Literary interlude: The songs of distant Africa
Alexander Chishimba, The Stars That Bore Us (Ndola: Chenjele, 1963)
Alexander Chishimba (b. 1935) may or may not be one of the Copperbelt’s great planetary-romance writers, but he is certainly one of the most prolific. He is the author of 66 novels, more than a hundred published short stories, and ten film scripts, and these numbers will only increase, because he is active today.
Chishimba was born to a working-class Ndola family: his father was a drill operator in a nearby copper mine and his mother sold the produce of the family garden in the city market. Like many Lamba, he fostered with his grandparents in the countryside between the ages of five and eleven, participating in the scouting movement that had grown up in the wake of the Wandervögel and returning to the city to begin his secondary education.
His early dreams, like those of many classmates, were of a career in civil engineering, but even before he graduated from the Ostgarten Gymnasium, they had moved in a literary direction. Kazembe at the time was awash with German boys’ adventure stories and their local adaptations, as well as the poetry of the Ndola Futurists and early planetary romances such as Walther Masumba's Starwind Epic, and Chishimba absorbed them all. At fourteen years of age, he began writing planetary-romance stories for class assignments, bringing condemnation from some of his teachers but praise from others who recognized an aspiring talent.
He sold his first story to the newsletter Tusua Tunji (Many Suns) [1] in 1952, and although he continued his engineering studies and worked briefly in the Nchanga copper mine in his twenties, he became a full-time writer by the age of 25. At times he had to supplement his literary income with freelance engineering projects, but once he became involved in Kazembe’s emerging cinema industry, he was able to leave even this behind.
The Stars That Bore Us (1963) marks a turning point in Chishimba’s literary career. His early works mirrored the stories on which he was brought up: plot-driven near-future epics full of battle and adventure on distant worlds, sometimes with only the exotic setting and richly-described technology to differentiate them from contemporary African romances. By the early 1960s, he had begun to explore different and more character-driven themes, initially in short stories such as Ifilolo (Commoners) and then in novels. In The Stars That Bore Us, the theme is ancestral memory and its understanding during times of cultural change.
Chishimba’s novel, like Masumba’s cycle, is set in the distant future, 30,000 years from now when several advanced civilizations have risen and fallen and the descendants of Africa have undergone folk-migrations that are clearly analogous to the Bantu expansion. (It is never made entirely clear what happened to the Europeans and Asians: at times it is suggested that they migrated to another part of the galaxy, and at other times it is implied that they remained on the central worlds that the Africans left behind.) The dominant culture is loosely based on the Lamba, accounting for millennia of dispersion and mixing of folkways; there are minority cultures among the humans, but as always in Chishimba’s works, the role of premodern Africans is played by the awantu, the alien races. Several of the awantu cultures in the novel are drawn from the nineteenth-century peoples of the Copperbelt and the surrounding region, with at least one being more Lamba-like than the distant descendants of the Lamba themselves.
Within that framework, Chishimba explores the nature of folk-memory across unfathomable spans of distance and time. The narrator, Mwema, is an itinerant merchant-storyteller who travels between stars via the ichiyawafu, a non-space named after the legendary country of the dead. In his time, the known worlds are emerging from a dark age, rebuilding connections and combining the technology of the past with more recent improvisations. Mwema sails among humans and awantu in a quest for a computer that can reconstruct ancestral memories – and, it is rumored, souls – and when he finds it, his quest becomes something else entirely and leads him to and past the edge of what is known.
The following chapter takes place on and around the world of Chifwe, near the edge of the settled universe, and shows the end of one search and the beginning of another…
When Mwema came out of the
ichiyawafu, the station was in front of him, and beyond it, the world.
The station’s name was written across its length in bold letters:
Ngoma, after the drum it resembled. To one side were the cranes and grapples of what had been a shipyard. On all other sides were the
inkunka, the huts [2] – modules, derelict ships and abandoned containers that were jerry-rigged to the station’s framework and in which most of its citizens lived. Further ahead, the surface of Chifwe stretched in all directions, and Mwema was just close enough to see the muddy delta of the Ogowe and the city lights beside it.
