by Paul Theroux
It was screechy and silent, old-fashioned Africa, smelling of woodsmoke and wet earth. And strangest of all to me these spring months: it was cold.
I was in charge. But a headmaster at twenty-three was unusual, even in this unusual country. Some of my boy students were twenty, and many looked older than me. The girls were younger, but some of them had given birth and had small children. That was their secret. They pretended to be schoolgirls and I pretended not to know about their kids. There were 156 students. They were all skinny and popeyed and barefoot.
Willy Msemba was one of the rare ones—virtually the only delinquent, but a cheerful one. And he was intelligent. He read Mickey Spillane. He wrote me an essay which began, “My name is Msemba. I’m a cop. I was in Chikwawa. I saw a broad—pointed breasts, fat face, ironed hair, a real doll. But she was tough. I had to kick her before she would volunteer the information I needed—”
The other students were well-behaved and in general the discipline was so good I never really believed that we would get our chimbuzi. That was the point of the brickmaking. We needed a new latrine. The fence around the ditch was broken, and the ditch itself was nearly full; and it stank. It made you think that these people were grubby and hopeless. I knew that was not true and I wanted to prove it with a new chimbuzi. I envisioned a big solid symmetrical thing with this year scratched on it, 1964, and when people asked what I had done for these Africans in their year of independence I could say that I had gotten them a brick shithouse.
The earth around us was clayey enough for good bricks but we didn’t have enough discipline problems to guarantee a steady supply. I gave them five bricks for lateness, ten for not doing homework, fifteen for fighting, fifteen for littering (chewing and spitting sugarcane on school premises), and so forth. It was supposed to be twenty-five bricks for smoking hemp, but Willy Msemba had been on the verge of revelations, and so far my private life had remained secret. He was buzzing, and I had to get him out of there. I had not wanted to antagonize the boy. He knew too much.
I thought—as punishment—brickmaking was a good idea. It was dirty and useful. Yet I was criticized for being too soft. I was friendly towards the students. Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo spread the word that I was afraid of the students. Miss Natwick said that the trouble with Americans was that they were so bloody diffident. That was the most painful kind of criticism, because I was not quite sure what she meant and I hated looking up one of Miss Natwick’s words in the dictionary (Lacking in confidence; timid).
I kept on. It was better to be whispered about for being a weak headmaster than for that other thing, that I had tried to keep secret. And I knew that the students liked me. I spoke the language, Chinyanja, and I had learned all the proverbs in Nzeru Za Kale (“Wisdom of the Old Folks”)—“He who cries for rain also cries for mud”—that sort of thing. I quoted them in morning assembly. “If your face is ugly, learn to sing.” I was the first American any of them had ever seen. For some I was their first white man. Being an American—and I was friendly—gave me power over the students, and the school ran well.
It was a new school—a compound of four squat cement buildings with tin roofs that clattered so loudly when it rained that we had to stop teaching until the rain eased. There were verandas on the classroom blocks and in the center a trampled space where we held morning assembly. Outside my office door was a foot of railway track that I banged with an iron rod at five minutes to eight.
Morning assembly was a prayer, a song, and a pep-talk. There was as yet no national anthem. We sang Mbuye Dalitsani Africa, “God Watch Over Africa,” a sort of Pan-African hymn with the lugubrious plodding melody of a funeral dirge. Likoni used to read from the Bible—usually the Psalms. I avoided the Psalms but I liked Jonah, Ecclesiastes and Ezekiel—especially I liked declaiming about the valley of bones. I also read from Aesop’s Fables, and well-known speeches from Shakespeare, and memorable poems. I made appropriate comments. I read announcements and I called the roll. On these cold mornings the wind fluttered the blue gums and made the tin roofs moan and snatched at the children’s clothes as they stood shivering. When they heard their names they answered “Heah” or “Sah.”
