From Malawi

2004-05-13T13:40:00.000-07:00

THE SEA
It can be such a miraculous number of colors! There are lots of shades of blue: light light blue, just like the sky, so that the horizon is invisible; darker, shiny blue; lush turquoise blue with a twist of green; dark deep blue. Then sometimes it's not blue at all. Around sunset it is especially changeful, now pink, now purple, now green. Foam is white, and the underside of waves is brown; the flashing reflection of the sun is too bright to be classified by color, it's gold and white and silver and yellow but mostly just blinding; and the when the moon dances upon the water... aahhh... Later at night, the sea is black.

I'm still not doing justice to the variety. For it can be several colors at once. For example, it may be pink and blue at the same time; maybe pink and blue in different places, but it might also manage to be pink and blue at the same place. Impossible, you say? It would seem so, but light is more devious and dexterous than you think, and only a huge, glassy, chameleon creature like the sea can make you realize it.

I watched a wave, or waves, at a spot on the beach. I am confused between singular and plural because, on the sea, there are many waves, moving forward one after another, but at the edge of the water, there is just one, which surges, then dissipates in the sand and slides back, then pushes upwards again. Well, this wave was constantly switching between blue and brown! When it was moving in, I saw its underside, catching the sun and churning with sand, and it was brown. But then as it sunk, it all turned to sky blue, the retreating waters and the wet sand together. Every few seconds, brown, blue, brown, blue.

God is the greatest artist. A few days by the sea in Mozambique were a precious reminder of that.

Keep reading, I've got some stories left: I'll tell more about the robbery, and about the charm of Mozambique's Marxist street names, and even some very old stories from Malawi, including a bitter old colonialist I met in Liwonde...

2004-05-13T13:37:00.000-07:00

BACK IN THE USA
I had a rough trip back to the US: we got robbed our last night in Mozambique, and then the airline lost my suitcases on the way home! I cancelled the day in Kenya I was planning to spend: without money, and shaken up by the robbery, it seemed less appealing. I have a few stories left to tell though, so keep reading. Meanwhile, I'm starting up my old blog again, which has quite a different tone.

2004-05-06T03:42:00.000-07:00

MOZAMBIQUE
Not everything went well with our litle one-week vacation in Mozambique. We were surprised by the high prices, higher than in some much richer countries and often much higher than the Lonely Planet would have us believe. Beaches are the main attraction of southern Mozambique, and we got to one on our second day, the "Costa do Sol" (Sun Coast) on the outskirts of Maputo, bu, thinking the out-of-town beaches might be better (more pristine, and on the open ocean rather than the bay) we rented a car and headed north to Bilene, based on a vague recommendation from someone in the airport in Jo'burg. Stupidly failing to check the book (this time it's not the Lonely Planet's fault) I thought it would be a short, hour or hour and a half, drive, but it was 140 km and took all day Saturday; on Sunday, after spending most of the day on the beach, the drive home took us well into the night. In Malawi, driving at night is dangerous because the roadsides are full of pedestrians and bikers which are hard to see. Mozambique is more developed and less crowded, so there are fewer people on the road but more cars, some of which are absurdly slow trucks, going at 30km/hour while long and miserable backlogs of cars pile up behind them, constantly sliding a bit into the right line and hoping for an absence of headlights so that they can pass en masse.

Bilene does have a nice beach, and a walk along it at night was a very haunting experience, because there was a huge moon overhead, but also because the waters of the lagoon were so still and clear that you could see right to the bottom, and watch the way the ripples refracted the moonlight, concentrating it in moving lines and webs on the sand. Touch the water with your foot and the moon-webs would come into motion, rippling outwards in glistening circles... In the day, we would have liked to swim a bit more, and as for soaking up the sun, we stupidly didn't bother with sunscreen, and it took me about three days to recover from the sunburns. That night, as our little car splashed our way into rain-drenched Maputo to look for a hotel, I was really suffering. And the first few places we tried were full. Finally we found a guesthouse, beautiful place, great deep brown wooden floors, sculptures and jungle vegetation around the swimming pool, huge plush furniture, jade-colored tiles in the bathroom, high ceilings, spacious, elegant... Despite the $85/night bill we decided to stay two days. But we got a bit of disappointing travel advice from one of the guys there. The Maputo Elephant Reserve, and Punto d'Ouro, a beach with dolphin tours, were only reachable by 4-wheel drive. My pocketbook was reeling by this time, so for the last three days we found a little backpacker place along the Costa do Sol, and returned the car, to rely on the minibuses to get in and out of the city. Finally, a good deal: it was clean, friendly, very close to the beach, with a wonderful balcony, on the top floor, looking out on a palm tree with HUGE leaves, about 20 feet long. My fiancee had to work on her final on paper (she's supposed to be in school right now) so the last three nights are turning out to be quite pleasant, laid-back, and cheap. My sunburns are subsiding. Yesterday we bought a huge supply of foodstuffs at the market, including two crabs and a kilo and a half of prawns, and cooked them at home. Mm-mm! (Even if seafood is very labor-intensive to eat.)

