She could feel the whispers in her chest, could hear them in her mind. When she was a child, before the war, before the river, her parents spoke to each other in Yiddish, a language they didn’t share with her. This was how the river felt to her—a language that soothed her, a constant presence, but one she barely understood.

Like the several great civilizations that have clashed and coexisted in southern Africa over the last two centuries, the waters cannot be segregated. And who can tell which wave is resisting, which collaborating? The sea reveals no moral; what moves the whole is a greater tide. Perhaps the currents of history are what they are, and we only choose—o