by Paul Theroux
Leaving the Soche library I felt as though I was emerging from a dark hole of ignorance and plunder. We walked across to the classrooms, which were as seedy as everything else, but in some respects worse, for the verandas had not been swept and the grass had not been cut, and there was litter on the paths. What excuse was there for that?
‘There’s a serious money shortage in this country,’ Anne said.
‘That’s probably true,’ I said. ‘But how much does a broom cost? The students could sweep this place and cut the grass. I don’t think it’s a money problem. I think it’s something more serious. No one cares. You’re here to do the work, and you’re willing, so why should anyone help?’
I’m not just teaching,’ she said. ‘I’m learning a lot.’
‘Absolutely – that’s a good reason to be here,’ I said. ‘That’s why I liked being here.’
We walked through the building to the schoolyard, where some students lingered, watching us. This field was where morning assembly was held, a bigger space than I had known, but now paved with cinders and bordered by more unswept and damp-stained classroom blocks. A stout confident-looking woman in a green dress stepped out from a classroom, where she had obviously been eating, for she was licking her fingers. The headmistress.
‘This is Mr Theroux. He used to teach here.’
‘Thank you. That’s interesting.’
Still with her fingers in her mouth, the headmistress returned to the classroom, to her meal.
Anne and I walked on to the assembly ground. I looked around the dismal school and thought how I had longed to return here. I had planned to spend a week helping, perhaps teaching, reliving my days as a volunteer. This was my Africa. You’re planting a seed! some people had said. But the seed had not sprouted and now it was decayed and probably moribund.
Perhaps reading my thoughts, Anne said, ‘I have my doubts sometimes. I say to my mother, “What if we just upped and left? All of us. Every last one.” ’
‘What do you think would happen?’
‘Then the people here would have to think for themselves. They’d have to decide what’s best for them – what they want. No one would influence them. Maybe they would say they wanted education – and they’d have to do the teaching. They’d have to do what we’re doing.’
‘For your measly salary.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Or maybe they’d decide that they wouldn’t want a change. They might allow things to stay as they are. Lots of the people in villages are fine – they’re not miserable.’
These serious questions from someone who was willing to work – the person I had been – gave me hope. Not enough Africans were asking the same questions.
I wanted to see some African volunteers – caring for the place, sweeping the floor, cutting grass, washing windows, gluing the spines back on to the few remaining books, scrubbing the slime off the classroom walls. Or, if that was not their choice, I wanted to see them torching the place and burning it to the ground, and dancing around the flames; then plowing everything under and planting food crops. Until either of those things happened I would not be back. I felt no desire to linger, and certainly none to work here. I wished Anne Holt lots of luck and I left the place in her hands, feeling that I would never be back, that this was my last safari here.
I did not know the answer; I didn’t even know the question. A kind of clarity came to me: I saw the pointlessness, almost triviality, of my staying and attempting to do some teaching. That effort would have been something purely to please myself. I did not feel despair at having been prevented from doing it, but rather a solemn sense that since only Africans could define their problems, only Africans could fix them.
And maybe none of these flawed schools was the problem, but only foreign institutions like foreign contraptions – like the big metal containers that were sent full of machinery or computers that were distributed and used for a while, then broke and were never fixed. I saw them all over Africa, the cast-off container at the edge of town. Whatever their contents might have been, what remained as the most valuable object was the metal container itself. The empty things became sturdy dwellings, and there were always people or animals living in them, like credulous corrupted tribesmen in a cargo cult.
On my way back to Zomba I drove to Blantyre (named for David Livingstone’s birthplace in Scotland) and stopped at a shop on a side street, Supreme Furnishers, to see another of my students, Steve Kamwendo. Steve was now branch manager, aged fifty-one, father of six, a big healthy man with the powerful features and chiefly presence of Vernon Jordan, Bill Clinton’s expert in damage control. He hugged me and said he was glad to see me. I told him where I had been. His face fell.
‘You went to Soche?’ he said. ‘Did you shed tears?’