Even if we weren't the shrewdest or most fortunate of Mozambican tourists, impressions of the country have been interesting.

LANGUAGE AND DEVELOPMENT
The biggest question that interested me in my first few days here is this: Why is it that Portuguese has become the native language of many Mozambicans, while no Malawians seem to have become native in English? I first learned about native-Portuguese-speaking African Mozambicans when I met the wife of our transporter friend in Blantyre. Here in Maputo it's quite noticeable. The conversations you overhear in the street seem to be in Portuguese. People can understand my Spanish decently well. On the streets, you see Portuguese everywhere, which doesn't prove much per se-- in Malawi English was everywhere-- and yet it's more abundant and colloquial here.

I have several theories about this. The one my fiancee believes is that there are just too many different "tribes" here, so they needed to learn Portuguese in order to communicate with each other; in Malawi, Chichewa was widely enough spoken that it wasn't so necessary to adopt a European language. But that doesn't quite seem to explain it. Just because Mozambique "needed" Portuguese as a national language, doesn't explain why, in practice, people would adopt it. In Malawi, I didn't quite understand why they used English as much as they did, since Chichewa seemed fairly universally understood. English is an international language, useful for trade, of course, but that hardly explains why streetsigns, advertisements, school textbooks, newspapers were exclusively in English when most of the population has a pretty feeble command of English and even the best-educated seem to like switching into Chichewa to explain things that are unclear. Malawians seem to have an inferiority complex about their language, anway: they call it a "vernacular," and I remember the man in the hut in the village who insisted, rather than answering my Chichewa in Chichewa, on answering in English, saying with stiff pride, "I an educated man. Can speak English."

The role of English puzzled me greatly, in fact. It always seemed to me they should just use Chichewa as a national language, even if it was so obscure and lacked international recognition-- like the Czechs and the Finns, for example, who going happily speaking and writing and publishing newspapers and conducting government business in their language, even if to all but a few million speakers their language seems extremely obscure. And in thinking about why they didn't, I started to think of all the things a full, upstandnig, self-respecting language needs. Speech and grammar and speakers are not enough: you also need a literature, including translations but preferably some masterpieces in the language itself. You need good writers to develop good style, to develop an advanced vocabulary. You need libraries, and preferably internet resources... Maybe Chichewa just didn't have the literary sinews it takes to be a national language, and that was why so much of Malawi's national life was conducted in English, even if it was the language of the colonialists which few Malawians really knew well.

So anyway, all this makes me quite impressed with the native fluency of so many Mozambicans in Portuguese. And it makes me wonder: is that part of the reason why Mozambique is so much more successful than Malawi? Mozambique has enjoyed very fast growth in recent years. A big reason is that they're so close to South Africa, of course. The sea helps, too, and the Mozambican government is probably a lot smarter than the Malawian. But does their command of a European language change the culture somehow. This has the feel of a Latin country. The women dress to be more beautiful here, they wear their hair long, and public display of affection is more acceptable. The architecture is Mediterranean, and I often imagine I'm in Latin America or Portugal or even Italy.

So, back to the question I started with: why do Mozambicans speak Portuguese so well? Maybe it's because the Portuguese were here longer: the British arrived in Malawi only in the late 19th century, whereas the Portuguese were in Mozambique centuries earlier. But they left the place almost untouched, staying mostly on the coasts, until the Scramble for Africa in the 19th century. Mozambicans have much more reason to resent the Portuguese than Malawians the British. Whatever the British may have done elsewhere, in Malawi they came as missionaries and humanitarians, stopped the slave trade, and governed with relative wisdom and moderation (though a certain dose of racism mars the picture, of course) and left willingly enough in the end. The Portuguese were slavers, conquerors, made no investment in the African population when they finally moved in, and fought to the bitter end before suddenly abandoning the country to a horrific civil war.

Which all leads me to a disturbing thought: did the Portuguese cause Mozambicans to learn the Portuguese language, and with it absorb Portuguese/European culture a bit more, thus enabling them to be more prosperous now, while the British actually did the Malawians a disservice with their humanitarianism and moderation which allowed the Malawians to stagnate? Or was the civil war, perhaps, useful, tearing the country out of its traditional ways and energizing it to embrace the modern world? Hmm... well, probably Mozambique's success can be explained in less politically correct ways, so there's no need to run the risk of resorting to such heretical thoughts. But being here, and comparing it to Malawi, it's hard to silence the idea.