A new road connected the school to the lower road which, once used for logging—it led through a forest—ended at the township of Kanjedza. I had built the school road. Building it had made my reputation. In old Likoni’s time it had been a narrow path through chest-high thorn bushes and scrub. I wanted the path widened. “Big cars will pay calls on us,” Deputy Mambo said. But it wasn’t that—I didn’t want cars. I merely imagined a long sweeping road that would dignify the school and the hill.
For the road I asked the Public Works Department to send us some workmen.
“I can send some men, but you will have to pay them,” the works manager told me over the phone. His tiny distorted voice came out of a heavy old-fashioned receiver.
“Why can’t you pay them?”
“PWD is in suspension,” he said. “The British have left.”
“Who’s in charge?”
“That is the question.”
Independence was not until July and at the moment there was no one in the department to okay an order. Men still showed up every morning, but there was nothing for them to do; and although they were on the payroll they received no money.
I had a budget. I had allotted sixty pounds for the road, which seemed plenty—over a hundred dollars.
“Send me six men.”
The men arrived on bicycles. They stared at the students until assembly ended, and then they hacked at some bushes and bullied a big tree. Afterwards they slept under it. They said they wanted more money and when I refused to give it to them they pushed their bicycles down the narrow path and pedaled away.
Fifty-four pounds remained. Mr. Nyirongo said that the headman of a nearby village would supply the men to clear the road, but that he wanted a bribe.
“It’s just bushes,” I said. “If the students weren’t so sleepy they could trample a new road.”
Everyone said that the students had worms, which was why they were so languid.
But I had an idea. I went to the bank in Zimba and changed the remaining fifty-four pounds into “tickeys”—small gray threepence coins. I returned to the school with canvas money bags hanging on my bike. I had almost four and a half thousand tickeys. At the end of the next day’s assembly I shocked the students by declaring a holiday.
But before I dismissed them I said, “Watch me.”
I went to the path with my bags of coins and walked the length of it, flinging tickeys left and right, the width of the road I wanted.
Like locusts, the students descended hungrily, tearing at the bushes, and by the middle of the afternoon the land was cleared. A little tidying made it into the road I wanted. That was my first significant accomplishment as a young headmaster.
I was popular also for my special homework policy. Because the students lived in mud huts with no electric lights, I made a rule that all homework was to be done at school, before the kids set off for home. And they had homework on weekends, but none on Friday afternoons. This meant that we teachers had no weekend papers to mark.
The school was called Chamba Secondary, after the hill just behind it. The word signified Indian hemp and it was also a frenzied and futile dance. Everyone who was told what it meant said, “Very appropriate!” But I regarded that as unkind. Give them a chance, I said; and I also thought: Give me a chance.
2.
But the main reason I made sure we had no papers to mark on weekends was that I was busy those days with my own affairs. I wrote the school rules and I fitted them to my life. That odd boy Willy Msemba had been right when he twisted his face at me and said, “African girls!”
It was my secret life—my real life. The Peace Corps knew nothing about it. I had always lived two lives, but in Africa this second one became fuller and freer. I sometimes thought that it was the best reason for having gone there, especially then, ju
st before independence, when no one was in charge.
It had started in the most innocent way, my first week in Nyasaland. I was in Zimba, the one-street town. I had pedaled through the rain to mail some letters. (It thrilled me to write letters from Africa. I was the hero of those letters. But it was so hard to be truthful and not take liberties.) On Saturdays the post office closed at noon, and so afterwards I killed time in the small market—squatting women selling misshapen and dusty vegetables. I ate lunch at the Zimba Coffee Shop. The place was owned by two Greek brothers and was run by a yellow-haired Greek woman. She sold me a cheese sandwich, a curry puff they called a samosa, and a cup of strong coffee. She watched me eat, and she gave me the familiar attention of the white people there, as if she were a distant relation.
