‘Your children are doing so well,’ he said. ‘When I was in London one of them had his own TV show and the other had just published a novel. Clever chaps.’
‘Thanks,’ I said. Though I was flattered, I found it hard to say more. Dizziness and nausea made me laconic. My feeling of annoyance had turned into physical discomfort. I wondered if I had eaten something foul. ‘Yes, they’re good boys. They work very hard.’
‘What I would like,’ David said in an emphatic way, a little theatrical, becoming Othello-like in his demand, ‘what I would like very much indeed, is for one of your children to come here for a spell.’
After what I had seen since entering Malawi through Karonga weeks before, I found the idea shocking and unacceptable, like Almighty God instructing Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Shock gave way to incredulity and bewilderment.
‘What would either of my sons do here, for goodness sake?’
‘He would work, he would teach, he would be a source of ideas and inspiration.’ It was the old song, but just a song.
Smiling angrily, and bent slightly because my guts ached, I said, ‘But you’ve had plenty of those people. Years of those people. Years and years.’
‘I want your son.’
What he meant as praise and, perhaps, flattery offended me. Now in his insistence he sounded like one of Herod’s hatchet men, just before the Slaughter of the Innocents. I want your son.
Why were these murderous Biblical metaphors occurring to me? Perhaps because Malawians were such a church-going bunch.
‘How many children do you have, David?’
‘As you know, nine.’
‘How many of them are teaching here?’
‘One is in Reno, one in Baltimore, one in London, one in Kampala, another….’ he stopped himself and looked tetchy. ‘Why are you inquiring?’
‘Because you’re doing what everyone does — you’re asking me to hand over one of my kids to teach in Malawi. But Marcel taught in India, and Louis was a teacher in Zimbabwe. They’ve had that experience — have yours?’
I was a bit too shrill in my reply. He took it well but he saw me as unwilling, someone no longer persuaded by the cause. He suspected that I had turned into Mr Kurtz. He was wrong. I was passionate about the cause. But I had had an epiphany: though my children would be enriched by the experience of working in Africa, nothing at all would change as a result of their being here. I thought of what my friend in Uganda had said about her American-educated children. We wanted them here. We said, ‘Come back and get your foot in the door. Get a decent job. Try to be part of the process.’
Still trying to control my indignation I said as quietly as I could, ‘What about your kids? This is their country. They could make a difference. They are the only people — the only possible people — who will ever make a difference here.’
That was my Malawian epiphany. Only Africans were capable of making a difference in Africa. All the others, donors and volunteers and bankers, however idealistic, were simply agents of subversion.
In my room that night I was struck down — cramps, nausea, griping guts, some evil gurgling in the knotted tubes of my intestines. The chimbudzi was down the corridor. I visited the little room every hour throughout the night. In the morning I was still weak and felt sick, for the first time since Cairo. I drowsed and slept late. No one was around the house when I woke. I rehydrated myself with a mixture of sugar and salt in water, took some pills, and drove away, downhill, past people — I almost wrote ‘ragged,’ I almost wrote ‘barefoot’, I almost wrote ‘trudging.’ But no, just Malawians walking along the road — people I could not help.
In Blantyre, I checked into a hotel and stayed in my room, medicating myself. I lay doubled-up for a few days and then strayed into town. What I had not noticed on my previous visit was the great number of shops and churches run by Christian evangelists — Jimmy Swaggart Ministries among them. The education system was appalling but there was no shortage of dreary hymn-singing pietists and preachers who promised people food if they handed over their souls.
I realized I was somewhat out of sympathy with this new Malawi when I saw a man on the sidewalk lying in wait for me.
Seeing me, the man smiled and frolicked ahead, flapping his arms to get my attention. He capered some more, then he crouched in front of me, blocking my path, and said, ‘I am hungry. Give me money.’
I said ‘No,’ and stepped over him and kept walking.
16. River Safari to the Coast
Possessed with another yearning to light out for the territory — another territory — I fell ill. Yet sickness of the sort I suffered is so common among travelers there is no point reporting the particularities. My ailment’s effect on me was to make me idle. My ailment’s effect on others was to make them active and pestiferous. The Africans who seemed to understand that I was weak pursued me, the way predators harry slower or uncertain prey animals, and they demanded money, as though knowing that I was too weak to refuse them. Seeing me hollow-eyed and scuffing along the crowded streets of Blantyre, they nagged me. I walked slowly. Boys tagged along, snatching and calling out, ‘Mzungu! Mzungu!’
A man accosted me outside a shop. He said, ‘Please give me money for food.’
I said in his language, ‘Why are you asking me for money for nothing? Why don’t you ask me for work?’
This perplexed him and threw him off his spiel.
‘Don’t you want to work? If you work you’ll have money every week.’
He knelt down — got on to his ragged knees — and implored me for money. This abasement must have worked well for him before, because he did it without hesitation. He even gripped my ankles as he begged.
‘Get up,’ I said. ‘You’re a man. Get off your knees. Stand up like a man and ask me for work.’
‘I’m hungry,’ he said.
‘I’m sick — can’t you tell?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you give me money for being sick?’
My unexpected aggression and weird demand seemed to frighten him, and it surprised me too, for I had not planned on saying any of that. He walked quickly away.
In my weakened state I felt irritable and contrary and persecuted. Blantyre had once been a mixed community: Greek bakers, Italian tea planters, many mixed-race families, and not just generic Indians but Ismailis, Sikhs, Gujaratis. Even the worst of them had played a part in making society in Malawi work — the friction had been necessary, the challenges had made people think harder, the pluralism had forced people to become considerate. But all these exotic-looking people had been driven out. There was no racial difference now, except for the agents of virtue, all white, all short-timers. The working of society was in the hands of charities, running orphanages, staffing hospitals, doing triage in the pathetic education system. They were saving lives — you couldn’t fault them — but in general I despaired at the very sight of aid workers, as no more than a maintenance crew on a power trip, who had turned Malawians into beggars and whiners, and development into a study in futility.
The news in the paper was that the maize harvest was a failure. A famine was expected for the coming year.
One day I woke up well. Having no desire to stay any longer in Malawi and discuss what went wrong, I decided to leave. I was now strong enough to depart by an unusual route, through the bush, to light out for the territory south, an almost unknown land.
It was the ultimate safari, one of my own devising, down the Shire River and into Mozambique to the Zambezi. Downstream at Caia I could go by road to Beira, on the coast, then travel inland on the direct road to Harare. I justified the detour by telling myself that I would compare it with a previous trip I had taken on this same route. But in fact this, the most roundabout way of getting to Zimbabwe, was a jaunt, a lark, an antidote to all the miserable buses and all the dishonest blamers.