by Paul Theroux
‘You buy me kachasu?’ the immigration official said.
It was Malawian gin, made from bananas. I bought two. We drank. I said, ‘I want to sleep next door tonight, okay?’
He shrugged, not saying yes or no. I bought him another glass and when I started to walk away he said, ‘Come. You can sleep.’
Boiling the flour with water in the blackened pot, Karsten had mixed up some nsima. He mashed the dried fish with greens. I opened a can of stew, heated it on the fire and ate that with the nsima. We squatted around the smoky fire and talked.
‘How far can we get tomorrow? Maybe the Zambezi?’
He made an equivocating face and said, ‘Mphepho’ –- wind.
If there was a headwind we probably would not make it as far as the Zambezi, he said. The dugout rode so high in the water that the wind affected us more than other shallower craft.
It was hardly seven thirty when we turned in. I reclined on my bench in the shed up the road and though I could hear the idiot music coming from the bar, I fell into sleep so deep I did not awaken until Karsten came for me in the darkness of early morning.
We slid into the river and paddled in the predawn silence for almost an hour. The sun came up – no warning, a flicker, the whole sky lighted and then the powerful heat and blaze of the quickly risen sun. Ahead I could see a single loaf-shaped mountain, Morrumbala. My map showed a town nearby called Morrumbala, but there was no sign of that, only this beautiful rounded thing rising 4000 feet from the flat marshy land by the river. There was not another hill or high spot anywhere.
We toiled towards it all that hot morning. When Livingstone had come through here in 1859 he urged some of his crew to climb it. The Zambezi and the Shire had allowed Livingstone to penetrate the African interior with all its marvels – lakes Shirwa and Nyasa, the country we know today as Malawi, the labyrinthine marsh on the Shire with its abundant elephants, and the mountain Morrumbala, or ‘The Lofty Watch Tower.’ But for Livingstone it was a horrible trip on a riverboat that had too deep a draft for this river, and it was slow going through the sandbanks and the marsh. He had gone at a time of widespread famine, and the river was full of crocs. The verdict of one of Livingstone’s men was that the Shire was ‘a river of death.’
As a monumental land feature, sculpted like a citadel, Morrumbala had been regarded as a prize from the earliest days of Portuguese exploration. In the 1640s, this general area was the haunt of Portuguese sertanejos – literally, backwoodsmen – each of whom chose a region to rule. All were colonists from the mother country, but while some were aristocrats, others were criminals. They were conquistadores, united in their greed and in their delusions of grandeur, for they made themselves into provincial potentates, lived like little kings, created retinues, cultivated courtiers, and owned and traded in slaves.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century sertanejos inhabited the Mozambican hinterland, turning featureless bush into a number of rural kingdoms, where they amassed silver and gold and ivory. Conrad’s Kurtz is a Belgian version of a sertanejo. In his doublet and hose, carrying an arquebus, the wild-eyed Portuguese backwoodsman is colorful in a contemptible way, and an illustration of Sir Richard Burton’s remark, ‘There is a time to leave the Dark Continent and that is when the idée fixe begins to develop itself. “Madness comes from Africa.” ’
The immediate area of Morrumbala was held in the mid-seventeenth century by a self-appointed Lord of the Manor, a backwoodsman named Sisnanda Dias Bayão, who settled in Sena, not far away. The Africans farther up the Shire and in Sena-land generally were not warlike or well-armed and so Bayão had an easy time suppressing them, enslaving them and putting them to work, searching for silver and gold. There was a gold rush of brief duration in this area in Bayão’s time, all those years ago. When the colonial government objected to Bayão’s methods and pursued him, he holed up on the mountain. At the same time, because of its gullies and caves, the wooded slopes of Morrumbala became a favorite route for escaped slaves. Morrumbala as a refuge persisted to the present day. The mountain was a favorite hiding place for fleeing soldiers in the vicious guerrilla war, twenty-five years of it, fought in the Mozambican bush in the twentieth century.
The wind picked up in the afternoon, riffling the river, pushing our boat sideways. To steel himself, Karsten paused in his paddling, fired up a doobie, and with wild staring eyes, headed downriver again.
