10

One-Man-Banda

The Two Faces of Malawi

When travelling alone one can behave childishly without fear of derision. It was dotty to leave Tukuyu at 5.50 a.m. in rainy darkness – ‘But so what?’ I said to myself, pushing Lear up a steep main street pitted with craterous pot-holes. I was too impatient for my first glimpse of Lake Nyasa to be detained by the sort of steady cold rain not unknown in Ireland. Then the first light glimmered over the Kipengere Range – sulphurous streaks amidst heavy clouds lying along the summits. Free-wheeling down from the ridgetop, I thought of the runner who left Tukuyu (then Neu Langenburg) on 15 August 1914, bearing an urgent message from Herr Stier, the German Imperial Administrator of the district, to his friend Mr Webb, the British Resident at Karonga, sixty miles away. Poor Herr Stier had heard rumours of war but his anxious pleas for information from Mbeya had been ignored, or not received. So he wrote to Mr Webb: ‘I am not clear whether England is at war with Germany or not.’ Courteously Mr Webb replied, clarifying the situation; and that, one supposes, put an end to a beautiful friendship.

During the Scramble for Africa this region was much coveted, despite its being so inaccessible. Germany and Britain – with Portugal protesting in the wings – laid claim to here or there and one morning in 1885 several tribes around Lake Nyasa woke up to find that the cartographers in Berlin had given them new identities by drawing international frontiers through their territories. Henceforth there would be Portuguese and British Angonis, British and German Wakondes, and so on.

In 1875, Europeans ruled less than a tenth of Africa; by the end of the century they had appropriated almost the entire continent. (There wasn’t enough widespread organised armed resistance to talk of its being ‘conquered’.) Yet the speed of the political take-over was deceptive; not everyone knew precisely what it was they were taking over.

As a British Protectorate, Nyasaland was treated as a reservoir for labour in the South African and Rhodesian mines and plantations. There were some misgivings about this policy at official levels; in the British colonial administration those who didn’t like what they found themselves doing quite often said so, but were rarely heeded. In 1935 a Nyasaland government inquiry reported:

The whole fabric of the old order of society is undermined when 30% to 60% of the able-bodied men are absent at one time. It is easy to criticise that old order, but it worked: the community was stable; and there was give and take within the community. Emigration destroys the old order, but offers nothing to take its place. The family-community is threatened with complete dissolution.

This alarm bell rang in deaf ears and a decade later there were 200,000 migrant workers in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), 62 per cent from Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and Nyasaland (now Malawi). Their families remained at home in moribund villages, a pattern already seen in Uganda. However, the British – despite their mixed motives – unquestionably did more good than harm in Nyasaland. Without outside intervention the whole region might have been depopulated by the turn of the century, so efficiently were the Arab slavers raiding when Dr Livingstone arrived in 1861, and so ruthlessly were the Angoni slaughtering those who escaped the Arabs. (The Angoni, a sickeningly bloodthirsty tribe originally from Zululand, spent much of the nineteenth century killing every African who had the misfortune to get in their way as they rampaged from southern Africa to the shores of Lake Victoria.) Thus Pax Britannica really was urgently needed around Lake Nyasa; and it was initially imposed not by detachments of the British or Indian army but by a scattering of resourceful, fearless missionaries and a handful (sometimes no more than two or three) of extraordinarily courageous traders, armed with obsolete weapons that as often as not didn’t work.

Livingstone’s ambition to bring ‘Commerce, Christianity and Civilisation’ to Africa is often unfairly quoted as summing up Victorian racism-cum-profiteering. Although Livingstone the man was unlikeable in many ways, greed was not among his personality flaws – his whole career proves him to have been singularly unmercenary, he only wanted to stop the Africans exploiting each other for the benefit of the Arabs. Any humane European, arriving on the southern shore of Lake Nyasa on 17 September 1859, would have seen a need to import ‘civilisation’ – and fast, before the local tribes became extinct. Livingstone naturally thought Christianising the ‘natives’ was the best way to go about civilising them. And a profit-making exchange of non-human goods seemed the quickest way to wean them off their enthusiastic collaboration with Arab slavers – by whom they were paid only the pittance needed to secure their collaboration.

