My father’s favorite saying crossed my mind as the plane touched down in Bulawayo: Almost doesn’t fill a bowl. I expected that to be one of the first things he said to me once he found out the truth.
The last time he’d spoken the words out loud was six years ago. I was twelve and we were playing tsoro yematatu, a board game. Before I could make my winning move, my father made a calculated one. I threw my hands up. I almost won, I said. Almost doesn’t fill a bowl, he said, taking away the six pieces from the board. You don’t get partial credit for failure. Father hand-carved the board when he was a little boy. It was his most prized possession. The board was a triangle with a cross carved inside it. This gave us seven possible points to put our pieces. There were six pieces in total and winning the game meant placing them three-in-a-row. Rematch? my father said, a childlike joy in his eyes. What color pieces do you want this time? But I pushed back against playing this stupid village game all the time. I had told him that I was better off playing a more sophisticated board game like chess, not this African thing. Father reminded me that there is plenty you can learn from this African thing. That ttsoro yematatu was a game of strategy and mathematics, and that I needed to think fast, figure out the probability that my opponent will make a certain move and block them before they do. I can do that with chess, I said, folding my arms. What if people at school find out I play this village game. Everyone will laugh at me.
I never played tsoro yematatu again after that.
I shook the memory away as we walked down the stairs of the South African Airlines plane and onto the tarmac of Joshua Nkomo International Airport.
“I’m so excited,” Chad said into his iPhone camera. He was making a video for his YouTube Channel. It had over 50,000 subscribers so far and his end of the year goal was to reach a million viewers. He told his viewers that this was his first time in Africa, drawing out the continent’s name as if it was some wild creature, a new species just waiting to be tamed and domesticated. I was still bitter that Chad had gotten all the votes to be president of the International Student’s Union, a position I had campaigned for for nearly a year. Chad wasn’t even an international student, but his blonde hair and hip charm had won over everyone.
“I’m out here with my friend from college, Dineo. I call her Dinny,” Chad said. “Say hi to everyone, Dinny!”
Chad shoved the camera in my face and I flashed some teeth. I hoped he wasn’t going to have that camera on all the time. I could imagine the horror on my father’s face at being recorded. Chad rambled on about how we’d flown from the resort town of Victoria Falls to my hometown, Bulawayo.
Chad ran his fingers through his blond hair and took a deep breath.
“Even the air smells fresher here,” he said.
I rolled my eyes. Airport air was definitely not fresher, but I let Chad enjoy being an American tourist.
My father picked us up in his white Isuzu. He seemed older, weighed down. I knew things in the country were getting worse. Inflation kept rising and rising and there were projections that soon we’d be resorting to barter and trade as currency. Being away from home for a year I hadn’t noticed this change in my father through our Skype calls. He’d been cheerful as always when we chatted.
“Welcome to Bulawayo, the City of Kings,” father said to Chad.
Chad thanked my father for hosting. “I’ve always wanted to visit Africa,” Chad said. “How do you say thank you in the local language?” His camera was pointed outside the car window. There was nothing fascinating on the road from the airport into town but Chad stared wide-eyed and repeated the words so cool several times. My father and I exchanged a look. I could tell father was holding in his laughter.
“It’s ngiyabonga,” father said. I didn’t detect any annoyance in his voice. My father was too well-mannered to ever be rude to a guest. “So how was your first year at Cornell?”
“Ni...gee..bonga,” Chad said, butchering the word. He told my dad about how he had chosen to live in the international students dorm because he wanted to “widen his horizon” and that’s how he had met me and other “diverse people.”
“Dineo, you told me you were campaigning to be President of the International Student’s Union, how did that go?” my father asked.
“I’m president,” Chad blurted out before quickly adding, “but Dineo worked so hard that I made her Diversity Chair.”
Father didn’t respond. I could almost hear him say, second place is the first loser over the silence.
Our car approached a traffic light. Where there should have been a red, amber or green light was completely black. During the power cuts, even the traffic lights stopped working.
Chad watched fascinated, leaning forward from the back seat to see everything up ahead. He asked how traffic stays orderly without working traffic lights?
