‘You have seen so much of the country, Paul! So, tell us, what do you think?’
‘The visitor usually brings a sharp knife,’ someone said — another proverb. The stranger was known for having the keenest perceptions.
I did not know where to begin, but for some reason I kept seeing in my mind the main road through the northern towns, the outposts of the plateaus — Karonga, Livingstonia, Rumphi, Ekwendeni, Mzuzu — the empty Indian shops, the women squatting on the ground, selling bananas and peanuts. I mentioned this vision of rural decline, but I didn’t say decline, I said change.
‘The Indians were chased away,’ the former ambassador said. ‘It wasn’t a law, it wasn’t Gazetted. But that is a detail. As soon as the president made the speech against the Indians — mid-seventies about — they closed their shops. The Indians went to the UK or South Africa.’
I knew this but I wanted to hear him say it. I went on, ‘What was the motive behind the president’s speech?’
‘We wanted Africans to be given a chance to run the shops. So that Africans could go into business. The shops were handed over. I bought one myself!’
‘With what result?’
‘Ha-ha! Not much! It didn’t work. They all got finished!’
He was saying: We kicked out the Indians, we took over their shops, we failed — so what? End of story. He even tried to change the subject, but I was interested and I asked him to describe the failure in a little more detail.
‘Well, as you know, Indians are good at business,’ he said. Then laughing in dismay as though he had just dropped a slice of bread butter-side down, ‘What do we know about these things? We had no capital. The shops failed — almost all of them! Ha! They were abandoned, as you saw. And the rest were turned into chibuku [beer] bars.’
The result in the rural areas was: no shops at all, and twenty-seven years later, still no shops. So the whole scheme had backfired. When I pointed this out, one of the other African guests began, perversely, denigrating the Indians for their business acumen in a mocking voice.
‘They sit there, you see, and they have these little pieces of paper, and have these columns of numbers.’ He spoke pompously about the Indians as though describing demented obsessional children with broken toys. ‘And one Indian is running the calculator, and another is counting the sacks of flour and the tins of condensed milk. One-two three. One-two-three.’
What this educated African in his plummy voice intended as mockery — the apparent absurdity of all this counting — was the description of people doing a simple inventory of goods in a shop.
I said, ‘But that’s how a shop is run. That’s normal business. You make a list of what you’ve sold, so you know what stuff to reorder.’
‘Indians know no other life!’ he said. ‘Just this rather secluded life — all numbers and money and goods on shelves. One-two-three.’
‘Record-keeping is the nature of small business, isn’t it?’ I resented his belittling the shopkeeper, yet I kept calm so as to draw him out. ‘The profit margins are so small.’
‘But we Africans are not raised in this way,’ he said, nodding to the others for approval. ‘What do we care about shops and counting? We have a much freer existence. We have no interest in this — shops are not our strong point.’
‘Why close the shops then?’
That stumped them, but not for long.
‘Maybe something can be done with them. Selling is not our heritage. We are not business people.’
‘Women are selling soap and matches and cooking oil.’
‘But not in shops.’
‘No, they’re sitting in the mud in Mzuzu,’ I said, feeling agitated.
‘I’ll tell you why these shops didn’t work out,’ the former ambassador said. ‘When Africans run businesses their families come and stay with them and eat all their food — just live off them. As soon as an African succeeds in something he has his family cadging from him. Not so?’
‘That is true, brother,’ the other man said.
‘And we are not cut out for this shop-keeping and book-keeping and,’ he winked at me, ‘number crunching.’
I had never heard such bullshit. Well, perhaps I had and not recognized it. The man was saying: This is all too much for us. We cannot learn how to do business. We must be given money, we must be given sinecures, because we don’t know how to make a profit.
I said, ‘If you’re no good at book-keeping and keeping track of expenses, why do you expect donor countries to go on giving you money?’
This was a bit too blunt and it had the effect of ending this particular discussion.
Rubadiri the host said, as though to explain my irritation, ‘Paul has had a very powerful experience, returning to his old school. That is why he was such a good teacher. It meant so much to him.’
Feeling patronized, I said, ‘No lights. The place is falling down. They stole the books. I know what you’re going to say, but — hey — why doesn’t anyone sweep the dirty floor?’
‘There is a panel, studying the education system.’
I thought: Oh, bollocks, and drank another beer and sat back in my chair while they talked about other things.
I did not hear what they were saying. I heard rats scurrying and squabbling in the space above the wooden ceiling of the old colonial house. The open window admitted lovely gossamer-winged dragonflies and yellow moths and big bumbling beetles.
The stout man was staring at me. I was at a loss for words. Finally I said, ‘Which country were you ambassador in?’
‘Germany. Four years.’
‘Lovely museums,’ I said.
‘I only went to a museum once,’ he said. ‘They gave a dinner at the museum — inside, you see. Tables and chairs set up where the pictures were. We ate and looked at the pictures. It was very nice. I didn’t go to any other museums.’
‘Lovely music,’ I said.
‘I learned a bit about classical music. Up to then my favorite music was pata-pata.’That was South African shanty town jive. ‘But I still love pata-pata. It’s my Mozart!’
‘Did you travel much in Germany?’
‘Ah, I was in Berlin, at that hotel, the Adlon. So beautiful. It costs $300 a night.’
I resisted the gibe that the Mount Soche, a mediocre and pretentious hotel in Blantyre, cost $250 a night, because it was where all the economists and aid people and political observers on junkets stayed.
The former ambassador said, ‘One night, I was having a drink in the bar of the Adlon — my wife was with Mrs President when our president was visiting Germany. I looked up and I saw James Bond — that chap, what’s-his-name, Pierce Brosnan. I went up to him. ‘Hello. I want a few words with you.’ He said, ‘Yes?’ I was actually talking to him! Oh, he was so nice. I had nothing to write on, so he signed the menu. My daughter was very cross. ‘Why didn’t you take me to see him, Papa?’ Yes, that James Bond chap, I was talking to him. In Berlin!’
After the dinner party broke up and the guests left I sat with David Rubadiri, feeling so irritable it was as though I was experiencing the symptoms of an illness. I drank some more beer. The loud thumps and scrabbling of the rats in the space above the wooden ceiling had died down, had become scratchings and squealings. The large glider-winged dragonflies still drifted through the windows and seemed as large and nimble as swallows.
I did not dare approach the subject of how appalled I felt that so much effort had been wasted here, for Rubadiri was being friendly. In his expansive mood he was a romantic. He had lived through the worst years of Malawi, he had occupied high positions, he had been an exile, and he was now powerful again, running the national university, though it was millions in debt and so behind in salaries that all classes had been cancelled. Students were threatening to hold demonstrations in Zomba.