Our road of ravaged tarmac ran level for a few miles through Tukuyu Tea Estates, not far from the town, where pickers were already at work – the women’s bright garments like confetti strewn over distant green slopes. Then abruptly everything disappeared; a cloud had sat on the mountain, reducing visibility to thirty yards and imposing the strange silence of fogginess. But soon the long, gradual descent began and the meridian cleared, though on either side immense grassy valleys retained in their depths small separate cloudlets, drifting like misshapen ships on an ocean of space. At every shoulder I looked for the lake but saw yet another mountain – wooded or sparsely cultivated. A delightful lack of traffic puzzled me; soon that mystery was to be unpleasantly solved. Then the mountains opened out and to the east, beyond a wide, shallow, tree-packed valley, rose four free-standing, oblong forested hills crowned with lines of pale grey rock obelisks. Eagerly I scrutinised the southern horizon and there, fringing a vast flat hazy plain, lay Lake Nyasa – a remote blueness, a mere line of light that might have been mistaken for sky. The plain still lay a thousand feet below me but from here the descent was steep and soon I had joined – disconcertingly – an EC-type highway complete with harshly coloured obtrusive signs. One of these informed me that it was five miles to Malawi. This new road and the open border celebrate a reconciliation between neighbours; because of Banda’s cosy relationship with South Africa, Tanzania and Malawi were non-speakers for many years.

It pained me to cross the flooded Songwe River on one of those starkly functional concrete bridges to be found everywhere from Norway to Calabria. I paused to gaze at this famous frontier between Tanganyika and Nyasaland, hurrying brownly between low shrub-lined banks with a long smooth mountain ridge in the background. In anticipation, the next four or five weeks filled me with excitement. I had a detailed map, showing me how to avoid areas now tourist-infested, and Malawi was to be the centrepiece of my journey. For some reason lost in the mists of time, Nyasaland – as it was when first I read about it – had always enthralled me even more than Masailand, Kilimanjaro, the source of the Nile, the Mountains of the Moon. And in 1992 there was the added interest of a complex political evolution – too complex, as events soon proved.

The new Tanzanian border-post comprised a few beat-up portacabins at the foot of a cliff in the middle of nowhere. A sudden brief heavy shower coincided with my arrival. The only other border-crossers were local peasants; they had moved freely before the reconciliation but now were required to produce documents. As we huddled together in the shelter of the cliff there was a vague unease in the air. Then I hauled Lear into Passport Control where my health documents were checked, for the first and last time, and my cholera certificate found to be out of date; in London I had forgotten to replace the old with the new. From the Tanzanian point of view it couldn’t have mattered less; I was now leaving the country. However, I had broken the law and provided another bribe-seeking opportunity not availed of; the officer registered shock! horror! – then lectured me at length before accepting my grovelling apology and waving me on. While crossing no man’s land I paused to forge an up-to-date vaccination on my old certificate.

A customs officer and a policeman – both polite but distant – awaited me outside a solitary, freshly painted little bungalow. The former glanced cursorily into one pannier, the latter told me the ‘formalities’ happened twelve miles farther on, at the village of Kapora. This seemed odd, until I studied the landscape and realised how difficult an illegal entry would be with Lake Nyasa on the left and high, bulky, pathless mountains quite close on the right.

At 9.45 the ominously hot sun was tempered by a headwind against which I couldn’t pedal much above walking speed. It came tearing across the plain of Nkonde – flat, fertile, bright green – and here I remembered with grief the fate of the Wankonde, a tribe who lived next door to Paradise before the slavers arrived. (One can and does mourn uselessly in certain places.) This plain was once a haven of tranquillity and abundance, protected to the north by the mountains I had just crossed, to the west by the mountains I was about to cross, to the east by Lake Nyasa – and never encroached on from the south because no one bothered to find out what went on at that extremity of the inland sea. (Livingstone imagined Lake Nyasa to be a hundred miles shorter than it is and none of the Africans he met on its shore was in a position to put him right.) ‘Nkonde’ means ‘banana’; this tribe took its name from the plant that supplied not only its main food but fuel, roofing material, plates, umbrellas, soap from the sap and fibre for weaving into blankets. (The Wankonde went naked during the day, apart from the women’s token apron of bark-cloth, some nine inches square.) Plump cattle grazed the pasturelands between the banana groves, and the stands of cotton trees and sycamore, and Thomson wrote ecstatically, ‘I felt as if I had fallen upon some enchanted place’. But a decade later came the Arabs from Tanzania, who had heard talk of these happy people, lacking a warrior tradition and there for the taking. Monteith Fotheringham, an African Lakes Company employee then managing the Company’s new store at Karonga, described the slavers ‘burning village after village, slaughtering without stint, and those women they did not kill they put in irons and reserved for a fate still more severe’. All this was the standard prelude to the enslavement of the most saleable members of a tribe. Fotheringham – the only European in the region – at once took it upon himself to organise an ultimately successful campaign against the Arabs and their local half-breed ally, the infamous Mlozi. But by then the tribe’s ‘perfect Arcadia’ – Thomson’s phrase – had been destroyed forever.

