The section set around the Zambian National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy is a good place for the reader to catch their breath. This moment of transition is interesting but the pace of the novel means that we trot beside the action, eager to keep up. Confronted by the unsurprising bigotry of her family, they decide to flee to Zambia and return to a country on the brink of change in the early 1960s. Africans are first seen through the eyes of Europeans, and called every racial epithet possible, until black student Ronald arrives in England and falls in love with the granddaughter of Percy Clark. The book is set primarily in Zambia, but it is not until nearly 90 pages in that we meet a substantial Zambian character. Photograph: Nkoloso: The Afronaut (A24 Media Productions) When we move to Italy and meet the first of the grandmothers, Sibilla, we are so overwhelmed by an infinitude of descriptions, mostly of the long, uncontrollable hair that covers her body, that the paragraphs become more thicket-like than the black veil shrouding her limbs.Įdward Makuka Nkoloso at his Zambian National Academy of Science, Space Research and Philosophy, 1964.
In fact, throughout the book, while the Zambezi surges and floods and glides, the humans drift, both narratively and in terms of their characterisation. The hardscrabble, alcohol-soaked world he inhabits is well drawn and realistically evoked, but as a character he seems oddly flat, a pastiche of a pith-helmeted colonial brute. Percy is the type of man who refers to “Merrie Old England” and gives “natives” a wallop when necessary. The novel is divided into parts that follow matrilineal inheritances – grandmothers, daughters, granddaughters – but we begin with a grandfather, Percy Clark, an itinerant British photographer ekeing out a living near Victoria Falls at the turn of the 20th century.
That work is a subtle and economical piece of writing which does not prepare one for the expansive and genre-meshing The Old Drift.
Serpell, who was born in Zambia and moved to the United States at the age of nine, won the Caine prize for African writing in 2015 for her short story “The Sack”. N amwali Serpell’s first novel is a rambunctious epic that traces the intertwined histories of three families over three generations.
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