I decided to stay in Lilongwe for a week before heading farther south. I needed a rest from my incessant travel and I had to remind my family that I was still alive. I chose a hotel on the main street. Third World luxury resorts are one aberration — Malawi even had a few on the lake. But Third World hotels are another, just as awful, because they get the economists and the UN people and the refugee experts and the heads of charities and the visiting opportunists and politicians. Malawi had the worst and most expensive hotels I encountered on my whole trip, and all charged two daily rates — a low one for Africans, an exorbitant one for foreigners. They were most of them state-owned hotels, run by South African management companies.
‘What is this?’ I said at the Lilongwe Hotel, pointing to a 10 percent addition on a hotel bill.
‘Service charge.’
‘Where is the service? There is no one to carry bags, no one sweeps the floors, the room isn’t clean, the toilet is broken. You know what I mean? No service, so why the charge?’
‘It is the name. “Service charge.”. Ten percent, plus-plus.’
The charities and foreign donors had had a questionable effect on the poverty and misery in the country, but they were positively destructive when it came to hotels, because they were expense-accounters for whom money was no object. Those of us who were budget-conscious and aimless wanderers were punished for their profligacy. But I stayed at the bad expensive hotel; I had no choice. Lying in bed there I rehearsed the writing of this paragraph, and during the day in the week I spent in Lilongwe I busied myself writing my erotic novella.
Lilongwe was two towns. One was the old market town of shops and gas stations and crowds of idle ragged boys; the other was the adjacent much newer town, the nation’s capital, of wide streets, government offices, the presidential palace, official residences, mansions and embassies. Soldiers and policemen stood guard all over the streets of the capital, but in slummy Lilongwe Old Town everyone complained of crime, especially the Indian shopkeepers.
Chased from the rural areas by Hastings Banda’s party thugs, Indians had come to old commercial Lilongwe where life was safer and they were for a time lost in the shuffle. One feature of Banda’s dictatorial rule was that political violence was common, but that civilian crime — car theft, burglary, rape, murder — was comparatively rare. This had changed, in fact reversed — rape and murder were now more common than political terror.
Banda was gone now, after thirty-four years in power, and his name had been removed from the national stadium and the roads and schools and hospitals. Under the new president, Bakili Muluzi, the man who had put his chubby face on the money, the streets were unsafe and house break-ins were frequent. Muluzi had been seen as a populist, the anti-Banda; now he was turning into a despot. As a Muslim in a mostly Christian country, one of his most ardent foreign supporters was the Libyan government of Muammar Ghaddafi. The Malawian proverb explaining someone like Muluzi was, ‘Raise a python and he will swallow you.’
‘We could sleep at night in our homes before,’ a man named Salim told me. He ran a restaurant. He had joined me at a table while I ate one of his samosas. ‘We can’t feel safe now. Not now. There are thieves!’
‘I used to live here,’ I said.
‘What do you think?’ he said, challenging me.
‘You tell me, Salim.’
‘It is worse, worse, worse. And not getting better. Getting much worse!’
But, being watchful, I walked the streets of Lilongwe, explored the market — an enormous emporium of second-hand clothes, here as elsewhere being retailed by hustlers who had gotten them free from charities. There was so little traffic that Africans habitually walked in the middle of the street. I was warned by Indians of theft, but I was poorly dressed and though I had valuables in my bag (cash, passport, artifacts) I carried nothing that was worth stealing. Most of my clothes had come from second-hand markets like this.
Even the prostitutes avoided me, unless I bought them drinks, which I did out of pure loneliness, like one of those geezers you see on back streets at odd hours feeding stray cats, a displacement activity this much resembled. All the talk of AIDS kept me detumescent. Usually, I sat alone under the trees at the bar next to the Hotel Lilongwe. Sometimes I joined a table of loitering girls and talked to them. They were nicely dressed and even demure.
‘We are schoolgirls. We are all cousins.’
‘I am studying secretarial.’
‘Myself, I am studying business.’
‘Me, I am working for the Anything Goes shop.’
They were in their mid- and late teens, not married, no children, and didn’t drink beer, only soft drinks. They giggled and murmured and meowed, they told me about themselves, asked me questions, teased me.
‘You are not old — what? — forty or forty-five.’
‘Have another Coke, dear!’
There were Christmas lights tangled in the tree branches, the music was mellow, the place was not rowdy. For an abused traveler who had been catching buses and trucks and trains through the whole of the Great Rift Valley, from Ethiopia to Malawi, it was a novelty and a pleasure just to stay in one place and eat regular meals, take baths, have my laundry done, hold meaningless conversations, write my story, and do the New York Times crossword, faxed from home.
‘What are you doing, Mr Paul?’
‘Just a puzzle. Filling in words. Ah, the clue is “Forbidden tea.” ’
They leaned over, smelling of perfume and face powder and hair oil, the bodices of their crunchy dresses like prom gowns of my youth, pressed against me.
‘I guess that’s “taboo oolong.” It fits.’
When I had finished and was tucking the folded puzzle into my pocket, one of the girls would lean over and whisper with warm breaths, her lips grazing my ear, ‘I want to give you a massage, Mr Paul. Please take me. I am good.’
But I went chastely to my room and lay there alone on my damp mildewed bed staring at the stains like faces on the ceiling and thought: What went wrong here?
The newspapers still ran headlines such as ‘A New Journey from Poverty to Prosperity’ (reporting a speech by the Minister of Agriculture) and ‘Fresh Start in the Ag Sector’ (American-funded scheme for tobacco farmers to switch to growing pigeon peas and soy beans) and ‘Tobacco Auction Projections Raise Hopes’ (but a week later the auction prices were a fifth of what they had been the year before). I thought: What gives?
Still smarting from having been rebuffed as a volunteer speaker, I asked to see the American ambassador. The usual form in a book such as this, answering the question of attribution, was to describe this man as ‘informed sources’ or a ‘high-level Western diplomat’ or ‘someone I happened to meet.’ But the meeting was so brief and so anodyne it needs no camouflage, and his being a diplomat made me smile, as I was talking with him.
I had the impression the ambassador did not like me any more than the embassy woman, apparently his ally, who had said You wouldn’t believe the week I had. He was about my age, rather benign on the whole but visibly seeming to suppress a mood of fuss and fret. Was it my faded American thrift-shop clothes from the African market? More likely it was my wild-eyed frustration, my reckless criticism, my incautious gibes, but I was road weary from my dark star safari, and Africa’s fortunes had become my obsessive subject. In other countries I was a detached observer, but absurd as it seemed, I took the Malawian situation personally.
I said, ‘I used to teach here. I know the country pretty well. I even speak the local language. I offered to give some lectures here but your Public Affairs Officer wasn’t interested and didn’t do anything to help me.’
The ambassador was not provoked.