by Paul Theroux
I said, ‘Ha! Cell phones! They’ll play with them like people in a cargo cult! They’ll treat them like toys!’
A bald man can express frustration with his entire head. My friskiness tried the ambassador’s patience, but even with his scalp creased with anger he remained polite and positive. I had to admire his equanimity, yet I could see he was dying for me to leave. He did not refill my glass. This is an effective suggestion that one’s time is up. When it was conveyed to me through meaningful silences that the meeting was over, we strolled through his garden, admiring his palm trees, and off I went, back to my hotel room to brood.
The next day I called the president of the University of Malawi, a man I knew – he had been a fellow teacher, long ago. He said he was glad to hear from me.
‘I’m just passing through,’ I said. I did not mention my birthday promise to myself - to spend a week or so teaching, helping out, doing something useful. ‘I want to offer my services – give a lecture at the university or do some teaching at Soche Hill.’
‘That’s excellent. Come to Zomba - I’ll arrange something. And welcome home, achimwene.’
Achimwene was the fondest word for brother.
15 The Back Road to Soche Hill School
‘Your mother is your mother, even if one of her legs is too short,’ Malawians said, another old saw, and this was also their off hand way of forgiving their country its lapses.
Most people didn’t complain. Some people even boasted – ‘Better roads,’ many people said. Well, maybe so, here in the south, but Malawi was so poor only politicians had proper cars. They drove Mercedes-Benzes on these good roads while everyone else walked, or rode bikes, or herded their animals. Children used the main roads for playing games – the pavement was good for bouncing balls or tugging their home-made wire toys. As for buses, most of them were such a misery the good roads made little difference. I was so demoralized by my various bus trips from the far north that I had rented a car in Lilongwe. It was the first and last time on my whole trip I did so. Now I was the driver being hassled by police at the roadblocks.
‘Open the boot, bwana,’ ordered a heavily armed policeman at a barrier.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Drugs and guns.’
‘Do you ever find any of that stuff?’ I asked.
Two of the policeman’s helpers were rifling through my bag in the trunk, one inhaling deeply like a sniffer-dog smelling for ganja, or chamba as it was known in Malawi, a very inexpensive item that was widely available.
‘Before this day ends we will find some,’ the policeman said.
Apart from the roadblocks, the 200-mile trip to Zomba was a pleasure. I drove slowly, loving the freedom of my own vehicle and the starkness of the weirdly shaped mountains, each one of them standing alone on the green plain. I came to see them as specifically African, unique as the animals that grazed beneath them, for these Rift Valley boulders were scorched gray mountains, as though blown out of the cannon’s mouth of a volcanic crater in some fiery epoch of prehistory. Smooth and solitary, not quite buttes, not quite mesas, some of them were egg-shaped and some like exotic fruit. I was reminded of how I had felt when I had first seen them, the deep impression they had left was that I was in a special place, the dark star of Africa, and that traveling across other continents I never saw anything like them.
Paved roads ran where there had once been only rutted red clay tracks; the train line to Balaka that I had taken in 1964 to a Mua leprosarium by the lake was defunct - and so was the leper colony. The ferry at Liwonde across the Shire River, brimming and brown in flood, had been replaced by a bridge. All this was progress, but still on these new thoroughfares the Africans, buttocks showing in their tattered clothes, walked barefoot.
I traveled so idly, stopping so often to look at birds or talk to farmers, I did not arrive in the hill-town of Zomba until after dark. The main street was unlit, people flitting and stumbling in the dark. I had instructions to proceed to the Zomba Club and there to call my friend, who would meet me and guide me to his hard-to-find house high on the steep side of the plateau.
