‘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, over 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.’