That summed it up. Anyone who felt I had been too hard on my old school I could send to Steve, who lamented that the school was in a bad way, that crime was terrible and life in general very hard. His own business was good. Malawian-made furniture, and bedsteads and lamps from South Africa and Zimbabwe were popular, because furniture imported from outside Africa was so expensive.
‘Your old students are doing well, but the country is not doing well. People are different – much poorer, not respectful.’
‘What about your kids, Steve?’
‘They are in America – four of them are in college in Indiana. One is graduating in June.’
By any standards, Steve’s was a success story. All his savings went towards educating his children elsewhere and, though he was gloomy about Malawi’s prospects, he was encouraging his children to return to the country to work.
‘It’s up to them now,’ I said.
I returned to Zomba sooner than I had expected, with an unanswered question in my mind. Why were the schools so underfunded?
‘I can tell you that,’ Gertrude Rubadiri said, her feet squarely on the ground as usual. ‘The money was taken.’
It seemed that two million American dollars, earmarked for education from a European donor country, had recently been embezzled by the finance minister and two other politicians in a scam that involved the creation of fictional schools and fictional teachers. More money was unaccounted for. The men were in jail, awaiting trial but the money was gone and would never be found.
So there was a good reason for the broken windows and dead lights and unpainted walls of the school at Soche and every other school in the country. A large and important part of the education budget had been stolen by the government official to whom it had been entrusted.
The next day the Rubadiris invited some friends for dinner. One man, very fat and self-possessed, had been a Malawian ambassador in Europe and was now a bureaucrat, living in Zomba.
‘You have seen so much of the country, Paul! So, tell us, what do you think?’
‘The visitor usually brings a sharp knife,’ someone said – another proverb. The stranger was known for having the keenest perceptions.
I did not know where to begin, but for some reason I kept seeing in my mind the main road through the northern towns, the outposts of the plateaus – Karonga, Livingstonia, Rumphi, Ekwendeni, Mzuzu – the empty Indian shops, the women squatting on the ground, selling bananas and peanuts. I mentioned this vision of rural decline, but I didn’t say decline, I said change.
‘The Indians were chased away,’ the former ambassador said. ‘It wasn’t a law, it wasn’t Gazetted. But that is a detail. As soon as the president made the speech against the Indians – mid-seventies about -they closed their shops. The Indians went to the UK or South Africa.’
I knew this but I wanted to hear him say it. I went on, ‘What was the motive behind the president’s speech?’
‘We wanted Africans to be given a chance to run the shops. So that Africans could go into business. The shops were handed over. I bought one myself!’
‘With what result?’
‘Ha-ha! Not much! It didn’t work. They all got finished!’
He was saying: We kick
ed out the Indians, we took over their shops, we failed – so what? End of story. He even tried to change the subject, but I was interested and I asked him to describe the failure in a little more detail.
‘Well, as you know, Indians are good at business,’ he said. Then laughing in dismay as though he had just dropped a slice of bread butter-side down, ‘What do we know about these things? We had no capital. The shops failed – almost all of them! Ha! They were abandoned, as you saw. And the rest were turned into chibuku [beer] bars.’
The result in the rural areas was: no shops at all, and twenty-seven years later, still no shops. So the whole scheme had backfired. When I pointed this out, one of the other African guests began, perversely, denigrating the Indians for their business acumen in a mocking voice.
‘They sit there, you see, and they have these little pieces of paper, and have these columns of numbers.’ He spoke pompously about the Indians as though describing demented obsessional children with broken toys. ‘And one Indian is running the calculator, and another is counting the sacks of flour and the tins of condensed milk. One-two three. One-two-three.’
What this educated African in his plummy voice intended as mockery – the apparent absurdity of all this counting – was the description of people doing a simple inventory of goods in a shop.
I said, ‘But that’s how a shop is run. That’s normal business. You make a list of what you’ve sold, so you know what stuff to reorder.’
‘Indians know no other life!’ he said. ‘Just this rather secluded life – all numbers and money and goods on shelves. One-two-three.’
‘Record-keeping is the nature of small business, isn’t it?’ I resented his belittling the shopkeeper, yet I kept calm so as to draw him out. ‘The profit margins are so small.’
