‘The people are greedy and materialistic,’ he went on. ‘They’re lazy, too. They show no respect. They push and shove. They are awful to each other.’
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Seeing my family, but also I wanted to come back to teach. I was recently interviewed by the university.’
I listened closely — after all, I was staying at the house of the university’s vice-chancellor.
‘So what happened?’
‘I was questioned by a panel of officials. They asked me about my political views. Can you imagine? If I were teaching science or geography, no problem. But my field is political science. I said, “I have no specific party affiliation.” ’
‘What did they say to that?’
‘They didn’t like it. I said, “I want to teach my students to make up their own minds — to form political ideas of their own. That’s what matters most to me.” They looked at each other and one said, “We can’t pay you much.” ’
‘I’m sure it would be less than Georgetown,’ I said.
‘I don’t care. I said to them, “That’s fine with me. I am here to learn.” ’
But Dr Jonathan Banda didn’t get the job. He was sure the reasons for his being turned down were political. He said that if he had praised the government and the ruling party they would have hired him.
Thinking of what the ambassador had told me, I said, ‘A diplomat told me there is no political terror here anymore. Is that true?’
‘Maybe, but there is political pressure of a very insidious sort.’
He seemed so outspoken I asked him the questions about charities and aid agencies that had been nagging at me, the agents of virtue in white Land-Rovers — what were they changing?
‘Not much — because all aid is political,’ he said. ‘When this country became independent it had very few institutions. It still doesn’t have many. The donors aren’t contributing to development. They maintain the status quo. Politicians love that, because they hate change. The tyrants love aid. Aid helps them stay in power and it contributes to underdevelopment. It’s not social or cultural and it certainly isn’t economic. Aid is one of the main reasons for underdevelopment in Africa.’
‘You said it, I didn’t,’ I said. ‘There’s an awful lot of aid agencies here.’
‘All those vehicles — everywhere you look,’ he said, which is precisely what I had felt.
‘So how will things change for the better?’
He said, ‘Change will involve all the old men dying off. Or it might take another forty years.’
‘What if all the donors just went away?’
‘That might work.’
I wished him luck and walked up the main street to confirm an old memory, to see if the Malawi Censorship Board was still operating as normal. Indeed it was, still a government office in its own substantial building at the east end of town. The offices were heavily staffed, all the names listed on a board in the lobby — Executive Director, Assistant Director, Accountant, Typing Pool, Screening Room Technician, and so forth — about thirty people altogether.
I knocked on a door at random and found an African man in a pinstripe suit sitting at a desk, a Bible open at his elbow — but otherwise a tidy desk.
‘Excuse me, do you have an updated list?’ Not sure of what I was asking for, I was deliberately vague.
‘I can sell you this,’ he said, and handed me a pamphlet titled Catalogue of Banned Publications, Cinematograph Pictures and Records, with Supplement, dated 1991. ‘Please give me five kwacha.’
He straightened his tie. He then opened a ledger labeled Accounts Section Censorship Board and laboriously filled out a lengthy receipt in triplicate, stamped it, and tore out a copy for me. All this work for six cents.
‘Don’t you have anything more recent than 1991?’
‘I will check. What is your interest?’
‘I want to write something about censorship,’ I said. ‘I’m studying the problem.’
‘Please wait here. I will need your name.’
I wrote my name on a piece of paper and he took it and left the room. While he was gone I looked around — lots of uplifting mottoes on the office walls, a portrait of the president, Mr Muluzi, some religious tracts on a bookshelf. The man’s Bible was open to the Book of Ezekiel, the hellfire chapters of punishment, ‘Threats against sinners’ in its denunciations a sort of mission statement for the Malawi Censorship Board, but containing a great deal of explicit imagery that might have been deemed unfit for Malawian readers. Ezekiel 23:20: ‘Oholibah… surpassed her sister in lust… and played the whore over and over again. She was infatuated with their male prostitutes, whose members were like those of donkeys and whose seed came in floods like that of stallions.’
The paradox was that this Malawian catalogue of banned books would have constituted a first-year college reading list in any enlightened country. Flipping through the pamphlet I saw that it contained novels by John Updike, Graham Greene, Bernard Malamud, Norman Mailer, Yukio Mishima, D. H. Lawrence, James Baldwin, Kurt Vonnegut, Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell. Animal Farm was banned, as well as — more predictably — many books with titles such as Promiscuous Pauline and School Girl Sex. Salman Rushdie’s name was on the list — the president was a Muslim, that could explain it; and so was my name — after all these years, my novel Jungle Lovers, set in Malawi, was still banned.
The censorship officer had not returned. It seemed to me that the wisest thing to do was leave the censorship board before they linked my name with that of the pernicious author in their list. I tiptoed out of the office, saw that the hall was empty, all the office doors closed, and hurried away as storm clouds gathered over the nearby hills.
In a fine, chilly and drifting mist known in Malawi as chiperoni, I drove out of Limbe by a familiar route: uphill through a forest that had once been much larger, past a village that had once been much smaller, on a paved road that had once been just a muddy track. My hopes were raised by this narrow but good back road that ascended to the lower slopes of Soche Hill, for I assumed that this improved road indicated that the school too had been improved.
But I was wrong, the school was almost unrecognizable. What had been a set of school buildings in a large grove of trees was a semi-derelict compound of battered buildings in a muddy open field. The trees had been cut down, the grass was chest-high. At first glance the place was so poorly maintained as to seem abandoned: broken windows, doors ajar, mildewed walls, gashes in the roofs, and just a few people standing around, empty-handed, doing nothing but gaping at me.
I walked to the house I had once lived in. The now-battered building had once lain behind hedges, in a bower of blossoming shrubs, but the shrubbery was gone, replaced by a small scrappy garden of withered maize and cassava at one corner. Tall elephant grass — symbol of the bush — had almost overwhelmed it and now pressed against the house. The building was scorched and patched, one sooty wall where the boiler fire was fed, and the veranda roof broken. Mats lay in the driveway, mounds of white flour drying on it — except that falling rain had begun to turn it to paste. Faggots of firewood had been thrown in a higgledy-piggledy stack outside the kitchen.
To someone unfamiliar with Africa the house was the very picture of disorder. I knew better. A transformation had occurred, an English chalet-bungalow turned into a serviceable African hut, not a very colorful hut, even an unlovely hut. But it was not for me to blame the occupants for finding other uses for the driveway, or chopping the trees up for firewood, or slashing the hedges, or growing cassava where I had grown petunias. I did regret that the paint had peeled from the trim and the eaves, that the wood had rotted and brickwork had cracked and the windows had slipped from their frames. Village huts were kept in better repair. It would not be long before this badly maintained dwelling would fall down.