Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight: An African Childhood (21 page)

The water is up to Mum’s chest now. She raises her arm, and it is only then that I notice she is holding a beer. “Cheers!” she shouts. Then, “It’s not very deep.”

For a moment we’re all too stunned to react.

Then, “Is it nice?” I shout.

“Nicer than outside.”

Vanessa pokes one toe into the water and then, with sudden resolution, wades out to Mum.

“Why don’t you bring a beer in, Tim?”

By the time Richard dives off his log and swims toward us, we are all up to our chins in the water, sipping beer.

“Get yourself a drink, Richard.”

“The beers are a bit warm, I’m afraid.”

Mum says, “There’s nothing worse than warm beer”—she pauses—“except no beer.”

And we laugh and laugh. I am deliciously, carelessly drunk. I throw my empty bottle to the shore and declare my intention to swim to the log. I soon discover that the dam is shallow enough for me to wade chest-deep the whole way. The dogs swim circles around me.

We eat lunch in the dam. Then Dad opens the wine, and we pass the bottle around. “We need a table,” he says.

“And a roof,” I say.

“A lodge on stilts,” says Vanessa.

“A butler,” says Mum.

Richard is smiling. “This is very civilized,” he says.

“It seemed the only sane thing to do,” says Mum.

That night when we get home, our skins shining with sun, our eyes stinging with sun’s reflection on the water, Richard comes in for supper and Mum gets drunk but she doesn’t dance alone in front of the window, sad and mourning. She dances with Richard. We roll up the rug, push the sofa aside, and put the “Ipi Tombi” record on the player. We all dance wildly—hips sideways, wiggle-wiggle, shuffling feet, shaking breasts and breastbones—the way we imagine Zulu warriors to dance, up and down the sitting room.
“Ay ya! Ay ya! Ay-ya, oh in-tombi-um. Ipi in-tombi-um. In-tombi-um!”

Mum is glowing, twisting, beautiful again. Her face is pink with sun and wine.

Dad is laughing, “Let’s have a par-ty!” in his signature, singsong way.

Vanessa is trying to avoid permanent humiliation, but she dances anyway, edging her way around Mum and Richard,
“Uh, uh, uh!”

I am dancing with the dog, her feet caught up in my hands, crouched low; she teeters around for a few steps before her feet slip on the floor. “Look at Shea dance! Look!”

We dance until the generator dies. And then we sit outside in deck chairs, under the silver moon, and drink Irish coffees. Dad tells stories about the time he went hunting for a zebra and got lost, the time he was chased by a rhino and had to jump fourteen feet into a dry riverbed, the time he saw a man get downwind of buffalo bean.

Beyond the gate I can hear the jackals laughing, their quick, high voices traveling sharply through the dense night.

It’s almost midnight by the time Richard leaves and we all climb into bed.

Dad with President Banda

MALAWI

North of Zimbabwe (but not bordering it), there is a skinny slice of a country, over one fifth of which is a lake boasting the largest population of freshwater tropical fish in the world. Its highlands are speckled with rivers and lakes that were stocked with Scottish trout before the Second World War and whose waters are still rich with the trouts’ descendants. The air almost anywhere you go in Malawi is salty and rich with the scent of smoked fish.

To reach Malawi we can go the short, dangerous way, or we can go the long, less dangerous way. We can choose to drive this way: first, west out of Zimbabwe at Chirundu, then north through Zambia, following the spiny Great East Road to Chipata and finally into Malawi—a journey of four or five days on increasingly deteriorating roads, but without war and with few bandits. Or we can choose to drive east through the Tete corridor in Mozambique and be in Malawi in a matter of hours, a full day perhaps.

In any normal situation, the journey through Tete would be the more sensible choice. But this is Africa, so hardly anything is normal. If we go through Mozambique, we will have to elude land mines, Renamo rebels, bandits, and roads so decayed they are worse than the tracks that army lorries and trucks have worn beside them.

For once, my parents are prudent. Dad flies up to Malawi from Zimbabwe, his plane (taking the shortest route) breathlessly flying over the Tete corridor while the passengers anxiously drink Carlsberg lager and peer out of the windows. Mozambique slides into, and then out of, view, the years of savage warfare and burnt villages and raped women and child soldiers and no schools and no hospitals and battle-bred malnutrition felt as only a temporary dip of unrelated turbulence. The plane lands in Blantyre—a strangely Scottish-feeling, African-smelling city—and Dad is met at the airport by an unusually tall, unusually dark African who, it turns out, is not Malawian, but from Zambia. Malawians tend to have a reddish complexion and tidy features. Dad’s driver stands out, tall and rangy and black, like a palm tree in a mopane forest.

