‘Yes, you are looking for someone?’
The occupant of what had been my house stepped out, barefoot, in stained trousers and an undershirt, dabbing at the floury scraps on his cheeks. He had been eating.
‘No. Just passing by,’ I said. ‘I used to live here. In the sixties.’
A long time ago!’ he said.
That remark fascinated me, for thirty-five years did not seem long at all to me, and in the heart of ancient changeless Africa it seemed nothing. But it was before he was born. The man did not introduce himself or welcome me, which was unusually inhospitable here. He didn’t ask why I might have lived in the house, or inquire what I had done there all those years ago. He licked food from his lips and folded his arms. He was just a village man eating a village meal in his village hut, and I was an interruption, from another planet.
It’s a very old house,’ he said. He turned to examine it.
‘Not really.’
‘Built around independence time,’ he said, as though pegging it to some remote period in the past.
Independence was 1964. But in a place where people married young, bore children young, and died young, that was two generations, far-off to him in African time.
The old Roseveare homestead next door, much larger, was in worse shape. To those two meticulous English green-fingered gardeners, unweeded plants were a nightmare. But this was transformation, too. There was a solid maize crop growing where their roses and lupins had been. This vividly illustrated African life, which was the story not of adaptation but of survival.
‘The Roseveares used to live there.’
‘Myself, I am not knowing them.’
‘Sir Martin Roseveare founded this school. He and his wife taught here for many years.’
The man shrugged: not a clue.
‘They are dead now.’
‘Oh, sorry.’ But he seemed more suspicious than sorry, as though I was spinning a yarn to take him off guard and perhaps rob him.
‘You’re a teacher?’
‘Communications and what-not,’ he said.
‘Thanks. I must be going.’
‘Bye-bye, mister.’
More rain-stained mildewed walls and sagging roofs, more broken windows and cracked verandas up the road, at the other teachers’ houses. The drizzle was coming down hard now, but the rain and the mud and the dripping trees and the green slime on the brick walls were appropriate to the melancholy I felt.
I met two teachers standing in the wet road, chatting together. They introduced themselves as Anne Holt from Fife in Scotland, and Jackson Yekha, a Malawian — new teachers here.
‘I’ve read some of your books,’ Anne said. ‘I didn’t know you’d taught here.’
‘It was a while ago. Ever hear of the Roseveares? They actually started the school. They lived over there.’
Nothing, no memory of them, and I began to think that the weeds that had covered their graves in Mzuzu were an accurate reflection of how much their decades of work and sacrifice mattered. It was as though they had never existed, or were just ghostly figures. What they had helped create was almost gone, so in a sense they might never have come, though they still haunted the school.
And I was a specter, too: a wraith from the past, knocking on broken windows with my bony fingers, pressing my skull against the glass and looking death’s head toothy, and saying, Remember me? But I was so obscure and insubstantial a spook I was hardly visible to these people, though I saw them clearly as a repetition, another cycle, a sadder incarnation than before. Anne Holt was twenty-two, as I had been here at Soche Hill, and so as a ghost I was visiting and haunting my earlier self, and seeing myself as I had been: thin, pale, standing on a wet road in the bush, with a foxed and mildewed textbook in my hand.
As we were talking the rain turned very heavy, smacking the leaves overhead and threatening to drench us. We sheltered in the nearest house, that of Jackson Yekha. It so happened that Jackson’s house was also the first one I had ever occupied in Malawi. While my house was being finished, I stayed in this one, belonging to a hard-working Scottish teacher from the island of South Uist. He was John MacKinnon, a stalwart at the school, and another forgotten man. The same dining table that had once held sauce bottles and the mustard pot and a sticky jar of Branston Pickle was now dusted with the talcum of maize flour from nsima spills. This house too had become bush-like and cluttered and scorched: bungalow into hut.
Sitting there, listening to the rain hammering on the roof, it was Jackson Yekha, not I, who bemoaned the poverty and disorder in the country.
I said, ‘When I was here, people used to say, “In five or ten years things will improve.” ’
I didn’t have to finish the thought, for Jackson said, ‘Things are terrible. What can we do to change?’
I said, ‘First you have to decide what’s important to you. What do you want?’
‘I want things to be better. Houses. Money. The life.’
What’s stopping you?’
‘The government is not helping us.’
‘Maybe the government wants to prevent things from becoming better.’
I sketched out my theory that some governments in Africa depended on underdevelopment to survive — bad schools, poor communications, a feeble press and ragged people. They needed poverty to obtain foreign aid, they needed ignorance and uneducated and passive people to keep themselves in office for decades. A great education system in an open society would produce rivals, competitors, and an effective opposition to people who wanted only to cling to power. It was heresy to say such things, but this was how it seemed to me.
‘That’s so depressing,’ Anne said. ‘But no one wants to be a teacher. A primary school teacher only makes 2000 kwacha a month. The college level is about 5000 kwacha.’
These figures represented about $25 to $65 — very low, but the average annual per capita income in Malawi was $200.
‘The NGOs pull out the teachers,’ Jackson said. ‘They offer them better pay and conditions.’
That was interesting — the foreign charities and virtue activists, aiming to improve matters, co-opted underpaid teachers, turned them into food distributors in white Land-Rovers, and left the schools understaffed.
Seeing that the rain had let up I asked Anne to show me around the school. In the main office, I met the principal.
Anne said, ‘This is Mr Theroux. He used to teach here.’
The principal shortened his neck like a surprised turtle and glanced at me. He said, ‘That’s interesting,’ and returned to his scribbling.
The library, a large substantial building, had been the heart of the school. It had never been difficult to get crates of new books from overseas agencies. My memory of the Soche library was an open-plan room divided with many high bookcases and filled shelves, 10,000 books, a table of magazines, a reference section with encyclopedias.
The library was almost in total darkness. One light burned. Nearly all the shelves were empty. The light fixtures were empty too.
‘It’s a little dark in here.’
‘You should have seen it before,’ Anne said. ‘At least we’ve got that one light. We’ve asked the ministry countless times to send us fluorescent bulbs but they don’t even reply to our letters.’