But what caught his attention, even more than the world, was the stars. Below him, as his ship measured “below,” thousands could be seen: that way lay the heart of the Orion Arm, and it was filled with light and color. But above, there was nothing. Chifwe was near the edge of the galactic lens, and the great black ocean beyond the galaxy washed on its shores.
The idea was a chilling one even to a man who had spent a lifetime moving between the stars, and Mwema looked above his instrument panel to the ghostly image of his twice-great grandfather.
We’ve reached the edge of everything, he thought.
If we don’t find it here, it’s surely gone…
“Unidentified ship, please identify yourself,” said a sudden disembodied voice in an accent that was hard to understand. “I repeat, unidentified ship, state your name and registry.”
“The
Ushiku, out of Mutanda,” he answered. “Last come from Masilo.”
“Your cargo,
Ushiku?”
“Enriched uranium. Precious stones. Industrial tools. Books. Sundries.”
There was a pause as the disembodied voice did whatever such voices do, and then a response: “Come in,
Ushiku. Bay two. Have you been here before?”
“No,” Mwema answered, but he had no trouble seeing the bay he had been told to enter. It lay open before him, and he guided the
Ushiku toward it.
The stories said that in the old days, the computer would have steered the ship into the dock. But computers were made to hear the language spoken fourteen hundred years before, and even with the archaic pronunciation passed down among the merchant clans, they often misunderstood. They couldn’t be used for things that required split-second decision. It was for Mwema and his instruments to bring the
Ushiku through the port traffic and the warren of
inkunka to the bay, and he looked to the piece of space rock that was his
ubwanga against collision and the fragment of a dead ship that protected him from piracy.
But he got there. His hand and eye were almost faster than his mind, and they threaded through the
inkunka with a sureness born of experience, and this wasn’t one of the lawless worlds where pirates lurked in the detritus of old stations. The bay grew before him, and then he was inside, and his worries now were nothing more than inspections and port taxes.
Later, he walked along the station’s main concourse, once a place of hostels and offices and shops stocked with the cargo of ten thousand worlds. Now, it was a place of market stalls, divided by patterned tapestries of dark red and brown and ochre, with brightly-lit images above them advertising their wares. Some sold power plants and hard-light tools and communicators; others sold parts and made repairs; there were
umulaye with their nanocures and
imfwiti who claimed the ability to alter the body and mind. The air carried the smell of roasting
ulumombwe caterpillars and locusts, both far easier to farm on a station than chicken or goat. There were trinkets, jewelry, artwork, music-boxes and songs to load into them, books; there were fortune-tellers and spirit-raisers. Beyond them, unseen, was the beat of
ingoma and the smell of cooking meat and bread and beer from the shebeens within the walls.
Mwema would return here tomorrow to sell his cargo. The market-people were only the tip of something unseen: many of them had interests in the deep parts of the station where the warehouses and farms and energy-rooms lay, and those that didn’t might work for or have clan connections to someone who did. Mwema had been in many stations, and the merchants always preferred business to be done here first: if there were a reason, and only then, would it go to other places.
But now, he was looking for something else: the clan-sign of the Black Hole. He might have clansmen here of any nation: clan came from the mother and nation from the father, and after this much time, the clans were spread among all the peoples of the galaxy. He looked, even, at the flat-featured fortune-teller who had come from very far, and who was dressed in the white and blue of Yemoja, orisha of the oceans and of space. Her people lived at the other end of the known worlds, and the language here must be very strange in her ears, but they too had become part of the same clans.
She wasn’t from the same one as Mwema, though – the patterns on her necklace gave away that she belonged to the Leopard clan instead. It was the man next to her, an
imbote-seller wearing dark blue geometric patterns and with his head shaved so that a single wall of hair formed a visor above his forehead [3], who wore the Black Hole sign.