Zomba had been the capital of Malawi’s British incarnation, the little tea-growing Protectorate of Nyasaland. The still small town was a collection of tin-roofed red-brick buildings clustered together at the edge of Zomba Plateau. From the main road, the plateau looked like an ironing board draped in a green sheet, and was high enough to be seen from a great distance – one of the peaks was well over 6000 feet. The craggy sides were misty and parts of the plateau still wild enough to support hyena packs and small bushbucks and some troops of monkeys and baboons. All the features of British rule had been imposed on the lower slopes in Zomba : the red-brick Governor-General’s house, the red-brick Anglican church, the red-brick civil servants’ bungalows, the red-brick club. The tin roofs of these buildings were now rusted the same hue as the bricks.
The Zomba Gymkhana Club had been the settlers’ meeting place and social center in British times but, absurdly, membership was restricted according to pigmentation, whites predominating, a few Indians, some golden-skinned mixed-raced people known then as ‘Coloureds.’ Even in the years just after Malawi’s independence the club was nearly all white – horsy men and women, cricketers and rugger hearties. No footballers: kicking a football was regarded as an African sport.
Back then, I was not a member of any club, but was sometimes an unwilling party to rants by beer-swilling Brits wearing club blazers and cardigans (‘This is my UK woolly’) saying, ‘Let Africans in here and they’ll be tearing up the billiard table and getting drunk and bringing their snotty little piccanins in the bar. There’ll be some African woman nursing her baby in the games room.’ This was considered rude and racist, yet in its offensive way it was fairly prescient, for the rowdy teenagers at the billiard table were stabbing their cues at the torn felt, the bar was full of drunks (no children, though, and no one used the crude word ‘piccanins’ anymore), and a woman was breast-feeding her baby under the dart board. But if the fabric of the place had deteriorated, the atmosphere was about the same as before.
Some relics remained – the sets of kudu and springbok horns mounted high on the wall, the glass cases of dusty fishing flies, all neatly tied and categorized in rows, the biggest for salmon, the tiny midges for smaller fish. The calendar was months out of date, the portraits were gone, the floor was unswept, the overbright lights made the interior seem harsher and dirtier.
I sat drinking a beer, noting these observations, waiting for my friend to arrive.
Soon he came and greeted me warmly in two languages. He was David Rubadiri, whom I had first met in 1963, when he had been headmaster of my school, Soche Hill – Sochay was the correct way of saying it. The shortage of college graduates at independence meant that Rubadiri was plucked from the school and put into the diplomatic service. The prime minister, Hastings Banda, appointed him Malawi’s ambassador to Washington. There, Rubadiri prospered until three or four months after independence, when there was a sudden power struggle. The cabinet ministers denounced Hastings Banda as a despot, attacked him verbally and held a vote of no-confidence in parliament. From a distance, Rubadiri joined in, but Banda survived what became an attempted coup d’état, and he turned on his accusers. Those who had opposed him either left the country or fought in the guerrilla underground. Banda remained in power for the next thirty years.
Rubadiri was disgraced politically for taking sides, and lost his job in the coup attempt. He went to Uganda to teach at Makerere. After it became known that I assisted him – I delivered him his car, driving it 2000 miles through the bush to Uganda -I was accused of aiding the rebels and branded a revolutionary. I was deported from Malawi late in 1965, ejected from the Peace Corps (‘You have jeopardized the whole program!’), and with Rubadiri’s help, was hired at Makerere. One week I was a schoolteacher, the following week a university professor. The combination of physical risk, social activism, revolutionary fervor, Third World politics
and naivete characterized this drama of the 1960s.*
So our careers, Rubadiri’s and mine, had become intertwined. We had been friends for thirty-eight years. His fortunes had risen again with the change of government in Malawi. In the mid-nineties he was appointed Malawi’s ambassador to the United Nations, and after four or five years, was made vice-chancellor of the University of Malawi. He had two wives and nine children and was now almost seventy, grizzled and dignified and venerable, like General Othello, a role he had played in a college production while studying in England. After a few drinks Rubadiri sometimes raised his hand and cocked an eyebrow, and said in a deep smoky voice,
Soft you, a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service…
It was wonderful to see him again in the Zomba Gymkhana Club, still alive, a survivor from the distant past. Following his car through the narrow switchback road along the side of the Zomba Plateau – guard dogs and night watchmen darting out of the darkness – I had a glimpse of officialdom at home. These former residences of British bureaucrats were now the houses of African bureaucrats. Rubadiri’s had been the British High Commissioner’s house, a sprawling one-story colonial mansion (tin roof, brick and stucco walls) set into a steep slope, atop a terraced garden.