Mum drives the long way around to Malawi, through Zambia, in the Land Rover, with the dogs, the cats, and all our worldly goods. Oscar falls out of the Land Rover somewhere near the Kafue River and is never seen again even though Mum spends two days walking along the river calling for him. At last she gives a schoolteacher in a nearby village some money and says, “If you find my dog, will you look after him for me?”

“He probably bought beer with the money,” says Dad afterward.

“You never know.”

“You
should
know by now.”

Malawi was formerly the Nyasaland Protectorate. When we arrive in the country in 1982, it is being run by a lilliputian dictator, Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda. He is shrunken and very old, although no one is supposed to know exactly how old. His birthday is an official state secret but it is generally agreed that he may have been born as early as 1898 or as late as 1906. Some careless people joke, behind their hands, in quick nervous whispers, that Kamuzu Banda is actually dead. That his body is battery-run by remote control. After all, they point out, he does little in the way of official state business anymore, except wave a zebra-tail fly whisk from the steps leading up to his private jet or personal helicopter.

But most people are careful to keep their mouths shut. Mum says, “Never say anything derogatory about the government or the President.”

“What if we’re alone?”

Mum sighs, as if the dense population of Malawi is pressing air out of her lungs. “We’re never alone here.”

People who disagree with His Excellency, the President for Life and “Chief of Chiefs,” are frequently found to be the victims of car crashes (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or dead in their beds of heart attacks (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets); or the recipients of some not-quite-fresh seafood (their bodies mysteriously riddled with bullets).

Revolts by H.B.M. Chipembere and Yatuta Chisiza are crushed in 1965 and 1967. Chipembere dies in exile in the United States.

Dick Matenje
(
Banda’s likely successor
)
dies under mysterious circumstances in 1983.

Orton and Vera Chirwa are imprisoned for life for protesting against some of Banda’s policies. Orton is released, but later kidnapped in Zambia.

Dr. Attati Mpakati, leader of the Socialist League of Malawi, is killed by a letter bomb in 1983 in Zimbabwe.

Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda is not only Life President. He is also the Minister of External Affairs, the Minister of Work and Supplies, the Minister of Justice, and the Minister of Agriculture. The airport, most major roads and public buildings, and many schools and hospitals are named after the President. Lining almost all the main roads there are scores of billboards containing a photograph of the President for Life. Many women wear bright cloth chitenges around their waists—as skirts—which contain a photograph of Banda, a younger Banda, whose face shines over round bottoms and swelling bellies. Babies hang from chitenge slings decorated with the President’s face, their little faces peeping over the placid, mild gaze of the image of their Great Chief.

When we move to Malawi, the people of this sliver of a country have among the lowest per capita incomes of anyone in the world. Their numbers are swelling as refugees flood over the borders from Mozambique to escape that country’s seemingly endless civil war.

We move to a tobacco farm on the edge of Lake Chilwa, not far—on roads that toss the pickup from one side to the other as if it were a small boat—from Lake Malawi, the Shire River, and Mozambique. The farm, Mgodi (meaning the Hole), is one of many owned by His Excellency the Life President. It is supposed to be a shining example of what can happen when the President sets his mind to help his people. When we arrive, the estate is a shambles, overrun with weeds, corruption, thieves, threatening Big Men, trembling Little Men, collapsing workshops, and disintegrating roads. The entire place is shuddering under a crumbling infrastructure. It is a smaller, contained version of the Malawian government as a whole.

There are one thousand “peasant farmers,” each of whom rents an acre of land on which to grow burley tobacco, which they will sell back to the estate. They are also required to grow a patch of maize and a patch of vegetables on a separate acre of land to feed themselves and their families.

By the standards of this tiny, tightly controlled, densely populated country, our farm is remote. It’s at least an hour’s drive to Zomba, the nearest town. Zomba is built on the edge of a startling plateau on which the Life President has built himself a small palace (one of many scattered throughout the country) and which offers a sudden change of climate. The plateau, whose summit we reach by winding up an up-only road (avoiding the lawless drivers hurtling illegally down), is planted with fresh, sweet-smelling pine and fir trees. Its ground is soft and mossy; the air is thick and cool, and fresh with an almost permanent lick of mist. The dams and streams are stocked with trout; the roads on top of the plateau are hard, red, slick clay, which become so slippery during the rains that our heavy truck slides drunkenly off their spines and into the ditch. As we come down the “down” road from the plateau, the air thickens by degrees until, by the time we reach the town, we have almost forgotten the tonic of the plateau’s summit, its cool, comforting, mossy silence.

