2
But the main reason I made sure we had no papers to mark on weekends was that I was busy those days with my own affairs. I wrote the school rules and I fitted them to my life. That odd boy Willy Msemba had been right when he twisted his face at me and said, “African girls!”
It was my secret life — my real life. The Peace Corps knew nothing about it. I had always lived two lives, but in Africa this second one became fuller and freer. I sometimes thought that it was the best reason for having gone there, especially then, just before independence, when no one was in charge.
It had started in the most innocent way, my first week in Nyasaland. I was in Zimba, the one-street town. I had pedaled through the rain to mail some letters. (It thrilled me to write letters from Africa. I was the hero of those letters. But it was so hard to be truthful and not take liberties.) On Saturdays the post office closed at noon, and so afterwards I killed time in the small market — squatting women selling misshapen and dusty vegetables. I ate lunch at the Zimba Coffee Shop. The place was owned by two Greek brothers and was run by a yellow-haired Greek woman. She sold me a cheese sandwich, a curry puff they called a samosa, and a cup of strong coffee. She watched me eat, and she gave me the familiar attention of the white people there, as if she were a distant relation.
That made me uncomfortable. I walked into the rain. There was not much else in the town — five Indian shops, all selling identical merchandise, canned goods and cloth; a car-repair shop and gas station, a branch of Grindlay’s Bank, a fish and chip shop, a bakery, and The Nyasaland Trading Company. None were run by Africans. Two old women were the sales clerks in The Nyasaland Trading Company. This was a general store in a low wooden building. It stocked colonial merchandise — jars of jam, stationery, clothes, last month’s London newspapers, books, ink, shoes, oil lamps, rubber boots. When I walked in, one of the women was wiping a feather duster (and they sold those too) against a contraption they called a radiogram — a large varnished cabinet with a yellow plastic window.
“It’s a wireless, and it also plays gramophone records,” the woman had told me on my first visit, and I had gone away mumbling the words.
Most of the white settlers had left the country for good. The shelves were becoming very dusty. Africans did not buy Birds Custard, Bovril, Swan Vestas, Dundee Thick-Cut Marmalade, Fenwick’s Gumboots, Hacks Honey Lemons, Gentleman’s Relish, Nairn’s Capital Oatcakes, tins of Bath Olivers or Battley’s Pickled Walnuts.
I browsed in the Nyasaland Trading Company until the rain stopped, bought a Penguin paperback — a novel set in the tropics by a writer I admired, S. Prasad — and then I started back to Chamba on my bike, bracing myself for the three-mile journey, which was mostly uphill.
Passing another shop, I saw a mass of small bottles and cartons in the window, and it was my first indication of the Nyasalanders’ liking for patent medicine — DeWitt’s Worm Syrup, Philipps’ Gripe Water, Goodmorning Lung Tonic, Iron Tonic, Liver Elixir, Red Syrup (“For Strength”), Kidney and Bladder Pills by Baxter, Fam-Lax, Day-Glo, X-Pell, Reg-U-Letts, and Letrax (“Expells Roundworms, Hookworms, Whip-Worms and Threadworms”). There were skin lighteners — TV Beautybox Day and Night Skin Lightening Pack, Dear Heart Skin Brightener and Glo-Tone. And hair straighteners — Hairstrate, and Glyco Superstrate. This shop had customers inside, but reading these labels I thought: Where am I?
Farther up the road, at the edge of town, there were African men lingering outside a shopfront. There was music at the door, a harmonious howling. Later I realized that this was my first taste of the Beatles: in a back street, in Zimba, a small town in Nyasaland, in Central Africa. It was not a shop. I went nearer. It was noisy, there were African girls at the windows, and young men in sunglasses watched me from the veranda. A sign above them was clumsily lettered BEAUTIFUL BAMBOO BAR.
Did someone wave to me? I thought I saw an African girl beckon, but she had vanished when I looked again. Anyway, I went in. It seemed dark inside. The few lights made the interior indistinct and had the effect of making the place seem darker and more shadowy. It was one room and it smelled dankly of piss and dirt, like a crawlspace. It was damp, smoke blew through one window, the mirror was streaked with green and red paint, and on the walls were shelves of beer — small plump bottles of Lion and Castle Lager.
The bartender wore a T-shirt and a tweed vest and ragged shorts and plastic sandals. He approached me nervously.
I said, “Moni. Muli bwanji, achimwene?”
Hello brother: it was the friendliest greeting.
He was too astonished to reply at once. Then he said, “You are speaking.”
“Yes, brother.”
“Oh, thank you, father,” he said.
“What is your name, brother?”
“My name is Wilson.”
They all had names like that — Wilson, Millson, Edison, Redison; and Henderson and Johnston.
“Thank you, Wilson.”
“And what is your name, father?”
“Please stop calling me father.”
“What is your name, sir?”
“Please, brother.”
“Yes, achimwene”—and he almost choked on the word—“what is your name?”
“My name is Andy.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Undie,” he said.
He told me that I was the first mzungu ever to go into the Beautiful Bamboo Bar. That cheered me up. Wasn’t that the point of my being in Africa?
Nearby, there were five or six girls sitting at wooden tables. The first thing I noticed about them was that they had no hair — or very little, no more than fuzz. But their shaven heads seemed to emphasize the shapeliness of their bodies. They wore dresses, but even among the shadows in the bar I could tell they were naked underneath. They were barefoot, but that seemed strangely appropriate to their having no hair on their heads.
I sat at a table with two of them and drank a beer, and I talked to them in their own language. They asked me where I had learned it.
“Would you believe Syracuse University?” And I added, “Upstate New York. United States.”
They laughed, because everywhere outside Nyasaland sounded magical. And yet I knew that Nyasaland was the only place that I wanted to be.
“American,” one girl said, trying the word out.
It seemed that they were working casually in the Bamboo. They had come from distant villages. They believed Zimba was the big city; they had attached themselves to this bar. They lived out back. The jukebox was playing Shimmy Shimmy Koko Bop, and an African girl was doing a flat-footed African dance.
Her name was Rosie. She said her favorite singer was Chubby Checker. She also liked Elvis, Del Shannon and The Orions.
“Who are the Orlons?”
“Wah-Watusi,” Rosie said.
“Oh, them.”
“And Spokes Mashiani,” she said. “South African.”
That was the kind of conversation — names of singers, names of songs, and how much can you drink, and have you ever seen a lion? And Shimmy shimmy koko bop.
Finally, Rosie said, “You’re the teacher up at Chamba?”
I said yes, and turned to the door. It had gone dark outside.
“The big house with the flowers in front,” she said.
Shimmy shimmy bop.
“It used to belong to Mr. Campbell. He went back to England.”