by Paul Theroux
The past tense and reminiscing tone of this Introduction might make it seem as if in a fit of renunciation, the way you clean out a drawer, I have put it all behind me and given up writing pieces. But, no, I am still at it.
P.T.
December, 1984
The Edge of the Great Rift
[September 1, 1964]
There is a crack in the earth which extends from the Sea of Galilee to the coast of Mozambique, and I am living on the edge of it, in Nyasaland. This crack is the Great Rift Valley. It seems to be swallowing most of East Africa. In Nyasaland it is replacing the fishing villages, the flowers, and the anthills with a nearly bottomless lake, and it shows itself in rough escarpments and troughs up and down this huge continent. It is thought that this valley was torn amid great volcanic activity. The period of vulcanism has not ended in Africa. It shows itself not only in the Great Rift Valley itself, but in the people, burning, the lava of masses, the turbulence of the humans themselves who live in the Great Rift.
My schoolroom is on the Great Rift, and in this schoolroom there is a line of children, heads shaved like prisoners, muscles showing through their rags. They are waiting to peer through the tiny lens of a cheap microscope so they can see the cells in a flower petal.
Later they will ask, "Is fire alive? Is water?"
The children appear in the morning out of the slowly drifting hoops of fog-wisp. It is chilly, almost cold. There is no visibility at six in the morning; only a fierce white-out where earth is the patch of dirt under their bare feet, a platform, and the sky is everything else. It becomes Africa at noon when there are no clouds and the heat is like a blazing rug thrown over everything to suffocate and scorch.
In the afternoon there are clouds, big ones, like war declared in the stratosphere. It starts to get gray as the children leave the school and begin padding down the dirt road.
There is a hill near the school. The sun approaches it by sneaking behind the clouds until it emerges to crash into the hill and explode yellow and pink, to paint everything in its violent fire.
At night, if there is a moon, the school, the Great Rift, become a seascape of luminescent trees and grass, whispering, silver. If there is no moon you walk from a lighted house to an infinity of space, packed with darkness.
Yesterday I ducked out of a heavy downpour and waited in a small shed for the rain to let up. The rain was far too heavy for my spidery umbrella. I waited in the shed; thunder and close bursts of lightning charged all around me; the rain spat through the palm-leaf walls of the shed.
Down the road I spotted a small African child. I could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl, since it was wearing a long shirt, a yellow one, which drooped sodden to the ground. The child was carrying nothing, so I assumed it was a boy.
He dashed in and out of the puddles, hopping from side to side of the forest path, his yellow shirt bulging as he twisted under it. When he came closer I could see the look of absolute fear on his face. His only defense against the thunder and the smacking of rain were his fingers stuck firmly into his ears. He held them there as he ran.
He ran into my shed, but when he saw me he shivered into a corner where he stood shuddering under his soaked shirt. We eyed each other. There were raindrops beaded on his face. I leaned on my umbrella and fumbled a Bantu greeting. He moved against a palm leaf. After a few moments he reinserted a finger in each ear, carefully, one at a time. Then he darted out into the rain and thunder. And his dancing yellow shirt disappeared.
I stand on the grassy edge of the Great Rift. I feel it under me and I expect soon a mighty heave to send us all sprawling. The Great Rift. And whom does this rift concern? Is it perhaps a rift with the stars? Is it between earth and man, or man and man? Is there something under this African ground seething still ?
We like to believe that we are riding it and that it is nothing more than an imperfection in the crust of the earth. We do not want to be captive to this rift, as if we barely belong, as if we were scrawled on the landscape by a piece of chalk.
Burning Grass
[October 22, 1964]
In July, it was very cold in Malawi. On the day that Malawi gained her independence the wind swept down from Soche Hill into the Central stadium bringing with it cold mists. The Africans call this wind chiperoni and dread it because they don't have enough clothes to withstand its penetration. They also know that it lasts only a few weeks and that once this difficult period is gotten through they can go out again into the fields and dig furrows for planting.
Independence was very dark, yet despite the cold winds the people came to see their newly designed flag raised. The Prime Minister told everyone that Malawi is a black man's country. The cold seemed to turn everything, everyone, to wood; even the slogans were frozen, the gladness caged in trembling bodies.
Through August it became warmer. The violet flames of the jacaranda, the deep red of the bougainvillaea, the hibiscus, each bloom a delicate shell—all suddenly appeared out of the cold of the African winter.
In September, two months had passed since that winter, two months since that freezing Independence Day. And now, in this dry season, the people have begun to burn the grass.
September 8 was the first day of school. On this same day three members of the cabinet were asked to resign. Shortly afterward all the ministers but two resigned in protest. The Prime Minister, "the Lion of Malawi," was left with only two of his former ministers. Two months after independence the government smoldered in the heat of argument.
