Mayo – 2019
Umucele ukufina kumfwa kubasenda.
The weight of a bag of salt is only felt by those who carry it.
Bemba proverb
A mother folds herself at the head of a grave. She strokes a metal nameplate, marking the opening and closing of her child’s life. The funeral phonation has long since died down. The white hearse is a ghost now, swallowed by dust devils fleeing the windbreak of graves for the car-clogged tar of Leopards Hill Road. The gold-embossed St. Anne’s Funeral Home logo fades into the horizon like the peeling epitaphs on the gravestones.
The mother shuts her eyes. She ignores Lusaka’s cacophony—all the rubber beating against asphalt, voices climbing over each other. Her eyelids can defy time. In her mind, it is 1974 again—she’s inside a local midwife’s hut, taking her tiny bundle from the birth aid’s hands, watching life pulse beneath her new baby’s fontanelle.
For a beat, she hasn’t yet been made an abomination, a vilomah, after four swift decades of mothering.
Ntashé – 2019
Beshiba ekowafuma tabeshiba eko uleya.
We can only know where we are coming from, not where we are going.
Bemba proverb
Ntashé is a child turned abomination.
She should not be here. She should not be perched by the open window. Should not be watching wild orchids shoot out of the fringes of the lush court lawn. Should not be taking in the row of gleaming GOVERNMENT OF THE REPUBLIC OF ZAMBIA–branded vehicles, or the lightless court cell manned by a small guard and her battered rifle.
Ntashé’s eyes should be glazing over the molecular mass, the rate of diffusion, proportionality to temperature, groaning at how time slows as soon as she enters the chemistry lab. In three hours, the school bell will ding. She should gather her things, walk the fifteen minutes back to her grandparents’ home, microwave last night’s leftover rice and chicken stew, and wait for her grandma to return from court with news.
Instead, this morning, Ntashé stole 100 kwacha from the offering basket while her grandfather prayed for it to multiply. After their usual goodbyes, terse and harried, instead of walking to school, she caught a minibus to Intercity, where she boarded another to Kabwe, the city she’d called home since birth.
As the quiet town rose from the hill, her vellus hairs on her arms began to dance, the window suddenly taking the shape of a door. If she jumped, she wondered, would the blades of grass hold her like a nest, or would she be pancaked beneath the cars?
Ahead, the Great North Road started to narrow, the small town like a bud unfolding—first with the quiet dotting of houses after the army barracks, then the signage pointing out the market, and then the hospital, where the speeding traffic wound into a sluggish queue. Soon, the bus would arrive. There was no time for her what-ifs.
Ntashé traded her school uniform for a well-thought-out disguise. She rolled her eyes at the gawking passengers. It’s not like I’m getting naked, please, just dressing for the occasion. But they were all adults, and she, visibly a schoolgirl, knew how big people liked to feel powerful. So, Ntashé focused on her mission to successfully cosplay Woman and shed the title of Girl, which would grant her quiet entry into the courtroom. She half stood to wrap one of her mother’s chitenges around her waist; she stripped off the Kamwala High School jersey and stuffed it into her backpack; she peeled off the knee-length white socks and pretended her heart wasn’t racing, that tears weren’t on the verge of falling, and this was just another Monday in Kabwe.
Other than Vanessa, the one friend she’s made at the new school, and Ms. Pichi, the state prosecutor who talked her into coming on the promise of a transport refund and a little extra, plus Ntashé’s all-important role in the execution of justice, not a soul knows she’s here.
Once seated, crammed between bodies, the terror of her secret presence loses its grip, and her palpitations finally slow.
But when Ntashé spots her grandma in the front row, air latches like the wrong key in her throat. She hiccups, catching a few irritated glances from the other people in the courtroom. This is just a movie to them, she thinks. Under her breath, she kisses her teeth. Years of doing it behind her mother’s back have made an expert of her, so Ntashé is sure no one hears it for the stealthy insult it is. Her grandma’s face isn’t among the staring ones. She exhales. Grandma has no reason to look back, she consoles herself. No reason to expect Ntashé’s face among the faux friends gathered with the curious onlookers. Ntashé leans into the back of the bench, drinking in the room fully for the first time since she squeezed in with the crowd.
The gallery is packed tighter than her grandpa’s church, voices thrumming like bees. Examining the room’s composition, it’s as if all those who can have abandoned their roadside tables and market stalls. As if they’ve hauled their nursing babies into chitenge wrappers on their backs, called in sick, lied about family commitments—anything, just to witness for themselves how the death predicted by marriage vows came to be inflicted by the vow maker.