Mwema bought a cup of
imbote and a roasted locust, and let the taste of the honey-beer fill his mouth before he spoke. Then he gave the clan lineage, the naming of ancestors and precepts that he’d learned when the
Ushiku belonged to his grandfather and he’d fostered on it as a child. The
imbote-seller recognized it – he, too, had learned, as all the clansmen in the many worlds had learned – and repeated it.
I am of the people of Nkonde, the people of Chibala, the men of the Black Hole who dare all and fear nothing…
“All right,” said the
imbote-man, demonstration done. “We know each other now; why have you come?”
“I am looking for someone deep in the station, a man called Tsanganayi. Do you know him?”
“The
mhondoro-man? I don’t know him – no one does. But I know
of him.”
Mwema had heard the word
mhondoro before. It was a spirit word in Ancient Shona, a word for the most powerful of ancestors. And he’d only heard it applied to this man, Tsanganayi.
“Do you know where he is?”
“Yes, but he isn’t deep in the station. He’s deep
outside – very, very deep in the
inkunka. You’ll need a guide. You’ve come to the right place – I can find you one who isn’t afraid of him.”
If people were afraid of Tsanganayi, Mwema thought, then the
mhondoro-man might indeed be the person for whom he’d searched forty worlds. “I have a cargo,” he said. “What price for the guide?”
The price agreed, he drank another cup of
imbote to fortify himself and waited for the guide to arrive. That worthy proved to be a girl of eight named Nkowo with dark eyes beyond her years. “She’s fostered with the mechanics, and she goes to school,” the
imbote-seller explained. “But she’s a member of the clan, and she runs errands for me sometimes. She’s a true daughter of the Black Hole – she fears nothing.”
Mwema paid the price to the
imbote-man and made sure he shared with Nkowo, and then the girl led him away. The concourse led to a side corridor, and a ladder, and an echoing hallway of root-farms and another of locust-tanks, and crowds of people on a myriad of jobs and errands, and then to one of the many entrances to the
inkunka. From there, they swam rather than walked. Few of the
nkunka-dwellers could afford gravity for themselves, let alone for the tubes and passages that connected them. Many of them could scarcely afford power, if the number of clandestine hookups were any sign. Nkowo was an expert swimmer, and she dodged the red-clad, beaded children playing ball games in the tubes and laughed when they complained.
“What language is that?” Mwema asked. The children spoke a language he couldn’t understand, and after most of a lifetime traveling between stars, he’d thought there were few of those. “Do they come from the fortune-teller’s world?”
“No. They’re the settlers who live below us – the ones who call this world Shinyanga rather than Chifwe. They lived here before the station, before the Union fell, even before the Union ever was. They came in the First Migration, all this way.” The look on her face was one of pure fascination, but she added, “the ones who come up here speak our language well enough.”
They were past the children and in another tube, with more smells of cooking and snatches of conversation from the
inkunka connected to it. Nkowo chattered excitedly of the chores she did at the mechanics’ stall, how she was learning to fix machines and make new ones from parts, how she was starting to discern how the parts worked with each other. She was even learning the language of the computers, she said – she spoke it with Mwema when she learned he understood it too, and whispered that this must be the
mhondoro-man’s native tongue.
And then, suddenly, the man was there.
His nkunka had gravity, and Mwema stumbled momentarily as the unexpected weight took hold. The capsule was a small one, with mats on the floor and a small hot-pot in the corner, and half or more of it was filled by the computer. It was like none that Mwema had ever seen: it seemed to have been made of dozens or even hundreds of separate machines, with keyboards and switches and levers to move the memory-cards from one module to another. Beside it, almost insignificant next to his machine, was a white-haired ancient, dressed in striped cloth of subtle reds and purples and blues.
Mwema sat cross-legged on the mat and clapped his hands, and Nkowo did the same. “My greeting to you, Tsanganayi,” he said, “if that is who you are.” He held out the book-card that he’d carried with him from the
Ushiku, and made an offering of it.
The
mhondoro-man, for that he indeed was, took the gift with both hands, and offered shake-shake beer in return as any other host might do. Nkowo took her cup at once, with thanks; a moment later, Mwema did as well, feeling odd about doing such a natural act in such a place.
