The Zomba Gymkhana Club had been the settlers’ meeting place and social center in British times but, absurdly, membership was restricted according to pigmentation, whites predominating, a few Indians, some golden-skinned mixed-raced people known then as ‘Coloureds.’ Even in the years just after Malawi’s independence the club was nearly all white — horsy men and women, cricketers and rugger hearties. No footballers: kicking a football was regarded as an African sport.
Back then, I was not a member of any club, but was sometimes an unwilling party to rants by beer-swilling Brits wearing club blazers and cardigans (‘This is my UK woolly’) saying, ‘Let Africans in here and they’ll be tearing up the billiard table and getting drunk and bringing their snotty little piccanins in the bar. There’ll be some African woman nursing her baby in the games room.’ This was considered rude and racist, yet in its offensive way it was fairly prescient, for the rowdy teenagers at the billiard table were stabbing their cues at the torn felt, the bar was full of drunks (no children, though, and no one used the crude word ‘piccanins’ anymore), and a woman was breast-feeding her baby under the dart board. But if the fabric of the place had deteriorated, the atmosphere was about the same as before.
Some relics remained — the sets of kudu and springbok horns mounted high on the wall, the glass cases of dusty fishing flies, all neatly tied and categorized in rows, the biggest for salmon, the tiny midges for smaller fish. The calendar was months out of date, the portraits were gone, the floor was unswept, the overbright lights made the interior seem harsher and dirtier.
I sat drinking a beer, noting these observations, waiting for my friend to arrive.
Soon he came and greeted me warmly in two languages. He was David Rubadiri, whom I had first met in 1963, when he had been headmaster of my school, Soche Hill — Sochay was the correct way of saying it. The shortage of college graduates at independence meant that Rubadiri was plucked from the school and put into the diplomatic service. The prime minister, Hastings Banda, appointed him Malawi’s ambassador to Washington. There, Rubadiri prospered until three or four months after independence, when there was a sudden power struggle. The cabinet ministers denounced Hastings Banda as a despot, attacked him verbally and held a vote of no-confidence in parliament. From a distance, Rubadiri joined in, but Banda survived what became an attempted coup d’état, and he turned on his accusers. Those who had opposed him either left the country or fought in the guerrilla underground. Banda remained in power for the next thirty years.
Rubadiri was disgraced politically for taking sides, and lost his job in the coup attempt. He went to Uganda to teach at Makerere. After it became known that I assisted him — I delivered him his car, driving it 2000 miles through the bush to Uganda — I was accused of aiding the rebels and branded a revolutionary. I was deported from Malawi late in 1965, ejected from the Peace Corps (‘You have jeopardized the whole program!’), and with Rubadiri’s help, was hired at Makerere. One week I was a schoolteacher, the following week a university professor. The combination of physical risk, social activism, revolutionary fervor, Third World politics and naivete characterized this drama of the 1960s.*
So our careers, Rubadiri’s and mine, had become intertwined. We had been friends for thirty-eight years. His fortunes had risen again with the change of government in Malawi. In the mid-nineties he was appointed Malawi’s ambassador to the United Nations, and after four or five years, was made vice-chancellor of the University of Malawi. He had two wives and nine children and was now almost seventy, grizzled and dignified and venerable, like General Othello, a role he had played in a college production while studying in England. After a few drinks Rubadiri sometimes raised his hand and cocked an eyebrow, and said in a deep smoky voice,
Soft you, a word or two before you go.
I have done the state some service…
It was wonderful to see him again in the Zomba Gymkhana Club, still alive, a survivor from the distant past. Following his car through the narrow switchback road along the side of the Zomba Plateau — guard dogs and night watchmen darting out of the darkness — I had a glimpse of officialdom at home. These former residences of British bureaucrats were now the houses of African bureaucrats. Rubadiri’s had been the British High Commissioner’s house, a sprawling one-story colonial mansion (tin roof, brick and stucco walls) set into a steep slope, atop a terraced garden.
Only one of his wives was in residence — Gertrude, whom I had known as an intelligent and sensible person. She greeted me, welcomed me, and made me feel at home.
‘Dinner is in one hour.’
‘Time for you to talk to some students,’ Rubadiri said.
We went downhill to the University Club, another glorified bar from the 1920s, and I spoke to a group of students and teachers — another pep talk. One man I recognized almost immediately as an old student of mine — the same chubby face and big head on narrow shoulders, the same solemn heavy-lidded eyes that made him look ironic. His hair was gray but otherwise he was Sam Mpechetula, now wearing shoes. I had last seen him when he was a barefoot fifteen-year-old, in gray shorts. He was now fifty-two, in a jacket and necktie.
Sam said he happened to be in Zomba and had heard I was speaking, so he showed up. He was married, a father of four, and a teacher at Bunda College, outside Lilongwe. So at least I could say that one of my students had taken my place as an English teacher in a Malawi classroom. That had been one of my more modest goals.
‘Do you remember much about our school?’ I asked.
‘It was a good school — the best. They were the best days of my life,’ he said. ‘The Peace Corps guys were wonderful. They brought blue jeans and long hair to Malawi.’
‘What a legacy,’ I said, because Rubadiri was listening.
Sam said, ‘They talked to Africans. Do you know, before they came, white people didn’t talk to us.’
Rubadiri said, ‘You remember this man, eh?’
Oh, yes. When he was declared “PI” we were sad.’
PI was Prohibited Immigrant. My reward for helping Rubadiri.
‘Around that time Jack Mapanje also taught us. You remember him?’
Another political casualty: Jack Mapanje was jailed for ten years for writing poems deemed by the Malawian government to be subversive.
Sam brought me up to date on the students I had taught — many were dead, some had left the country, but a number were working in useful jobs in different parts of the country. A high proportion of these former students were working women.
Later that night, after dinner, I was reminded again of the strength and clear-sightedness of Malawian women when David Rubadiri went to bed and his wife stayed up, drinking tea and monologuing. Gertrude was a short solid woman, with a full face and powerful arms and she sat deep in the cushions of a sofa, leaning slightly forward, looking alert. She was intelligent and, for her generation, highly educated, having gone to Fort Hare University in South Africa. Robert Mugabe, later guerrilla fighter and erratic president of Zimbabwe, had been one of her classmates. We talked about him a little because that month he was harassing white farmers in Zimbabwe so severely people were warning me to stay away from that country.
‘Mugabe was so studious — we called him “Bookworm.” ’
Fearful of offering an insult, for I was a houseguest, I at first tentatively suggested that on my return to Malawi I was seeing a country greatly reduced. But Gertrude seized on this, for she too had been away for a long time — perhaps twenty-five years.