‘Things are worse,’ Gertrude said decisively. ‘When I came back in 1994 I was surprised. The poverty here really shocked me. I could not believe the people could be so poor. I saw a boy with some small money in his hand trying to buy some soap — he needed one kwacha [1.3 cents] but didn’t have it, and so he went away. The people were dressed in rags. The streets were littered with rubbish.’
‘I’ve noticed that myself,’ I said.
‘But do you know? Within two weeks I had stopped seeing it!’
‘What else shocked you when you came back?’
‘The way the young people spoke in the house really bothered me. Some of them were my own nephews. If I asked a question they would answer with a question, sometimes saying “Si chapita?” [So what?] That is not traditional at all — it shows no respect. I might ask for sugar and the child would just shrug and sit there and say, Si watha? [Isn’t it all gone?] Shocking!
‘And the way people gossip. Well, you know this has always been an envious society. Someone comes from abroad with a Ph.D. and we say it stands for “Pull him down.” They gossip about the person and say he or she is proud. I was at a funeral recently and heard people gossiping. Can you imagine — at a funeral?
‘We have become so dirty — in throwing garbage on the street. Also, personally. People are less clean in their personal habits. You notice it on buses. The smell. And you see how people push? They never did that before. It is not part of our culture to be in a crowd or to press against each other. Our culture determines that we need space. A servant gives you space — he stands aside. People do the same with each other. So it is unnatural to be pushed and pressed, yet it happens all the time. No one respects old people. No one gives me a seat. Maybe I am saying that because I am old!
‘What went wrong? Is it because of all those years of Banda’s rule, telling people what to do, to be tidy, to be respectful? And now they say, “The old man is gone. Now I can be messy, to make up for all those years.” ’
‘The foreign charities here are doing our work for us — so many of them! What progress are they making? Will we have them for ever? There were not so many before. Why do we still need them after so long? David says I am a pessimist, but to tell the truth I am a bit ashamed.’
I went to bed thinking, So I’m not imagining this.
I set off the next morning to revisit my school, forty-five miles down the road from Zomba to Soche Hill.
Some trips mean so much to us that we rehearse them obsessively in our head, not to prepare ourselves but in anticipation, for the delicious foretaste. I had been imagining this return trip down the narrow track to Soche Hill for many years. It was a homecoming in a more profound sense than my going back to Medford, Massachusetts, where I had grown up. In Medford, I was one of many people struggling to leave, to start my life; but in Malawi, at Soche Hill School, I was alone, making my life.
In Africa, for the first time, I got a glimpse of the sort of pattern my life would take — that it would be dominated by writing and solitariness and risk and, already, in my early twenties I tasted those ambiguous pleasures. I had learned what many others had discovered before me, that Africa for all its perils represented wilderness and possibility. Not only did I have the freedom to write in Africa, I had something new to write about.
The African world I got to know was not the narrow existence of the tourist or big-game hunter, or the rarified and misleading experience of the diplomat, but the more revealing progress of an ambitious exile in the bush. I had no money and no status. In Malawi I began identifying with Rimbaud and Graham Greene, and it was in Africa that I began my lifelong dislike of Ernest Hemingway, from his shotguns to his mannered prose. Ernest was both a tourist and a big-game hunter. The Hemingway vision of Africa begins and ends with the killing of large animals, so that their heads may be displayed to impress visitors with your prowess. That kind of safari is easily come by. You pay your money and you are shown elephants and leopards. You talk to servile Africans, who are generic natives, little more than obedient Oompa-Loompas. The human side of Africa is an afternoon visit to a colorful village. This is why, of all the sorts of travel available in Africa, the easiest to find and the most misleading is the Hemingway experience In some respects the feed-the-people obsession that fuels some charities is related to this, for I seldom saw relief workers that did not in some way remind me of people herding animals and throwing food to them, much as rangers did to the animals in drought-stricken game parks.
The school-teaching experience in Africa, harder to come by, takes less money but more humility I had been lucky. Fearing the draft, I had joined the Peace Corps, in one of the earliest waves of volunteers, and been sent to Nyasaland, an African country not yet independent. So I experienced the last gasp of British colonialism, the in-between period of uncertain changeover, and the hopeful assertion of black rule. That was lucky, too, for I saw this process at close quarters, and African rule, necessary as it was, was also a tyranny in Malawi from day one.
School teaching was perfect for understanding how people lived and what they wanted for themselves. And my work justified my existence in Africa. I had never wanted to be a tourist. I wished to be far away, as remote as possible, among people I could talk to. I achieved that in Malawi. What I loved most about Africa was that it seemed unfinished, and was still somewhat unknown and undiscovered, lying mute but imposing, like the giant obelisk in the quarry at Aswan. The beautiful flawed thing lay trapped in the rock, but if erected it would have risen 150 feet. It was for me the very symbol of the Africa I knew.
What I liked then was what I still liked, village life, and tenacious people, and saddleback mountains of stone and flat plains where anthills were higher than any hut. The road from Zomba had everything — vistas almost to Mozambique, the savanna of scattered trees, small villages, roadside stands where people sold potatoes and sugar cane — famine food, for the maize was not yet harvested. I liked the sweet somnolence of rural Africa, which I always regarded with a sense of safety.
Instead of driving straight to the school I stopped at the nearby town of Limbe, which began abruptly, the edge of the town slummy, with the outdoor businesses — bicycle menders, car repairers, coffin-makers; the rest of it chaotic, litter and mobs, small businesses and shop houses, and a proliferation of bars and dubious-looking clinics. I drove around looking for landmarks and found a bar where I used to drink, the Coconut Grove; and the Limbe market; and the Rainbow Theater, where we had to stand while they played ‘God Save the Queen’ before every movie performance, until independence.
The countryside had seemed emptier than before, the town was much fuller — larger and meaner-looking. I parked my car and went into a bank to get a cash advance on my credit card.
The clerk said, ‘This transaction will take three days.’
An African behind me in line sighed on my behalf and said, ‘That should take no more than an hour. That’s disgusting.’
I abandoned the thought of getting money and talked to the man instead. He was a Malawian, Dr Jonathan Banda, a political science teacher at Georgetown. He had left Malawi while quite young, in 1974, had traveled and studied in various countries but had finished his Ph.D. in the United States. He had just come back to Malawi and he was disappointed by what he saw.
‘It is dirty — it’s awful,’ he said.
We were standing on the main street of Limbe, among the crowds of people. Jonathan Banda was hardly forty, and having lived so long abroad he was better fed, and so bigger and stronger than any of his fellow Malawians. He had the look of an athlete, the same confidence that is also a sort of muscularity and an upright, assertive way of standing, and his posture matched his skeptical smile.