This visible bliss on wheels, courtesy of the First World saps who had been guilt-tripped out of their money, was only one of my objections, and the pettiest. A more substantial one was the notion that after decades of charitable diligence, there were more charities in Malawi than ever. Charities and agents of virtue and NGOs were now part of the Malawi economy, certainly one of the larger parts. The charities in Malawi were troughs into which most people were unsuccessfully trying to insert their snouts. It did not surprise me later to learn that the hotshots who doled out aid in some African countries demanded sex from famine victims in return for the food parcels.
Some minibuses were going to Lilongwe but they looked dangerous — overcrowded, bald tires, doors mended with bailing wire, people riding on the roof, drivers with glazed ganja eyes. I looked for something a bit bigger and safer, but saw nothing — only deathtraps and the superb Land-Rovers of the charities. ‘Maybe there’s a big bus this afternoon.’
I went back to the hotel and reflected on my recent weeks. I had been three days on the bush train from Mwanza, abused by the immigration people in Dar es Salaam, bewildered by the dreadful train to Mbeya, a filthy town where I had been overcharged at the hotel and cheated out of my bus fare; delayed by a bus that didn’t show up. Then the struggle to the border, and there had been the punks who had tried to shake me down there, and the health officer who wanted a bribe, before the nighttime trip through the roadblocks to Karonga, and at last the long slow ride across the plateau to here, drizzly Mzuzu.
But I was within striking distance of the capital, Lilongwe. Knowing that I would be arriving there in the next few days I decided to call the US Embassy in Lilongwe. I had volunteered to give lectures anytime, anyplace, to talk to students, to be a Peace Corps helper all over again. My good-will message had been sent to Lilongwe, or so I hoped.
I called the embassy’s Public Affairs Office from my hotel in Mzuzu and was surprised to be greeted by a gloomy somewhat impatient woman, saying, ‘Yes, yes, I know who you are. The emails came a few weeks ago.’
‘About those lectures,’ I said.
Cutting me off, in fact snapping at me, the officer said, ‘I haven’t arranged anything for you.’
‘Nothing?’
‘You wouldn’t believe the week I had,’ she said.
Had she, like me, been abused, delayed, terrified, stranded, harassed, cheated, bitten, flooded, insulted, exhausted, robbed, lied to, browbeaten, poisoned, stunk up and starved?
To avoid howling at her, I put the phone down. I was discouraged at first, for she had only a lazy reply to my offer of help. But then in a kinder moment I thought: in a culture where foreigners constantly showed up and offered themselves, their time, and even material help, charity was nothing special — in fact in Malawi it was another necessitous routine, not philanthropic but a permanent drip-feed, part of a system of handouts.
Who was I in offering to teach or give lectures but just another agent of virtue being reminded by a harassed official that she was far busier than me. Overpaid, officious, disingenuous, blame-shifting and off-hand as she was, this embassy hack was also probably right, saying, ‘Take a number, sonny. Get in line. There’s plenty of people like you.’
Morning on the Viphya Plateau: drizzling rain, blackish trees in heavy fog, slick muddy roads, Africans tugging plastic bags on their heads to keep dry. At 6:30 in the street outside the Mzuzu bus terminal, sheltered by the twig roof of a banana stand, balancing on a boulder to keep her feet dry was a white woman of about sixty, very thin, very pale in the darkness of the wet morning, searching wide-eyed through the mountain mist for the Lilongwe bus.
She boarded it and we sat side by side at the front, the rain slopping on the front window as we crossed the plateau. The bus was old but it was wide enough and high enough to impart a sense of safety. Every passenger had a seat, the driver was a cautious middle-aged man, and he used his brakes and his directional signals.
The woman beside me was Una Brownly, a nurse from Livingstonia Mission. She and her husband, Don, had been in Africa for twenty-seven years. Don, a doctor, was staying behind at the mission because of the large volume of patients. Una had two weeks’ home leave. She had taken the bus from Livingstonia the day before — all day to Mzuzu. A night in a dirty hotel in Mzuzu. Another bus today — all day to Lilongwe. A day in Lilongwe to wait for the London flight. It would take another day for her to get home to Ulster, a four-day trip to have a week at home, before turning around and taking the reverse sequence of planes and buses. A plane from Mzuzu and a connecting flight to London were out of the question — too expensive. Una was not being funded by an international NGO — no white Land-Rover, no mobile phone, no CD player. She and her husband were medical missionaries, living on money collected by her church back home. They were not well paid, not even by Malawian standards. Many African doctors had been asked to work in Livingstonia; they knew the long history of the hospital and the dire need for medical officers. They all turned the job down.
‘There isn’t a surgeon north of Lilongwe,’ she said.
Forty years after independence, and still the entire northern half of the country lacked a surgeon to perform the more complex operations that her husband was not trained for.
‘The government doesn’t pay its doctors enough,’ she said. ‘They leave the country and go where the pay is better.’
‘What about your pay?’
She said, ‘African doctors don’t work for what we’re paid.’
I began to understand the futility of charity in Africa. It was generally fuelled by the best of motives, but its worst aspect was that it was non-Inspirational. Aliens had been helping for so long and were so deeply entrenched that Africans lost interest — if indeed they had ever had it — in doing the same sort of work themselves. Not only was there no spirit of volunteerism, there was not even a remote desire to replace aid workers in paying jobs. Yet many Africans were unemployed, doing nothing but sitting under trees.
‘Does the Malawi government help fund your hospital?’
‘Not at all. They don’t even run their own hospitals.’
‘How did things get this bad?’
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s corruption, of course. All the ministers want a cut of whatever aid is given. But I don’t think about politics — what’s the point? And there’s lots of aid. Some people think that’s the problem. There are some doctors here — Elspeth and Michael King — who wrote a book arguing that Africa is backward because of aid.’
‘What do you think?’
My soliciting her opinion on this subject seemed to amuse her, for it is a characteristic of the long-term expatriate health workers in Africa that they do their jobs without complaint or cynicism. Anyone preoccupied with the contradictions and the daily repetition of the myth of Sisyphus would find such work intolerable, and complaints just tedious if not demoralizing.
‘There’s always strings attached to aid,’ she said. ‘That’s no bad thing, but in many cases there’s no local input. The donor determines what is needed and so the local people adapt their project to get the money.’
Cross-purposes was the kindest interpretation, scamming the more brutal one. I asked, ‘Why are the roads in the north so bad?’
‘That escarpment road is a hundred years old. It has been beautiful, but did you see all the landslides?’ she said. ‘In the past they cleared the landslides manually — it took a lot of people, but labor is cheap. And doing it by hand kept the storm drains open. For the past few years they’ve been using donor bulldozers to clear the rock slides. They bulldoze them to the side, blocking the drains. So when the rain comes it washes the road away and creates a torrent — another landslide.’