by Paul Theroux
So the solution of donor bulldozers had made the problem worse and put many manual laborers out of work.
‘The government had been paying five men to maintain the road. Then they stopped paying them. The road has been deteriorating ever since.’
‘The school in Livingstonia looked in pretty poor shape,’ I said.
‘They need twenty-four teachers to run it. There are only fourteen at the school. The English chap is leaving, so in a month they will only have thirteen teachers for about six hundred students. Teachers’ salaries are so low, you see.’
I said, ‘I’ m wondering why a foreign teacher should go to Livingstonia to teach if Malawians are not willing to make the sacrifice.’
With the sweetest smile she dismissed the question as much too logical.
‘What sort of vehicle do you have at Livingstonia?’ I asked, thinking of the white charity-dispensing Land-Rovers I saw everywhere.
‘An ambulance, but it’s nine years old and it’s off the road at the moment for repairs,’ she said. ‘Rather a sad story, I’m afraid. We were in Lilongwe a month ago buying parts for it, and tools, and a roll of material for school uniforms. We had tied them very securely in the back of a pick-up truck, but just as we got in and started to pull away some boys jumped on the truck and cut the ropes and stole everything.’
There was theft and vandalism everywhere, she said. A boy in Lilongwe had yanked a gold chain from her neck. She had shouted ‘Thief! Thief!’ but men sitting in cars nearby just watched as the boy ran away. The Livingstonia boat was damaged by vandals, and so the two clinics on the lakeshore that could be reached only by water were out of luck.
‘My husband’s very good at fixing things, though.’ When he wasn’t operating on patients, Don was patching boats and repairing motors. And it turned out that he had known those two other do-it-yourselfers, the Roseveares.
We talked about AIDS. Una said, ‘There must be a great deal in the country because we’re seeing many cases, and we’re in a very rural area.’ Hospital workers themselves were infected, two of the Livingstonia clinical workers were HIV positive.*
‘We have no means to treat AIDS patients – no medicines. They die at home. We had a man who had a severe hernia. We operated on him but he didn’t improve. We tested him. He was positive. He went home and died.’
‘Why do so many people have AIDS here? Is it just because they don’t use condoms?’
‘I asked that question some years ago,’ she said. ‘There has to be blood-to-blood contact, but many Africans have had the other STDs, and it’s those that create the possibility of infection. But we see so many other ailments. Lots of malnourished children. Lots of anemia. It’s the malaria – it destroys the red blood cells.’
We had crossed the forest of the plateau, the dense pinewoods that had been planted fifty or sixty years before as a source of paper pulp. But the scheme hadn’t worked – too costly to transport the logs, too expensive to manage – and so the trees were being cut down for fuel and charcoal. Once through the forest we came to the moorland and the outposts of the plateau, sodden and isolated villages, huts with roofs of black rotted thatch. Then we descended through the rain and mist to flatter land, great stretches with the bouldery hills I had seen in Tanzania and Kenya – Rift Valley features, the remnants of the age of vulcanism. Some egg-shaped boulders were the size of small mountains.
At Mzimba where we stopped to refuel I looked around the market. There was hardly anything to eat for sale, some dirt-caked roots and wilted greens.
‘It’s the time of year,’ Una said. ‘The crops aren’t ready. Last season’s food’s been eaten. And, you know, children in Africa aren’t a priority. We see children in very advanced stages of malnutrition – bellies distended, skin peeling off. Some of the children are dead by the time they get to us.’
Since this mission nurse of long experience was such a fund of information, I asked her about simple hygiene. Why were buses and matatus and enclosed places so much smellier than they had seemed long ago? Was I more fastidious now as an older fussier man? Asking her this, I struck a nerve.
‘Oh, the smell!’ she said. ‘In church when they are all together – the smell in church!’ She shut her eyes and smiled in horror. ‘But you see there is no hot water for washing. And they don’t wash sick people – they think it’s bad for the patient, that washing will make them cold and more ill.’