‘But we Africans are not raised in this way,’ he said, nodding to the others for approval. ‘What do we care about shops and counting? We have a much freer existence. We have no interest in this – shops are not our strong point.’
‘Why close the shops then?’
That stumped them, but not for long.
‘Maybe something can be done with them. Selling is not our heritage. We are not business people.’
‘Women are selling soap and matches and cooking oil.’
‘But not in shops.’
‘No, they’re sitting in the mud in Mzuzu,’ I said, feeling agitated.
‘I’ll tell you why these shops didn’t work out,’ the former ambassador said. ‘When Africans run businesses their families come and stay with them and eat all their food – just live off them. As soon as an African succeeds in something he has his family cadging from him. Not so?’
‘That is true, brother,’ the other man said.
‘And we are not cut out for this shop-keeping and book-keeping and,’ he winked at me, ‘number crunching.’
I had never heard such bullshit. Well, perhaps I had and not recognized it. The man was saying: This is all too much for us. We cannot learn how to do business. We must be given money, we must be given sinecures, because we don’t know how to make a profit.
I said, ‘If you’re no good at book-keeping and keeping track of expenses, why do you expect donor countries to go on giving you money?’
This was a bit too blunt and it had the effect of ending this particular discussion.
Rubadiri the host said, as though to explain my irritation, ‘Paul has had a very powerful experience, returning to his old school. That is why he was such a good teacher. It meant so much to him.’
Feeling patronized, I said, ‘No lights. The place is falling down. They stole the books. I know what you’re going to say, but - hey - why doesn’t anyone sweep the dirty floor?’
‘There is a panel, studying the education system.’
I thought: Oh, bollocks, and drank another beer and sat back in my chair while they talked about other things.
I did not hear what they were saying. I heard rats scurrying and squabbling in the space above the wooden ceiling of the old colonial house. The open window admitted lovely gossamer-winged dragonflies and yellow moths and big bumbling beetles.
The stout man was staring at me. I was at a loss for words. Finally I said, ‘Which country were you ambassador in?’
‘Germany. Four years.’
‘Lovely museums,’ I said.
‘I only went to a museum once,’ he said. ‘They gave a dinner at the museum – inside, you see. Tables and chairs set up where the pictures were. We ate and looked at the pictures. It was very nice. I didn’t go to any other museums.’
‘Lovely music,’ I said.
‘I learned a bit about classical music. Up to then my favorite music was pata-pata.’That was South African shanty town jive. ‘But I still love pata-pata. It’s my Mozart!’
‘Did you travel much in Germany?’
‘Ah, I was in Berlin, at that hotel, the Adlon. So beautiful. It costs $300 a night.’
I resisted the gibe that the Mount Soche, a mediocre and pretentious hotel in Blantyre, cost $250 a night, because it was where all the economists and aid people and political observers on junkets stayed.
The former ambassador said, ‘One night, I was having a drink in the bar of the Adlon – my wife was with Mrs President when our president was visiting Germany. I looked up and I saw James Bond – that chap, what’s-his-name, Pierce Brosnan. I went up to him. ‘Hello. I want a few words with you.’ He said, ‘Yes?’ I was actually talking to him! Oh, he was so nice. I had nothing to write on, so he signed the menu. My daughter was very cross. ‘Why didn’t you take me to see him, Papa?’ Yes, that James Bond chap, I was talking to him. In Berlin!’
After the dinner party broke up and the guests left I sat with David Rubadiri, feeling so irritable it was as though I was experiencing the symptoms of an illness. I drank some more beer. The loud thumps and scrabbling of the rats in the space above the wooden ceiling had died down, had become scratchings and squealings. The large glider-winged dragonflies still drifted through the windows and seemed as large and nimble as swallows.
I did not dare approach the subject of how appalled I felt that so much effort had been wasted here, for Rubadiri was being friendly. In his expansive mood he was a romantic. He had lived through the worst years of Malawi, he had occupied high positions, he had been an exile, and he was now powerful again, running the national university, though it was millions in debt and so behind in salaries that all classes had been cancelled. Students were threatening to hold demonstrations in Zomba.
‘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 m
e? 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.