Between Mosquitos and Moskeetoze: Technical, Political, and Familial Bricolage in Namwali Serpell’s The Old Drift

Abstract

ABSTRACT: Namwali Serpell’s novel is an epic work, both in length and ideas; difficult to discuss in its entirety. I will focus on how three young Zambians challenge their nation’s neocolonial power structure by appropriating and adapting technological innovations in the near future. While these activities comprise the third part of the novel, they organically grow out of the events and people that make up the first two thirds. This link is literally genealogical as well as historical, through the earlier ancestors, especially grandmothers, who took part in the colonial and postcolonial creation of Zambia. This interweaving is reiterated in the Afrofuturistic merging of humans and, eventually, mosquitoes with technology. These latter developments can be theoretically framed through the rehabilitation of Claude Lèvi-Strauss’s long-discarded theory of bricolage, as a way to consider how technology, economic practices, and ideology are appropriated over decades for local needs.