by Paul Theroux
In Blantyre, I checked into a hotel and stayed in my room, medicating myself. I lay doubled-up for a few days and then strayed into town. What I had not noticed on my previous visit was the great number of shops and churches run by Christian evangelists – Jimmy Swaggart Ministries among them. The education system was appalling but there was no shortage of dreary hymn-singing pietists and preachers who promised people food if they handed over their souls.
I realized I was somewhat out of sympathy with this new Malawi when I saw a man on the sidewalk lying in wait for me.
Seeing me, the man smiled and frolicked ahead, flapping his arms to get my attention. He capered some more, then he crouched in front of me, blocking my path, and said, ‘I am hungry. Give me money.’
I said ‘No,’ and stepped over him and kept walking.
16 River Safari to the Coast
Possessed with another yearning to light out for the territory – another territory – I fell ill. Yet sickness of the sort I suffered is so common among travelers there is no point reporting the particularities. My ailment’s effect on me was to make me idle. My ailment’s effect on others was to make them active and pestiferous. The Africans who seemed to understand that I was weak pursued me, the way predators harry slower or uncertain prey animals, and they demanded money, as though knowing that I was too weak to refuse them. Seeing me hollow-eyed and scuffing along the crowded streets of Blantyre, they nagged me. I walked slowly. Boys tagged along, snatching and calling out, ‘Mzungu! Mzungu!’
A man accosted me outside a shop. He said, ‘Please give me money for food.’
I said in his language, ‘Why are you asking me for money for nothing? Why don’t you ask me for work?’
This perplexed him and threw him off his spiel.
‘Don’t you want to work? If you work you’ll have money every week.’
He knelt down – got on to his ragged knees – and implored me for money. This abasement must have worked well for him before, because he did it without hesitation. He even gripped my ankles as he begged.
‘Get up,’ I said. ‘You’re a man. Get off your knees. Stand up like a man and ask me for work.’
‘I’m hungry,’ he said.
‘I’m sick – can’t you tell?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you give me money for being sick?’
My unexpected aggression and weird demand seemed to frighten him, and it surprised me too, for I had not planned on saying any of that. He walked quickly away.
In my weakened state I felt irritable and contrary and persecuted. Blantyre had once been a mixed community: Greek bakers, Italian tea planters, many mixed-race families, and not just generic Indians but Ismailis, Sikhs, Gujaratis. Even the worst of them had played a part in making society in Malawi work – the friction had been necessary, the challenges had made people think harder, the pluralism had forced people to become considerate. But all these exotic-looking people had been driven out. There was no racial difference now, except for the agents of virtue, all white, all short-timers. The working of society was in the hands of charities, running orphanages, staffing hospitals, doing triage in the pathetic education system. They were saving lives – you couldn’t fault them – but in general I despaired at the very sight of aid workers, as no more than a maintenance crew on a power trip, who had turned Malawians into beggars and whiners, and development into a study in futility.
The news in the paper was that the maize harvest was a failure. A famine was expected for the coming year.
One day I woke up well. Having no desire to stay any longer in Malawi and discuss what went wrong, I decided to leave. I was now strong enough to depart by an unusual route, through the bush, to light out for the territory south, an almost unknown land.
It was the ultimate safari, one of my own devising, down the Shire River and into Mozambique to the Zambezi. Downstream at Caia I could go by road to Beira, on the coast, then travel inland on the direct road to Harare. I justified the detour by telling myself that I would compare it with a previous trip I had taken on this same route. But in fact this, the most roundabout way of getting to Zimbabwe, was a jaunt, a lark, an antidote to all the miserable buses and all the dishonest blamers.
Having sworn off risky minibuses, I dickered with a taxi driver to take me down the muddy and weirdly ferric-colored road to Nsanje, the southernmost settlement in Malawi. Nsanje, once known as Port Herald, was so buggy and remote and malarial, it had been Malawi’s Siberia for decades, a penal colony for political dissidents. Undesirables were sent to the southern region to rot.