The custom of burning grass dates back to prehistoric times when there was a great deal of land and only few farmers; much of the land could lie fallow while the rest was burned. It was thought that the burning was necessary for a good crop the following year. The scientists say this is not true, but there are only a handful of scientists in this country of four million farmers. So each year, in the dry season, the grass is burned. A few weeks ago I saw thin trails of blue smoke winding out of valleys and off the hills to disappear in the clouds. And at night I saw the flicker of fires at a great distance. A short time ago the fires were not great; I could still see the huge Mlanje plateau, a crouching animal, streaked with green, disappearing into Mozambique.
Last night I walked outside and saw the fires again. It can be terrifying to see things burning at night, wild bush fires creeping up a mountain like flaming snakes edging sideways to the summit. Even behind the mountains I could see fires, and off into the darkness that is the edge of Malawi I saw the glowing dots of fires just begun. They could burn all night, light the whole sky and make the shadows of trees leap in the flames. During the day the flames would drive the pigs and hyenas out of their thickets; the heat and smoke would turn the fleeing ravens into frightened asterisks of feathers.
Today the portent was real. Early this morning the radio said there would be heavy smoke haze. I looked off and Mlanje, Mozambique, even the small hills that had always lain so patiently in the sun, were obscured by the smoke of the bush fires. The horizon has crept close to my house. The horizon is still blue, not the cold blue of the air at a distance, but the heavy pigment of smoke and fresh ashes lingering low over the landscape, close to me.
In this season the ministers who have broken from the government are making speeches against the Prime Minister. They are angry. They say that this government is worse than the one it replaced. They say that in two months the Prime Minister has kept none of his promises; the ministers have spread to all the provinces where, before great numbers of people, they repeat their accusations. The air is heavy with threats and indignation; the people are gathering in groups to talk of this split in the government. They take time off from burning the grass to speak of the government now, after two green months, in flames.
Fire in Africa can go out of control, out of reach of any human being, without disturbing much. It can sweep across the long plains and up the mountains and then, after the fire has burned its length, will flicker and go out. Later the burned ground will be r
eplaced by the woven green of new grass. For a while very little will clear; the smoke will hang in the air and people will either dash about in its arms blindly or will be restless before it, anxiously waiting for it to disperse.
We all know that the horizon will soon move back and back, and another season will come in Malawi. The prolonged fires will delay planting but planting will certainly begin; perhaps the harvest will be later than usual.
Yet now we have the flames and we must somehow live with the heat, the smoke, the urgency of fires on mountains, the terror of fires at night, the burning grass, the dry fields waiting to be lighted, and all the creatures that live in the forest scattering this way and that, away from the charred and smoky ground.
Winter in Africa
[July 2, 1965]
Ptolemy guessed that there was snow on the equator, but it was not until 1848 that Johann Rebmann actually saw it. Rebmann noted in his diary that it was a "dazzling white cloud" on Mount Kilimanjaro; his guide told him that it was called "beredi", cold.
The idea of snow on the equator was ridiculed even after Rebmann's discovery and it was some time before it was a proven fact. Late in the nineteenth century it was discovered that the snow on the Ruwenzoris (Ptolemy had called them "the Mountains of the Moon") provided the water which formed one of the sources of the River Nile.
Ptolemy was more realistic about these matters than most people were, or are. It can be very cold in Africa.
In the tiny country of Malawi the winter is severe, though paradoxical, and the inhabitants of this country are both eager and hesitant to greet it. May, June and July, the cold months, are also the harvest months. This is the season when the village silos—huge baskets on legs—are filled to the brim with corn, the staple food of the Malawian. The oranges and tangerines are ripe; the second bean crop, the tobacco and tea are all being harvested and auctioned. This is the season when there are jobs, a season of feasting in the cold.
On the plateaux the cold wet winds sting the countryside with a mixture of fog and rain. These winds whip sideways against the face, tear and flatten the elephant grass, and yank swatches of thatch from the roofs of the mud houses. Yet one rarely hears complaints about this cold season—food is a great blessing in a poor country. Few mention the discomfort and perhaps this is the reason no one has popularized the African winter.
As an English teacher I can tell the season by the changing conditions of the exercise books. In the rainy season, spring, the books are damp, the ink has run, and the point of the red grading pencil gets soggy and usually breaks. Winter arrives in Malawi and the students' exercise books are charred at the edges, the stacks of books reek of woodsmoke and dampness. Sometimes moons of candlewax appear on the pages.
This is the circumstantial evidence of the season, of the conditions under which those essays on truth or Treasure Island are written. One corrects the compositions and a small room materializes. The room is either of cement or mud and has a grass roof; in the corner of the room a boy or girl squints at an exercise book under the feeble flickering light of a candle or the low flame of a wick stuck in a dish of kerosene. The kerosene lamp gives off a deep yellow light and fills the room with thick smoke. In the center of the room a pile of smoldering coals in a pit warms the student and a sleeping family.
In the townships just outside the large cities of Central Africa—Salisbury, Blantyre, Lusaka—winter can be dismal. It is not a time of harvest since the persons that live in the townships in those millions of cement sheds are civil servants, mechanics, shopgirls and students. Even if there were time to plant and care for a garden there would be no space for the garden. The townships stretch row on row, symmetrical treeless towns, long files of tiny white one-room or two-room houses. Rusting signboards appear at intervals on the dirt roads that run in a grid in the townships. And early in the morning, before dawn, a stream of people winds its way among the unnamed roads. The school children, many without shoes, run stiff-legged in the cold; the girls march in clumps, hugging themselves in their long clothes.