Vultures, Ntashé simmers. They are just here to watch her family fully come undone, she knows, and hates that they have no decency to hide their excitement, even though, in their shoes, she would do the same. If she could, she’d spit in every single one of their faces. But her family has reached its scandal quota—one a year is enough for their neighborhood gossip stew. For now, all she can do is glare. So, Ntashé remains the quietly hunched body in the middle pew.
To avoid their faces, she returns her attention to the cell—its crisscrossing of thick rusted metal, and the sounds emerging from the other side of the darkness, permeating Ntashé as if someone is pouring them into her ear hole, stamping them onto her brain. First comes the staccato of restless pacing, accompanied by the relentless talk of someone who has been left alone with their thoughts for far too long. “I can do all things” coasts the air, delicate and hushed, slow as the hairy little mopane worms inching along the skirting board. The voice climbs one octave. “I can do all things” emerges next with a dab of confidence. Then, finally, “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me!” An adamant shout, like the weeds that make home of the cracks in the cement floor.
Despite the familiarity of the cadence, Ntashé starts, goosebumps beading across her skin. Ninety days of absence seems a lifetime, as if she hasn’t heard this voice all her life.
She squints, attempting to create a body out of the shadows.
The guard jumps to her feet. “Behave yourself, iwé!” she snaps at the cell.
The voice from the cell obeys instantly, dying mid-incantation.
The guard has a small heart-shaped face, a constellation of blackheads speckled across her forehead. Ntashé guesses her to be no older than twenty-one, and thinks how, if she ever addressed an adult as iwé, now or even in six years, when she too turns twenty-one, her mother would give her one of those backhanded slaps that stung for hours. She cups her cheek, warding off the phantom pain.
“They have even called your case,” says the guard. “No need for all that chongo umo. Just endesa, come to the door!” The guard unlatches the rusting lock and pulls the door open.
From the shadows, a prisoner follows the guard’s instruction to hurry, stepping onto the narrow, sun-drenched veranda.
Ntashé draws in a sharp breath, willing—no, begging herself to look away, but, like a bystander at an accident scene, her gaze is stubborn, focused on the prisoner’s wonky afro, mostly pepper with the occasional sprinkling of salt; on the sunburnt face; the blackened knuckles; the ashen pinky toes poking through canvas shoes; on the way they cease at the large Mukwa door of the courthouse as if suddenly turning to steel, on the flowering devil’s ivy sitting in terracotta ceramic pots by the door, on the gorgeous tapestry of leaves, stems, and petiole creeping over the pan brick wall, toward the polymer shingles on the roof.
Her heart rages so loud she’s sure the man next to her can hear it. It’s been ninety days of slouching into herself, of waiting.
And now?—
The prisoner turns just so and locks eyes with Ntashé.
The moment stills, stretches like elastic, but then, “N’géna, iwe,” shouts the guard, rupturing it. The prisoner nods in compliance, but before crossing the threshold of the imposing courtroom door, the prisoner gives Ntashé a worn smile and mouths Hi baby.
Intuitively, Ntashé mouths a My mum, replacing Hi with My, exactly as she’d done as a toddler, still learning the contours of words. The sight of her mother, now a shadow of herself, unhinges Ntashé. A tiny sob leaps from her throat.
A fan whirrs on the ceiling, fluttering papers on the lawyers’ table. The gaping windows carry the sedentary sounds of the once-upon-a-mining town in, but they do nothing to ebb the January heat. Ntashé fans herself with her hand as her mother shuffles in. With the butt of her gun, the guard nudges her forward through the tight gate of the coffin-shaped box ahead. She latches the small door, locks it, and takes position next to it.
At the front of the courtroom, Judge Lungamo, who has taken her seat on her high throne of a chair, watches the scene unfold through squoval glasses resting on the tip of her powdered nose. Sit down says the curt nod of her head. Her stiff, white adjudicator’s wig bobs up and down, mimicking her movements as she scribbles something in her notepad.
Beneath her pedestal, mobile-phone-sized black recorders are pointed at the dock, one from the lawyers’ desk and the other from the marshal’s podium. The two court reporters have positioned their stares at the dock, svelte fingers poised above their keyboards, on their mark to key in responses even before the trial has begun.
When Ntashé was much younger, long before she understood the proper order of her parents’ relationship, Ntashé had cried relentlessly about not being present at their wedding. Every time ZESCO snatched the electricity away, Ntashé pulled out the reams of photo albums stacked on the TV stand, substituting them for entertainment now that the cartoons were off, only to wail once she started leafing through them. After the third time, Ntashé rejected her mum’s “God was still making you,” the albums and video tapes disappeared from their spot, and Ntashé hasn’t seen them since. Rather than soothe her, the absence only made the heat in her chest bloom. But jealousy wasn’t in Ntashé’s vocabulary yet. What she knew was that those photographs of a magical party, with the light-as-air pink lanterns decorating the chapel where toothy smiles sat row after row, both sides of her family, captured her parents’ eyes brimming with a palpable affection she’d never witnessed in person. She just wanted to be a part of it, that’s all.
