by Paul Theroux
James Joyce anatomizing the malodorous upper gallery of the opera house in Trieste seemed to prove a common humanity in body odor. But the strong human reek on African buses was a smell of mortality that seemed to me like a whiff of death.
The bad road was a help to safety, for on most parts of it there was no way to speed. The potholes were so numerous and so deep the driver had to slow down and steer around them, as in an obstacle course; or else he plunged into them, going dumpty-dumpty-dumpty, in and out of the holes, making some of the children on board puke on their chins. The driver went much too fast on the smooth parts of the road, but his speed sent us careering into stretches of mud. Twice we became mired, and some male passengers got out and pushed. Not me. I walked ahead through the mud, with some other older men, until the minibus caught up with us elders.
I walked thinking, What has changed? The road had always been bad. The lakeshore had always been thinly populated by Tumbuka-speaking fishing families in thatched huts, using dugout canoes and nets they spread on bushes to dry. They smoked the little fish, kapenta, and the plumper chambo on grills made of tree branches. Rice was grown here in lakeside paddy fields that were easily flooded. I saw fishermen and dugouts and drying racks and rice fields and thought, Anyone who had snapped a picture of this lakeside forty years ago would have been able to take the same picture today.
On one of the muddy stretches we passed a small somewhat deformed man, perhaps a dwarf, certainly a hunchback, and the boys in the minibus yelled out the window, mocking him for his deformity.
The hunchback screamed at them, ‘You’ve got trouble!’
‘You’ve got bigger trouble!’ one of the boys called out, and everyone laughed.
I had caught the word mabvuto – trouble – and the man next to me told me what had been said in Tumbuka. People walking by the road shouted at us so often that I asked the same man why this was so.
He said, ‘Because they are forced to walk they are mocking us.’
‘And you mock them, too.’
‘Just to make a joke.’
The Malawi joke, shouted from the bus, was: Keep walking, sucker!
The lake was beautiful, there were golden mountains on the Mozam-bican side, and on ours the escarpment leading to the Nyika Plateau, glittering water and great heights and the natural beauty of Africa. That was half the story. The other half was this miserable bus and the stinking hostile boys in it mocking the heavily laden women and the deformed man.
We came to Chilumba, just a fishing village, where a man was frying cut-up potatoes in fat. The potatoes were crusted lumps, the fat looked like motor oil. I bought some and ate them while we waited for passengers and, still hungry, ate a couple of bananas.
We climbed the escarpment on a treacherous road of hairpin bends, many of them with hastily – and badly – cleared landslides, past some disused coalmines, to the escarpment and the settlement of Livingstonia, the earliest mission in the country. The mission had once been a brick church and bungalows, a hospital and huts, a high cool place where expats could grow Brussels sprouts and chrysanthemums. Now it sprawled more, and had lost many trees, the school looked neglected, but it was much the same as it had been.
And beyond Livingstonia the plateau rolled on, green, unpeopled. We stopped often, because a minibus made its greatest profit by traveling overstuffed, picking up whoever signaled for it to stop, and all their produce and livestock. And when I thought the sorry vehicle could not take any more passengers, the ticket taker slid the door aside and hung on, as the bus sped with the door open, some passengers hanging out.
The towns of Rumphi and Ekwendeni – places I had once known pretty well – had also lost their Indian shops and not replaced them with African ones. This interested me; the ruined and abandoned shops, with faint painted signs saying Patel Bros and Bombay Bazaar and Alibhai Merchandise Mart – all of them derelict, the roofs caved in, the windows broken, many of them vandalized with graffiti. In front of them, on the grass verge by the storm drain and the roadside ditch were African women, displaying soap and salt and matches and cooking oil on a small square of cloth. The commercial life of these towns in the Northern Province had declined from main streets of busy shops to simple open-air markets of hawkers and fruit sellers sitting in the mud.
Six hours after leaving Karonga we came to the town of Mzuzu, at the edge of the Viphya Plateau. I knew some people here, so I decided to stay in a hotel and look them up. The person I most wanted to see was Margaret, the widow of one of my first friends in Malawi, Sir Martin Roseveare.