There is little to recommend the town of Zomba, or to set it apart from many other African cities of its nature, except the mental hospital on the main street. To the casual observer, the town of Zomba is primarily populated by mentally ill Malawians, escapees from the hospital, who tear around the modest city in sawn-off pink-, blue-, and white-striped pajamas.

By now, Vanessa is sixteen and attending a private coeducational school in Blantyre where the focus is on a cheerful learning atmosphere and where the students are encouraged to express themselves artistically. I am thirteen, at Arundel High School in Harare, Zimbabwe, where the students are expected not to express themselves at all. The focus is on a rigorous academic program and we will be expected to pass difficult examinations sent out from Cambridge in England.

At our school, we cannot make or receive phone calls except at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, when our conversations are monitored by a matron and we may speak for only five minutes. Our letters out of the school are frequently censored. Our letters into the school are subject to censorship at any time. We may receive only visitors who are approved by the authorities and who appear on a master list, and those only between the hours of three and five on Sunday afternoons. We must attend chapel twice a day. Grace before meals is expressed in Latin.

We must wear our uniforms no longer than an inch below the knee, no shorter than an inch above the knee as measured from a kneeling position; we are required to wear a uniform of some description (there is a school uniform, a Sunday uniform, and an activities uniform) for all but a few hours a day when, between bath time and lights-out, we are (in any case) shut up in a classroom attending to homework. We must tie up our hair when it touches our collars. We must wear high-waisted, low-legged thick brown nylon underwear. We may not speak after lights-out, or before the wake-up bell, which rings at six. We must wait at the door for our seniors, teachers, visitors.

We are issued packing lists. We must bring (but may bring no more than) everything on the list. Three sets of school uniform, three sets of civilian clothes, five pairs of underwear, a Sunday dress, two pairs of lace-up Clarks shoes bought at vast expense from the aging lady (who seems prewar to me, by which I mean pre-Chimurenga) with flaking pink-powdered cheeks and a bright blond beehive at the shoe department on the third floor of Meikles in Harare. After we have bought the shoes, Mum will take me out for tea and scones as a treat but I will hardly be able to swallow with the sickening anticipation of school ahead of me. And Mum’s mouth has dried up, too, at the thought of all the money we do not have that she has just spent.

In our dormitories, we may have only three posters on our walls and five items on our dressing tables. We may wash our hair only on Saturday mornings. We cannot watch television or listen to a radio except for a few hours on the weekends. If we are caught smoking or drinking, or if we are disruptive, we will be expelled.

One evening, before lights-out, a rumor spread through the boardinghouses (hopping the lawns from one hostel to the next) that two teenage boys had scaled the security fence and were at large on Arundel High School property. All the boarding hostels were immediately locked, with us inside them, roll call was taken, and we were instructed to turn out the lights and undress in the dark (lest the rumored boys see us as we changed into our pajamas). Hysteria swept from cubicle to cubicle, from dorm to dorm. Several girls threw their underwear and bras out of the windows. One girl burst into tears and it was rumored that another actually fainted with excitement.

At the end of the school term, I fly out of Zimbabwe and arrive at Kamuzu International Airport.

There is a barrage of signs to greet me.

I may not take photographs of official buildings; doing so will result in my arrest.

If I am a man, I may not wear my hair below my collar. My hair will be cut if it is too long.

If I am a woman, I may not wear shorts, trousers, or skirts that show the knee. Doing so will result in my arrest.

I may not bring pornography into the country. Doing so will result in my arrest.

(Pornography laws are so stringent that even the boxes of salty crackers imported from South Africa are censored. The bikini-clad woman on the box of crackers has her shapely legs blackened to the knee by the marker of a pornography official.)

I may not bring drugs into the country. Doing so will result in my death.

There is a small army of customs and immigrations officials to greet me as I climb off the plane. I peer over their shoulders, trying to see into the terminal building, but there appears to be no end to the arrival procedures. There are rows and rows of officials and behind them there are poster-sized photographs of the little dictator whose skin, I notice, is shiny, like redwood mahogany. His photograph has been airbrushed into an eternal, tight-smiling youth. Armed guards stand at an imposing wooden entryway, blocking the view beyond the posters.

My school trunk is laid on a table. I am ordered to open it.

Three customs officials descend on my modest pile of possessions.

“Do you have any pornography?” asks one official. He waves his gun casually at the place where my heart is.

“No.”

My textbooks are discovered, opened, examined. Pages of biology, mathematics, chemistry, Latin, and French are carefully turned over until, with an expression of disgust, the official bears down on me and asks, “Do you have drugs?”

“No.”

The officials find my box of tampons, open the box, unwrap a few tampons and peer down the tubes as if they were kaleidoscopes.