2004-04-27T13:11:00.000-07:00

ZOMBA
Northerners think of the tropics stereotypically as "paradise" just because you don't have to wear jackets and coats and stay indoors so your ears won't get cold. For about the first two weeks I was so grateful to be able to walk around in short sleeves that I was a bit giddy and had that "paradise" feeling, but you soon get past that. Just as Northerners think it would be paradise to take warmth for granted, I suppose Malawians think it would be paradise to take food for granted. The trees and flowers of Lilongwe are nice, but the city is flat and muggy and some parts are dirty and noisy, and it's certainly no paradise.

But Zomba, the old British capital, in the south-- there the stereotype of tropical "paradise" begins to seem valid. We spent a week down there for work, five days in the city, two on Zomba Plateau. The city climbs the slopes of the mountains. It's wonderfully lush. In the city center, stately bluegum trees line the road. Trees are bigger in Zomba, the air is cooler, the view of the mountain slope rising serenely overhead... I can't describe it adequately. Huge palm fronds. A big herbarium. The canopy high overhead, and on the mountain slopes, you can't see what's below it...

On the Plateau, it's a bit different, but in a way even better. We stayed at a hotel on the very edge of the plateau called Le Meridien Ku Chawe that must be one of the most wonderful places I've ever been. The architecture reminded me vaguely of a castle. Big rooms with fireplaces. Clean, brick corridors, with arches, terraced green lawns with palms. The plateau is covered in cloud often, and when it is, all the trees become phantoms. When the clouds are gone, the views are spectacular.

2004-04-27T13:01:00.000-07:00

LEAVING MALAWI
I didn't get my contract extended here, so I'm going to leave sooner than I thought, and I'm a bit sad about it. I went to my favorite restaurant tonight, a Chinese restaurant in the City Centre, and walked around the streets beneath those beautiful African night skies, and already felt a pang of regret to know that I'm flying out tomorrow.

Which doesn't mean I'll cancel the blog just yet. First of all, I'm going to Mozambique next, for a week, and I'll also have brief stops in South Africa (Johannesburg) and Nairobi (Kenya) on my way back, which might be worth blogging about. Four African countries in toto, if all goes according to plan. Second, I've got quite a few stories left to tell.

2004-04-16T09:40:00.000-07:00

THE BIG DAY LOOMS AHEAD
On May 18, Malawians will go to the polls. Who will win? Nobody knows, and that's good in a way, at least. It's not one of these countries where the result is a foregone conclusion.

It's obscene, the role that egos and corruption play in African politics. Bakili Muluzi, the president, whose picture is in every government office, has served his constitutional maximum of two terms, so why can't he just step down gracefully? Instead, he tried to get a law passed to allow him to serve a third. Parliament refused. So now he's picked some puppet to run for him. I don't know much about him except that everyone thinks he's a pure pawn of Muluzi. One newspaper says that Muluzi even wanted to put his own picture on the ballot, though he's not running. The way he chose the pawn, over the heads of senior members of his party, has created a big rift, with a lot of former UDF-ers running as independents.

And yet it still seems there will be a new president.

The opposition is fragmented. There were efforts to form a coalition, but all the candidates had their eye on the presidency. So it unraveled, and now there are a whole lot of parties competing. How that interacts with the voting system, I have no idea.

Some of the newspapers circulating in Lilongwe are passionately against Muluzi and UDF. "Save us from this torture, UDF," pleaded one of them, to the opposition candidates. Can't say I disagree. It seems that someone corruptly sold off the state maize stash in 2002, thus helping to bring about the famine then which killed many Malawians. They also defied the IMF, indulging in domestic borrowing which drove up inflation and interest rates and put the country on the wrong foot with donors for who knows how long. But will the papers influence the country's majority of illiterate peasants? Hardly.

Public opinion polls are inadequate here: rare, inaccurate, published when out-of-date, and so on. As far as I can tell, nobody has a clue what will happen come May 18th.

For my part, I'm rooting against UDF.

2004-04-16T09:28:00.000-07:00

ENCOUNTER WITH A SPIDER
I was startled a few days back when, walking across the floor, I seemed to catch a bit of motion from the corner of my eye. I looked down at the rug, and it took my eyes a minute to notice it. It was a bit dim, the rug was dark blue, and the furry brown legs spreading out sort of blended in, so that it took the eye a moment to identify... a piece of cloth?... did I drop something?... It was startling to recognize what it was, and a tremor of horror ran through me as I moved back.

But the horror lasted only a second, and soon was eclipsed (not exactly replaced) by fascination. My fiancee was delighted, partly because she found my fear amusing. (She rather overestimated how afraid I was, because she thought my fear of spiders was comparable to her fear of cockroaches. I'm not actually that arachnophobic.)

We gazed at it for a while on the rug. