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Chimurenga Culture

Malawi

November 9: At Nairobi airport the insolent daughter of someone’s brother behind the counter where I had to pay my airport tax in hard currency refused to accept Scottish notes. I had to trek to another terminal and queue up behind eight huge young Finns — not a basketball team, just ‘students’, they told me to change a travellers’ cheque into dollars. However weak the US economy may be, dollars remain the most negotiable currency everywhere. I was fretting that I might be late for my flight. Needlessly it took off three hours late. Air Kenya are in all kinds of financial trouble ...

After flying quite low over the desiccated, unpopulous terrain of Tanzania, Lake Malawi seemed vast, oceanic. I was rushed through checkout at Lilongwe and safely made my connection to Blantyre, along with numerous dark-suited, serious business-and-professional Africans. A quiet lot. How quiet Malawi at once seems after Nairobi, which teems with hustlers, boozers and boasters.

Professor Steve Chimombo at once presented himself at Blantyre Airport — semi-familiar from a book cover with a grizzled, curly mop of hair, a Mephistophelean beard and a huge grin. Steve is the best known poet writing in Malawi itself — two generations behind the exiled Rubadiri; one behind Mnthali, now self-exiled after a spell in detention; a contemporary of Chipasula and Mphande, both teaching in the States, and of Jack Mapanje After three and a half years in detention, without trial, it seems for uttering something subversive, Jack was released in May this year. He’s now at the University of York — with his wife and children (which is important — no hostages).

As Steve and I head for his car, a very familiar figure steps up to shake hands: Ken Lipenga. When I taught here in ‘78, Ken and I went night after night to the OK Night Club, one of Zomba’s three bars, where a mixed crowd of soldiers, policemen, whores and informers danced to music from a portable gramophone — ‘Rivers of Babylon’ over and over again. We talked outside over lagers in little bottles, the Carlsberg Greens made world-famous by one of Jack’s best poems.

Ken has now left academic life. He is editor in chief of the Blantyre Times, an officially-controlled ‘news’paper which actually exists to suppress ‘news’: everyone listens to BBC World Service for that. I’m glad Ken’s hanging around here to meet some VIP. He’s just back from Edinburgh where Banda has been parading his Eldership of the Church of Scotland and his entourage have no doubt ransacked Princes Street with all the hard currency this very poor country can lay hands on, but cannot spare.

Steve takes me to Mount Soche Hotel for refreshment. It’s plush — and quiet. Medieval theologians might have understood the dispute which Steve commences with a friend about whether Carlsberg ‘Green’ tastes different in brown bottles (though still with Green labels). Nevertheless, he at once impresses me. After the twitchy torpor of Nairobi’s moribund ‘literary scene’, here, of all places, I find things happening, despite a censorship so feared that Malawi, according to a recent report in INDEX, is a land of ‘zombies’. Anthony Nazombe (no zombie) managed to publish an anthology of Malawian verse quite recently. Steve himself has published a novel, The Basket Girl, and sold out a run of 1,000 copies by hawking it from office to office, shop to shop. And there’s this rather glossy magazine for writers which he’s started — look!

Steve’s best known for a sequence of poems about the local god Napolo. When my plane touched down at Blantyre airport, Napolo at once signified his rage with a spectacular blast of lightning. As we drive on the almost empty fifty mile road to Zomba, the night is stormy. I know Government Hostel of old: here, too, Mapanje and I swapped many a Carlsberg. It’s rather handsome, built for colonial officials, with twin corrugated-iron turrets and spick and span blue details on its curving white façade. At once, an exuberant figure rushes from the bar: Nazombe, whom I last saw years ago when he was a student at Sheffield, now Dean of Arts at Chancellor College, University of Malawi. Steve leaves me in Nazombe’s hands. He talks about poetry and criticism with easy professionalism. I read him ‘Hallaig’ and send him on his way with my last copy of Sorley’s poems. I fear for its safety as I watch from my room Nazombe, book in hand, huge umbrella in the other, pick his way homewards across the drenched lawn in torrential rain.

November 10: Steve picks me up back of four. He’s a local man, born under Zomba Mountain, and his interest in Napolo needs no explanation. He drives me out into the countryside. Rain lashes, lightning flashes, clouds roll rapidly over the steep ridges. It’s like the West Highlands, but we lack Napolo in Scotland to provide weather of such exhilarating, OTT, violence. A party at the Chimombos. It’s a remarkable party which is clearly enjoyed by the African guests, Ben Malunga from University admin. (the country’s leading poet in Chichewa) and Gregory, a young lecturer in English. Moira’s Malawian cuisine is delicious. Steve, having heard that when I was here in ‘78 I had made a point of never going to the white-dominated Zomba Club, had apologised in advance for the fact that there would be Scots at his party. "Steve", I’d said, "there are three kinds of people: Black people, white people and Scots".

And what should I meet but a German Scot, a new sub-species. Manfred Malzahn who teaches English (forsooth) at Chancellor was in Edinburgh for several years and is an expert on Scottish literature. He looks like a Scottish intellectual (rather, in fact, like a cross between Alasdair Gray and Douglas Dunn). He sounds echt Lothian. He knows the nuances of football culture. His wife, a beautiful German opera singer, heavily pregnant, has only to smile while he and I gossip shamelessly. The other couple, Pat from Edinburgh, George from Kircudbright, agree with me that Manfred’s quite uncanny. They’ve taught in various parts of Africa, with fourteen years back in Edinburgh in between. George has retired now and devotes himself to woodwork.

November 11-13: At breakfast, a corpulent white man swims into view — Father Pat O’Malley. Pat’s a devotee of Yeats and a connoisseur of Irish Gaelic verse. (Nazombe’s already shown him Sorley’s book, so that was spared by the rain.) Pat taught English at Chancellor for many years, now works for a Catholic development agency. We have a good crack. He puts me right. I say: "I’m enjoying this too much, being back". He nods and gives me terrible facts. Malawi has the highest infant mortality rate in this bitterly poor region which includes Tanzania and Mozambique. Barely half of its children enter primary school: then those who do start dropping out because their parents can’t meet the fees ...

I stopped writing a diary when I reached this conversation. My stay remained specially pleasant. Chancellor’s comely brick quadrangles under the spectacular backdrop of Zomba Mountain were always attractive. Now the Senior Common Room has been expanded so that one can lounge, rather privately, in a kind of huge bow window, looking out on sun, flowers, birdlife, weather. Here I talked to many academics and met the students who now run the legendary Writers Workshop. This goes back two decades. In a situation where political clubs were impossible, student newspapers worthless if possible, the Workshop attracted scores of people to weekly meetings where stories and, still more, poems were circulated, read aloud and discussed. The half dozen students I met were very reserved at first, rather less so after their teachers, Chimombo and Nazombe, had left us. (Gregarious Manfred confirmed to me that Malawian students are hard to get to know.) The workshop, I learnt, still gets 80 to 100 participants to some meetings. I asked, did they consider pieces in Chichewa and Yao? Sometimes, yes.

This is important. I talked to Ben Malunga for an hour in his office in admin: a man slow and formal in English speech but not at all without humour. He took up writing in Chichewa as a student when he found that a trial attempt went down well. Though, as the language of Banda’s own people, its status as official language might seem provocative, my enquiries always established that people from other parts don’t mind using it. Ben’s book of 23 poems, published by Christian Literature Association in Malawi, CLAIM, has, he drily observes, nothing Christian in it. It came out in January and by October had sold 700 copies. As I told him, that would be a triumph for a slim first volume published in London, let alone in Edinburgh. The last book of poems in Chichewa was published in 1981. Ben’s is only the third by an individual author, and the others go back decades. I’m told Ben reads aloud very well, takes his book to local arts festivals. Radio here is bilingual and very popular — while I speak to him someone rings Ben to congratulate him on a poem he’s just heard over the airwaves.

Malawian poetry in English, taking the country’s small population and tiny readership into account, is one of Africa’s cultural glories. Four out of the twenty two poets in Maja-Pearce’s Heinemann Book of African Verse in English are Malawian. This isn’t a proportion which many good judges would challenge and some, like me, would say there should be five or six. The standard is so high, I think, for two reasons. One is the strength and dedication of the English Department at Zomba, which has long encouraged in the Writer’s Workshop good craftsmanship and a respect for the language’s poetic tradition, without imposing Parnassian or Oxbridge conventions. The other is censorship. That diverted very talented people who might have been journalists or novelists into poetry and ensured that their work would necessarily be subtle. To say anything important at all, it had to be thoughtful, riddling, witty. But Malawi will be still more glorious if Malunga’s success inspires complementary work in Chichewa. Ole Sunkuli, the young Maasai who interviewed me in Nairobi, jolted me to recognise that in the Great Days there twenty years ago, the issue of African languages was generally evaded by the impassioned controversialists who asserted the value of African culture against European conventions. Swahili, the lingua franca of Kenya, and an official language, has not been a literary medium recently — partly, I suspect, because there is in fact a rather ancient tradition of richly wrought poetry in the coastal area where Swahili is a mother tongue. Only the white woman, Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye, has dared to imitate those difficult forms — and she’s done so in English. Here in Malawi, the popularity of Chichewa offers the hope of a body of poetry written from a present day perspective in the international mainstream — and in an African language.

