The heart of Malawi

I was excited to go to Malawi because it meant driving through Mozambique and, particularly, Tete. And I was excited to go through Tete because of the people I had met at my local touch rugby group who spent time there. One fellow only a few weeks ago had turned up to a game with a giant bruise on his thigh. "What happened?" I asked.

"Yeah, hey, had my bachelors in Tete last week. Got out of hand, fell
through a roof, hey, nearly broke my leg. Humour."

"Why did you come up to Harare, medical treatment?"

"Ah, ja, no, hey, too much Renamo activity there right now. Just
keeping my head low for a bit."

In short Tete (the town, bang in the middle of the 350km corridor) was much like it had been described to me: A desolate cowboy's mining town set in the middle of the parched Tete corridor, about 40 degrees celsius, sprinkled with shacks and the odd petrol station. And studying the landscape as we drove through it was like studying an alien land from a spaceship, such was the disconnect I felt watching the arid earth and scraggly trees rolling by hour after hour while I sat cocooned in metal and fabric, passing an uncountable number of small children, ragged and dust-swept, like they'd been hewn from the bush. Their main (and possibly only) past time was seemingly to mortgage away what little future they had. And the evidence of their mortgage was everywhere by the ton: charcoal piled up kilometer after kilometer in giant bags, waiting to be bought by truckers for sale in urban centres. Vast swathes of areas by the road resembled a tennis ball: mown flat, calved like an accidental hair-trimmer's damage into a thick bed of hair. I gave it 30 years beforethe area would resemble a mystical dead planet.

I hoped, thereafter, that Malawi would be a breath of fresh air. The Monza border post (joining Moz with Malawi) was small and inhabited by the usual touts and people selling trinkets. The touts forced themselves on us. An eloquent Malawian standing close by felt  (for some reason) the need to defend us in perfect Victorian English. "Ay, why do you not leave these good people alone? Can you not see that they have driven many kilometres and do not need nefarious merchants of confusion like yourselves disturbing their already arduous day?"

The tout turned to me and laughed. "Ah ah, you see now, we have a good Samaritan before us!" They proceeded to have a jousting match in which the most eloquent and verbose of the two was impossible to make out.

So far so good I thought, they're speaking better English than the English, which is a good start. I went to the tout and said, "Excuse me, can you tell me, what is the biggest problem facing Malawi, in your view?"

"Ah, poverty", he said.

"But why are people so poor?" I asked.

"Ah, it's because we are no longer being given enough money."

I was gobsmacked. No "Ah, our government is stealing all the money" or "We don't have the right conditions to promote business growth" or "agriculture will never work until we have proper land title". No, just "Ah, geev me munn", and all the eloquence of thought didn't seem to change the basic assumption that income should be given rather than earned.

On the road in I saw many of the same signs that I had in Mozambique: an exploding population and a landscape butchered by tree-cutters. On the road we passed a huge billboard advertising a presidential candidate. "Vote for me for general change" said the enormous writing beneath a smiling candidate. I giggled. "General" I thought. Why did he use that word? Is it because the list of things to change is so big that if he were to list them, he would have needed so many bullet points that the print would have been too small to be suitable for a billboard? Or was it because he didn't have a clue about what really needed to change? Or was it that the nature of change required was so obvious to everyone that it didn't require more explanation than "general". Or was he in fact the military man, "General Change"?

We drove for hundreds of more km. As we got closer to the lake the road became lined with ever more people walking, riding and talking. I kept on thinking, "round the corner we'll get away from the people and there'll be some good stretches of empty bush". But the emptyness never came. People were everywhere. "This is overpopulation" I thought. Trees subjected to a permanent holocaust. A lake increasingly vacuumed of all life.

We drove through this dusty village, human-to-goat ratio approximately 5:1, and after passing dust-caked shacks came to this peculiarly large house just off the main road. This was our holiday home. An attractive well-kept woman, all smiles and giggles, greeted us at the door with 2 bleached-white poodle-type dogs. "What the hell
is she doing with these Hollywood dogs in a Malawian township?" I thought to myself. "They're totally white, not even a hint of dirt from dust, like she wakes up in the morning and shampoos and hairdry's them before breakfast." As she stroked these things I couldn't help but think, "Oh my god, they're so freakin' out of place here, probably going to get eaten by rats, or killed by the rabid nomadic dogs eating road kill just a stones throw away from here."  

