I had to correct him.‘We don’t call it a big bum. To be polite, we call it an African bum.’
‘OK, so they have big African bums,’ he agreed.
I decided to leave it at that.
After two hours of waiting, just when I thought we were about to have a meal, the captain got into the speedboat and left. When I enquired what was happening, Spearman responded in a very calm voice, ‘He is going to get a fish and will be back now.’
About 20 minutes later the captain returned with two fishes. Spearman cut them up and washed them at the very same spot where the captain had had a bath earlier on. Altogether, the barbecue preparations took three hours. Then, rice and spinach, sprinkled with boiled tomatoes and fish, were served by David.
What does not make you sick makes you fat, I thought as I munched away. To my surprise the dish was not just tasty, it was delicious. I finished off the fish and vegetables; the rice was too much. By then I had told my various tour guides that I was cancelling the hippo tour.
Cruising back to the mainland was much quicker than the outward trip. Rasta was waiting for me and he just would not give up on his insistence that I would be ‘a very good business partner’. I ignored him completely. Being stuck in a corporate environment was not the best thing, but exchanging it for a career in smuggling could not be an improvement.
I parted company with the guys at the village. We promised to see each other soon.
That night I had dinner with Elizabeth, an American blonde. She was on a month’s Malawi-Tanzania-Kenya vacation and was very easy to talk to.
One thing about being brought up in apartheid South Africa is that I never really interacted with people from other races until I went to a tertiary institution. Even then, interaction was very limited: ‘wit okes’ hung out together and so did darkies. The democratic dispensation had not changed things much. The only white people I interacted with were my former colleagues and we met, by and large, only during working hours. After hours and during weekends we all hung out with our own. So, to find an attractive white woman who had no hangups/frills and who judged me by what I am and not by my race was a breath of fresh air.
Thanks to apartheid I, like the majority of black South African men, grew up thinking it was a privilege, blessing and honour to sleep with a white woman. If my memory serves me correctly, it was almost every black man’s fantasy. Those very few black men who got lucky would often relate the story, even five years after the actual event, and the unlucky ones would listen attentively while turning green with envy. Even if the white woman was ugly and unattractive, who cared? As long as the black brother had done it with ungamla (tsotsi taal for a white person), he was The Man and he was given all the respect he deserved.
Elizabeth was attractive and very nice to me, but I did not try my luck. Later that night she came to my caravan to pour her heart out. She told me that the real reason she was doing the African trip was to discover herself after she had found her fiancé in bed with her best friend. Again, being such an introvert, I was not sure what to say to console her. I changed the subject. It did not work. She appeared very hurt. I told her what I thought would make her feel better: ‘Your fiancé is a dog and your best friend is a whore.’
I am not sure if that consoled her, but soon thereafter she left.
The next morning I took a matola to Salima, stacked under people this time, not between luggage. In fact, we were so many in the back of that bakkie that I had to put my backpack on the roof of the cabin, hanging onto it with one hand.
I had thought of taking the Ilala boat on its weekly trip to the northern part of Malawi but realised, after checking the schedule, that I would have to disembark at Nkatha Bay at one o’clock in the morning. That was definitely not my cup of coffee. I decided instead to go back to Lilongwe and begin the, reportedly, uncomfortable 26-hour bus ride to Dar es Salaam, Tanzania.
Returning to Lilongwe, I spotted three funeral processions although it was a weekday – another reminder that people were dying in numbers. Although it was reported by UNAIDS, the joint United Nations programme on HIV/AIDS, that 90 000 Malawians had died from HIV/AIDS-related illnesses in 2003, I felt that, given the poor living conditions and lack of infrastructure I saw along the road between Salima and Lilongwe, the figure might have been even higher.
In 2002, Malawi had experienced the worst famine in four decades and hundreds of people died as a result. Malawi’s agricultural sector is the country’s biggest employer, as well as the biggest exporter, especially of tea, tobacco and sugar. As much as I was enjoying the trip, the suffering of my fellow African brothers and sisters was a constant reminder of the seemingly insurmountable problems facing our continent.