Malawi’s Department of Tourism proclaims to the world: ‘You’ll fall in love the moment you discover the spectacular beauty, the charming friendliness, the mysterious moods of Malawi – THE WARM HEART OF AFRICA!’ It wasn’t quite like that at Kapora, apart from the mysterious mood which led to my being given only a ten-day visa and told that I must go no further south than Kasungu. I almost wept, so grievous was this blow.

Kapora’s atmosphere differed grimly from all the other border-posts on my route. It is true that to qualify for admission to Malawi men must be ‘short back and sides’ and women skirted to below the knee; I had half-suspected these off-the-wall regulations to be a travellers’ tale. Men with hair likely soon to touch the collar are turned back unless they consent to be shorn on the spot. Those for whom long hair is a ‘significant statement’, and who therefore try to hide their flowing locks within capacious headgear, are dealt with extra-severely. I was curtly ordered to put on a skirt; when I protested that no one could ride a bicycle with a cross-bar wearing a long skirt the hard-faced immigration officer snapped ‘No exceptions can be made!’ and handed me a thick book of rules. Luckily I read on, out of curiosity, thus discovering that writers and journalists require written permission from Lilongwe to enter the country and are not allowed to travel without a ‘guide’. That was a narrow squeak; instantly I became a ‘retired teacher’ and during the next ten days was surprised by the strength of my own reaction to this deception. Enforced concealment of one’s identity is oddly disorientating, especially among a people as endearing and affably curious as the Malawians. On being told ‘retired teacher’ they always sought details about my long and presumably honourable career.

Donning my wrap-around skirt, bought in Mbeya for this purpose, I cycled on in a miserable and puzzled fury. Beyond sight of officialdom I stopped to adjust the skirt, rolling it up into a thick pad around my waist and incidentally discovering that those silly old colonialists were right after all and a cummerbund greatly ameliorates the savagery of the midday sun. I knew nothing of recent events in Malawi, which, is a measure of how little interest most Africans take in each others’ problems – understandably, their own being all-absorbing. In fact to be Irish in a Malawian Immigration Office on 7 May 1992 was singularly unfortunate; Bishop John Roche, a brave fellow-countryman, had recently set a much-needed cat among Malawi’s over-fed pigeons – of which more anon.

Approaching Karonga, I saw that tall bango reeds still mark the Kombwe lagoon. Here, on 27 October 1887, the Arabs’ African mercenaries (the dreaded ruga-ruga) attacked the Wankonde. Fotheringham described how:

The war whoops of the ruga-ruga smote the Wankonde hearts with terror. Armed only with spears they were no match for the Arabs who, keeping at a safe distance, poured volley upon volley into the reeds, soon red with the blood of the dying. Every black who jumped out of the lagoon was shot in the open … Maddened by their success, the ruga-ruga rushed upon the natives and drove them farther back, spearing those who stuck fast in the mud. They then fired the reeds and, as the flames rose, the yells of the poor creatures behind might be heard far and near above the steady discharge of the guns. Now another enemy, more dreaded than the Arabs, rose against the natives in their dire extremity. This was the crocodile, who swung his hideous jaws out of the pool and made an easy prey of the bewildered blacks … Few succeeded in struggling through to the other side. While the attack was in progress the three Arab leaders, in order to gratify their morbid curiosity, climbed into trees, and with diabolical interest watched and regulated the work of extermination. Darkness only put an end to the slaughter. The native chiefs with the remnant of their people fled to the Songwe river, while the Arabs who had captured a great many women and children, encamped at the lagoon. Surely was never such a cruel massacre as this day had witnessed! It was the butchery of a simple people who had done wrong to no one.

Post-massacre, Mlozi, the slavers’ leader, arrogantly informed Fotheringham that he was now Mlozi I, Sultan of Nkondeland, and expected regular tribute from the African Lakes Company. So began a small but momentous war that continued until 1895 and afforded Frederick Lugard his African initiation. Oddly, it was scarcely noticed in Britain though the Siege of Karonga out-Hentied Henty.

