We climbed the escarpment on a treacherous road of hairpin bends, many of them with hastily — and badly — cleared landslides, past some disused coalmines, to the escarpment and the settlement of Livingstonia, the earliest mission in the country. The mission had once been a brick church and bungalows, a hospital and huts, a high cool place where expats could grow Brussels sprouts and chrysanthemums. Now it sprawled more, and had lost many trees, the school looked neglected, but it was much the same as it had been.
And beyond Livingstonia the plateau rolled on, green, unpeopled. We stopped often, because a minibus made its greatest profit by traveling overstuffed, picking up whoever signaled for it to stop, and all their produce and livestock. And when I thought the sorry vehicle could not take any more passengers, the ticket taker slid the door aside and hung on, as the bus sped with the door open, some passengers hanging out.
The towns of Rumphi and Ekwendeni — places I had once known pretty well — had also lost their Indian shops and not replaced them with African ones. This interested me; the ruined and abandoned shops, with faint painted signs saying Patel Bros and Bombay Bazaar and Alibhai Merchandise Mart — all of them derelict, the roofs caved in, the windows broken, many of them vandalized with graffiti. In front of them, on the grass verge by the storm drain and the roadside ditch were African women, displaying soap and salt and matches and cooking oil on a small square of cloth. The commercial life of these towns in the Northern Province had declined from main streets of busy shops to simple open-air markets of hawkers and fruit sellers sitting in the mud.
Six hours after leaving Karonga we came to the town of Mzuzu, at the edge of the Viphya Plateau. I knew some people here, so I decided to stay in a hotel and look them up. The person I most wanted to see was Margaret, the widow of one of my first friends in Malawi, Sir Martin Roseveare.
On his retirement from the British Civil Service in 1962, Sir Martin had come to Nyasaland to run a teachers’ college. He was a good-humored pipe-smoking gentleman who in his late sixties was a hearty field hockey player. But he was also a stickler for detail. The frugality that the war had imposed on British people had made many of them misers and cheeseparers, but had inspired others with incomparable ingenuity, turning them into inventors and self-helpers. Wartime deprivation had brought out Sir Martin’s resourcefulness. He first devised the fraud-proof ration book, and was awarded a knighthood for his effort. But he also took an interest in education, in gardening, and sports. These enthusiasms he carried to Malawi. And he was of the old breed, an educator, not an evangelist, someone who had come to Africa to serve, to call it home, and to die in the bush.
His wife, Lady Margaret, was the same, sporty, intelligent, and resourceful, able to mend the water-driven stirrup pump that generated their electricity. I sometimes would see her bent over a greasy machine — tweed skirt, hair in a bun, argyle socks and muddy sandals — waving a socket wrench and saying, ‘Crikey!’
Sir Martin had died in his nineties, Lady Margaret lived on, and in her widowhood she ran Viphya Secondary School. I had always seen these people as admirable, even as role models, vigorous retirees I might emulate in my own later years. They gave me the ambition, one I nursed for a long time, of returning to Africa, perhaps in my mid-sixties, and doing as they had done. Of course, I would go on writing, but I would justify my presence in this country by starting a school, or whipping a school into shape. To devote the rest of my life into seeing my self-financed school producing bright well-educated students seemed perfect. I did not intend a deliberate martyrdom or even much of a sacrifice, for I liked the remoteness, the vegetable growing, the rusticity, the Tolstoyan pedagogy. Living in this positive purposeful way would be so healthy as to be life lengthening. I would be a pink-cheeked bore in baggy shorts, doing some writing, a beekeeper in the bundu, running a school of overachievers, imagining the gossip.
Whatever happened to Paul?
He’s somewhere in Central Africa. Just upped and left. Been there for years.
‘Lady Margaret, she is dead,’ a girl told me at the school — and the school was looking run-down in a way that would not have pleased its scrupulous late headmistress.
She had passed away two years before, at the age of eighty-seven.
‘Where is she buried?’
The girl shrugged — no idea. The Roseveares were not proselytizers but they were churchgoers, so I went to the Anglican church in Mzuzu and asked the African vicar if he had known them. ‘Vicar-General,’ he said, correcting me. Yes, he had known them. They were wonderful, he said. They had helped build the church. They were buried right here.
Their graves were rectangular slabs set side by side in the muddy churchyard, Lady Margaret’s unmarked, Sir Martin’s inscribed, Beloved by All. The graves were overgrown with weeds and looked not just neglected but forgotten. As serious gardeners, haters of disorder, they would have been dismayed at the sight of this tangle of weeds. And so I knelt and as a form of veneration, weeded their graves for old times’ sake.
Later, walking through Mzuzu to my hotel I stopped in a bar to drink a beer, but also knowing that inevitably an African would join me and ask me for a drink and tell me a story.
His name was Mkosi. ‘We are Angoni, the Zulus from South Africa who came here.’
‘So how are things, Mkosi?’
‘We are just suffering, sir.’
‘And why is that?’
‘For myself, sir, my wife is going about with a soldier. I found a letter she wrote to him. It was terrible. “I love you, my dearest darling.” I showed her the letter. She cheeked me. “How can I love you? You have no money. I can’t love someone who is poor. You are poor.” ’
‘Good riddance to her,’ I said.
Two of Mkosi’s friends came over looking for free drinks. But I decided to leave. They followed me outside, wanting to talk. Since there had been obvious prostitutes in the bar I brought up the subject of AIDS. They said that people died all the time in Malawi — how could anyone say for sure the cause was AIDS?
‘If you went home with one of those women, would you use a condom?’
One said energetically, with gestures, ‘We are Malawians — we like skeen to skeen,’ and the others laughed.
‘Condoms are rubber,’ another said. ‘Rubber has so many tiny holes in it. The germs can go through it, and even air, it can go through.’
There was a taxi parked at the curb.
‘If rubber leaks why isn’t that tire flat?’ I said.
They hung around arguing, and talking about the upcoming tobacco auctions, but when they saw that I was not going to give them any money they drifted away.
The next day I looked for a vehicle going south. There were many vehicles in Mzuzu, the most expensive of them of course were the white four-wheel drives displaying the doorside logos of charities, every one that I had ever heard of and some new ones — People to People, Mission Against Ignorance and Poverty, The Food Project, Action Aid, Poverty Crusade, and more.
I was not surprised when they refused to give me a lift — I knew from experience that they were the last people to offer travelers assistance. Still, I was annoyed. I analyzed my annoyance. It was that the vehicles were often driven by Africans, the white people riding as passengers in what resembled ministerial seats. They had CD players, usually with music playing loudly, and now and then I saw the whole deaclass="underline" an African or a white person driving one-handed in his white Save the Children vehicle, talking on a cell phone with music playing — the happiest person in the country. For every agent of virtue I saw slogging his or her guts out in the field, I saw two of them joy-riding.