by Paul Theroux
What I liked then was what I still liked, village life, and tenacious people, and saddleback mountains of stone and flat plains where anthills were higher than any hut. The road from Zomba had everything – vistas almost to Mozambique, the savanna of scattered trees, small villages, roadside stands where people sold potatoes and sugar cane – famine food, for the maize was not yet harvested. I liked the sweet somnolence of rural Africa, which I always regarded with a sense of safety.
Instead of driving straight to the school I stopped at the nearby town of Limbe, which began abruptly, the edge of the town slummy, with the outdoor businesses – bicycle menders, car repairers, coffin-makers; the rest of it chaotic, litter and mobs, small businesses and shop houses, and a proliferation of bars and dubious-looking clinics. I drove around looking for landmarks and found a bar where I used to drink, the Coconut Grove; and the Limbe market; and the Rainbow Theater, where we had to stand while they played ‘God Save the Queen’ before every movie performance, until independence.
The countryside had seemed emptier than before, the town was much fuller – larger and meaner-looking. I parked my car and went into a bank to get a cash advance on my credit card.
The clerk said, ‘This transaction will take three days.’
An African behind me in line sighed on my behalf and said, ‘That should take no more than an hour. That’s disgusting.’
I abandoned the thought of getting money and talked to the man instead. He was a Malawian, Dr Jonathan Banda, a political science teacher at Georgetown. He had left Malawi while quite young, in 1974, had traveled and studied in various countries but had finished his Ph.D. in the United States. He had just come back to Malawi and he was disappointed by what he saw.
‘It is dirty – it’s awful,’ he said.
We were standing on the main street of Limbe, among the crowds of people. Jonathan Banda was hardly forty, and having lived so long abroad he was better fed, and so bigger and stronger than any of his fellow Malawians. He had the look of an athlete, the same confidence that is also a sort of muscularity and an upright, assertive way of standing, and his posture matched his skeptical smile.
‘The people are greedy and materialistic,’ he went on. ‘They’re lazy, too. They show no respect. They push and shove. They are awful to each other.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Seeing my family, but also I wanted to come back to teach. I was recently interviewed by the university.’
I listened closely – after all, I was staying at the house of the university’s vice-chancellor.
‘So what happened?’
‘I was questioned by a panel of officials. They asked me about my political views. Can you imagine? If I were teaching science or geography, no problem. But my field is political science. I said, “I have no specific party affiliation.” ’
‘What did they say to that?’
‘They didn’t like it. I said, “I want to teach my students to make up their own minds – to form political ideas of their own. That’s what matters most to me.” They looked at each other and one said, “We can’t pay you much.” ’
‘I’m sure it would be less than Georgetown,’ I said.
‘I don’t care. I said to them, “That’s fine with me. I am here to learn.” ’
But Dr Jonathan Banda didn’t get the job. He was sure the reasons for his being turned down were political. He said that if he had praised the government and the ruling party they would have hired him.
Thinking of what the ambassador had told me, I said, ‘A diplomat told me there is no political terror here anymore. Is that true?’
‘Maybe, but there is political pressure of a very insidious sort.’
He seemed so outspoken I asked him the questions about charities and aid agencies that had been nagging at me, the agents of virtue in white Land-Rovers – what were they changing?
‘Not much - because all aid is political,’ he said. ‘When this country became independent it had very few institutions. It still doesn’t have many. The donors aren’t contributing to development. They maintain the status quo. Politicians love that, because they hate change. The tyrants love aid. Aid helps them stay in power and it contributes to underdevelopment. It’s not social or cultural and it certainly isn’t economic. Aid is one of the main reasons for underdevelopment in Africa.’
‘You said it, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘There’s an awful lot of aid agencies here.’
‘All those vehicles – everywhere you look,’ he said, which is precisely what I had felt.
‘So how will things change for the better?’
He said, ‘Change will involve all the old men dying off. Or it might take another forty years.’
‘What if all the donors just went away?’
‘That might work.’
I wished him luck and walked up the main street to confirm an old memory, to see if the Malawi Censorship Board was still operating as normal. Indeed it was, still a government office in its own substantial building at the east end of town. The offices were heavily staffed, all the names listed on a board in the lobby – Executive Director, Assistant Director, Accountant, Typing Pool, Screening Room Technician, and so forth – about thirty people altogether.
I knocked on a door at random and found an African man in a pinstripe suit sitting at a desk, a Bible open at his elbow – but otherwise a tidy desk.
‘Excuse me, do you have an updated list?’ Not sure of what I was asking for, I was deliberately vague.
‘I can sell you this,’ he said, and handed me a pamphlet titled Catalogue of Banned Publications, Cinematograph Pictures and Records, with Supplement, dated 1991. ‘Please give me five kwacha.’
He straightened his tie. He then opened a ledger labeled Accounts Section Censorship Board and laboriously filled out a lengthy receipt in triplicate, stamped it, and tore out a copy for me. All this work for six cents.
‘Don’t you have anything more recent than 1991?’
‘I will check. What is your interest?’
‘I want to write something about censorship,’ I said. ‘I’m studying the problem.’