Only one of his wives was in residence – Gertrude, whom I had known as an intelligent and sensible person. She greeted me, welcomed me, and made me feel at home.
‘Dinner is in one hour.’
‘Time for you to talk to some students,’ Rubadiri said.
We went downhill to the University Club, another glorified bar from the 1920s, and I spoke to a group of students and teachers – another pep talk. One man I recognized almost immediately as an old student of mine – the same chubby face and big head on narrow shoulders, the same solemn heavy-lidded eyes that made him look ironic. His hair was gray but otherwise he was Sam Mpechetula, now wearing shoes. I had last seen him when he was a barefoot fifteen-year-old, in gray shorts. He was now fifty-two, in a jacket and necktie.
Sam said he happened to be in Zomba and had heard I was speaking, so he showed up. He was married, a father of four, and a teacher at Bunda College, outside Lilongwe. So at least I could say that one of my students had taken my place as an English teacher in a Malawi classroom. That had been one of my more modest goals.
‘Do you remember much about our school?’ I asked.
‘It was a good school – the best. They were the best days of my life,’ he said. ‘The Peace Corps guys were wonderful. They brought blue jeans and long hair to Malawi.’
‘What a legacy,’ I said, because Rubadiri was listening.
Sam said, ‘They talked to Africans. Do you know, before they came, white people didn’t talk to us.’
Rubadiri said, ‘You remember this man, eh?’
Oh, yes. When he was declared “PI” we were sad.’
PI was Prohibited Immigrant. My reward for helping Rubadiri.
‘Around that time Jack Mapanje also taught us. You remember him?’
Another political casualty: Jack Mapanje was jailed for ten years for writing poems deemed by the Malawian government to be subversive.
Sam brought me up to date on the students I had taught – many were dead, some had left the country, but a number were working in useful jobs in different parts of the country. A high proportion of these former students were working women.
Later that night, after dinner, I was reminded again of the strength and clear-sightedness of Malawian women when David Rubadiri went to bed and his wife stayed up, drinking tea and monologuing. Gertrude was a short solid woman, with a full face and powerful arms and she sat deep in the cushions of a sofa, leaning slightly forward, looking alert. She was intelligent and, for her generation, highly educated, having gone to Fort Hare University in South Africa. Robert Mugabe, later guerrilla fighter and erratic president of Zimbabwe, had been one of her classmates. We talked about him a little because that month he was harassing white farmers in Zimbabwe so severely people were warning me to stay away from that country.
‘Mugabe was so studious – we called him “Bookworm.” ’
Fearful of offering an insult, for I was a houseguest, I at first tentatively suggested that on my return to Malawi I was seeing a country greatly reduced. But Gertrude seized on this, for she too had been away for a long time - perhaps twenty-five years.
‘Things are worse,’ Gertrude said decisively. ‘When I came back in 1994 I was surprised. The poverty here really shocked me. I could not believe the people could be so poor. I saw a boy with some small money in his hand trying to buy some soap – he needed one kwacha [1.3 cents] but didn’t have it, and so he went away. The people were dressed in rags. The streets were littered with rubbish.’
‘I’ve noticed that myself,’ I said.
‘But do you know? Within two weeks I had stopped seeing it!’
‘What else shocked you when you came back?’
‘The way the young people spoke in the house really bothered me. Some of them were my own nephews. If I asked a question they would answer with a question, sometimes saying “Si chapita?” [So what?] That is not traditional at all – it shows no respect. I might ask for sugar and the child would just shrug and sit there and say, Si watha? [Isn’t it all gone?] Shocking!
