It was screechy and silent, old-fashioned Africa, smelling of woodsmoke and wet earth. And strangest of all to me these spring months: it was cold.
I was in charge. But a headmaster at twenty-three was unusual, even in this unusual country. Some of my boy students were twenty, and many looked older than me. The girls were younger, but some of them had given birth and had small children. That was their secret. They pretended to be schoolgirls and I pretended not to know about their kids. There were 156 students. They were all skinny and popeyed and barefoot.
Willy Msemba was one of the rare ones — virtually the only delinquent, but a cheerful one. And he was intelligent. He read Mickey Spillane. He wrote me an essay which began, “My name is Msemba. I’m a cop. I was in Chikwawa. I saw a broad — pointed breasts, fat face, ironed hair, a real doll. But she was tough. I had to kick her before she would volunteer the information I needed—”
The other students were well-behaved and in general the discipline was so good I never really believed that we would get our chimbuzi. That was the point of the brickmaking. We needed a new latrine. The fence around the ditch was broken, and the ditch itself was nearly full; and it stank. It made you think that these people were grubby and hopeless. I knew that was not true and I wanted to prove it with a new chimbuzi. I envisioned a big solid symmetrical thing with this year scratched on it, 1964, and when people asked what I had done for these Africans in their year of independence I could say that I had gotten them a brick shithouse.
The earth around us was clayey enough for good bricks but we didn’t have enough discipline problems to guarantee a steady supply. I gave them five bricks for lateness, ten for not doing homework, fifteen for fighting, fifteen for littering (chewing and spitting sugarcane on school premises), and so forth. It was supposed to be twenty-five bricks for smoking hemp, but Willy Msemba had been on the verge of revelations, and so far my private life had remained secret. He was buzzing, and I had to get him out of there. I had not wanted to antagonize the boy. He knew too much.
I thought — as punishment — brickmaking was a good idea. It was dirty and useful. Yet I was criticized for being too soft. I was friendly towards the students. Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo spread the word that I was afraid of the students. Miss Natwick said that the trouble with Americans was that they were so bloody diffident. That was the most painful kind of criticism, because I was not quite sure what she meant and I hated looking up one of Miss Natwick’s words in the dictionary (Lacking in confidence; timid).
I kept on. It was better to be whispered about for being a weak headmaster than for that other thing, that I had tried to keep secret. And I knew that the students liked me. I spoke the language, Chinyanja, and I had learned all the proverbs in Nzeru Za Kale (“Wisdom of the Old Folks”)—“He who cries for rain also cries for mud”—that sort of thing. I quoted them in morning assembly. “If your face is ugly, learn to sing.” I was the first American any of them had ever seen. For some I was their first white man. Being an American — and I was friendly — gave me power over the students, and the school ran well.
It was a new school — a compound of four squat cement buildings with tin roofs that clattered so loudly when it rained that we had to stop teaching until the rain eased. There were verandas on the classroom blocks and in the center a trampled space where we held morning assembly. Outside my office door was a foot of railway track that I banged with an iron rod at five minutes to eight.
Morning assembly was a prayer, a song, and a pep-talk. There was as yet no national anthem. We sang Mbuye Dalitsani Africa, “God Watch Over Africa,” a sort of Pan-African hymn with the lugubrious plodding melody of a funeral dirge. Likoni used to read from the Bible — usually the Psalms. I avoided the Psalms but I liked Jonah, Ecclesiastes and Ezekiel — especially I liked declaiming about the valley of bones. I also read from Aesop’s Fables, and well-known speeches from Shakespeare, and memorable poems. I made appropriate comments. I read announcements and I called the roll. On these cold mornings the wind fluttered the blue gums and made the tin roofs moan and snatched at the children’s clothes as they stood shivering. When they heard their names they answered “Heah” or “Sah.”
A new road connected the school to the lower road which, once used for logging — it led through a forest — ended at the township of Kanjedza. I had built the school road. Building it had made my reputation. In old Likoni’s time it had been a narrow path through chest-high thorn bushes and scrub. I wanted the path widened. “Big cars will pay calls on us,” Deputy Mambo said. But it wasn’t that — I didn’t want cars. I merely imagined a long sweeping road that would dignify the school and the hill.
For the road I asked the Public Works Department to send us some workmen.
“I can send some men, but you will have to pay them,” the works manager told me over the phone. His tiny distorted voice came out of a heavy old-fashioned receiver.
“Why can’t you pay them?”
“PWD is in suspension,” he said. “The British have left.”
“Who’s in charge?”
“That is the question.”
Independence was not until July and at the moment there was no one in the department to okay an order. Men still showed up every morning, but there was nothing for them to do; and although they were on the payroll they received no money.
I had a budget. I had allotted sixty pounds for the road, which seemed plenty — over a hundred dollars.
“Send me six men.”
The men arrived on bicycles. They stared at the students until assembly ended, and then they hacked at some bushes and bullied a big tree. Afterwards they slept under it. They said they wanted more money and when I refused to give it to them they pushed their bicycles down the narrow path and pedaled away.
Fifty-four pounds remained. Mr. Nyirongo said that the headman of a nearby village would supply the men to clear the road, but that he wanted a bribe.
“It’s just bushes,” I said. “If the students weren’t so sleepy they could trample a new road.”
Everyone said that the students had worms, which was why they were so languid.
But I had an idea. I went to the bank in Zimba and changed the remaining fifty-four pounds into “tickeys”—small gray threepence coins. I returned to the school with canvas money bags hanging on my bike. I had almost four and a half thousand tickeys. At the end of the next day’s assembly I shocked the students by declaring a holiday.
But before I dismissed them I said, “Watch me.”
I went to the path with my bags of coins and walked the length of it, flinging tickeys left and right, the width of the road I wanted.
Like locusts, the students descended hungrily, tearing at the bushes, and by the middle of the afternoon the land was cleared. A little tidying made it into the road I wanted. That was my first significant accomplishment as a young headmaster.
I was popular also for my special homework policy. Because the students lived in mud huts with no electric lights, I made a rule that all homework was to be done at school, before the kids set off for home. And they had homework on weekends, but none on Friday afternoons. This meant that we teachers had no weekend papers to mark.
The school was called Chamba Secondary, after the hill just behind it. The word signified Indian hemp and it was also a frenzied and futile dance. Everyone who was told what it meant said, “Very appropriate!” But I regarded that as unkind. Give them a chance, I said; and I also thought: Give me a chance.