As with the last time I had come here, for many miles downstream we could see Morrumbala. For its isolation and its solitary strangeness - no one on it or around it – I regarded Morrumbala as an inspiration. I fastened my attention on it and delighted in it. Its shape was more that of a plateau than a mountain. There were abandoned farms and fruit orchards at the top, we were told by Africans in passing dugouts. How had the Portuguese gotten up and down the mountain, I wondered.
‘They were carried by Africans,’ Wilson said.
I could just imagine a pink Portuguese planter in a palanquin, fanning himself as he was being trundled by four Africans up the steep mountainside. Abandoned houses and plantations, remnants of the Portuguese colonial presence, were visible in many places on the riverbanks. They had the melancholy look of ruins in remote places, mute but solid signs of a lost world. The river itself was swampy in some places and just marsh in others – a series of divided streams running through dense reeds. ‘A swampy plain sacred to buffaloes and water buck and mosquitoes,’ a traveler in 1863 wrote - one of Livingstone’s companions. ‘We almost despair of finding the waters of the Shire in the various currents that mingle there.’
But Karsten was never in any doubt of the stream. He had paddled the river so often that he had come to know the backwaters and the wrong turns. We came to a village. I thought Karsten was intending to buy fish or fruit, so I rested on my paddle. But Karsten had grabbed the food box and was swinging it to the bank.
‘What’s happening?’
‘We sleep here.’
There was still at least two hours of daylight and the wind was not bad. I could see a lovely bend in the river beckoning, a stillness and gilded look in the reach. I said, why not go a few more miles?
But he pointed to the bend in the river.
‘Bad people there.’ His saying this in English made them seem much more dangerous.
That simple statement was all it took to persuade me to leap ashore and claw my way up the steep bank and through a crowd of about thirty women and children. A cluster of village huts stood on higher ground a little distance away.
They watched us laboring with our boxes and bundles, but I knew they were not idle spectators. Anything we did not want – bits of plastic or paper, tin cans, anything reusable – they were ready to seize. A little while later, after we started the fire, a woman crouched next to me as I opened a can of beans. She said, ‘Wanga,’ ‘That’s mine,’ meaning the can when it was empty.
Many people were watching me, children sitting in a semi-circle, tall skinny girls standing behind them, ten or a dozen women and a few men standing at a little distance, perhaps thirty people altogether, observing Karsten, Wilson and me, steaming nsima, slopping food out of cans. They had enough to eat themselves – this was not a place deprived of food, but a village where the men fished and the women tilled the fields. Watching us was their evening entertainment.
I became aware of a ripple of laughter that ran through the watchers and I turned to see a small ugly man tottering towards me. From his hideous face, bumpy with boils and growths and seeping wounds, and his withered fingers, I took him to be a leper. But he might also have been an epileptic, because the fresh bruises and his smashed nose were injuries I associated with grand mal sufferers who repeatedly fall down in their seizures.
Anyway, for his deformities he must have been considered the village fool – blameless, an object of scorn, teased but also a teaser when he found someone weirder-looking than himself. This would be me, the mzungu, who had wandered into his village.
He took t
o poking his finger in my plate of nsima and pretending to snatch my food. His finger was truly disgusting. His face was stained and gleaming from the leaking wounds, his eyes were crazed-looking, his hands were scaly, leprous, and very dirty. When he opened his mouth to laugh I could see his teeth were broken.
His antics roused the watching villagers to laugh, some in mockery, others in embarrassment, for they were not sure how I was going to react to this teasing. But I could see that the little battered man, miserable in his disfigurement and probably simple minded, was like the Fool in a Shakespeare play, the court jester who is licensed to do or say anything he likes.
‘This man is stupid,’ Karsten said, on my behalf using an unequivocal Chichewa word, wopusa.
But I beckoned the man over and when I gestured I saw a kind of fear come into his eyes. The watching people laughed as the man wobbled towards me on his twisted feet.
I said, ‘Mukufuna mankhwala?’ (Do you want medicine?) and gave him some chocolate cookies I had bought in the little shop in Marka village.