At Kasungu we stopped for passengers and I got out to stretch my legs. The rain was coming down so hard I had to shelter inside the depot, where I complained about the rain.
‘That is because you are a European,’ said an African in the garage where I was sheltering, looking out at the downpour. ‘I am an African. We like rain. We don’t like the sun as Europeans do. Europeans lie down in the sun almost naked. Africans – do you ever see them do that? Eh! No! The sun makes us hot. But the rain is good. It gives us a good temperature. It makes the crops grow. Unfortunately now we have floods and the maize cobs are rotting in the fields.’
This seemed to me a pretty fair assessment of cultural difference.
Back on the bus I said to Una, ‘It’s such an uphill battle. Do you ever ask yourself, “What’s the point?” ’
‘We do what we can,’ she said. And you know that Livingstonia is very beautiful. The lake is lovely. The people have good hearts.’
‘But so little has changed. This is practically the same country I left thirty-five years ago. Maybe worse. The government doesn’t even care enough to help you.’
This was too broad a subject. She said with what seemed like hesitation but something that was actually a statement of fortitude, ‘It’s – just - light a little candle.’
We passed grass huts, smallholdings of tobacco, some of them being harvested, soggy fields. Not much traffic, though many ragged people marching down the road.
‘My husband is sixty-four. He’s going to retire sometime soon. The government has no plan to replace him. They probably won’t send anyone.’ She looked grim, saying this. ‘If we’re not here, there’ll be no one
‘What’ll happen then?’
‘They’ll die,’ she said softly. ‘They’ll just die.’
We were in open country, nothing in the distance but bush, and clouds pressing on the horizon, everything green. I had been nagging about the problems, but Una the optimist had reminded me that Livingstonia was lovely; and this sloping bush was lovely, too – empty Africa, green from the long rains.
But she was pondering her absence, because after a lengthy pause she spoke again, ‘That’s what happened before. They just died.’
She went back to watching the road ahead, for we had entered the outer villages of Lilongwe district, the tumbled huts, some mud-walled, others just shacks. I admired this woman, for her humility especially. One of her greatest virtues was that she was unaware of how virtuous she was. She had not uttered a single word of sanctimony. She had no idea that I was a writer. Her sympathy was tempered by realism, yet she had not complained of her fate. No Malawian nurse or doctor would have gone near this public bus, nor taken the three-day road trip from Livingstonia to Lilongwe.
Medical and teaching skills were not lacking in Africa, even in distressed countries like Malawi. But the will to use them was often non-existent. The question was, should outsiders go on doing jobs and taking risks that Africans refused?
I decided to stay in Lilongwe for a week before heading farther south. I needed a rest from my incessant travel and I had to remind my family that I was still alive. I chose a hotel on the main street. Third World luxury resorts are one aberration – Malawi even had a few on the lake. But Third World hotels are another, just as awful, because they get the economists and the UN people and the refugee experts and the heads of charities and the visiting opportunists and politicians. Malawi had the worst and most expensive hotels I encountered on my whole trip, and all charged two daily rates – a low one for Africans, an exorbitant one for foreigners. They were most of
them state-owned hotels, run by South African management companies.
‘What is this?’ I said at the Lilongwe Hotel, pointing to a 10 percent addition on a hotel bill.
‘Service charge.’
‘Where is the service? There is no one to carry bags, no one sweeps the floors, the room isn’t clean, the toilet is broken. You know what I mean? No service, so why the charge?’
‘It is the name. “Service charge.”. Ten percent, plus-plus.’
The charities and foreign donors had had a questionable effect on the poverty and misery in the country, but they were positively destructive when it came to hotels, because they were expense-accounters for whom money was no object. Those of us who were budget-conscious and aimless wanderers were punished for their profligacy. But I stayed at the bad expensive hotel; I had no choice. Lying in bed there I rehearsed the writing of this paragraph, and during the day in the week I spent in Lilongwe I busied myself writing my erotic novella.