“Traffic lights? You mean the robots?” Father said. “Those haven’t been working for a while. I’ve even forgotten what their purpose is.”
“Zimbabweans call traffic lights robots,” Chad said into the camera. “That’s so cute.”
I wanted the leather seats to swallow me whole.
“It’s amazing that all the cars aren’t hitting each other,” Chad said.
“Same logic as an all-way stop,” father said, patiently. “We give each other turns depending on who arrived at the intersection first.”
We had just passed the dead traffic lights safely when suddenly, the car’s engine coughed and the car slowed to a stop. We all got out and stood by the front of the car. When father opened the hood of the car, smoke plumed out. It made my eyes tear up and Chad coughed until he was red in the face. My father grumbled about how he should have taken the hunk of metal to a garage but their prices kept rising.
Great, this is just what I needed, I thought, Chad recording “a car breakdown in Africa” for all his new followers to see.
“Should we call a taxi?” Chad said. He was capturing the smoke coming out of the car like it was a rare butterfly he just spotted.
“Sure sure. I will call an African taxi,” father said, chuckling. “Get your bags out of the car kids.”
I wanted to die when father began hailing down cars that were going in our direction. I wanted to sink into the ground with embarrassment. Everything I loathed about this place was on full display for the whole world to see.
“We’re hitchhiking?” Chad said, uncertainly. “Is that...you know...safe?”
“It’s not hitchhiking,” father said. “It’s a lift.”
“A what?” Chad said.
“We call it a lift or a private car,” father said.
Chad’s eyes lit up as my father explained how our transportation system was unreliable, especially with this inflation business going on. Chad nodded in fascination as father described how people just hailed down a car and someone going in the same direction as them would pick them up and drop them off for a small tip as thank you.
“I’ve used my car as a lift sometimes too,” father said.
“So it's kind of an informal community ride-sharing service?” Chad said.
Chad put his camera down for the first time since we’d landed. He scratched his beard, deep in thought. This was the thoughtful Chad I saw in classes at Cornell. The Chad who could tackle a problem set by just staring it down.
“When you get into a stranger’s car though,” Chad said. “Aren’t you afraid of like serial killers?”
“There are no serial killers in Africa,” father said. “Unless you count the government.” Father laughed out loud at his own joke.
A Honda Fit stopped in front of us. A friendly old man was behind the wheel and waved at us. We loaded our luggage into the trunk and squeezed into the small car. Chad took out his camera again.
“This is called a lift,” he said into the camera. “It’s a Zimbabwean ride-share.”
#
THE HERALD
Chad hadn’t shut up about lifts ever since we used one the day before. I don’t know why he was so fascinated by them. It was so embarrassing that my town’s transportation system was so unreliable, we had to catch a lift everywhere most of the time. Yet Chad seemed to think it was some bright idea. I rolled my eyes as he rambled on about it at dinner.
“That was so cool!” Chad said. “I still can’t believe what a brilliant idea it is. This could revolutionize the transport industry.”
“It would be nice if we had a subway,” I said, throwing a ball of sadza into my mouth. “Then we wouldn’t have to rely on strangers to get around.”
“Come on think about it, Dinny,” Chad said. His eyes were bright. “This could be the Amazon for driving. Lifts let drivers leverage all the unused inventory that they’re carrying in their cars.”
“And what’s this unused inventory?” I said, stifling a yawn. My okra stew was more interesting than this conversation.
“Empty seats!” Chad said. “Think about it, Dinny! Zimbabwe is sitting on the biggest transportation innovation of our time!”
“Your words are falling on closed ears,” my father said. “Dineo will never see all that her country has to offer.”
“There is no innovation here,” I said. “Just corruption, inflation, and misery.”
Chad sighed and shook his head. He looked at me as if I were lost. It was the look my father gave me regularly. After dinner, Chad continued to ask a million questions about the logistics of lifts as we sat in the living room. The boy was obsessed.
So are there lifts in every city in this country?
Do the majority of Zimbabweans trust lift drivers?
Has anyone tried to formalize the service. You know, like turn it into a company?
I laughed sharply, almost choking on my own spit. I concluded that the African heat had turned Chad’s brain to marshmallow for him to think that lifts are even an idea worth turning into a company.