Needing to protect his cookies from the villagers, he ran away. Then we ate in peace, though we were watched the whole time. As time passed the children crept closer, nearer to our dying fire.
At last, hoarse with shyness, one of them said, ‘We want medicine, too.’
I gave them cookies and sent them away. Karsten handed the pots and plates to a woman to wash in the river, and he lay back and fired up a postprandial joint.
Since we were sleeping in the open the only question I had in my mind was whether there were hyenas in the area. Hyenas root among rubbish, and though they stay out of huts they have been known to nibble human feet protruding from hut doors, and in some instances to chew the face of the person sleeping nearest the entrance.
‘Palibe mafisi,’ Wilson said – ‘No hyenas.’ But I wanted to hear it from a villager, so when the woman came back with the washed plates I asked her. I liked her reply, which sounded poetic.
‘Palibe mafisi, alipo mfiti – No hyenas, lots of ghosts.
Curious to ask Karsten a political question I said, ‘Do you ever think about the president?’
‘No. Because he never thinks about me,’ he said.
Urging Karsten to pile wood on the fire to keep the snakes away, I sprayed my head and hands and zipped myself into my sleeping bag and went to sleep.
Hyenas and snakes were not the problem. The most dangerous aspects of the Zambezi were almost invisible – the wind, the mosquitoes which carry malaria, the biting tse-tse flies, or the innocent-looking fruit of a riverside plant called ‘buffalo beans’ which causes painful welts on the skin. There were also spiders, scorpions and in some places big wet frogs which positioned themselves near anyone sleeping in the open and then jumped with a gulp in a great smothering flop on to your face.
We left before dawn, slipping away into the still water, as we had done the day before. I asked Karsten if we would get to the Zambezi that day. Maybe, he grunted.Kapena. He seemed intent on his paddling, and so I joined them, using a board for a paddle, three of us propelling the dugout forward in silence. It was only after sunup that I remembered how he had said the day before, of the stretch we had traveled, Bad people there.
In mid-morning, I was sitting eating a mango, and Karsten said, ‘There are some hippos coming.’
We rounded a bend and there they were, snuffling, and looking fierce. Next to humans, they were the most territorial of river critters. I tried to think of the wild animals I had seen since I had left Cairo, but all I came up with were the hyenas in Harar, various antelope in Ethiopia and Kenya, the flamingos in Lake Naivasha, and the game I had spotted from the train in Tanzania. These were my first hippos in months. Hippo meat was sold in Zambezi markets in Mozambique, so Karsten said. Given the rate of deforestation and the growth in population it was predicted by environmentalists that the day was not far off when the bigger game would be poached out of existence.
Around noon we came to a ferry landing, where a barge was approaching from the east bank, bringing a pick-up truck across the river. The white man at the wheel of the vehicle that rolled on to the landing was a South African farmer, growing red peppers on an estate he had bought cheap from a Portuguese who had bolted. He said he enjoyed living in the remote Mozambican bush.
‘South Africa used to be like this,’ he said. ‘I don’t like what’s happening down there.’
He had an African foreman to translate work orders for him and to manage the workers, but he seemed completely out of his element - a plump sunburned man in a floppy hat and shorts. The variety of red pepper he grew he sold to a Dutch pharmaceutical firm – the pepper was used in some sort of medicine.
‘Aren’t you afraid of people coming out of the bush and trespassing or breaking in?’
He thrust out his chest and made a fist and said with growly authority, ‘They should be afraid of me.’
Karsten and Wilson wandered towards me obliquely to ask for some money to buy soft drinks being sold out of a burlap bag – soaked to cool them – by a woman sitting on a crate. I gave them some Malawian money and they walked away. They were very skinny, very ragged, barefoot, bushy haired.
‘Those your chaps?’
It was a significant question, the moment when one mzungu sized up another’s workers. ‘My Africans are better than your Africans,’ was a serious colonial boast. The Africans in the white farmer’s pick-up truck were dressed in sturdy overalls and floppy brimmed bush hats. Most wore shoes, one wore rubber boots. By Mozambican standards they were well dressed.