‘And the way people gossip. Well, you know this has always been an envious society. Someone comes from abroad with a Ph.D. and we say it stands for “Pull him down.” They gossip about the person and say he or she is proud. I was at a funeral recently and heard people gossiping. Can you imagine – at a funeral?
‘We have become so dirty – in throwing garbage on the street. Also, personally. People are less clean in their personal habits. You notice it on buses. The smell. And you see how people push? They never did that before. It is not part of our culture to be in a crowd or to press against each other. Our culture determines that we need space. A servant gives you space – he stands aside. People do the same with each other. So it is unnatural to be pushed and pressed, yet it happens all the time. No one respects old people. No one gives me a seat. Maybe I am saying that because I am old!
‘What went wrong? Is it because of all those years of Banda’s rule, telling people what to do, to be tidy, to be respectful? And now they say, “The old man is gone. Now I can be messy, to make up for all those years.” ’
‘The foreign charities here are doing our work for us – so many of them! What progress are they making? Will we have them for ever? There were not so many before. Why do we still need them after so long? David says I am a pessimist, but to tell the truth I am a bit ashamed.’
I went to bed thinking, So I’m not imagining this.
I set off the next morning to revisit my school, forty-five miles down the road from Zomba to Soche Hill.
Some trips mean so much to us that we rehearse them obsessively in our head, not to prepare ourselves but in anticipation, for the delicious foretaste. I had been imagining this return trip down the narrow track to Soche Hill for many years. It was a homecoming in a more profound sense than my going back to Medford, Massachusetts, where I had grown up. In Medford, I was one of many people struggling to leave, to start my life; but in Malawi, at Soche Hill School, I was alone, making my life.
In Africa, for the first time, I got a glimpse of the sort of pattern my life would take – that it would be dominated by writing and solitariness and risk and, already, in my early twenties I tasted those ambiguous pleasures. I had learned what many others had discovered before me, that Africa for all its perils represented wilderness and possibility. Not only did I have the freedom to write in Africa, I had something new to write about.
The African world I got to know was not the narrow existence of the tourist or big-game hunter, or the rarified and misleading experience of the diplomat, but the more revealing progress of an ambitious exile in the bush. I had no money and no status. In Malawi I began identifying with Rimbaud and Graham Greene, and it was in
Africa that I began my lifelong dislike of Ernest Hemingway, from his shotguns to his mannered prose. Ernest was both a tourist and a big-game hunter. The Hemingway vision of Africa begins and ends with the killing of large animals, so that their heads may be displayed to impress visitors with your prowess. That kind of safari is easily come by. You pay your money and you are shown elephants and leopards. You talk to servile Africans, who are generic natives, little more than obedient Oompa-Loompas. The human side of Africa is an afternoon visit to a colorful village. This is why, of all the sorts of travel available in Africa, the easiest to find and the most misleading is the Hemingway experience In some respects the feed-the-people obsession that fuels some charities is related to this, for I seldom saw relief workers that did not in some way remind me of people herding animals and throwing food to them, much as rangers did to the animals in drought-stricken game parks.
The school-teaching experience in Africa, harder to come by, takes less money but more humility I had been lucky. Fearing the draft, I had joined the Peace Corps, in one of the earliest waves of volunteers, and been sent to Nyasaland, an African country not yet independent. So I experienced the last gasp of British colonialism, the in-between period of uncertain changeover, and the hopeful assertion of black rule. That was lucky, too, for I saw this process at close quarters, and African rule, necessary as it was, was also a tyranny in Malawi from day one.
School teaching was perfect for understanding how people lived and what they wanted for themselves. And my work justified my existence in Africa. I had never wanted to be a tourist. I wished to be far away, as remote as possible, among people I could talk to. I achieved that in Malawi. What I loved most about Africa was that it seemed unfinished, and was still somewhat unknown and undiscovered, lying mute but imposing, like the giant obelisk in the quarry at Aswan. The beautiful flawed thing lay trapped in the rock, but if erected it would have risen 150 feet. It was for me the very symbol of the Africa I knew.