At the assembly, held outside the school in the morning, the national anthem is sung by three hundred shivering children. Their teeth chatter and they hop up and down between choruses to keep warm. If anyone owns shoes this is the season for them. The leather shoes are patched, sewn, and some are in shreds; some wear plastic shoes—made in Rhodesia or Japan—which are uncomfortable and very little protection against the cold.
In class the wind sounds like someone crawling slowly around the corrugated roof, a heavy man trying to break through the tin. After school there is a vigorous soccer game. No one dares to stand still, the players dash about the field—a ballet on the grass with a backdrop of trees tossing in the fog.
In the villages after supper the people can be seen crouching around fires to warm themselves. A student of mine once suggested that independence in Malawi came at a perfect time of the year. He said the day of independence comes in July, with winter at its coldest, and the people who would naturally be together around the fires would have a good opportunity to discuss the meaning of the freedom they had won for themselves.
There are places in Africa that are colder than Malawi. In Basutoland (Lesotho), where the national costume is the blanket, the people can expect snow, sometimes two or three feet of it. Freezing winds sweep across the Karoo table land of South Africa, batter the Great Rift escarpments in Kenya and Uganda.
Winter in Africa? Yes, just as sure as there is snow on the equator. Winter in Africa is much more than a word. And though we may not associate cold with this continent, it is there as conspicuous and intense as the heat, and perhaps as unpublicized as the peace that also exists in Africa.
The Cerebral Snapshot
[October 5, 1965]
It is my good fortune that I've never owned a camera. Once, when I was in Italy, I saw about three dozen doves spill out of the eaves of an old cathedral. It was lovely, the sort of thing that makes people say if only I had a camera! I didn't have a camera with me and have spent the past two-and-a-half years trying to find the words to express that sudden deluge of white doves. This is a good exercise—especially good because I still can't express it. When I'm able to express it I'll know I've made the grade as a writer.
And recently I was driving through Kenya with a friend of mine. It was dusk, an explosion of red shot with gold, and the setting sun and the red air seemed to be pressing the acacias flat. Then we saw a giraffe! Then two, three, four—about ten of the lanky things standing still, the silhouettes of their knobby heads protruding into the red air.
I brought the car to a halt and my friend unsheathed his camera and cocked it. He snapped and snapped while I backed up. I was so busy looking at the giraffes that I zig-zagged the car all over the road and finally into a shallow ditch.
The giraffes moved slowly among the trees like tired dancers. I wanted them to gallop. Once you've seen a giraffe galloping—they gallop as if they're about to come apart any second, yet somehow all their flapping limbs stay miraculously attached—you know that survival has something to do with speed, no matter how grotesque, double-bellied and gawky the beast may be.
My friend continued to fire his camera into the sunset, and pretty soon all the giraffes had either loped away or had camouflaged themselves in the trees. Both of us, rendered speechless by beauty, nodded and we continued along the road.
After a while my friend told me that we should have stayed longer with the giraffes. Why? Because he didn't get a good look at them.
"See," he explained calmly, "if you take a picture of things—especially moving things like giraffes—you don't really see them." He said he would have had trouble explaining what the giraffes looked like except that he had seen some in the Chicago Zoo. I could only agree and I told him about my Italian dove episode.
The next day, when we saw another herd of giraffes, he pushed his camera aside and we both sat there—it was a blazing Kenyan noon—and watched the giraffes placidly munching leaves
and glancing at us, pursing their lips in our direction.
No camera is like no hands, a feat of skill. And if you know that sooner or later you will have to explain it all, without benefit of slides or album, to your large family, then as soon as you see something you start searching the view for clues and rummaging through your lexical baggage for the right phrases. Otherwise, what's the use? And when you see something like a galloping giraffe which you can't capture on film you are thrown back on the English language like a cowboy's grizzled sidekick against a cactus. You hope for the sake of posterity and spectators that you can rise unscratched with a blossom.
Some writers frustrated by prose turned to get-rich-quick schemes, action paintings or mushrooms. Goethe botanized, Melville wore black, Dostoevski gambled all his money away, and Mark Twain had many flirtations with printing machines and photography. All writers look for a way out of writing. But writing is like serving a jail sentence—you're not free until you've done your time on the rock-heap. Taking fine pictures won't give any lasting freedom to a writer.
(And neither will plagiarizing. I was once in a writing course in which there was a boy who wrote superb poems. Of course the teacher gave him a hint or two, touched the poems up here and there, but said affirmatively that the boy was well on his way to becoming a very good poet. Everyone competed with the boy and we all improved ourselves by his good example. Alas, our poems never were as good as those of the boy. On the last day the class met it was revealed that the boy had lifted his poems from somebody else's translations of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Nobel Prize winning Spanish poet.)