Chad rambled on about the idea until I resorted to bringing up his YouTube channel to get him to talk about something else.
“I finished editing the vlog of us in Victoria Falls,” Chad said, opening his laptop. “I’m going to upload it tonight. Want to see?”
My father and I huddled behind Chad and peered at the video on his screen.
The date and time stamp beneath the YouTube video reads June, 2005. Chad signs the visitor’s book at the Visitor’s Center and high fives a local guide, a man three times his age. Chad points at a map of the gorges and traces the trail to the falls. Sometimes my shadow can be seen hovering at the bottom of the frame but I mostly avoid the camera. The video is captioned MY SUMMER TRIP TO AFRICA: VICTORIA FALLS, ZIMBABWE.
Chad is in khaki shorts, sunglasses, and a safari hat with a backpack strapped to his back. In his fresh tan, he is the image of zeal and youth. The hike through the rainforest plays at two times speed with a jingle in the background until Chad sees a rainbow peeking through the trees, creating pockets of light amongst the greenery.
“Whoa,” he says, pointing. “We’re here!”
The water gushes down the cliff with a roar. The cascade is relentless as if the water is angry as if a deluge isn’t enough, it needs to tear through the land until everything is eroded. Chad’s shirt is soaked by the spray. He brings his hands to his ears to drown out the sound of the torrent.
“To all the Cornellians watching,” Chad screams. “This is the largest waterfall in the world.”
The waterfall is so loud his voice is drowned out. Subtitles appear at the bottom of the screen.
“Ithaca is gorges could never,” he says.
We walk down a bridge that arches over the gorge at two times speed again, fast-forwarding to the moment when Chad bungee-jumps down the gorge. His hands are outstretched like wings. I can almost feel the wind between his fingers. He is so confident that the rope will not snap, that everything always turns out okay.
After the bungee-jump, we stand near David Livingstone’s statue. The statue overlooks the falls. It has loomed over the falls for more than half a century. David Livingstone leans against a walking stick with a hand on his hip. Chad is dressed just like Livingstone.
“This is the explorer who discovered these falls,” Chad reads from the plaque.
He bows in appreciation before the statue.
#
Father cleared his throat when the video ended. He was frowning. Chad looked at us expectantly.
“Dineo,” father said. “Why didn’t you tell our guest that David Livingstone didn’t discover the falls?”
The shame that overcame me was like heartburn. The disappointed look in my father’s eyes stung. My father was going to go into a long lecture about history again. My eyes went to the door. If I said I was tired from the flight maybe I could go to bed early to avoid being chewed out.
“What do you mean?” Chad asked.
“The Tonga people were already living in that area long before David Livingstone arrived,” father said. “So how can David Livingstone have discovered the falls when people lived there?”
“I never considered that,” Chad said. Color rose to his cheeks.
Another thing that my daughter didn’t tell you is that their name isn’t Victoria Falls, father said. They are called Mosi-oa-Tunya. That’s what the Tonga people named them and that is their name.
“Mosi-oa-tunya?” Chad said, trying to feel the name with his tongue.
When Livingstone went to the falls, he decided to name them after his Queen Victoria, father said. Didn’t bother to ask the natives if the falls had a name even though it was natives who’d taken him to the falls in the first place.
Chad swallowed, a lump forming at his throat and mumbled a, “thank you for educating me.”
Later when father wasn’t looking, he uploaded the video to YouTube anyways.
#
On the fifth day in Bulawayo, there was a city-wide power cut. It gave me a small joy to see Chad have a near breakdown when both his laptop and phone ran out of battery. I smirked when he sighed yet again and stared longingly at his phone’s black screen. We could have gone out but he didn’t want to go anywhere if he couldn’t record it so we stayed at home all day waiting for the electricity to come back.
When the sun set, father lit a candle and we sat in the dark, the faint light flickering.
Suddenly, Chad pointed at the display.
“What’s that wooden board in there?” Chad said. “Is that a board game?”
I narrowed my eyes. He was pointing at that wretched game tsoro yematatu.
“It’s just a village game,” I said. “Don’t bother with it. Why don’t we play some chess?”