The house was a single story home with 4 bedrooms. There was no furniture to speak of and the floors were just grey concrete screed without carpets. There was no kitchen for some reason. Three solitary chairs sat in the sitting room facing an enormous flat screen television that blared out MTV.

The rooms had been packed with hastily-built bunk-beds. We were placed in them, 6 per room. I drew the short straw with 4 others for a small brick house outside. In total there were 16 people to share two toilets, one shower. "This is going to be interesting" I thought.

Festivities get off to a good start: We had some drinks on the verandah and chatted with the other expats who'd arrived from Malawi and Kenya for the event (The Lake of Stars music festival, as it was called). I asked the expats some questions. Why wasn't there a  single mealie in the ground? Why was there not one single visible entrepreneurial venture? Why had nothing been done about the deforestation? In short, what the hell were they actually achieving in Malawi?

To my dismay they had nothing useful to say. They agreed that, at best, they were ineffectual and, at worst, damaging. 

The landlady's cousin arrived a couple of hours later to take us to the festival (situated at the lake). We agreed on a fee of 3000 meticash (about 6 dollars or so). He packed us into this minibus and drove us there. On arrival we paid him the money but he immediately retorted:  "ah ah, but it was 3000 each!" (ie he was demanding 60 dollars for a 3 km journey) The situation deteriorated. He was adamant that we had taken advantage of him. Protests from the Malawians that 3000 was already way above the market value, fell on deaf ears. Eventually he sped off in what seemed to be an obvious rage.

The festival itself was bizarre to my Zimbabwean sensibilities. At home such a festival would have been in an isolated place, far from the masses. In Malawi, it seems the population density is so high that escaping the masses is not an option. The resorts are therefore plonked in the middle of sprawling townships that hug the edge of the lake, the tourists living cheek-by-jowl with the locals. On our beach, for example, the fishing boats and children splashed in the waves within putting distance of our GNTs. And so the festival was the same: festival incomers were matched by far greater numbers of locals from the area, who seemingly had just strolled down to the road to partake in the music.

In short Malawi seemed to exhibit all of Zimbabwe's malaises, with none of its graces. People, for example, moved at approximately half the pace of my own countrymen. They were more sloth-like, more distracted and far less purposeful with their movements. 

At the restaurants and bars, for example, you would have to put your hand up to get their attention. When they saw you, they wouldn't drop what they were doing and think, "there: behold the client, I must serve him." They would slowly remove their hands from their pockets, sometimes stopping to momentarily pick their noses, or finish a conversation with their friend, and then stroll over to you. On every occasion food took 2 hours or more to arrive. The first time I went into a restaurant I ordered a fish. The waiter took my order after the usual parade of me waving to him. Every half an hour I asked him where my fish was. "Ah, yes, boss, it's coming now-now!" 

After two hours he emerged to say, "Ah...Mr, the thing is....that, besicall... they have justi noteeced in the keetchen that the greeel is not working."

"What do you mean, the grill isn't working? So you haven't grilled my fish?"

"Ahhhhh" he says, shaking his head and smiling.

"Well how come you only just noticed that the grill isn't working, does nobody check on the fish? You just stick it in, hope for the best, and whip it out just before you give it to the customers?"

[silence]

"So there's literally nothing for me to eat?"

[silence, shakes his head as if to say 'no']

With that we got up and left. At first I thought it could have been a statistically non-significant event, but repeated experiences at many restaurants (both cheap and expensive) were the same. I was left with the impression that Malawians are not even able to compete with other Africans, let alone with Chinamen or Indians. Everything I saw reinforced the idea that they are an African Titanic, sinking slowly into the morass, with the only caveat being that there is no orchestra on deck.

We arrived home at about 2am and stumbled into the sitting room. To my shock and horror I discovered the poodle-madame's domestic servant sleeping with her baby on the floor of the sitting room, no sheet and no mattress to speak of. The house was open plan so she was literally in everybody's path. As we stumbled about she lifted her head for a moment as if to study us with her tired eyes and then went back to sleep. It dawned on me then that the owner of the house had turfed the servant out of her accommodation so that she could rent out the servant's quarters (in which I and 4 others were sleeping), expecting that the servant would then just "make a plan". 