‘Please wait here. I will need your name.’
I wrote my name on a piece of paper and he took it and left the room. While he was gone I looked around – lots of uplifting mottoes on the office walls, a portrait of the president, Mr Muluzi, some religious tracts on a bookshelf. The man’s Bible was open to the Book of Ezekiel, the hellfire chapters of punishment, ‘Threats against sinners’ in its denunciations a sort of mission statement for the Malawi Censorship Board, but containing a great deal of explicit imagery that might have been deemed unfit for Malawian readers. Ezekiel 23:20: ‘Oholibah… surpassed her sister in lust… and played the whore over and over again. She was infatuated with their male prostitutes, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose seed came in floods like that of stallions.’
The paradox was that this Malawian catalogue of banned books would have constituted a first-year college reading list in any enlightened country. Flipping through the pamphlet I saw that it contained novels by John Updike, Graham Greene, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, D. H. Lawrence, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell. Animal Farm was banned, as well as – more predictably – many books with titles such as Promiscuous Pauline and School Girl Sex. Salman Rushdie’s name was on the list – the president was a Muslim, that could explain it; and so was my name – after all these years, my novel Jungle Lovers, set in Malawi, was still banned.
The censorship officer had not returned. It seemed to me that the wisest thing to do was leave the censorship board before they linked my name with that of the pernicious author in their list. I tiptoed out of the office, saw that the hall was empty, all the office doors closed, and hurried away as storm clouds gathered over the nearby hills.
In a fine, chilly and drifting mist known in Malawi as chiperoni, I drove out of Limbe by a familiar route: uphill through a fore
st that had once been much larger, past a village that had once been much smaller, on a paved road that had once been just a muddy track. My hopes were raised by this narrow but good back road that ascended to the lower slopes of Soche Hill, for I assumed that this improved road indicated that the school too had been improved.
But I was wrong, the school was almost unrecognizable. What had been a set of school buildings in a large grove of trees was a semi-derelict compound of battered buildings in a muddy open field. The trees had been cut down, the grass was chest-high. At first glance the place was so poorly maintained as to seem abandoned: broken windows, doors ajar, mildewed walls, gashes in the roofs, and just a few people standing around, empty-handed, doing nothing but gaping at me.
I walked to the house I had once lived in. The now-battered building had once lain behind hedges, in a bower of blossoming shrubs, but the shrubbery was gone, replaced by a small scrappy garden of withered maize and cassava at one corner. Tall elephant grass – symbol of the bush – had almost overwhelmed it and now pressed against the house. The building was scorched and patched, one sooty wall where the boiler fire was fed, and the veranda roof broken. Mats lay in the driveway, mounds of white flour drying on it – except that falling rain had begun to turn it to paste. Faggots of firewood had been thrown in a higgledy-piggledy stack outside the kitchen.
To someone unfamiliar with Africa the house was the very picture of disorder. I knew better. A transformation had occurred, an English chalet-bungalow turned into a serviceable African hut, not a very colorful hut, even an unlovely hut. But it was not for me to blame the occupants for finding other uses for the driveway, or chopping the trees up for firewood, or slashing the hedges, or growing cassava where I had grown petunias. I did regret that the paint had peeled from the trim and the eaves, that the wood had rotted and brickwork had cracked and the windows had slipped from their frames. Village huts were kept in better repair. It would not be long before this badly maintained dwelling would fall down.
‘Yes, you are looking for someone?’
The occupant of what had been my house stepped out, barefoot, in stained trousers and an undershirt, dabbing at the floury scraps on his cheeks. He had been eating.
‘No. Just passing by,’ I said. ‘I used to live here. In the sixties.’
A long time ago!’ he said.
That remark fascinated me, for thirty-five years did not seem long at all to me, and in the heart of ancient changeless Africa it seemed nothing. But it was before he was born. The man did not introduce himself or welcome me, which was unusually inhospitable here. He didn’t ask why I might have lived in the house, or inquire what I had done there all those years ago. He licked food from his lips and folded his arms. He was just a village man eating a village meal in his village hut, and I was an interruption, from another planet.
It’s a very old house,’ he said. He turned to examine it.
‘Not really.’
‘Built around independence time,’ he said, as though pegging it to some remote period in the past.
Independence was 1964. But in a place where people married young, bore children young, and died young, that was two generations, far-off to him in African time.
The old Roseveare homestead next door, much larger, was in worse shape. To those two meticulous English green-fingered gardeners, unweeded plants were a nightmare. But this was transformation, too. There was a solid maize crop growing where their roses and lupins had been. This vividly illustrated African life, which was the story not of adaptation but of survival.
‘The Roseveares used to live there.’
‘Myself, I am not knowing them.’
‘Sir Martin Roseveare founded this school. He and his wife taught here for many years.’
The man shrugged: not a clue.
‘They are dead now.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ But he seemed more suspicious than sorry, as though I was spinning a yarn to take him off guard and perhaps rob him.
‘You’re a teacher?’
‘Communications and what-not,’ he said.
‘Thanks. I must be going.’
‘Bye-bye, mister.’