When we arrived in Lilongwe I was told that there were two direct buses to Dar es Salaam in the next three days, but both were fully booked. That meant I either had to stay in Lilongwe for four days or do the trip in stages. Although I hated the prospect, I felt I had no option but to catch a minibus the next day to Mzuzu, Malawi’s third largest city after Blantyre and Lilongwe, with a view to reaching the border town of Karonga a few hours later. I spent the night in a basic hotel in the centre of Old Town.
It was another early morning. I was woken up around five by the muezzin’s call to prayer. I was amazed by the number of mosques in Malawi, more so even than in Zambia. Before the trip, I had thought the number of Muslims in sub-Saharan Africa was negligible. The abundance of mosques convinced me otherwise.
I had read that Islam came to northern Africa via Egypt in the 7th century and spread westwards to today’s Libya, Algeria and Morocco. So, the majority of people in North Africa would naturally be Muslim. Much later, in the 18th and 19th centuries, Islam was introduced to East Africa by Arab and Persian sailors and traders, and from there westwards along the slave routes to countries in central Africa.
Christianity also came to North Africa via Egypt, but much earlier – apparently, Mark the Evangelist had already built the first church in Alexandria in the 1st century. However, Christianity didn’t stick so well around Mediterranean Africa and it is a minority religion there today, unlike further south, where Christianity is still the dominant religion.
It is the missionaries who must be credited for successfully spreading Christianity in sub-Saharan Africa. The likes of Robert Moffat and Dr Livingstone – whose motto could have been Christianity, Commerce and Civilisation – were among the first to come to convert ‘dark’Africa, but soon many from different missionary societies and countries (especially from those who ‘scrambled’ for Africa) followed their example.
The muezzin’s call to prayer, and the fact that some African brothers and sisters are so big on Christianity that they see those, like me, who still believe in the ancestors, as both uncivilised and barbaric and possessed by the devil, got me wondering why we Africans never exported our own religion, our ancestor belief, to other parts of the world. Why is it only we who are dropping what our forefathers believed in while others spread and are still busy exporting their religion to the four corners of the globe? Why are we only consuming and not producing where religion, too, is concerned?
An hour later, I was at the taxi rank. In terms of chaos, nothing beats Lilongwe’s taxi rank for me. It is a mad house at its worst. While hawkers were still unpacking fresh fish from the lake, everyone was shouting, screaming and trying to get the attention of potential customers, making it almost impossible for me, carrying a backpack, to get to where another 22-seater was waiting, bound for Mzuzu.
After 90 minutes, the minibus was finally full and ready to hit the road. There was a minor problem, though – it would not start. It took a lot of effort from a few other taxi drivers to create enough space amid the chaos to allow the minibus to roll down a slight incline to get it jump-started. Thirty minutes later we were finally on our way. As soon as we hit the main road, I realised that reaching Karonga the same day was a pipe dream. The minibus was moving at a tortoise’s pace and it was clear that I would h
ave to sleep over in Mzuzu.
A note here on a few words used in Malawi that may cause confusion: what we black South Africans – after all, we are just about the only ones that take them – call a taxi (itekisi in Zulu), Malawians call a minibus; what we call a cab (i.e., a metered taxi) they call a taxi. But their taxis (what we call a cab) are not metered, as is normally the case with taxis in the outside world. You agree on a price at the start of the journey, never mind how long the journey takes, and that’s it. Malawians are right, though, to call what we call a taxi a minibus because it is, in fact, a minibus. Or is it a minibus taxi? In which case, both of us are 50 per cent correct.
The Malawians also seem to call every shop a shopping centre. Thus, in a tiny rural town you may have three shopping centres. Outside one, an innovative sign caught my eye, this time over a mortuary: Energy Coffins.