On his retirement from the British Civil Service in 1962, Sir Martin had come to Nyasaland to run a teachers’ college. He was a good-humored pipe-smoking gentleman who in his late sixties was a hearty field hockey player. But he was also a stickler for detail. The frugality that the war had imposed on British people had made many of them misers and cheeseparers, but had inspired others with incomparable ingenuity, turning them into inventors and self-helpers. Wartime deprivation had brought out Sir Martin’s resourcefulness. He first devised the fraud-proof ration book, and was awarded a knighthood for his effort. But he also took an interest in education, in gardening, and sports. These enthusiasms he carried to Malawi. And he was of the old breed, an educator, not an evangelist, someone who had come to Africa to serve, to call it home, and to die in the bush.
His wife, Lady Margaret, was the same, sporty, intelligent, and resourceful, able to mend the water-driven stirrup pump that generated their electricity. I sometimes would see her bent over a greasy machine – tweed skirt, hair in a bun, argyle socks and muddy sandals – waving a socket wrench and saying, ‘Crikey!’
Sir Martin had died in his nineties, Lady Margaret lived on, and in her widowhood she ran Viphya Secondary School. I had always seen these people as admirable, even as role models, vigorous retirees I might emulate in my own later years. They gave me the ambition, one I nursed for a long time, of returning to Africa, perhaps in my mid-sixties, and doing as they had done. Of course, I would go on writing, but I would justify my presence in this country by starting a school, or whipping a school into shape. To devote the rest of my life into seeing my self-financed school producing bright well-educated students seemed perfect. I did not intend a deliberate martyrdom or even much of a sacrifice, for I liked the remoteness, the vegetable growing, the rusticity, the Tolstoyan pedagogy. Living in this positive purposeful way would be so healthy as to be life lengthening. I would be a pink-cheeked bore in baggy shorts, doing some writing, a beekeeper in the bundu, running a school of overachievers, imagining the gossip.
Whatever happened to Paul?
He’s somewhere in Central Africa. Just upped and left. Been there for years.
‘Lady Margaret, she is dead,’ a girl told me at the school – and the school was looking run-down in a way that would not have pleased its scrupulous late headmistress.
She had passed away two years before, at the age of eighty-seven.
‘Where is she buried?’
The girl shrugged – no idea. The Roseveares were not proselytizers but they were churchgoers, so I went to the Anglican church in Mzuzu and asked the African vicar if he had known them. ‘Vicar-General,’ he said, correcting me. Yes, he had known them. They were wonderful, he said. They had helped build the church. They were buried right here.
Their graves were rectangular slabs set side by side in the muddy churchyard, Lady Margaret’s unmarked, Sir Martin’s inscribed, Beloved by All. The graves were overgrown with weeds and looked not just neglected but forgotten. As serious gardeners, haters of disorder, they would have been dismayed at the sight of this tangle of weeds. And so I knelt and as a form of veneration, weeded their graves for old times’ sake.
Later, walking through Mzuzu to my hotel I stopped in a bar to drink a beer, but also knowing that inevitably an African would join me and ask me for a drink and tell me a story.
His name was Mkosi. ‘We are Angoni, the Zulus from South Africa who came here.’
‘So how are things, Mkosi?’
‘We are just suffering, sir.’
‘And why is that?’
‘For myself, sir, my wife is going about with a soldier. I found a letter she wrote to him. It was terrible. “I love you, my dearest darling.” I showed her the letter. She cheeked me. “How can I love you? You have no money. I can’t love someone who is poor. You are poor.” ’
‘Good riddance to her,’ I said.
Two of Mkosi’s friends came over looking for free drinks. But I decided to leave. They followed me outside, wanting to talk. Since there had been obvious prostitutes in the bar I brought up the subject of AIDS. They said that people died all the time in Malawi – how could anyone say for sure the cause was AIDS?
‘If you went home with one of those women, would you use a condom?’
