Malawi time was an hour earlier than Tanzania, yet it was night at the border. No one else was immigrating. I was alone in the office, a small building on the dark road leading into a forest. All these elements created the strong impression that I was entering the country by the back door.
I greeted the officials in their own language, using the polite form of address, the formal ‘you,’ and filled out my application form. Under ‘Occupation’ I wrote ‘Teacher,’ though I wanted to write, ‘Provocateur.’ I paid my visa fee, and got my passport stamped. I was heading out the door, into the country itself, when a small man sitting at a bare wooden table said, ‘Yellow fever certificate, please.’
Amazingly, I had one. I handed it over.
‘Out of date,’ the man said. ‘It expired last year. Good for ten years only.’
‘I didn’t know that.’
‘You should read the certificate.’ The tiny nondescript man, speaking to me sharply in this way, acquired distinct features – became a skinny, cold-eyed, rat-faced predator, in a sweaty shirt, with flecks of dirty lint in his hair. ‘Also, your vaccination is out of date.’
‘Do you have yellow fever in Karonga? Because that’s where I’m going.’
‘Yes, we have yellow fever,’ he said turning his fangy face on me.
‘We have cholera. We have smallpox. We have malaria. Polio, too. We have many illnesses.’
‘Ntenda kwambiri. Pepani!’ I said, Lots of sickness. Sorry!
‘This is very serious. Come with me.’
As soon as he uttered them, I knew that the actual meaning of these words was, Bribe me. He believed he had the advantage: the border had just closed, the office was empty except for a few officers, the road was dark, and we were at the remotest, northernmost point of this elongated country. The first time I had entered the country, in December 1963, the African immigration officer had smiled and welcomed me and thanked me in advance for being a teacher in Malawi.
‘In here,’ the rat-faced man said, ordering me. He opened the door to a small shabby office. The building was so badly made, so temporary looking, that the walls did not reach to the ceiling. I could hear mutterings from other rooms. I sat on a plastic chair, while he took his place behind a desk, under a portrait of the president of Malawi, Mr Muluzi, a gap-toothed fatty in glasses. This politician’s first act in office was to put his unappealing face on all the national currency, his chubby profile on coins, full face on the notes. The act had since been rescinded but the money still circulated, and his intimidating portrait hung on every shop wall in the country. One of his objections to his predecessor in office was that the man had created a cult of personality.
Smiling at the bribe-minded man behind the desk, I thought, You will get nothing from me, buster.
‘This is very serious,’ he said, fingering an official form that was perhaps a deportation order.
‘I will get a revaccination in Karonga. Also a yellow fever shot.’
‘Not possible in Karonga. There is no hospital.’
‘In Lilongwe, then.’
‘The prophylaxis, so to say, does not take effect for ten days. What if you fell ill? That would be serious.’
I hated his pomposity, and every time he used the word ‘serious,’ it sounded insistently extortionate. I decided not to speak to him in English.
‘Ndithu, bambo. Ndadwala ndikupita ku chipatala,’ I said. Definitely, sir. If I got sick I would go to the hospital.
He said, ‘I would be very sorry if you fell ill.’
‘Pepani, pepani sapolitsa chironda.’ It was an old Malawi saw: ‘Saying “Sorry, sorry” doesn’t heal the wound.’
He didn’t react to that jape. He said, The road is very bad because of rain. You might not reach up to Lilongwe for many days.’
‘Mvula! Matope! Nzeru za kale, anthu anasema, “Walila mvula, malila matope!” ’ – ‘Rain! Mud! Long ago, the wisdom was, “Ask for rain and you’re asking for mud!” ’
My yakking clearly irritated him, but he was still delaying me and not dissuaded from circling around a bribery demand. Now he dangled my passport at me. ‘You must understand this is serious. Your certificate is out of date. It has failed.
‘Like you’d say of a bow. Uta wabwino wanga wagwa!’ – My good bow has failed.