That made me uncomfortable. I walked into the rain. There was not much else in the town—five Indian shops, all selling identical merchandise, canned goods and cloth; a car-repair shop and gas station, a branch of Grindlay’s Bank, a fish and chip shop, a bakery, and The Nyasaland Trading Company. None were run by Africans. Two old women were the sales clerks in The Nyasaland Trading Company. This was a general store in a low wooden building. It stocked colonial merchandise—-jars of jam, stationery, clothes, last month’s London newspapers, books, ink, shoes, oil lamps, rubber boots. When I walked in, one of the women was wiping a feather duster (and they sold those too) against a contraption they called a radiogram—a large varnished cabinet with a yellow plastic window.
“It’s a wireless, and it also plays gramophone records,” the woman had told me on my first visit, and I had gone away mumbling the words.
Most of the white settlers had left the country for good. The shelves were becoming very dusty. Africans did not buy Birds Custard, Bovril, Swan Vestas, Dundee Thick-Cut Marmalade, Fenwick’s Gumboots, Hacks Honey Lemons, Gentleman’s Relish, Nairn’s Capital Oatcakes, tins of Bath Olivers or Battley’s Pickled Walnuts.
I browsed in the Nyasaland Trading Company until the rain stopped, bought a Penguin paperback—a novel set in the tropics by a writer I admired, S. Prasad—and then I started back to Chamba on my bike, bracing myself for the three-mile journey, which was mostly uphill.
Passing another shop, I saw a mass of small bottles and cartons in the window, and it was my first indication of the Nyasalanders’ liking for patent medicine—DeWitt’s Worm Syrup, Philipps’ Gripe Water, Goodmorning Lung Tonic, Iron Tonic, Liver Elixir, Red Syrup (“For Strength”), Kidney and Bladder Pills by Baxter, Fam-Lax, Day-Glo, X-Pell, Reg-U-Letts, and Letrax (“Expells Roundworms, Hookworms, Whip-Worms and Threadworms”). There were skin lighteners—TV Beautybox Day and Night Skin Lightening Pack, Dear Heart Skin Brightener and Glo-Tone. And hair straighteners—Hairstrate, and Glyco Superstrate. This shop had customers inside, but reading these labels I thought: Where am I?
Farther up the road, at the edge of town, there were African men lingering outside a shopfront. There was music at the door, a harmonious howling. Later I realized that this was my first taste of the Beatles: in a back street, in Zimba, a small town in Nyasaland, in Central Africa. It was not a shop. I went nearer. It was noisy, there were African girls at the windows, and young men in sunglasses watched me from the veranda. A sign above them was clumsily lettered BEAUTIFUL BAMBOO BAR.
Did someone wave to me? I thought I saw an African girl beckon, but she had vanished when I looked again. Anyway, I went in. It seemed dark inside. The few lights made the interior indistinct and had the effect of making the place seem darker and more shadowy. It was one room and it smelled dankly of piss and dirt, like a crawlspace. It was damp, smoke blew through one window, the mirror was streaked with green and red paint, and on the walls were shelves of beer—small plump bottles of Lion and Castle Lager.
The bartender wore a T-shirt and a tweed vest and ragged shorts and plastic sandals. He approached me nervously.
I said, “Moni. Muli bwanji, achimwene?”
Hello brother: it was the friendliest greeting.
He was too astonished to reply at once. Then he said, “You are speaking.”
“Yes, brother.”
“Oh, thank you, father,” he said.
“What is your name, brother?”
“My name is Wilson.”
They all had names like that—Wilson, Millson, Edison, Redison; and Henderson and Johnston.
“Thank you, Wilson.”
“And what is your name, father?”
“Please stop calling me father.”
“What is your name, sir?”
“Please, brother.”
“Yes, achimwene”—and he almost choked on the word—“what is your name?”
“My name is Andy.”
“Oh, thank you, Mr. Undie,” he said.
He told me that I was the first mzungu ever to go into the Beautiful Bamboo Bar. That cheered me up. Wasn’t that the point of my being in Africa?
Nearby, there were five or six girls sitting at wooden tables. The first thing I noticed about them was that they had no hair—or very little, no more than fuzz. But their shaven heads seemed to emphasize the shapeliness of their bodies. They wore dresses, but even among the shadows in the bar I could tell they were naked underneath. They were barefoot, but that seemed strangely appropriate to their having no hair on their heads.