“So tell me,” said Tsanganayi when all had drunk. “You’ve finished finding me. Where did you start?”
“Mutanda.”
Tsanganyi raised an eyebrow. “That’s a very long way.”
“Yes. My ship-clan has probably cast
ifipa by now to see if I’m alive or dead.”
“
Ifipa are nothing. What you’ve come here for, on the other hand… You’ve heard I can raise the ancestors, haven’t you?” He waited for an answer and got none. “Well, haven’t you?”
“That’s what they say, yes.”
“The
awantu think computers have souls – that the ancestors reside in them. Do you agree?”
“I’ve seen many computers. I haven’t seen a soul in any of them.”
“But you haven’t seen this one.” The
mhondoro-man suddenly took a needle from a shelf, cleaned it with alcohol, and grasped Mwema’s hand. “You’ll have to trust me,” he said, and at Mwema’s nod, he pierced his finger.
The barrel of the needle filled with blood, and Tsanganayi squeezed it out into a glass tube attached to the machine. His hands were a blur as he manipulated the keys and levers, connecting test strips and memory cards and wires. It all seemed like a ritual, and it suddenly occurred to Mwema that
any use of a computer took on aspects of ritual. You had to do everything correctly and in the right order for it to work, and even when you
did do everything right, you all too often didn’t get what you wanted.
That seemed to be little concern to the
mhondoro-man as his machine’s parts changed position, and suddenly a ghostly head and shoulders appeared above its projector. The face was long and thin, with sharp features; the dark brown scalp was shaved except for four nodules of hair, and he wore what appeared to be a uniform.
Nkowo gasped, and Mwema had to consciously stop himself from doing the same, especially when he realized how much the phantom face resembled his.
“Who is that?”
“Why don’t you ask him?” the
mhondoro-man answered.
It seemed impossible, but Mwema turned toward the head, clapping his hands once and talking as if to a person rather than a machine. “Who are you?” he asked. “When were you born? When did you die? What uniform are you wearing?”
“I am Kamwendo. I was born in the first month of 17,848 and I died in the seventh month of 18,016. I was in the Fifth Fleet of the Commonwealth.”
Almost fourteen thousand years – older than the Union, born in the days when the Second Migration was nearly living memory…
“Is he an ancestor of mine?”
“There can be no doubt. Your twin-helix and his are the same in the right places.”
“How could you compare… The Central Registry! You have their records?”
“A copy of them.” Tsanganayi nodded as Mwema fell silent. “They made copies, and some of them were lost when the Union fell. I had to fight a
badigui [4] for it. I had to become a sea creature myself to get it.” For the first time, Mwenya noticed that the marks on the older man’s cheeks were not scars but gills.
“But there was more,” the
mhondoro-man continued. “Once, in Kamwendo’s day and the time of the Union, the Central Registry learned of all births and deaths. In these times… maybe it will take decades or centuries to hear of them, maybe not at all. I had to find records of other worlds where I could, and helical records so that blood could bridge the gaps between the missing ones… and I had to make them all work together.” He gestured at the myriad of wires and cards.
“But why are you
here?” Mwema had recovered the power of speech. “Why aren’t you on Mutanda? Why are you at the edge of the worlds, not the center?”
“The Registry might not care for me breaking their monopoly. And in these times, even in Mutanda, there are too many who believe in witchcraft.”
Mwema bristled at the insult to his homeworld. “So you came here, where even more people do?”
“Here, they fear me enough to leave me alone. And there is another reason… What did you hope to do here, Mwema of Mutanda?”
Wasn’t that obvious? “To speak with the ancestors. To bring the elders back into the community. One people, across space and time. One people, even after everything falls apart.”
Tsanganayi nodded. “Of course. But I can’t do that. I have a store of records. I can find names if they are recorded, and faces if there are records of them or if there’s enough of a helical profile. And they can tell you… what is in their records. I can’t reconstruct the
people. They can’t truly talk to you, advise you, be part of us all.”
“And here, they can?”