Finishing this alliteration, for it was a magnificently alliterative language, I heard an African yodeling in Chichewa from the other side of the transom, ‘Eh! Eh! What is this I hear? A white man speaking this language. Where is this white man?’
The door opened and a stout bald man in a policeman’s uniform entered, laughing and reaching to shake my hand. We exchanged polite greetings in Chichewa, he asked me my name, my country, and welcomed me.
‘I want to go to America,’ he said in his language, and then, ‘Where did you learn to speak Chichewa?’
‘I was a teacher a long time ago at Soche Hill.’
‘Please, be a teacher again here. We need you, father.’
While the policeman clutched my hand in his two hands, to show respect, I said, ‘I want to help. But I have a problem.’
‘What is the problem?’ he said, raising his voice and leaning to look at the small scruffy man at the desk.
But the scruffy man’s head was down and he was writing fast, completing the form he had waved at me. He said in a breathless furtive way, ‘I am allowing you entry on humanitarian grounds.’
The policeman accompanied me to the gate, saying, ‘Did you have a problem in there?’
I reminded him of another bit of Malawi wisdom, ‘Matako alaabili tabuli kucumbana.’ – Two buttocks cannot avoid friction.
‘You must stay,’ he said, laughing. ‘Our schools are bad these days. We want teachers.’
‘I am not a teacher now. I am a mlendo.’ It was a nice all-purpose word meaning traveler, wanderer, stranger, guest.
I found a minibus parked on the dark road near some fruit and drink stalls. The vehicle reeked of diesel oil and chicken blood in the evening heat, and was half-filled with passengers. I stood near it, listening to the racket of the nighttime insects. The market was ramshackle and very dirty, run by grannies and ragged boys. A man was roasting corncobs on a smoky fire. A short distance away, glowing in moonlight, was a huge cactus like a saguaro with upraised arms.
‘When is this bus going to Karonga?’ I asked.
‘We don’t know.’
I did not mind. I was forgiving and patient, because I was where I wanted to be. I was not spooked by the darkness and this empty road, the disorderly market, the rotten garbage, the blowing smoke, the rags, the stinks; I was reassured. For one thing, it seemed that nothing had changed: the simplest country I had ever known was still simple.
After a while, the driver got in, and after many tries with the key and several denunciations, he started the engine, and off we went.
In the fifty miles to Karonga in the battered bus, I made a mental list, headed, ‘You Know You’re in Malawi When…’
the first seven shops you pass are coffin-makers;
an old man on the road is wearing a fur-trimmed woman’s pink housecoat from the 1950’s;
the rear rack on a bike is stacked with ten uncured cow hides;
a roadblock is a bamboo pole across two barrels and the official manning it is wearing a T-shirt lettered Winnipeg Blue Bombers;
two policemen stop your minibus for no reason and at gunpoint force the fourteen passengers to pile out in the dark (and they looked at my passport for quite a long time);
the lovely smooth tarred road abruptly becomes a rutted muddy track that is barely passable;
people start sentences with, ‘But we are suffering, sir;’
people say, apropos of nothing, ‘The day the old woman disappears is when the hyena shits gray hair;’
on the day the Minister of Finance announces his National Austerity Plan, it is revealed that thirty-eight Mercedes-Benzes have just been ordered from Germany.
In the cool wet air, ove
r muddy broken roads, past huts and hovels lit by kerosene lamps, we traveled slowly, stopped by armed policemen at some roadblocks and by insolent youths at others. We were in darkness. In some places, people were squatting in the road, awaiting any vehicle to take them into Karonga. This seemed the height of desperation, because it was after eight at night, two hours after sunset, and hardly anyone drove at night. But we picked them up and they got in blinking, pulling sacks and children after them.
The teenager collecting the fares had been calling me mzungu since the border. At first I ignored him, because it was insulting, and beneath my notice. But the punk kept it up, asking me in Chichewa, ‘White man, where are you going?’
The correct form of address was, ‘bambo’ (father), or ‘bwana’ (sir), or even ‘achimwene’ (brother). In the past, no Malawian would have dreamed of speaking to a stranger in such a rude way.