Not hope, but fact, is the success of theatre in Malawi. The theatre arts department at Chancellor is headed by the energetic Chris Kamlongera, a Leeds graduate with an international reputation. The University’s Travelling Theatre has long taken productions out to the rural districts. Recently, its significance has been diminished as other groups have teemed into existence. One of Kamlongera’s colleagues, reacts coolly when I express astonishment: "What! Popular theatre? With this censorship?" The plays he says (they’re in Chichewa, of course) are uncontroversial, anecdotal items about — for instance —marital relations. Verb sap. Theatre, as they knew in Ceausescu’s Romania, brings people together into an audience reacting to what is conveyed by gesture and staging as well as by words — and these latter may be improvised. Marital problems? Like those between Husband Banda and his Wife Malawi, maybe ... when theatre flows, spring torrents threaten the ice.

Malawi’s a country like no other. The regime isn’t militaristic, though the army might yet become the key actor when the crisis of succession to Banda arrives. Malawi isn’t, so far as one sees and hears, corrupt: a charming bank cashier went out of his way to work out for me that the rival establishment down the road would charge me less to transact a travellers’ cheque. The tyranny, I’m sorry to say, is quasi-Presbyterian. Father O’Malley introduced me to a useful concept. The churches here haven’t ‘sold out’. They’ve ‘bought into’ the Banda regime. What they’ve bought is not just the puritanism which prohibits miniskirts but something covered by the word umelu — roughly, ‘respect’. They give ‘respect’ to the authorities who ensure that in return ‘respect’ is given to them.

In Kenya, male chauvinism is rampant, but I’ve never seen anything like the phenomenon which I encountered in Zomba this time, when I accepted with great delight an invitation to dine with two black Anglican pastors in their rectory. The young Rev. Evans picked me up on his motorbike: as I sat behind him clutching a strap while he chugged and bumped over dirt tracks, I applied techniques of mental dissociation which never fail me at the dentists. When we arrived at his house a young woman was standing outside to receive us. As I lurched off the bike with a bag of gifts in my hand, she suddenly knelt before me. Instinctively, I fell on my knees likewise and passed her the bag. Evans, I finally gathered, was not clear that these were gifts, so my wine wasn’t served with his excellent chambo (like mackerel, but subtler, a fish from Lake Malawi). The young woman proved to be his servant. Every time she entered with a dish she knelt to present it. Is this another aspect of umelu? Even his wife would have knelt. Malawi has no well-known woman writer.

But the spate of male talent is diminishing. My last conversation on campus was with a very bright young lecturer in law, Garton Kamchedzera. The censors astounded everyone here when they passed a play he’d had accepted by the BBC for performance on its African Service. A £600 fee. In the land of the puny Kwacha, that’s big money. There’s been a little crisis going on. One tambala coins have been in short supply. Even expatriates seem really concerned. These coppers, worth about one-fifth of 1p, are, it seems, absolutely necessary for transactions in the local market ... This is not as odd as the fact that a popular brand of cigarettes is called LIFE.

My valedictory drink with friends in the Hostel bar was rather marred by a barrage of insects — not flying ants, but as large, built like dragonflies, flopping on to one’s collar, whizzing up one’s sleeve, strafing one’s beer. African friends are unperturbed. They’re harmless. I tell my favourite story from ‘78 about a spider, as large as my hands, I once met in my bedroom in up country Malawi. (I squashed it with a box of papers: woke up next morning to find that only its legs remained: the othercreatures in my room had devoured it.) Kamlongera caps this with an even nastier tale about a scorpion he thought he’d killed in his bedroom somewhere. Next morning, it had removed itself. Going in search of it, he met a snake on the sill ... (I’ve never seen a live snake wild in Africa).

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