“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.