, however, reveals more about Lenshina and her sect maintaining her mythical status in real life and explaining that her conflict with the Zambian government at the time was due to a demand for taxes from her many adherents. Furthermore, the regime, then led by the late Kenneth Kaunda, is depicted as having been alarmed at Lenshina’s following, which it saw as a threat to political power. The description in the interlude is close to Jonathan Kangwa’s account that Lenshina was fought by both male political and religious leaders (especially Presbyterians and Catholics) for being powerful and yet illiterate, but it was primarily because of her gender that she was persecuted (77). These are examples of disnarration as a tool for historiographic metafiction where it offers narratives that go against what has been misinterpreted in official history.

A similar instance is with the story of Edward Nkoloso and his Afronaut project, which Serpell recasts in the novel. She utilizes the interludes to offer more information that affirms or challenges what the reader may already know. Like Lenshina, Nkoloso is rigidly designated—assigning the same proper name to figures from the actual world in the textual actual world. The story of Edward Nkoloso in the main sections of the text has very little alteration to the version of the story that Serpell wrote in a 2017 essay where she asserts that the Afronaut Project (the Zambian Space Program) is a piece of Zambian history that has been potentially misinterpreted. In the essay, Serpell writes that Edward Nkoloso, a former soldier and schoolteacher, embarked on an ambitious mission to land on the moon. His team of “space cadets” was trained by “swinging them from long ropes, rolling them down hills in empty oil barrels, and bobbing them in streams to simulate water landings,” and they were armed with twelve cats as part of their landing preparations (“The Afronaut Archives” para. 4). According to Nkoloso, the project failed due to a lack of support from the government and that his “cadets” could not focus on the space flight because of “too much lovemaking when they should be studying the moon” (para. 6). These events occurred in Zambia in 1965, and Nkoloso saw the program as a chance to give the country some pride as the only African country to “rival” the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, in space landings.

In The Old Drift, the main sections of the text dramatize these events depicting Nkoloso as a revolutionary who seems to have lost his mind. However, the interludes portray a different picture of Nkoloso, first comparing his story to David Livingstone’s, asserting that, “If Livingstone was our white father, Nkoloso was our black prince–Bemba royalty, they say. Equally smart, just as possessed, abrim with the will to explore . . .” (199). This implies that while official history credits Livingstone with the “discovery” of the Nile, which already existed, Nkoloso’s revolutionary project was something new and brought hope to Zambians. However, the ellipsis at the end of the statement is a disnarration that discounts the notion of the project being a space exploration per se but more about political mobilization against colonialism.

Furthermore, the interlude’s focus on Nkoloso’s revolutionary spirit is consistent with Serpell’s description of him in her essay as an “eccentric visionary—an early pioneer of Afrofuturism” (Serpell para. 7) rather than a madman, as the Western press had labeled him. Serpell depicts the project as a kind of African speculative fiction that blends “together science, fable, African technology, and Western philosophy” (167). These words are uttered by Matha Mwamba, one of Nkoloso’s cadets who, in the course of the project, learns “to see the world through [Nkoloso’s] double vision,” noting that the project “was a work of art! It was inspiring for Zambians to dream about going to the moon. That is how real change happens” (181). In the textual actual world, Nkoloso’s idea of going to the moon is thus depicted as a form of speculative fiction consistent with the recent corpus of the genre coming from African writers, which Nnedi Okorafor has defined as “Africanfuturism,” which she explains as follows:

Africanfuturism is concerned with visions of the future, is interested in technology, leaves the earth, skews optimistic, is centered on and predominantly written by people of African descent (black people). It is rooted first and foremost in Africa. It’s less concerned with “what could have been” and more concerned with “what is and can/will be.” It acknowledges, grapples with, and carries “what has been.”

(Okorafor para. 6)

While Serpell’s brand of speculative fiction is unique from Okorafor’s, given the former’s straightforward engagement with the historical, her use of Africa as the novel’s primary setting and the appropriation of a number of actual historical figures from Zambia, like Nkoloso, attest to her effort in using the speculative genre to render a counterfactual reworking of Zambia’s nationalist history that is incomplete and even inaccurate.

Disnarration’s ability to unpack the multiplicity and the nuances of the past in the interludes makes it a critical device in interrogating the truth and rendering an all-rounded representation of history. Its evocation of absences or unnarrated presences enriches and undermines the main narrative in the novel and the narrative of Zambian nationalist history that Serpell uses as the starting point of her narration. The alternative narratives that Serpell imagines flow into the raging wave of recent writings that disrupt African fiction conventions.

CONCLUSION

I argue in this paper that The Old Drift is a post-nationalist African novel that counterfactually reimagines African nationalist histories in general and Zambian history in particular. Serpell does this by postulating an alternative narration through interludes, which challenge the histories of the actual world and disnarrate the main sections of the narrative in the textual actual world. They are, therefore, distinct spaces within the text where a nonhuman narrative voice addresses the reader directly by offering extra information about the text and Zambia’s past. The novel’s structure is thus unique as it disrupts genres, presenting us with a complex world of speculative fiction to experiment with counterfactual theorizing. In this regard, counterfactuals ensure unity and coherence in the text, as well as suggest how fallible the known histories of Zambia are. By using the narrative voice in the form of a collective “we,” Serpell draws our attention to an alternative history that exists somewhere else that needs to be brought to the fore. The alternative history fact-checks what has been written in European-authored history texts that lay claim to African knowledge and resources while misrepresenting African stories. Albeit unusual and complex in their narration, I read the nonhuman focalization in the text as proposing a more rational narration of some aspects of the Zambian past.