“What if we’re alone?”
Mum sighs, as if the dense population of Malawi is pressing air out of her lungs. “We’re never alone here.”
People who disagree with His Excellency, the President for Life and “Chief of Chiefs,” are frequently found to be the victims of car crashes (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or dead in their beds of heart attacks (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or the recipients of some not-quite-fresh seafood (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets).
Revolts by H.B.M. Chipembere and Yatuta Chisiza are crushed in 1965 and 1967. Chipembere dies in exile in the United States.
Dick Matenje (Banda’s likely successor) dies under mysterious circumstances in 1983.
Orton and Vera Chirwa are imprisoned for life for protesting against some of Banda’s policies. Orton is released, but later kidnapped in Zambia.
Dr. Attati Mpakati, leader of the Socialist League of Malawi, is killed by a letter bomb in 1983 in Zimbabwe.
Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda is not only Life President. He is also the Minister of External Affairs, the Minister of Work and Supplies, the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Agriculture. The airport, most major roads and public buildings, and many schools and hospitals are named after the President. Lining almost all the main roads there are scores of billboards containing a photograph of the President for Life. Many women wear bright cloth chitenges around their waists—as skirts—which contain a photograph of Banda, a younger Banda, whose face shines over round bottoms and swelling bellies. Babies hang from chitenge slings decorated with the President’s face, their little faces peeping over the placid, mild gaze of the image of their Great Chief.
When we move to Malawi, the people of this sliver of a country have among the lowest per capita incomes of anyone in the world. Their numbers are swelling as refugees flood over the borders from Mozambique to escape that country’s seemingly endless civil war.
We move to a tobacco farm on the edge of Lake Chilwa, not far—on roads that toss the pickup from one side to the other as if it were a small boat—from Lake Malawi, the Shire River, and Mozambique. The farm, Mgodi (meaning the Hole), is one of many owned by His Excellency the Life President. It is supposed to be a shining example of what can happen when the President sets his mind to help his people. When we arrive, the estate is a shambles, overrun with weeds, corruption, thieves, threatening Big Men, trembling Little Men, collapsing workshops, and disintegrating roads. The entire place is shuddering under a crumbling infrastructure. It is a smaller, contained version of the Malawian government as a whole.
There are one thousand “peasant farmers,” each of whom rents an acre of land on which to grow burley tobacco, which they will sell back to the estate. They are also required to grow a patch of maize and a patch of vegetables on a separate acre of land to feed themselves and their families.
By the standards of this tiny, tightly controlled, densely populated country, our farm is remote. It’s at least an hour’s drive to Zomba, the nearest town. Zomba is built on the edge of a startling plateau on which the Life President has built himself a small palace (one of many scattered throughout the country) and which offers a sudden change of climate. The plateau, whose summit we reach by winding up an up-only road (avoiding the lawless drivers hurtling illegally down), is planted with fresh, sweet-smelling pine and fir trees. Its ground is soft and mossy; the air is thick and cool, and fresh with an almost permanent lick of mist. The dams and streams are stocked with trout; the roads on top of the plateau are hard, red, slick clay, which become so slippery during the rains that our heavy truck slides drunkenly off their spines and into the ditch. As we come down the “down” road from the plateau, the air thickens by degrees until, by the time we reach the town, we have almost forgotten the tonic of the plateau’s summit, its cool, comforting, mossy silence.
There is little to recommend the town of Zomba, or to set it apart from many other African cities of its nature, except the mental hospital on the main street. To the casual observer, the town of Zomba is primarily populated by mentally ill Malawians, escapees from the hospital, who tear around the modest city in sawn-off pink-, blue-, and white-striped pajamas.
By now, Vanessa is sixteen and attending a private coeducational school in Blantyre where the focus is on a cheerful learning atmosphere and where the students are encouraged to express themselves artistically. I am thirteen, at Arundel High School in Harare, Zimbabwe, where the students are expected not to express themselves at all. The focus is on a rigorous academic program and we will be expected to pass difficult examinations sent out from Cambridge in England.