“They could, once. The
awantu say that, many ages ago when they had computers and starships and empires, they had a computer that could take records and helical profiles and recreate a personality. It’s why they believe computers have souls. Some of them have come here and looked for the soul in my machine, and they say it almost has one – almost.
“If we can find their computer, and teach it the language of our machines or teach our machines to learn its… but first we have to find it. The
awantu know where it is, and neither they nor I can go there, but maybe you can.”
Mwema, for the second time that day and one of the few times in his life, found himself with nothing to say. It was Nkowo who answered instead, and as the
imbote-man had said, she feared nothing.
“Can I guide you? I’ve been down there, and I speak the language. You need to be careful with the
awantu – break their custom and it will go badly for you…”
For a second, Mwema said nothing, and then a burst of laughter escaped his lips. “Will they miss you at the merchants’ stall?”
“I’ll give them a share of the price.”
“Very well, then,” he said. “It seems I have another journey to make.”
He sold his goods first, but he made the journey. There was a shuttle rank in Bay Five, and he and Nkowo joined the crowd pushing into one. The airlock sealed, and it fell away from the station, freefalling toward the surface, glowing red as it forced its way into the atmosphere. At the last possible moment, the engines cut on, and it leveled off and made its descent to the port.
Shinyanga Port was not a large town: the people who had settled this world were not fond of cities. Some were there, in the red robes and beads that Mwema had seen in the
inkunka; they had game and hides to trade, or beef, or mielies, or crates of squawking chickens, or precious stones. These they sold to the merchants from the station in exchange for tools or comforts to take back to the countryside, and when they’d done so, they left.
A few did live in the town all the time, and one of them had a shop near the port offices where Nkowo insisted they go. “He has charms for the
awantu,” she said, and she was right: he sold them pieces of iron twisted into geometric knots, which they could offer the natives as gifts of welcome.
“You have to be careful with them,” he said. “Do things their way, and they’ll treat you like clansmen – but you have to do things their way.” Mwema nodded and went to find a pirogue across the delta.
The ferryman proved to be an
awantu, the first he had seen on this world: a deep blue mantis-man seven feet tall. Mwema offered him one of the pieces of iron along with his fare, and the
awantu’s jaws clicked something that Nkowo assured him was gratitude. He settled in back of the pirogue and watched birds circle over the muddy water and come to rest on the reed islands.
They were now truly in
awantu country, and they saw more soon after they disembarked on the far shore: hunters of blue, yellow and pale green, armed with hard-light guns and mounted on giraffes. The settlers had brought the giraffes along with gazelles and elands to hunt and lions and leopards to test the hunters’ mettle; the
awantu had tamed them when people never could.
It was a
mokele-mbembe they hunted now, a great swamp-lizard twenty meters long, and their guns could only scorch its thick hide; they charged with iron spears as it turned at bay, making haste to dodge its snapping jaws as they struck. It seemed that the spears would have no more effect than the guns – the
mokele-mbembe was stung, but no more – but then, suddenly, the lizard fell.
There must have been a poison on the spears, Mwema realized as the
awantu drove in to finish it off.
“Honor to the hunters!” Nkowo cried, walking toward them with hands held out; Mwema took up the cry and showed them one of the iron knots. The
awantu looked at them curiously, noticing them for the first time, and one raised his gun in challenge.
“We are peaceful,” Nkowo said quickly. “We have come with gifts to speak to your wisdom-keeper.”
The hunters conferred among themselves briefly, and turned back to Mwema, speaking, surprisingly, in his language. “Chkwawa will take you, then. He’s going to the royal village while we guard the kill, to get others to bring it home.” At that, Chkwawa made his giraffe kneel, and to his surprise, Mwema found that he and Nkowo could ride behind.
The savanna stretched for kilometers, and they passed herds of imported animals with four legs and native ones with six. There were small villages scattered around, but Chkwawa stopped at none of them; instead, after three hours, they reached a broad expanse of farms surrounding a walled compound with a great thatched hut in the center.
“This is an
ichipembwe,” Chkwawa explained. “There are relics here of great chiefs and great kings, many thousands of years old, so it is a place of refuge. If anyone flees here, they will be tried, but they are safe from revenge.”