In the few days that I spent in Malawi, I had discovered that Malawians are a very creative and poetic people. Among other things, I spotted some quite unusual names of businesses:
Joy Online (for a telephone bureau)
Natural Mistake (for a telephone bureau)
Someone-Say-Something-So-What (for a bottle store)
Let Them Talk (for a general dealer)
Malawians also have a different way of breastfeeding. Mind you, it is not only in Malawi but also in Zambia that when women suckle their babies they do not hold their breasts; they just let it all hang out and nobody seems to notice and/or care – except me, of course.
An hour or so after leaving Lilongwe, it started to drizzle. The minibus had only one working wiper, but the real problem was that it was the one on the passenger’s, not the driver’s, side. This meant that the driver had to stop a few times to get out of the bus and wipe the windscreen by hand.
Six hours, 320 kilometres and four roadblocks later, we were welcomed to Mzuzu by a billboard with a simple but powerful message: Speed thrills but also kills. By now, I was convinced that Malawians are natural poets. Between Lilongwe and Mzuzu I had not seen a single speeding car; what I did notice was that most vehicles looked unroadworthy.
I found a room in a guesthouse in Kitutu, within walking distance of Mzuzu. My hostess was Mama Maggie, a woman in her early fifties. Slightly overweight, definitely not tall and with thick glasses, she welcomed me warmly and showed me to a room with only a narrow bed, where I dropped my bags before walking back to town. There, I strolled into the market, no longer stressing about being in unfamiliar surroundings. I was feeling very comfortable among my black brothers and sisters. Later, I noticed that quite a few tourists walked from the residential area of Kitutu to Mzuzu, or back, even late at night.
With time on my hands in Mzuzu, I decided to have my hair done. It needed to be washed before being plaited again. I went to the big, crowded, dusty market right next to the taxi and bus station and, after window shopping for a few minutes, went through the small gate that separated the market from the bus station. There I found a salon occupied by five sisters, all hairdressers I presumed, and one client who was having her hair relaxed. I told one of the sisters that I wanted my plaits to be undone and my hair washed and re-plaited. She looked at me for few seconds without saying a word. Then she asked, her eyes round with amazement, ‘So you want me to do your hair?’
Well, you’re a hairstylist. So that is what you do – you style people’s hair. No, I could not say that. Instead I said, ‘Yes, please, I want you to do my hair.’
‘Where you from?’ she asked, looking at me as if I came from another planet.
‘South Africa.’
She shook her head, turned around and spoke to the other sisters in a language I could not understand. Even the woman who was having her hair relaxed turned around and stared at me. Then they all started laughing. Somehow I figured out what the problem was: in some African countries, and especially in small towns such as Mzuzu, only women have their hair plaited. Although it did not feel right that they should laugh at a potential client, I understood why they were giggling. To them I was not man enough. After all, I’m sure they were asking themselves, what type of a man has his hair plaited?
The sister, nevertheless, undid all the plaiting done in Swakopmund and then asked me to bow my head over the sink. This was a strange request because in a hair salon you usually sit with your back to the sink, face upwards, so that the hairdresser can wash your hair from your forehead backwards without the shampoo running into your eyes. In Mzuzu it is exactly the opposite.
I bent over while facing the sink. Only when the sister took a jar full of water from the table did I realise that the taps on the sink were not connected to the water supply. The sister applied a nice-smelling shampoo to my hair before leaving the salon with an empty 10-litre bucket. I was still standing bent over the sink when, a couple of seconds later, she returned with a full bucket. She used the jar to scoop water from the bucket and poured it over my head until all the shampoo was rinsed out. I did not mind the long process, except that the water, which was fetched from a public tap not far from the salon, was very cold.
The cold water, however, was just what the doctor ordered: I felt much more awake after that. My hair was blow-dried with an electric hair dryer, and then the plaiting started.
Oh my sister, you are such a rough rider, I thought to myself as she pulled my hair so tightly that I could feel my eyes widen; it was as if she were warning me that I, a man, should not ever plait my hair again. I figured that I could not complain because that would cement the women’s view that I was a sissy.