Finally, when he persisted – this was in the darkness of the crowded smelly minibus on the rutted road - I faced him and said, ‘Do you want me to call you “dark man”?’ (muntu muda - the adjective covered dark, black, brown and blue).
He just went silent and sulked. The minibus labored onward. I was still facing him.
‘Kodi. Dzina lanu ndani?’ Excuse me. What’s your name?
‘Simon,’ he said.
‘Good. Don’t call me “white man” and I won’t call you “dark man.” My name is Paul.’
‘Mr Paul, where are you going?’ he said in a chastened voice.
But I had no idea where I was going. We entered the small shadowy town, where the main street was in even worse condition than the road from the border – deep ruts, potholes and wide mud puddles. The light of some fluorescent bulbs that served as street lamps showed that most of the shops were shut.
‘Drop me at the hotel,’ I said, assuming there was a hotel.
From the ripe smell and the rising damp I knew we were headed to the lakeshore, and there they dropped me at a bleak set of buildings, made of cinderblocks, with a sign saying Marina Hotel. As soon as I got out of the vehicle, rain began to fall, not heavy but spattery, like a noisy warning, smacking the big leaves of the trees overhead and making a crashing sound on the lake.
I was led to a room in a thatch-roofed hut that was full of mosquitoes. This was one of the ‘deluxe suites,’ fifteen dollars a night, including breakfast. I put down my bag, sprayed myself with insect repellent, and went to find some food. I could not remember whether I had eaten anything that day – perhaps some bananas, maybe some peanuts. In Tanzania as in Ethiopia, the people looked so desperate I had no appetite.
But there was a restaurant and bar at the Marina, and though it was a stormy night there was loud music and drunken Malawians, some of them singing, others staggering, perhaps dancing. The rain came down hard, lashing the awnings, wetting the tables, flooding the driveway. Two men with the hardy sunburned look of safari guides shoved out a chair and asked me to join them.
One said, ‘This rain is nothing. Last night was a torrent. It was the hardest rain I’ve ever seen in my life.’
He was raising his voice to be heard over the falling rain.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Driving to Kenya,’ the other man said. ‘You alone?’
‘Yes. I just came from the border,’ I said. ‘Actually, I’m on my way from Cairo. I passed through Kenya. You know Moyale?’
The younger man said, ‘I was born in Kenya and lived there my whole life and I’ve never been to Moyale.’
That made me feel as though I had accomplished something. And I was right about their having the look of safari guides, because they ran an upmarket safari company, Royal African Safaris. The name called to mind the sort of luxury safari where the clients wore pith helmets and khakis and camped in elegant tents by waterholes in the bush, a different Africa from the one I traveled through.
The younger man was David Penrose, his partner - huge and weather-beaten and white-haired - was Jonny Baxendale. They both looked jovial and dauntless and reliable. We drank beer and ate fish and chips, as the rain grew louder. They had worked on the film Out of Africa. David lived in Nanyuki, Jonny in Karen, which he said was safe now: ‘We chased the rascals out.’ They admitted that Nairobi was in deep decline, people moving to the outskirts. ‘But our business is in the bush.’
They were driving north, having just bought a new Land-Rover in South Africa. They had driven through Zimbabwe and Zambia.
‘You’re going to like South Africa. Cape Town is great,’ David said. ‘You’d think you were in Europe.’
‘What do you make of Malawi?’ I asked.
‘It’s okay,’ Jonny said. ‘We’ve just come over the plateau. It’s dead empty. There’s some game. It’s Africa, all right.’
As we talked and drank beer, the wind became stronger and drove the rain on to the veranda where we were sitting. We moved farther in, and were preparing to go inside when with an uprush of wind and drenching rain the lights went out, the music stopped, the Africans began shouting. We sat in the howling gale in complete darkness.
‘We’ve got to make an early start,’ David said, after a while, standing up.
We shook hands and parted. The bartender gave me a lantern and pointed me in the direction of my hut.