There seemed to be no trace of the notion that treating another human being in this way was wrong, or indeed embarrassing. The situation reminded me that the idea of fairness and human rights is so uniquely Western; the idea that man is born equal and therefore has some semblance of value despite his innate position in his hierarchy of birth. And yet, it is also only a very recent Western idea. I was reminded again that the behaviour I saw in the madame was not unusual: what was unusual was that my culture, for the briefest second before midnight, had decided that it was no longer acceptable to behave like that to people of a lower social rank. 

It occured to me that not even the few rabid blood-river Afrikaners I had met would think it acceptable to dump their servant with a 4 month old baby in the middle of their concrete sitting room floor while they rented out their maid's quarters for fast money. And if they did, for some reason, they would be embarrassed about it, they would attempt to hide what they had done from their foreign guests, knowing that such practices were not acceptable elsewhere. The poodle-carrying, American-TV watching madame of the house felt no compunction to hide what she had done, let alone arrange a mattress for her worker-woman.

The house itself was so badly made I thought it might fall down if I leaned too hard on the walls. The pillars on the verandah, for example, were squank, the walls thin, the various fittings appallingly badly installed. The toilet in the servant's quarters where I slept, for example, was covered in a pool of water from some leak.

Since the floor looked pretty disgusting and potentially laden with waterborne diseases I decided I would crouch on the bowl, long-drop style, rather than sit on the seat and have my feet immersed in the water. I placed one foot on the seat while standing at the toilet entrance and shifted some weight onto it. Crack! The toilet immediately ripped out of the floor and clanged onto its side. "Ah fuck! Now look! Argh!" I thought. I stood in the water and lifted the toilet onto its base and balanced it precariously on the thin crust of concrete it had been precariously supported by. The pipe from the cistern had by now disconnected itself from the tilting toilet bowl and sent  30 litres (or so) of water gushing onto the floor. 

After some minutes I got the toilet bowl upright. And then I managed to re-attach the pipe from the cistern to the bowl. I tried a test flush. The horror: half the water went into the toilet bowl, the other half squirted out backwards through the dodgy fitting onto the floor, adding another 15 litres of water to the developing pool. I was like, "What the fuck are you morons doing, for crying out loud! How do you expect to run a country if this is how you do your fucking plumbing!"

The electrics were done with the same dedication as the plumbing and, as such, the house seemed in imminent danger of burning down.

On the last day, the landlady came up to us with her pooches in hand and demanded 50 extra dollars for "gas". Given that we had been given 1 solitary pan to cook for 16 people, and had only done eggs in the morning, we estimated our gas bill at about 3 cents (most people spending 50 dollars on an entire year). We therefore declined, leading to another standoff in which she accused us of "taking advantage" of her. We stuck to our guns and mentioned that the gas was not part of the original deal, and that we'd be happy to fill the gas cylinder for her again, thereby replacing what we'd used. She then simply dropped her demand and sat down to watch more of her favourite American TV channels.

Before our departure we went to her as she sat in front of the TV and thanked her for having us. She escorted us to the door and shook our hands and said, "I'm sorry for everything."

"Everything?" I thought to myself. Maybe there is a hint of shame in there somewhere. I felt that the lady summed up much of Africa's elite in a nutshell. The TV was this window into this enigmatic Western life that she longed for, but which she didn't understand the origin of; like it was magic of sorts, its trappings obtainable if she could only perform the right kind of rain-dance, the right rituals, the right pantomime act to unlock the magic from the ether. Again and again I was (and am) reminded, that too many Africans are in love with the form of civilisation rather than its substance. And sadly, American television itself reports almost exclusively form rather than substance, a window into a decaying empire, its own citizens in the process of forgetting the origin of their prosperity, celebrating the outcome of previous generations of sacrifice and building; worshipping the empty shell of blind consumerism without its productive corollary.

It was against that backdrop that I returned to Zim a grateful man. As soon as we were into our border the charcoal selling was gone. There were trees,. There were empty spaces. There was the odd monkey, purple crested Turacos, the prospect of seeing duiker. During the 750 km drive to Malawi I had not so much as seen a single monkey or buck. Zim had this strange sense of order and civilisation, of welcome emptyness, of a different energy from the heart of darkness that I had just visited. And so, more than ever, I feel grateful to be in Zimbabwe, to be in the last refuge of partial wilderness, where nature has some semblance of hope against the marching virus that homosapiens sapiens has become.