At that moment I noticed that two brothers, who looked like taxi drivers, had come into the salon. I am not sure why they were there but they stood on one side of me, with the sister on the other, and chatted over my head in an incomprehensible local language, all the while looking at my hair and having a good laugh.
Sporting a new hairdo, I walked back to my guesthouse and had a cold beer. My hair was so tight that I had to have a second beer to numb the pain while watching a two-hour programme on prime-time television called ‘President’s Diary’. I discovered some interesting similarities between Malawi’s former president, Bakili Muluzi, and his counterpart in Zambia, Frank Chiluba. Chiluba spearheaded the reintroduction of democracy in Zambia but subsequently tried to amend the constitution in order to enjoy a third term in office; Muluzi spearheaded the reintroduction of democracy in Malawi and so ended Banda’s reign of terror, but he, too, attempted to have the constitution amended to allow him a third presidential term. Like Chiluba, Muluzi did not succeed in extending his presidency beyond ten years.
For two hours, while sipping cold Kuche beer, I saw in great detail what Malawi’s first citizen had been up to during the previous week. He obviously loved arriving in a howling motorcade of expensive German cars while women ululated and children waved small Malawian flags. All this fuss because he was opening a clinic in some remote town. Talk about good Saturday-evening viewing! Some things never change. Banda had forced women not to wear trousers and men not to have long hair; Malawi’s third president, Bingu wa Mutharika, was committing an equal offence by forcing Malawians to swallow him during prime time.
I resumed my trip to the border early the next morning, on the very first minibus to leave Mzuzu for Karonga. I was sitting next to a man in an old T-shirt, grey trousers and slops (flip-flops) named Zeblon Nkosi, who told me he was born in Zambia but his father had moved to Malawi while still a young man. His forefathers, he said, were originally from Swaziland, which explained his very familiar surname. As we left the town, the jacarandas in full bloom along the main road, I was briefly reminded of Pretoria, i.e., Tshwane, the new name for the city that Afrikaners can pronounce but appear to hate.
As we drove past certain villages, Zeblon would tell me their names and history. Between villages he complained about how corrupt the government was. ‘They all want to be voted in so that they can enrich themselves once in the office. All of them are rich and have big stomachs while the people are suffering
,’ he complained.
About halfway between Mzuzu and Karonga we passed Phwezi High School, a world-renowned boarding school, according to Zeblon. Kids from as far away as Mozambique, Namibia and even South Africa applied to study there, he told me. To say I was astonished to hear this is an understatement. According to Zeblon, most people who had made it big in Malawi and Mozambique had gone to Phwezi. To me, as we were driving past, it looked like any school in a South African township. It did not have that wow! factor you associate with Kearsney College or Michael House, two of the highly regarded private schools in my part of the world. But life has proved over and over again that it is not correct to judge a book by its cover and I was prepared to give Zeblon the benefit of the doubt. Phwezi may indeed have been an exceptional place of learning and it was possible that I would one day apply for my daughter Nala to go there.
In total, there were six roadblocks on the winding road between Mzuzu and Karonga, the last two just two drums on either side of the road with a wooden beam across. The army performed its job of questioning the driver and looking inside the minibus with enthusiasm and a smile. The road led through Ngara, a small town with rolling hills on the left, and Lake Malawi on the right, where I would certainly have stopped had I been travelling in my own car. It looked like a soul-enriching place.
Just before we entered Karonga, Zeblon turned to me and said, ‘My friend, I have a friend in Karonga whose name is Joshua. He has a taxi and can take you to the Tanzanian border for a good price.’
It was a scorching hot day. I soon noticed that some of the people at the taxi rank were speaking Swahili. These Swahili-speaking people, Zeblon explained, were in fact Tanzanians who had come down to Karonga to sell their wares. Malawians bought from them and then sold the goods, mostly garments, further south in Mzuzu, Lilongwe and Blantyre.
Dark Continent my Black Arse Page 8