“No ways,” Chad said. “That looks way more interesting than chess.”
Father retrieved the tsoro yematatu board and pieces from the display. He blew out the dust that had settled on the board.
“I have no one to play with,” dad said sadly. “So it has been sitting in the display for years.”
“I’ll play with you!” Chad said.
My father was shocked, his mouth forming an O. It was like he couldn’t believe his ears.
“You want to play this?” he said, holding up the board as if it were a mist that would fade away if he didn’t hold it carefully.
“Of course, why not?” Chad said.
I could see the joy returning to my father’s eyes in that instance. A newfound energy had found its way back into my father’s body as he cleared the coffee table and sat the board down. He gave Chad the white pieces and kept the black pieces for himself.
My father explained the rules of the game to Chad just as he had explained them to me so long ago.
You win by being the first to create a three-in-a-row with your pieces.
A piece can be moved by moving one space per turn onto a vacant point following the pattern on the board
Or a piece can be moved by jumping over another piece adjacent to it. The jump must be in a straight line and follow the pattern on the board. Unlike most board games, there are no captures in this game
Father demonstrated how to make a winning move. Chad gave him a high-five. My father sounded so excited as he spoke as if his soul was awakening. I had never seen him this happy ever since I stopped playing with him. Father and Chad both concentrated on their next move, treating each move as the most serious decision they have ever had to make. They did not rush to move their pieces. Their faces did not betray their emotions. Their moves were precise and calculated. I was shocked by how quickly Chad picked up the game as if he’d been playing it his whole life.
The game lasted a long time. Chad won the game.
#
The shortline bus stopped at the grimy Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City and I dragged my suitcase, the only thing to my name, through the terminal looking out for the signs to the subway. I wasn’t looking forward to the long ride to JFK Airport. I passed a newspaper and snack stand, the year 2013 in bold print catching my eye. I stopped by to buy something to munch on when I overheard two tourists.
“We can take a Lyft to Brooklyn Bridge,” a tourist said. “Then walk around for the rest of the afternoon.”
His partner took out his phone and tapped on the screen.
“Sweet,” he said. “It will be here in five minutes.”
I froze at the word Lyft. The vendor had to remind me to pay for my food.
I pulled out my phone from my pockets and stared at the pink logo. I downloaded the app earlier this year and never used it. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night and stare at it. I even avoided social engagements because I knew people would want to carpool afterward. I tried to avoid Lyfts but they were everywhere, on everyone’s lips and on every car windshield.
My finger shook as I tapped the screen to open the app for the first time. A map filled my screen with little icons of moving cars.
Where are you going?
I typed in JFK Airport and selected my terminal. A driver was ready to pick me up in four minutes.
The driver picked me up in Honda CR-V and put my suitcase in his trunk. He looked like he was in his sixties, bald and a little red. He offered me water and an outlet to charge my phone. The car smelled like Febreze. The GPS directed us in a nasal accent.
My throat went dry as soon as I stepped into the car. Lifts at home were filled with conversations about the economy, gospel music and prayers about how things will get better. This car was cold and smelled too sweet. When the GPS announced which street we should turn into, it sounded like she was laughing at me.
“Where are you flying to, young lady?” the driver said.
“Zimbabwe,” I said.
I felt something constrict in my heart. I’d come to America with dreams and I was leaving with only a suitcase.
“That’s a long way from here!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never been to Africa. Would love to go. Do they have Lyfts over there in Africa? Probably not right?”
I squeezed my thigh before I answered. I wanted to scream at him but forced a polite smile. I could tell he was watching me through the rearview mirror. He was probably going to go home and tell his loved ones the highlight of his day was picking up an African.
“We have lifts,” I said.
“Wow, who would have thought,” he said.
The Lyft driver mentioned that he was a veteran that had served his country for 30 years but didn’t have much of a pension. He had been one of the first drivers to sign up when Lyft started.
“If it wasn’t for Lyft I wouldn’t have enough to keep a roof over my head,” the driver said.
He flicked the rosary that dangled from the rearview mirror. New York’s skyscrapers seemed to close in on me.