At our school, we cannot make or receive phone calls except at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, when our conversations are monitored by a matron and we may speak for only five minutes. Our letters out of the school are frequently censored. Our letters into the school are subject to censorship at any time. We may receive only visitors who are approved by the authorities and who appear on a master list, and those only between the hours of three and five on Sunday afternoons. We must attend chapel twice a day. Grace before meals is expressed in Latin.
We must wear our uniforms no longer than an inch below the knee, no shorter than an inch above the knee as measured from a kneeling position; we are required to wear a uniform of some description (there is a school uniform, a Sunday uniform, and an activities uniform) for all but a few hours a day when, between bath time and lights-out, we are (in any case) shut up in a classroom attending to homework. We must tie up our hair when it touches our collars. We must wear high-waisted, low-legged thick brown nylon underwear. We may not speak after lights-out, or before the wake-up bell, which rings at six. We must wait at the door for our seniors, teachers, visitors.
We are issued packing lists. We must bring (but may bring no more than) everything on the list. Three sets of school uniform, three sets of civilian clothes, five pairs of underwear, a Sunday dress, two pairs of lace-up Clarks shoes bought at vast expense from the aging lady (who seems prewar to me, by which I mean pre-Chimurenga) with flaking pink-powdered cheeks and a bright blond beehive at the shoe department on the third floor of Meikles in Harare. After we have bought the shoes, Mum will take me out for tea and scones as a treat but I will hardly be able to swallow with the sickening anticipation of school ahead of me. And Mum’s mouth has dried up, too, at the thought of all the money we do not have that she has just spent.
In our dormitories, we may have only three posters on our walls and five items on our dressing tables. We may wash our hair only on Saturday mornings. We cannot watch television or listen to a radio except for a few hours on the weekends. If we are caught smoking or drinking, or if we are disruptive, we will be expelled.
One evening, before lights-out, a rumor spread through the boardinghouses (hopping the lawns from one hostel to the next) that two teenage boys had scaled the security fence and were at large on Arundel High School property. All the boarding hostels were immediately locked, with us inside them, roll call was taken, and we were instructed to turn out the lights and undress in the dark (lest the rumored boys see us as we changed into our pajamas). Hysteria swept from cubicle to cubicle, from dorm to dorm. Several girls threw their underwear and bras out of the windows. One girl burst into tears and it was rumored that another actually fainted with excitement.
At the end of the school term, I fly out of Zimbabwe and arrive at Kamuzu International Airport.
There is a barrage of signs to greet me.
I may not take photographs of official buildings; doing so will result in my arrest.
If I am a man, I may not wear my hair below my collar. My hair will be cut if it is too long.
If I am a woman, I may not wear shorts, trousers, or skirts that show the knee. Doing so will result in my arrest.
I may not bring pornography into the country. Doing so will result in my arrest.
(Pornography laws are so stringent that even the boxes of salty crac
kers imported from South Africa are censored. The bikini-clad woman on the box of crackers has her shapely legs blackened to the knee by the marker of a pornography official.)
I may not bring drugs into the country. Doing so will result in my death.
There is a small army of customs and immigrations officials to greet me as I climb off the plane. I peer over their shoulders, trying to see into the terminal building, but there appears to be no end to the arrival procedures. There are rows and rows of officials and behind them there are poster-sized photographs of the little dictator whose skin, I notice, is shiny, like redwood mahogany. His photograph has been airbrushed into an eternal, tight-smiling youth. Armed guards stand at an imposing wooden entryway, blocking the view beyond the posters.
My school trunk is laid on a table. I am ordered to open it.
Three customs officials descend on my modest pile of possessions.
“Do you have any pornography?” asks one official. He waves his gun casually at the place where my heart is.
“No.”
My textbooks are discovered, opened, examined. Pages of biology, mathematics, chemistry, Latin, and French are carefully turned over until, with an expression of disgust, the official bears down on me and asks, “Do you have drugs?”
“No.”
The officials find my box of tampons, open the box, unwrap a few tampons and peer down the tubes as if they were kaleidoscopes.