It felt strange to arrive in Karonga with my mind full of the town’s century-old drama and to be at once confronted by the current drama. All the shops were shut; the town centre was near-deserted; jeep-loads of heavily armed paramilitary types were patrolling the streets, their expressions suggesting direct descent from the ruga-ruga. In an unobtrusive one-storey tourist hotel by the lake I sought beer and information. For all I knew, it was normal in Malawi to have armed men cruising around a town but surely it was abnormal for shops to be shut on a weekday. In the hotel bar a grey-haired, elegantly dressed man was trying to get the World Service on his transistor. That seemed healthy; it is illegal to listen to foreign broadcasts that might occasionally criticise Banda or encourage the populace to think for themselves, but at least this gentleman was not being cowed by the cruising paramilitary.

Having cycled through the noon heat – fierce at lake-level – I finished my first beer before asking, ‘What’s going on?’ Gladly Sylvester explained, though I had feared my question might discomfit him. On the previous day, in Blantyre, a few hundred workers at Lonhro’s David Whitehead textile factory had turned off their machines, picketed the factory gates and urged others to go on strike. As they marched into the city hundreds more joined them. The police tried to break up the demo, violence inevitably ensued and twenty-two strikers (the official figure: the true figure was not expected to emerge) were shot dead. Whereupon the unrest rapidly spread.

‘We get all our credible information from the BBC,’ remarked Sylvester, resuming his twiddling of the knobs. ‘And in this hotel we can safely break the law. Malawi’s image as “the warm heart of Africa” is very important – no police will intrude here, frightening you and all those out there.’ He nodded towards the veranda, where a score of overlanders – English, Australian, New Zealander – sat gazing across the clear sparkling blue of Lake Nyasa towards the hazy blue mightiness of the Livingstone Mountains, rising sheer from the water on the far Tanzanian shore.

A small slim sandy-haired man hurried in, very agitated. He had just been on the telephone to Lilongwe, where lived his wife and little daughter. Things were much worse today, with thousands rioting and looting. He had also rung the boss of his Johannesburg road-haulage firm and been told to get his family out immediately. They would be leaving in an hour, on the next flight to Nairobi, from where they’d fly to Jo’burg – an eccentric route but the only quick exit.

Malcolm, a regular in Karonga’s tourist hotel, was a friend of Sylvester, who now accused the Jo’burg boss of over-reacting. ‘This is a beginning,’ he said, ‘but it isn’t a revolution. Things won’t be the same again – never! – but Whites are safe if they keep off the streets.’ I thought then of the 1915 Chilembwe Rising, when one visitor to Nyasaland commented, ‘The White population of the Protectorate were thrown into a very great fright over a very little thing.’ Given a whiff of crowd violence, the Black/White relationship quickly collapses into mistrust and fear – witness my fleeing downhill from those angry Ugandan Muslims.

Having heard about my visa disappointment Sylvester sighed. ‘Those immigration officers were also over-reacting, fearing a big uprising putting foreigners at risk. But nothing is organised, this is only the signal it’s time to organise. And of course those officers wouldn’t like your passport – maybe you’re a colleague or ally of Bishop Roche! We’re very sad about him, deported recently for demanding human rights for us – he’d lived in Malawi for twenty years and he loves us.’

Bishop John Roche was indeed central to the disturbances. Having led a chorus of clerical protests against Banda’s intolerable ill-treatment of ‘dissidents’, he was arrested in his cathedral during the Easter ceremonies and deported at twenty-four hours’ notice. Then, largely as a result of the religious leaders’ bold public stand, seventy-five dissidents met in Lusaka and formed the Interim Committee for a Democratic Alliance in Malawi (immediately acronymed into ICDAM) to oppose the Malawi Congress Party, otherwise known as the One-Man-Banda. On 16 April the 52-year-old trade unionist and apostle of democracy, Chakufwa Chihana, returned from exile in Zambia to lead this opposition, despite his having previously spent seven years in one of Banda’s notorious jails. A small crowd of Malawians and senior Western diplomats went to Lilongwe airport to meet him and witnessed his arrest as he left the plane. (The Malawians were few only because a rigorously censored press had been forbidden to announce Chihana’s return.) In times past that would have been that: but 1992 was different. Several Western governments promptly issued formal statements denouncing Chihana’s arrest and in a personal letter to the Life President the US government demanded his immediate release. All this ‘interference’ was ignored by Banda & Co. but widespread public awareness of outside support undoubtedly encouraged the strikers.