But Nsanje was one of those distant rural places that retained the look and feel of old Africa. Not populous, inhabited by the Sena people, who were despised for being unmodern and remote in their low-lying and swampy land, Nsanje was wild enough to have its own game park, the Mwabvi Game Reserve. Nsanje was also on a wide navigable river. When David Livingstone had first come to this area he had traveled along the Zambezi and up one of its larger tributaries, the Shire River, to Nsanje and the labyrinthine Elephant Marsh and into the highlands. On the way, he made the observation that cotton would be an ideal crop here. One hundred and fifty years later, cotton was still grown around Nsanje. The crop was not in great demand.
My driver’s name was Hudson. He repeated what the papers had said, that the southern region was due for a famine, because of the heavy rains that had come before the maize crop had been harvested.
The rain had been torrential in the south. The growing cycle had been skewed. The government gave out free seeds (courtesy of donor countries), ten kilos per family, enough for an acre. This in itself was a problem, for it suggested to me that small-scale sustainable agriculture was not the norm. Anyone who grows crops with unmodified seeds can set aside one field as seed corn. But because they were using hybrid seeds (big plants, but sterile seeds), the farmers could not create seeds for the following year. Instead they waited for them to be doled out. Without free seeds every year these people would starve.
Normally, fields were dug in September, the ground hoed and prepared in October, dry-planted in November, then the farmers prayed for rain. The maize stalks that matured in February were left in the field to dry, then in April the ears were picked. The cobs were stripped of their kernels and bagged for milling into flour. June, July and August were months of abundance. Malawi’s independence was in July, when people had plenty of free time and enough to eat. At the first independence celebration, Hastings Banda had stood in the National Stadium and led the thousands of Malawians present in the robust hymn, significant in that month, ‘Bringing in the Sheaves.’
The average family of four or five people required twelve bags of maize (one bag equaled fifty kilos). These were kept in a silo (nkokwe) outside the hut. Rats, rotting and importuning relatives diminished the hoard. To make flour for nsima – a blob of steamed white dough, served with stew, that I had been eating ever since Karonga – to create this Malawian staple, the kernels were pounded in mortars or ground in a communal mill. Of all the activities in Central Africa, the maize-growing cycle was the most vital, the only important work, the difference between life and death. Anything that interrupted it - war, weather, political trouble, spoiled seeds, flood, or wild fires – spelled doom.
This season the rains had been late. Some seeds had not germinated. Many had sprouted and produced a crop. But the rain was still falling in March, and the ripe ungathered maize was rotting in the fields. Much of the south had been flooded. The harvest would be small. Because of this shortfall, in Nsanje and elsewhere, famine was a certainty.
‘These people will get hungry,’ Hudson said, looking at the wet fields and blackened corn stalks, the decayed stubble, the rotted stooks, the soaked slumping thatch on the huts.
Ten months later, the situation was dire. Maize was so scarce South Africa sent a shipment of 150,000 metric tonnes, and more was ordered from Uganda, which had a surplus. But since the price per bag had tripled, the maize was unaffordable. Malawian newspapers reported peop
le eating boiled cassava leaves, and digging for wild roots and eating earthworms.
‘A bit farther,’ I said, when we got to Nsanje. ‘I want to go to Marka.’
‘You know this place?’
I did. I had come here in the 1990s to research a story about the Zambezi River. I had had my own kayak then, but I found out that I could hire a dugout canoe for the downriver trip; that with an early start it was two nights to the Zambezi, another night at Caia, and then about twelve hours by road to the coast. I had the essential equipment - a raincoat, a down-filled sleeping bag that could be compressed to the size of a football, and bug spray. I also had cash to buy food.
Hudson dropped me at the compound of the headman of Marka village, whom I had dealt with before. A group of women with children bandaged to their backs, sat in a circle, sorting beans in tin basins, picking out stones and chatting. I greeted them with the usual formulas, the equivalents of ‘May I enter?’ and ‘May I have permission to speak?’