Lilongwe was two towns. One was the old market town of shops and gas stations and crowds of idle ragged boys; the other was the adjacent much newer town, the nation’s capital, of wide streets, government offices, the presidential palace, official residences, mansions and embassies. Soldiers and policemen stood guard all over the streets of the capital, but in slummy Lilongwe Old Town everyone complained of crime, especially the Indian shopkeepers.
Chased from the rural areas by Hastings Banda’s party thugs, Indians had come to old commercial Lilongwe where life was safer and they were for a time lost in the shuffle. One feature of Banda’s dictatorial rule was that political violence was common, but that civilian crime -car theft, burglary, rape, murder – was comparatively rare. This had changed, in fact reversed – rape and murder were now more common than political terror.
Banda was gone now, after thirty-four years in power, and his name had been removed from the national stadium and the roads and schools and hospitals. Under the new president, Bakili Muluzi, the man who had put his chubby face on the money, the streets were unsafe and house break-ins were frequent. Muluzi had been seen as a populist, the anti-Banda; now he was turning into a despot. As a Muslim in a mostly Christian country, one of his most ardent foreign supporters was the Libyan government of Muammar Ghaddafi. The Malawian proverb explaining someone like Muluzi was, ‘Raise a python and he will swallow you.’
‘We could sleep at night in our homes before,’ a man named Salim told me. He ran a restaurant. He had joined me at a table while I ate one of his samosas. ‘We can’t feel safe now. Not now. There are thieves!’
‘I used to live here,’ I said.
‘What do you think?’ he said, challenging me.
‘You tell me, Salim.’
‘It is worse, worse, worse. And not getting better. Getting much worse!’
But, being watchful, I walked the streets of Lilongwe, explored the market – an enormous emporium of second-hand clothes, here as elsewhere being retailed by hustlers who had gotten them free from charities. There was so little traffic that Africans habitually walked in the middle of the street. I was warned by Indians of theft, but I was poorly dressed and though I had valuables in my bag (cash, passport, artifacts) I carried nothing that was worth stealing. Most of my clothes had come from second-hand markets like this.
Even the prostitutes avoided me, unless I bought them drinks, which I did out of pure loneliness, like one of those geezers you see on back streets at odd hours feeding stray cats, a displacement activity this much resembled. All the talk of AIDS kept me detumescent. Usually, I sat alone under the trees at the bar next to the Hotel Lilongwe. Sometimes I joined a table of loitering girls and talked to them. They were nicely dressed and even demure.
‘We are schoolgirls. We are all cousins.’
‘I am studying secretarial.’
‘Myself, I am studying business.’
‘Me, I am working for the Anything Goes shop.’
They were in their mid- and late teens, not married, no children, and didn’t drink beer, only soft drinks. They giggled and murmured and meowed, they told me about themselves, asked me questions, teased me.
‘You are not old – what? – forty or forty-five.’
‘Have another Coke, dear!’
There were Christmas lights tangled in the tree branches, the music was mellow, the place was not rowdy. For an abused traveler who had been catching buses and trucks and trains through the whole of the Great Rift Valley, from Ethiopia to Malawi, it was a novelty and a pleasure just to stay in one place and eat regular meals, take baths, have my laundry done, hold meaningless conversations, write my story, and do the New York Times crossword, faxed from home.
‘What are you doing, Mr Paul?’
‘Just a puzzle. Filling in words. Ah, the clue is “Forbidden tea.” ’
They leaned over, smelling of perfume and face powder and hair oil, the bodices of their crunchy dresses like prom gowns of my youth, pressed against me.
‘I guess that’s “taboo oolong.” It fits.’
When I had finished and was tucking the folded puzzle into my pocket, one of the girls would lean over and whisper with warm breaths, her lips grazing my ear, ‘I want to give you a massage, Mr Paul. Please take me. I am good.’
But I went chastely to my room and lay there alone on my damp mildewed bed staring at the stains like faces on the ceiling and thought: What went wrong here?