#
BUSINESS INSIDER
I threw my phone across the room before finishing the Business Insider article. My father who was playing tsoro yematatu by himself barely glanced at me. These days he talked to himself and moved the pieces on the board as if an apparition was sitting across from him.
“It’s not fair. He got that idea from us,” I said. “If it weren’t for us he wouldn’t have that stupid company and even Uber wouldn’t have been a thing.”
Father looked at me, his hand looming over a game piece.
“I seem to recall that you laughed in his face when he proposed turning lifts into a company,” he said. “You called it a stupid African thing. Just like you call this game a stupid African thing.”
Pangs of guilt and regret brought me back to when Chad and I were still friends, when he was sitting on this very couch playing tsoro yematatu with my father. Now he was a millionaire and we didn’t speak. Life had gone marvelously for him ever since his trip to Zimbabwe. He already had a successful company by the time he graduated. I had nothing. I came back to my corrupt country with no job prospects or hope. I sat all day in the living room applying to jobs I’d never hear back from.
“Tell me Dineo, how do you measure success?” father said, he made a three-in-a-row on the board and sat back.
You don’t think anything is valuable until it's given to you by a white person, father said. Now that a white person has made lifts into a company, suddenly you think it's a good idea.
I remember my last conversation with Chad after the summer trip in 2005. It was on campus right under the clock tower. The alma mater was chiming.
“You really need to give up this Zimride idea or whatever it is you’re calling it,” I’d said to him. “It’s so stupid. It would never work in a developed country like America. What sane American would ride in a complete stranger's car?”
“It’s sad that you can’t see the innovation in your own backyard, Dinny,” Chad said.
His tone was so sanctimonious, so full of pity that I shook with anger. How dare he speak to me as if I were a child? How dare he expect me to be proud of my backyard when it was people like him that had pillaged that same backyard in the first place? When it was people like him that used my backyard as a punchline?
“You’re just a culture vulture masquerading as a hippie,” I spat. “You’re no better than that colonizer David Livingstone.”
Chad flinched and stepped back as if I’d struck him. Something flashed in his eyes. I couldn’t tell if his grimaces were anger, embarrassment, or sadness.
“I think it's time for us to go our separate ways,” he said.
I watched his back recede into the sunset on Ho Plaza. We never spoke again after that and the campus was big enough that we never ran into each other again.
I pushed the memory down and watched father start another game by himself in our living room. The overhead lights went dark. I cursed the powercuts as I tried to light a candle. The match refused to light, breaking each time I slid it against the matchbox. Father stopped playing his game, came over, and took the matches from me. The match lit on the first try in his hands.
Isn’t it ironic that we import all our goods even though those goods are made from our resources, father said. Even lifts are now an import from the West.
Father’s voice had the quiet I-told-you-so timbre to it. He went back to his game. He seemed so at peace playing tsoro yematatu in the dark. It made my blood boil. The truth and my own shortsightedness stung.
“You know what makes me sad?” father said. “Lifts were the way a community helped each other. People stopped for strangers out of the kindness of their hearts. Now it has turned into this thing that exploits poor drivers. Chad saw a nice thing people were doing for each other and thought how do I make money with it? That’s what makes me sad.”
The rage I felt made my skin hot. I charged towards my father, grabbed the tsoro yematatu board from the coffee table, the game pieces flew across the room. I smashed the board on the ground and it shattered into a million pieces.
Contributor Notes
Yvette Lisa Ndlovu is a Zimbabwean sarungano (storyteller). She is pursuing her MFA at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst where she teaches in the Writing Program. She has taught at Clarion West Writers Workshop online and earned her BA at Cornell University. Her work has been supported by fellowships from the Tin House Workshop and the New York State Summer Writers Institute. She received the 2017 Cornell University George Harmon Coxe Award for Poetry selected by Sally Wen Mao and was the 2020 fiction winner of Columbia Journal’s Womxn History Month Special Issue. She is the co-founder of the Voodoonauts Summer Workshop for Black SFF writers. Her work has been anthologized in Tor.com and Fiyah Literary Magazine’s Breathe FIYAH anthology and the Voices of African Women Journal. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Columbia Journal, Tor.com, Fiyah Literary Magazine, Kweli Journal, the Jellyfish Review, and Kalahari Review.