They welcomed me and offered me a wobbly stool.
‘I am looking for Chief Nyachicadza,’ I said.
He wasn’t there – that was bad news; and from their euphemisms and circumspect manner I feared he might be ill or possibly dead. In a village such as Marka, in the Lower River District of Malawi, no one is dead. If people appear to vanish from their corporeal existence it is just a ducking-out to return as spirits, sometimes troubling the order of daily life, sometimes acting to smooth its course.
The women directed me to the chief’s son Karsten, whom I knew from my previous visit. Karsten lived elsewhere on the river, but he happened to be in Marka, delivering some goods in his dugout canoe.
‘Delivering’ could mean anything in Marka. The place was so far off the map there was hardly any law enforcement. There were police in Nsanje, and they had a motor boat; but the river was too wide and too long for any of them to monitor the comings and goings of dugouts. So, smuggling was common: sugar and cotton were smuggled out to Mozambique, and other items – tin pots, enamel plates, knives and machetes – were smuggled into Malawi.
The Lower River was a forgotten province, inhabited by the despised and dendrophobic Sena people. The Shire valley was neglected by the Malawian government; and farther downstream, where the river entered Mozambique, it was neglected by that government too. Who could blame these people living on its banks for finding illegal ways of fending for themselves? No one was looking after them. The region like many border areas in Africa was undefined, Sena people on both sides, but the river made it even more ambiguous, not Malawi, not Mozambique, but miles and miles of moving water, something fluid, a river in Africa.
Even the riverbank had no definition, for at the muddy margins of the river were vast swathes of reeds that obscured the bank, and in places dense stretches of water hyacinths – very pretty but a nuisance to the paddlers in the dugout canoes.
The women who had mentioned Karsten ordered a young boy to take me to him. We walked through the village of mud huts, their walls eroded by the rain, and down to the landing. About twenty dugouts were lined up on the foreshore.
Some men were unloading plastic sacks from an oversize dugout – cloudy-clear plastic that allowed me to see that the cargo was plastic sandals. I presumed that they had come upriver from some drop-off spot in Mozambique. The sacks were being heaped on wooden pallets to keep them out of the mud.
A fisherman was untangling his nets. His catch, a bucket thrashing with big fish, lay next to him. Another man was scooping water from a dugout using a plastic gallon jug, cut off to serve as a bailer. I thought I recognized Karsten Nyachicadza in a group of men who were standing near the unloaded sacks of sandals.
A heavy smoker of chamba, Karsten was in his mid-thirties – short, thin-faced, small-boned, but even with this scrawny physique unexpectedly strong and tenacious. He had a hard stroke, he could paddle all day. His habit was to rise early, before dawn, and push his boat out and keep at it, not stopping to eat though sometimes pausing to roll a joint. He ate fruit – oranges, bananas, and tangerines, whatever was in season – and at the end of the day made a proper meal of nsima and stewed greens and smoked fish.
Even glassy-eyed from the dope he seemed to remember me. He turned from the group and shook my hand, and called out something to the others, explaining who I was and laughing at the memory of that previous trip.
‘I want to go to Caia in your boat,’ I said.
He smiled, his expression said, Sure. He hung on to my hand as though to seal the agreement. His was a paddler’s hand, scaly, with a muscly palm and pads so hardened with calluses they seemed abrasive.
‘When?’
‘How about tomorrow?’
‘Tonight we go to my house. Sleep there. Start tomorrow morning for Caia.’
He was more eager to leave even than I was, which pleased me. But there were preparations to make.
‘What about food? I want to bring bottled water. We’ll need ufa’ – flour for nsima.
‘The shop in the market has tins. Give me money. I will buy flour.’
We went together, walking through the village to the shop. For me, this was one of the most pleasant aspects of a trip - stocking up on the necessaries, filling a box with solid food, and extras like cookies and canned cheese. Because bottled water was in short supply, I bought a case of Fanta and a case of beer. An African shop like this was perfect for such food and the basics for survival - matches, candles, rope. I wanted to buy pots and spoons and camping paraphernalia but Karsten said he had everything we needed. The plastic tarp he had for covering his contraband we could use as a tent if it rained.