More rain-stained mildewed walls and sagging roofs, more broken windows and cracked verandas up the road, at the other teachers’ houses. The drizzle was coming down hard now, but the rain and the mud and the dripping trees and the green slime on the brick walls were appropriate to the melancholy I felt.
I met two teachers standing in the wet road, chatting together. They introduced themselves as Anne Holt from Fife in Scotland, and Jackson Yekha, a Malawian – new teachers here.
‘I’ve read some of your books,’ Anne said. ‘I didn’t know you’d taught here.’
‘It was a while ago. Ever hear of the Roseveares? They actually started the school. They lived over there.’
Nothing, no memory of them, and I began to think that the weeds that had covered their graves in Mzuzu were an accurate reflection of how much their decades of work and sacrifice mattered. It was as though they had never existed, or were just ghostly figures. What they had helped create was almost gone, so in a sense they might never have come, though they still haunted the school.
And I was a specter, too: a wraith from the past, knocking on broken windows with my bony fingers, pressing my skull against the glass and looking death’s head toothy, and saying, Remember me? But I was so obscure and insubstantial a spook I was hardly visible to these people, though I saw them clearly as a repetition, another cycle, a sadder incarnation than before. Anne Holt was twenty-two, as I had been here at Soche Hill, and so as a ghost I was visiting and haunting my earlier self, and seeing myself as I had been: thin, pale, standing on a wet road in the bush, with a foxed and mildewed textbook in my hand.
As we were talking the rain turned very heavy, smacking the leaves overhead and threatening to drench us. We sheltered in the nearest house, that of Jackson Yekha. It so happened that Jackson’s house was also the first one I had ever occupied in Malawi. While my house was being finished, I stayed in this one, belonging to a hard-working Scottish teacher from the island of South Uist. He was John MacKinnon, a stalwart at the school, and another forgotten man. The same dining table that had once held sauce bottles and the mustard pot and a sticky jar of Branston Pickle was now dusted with the talcum of maize flour from nsima spills. This house too had become bush-like and cluttered and scorched: bungalow into hut.
Sitting there, listening to the rain hammering on the roof, it was Jackson Yekha, not I, who bemoaned the poverty and disorder in the country.
I said, ‘When I was here, people used to say, “In five or ten years things will improve.” ’
I didn’t have to finish the thought, for Jackson said, ‘Things are terrible. What can we do to change?’
I said, ‘First you have to decide what’s important to you. What do you want?’
‘I want things to be better. Houses. Money. The life.’
What’s stopping you?’
‘The government is not helping us.’
‘Maybe the government wants to prevent things from becoming better.’
I sketched out my theory that some governments in Africa depended on underdevelopment to survive – bad schools, poor communications, a feeble press and ragged people. They needed poverty to obtain foreign aid, they needed ignorance and uneducated and passive people to keep themselves in office for decades. A great education system in an open society would produce rivals, competitors, and an effective opposition to people who wanted only to cling to power. It was heresy to say such things, but this was how it seemed to me.
‘That’s so depressing,’ Anne said. ‘But no one wants to be a teacher. A primary school teacher only makes 2000 kwacha a month. The college level is about 5000 kwacha.’
These figures represented about $25 to $65 – very low, but the average annual per capita income in Malawi was $200.
‘The NGOs pull out the teachers,’ Jackson said. ‘They offer them better pay and c
onditions.’
That was interesting - the foreign charities and virtue activists, aiming to improve matters, co-opted underpaid teachers, turned them into food distributors in white Land-Rovers, and left the schools understaffed.
Seeing that the rain had let up I asked Anne to show me around the school. In the main office, I met the principal.
Anne said, ‘This is Mr Theroux. He used to teach here.’
The principal shortened his neck like a surprised turtle and glanced at me. He said, ‘That’s interesting,’ and returned to his scribbling.
The library, a large substantial building, had been the heart of the school. It had never been difficult to get crates of new books from overseas agencies. My memory of the Soche library was an open-plan room divided with many high bookcases and filled shelves, 10,000 books, a table of magazines, a reference section with encyclopedias.
The library was almost in total darkness. One light burned. Nearly all the shelves were empty. The light fixtures were empty too.
‘It’s a little dark in here.’
‘You should have seen it before,’ Anne said. ‘At least we’ve got that one light. We’ve asked the ministry countless times to send us fluorescent bulbs but they don’t even reply to our letters.’
‘You’re asking for bulbs and they won’t give them to you?’ I said. ‘I think they’re sending you a message, that they don’t care.’
‘Aye, possibly.’
This used to be one of the best schools in the country.’
‘Aye, it’s sad, I agree.’
‘What happened to the books?’
‘Students stole them.’
‘Good God.’
‘We’re trying to work out a new system. When we get it up and running we’ll be able to prevent a lot of the theft.’
I thought: I will never send another book to this country. I also thought: If you’re an African student and you need money, it made a certain criminal sense to steal books and sell them. It was a justifiable form of poaching, like a villager snaring a warthog, disapproved of by the authorities but perhaps necessary – there was no tribal sanction against poaching when it concerned survival.