One said energetically, with gestures, ‘We are Malawians – we like skeen to skeen,’ and the others laughed.
‘Condoms are rubber,’ another said. ‘Rubber has so many tiny holes in it. The germs can go through it, and even air, it can go through.’
There was a taxi parked at the curb.
‘If rubber leaks why isn’t that tire flat?’ I said.
They hung around arguing, and talking about the upcoming tobacco auctions, but when they saw that I was not going to give them any money they drifted away.
The next day I looked for a vehicle going south. There were many vehicles in Mzuzu, the most expensive of them of course were the white four-wheel drives displaying the doorside logos of charities, every one that I had ever heard of and some new ones – People to People, Mission Against Ignorance and Poverty, The Food Project, Action Aid, Poverty Crusade, and more.
I was not surprised when they refused to give me a lift – I knew from experience that they were the last people to offer travelers assistance. Still, I was annoyed. I analyzed my annoyance. It was that the vehicles were often driven by Africans, the white people riding as passengers in what resembled ministerial seats. They had CD players, usually with music playing loudly, and now and then I saw the whole deal: an African or a white person driving one-handed in his white Save the Children vehicle, talking on a cell phone with music playing – the happiest person in the country. For every agent of virtue I saw slogging his or her guts out in the field, I saw two of them joy-riding.
This visible bliss on wheels, courtesy of the First World saps who had been guilt-tripped out of their money, was only one of my objections, and the pettiest. A more substantial one was the notion that after decades of charitable diligence, there were more charities in Malawi than ever. Charities and agents of virtue and NGOs were now part of the Malawi economy, certainly one of the larger parts. The charities in Malawi were troughs into which most people were unsuccessfully trying to insert their snouts. It did not surprise me later to learn that the hotshots who doled out aid in some African countries demanded sex from famine victims in return for the food parcels.
Some minibuses were going to Lilongwe but they looked dangerous – overcrowded, bald tires, doors mended with bailing wire, people riding on the roof, drivers with glazed ganja eyes. I looked for something a bit bigger and safer, but saw nothing – only deathtraps and the superb Land-Rovers of the charities. ‘Maybe there’s a big bus this afternoon.’
I went back to the hotel and reflected on my recent weeks. I had been three days on the bush train from Mwanza, abused by the immigration people in Dar es Salaam, bewildered by the dreadful train to Mbeya, a filthy town where I had been overcharged at the hotel and cheated out of my bus fare; delayed by a bus that didn’t show up. Then the struggle to the border, and there had been the punks who had tried to shake me down there, and the health officer who wanted a bribe, before the nighttime trip through the roadblocks to Karonga, and at last the long slow ride across the plateau to here, drizzly Mzuzu.
But I was within striking distance of the capital, Lilongwe. Knowing that I would be arriving there in the next few days I decided to call the US Embassy in Lilongwe. I had volunteered to give lectures anytime, anyplace, to talk to students, to be a Peace Corps helper all over again. My good-will message had been sent to Lilongwe, or so I hoped.
I called the embassy’s Public Affairs Office from my hotel in Mzuzu and was surprised to be greeted by a gloomy somewhat impatient woman, saying, ‘Yes, yes, I know who you are. The emails came a few weeks ago.’
‘About those lectures,’ I said.
Cutting me off, in fact snapping at me, the officer said, ‘I haven’t arranged anything for you.’
‘Nothing?’
‘You wouldn’t believe the week I had,’ she said.
Had she, like me, been abused, delayed, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, lied to, browbeaten, poisoned, stunk up and starved?
To avoid howling at her, I put the phone down. I was discouraged at first, for she had only a lazy reply to my offer of help. But then in a kinder moment I thought: in a culture where foreigners constantly showed up and offered themselves, their time, and even material help, charity was nothing special – in fact in Malawi it was another necessitous routine, not philanthropic but a permanent drip-feed, part of a system of handouts.
Who was I in offering to teach or give lectures but just another agent of virtue being reminded by a harassed official that she was far busier than me. Overpaid, officious, disingenuous, blame-shifting and off-hand as she was, this embassy hack was also probably right, saying, ‘Take a number, sonny. Get in line. There’s plenty of people like you.’