Malcolm went to the telephone again and came back white-faced – now expatriate vehicles were being stoned in Blantyre and Lilongwe. Sylvester asked dryly, ‘Are you surprised?’

As the afternoon and evening passed more detailed news came through, either on the telephone via Malcolm or on the World Service. In the overcrowded and destitute townships around Blantyre and Limbe violence was increasing, the looters concentrating on PTC supermarkets owned by the Press Trust, which controls most of the Malawian economy and has Banda as its principal trustee. In Ndirne township women wearing Banda-decorated skirts were being stripped and beaten and the Malawi Congress Party offices had been destroyed. Meanwhile, in Lilongwe, some 3,000 of Chihana’s supporters had gathered outside the High Court to glimpse their hero, chanting, ‘We want to see the one who is brave!’ When the police failed to bring Chihana to court, as ordered by a judge, the crowd ran riot through Lilongwe old town where the PTC supermarket was the first shop to be looted.

In the intervals of learning about Malawian politics I used this opportunity to study a phenomenon even odder than backpacking – overlanding. Overlanders are youngish (usually) people who pay large amounts of money to travel by truck from, for example, Nairobi to Cape Town, bringing most of their own food with them and camping each night at predetermined places like Karonga. This way of seeing Africa is apparently gaining popularity among those with more money than sense. At least backpackers retain autonomy, even if they exercise it with timidity. Overlanding I found utterly incomprehensible. Consider the sheer physical misery of travelling the length of Africa – or even half the length – by truck: the jolting, the dust, the diesel fumes, the frustration of being confined all day to a motor vehicle with companions not necessarily congenial … Who wouldn’t gladly pay thousands of pounds to avoid such a fate? It relieved me to find much discontent among this truckload; reality was falling far short of the ‘adventure and discovery’ promised by advertisements. A young New Zealand woman complained, ‘I thought we’d learn lots about Africa but our expedition leader is an ignorant lout. And we never seem to get to meet with Africans – we’re all stuck together, or with other travellers, like now.’ As we spoke the ‘lout’ was sauntering in and out of the bar; I would have described him as a wide-boy – tall, handsome, cocky, smooth-talking and knowing as much about Africa as a dog about a holiday.

Returning yet again from the telephone, Malcolm reported all borders closed, presumably to prevent the import of arms should that be under consideration. Sylvester smiled at me. ‘So you’re lucky you got in, even for ten days!’ Malcolm hurried out to tell his four truckers they could not continue into Tanzania with their loads of grain for the drought areas. Then Sylvester advised me to spend another day in Karonga, awaiting developments; should events prove him right, a visa extension might still be possible. I followed the truckers to a large nearby guest-house set in a spacious, well-tended garden; my hot windowless cell, halfway down a long prison-like corridor, cost only £1.20.

The clock changes in Malawi, a change for the worse from my point of view as darkness falls at 5.45 p.m. After a dawn swim the hotel restaurant served an excellent breakfast at 6.10. People get going earlier in Malawi, perhaps because of the changed hour – or the Banda work ethic?

By 7 a.m. it was unpleasantly hot as I walked to the town centre – awkwardly, in my long skirt. The World Service had reported that unrest was spreading to various plantations in the south but Karonga seemed back to normal, apart from jeep-loads of the paramilitary Young Pioneers ostentatiously wielding their weapons as they patrolled the town and environs. I looked for the David Whitehead showrooms, as advised by the Tourist Board – ‘Remember: No trip to Malawi is complete without a visit to David Whitehead and Sons (Malawi) Limited. Brilliant colours, bold patterns and high-quality 100% cotton are turned into works of art by our design team.’ Alas! my trip to Malawi had to be incomplete; the Karonga showroom was closed – naturally enough, this firm’s workers having sparked off the unrest. No one knew (or would say) whether the local workers were on strike or had been ordered to close the premises for security reasons.

Karonga’s small PTC supermarket displayed an astounding range of products unseen for months: familiar brands of chocolate, tinned soups, breakfast cereals, preserves, fruit drinks, biscuits, washing-powders, toiletries, wines and spirits. I went for the powdered milk at 16 kwatchas (£2.60) per kilo; had I realised then how two-faced is Malawi – what Spartan fare lay ahead – I would have bought very much more. All these goodies are of course beyond the reach of the average Malawian. Yet an Australian overlander, queueing with me at a state-of-the-art till, exclaimed, ‘So really Banda is a good guy! I wondered, but look what he’s done for his country – there’s no store like this in Tanzania, even in Dar!’