On the way back to the landing (young boys following us, carrying the food boxes on their heads), we agreed on a price for renting the dugout – $100 in small bills. Karsten said we would need another paddler – his friend, Wilson Matenge. But by the time Wilson was found, the sun had dropped behind the trees and the daylight was slipping away. It was too late to go to Karsten’s. I did not mind traveling in the dusk but just at dark the mosquitoes came out in clouds. I wanted to find a hut to sleep in, and a smoky fire; to cover myself with bug spray and go to sleep early.
Village dogs barked all night outside the shed I had been assigned, probably because hyenas were lurking. It was still dark when I heard Karsten’s footfalls and his wide-awake voice, ‘We go now.’
Morning, too, was mosquito time on the Shire River. As we set off they whined around my head in bunches, as thick and busy as blackflies in Maine. But I was well sprayed, and as soon as the sun came up the mosquitoes dispersed. The dugout had been hollowed from an enormous log, about seventeen feet from tip to tip, and so wide it plowed through the marsh to the main stream. Karsten paddled in the stern and steered, Wilson and I took turns paddling in the bow.
The entry to the landing was a narrow lane of open water through the thickness of closely packed leaves and flowers of the hyacinths. Much of the time I sat on a stool amidships like Stanley in the Lady Alice, or else crouched in the bow. Karsten as master of this vessel was reluctant to surrender his paddle - even Wilson was happiest paddling and I supposed he wanted to humor me by giving me a chance. But it passed the time for me to paddle, and by mid-morning we had made it through the hyacinths and the twisting waterway through the marsh grass. We were now in the swift main stream of the Shire, riding the current south.
The recent rain had muddied the river and deepened it, but though it brimmed against some of the banks it hadn’t spilled over and flooded the plains and gardens. We moved steadily with the flow and at times we used the paddles to steer, the current speeding us.
People on the banks called out to us, and they must have been asking where we were going, because Karsten yelled, ‘Zambezi!’
In places the river twisted into bewildering marshland, dividing into many separate streams, softening, losing its riverine look and becoming slow water in a mass of spongy reeds. The Shire ceased to be a river at the Ndinde Marsh, which was so dense wi
th high grass and reeds we could not see ahead of us, so choked with hyacinths that our progress was slowed to hard paddling. In this marsh we could negotiate only by occasionally going upstream, fighting the current. I thought that perhaps Karsten’s chamba intake had destroyed his judgement, but after an hour in the marsh we emerged, with a view of Mozambique.
I could see no villages, but here and there were clusters of huts set back from the river’s edge. Karsten stopped at one village and bought mangoes, and at another he bought dried fish. The people knew him, which encouraged my confidence in him, for he could know these half-hidden places only by being intensely knowledgeable about navigating the river.
A muddy embankment was the Mozambique border. There was no indication it was a frontier, but there were wrecked vehicles and boats on the muddy banks, always signs of civilization. The riverside settlement of Megaza consisted of two wrecked riverboats, a rusted truck chassis, a slippery ramp, some sheds that sold the usual – oil, candles, matches, crackers, raw soap, cigarettes – and idle skinny Africans sitting under another wrecked truck for the shade. The place had everything except Mr Kurtz and his human skulls. Under a mango tree a man sat at a table, the Mozambican immigration officer. We pulled our dugout up the bank and Wilson made a fire, while Karsten went in search of water.
I sat under the mango tree with the immigration official while he thumbed through my passport, which he finally stamped. Then I walked up the road to see what else was here. I noticed the immigration officer was following me. I let him catch up. We walked together in silence. Ahead were three wooden buildings. One was a government office – a single room. One was an abandoned shop – I peered in and saw empty shelves and a long bench. I liked the width of the bench. The third building was a bar – just a counter, warm beer on shelves, and Portuguese music blaring from a radio.