Now, the short aisle from the dock to the looming exit door splits her father’s family from her mother’s—a near screenshot of all those wedding albums.
If Ntashé pretends, the judge is the priest who married her parents, about to ask them to promise each other forever.
Mbuya, Ntashé’s paternal grandmother, is in the front row on the left, rubbing her troublesome knee. She’s anchored by two of her sons flanking her on each side. In so many of the wedding photos, Ntashé’s father had his head turned, facing his mother. If her father could see Mbuya now, he’d no doubt fret over Mbuya’s eyes, batting so wildly, her head slightly shaking over and over, lips quivering, whispering, “Awé, not kasuli wandi.” He would probably rush to ask why worry had creased her face and comfort her by draping his arm on her shoulder—the way he’d hugged her at the end of the wedding ceremony, right before the newlyweds danced out of the church to be sprinkled with confetti.
On Mbuya’s left, Ntashé’s father would find his immediate elder brother, Katwishi, rubbing his left thumb against his fingers, one after the other, and James, the oldest, loudly tapping his left foot. Both brothers have a hand clasped on their mother’s arms, lending them the air of comforters. But her father, Mbuya’s kasuli, has always acknowledged and reiterated Mbuya’s unquestioned position as their pillar, evident now from her fingers tight around theirs.
Ntashé’s mother’s family is taking up the very edge of the front row on the right, starting with her maternal grandmother. Her face is a hollowed mess, barely visible beneath her loosely wrapped chitambala. Ntashé’s grandma cradles her Good News Bible like a newborn to her chest. She’s rocking back and forth, humming a tuneless song. Next to Grandma is Faye, Ntashé’s mother’s best friend and shadow as far back as Ntashé’s memory stretches. Faye was Grandma’s ride to Kabwe, saving Ntashé the trouble of dodging an unwanted sighting at the bus station. Sweat slicks down the side of Faye’s face.
And, just like in the albums, Happy, her father’s oldest friend, the one he calls Bro, observes the proceedings from the row of benches beneath the open window next to the witness box. Happy shakes his head and runs a hand over his clean-shaven chin. This is the friend with whom her father told her he’d endured a year of brittle 4 a.m. showers, 5 a.m. breakfasts, and all-day physicals at Lilayi Police Training College. They were commissioned together and celebrated graduation in a bar with chilled Mosi and over-salted chunks of roasted michopo. Together, they had become fathers, grown beards, tried and failed to buy plots of land on the city’s outskirts, and daydreamed about the mansions they could build if only promotions were handed out fairly and nepotism was not a real word with multigenerational consequences. They had mocked each other’s graying temples and abandoned attempts to flatten their stomachs as they swelled to the size of footballs.
The only person missing is Ntashé’s maternal grandfather, who continues to pretend this isn’t happening, refuses to talk about it, even when this court case makes TV and newspaper headlines.
Without her grandfather looking at his daughter, Ntashé’s mother, with all the pride a face can hold, Ntashé’s mental image of her parents’ wedding falls apart.
Judge Lungamo’s marshal stands from her spot beneath the judge’s high-rise seat. The judge straightens her white jabot, looks up, and starts talking.
Her words float up, snag on the fan, and scatter across the room like stray feathers. The whole family watches the judge intently. Ntashé almost wishes she could bottle this moment, stuff it into the wedding album, and make it so the two are one before her world splinters.
When the judge starts talking, Ntashé’s ears start ringing, diluting long sentences into clipped phrases. High Court, Zambia, Kabwe, accused, and stand up.
Ntashé’s mother stands without turning. Which is when Ntashé wonders—if this scene were her parents’ wedding day replayed. Both of them kept swiveling their heads to look at the people they loved. But would either of them have noticed their only daughter trying her hardest not to cry?
Ntashé tries to keep herself steady, but the marshal’s words start to dance again—stand charged spinning around murder and sucking the air out of the room. “Do you understand the charge?” he says now to Ntashé’s mother.
“Yes, I understand the charge.”
“How do you plead?”
“Not guilty.”
On one side of the room, Grandma wheezes, and on the other, Mbuya screams, “God, please, if you’re there, avenge me!”
This is an excerpt from The Shipikisha Club, published by Cassava Republic (2026).
Part family melodrama, part courtroom drama, The Shipikisha Club is a poignant intergenerational exploration of patriarchy and motherhood.