I remained discreetly silent. Sylvester had mentioned that PTC staff are reputed to be reliable Banda stooges.

After Tanzania’s drab and uniform poverty Karonga seems almost First World. Its freshly painted public buildings stand in grounds trim and flowerful; all its shops, including a bookshop, are well-stocked; its sleek middle class is conspicuous; its Carlsberg Special beer is superb. (In Malawi, Carlsberg hold the brewing monopoly.) Tourists inured to the deprivations of neighbouring countries naturally ask, ‘If this is the result of a benevolent dictatorship, who wants democracy?’ Karonga does not suggest a country with the fifth-highest infant mortality rate in the world (320 per thousand in the first five years) and one of the lowest (4 per cent) female literacy rates.

His Excellency the Life President Ngwazi Dr H. Kamuzu Banda, Malawi’s leader since 1963, fancies himself as successor to the region’s old Maravi kings and claims ‘divine right’ and absolute authority. Ngwazi means ‘Champion, Conqueror’ and the President’s megalomaniac title must be used in full whenever he is publicly mentioned. He exercises his absolute authority mainly through a 99 per cent share of Press Holdings, used to control not only agriculture, and retailing and distribution, but also Malawi’s finance – including the two major banks. During the 1960s he gave some half-hearted support to smallholders but his long-term economic strategy was based on the development of estate agriculture. Between 1969 and 1973 Press Holdings took over the tobacco estates and Banda began to endow his courtiers and their families with carefully chosen assets in industry and agriculture, assets that would keep them loyal. The cunning and skill with which he turned Malawi into his incalculably profitable personal property is deserving of a book in itself. One is tempted actually to admire his adroit manipulating of the World Bank, which at first was properly suspicious of his machinations, then gave in and allowed them to flourish.

Because Banda abhorred the Soviet bloc and fitted neatly into the capitalist scheme of things he was for long, in Western eyes, ‘a good guy’. Anyone who dared to defy him came to an unpleasant end – in exile, in prison or in an early grave – but that little weakness was overlooked. Before Portugal’s African empire collapsed he was on friendly terms with Lisbon. In 1967 he established diplomatic ties with South Africa; three years later he received Prime Minister Vorster, paying a return visit to Pretoria in 1971. Ever since, he has carefully cultivated diplomatic and commercial (including tourist) links with South Africa. No Western tongue praised him aloud for this but in powerful circles his ‘pragmatism’ was quietly applauded. And it has to be said that it was less morally – if not politically – repugnant than the furtive collusion with Pretoria practised by some ostensibly anti-apartheid Black leaders.

Seen from afar (and ‘afar’ could be a luxury hotel in Lilongwe) Banda looked like the glorious exception to African leaders, the man who knew how to ensure political stability, sustain a sound economy, pay national debts. It seemed sensible to make agriculture the backbone of the economy; only when agribusiness became profitable was industrialisation – concentrating on light industries – to be considered. It seemed even more sensible to disdain ‘Africanisation’, retaining expatriates in key positions in both the private and state sectors. However, Banda’s fondness for expatriates did not extend to the automatic acceptance of the rulings of an English judge. As Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg have recorded in Personal Rule in Black Africa:

In one High Court trial, Banda not only refused to accept the ruling of its English judge – who, for reasons of insufficient evidence, had dismissed charges of murder brought against five men – but also blocked the release of the men and proceeded to give the traditional African courts the right to retry the cases and pass sentences of death upon conviction. Banda warned: ‘Those five men are not going to be let loose, I can tell you that … Never, never, never. No matter what anyone says or does … I am in charge and I am not from England, either’. In addition, Banda secured from Parliament a Forfeiture Act, which empowered him to withhold the personal property of all persons whom he judged to be ‘subversive’. An amendment permitted the law to be used against allegedly corrupt or negligent officials, and no prior conviction had to be obtained in the courts.

Well might Banda claim, in an argument with the directors of a British multinational giant, ‘Anything I say is law. Literally law. It is a fact in this country.’ Malawi’s official motto is ‘Unity, Loyalty, Obedience and Discipline’, a list of virtues with considerable appeal for the multinational heirs of the bwanas.