The hut interior was damp and buggy but there was a mosquito net knotted over the bed. I undid it and tucked it in and slipped inside, and there I lay, listening to the radio – news of an attempted coup in the capital, Lilongwe. This might have been alarming, but I guessed it was the usual ruse, a pretext to arrest members of the opposition and an inspiration for the police to squeeze travelers at roadblocks.
Twiddling knobs, I found a station playing country music of a sort that had always been popular in Malawi – Jim Reeves, Hank Williams and Flatt and Scruggs, good old songs. But then a preacher came on and began talking about sinners and said, ‘Welcome to World Harvest Radio, Christian country music.’ I was like the Mexican heathens in the Paul Bowles short story ‘Pastor Dow at Tacaté,’ who are so bemused by the pastor playing ‘Fascinatin’ Rhythm’ on his wind-up record-player in the chapel that they stick around for the sermon.
So I switched off the radio and I lay in the dark, listening to the rain and marveling that I had made it to Malawi alone on the long safari. I was eager to spend my big birthday here, and even had a plan. I had asked the US Embassies in Uganda and Kenya to email the US Embassy in Lilongwe, saying that I was available to speak at any school or college in the country, or to meet aspiring African writers. I would also visit my old school, maybe bring some textbooks, and I would volunteer to spend a week teaching, to show my gratitude to Malawi after so many years: the long-lost son returning to give something back on his birthday. I wanted to signify my return in some way, with a gesture.
The morning in Karonga was golden after the rain, with sharp colors – the glittering lake, the pure blue sky without a scrap of cloud, the thick green foliage, the black mud. Some trees still dripped. The heat and dampness were heavy against my body. A delivery man at the hotel gave me a lift back to the main road, so that I could look for a ride south.
Karonga’s main street was a shock to me. The shops that had been in darkness, that I had taken to be shut the night before, were hollow-eyed and abandoned. This was the first big difference I noticed – the closed-down shops, which had been Indian shops. The second were the coffin-makers. Coffin-making in Africa is a visible outdoor business, carried on at sawhorses under trees. The high incidence of death from AIDS accounted for the coffin-making.
Indians had been officially hectored in the sixties. The first president, Hastings Banda, had come to Karonga in 1965 and singled them out, berated them, accusing Indian traders of taking advantage of Africans. ‘Africans should be running these businesses!’ he howled. But many of the Indians stayed. In the 1970s the president returned to Karonga and denounced the Indians again. This time the Indians got the message - nearly all left, and those few who hesitated saw
their shops burned down by Banda’s Israeli-trained Young Pioneers. Eventually, all the Indians left Karonga for the cities in the south, or emigrated. Banda had gone to other rural towns and given the same speech, provoking the same result.
The shock to me was not that all the Indians were gone but that no one had come to take their place; that the shops were in ruins, still with the names of Ismailis and Gujaratis on them. The empty shops and the coffin-makers gave Karonga the look of a city hit by plague, which in a sense was just what had happened.
At Karonga’s main market, I found a minibus going south and jammed myself in with twenty-one others, adults and children, steaming, aromatic. And when the driver began to go much too fast I wondered once again: Why am I risking my life in an overcrowded and unsafe jalopy being driven by an incompetent boy?
The answer was simple: There was no other way. I could have flown, of course. There was an airstrip in Karonga and a weekly plane, but that was for missionaries and politicians and agents of virtue, and the tourists who wanted to parachute into Karonga to see the lake.
Yet I promised myself on the road out of Karonga that after this African trip I would never take another chicken-bus, minibus or matatu, and no more cattle trucks or overcrowded taxis. If I were spared in this journey I would never again put my life in the hands of an idiot driver in a death trap.
The cracked windows were jammed shut, the damp passengers pressed together.
A symphony of smells fuses the mass of huddled human forms. Sour reek of armpits, nozzled oranges, melting breast ointments, mastick water, the breath of suppers of sulphurous garlic, foul phosphorescent farts, opoponax, the frank sweat of marriageable and married womankind, the soapy stink of men.