Karsten and Wilson’s clothes were purely symbolic – Karsten’s ripped T-shirt and split shorts, Wilson’s long-sleeved white shirt draped over his shoulders in ribbons. His shorts, too, were split.
‘Yup. Those are my guys,’ I said. And I thought: In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
Farther downstream as the river became wider, showing shallows and mud banks, we saw more hippos. There were herons, too, and hawks, and cormorants, and in the clay banks the riverside nests of white-fronted and carmine bee-eaters.
Karsten said the Zambezi was not far off. Yet nothing was visible ahead except bush, some of it marshland, and where there were huts they lay in small circular compounds. We never passed a cluster of huts without hearing the thudding of a mortar in a pestle – a woman laboring to make flour, sometimes two of them, taking turns raising the heavy pestle. Men fished with throw nets or with box-like traps woven from reeds. In some trees there were logs, hoisted there to serve as bee hives. Livingstone had noticed these cultural features on the Zambezi and on this river, too.
Honey was prized by the Arabs who had come here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, looking for slaves and ivory, and there were still slavers operating in Livingstone’s time. Livingstone said he was here commanding his steamboat the Ma Robert with the intention of saving souls for Jesus and eliminating the slave trade. But the real intention of this strange depressive man was to open Africa to trade. The Zambezi he called ‘God’s Highway.’ He had a negligible impact on the slave trade, the trackless bush of Zambezia was proof that commerce had been a failure, and Livingstone’s total number of converts to Christianity was just one man, who later lapsed.
‘Zambezi,’ Karsten said.
God’s Highway was in view – a sun-dazzled sheet of water half a mile wide, carrying whole trees and big boughs and enormous logs in its muddy current – debris from the heart of Africa, beautiful flotsam.
I caught some words of a story that Karsten was telling Wilson – ‘Indian’ and ‘fish’ and ‘money’ – and as we paddled across the Zambezi, our dugout pulled sideways by the power of the stream, he told me the story.
Farther up the Zambezi, on the Zambian side, he said, there were Indian traders who made a practice of abducting very young African girls from villages. The Indians killed the girls and cut out their hearts. Using the fresh hearts of these African v
irgins as bait on large hooks they were able to catch certain Zambezi fish that were stuffed full of diamonds.
‘That is why the Indians have so much money,’ Karsten said.
I was so glad to be heading down the Zambezi I told them both it was a delightful story. In the late 1990s, I had read of riots against Indians in Zambia, accusing them of trading illegally in human body parts. The rumor then was they were killing Africans and disemboweling them, and selling their hearts and lungs and kidneys to Western hospitals, to make money in the organ donor business. Even some Westerners believed this improbable story to be true.
The land beside the river was featureless and flat, a grassy floodplain with low forest in the distance. We paddled among the floating trees and logs in the middle of the river where the current was strongest, the eddies giving the water the cloudy muddy bubbles you see on the surface of a chocolate milk shake. The wide river moved slowly and we had to go on paddling, yet the current helped enough so that I was able to sit back from time to time and reflect.
I was happy. The riverside villages were sorry-looking but self-sufficient. No one in the government either helped them or meddled with them. I had sometimes been uncertain stopping at one of these places, but on the river, borne onward by the muddy water, watched by fishermen and herons and (only their bulging eyes and nostrils showing) the pods of hippos, protected by Karsten and Wilson, I was the nearest thing on earth to Huckleberry Finn. I had fulfilled one of my fondest yearnings at the outset of my trip, for this was the territory I had lit out for, and cruising down this empty river in a hollow log was pure Huck Finn pleasure.
About two hours after turning from the Shire River into the Zambezi I heard a loud chugging, the working engine of a tub-like vessel making its way from a landing on the north side of the river.
The engine noise was the barge at Caia, big enough to serve as a drive-on ferry for trailer trucks. A British aid group called the Mariners had devised this barge from twelve ‘uniflotes’ and the reassembled parts of eight junked engines. The Mariners were led by an Englishman called Chris Marrow, and many of the men, like Chris, were servicemen turned aid workers. This barge-ferry was the only way a wheeled vehicle could travel the hundreds of miles from southern to northern Mozambique.