While Nyerere’s adherence to a chimera was depleting Tanzania’s wealth, despite varied natural resources, Banda’s ‘state feudalism’ was increasing Malawi’s wealth, despite limited natural resources. Those neighbours had only one thing in common: both reduced the peasants to abject poverty. Malawi’s ‘economic miracle’ is largely based on overpopulation, on an agricultural and industrial work-force which must accept slave-wages. Much is made of Malawi’s capacity to feed its people and have enough over for export; in truth food is normally available for export only because most Malawians can’t afford to eat enough. The drought has of course left them as dependent on imported grain as the rest of Southern Africa and on 15 November 1992 the Reverend Canon Peter Price reported in the Guardian Weekly:

Two weeks ago I visited the drought-stricken regions of Malawi. The hunger of many in the villages was painfully evident. Equally apparent was the fact that in rural communities the price of food was loyalty to the government. Parish clergy spoke of the inequitable distribution of maize in government hand-outs, revealing that many of the most needy are ‘simply not entitled’ … During the worst drought in history, any restoration of aid would need to be accompanied by the closest monitoring to ensure that the most at risk receive its benefit … Recent news reaching church agencies in the United Kingdom suggests that church leaders are in immediate and considerable danger, and various threats and coercions have been applied.

After a not very thorough exploration of Karonga – the lake-level heat is peculiarly enervating – I sweat-replaced in a small downmarket café (comparatively down-market: anywhere else along my route it would have been up-market). A slogan plastered diagonally across the window said: ‘KAMUZU KNOWS BEST’ and two of my female fellow-customers wore wrap-around skirts displaying the Life President’s portrait – on their bottoms, which struck me as a comical case of lèse-majesté. A handsome young man stood by the counter, looking rather pensive and sipping a coke as though he wanted to make it last. He watched me drinking six cups of very sweet, milky tea, then followed me on to the street. ‘I feared to talk in there,’ he said, ‘but I like talking to visitors. What is your opinion of my country? You’ve come when we make history! This is the beginning of the end – maybe the beginning of something horrible and violent but we must have change! Can you understand what it means for us to see this crack? It’s only a crack, of course. And big buildings last long after they’ve shown a crack. But now people know there’s a crack and if they push, and keep on pushing, more and more cracks will appear, faster and faster!’

Throughout the day this view was expressed, in different ways, by eight casual acquaintances. I found the Malawians’ openness surprising, heartening – and touching. But their underlying message frightened me. I seemed to sense a people preparing for bloody conflict; dreading it, yet containing within themselves so strong an awareness of injustice that when the moment came they would contribute to it. I hope I was mistaken.

Near my guest-house stood Karonga’s public library, reasonably well-stocked (the educational and fiction sections especially strong) and very well-organised. It is open all day, five and a half days a week, and much used – including by ragged little urchins unable to afford school but pathetically absorbed in the Ladybird series and excited by the excellent range of illustrated children’s books. They spoke only a smattering of English and longed to be fluent. My engaging them in conversation displeased the librarian who chased them out of the building; I had trouble controlling my reaction.

The noon hours were spent sitting in breezy shade by the sapphire lake where white wavelets whispered and hissed on fine golden sand. In the intervals of bird-watching (mainly three species of heron) I talked with the passers-by or those laundering in the shallows. Karonga that day was invaded by a swarm of censorship-bred rumours: all borders and airports were closed – H.E. had fled to South Africa – the army and police were fighting each other in Lilongwe – Chihana had been strangled in jail by the Young Pioneers – the Presidential Palace had been burned down/blown up/looted – the Tanzanian army was coming to capture H.E. No rumour was too wild to be debated at length.

A few girls passed wearing big brightly coloured buttons on their bosoms, buttons inscribed around the periphery: SAVE OUR GIRLS FROM AIDS. NATIONAL AIDS CONTROL PROGRAMME. The central lettering preached the behaviour change message: SMART GIRLS SAY NO TO SEX! Banda’s neurotic puritanism has done nothing to protect his country from AIDS; Malawi has the second highest total of reported cases in Southern Africa. It was unnecessary to visit any clinic or office to get the depressingly familiar figures; a large notice-board in the library displayed them prominently, together with numerous newspaper cuttings, urgent pleas for ‘behaviour change’ and extracts from WHO reports. In 1985, 17 cases were reported in Malawi, by 1988 there had been 2,586 reported deaths and by March 1991 that figure had risen to 15,715. As elsewhere, health officials believed the true figure to be higher, probably much higher. One newspaper cutting praised Chief Mponda of Mangechi District for having ordered every initiate to bring his own razor blade to his circumcision rite. Dr George Liomba, Manager of the National AIDS Control Programme, was quoted:

In the mid-1990s, AIDS will be the major cause of death in the age-group 20 to 49 years. This group has suffered 77% of our AIDS cases. Already we have more than 20,000 children who have lost one or both parents to AIDS. In urban centres about 20% of the women attending antenatal clinics are HIV +, as are 20% of our blood donors and 80% of prostitutes. Out of a population of about eight million, more than 300,000 are HIV + – 20% of urban adults and 8% of rural adults.