I look around, my face burning. But everyone else is having their possessions fingered in just the same way. I can tell the Old Hands from the New Hands. While the New Hands blush, sweat, and occasionally protest their treatment, the Old Hands have relaxed. They are chatting to each other, smoking cigarettes, ignoring the officials, waving to each other: “Where did you go?” “How was your trip?” “Join us for a beer later?”
“Do you have foreign currency?” My brookies and training bras, awkwardly neither childish nor yet grown-up, are brought out and shaken, as if money might fall from their folds.
“No.”
The officials frown, suspicious. “Then how will you pay your way while you stay in our country?”
“My mum and dad,” I say, my voice growing hoarse with near tears.
I burst breathlessly out into the steaming, humid air of the main airport where Mum, Dad, and Vanessa have grown bored, waiting for me to emerge. Mum is reading; Vanessa has wandered outside and is doing handstands on a patch of grass near a bed of bright canna lilies; Dad is smoking and staring at the ceiling.
Our letters are censored, clumsily torn open and read by the greasy-fingered immigration officials at the post office, so that by the time we get them, they are smudged and fingerprinted and rumpled and smell of fried fish, Coke’ n’ buns, and fried potato chips: the office food of Africa. We may make phone calls only when the operator at Liwonde is on duty so that our calls can be monitored. If the operator is taking the rest of the day off, or is at home with malaria, or if the operator is attending a funeral, we cannot make a phone call.
I do not remember anyone making or receiving a phone call in that house. The Liwonde operator and his family appeared to suffer the most unfortunate ill health.
Butchery
TOUCHING
THE GROUND
Mgodi Estate is set up on gently sloping, sandy soil, seeping into the horizon, where a yellowing haze hanging over Lake Chilwa (less a lake than a large, mosquito-breeding swamp) marks the end of the farm and the beginning of the fishermen and their dugout canoes and their low, smoking fires over which they have stretched the gutted bodies of fish (spread thin, like large irregular dinner plates). From the spot where our garden ends (which Mum immediately encloses within a grass fence), the bodies start, and stretch as far as you can see on any side. Wherever we drive in Malawi there are people, and people in the act of creating food, whether scratching into the red soil with hoes and seed or raking the lakes for fish. It doesn’t seem possible that there can be enough air for all the upturned mouths. The land bleeds red and eroding when it rains, staggering and sliding under the weight of all the prying, cultivating fingers.
Our house is big, airy, well-designed, and cool, with a mock Spanish grandeur that holds up only under fleeting scrutiny. Arches and a gauzed veranda surround the house; a large sitting room, a dining room, a passage down which there are three bedrooms and (unheard-of luxury!) two bathrooms. The kitchen, dominated by a massive woodstove and a deep sink, is set in a little cement hut behind the house where its heat and smoke can be contained. Our cook is a gentle, avuncular Muslim called Doud whose careful rhythm of prayer and cooking and cleaning washes like a balm from his small inferno behind the dining room and soothes in waves across our house. The floors are covered with shiny, peeling-in-places linoleum, and the made-on-the-farm doors and cupboards have swollen in the humidity and must be forced into their holes. Termites and lizards have set up house on the walls.
The large garden is thick with mango trees and is a sanctuary for birds, snakes, and the massive black and yellow four- to six-foot-long monitor lizards. There is a swimming pool and a fishpond behind the house, but these bodies of water are a stubborn, frothing, seething mess of algae in which monitor lizards float, their small faces hiding their large, hanging bodies, and in which there are scorpions and frogs in staggering numbers. There is still the occasional goldfish, from previous managers, hanging in the murky fishpond, but between the monitor lizards and the fishing birds, their numbers dwindle monthly.
Dad strides down the passage in the morning, when the sun is just beginning to finger the skyline, banging first on my door—“Rise and shine!”—and then on Vanessa’s on his way to the veranda where Doud has set tea and fresh biscuits on a tray. Vanessa and I each have two beds in our rooms. Vanessa has taken the mattress off her spare bed and has laid it up against her door to dampen Dad’s early-morning wake-up calls and to ensure that when she doesn’t appear for tea he can’t come crashing into her room shouting in blustery, sergeant-major tones, “C’ mon, rise and shine. What’s wrong with you? Beautiful day!”