Mwema hardly heard; he was taking in every detail of the fields, the farmers’ huts, the buffalo and six-legged lizards that pulled the plows. The workers in the fields were female, and he noticed that the mantis-people were, after all, mammals.
“Women work with the hoe,” said Chkwawa, “men with the axe.”
There was little time to consider that as they entered the gates of the compound, making their way past the small huts that clustered just inside the gates. A large clearing stood beyond, and across it, the great hut, where
awantu worked in the garden while they waited for the chief to judge their cases. To Mwema’s surprise, Chkwawa didn’t lead them there, but instead took them to a smaller house next to it, from which issued smoke and the smell of molten iron.
“The
uwufushi’s house,” Chkwawa said. “He has magic. He has stories.”
It took only a second for Mwema to realize that the
awantu word for blacksmith came from his own language.
The awantu
may once have had a star empire, but they’d fallen so far that we had to teach them to work iron again. No doubt ironworking was four parts sorcery to them, as, so the most ancient stories said, it had been to his own remote ancestors.
Maybe they keep memories in more ways than one.
And they were inside, and Chkwawa clapped his forelimbs and made their introductions to the blacksmith. The smith was old – Mwema could tell that somehow – and his skin was so deep green as to almost be emerald. He bade them sit and gave them a tea boiled from some bitter herb; it was deathly hot in the smithy, but the tea made it no more so, and the drink was strangely soothing.
“Have you come for iron, or for stories?”
“For stories. The
mhondoro-man on the station sent us to you,” Mwema said, gambling that the smith would have heard of him. “He says that long ago, your people had a computer that could reconstruct souls.”
“Oh, yes. That is a very old story, maybe even the oldest.” The blacksmith put his hammer down. “Once, every star you can see was part of our empire, and the computer was in its capital. It held records of all our kings and all our great men, and the emperor and his council would seek their wisdom. But the people on that world became evil and proud, and they broke the commandments and oppressed the people, and they stopped listening to the voice of their elders. So the Creator sent another sun to punish them, and so great was their evil that the sun passed close to theirs and ejected it into the great black sea. We marked its place in the sky every year, until finally it was gone.”
The smith pointed to a tapestry that was hanging behind his anvil, which showed a curve over the horizon, passing between stars and vanishing to a point. “All our tapestries preserve those markings,” he said. “The weavers have kept them without error, for eight hundred thousand years.”
Eight hundred thousand years, and each of them almost a year and a half to us. It wouldn’t be hard to find the exact date when the stars shown in the tapestry had held those positions, nor would it be difficult to plot the runaway star’s current position: that could be done at leisure with the keyboard, so there would be no need to worry about the computer misunderstanding his speech. But to go find a star a million years gone into the intergalactic void, two hundred light-years or more from anything else warm or anything that could be used for navigation…
His mind rebelled at even saying as much.
Mention a lion and shut the door, the proverb went. But he saw no other way. He must pass through the
ichiyawafu, the land of the dead, and bring the ancestors back through it from beyond the galaxy.
“Maybe,” he said, “maybe I have come for iron after all. What is your price for that wrought knot?”
He would buy the knot, and on the way back to Shinyanga Port, he would fill its interstices with mud from the delta. The soil of the world, the thing its people had wrought – they would tie him to the stars, they would be his
ubwanga against being lost beyond them.
Where he was going, he hoped it would be enough.
_______
[1] As always, any mistakes in Lamba grammar and usage result from the creolization of Lamba with other regional languages and the influence of German grammatical construction.
[2] Or, more specifically, the
temporary huts: among the traditional Lamba, a
nkunka is a conical lean-to that is made during harvest or when a permanent village is under construction. Chishimba needed to translate this in the story because, by the 1960s, much of his audience no longer knew what one was.
[3] Partially-shaved hair styles, including that one, were common among the precolonial and colonial-era Lamba.
[4] A legendary river-serpent of Central Africa, whose name was evidently given to a similar creature on a distant world.