Malawi must be given credit – I said to Sylvester – for not sweeping the virus under the carpet in the interests of tourism. Swiftly he replied that the agricultural industry – as the mainspring of Malawi’s economy, employing 85 per cent of the work-force – is much more important. ‘This country will fall apart if we can’t stop the epidemic. Most of its export earnings come from tobacco, tea, sugar – all needing a big work-force. Other countries have the same problem but we’re more conscious of economic well-being, for the elite, so the government tried from the start to alert people. They haven’t had much success, AIDS education is hard when you’ve such a high illiteracy rate and most families are too poor to own even a cheap transistor.’

Sylvester’s brother worked for an insurance company in Lilongwe; it had recently doubled its premium and shortened its life-policy duration to ten years for untested clients. Only a minority had so far refused the test though no insurance is available for the infected. Time may reveal a statistically improbable number of false negatives on insurance company files.

Malcolm had joined us at the bar looking more cheerful, his family (including the dog) having landed safely in Johannesburg. He questioned the value of AIDS education. His employers, a South African haulage company, provided a hundred free condoms monthly to each driver of its fleet of seventy trans-Africa trucks and it was Malcolm’s responsibility to issue them and get a receipt. ‘Then the trucks come back to base and I find the rubbers stashed away in the back of the cab, spoiled by the heat, or the boys admit they’ve sold them. They’d rather get hell for selling them than have me thinking they’d used them – that’s not macho!’

Hitchhiking White girls, Malcolm asserted, were still sleeping with his drivers in considerable numbers. ‘It’s all part of their “African Experience” – and they don’t even insist on condoms. We go on about Blacks being suicidally fatalistic but those White bitches are no better.’ Malcolm himself was the reverse of fatalistic. In Blantyre the family’s Indian doctor had convinced him that mosquitoes could spread AIDS so he and his wife and 5-year-old daughter were tested every six months.

At sunset the World Service reported that thirty-eight were known to have been killed, by police and Young Pioneers, in Blantyre rioting. Later Malcolm heard that in Lilongwe and Blantyre the army (at present an insignificant force, though it may prove crucial in the years ahead) was passively siding with the rioters by refusing back up to the police and Pioneers. At which point I stopped hoping for a visa extension and settled down to some serious planning – as is not my wont.

By dusk on 17 May I must be over the border, in Zambia. Memories of that immigration officer deterred me from trying any tricks, like overstaying and pretending I’d got lost. Therefore impulsive detours, loitering in beautiful places, dismounting often to bird-watch, accepting delaying invitations – all those indulgences of the happy wanderer must be eschewed (more or less) for eight days. Carefully I worked out my route and mileage, allowing for the fact that most of those 420 miles would be on execrable tracks. At Karonga one has to choose between extremes: there is no middle way. The flawless lakeside road takes tourists where they want to go (and where Banda wants them to go), while the Stevenson Road – closely resembling that track from the Ugandan border to Bukoba – climbs into the Misuku Hills. I didn’t really have a choice. Apart from other considerations – like avoiding tourists – the lakeside temperature rivalled Kenya before the rains and I longed for mountain coolness. The Stevenson Road would take me north-west into an atypical – because infertile and sparsely populated – area of Malawi. This ‘highway’ was designed to link the northern extremity of Lake Nyasa with the southern extremity of Lake Tanganyika. When the Royal Geographical Society sponsored Thomson’s first expedition someone dreamed an impractical dream – as lunatic as the worst of modern ‘aid’ projects. To overcome the difficulties of land transport in Africa, the Mediterranean should be linked to Central and Southern Africa via the Nile, Lake Victoria, Lake Tanganyika and Lake Nyasa. An ill-advised Glasgow merchant named James Stevenson donated what were wrongly calculated to be the necessary funds for one of the link roads. This money ran out when the road reached Chitipa, on the present Zambia-Malawi border, but James Stevenson’s reward is immortality of a sort. Not everyone has a road called after them in the remotest corner of Malawi.