Mum and I both work on the farm. Mum walks down to the grading shed (a massive hangarlike structure, into which all the tobacco from the farm has been brought) during the reaping season, or is driven down to the nursery where tobacco seedlings strive under the heat during the planting season.
Mum had been issued a motorbike, but after her first lesson ended (with a humiliating burst of feathers from a surprised guinea fowl) in a flower bed, she turned the motorbike over to me and either relied on me to drive her down to the tobacco seedlings, or walked, with the dogs fanning out in a destructive, chicken-killing wake behind her. There were constant requests from Malawians, toting bloodied fowl, for “compensation for chicken death.” We began to suspect that even Mum’s badly behaved dogs could not possibly have the energy (in the thick, swampy heat that hung almost permanently over the farm) to kill such a number of chickens and ducks over such a wide, diverse range (and all, apparently, within an hour or two). But we always paid up.
There was a constant, unspoken tension in the air, expressing the Malawian’s superiority over all other races in the country. Even Europeans who had been in Malawi for generations, and who held Malawian passports, were on permanent notice. A complaint from a disgruntled worker could have a foreigner (regardless of citizenship) thrown out of the country immediately and forever.
At the end of the farm, where the road bordered the beginning of the fishing villages, and all through the country, there were the blank faces of elaborately fronted, abandoned Indian stores whose owners had been unceremoniously expelled from the country as unpopular, money-grubbing foreigners. The stores had been handed over to Malawians, who soon lost interest in the long hours and careful scrutiny that are required to make a living from selling small bolts of cloth, single sticks of cigarettes, and individual sweets to an impoverished population. Now the windowless stores baked in the sun, their previously brightly painted walls bleaching, their floors li
ttered with the droppings of fowl and birds, their rafters hung with bats and caked with the crusty red tunnels of termites.
Pulling dugout canoe
I often ride the motorbike down to these abandoned stores, which are so hung about with ghosts and old dreams and a lost time. Sometimes, I see chickens scratching on the cracking concrete floors where once a tailor toiled strips of bright cloth through his fingers to the treadle of a Singer sewing machine. This is as close as I get to the swamp. From here, I sometimes see men, stripped to the waist, their backs silver-shiny with sweat, as they pull dugout canoes (made farther and farther from the lake as forests disappear into stumped scrubland in the wake of many busy axes) to the lake. The men sing as they pull the craft; their song is rhythmic and hypnotic, like a mantra.
But mostly I don’t have time to drive all the way down to the start of the swamp. I have to work. Dad says, “You can’t have a vehicle unless you use it for farm business.”
I leave the house after tea in the morning; I come home for lunch and then leave again until supper. My arms and legs grow muscled and brown as I manhandle the Honda through thick sand (which quickly turns to impassable mud in the sudden, violent rainstorms that sweep across the farm). I ride the avenues between the one thousand plots that make up Mgodi Estate. I am supposed to make sure that the tobacco has been planted with appropriate spaces, that the crop is weeded, that the plants are topped and reaped correctly.
It’s a long time past lunch and I have been stuck at the north end of the estate since mid-morning trying to persuade the Honda out of an abandoned well into which I fell while following the flight of a fish eagle. Now I am hurrying down the avenues, keeping half an eye on the tobacco crop, half an eye on the road, where chickens and children and dogs have settled in the shade cast by straw barns and mud huts. Suddenly, a child runs laugh-crying from a hut, arms outstretched, looking over his shoulder at his mother, who emerges just in time to see the child hit the motorbike side on. I am sent sprawling, the vehicle’s spinning wheels kicking up stinging sand into my eyes and face until it stalls. In the sudden, ringing silence, I scramble to my feet, spitting dirt from my mouth and wiping my eyes. I am dizzy with fright, but the child is still standing and unhurt. He is looking at me with astonishment, his arms still outstretched. His face trembles, his lip shakes, and then he starts to cry. His mother swoops up on us and scoops her son into her arms. She shifts a smaller sling of baby, a quiet bulge in a bright hammock of cloth, under her arm to make room for the bigger child. The baby bleats once and then is quiet again.