I said, ‘I suppose you get lots of offers like that.’
The ambassador sipped his drink and pushed a saucer of peanuts at me as though to mollify me.
I said, ‘Nothing has improved in this country, for goodness sake. I mean, name one thing.’
The ambassador said, ‘There is no political terror. There was before.’
I said, ‘I’ve been frisked and delayed at twenty roadblocks from Karonga to here.’
The ambassador said, ‘I’m planning to make a trip to the north.’
I said, ‘The roads are terrible. We had to push the bus.’
The ambassador said, ‘The roads are much better than they were.’
I yawned and rounded my arm and waggled some peanuts in my hand.
The ambassador said, ‘My last post was the Congo. In the Congo there aren’t any roads.’
I said, ‘What good are roads if there are no motor vehicles?’
The ambassador said, ‘There are buses.’
I said, ‘Ever take one?’ But that was such a low blow, I added, ‘And tobacco is the cash crop. Tobacco!’
The ambassador said, ‘Tobacco can now be grown by smallholders. It was a government monopoly before.’
I said, ‘It’s a declining commodity.’
The ambassador said, ‘Coffee production is increasing.’
I said, ‘The price is down. Coffee is another money loser.’
The ambassador said, ‘This is all anecdotal of course. But I feel some changes for the better are in the air.’
I said, ‘Well, as a diplomat you’re paid to be an optimist.’
The ambassador scowled into his drink for my presumptuous remark. He did not like that imputation at all.
I said, ‘Honestly, I am really depressed here. Nothing works, the schools are awful, the infant mortality rate is still the highest in the world. I think the government wants to have bad schools, because ignorant people are easier to govern.’
The ambassador said, ‘The government is committed to improving the schools. But teachers are poorly paid.’
I said, ‘So what? No one ever became a teacher to get rich.’
The ambassador said, And there are some exciting new developments in telecommunications in Malawi. Cell phone technology. Next year perhaps.’
His ghastly credulous phrase ‘next year’ made me laugh as much as his mention of cell phones. ‘We hope by this time next year’, Mrs Jellyby says of her African Project for the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, and Dickens is making satire of the phrase. But the ambassador bore a greater resemblance to Mrs Jellyby’s fellow philanthropist, Mr Quale (‘with large shining knobs for temples’), whose project was ‘for teaching the coffee colonists to teach the natives to turn piano-forte legs and establish an export trade.’ Make-work schemes and cottage industries started by the present-day Jellybys and Quales were common In Africa. What had seemed an insanely mocking idea to Charles Dickens 150 years ago was considered a solemn hope for Malawi now.
I said, ‘Ha! Cell phones! They’ll play with them like people in a cargo cult! They’ll treat them like toys!’
A bald man can express frustration with his entire head. My friskiness tried the ambassador’s patience, but even with his scalp creased with anger he remained polite and positive. I had to admire his equanimity, yet I could see he was dying for me to leave. He did not refill my glass. This is an effective suggestion that one’s time is up. When it was conveyed to me through meaningful silences that the meeting was over, we strolled through his garden, admiring his palm trees, and off I went, back to my hotel room to brood.
The next day I called the president of the University of Malawi, a man I knew — he had been a fellow teacher, long ago. He said he was glad to hear from me.
‘I’m just passing through,’ I said. I did not mention my birthday promise to myself — to spend a week or so teaching, helping out, doing something useful. ‘I want to offer my services — give a lecture at the university or do some teaching at Soche Hill.’
‘That’s excellent. Come to Zomba — I’ll arrange something. And welcome home, achimwene.’
Achimwene was the fondest word for brother.
15. The Back Road to Soche Hill School
‘Your mother is your mother, even if one of her legs is too short,’ Malawians said, another old saw, and this was also their off hand way of forgiving their country its lapses.
Most people didn’t complain. Some people even boasted — ‘Better roads,’ many people said. Well, maybe so, here in the south, but Malawi was so poor only politicians had proper cars. They drove Mercedes-Benzes on these good roads while everyone else walked, or rode bikes, or herded their animals. Children used the main roads for playing games — the pavement was good for bouncing balls or tugging their home-made wire toys. As for buses, most of them were such a misery the good roads made little difference. I was so demoralized by my various bus trips from the far north that I had rented a car in Lilongwe. It was the first and last time on my whole trip I did so. Now I was the driver being hassled by police at the roadblocks.
‘Open the boot, bwana,’ ordered a heavily armed policeman at a barrier.
‘What are you looking for?’
‘Drugs and guns.’
‘Do you ever find any of that stuff?’ I asked.
Two of the policeman’s helpers were rifling through my bag in the trunk, one inhaling deeply like a sniffer-dog smelling for ganja, or chamba as it was known in Malawi, a very inexpensive item that was widely available.
‘Before this day ends we will find some,’ the policeman said.
Apart from the roadblocks, the 200-mile trip to Zomba was a pleasure. I drove slowly, loving the freedom of my own vehicle and the starkness of the weirdly shaped mountains, each one of them standing alone on the green plain. I came to see them as specifically African, unique as the animals that grazed beneath them, for these Rift Valley boulders were scorched gray mountains, as though blown out of the cannon’s mouth of a volcanic crater in some fiery epoch of prehistory. Smooth and solitary, not quite buttes, not quite mesas, some of them were egg-shaped and some like exotic fruit. I was reminded of how I had felt when I had first seen them, the deep impression they had left was that I was in a special place, the dark star of Africa, and that traveling across other continents I never saw anything like them.
Paved roads ran where there had once been only rutted red clay tracks; the train line to Balaka that I had taken in 1964 to a Mua leprosarium by the lake was defunct — and so was the leper colony. The ferry at Liwonde across the Shire River, brimming and brown in flood, had been replaced by a bridge. All this was progress, but still on these new thoroughfares the Africans, buttocks showing in their tattered clothes, walked barefoot.
I traveled so idly, stopping so often to look at birds or talk to farmers, I did not arrive in the hill-town of Zomba until after dark. The main street was unlit, people flitting and stumbling in the dark. I had instructions to proceed to the Zomba Club and there to call my friend, who would meet me and guide me to his hard-to-find house high on the steep side of the plateau.
Zomba had been the capital of Malawi’s British incarnation, the little tea-growing Protectorate of Nyasaland. The still small town was a collection of tin-roofed red-brick buildings clustered together at the edge of Zomba Plateau. From the main road, the plateau looked like an ironing board draped in a green sheet, and was high enough to be seen from a great distance — one of the peaks was well over 6000 feet. The craggy sides were misty and parts of the plateau still wild enough to support hyena packs and small bushbucks and some troops of monkeys and baboons. All the features of British rule had been imposed on the lower slopes in Zomba: the red-brick Governor-General’s house, the red-brick Anglican church, the red-brick civil servants’ bungalows, the red-brick club. The tin roofs of these buildings were now rusted the same hue as the bricks.