I sat at a table with two of them and drank a beer, and I talked to them in their own language. They asked me where I had learned it.
“Would you believe Syracuse University?” And I added, “Upstate New York. United States.”
They laughed, because everywhere outside Nyasaland sounded magical. And yet I knew that Nyasaland was the only place that I wanted to be.
“American,” one girl said, trying the word out.
It seemed that they were working casually in the Bamboo. They had come from distant villages. They believed Zimba was the big city; they had attached themselves to this bar. They lived out back. The jukebox was playing Shimmy Shimmy Koko Bop, and an African girl was doing a flat-footed African dance.
Her name was Rosie. She said her favorite singer was Chubby Checker. She also liked Elvis, Del Shannon and The Orions.
“Who are the Orlons?”
“Wah-Watusi,” Rosie said.
“Oh, them.”
“And Spokes Mashiani,” she said. “South African.”
That was the kind of conversation—names of singers, names of songs, and how much can you drink, and have you ever seen a lion? And Shimmy shimmy koko bop.
Finally, Rosie said, “You’re the teacher up at Chamba?”
I said yes, and turned to the door. It had gone dark outside.
“The big house with the flowers in front,” she said.
Shimmy shimmy bop.
“It used to belong to Mr. Campbell. He went back to England.”
“They all went back to England,” Rosie said. The other girl said wistfully, “They just left us.” She sounded like an abandoned child.
I said, “But I’m not leaving.”
“That’s good,” Rosie said.
I said, “Come and visit me someday.”
“Yes,” she said, and put her hand over her face and giggled behind it.
I took a breath and said, “What about now, sister?”
She made a sound, her tongue against her teeth, that was stronger than yes.
We left, walking side by side. I pushed my bike because I could not carry her on my crossbar uphill. She said that no one minded her leaving: the Bamboo was not very busy.
“No money for European beer—just for African beer.” She meant the porridgey stuff the market women sold in old oil cans.
In the pitch-black forest I took her hand. It was hard and heavy, tough fingers and a palm the texture of an old boot. But I hung on to it.
At home I sat her down and poured her a glass of gin. She sipped it, making faces. She was barefoot, and I could see that her feet were rough and cracked like her hands. Her green dress was both fancy and ragged, and the
strip of lace at her collar was torn.
I made a fire in the fireplace, burning eucalyptus logs, and we sat in front of it on the sofa Mr. Campbell had left. But Rosie was restless. She sniffed around the room.
“Books,” she said.
She looked at the pictures—of Scotland, from calendars. Of cats, of dogs. I asked if she liked them. She said no. She kept prowling.
“Table.” She smoothed it with her hand. “Flowers. Looking glass. Curtains. Carpet. Knife and fork. Tomato sauce. Mustard.”
Next to the cluster of sticky bottles on the table—they too were Campbell’s—we had dinner, served by Captain. Captain was my cook: he also had been left by Campbell. He was too nervous to disguise his leering, and he spoke to Rosie in a language I did not know, perhaps Yao or Tonga. I caught the word “American.”
She ate hungrily and with a lot of noise, wetting her fingers on the food and then wiping her lips with the back of her hand. I learned then that the frantic manners of the poor are their way of not wasting a crumb. Eating made her perspire, too, and sitting across from her at the table I was aroused and wanted to make love to her.
After the kitchen was silent—Captain gone—I took her leathery hand and, saying nothing, led her into the bedroom. She stepped out of her dress and folded it neatly on a chair. Then she sat on the bed and tipped onto her back and lifted her legs. I knelt before her and started, and a moment later she shrieked, “Mwamuna wanga!” (“My man!”). As soon as I had finished she wanted me again. We made love three times in the same sort of sandwichlike way. It had been over a month of abstinence for me. She fell asleep and snored all night. In the morning I took her back to town—downhill, on the crossbar of my bike.