Morning on the Viphya Plateau: drizzling rain, blackish trees in heavy fog, slick muddy roads, Africans tugging plastic bags on their heads to keep dry. At 6:30 in the street outside the Mzuzu bus terminal, sheltered by the twig roof of a banana stand, balancing on a boulder to keep her feet dry was a white woman of about sixty, very thin, very pale in the darkness of the wet morning, searching wide-eyed through the mountain mist for the Lilongwe bus.
She boarded it and we sat side by side at the front, the rain slopping on the front window as we crossed the plateau. The bus was old but it was wide enough and high enough to impart a sense of safety. Every passenger had a seat, the driver was a cautious middle-aged man, and he used his brakes and his directional signals.
The woman beside me was Una Brownly, a nurse from Livingstonia Mission. She and her husband, Don, had been in Africa for twenty-seven years. Don, a doctor, was staying behind at the mission because of the large volume of patients. Una had two weeks’ home leave. She had taken the bus from Livingstonia the day before – all day to Mzuzu. A night in a dirty hotel in Mzuzu. Another bus today – all day to Lilongwe. A day in Lilongwe to wait for the London flight. It would take another day for her to get home to Ulster, a four-day trip to have a week at home, before turning around and taking the reverse sequence of planes and buses. A plane from Mzuzu and a connecting flight to London were out of the question – too expensive. Una was not being funded by an international NGO – no white Land-Rover, no mobile phone, no CD player. She and her husband were medical missionaries, living on money collected by her church back home. They were not well paid, not even by Malawian standards. Many African doctors had been asked to work in Livingstonia; they knew the long history of the hospital and the dire need for medical officers. They all turned the job down.
‘There isn’t a surgeon north of Lilongwe,’ she said.
Forty years after independence, and still the entire northern half of the country lacked a surgeon to perform the more complex operations that her husband was not trained for.
‘The government doesn’t pay its doctors enough,’ she said. ‘They leave the country and go where the pay is better.’
‘What about your pay?’
She said, ‘African doctors don’t work for what we’re paid.’
I began to understand the futility of charity in Africa. It was generally fuelled by the best of motives, but its worst aspect was that it was non-Inspiration
al. Aliens had been helping for so long and were so deeply entrenched that Africans lost interest – if indeed they had ever had it – in doing the same sort of work themselves. Not only was there no spirit of volunteerism, there was not even a remote desire to replace aid workers in paying jobs. Yet many Africans were unemployed, doing nothing but sitting under trees.
‘Does the Malawi government help fund your hospital?’
‘Not at all. They don’t even run their own hospitals.’
‘How did things get this bad?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s corruption, of course. All the ministers want a cut of whatever aid is given. But I don’t think about politics – what’s the point? And there’s lots of aid. Some people think that’s the problem. There are some doctors here – Elspeth and Michael King – who wrote a book arguing that Africa is backward because of aid.’
‘What do you think?’
My soliciting her opinion on this subject seemed to amuse her, for it is a characteristic of the long-term expatriate health workers in Africa that they do their jobs without complaint or cynicism. Anyone preoccupied with the contradictions and the daily repetition of the myth of Sisyphus would find such work intolerable, and complaints just tedious if not demoralizing.
‘There’s always strings attached to aid,’ she said. ‘That’s no bad thing, but in many cases there’s no local input. The donor determines what is needed and so the local people adapt their project to get the money.’
Cross-purposes was the kindest interpretation, scamming the more brutal one. I asked, ‘Why are the roads in the north so bad?’
‘That escarpment road is a hundred years old. It has been beautiful, but did you see all the landslides?’ she said. ‘In the past they cleared the landslides manually – it took a lot of people, but labor is cheap. And doing it by hand kept the storm drains open. For the past few years they’ve been using donor bulldozers to clear the rock slides. They bulldoze them to the side, blocking the drains. So when the rain comes it washes the road away and creates a torrent – another landslide.’