The newspapers still ran headlines such as ‘A New Journey from Poverty to Prosperity’ (reporting a speech by the Minister of Agriculture) and ‘Fresh Start in the Ag Sector’ (American-funded scheme for tobacco farmers to switch to growing pigeon peas and soy beans) and ‘Tobacco Auction Projections Raise Hopes’ (but a week later the auction prices were a fifth of what they had been the year before). I thought: What gives?
Still smarting from having been rebuffed as a volunteer speaker, I asked to see the American ambassador. The usual form in a book such as this, answering the question of attribution, was to describe this man as ‘informed sources’ or a ‘high-level Western diplomat’ or ‘someone I happened to meet.’ But the meeting was so brief and so anodyne it needs no camouflage, and his being a diplomat made me smile, as I was talking with him.
I had the impression the ambassador did not like me any more than the embassy woman, apparently his ally, who had said You wouldn’t believe the week I had. He was about my age, rather benign on the whole but visibly seeming to suppress a mood of fuss and fret. Was it my faded American thrift-shop clothes from the African market? More likely it was my wild-eyed frustration, my reckless criticism, my incautious gibes, but I was road weary from my dark star safari, and Africa’s fortunes had become my obsessive subject. In other countries I was a detached observer, but absurd as it seemed, I took the Malawian situation personally.
I said, ‘I used to teach here. I know the country pretty well. I even speak the local language. I offered to give some lectures here but your Public Affairs Officer wasn’t interested and didn’t do anything to help me.’
The ambassador was not provoked.
I said, ‘I suppose you get lots of offers like that.’
The ambassador sipped his drink and pushed a saucer of peanuts at me as though to mollify me.
I said, ‘Nothing has improved in this country, for goodness sake. I mean, name one thing.’
The ambassador said, ‘There is no political terror. There was before.’
I said, ‘I’ve been frisked and delayed at twenty roadblocks from Karonga to here.’
The ambassador said, ‘I’m planning to make a trip to the north.’
I said, ‘The roads are terrible. We had to push the bus.’
The ambassador said, ‘The roads are much better than they were.’
I yawned and rounded my arm and waggled some peanuts in my hand.
The ambassador said, ‘My last post was the Congo. In the Congo there aren’t any roads.’
I said, ‘What good are roads if there are no motor vehicles?�
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The ambassador said, ‘There are buses.’
I said, ‘Ever take one?’ But that was such a low blow, I added, ‘And tobacco is the cash crop. Tobacco!’
The ambassador said, ‘Tobacco can now be grown by smallholders. It was a government monopoly before.’
I said, ‘It’s a declining commodity.’
The ambassador said, ‘Coffee production is increasing.’
I said, ‘The price is down. Coffee is another money loser.’
The ambassador said, ‘This is all anecdotal of course. But I feel some changes for the better are in the air.’
I said, ‘Well, as a diplomat you’re paid to be an optimist.’
The ambassador scowled into his drink for my presumptuous remark. He did not like that imputation at all.
I said, ‘Honestly, I am really depressed here. Nothing works, the schools are awful, the infant mortality rate is still the highest in the world. I think the government wants to have bad schools, because ignorant people are easier to govern.’
The ambassador said, ‘The government is committed to improving the schools. But teachers are poorly paid.’
I said, ‘So what? No one ever became a teacher to get rich.’
The ambassador said, And there are some exciting new developments in telecommunications in Malawi. Cell phone technology. Next year perhaps.’
His ghastly credulous phrase ‘next year’ made me laugh as much as his mention of cell phones. ‘We hope by this time next year’, Mrs Jellyby says of her African Project for the natives of Borrioboola-Gha, and Dickens is making satire of the phrase. But the ambassador bore a greater resemblance to Mrs Jellyby’s fellow philanthropist, Mr Quale (‘with large shining knobs for temples’), whose project was ‘for teaching the coffee colonists to teach the natives to turn piano-forte legs and establish an export trade.’ Make-work schemes and cottage industries started by the present-day Jellybys and Quales were common In Africa. What had seemed an insanely mocking idea to Charles Dickens 150 years ago was considered a solemn hope for Malawi now.