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.
James Joyce anatomizing the malodorous upper gallery of the opera house in Trieste seemed to prove a common humanity in body odor. But the strong human reek on African buses was a smell of mortality that seemed to me like a whiff of death.
The bad road was a help to safety, for on most parts of it there was no way to speed. The potholes were so numerous and so deep the driver had to slow down and steer around them, as in an obstacle course; or else he plunged into them, going dumpty-dumpty-dumpty, in and out of the holes, making some of the children on board puke on their chins. The driver went much too fast on the smooth parts of the road, but his speed sent us careering into stretches of mud. Twice we became mired, and some male passengers got out and pushed. Not me. I walked ahead through the mud, with some other older men, until the minibus caught up with us elders.
I walked thinking, What has changed? The road had always been bad. The lakeshore had always been thinly populated by Tumbuka-speaking fishing families in thatched huts, using dugout canoes and nets they spread on bushes to dry. They smoked the little fish, kapenta, and the plumper chambo on grills made of tree branches. Rice was grown here in lakeside paddy fields that were easily flooded. I saw fishermen and dugouts and drying racks and rice fields and thought, Anyone who had snapped a picture of this lakeside forty years ago would have been able to take the same picture today.
On one of the muddy stretches we passed a small somewhat deformed man, perhaps a dwarf, certainly a hunchback, and the boys in the minibus yelled out the window, mocking him for his deformity.
The hunchback screamed at them, ‘You’ve got trouble!’
‘You’ve got bigger trouble!’ one of the boys called out, and everyone laughed.
I had caught the word mabvuto — trouble — and the man next to me told me what had been said in Tumbuka. People walking by the road shouted at us so often that I asked the same man why this was so.
He said, ‘Because they are forced to walk they are mocking us.’
‘And you mock them, too.’
‘Just to make a joke.’
The Malawi joke, shouted from the bus, was: Keep walking, sucker!
The lake was beautiful, there were golden mountains on the Mozam-bican side, and on ours the escarpment leading to the Nyika Plateau, glittering water and great heights and the natural beauty of Africa. That was half the story. The other half was this miserable bus and the stinking hostile boys in it mocking the heavily laden women and the deformed man.
We came to Chilumba, just a fishing village, where a man was frying cut-up potatoes in fat. The potatoes were crusted lumps, the fat looked like motor oil. I bought some and ate them while we waited for passengers and, still hungry, ate a couple of bananas.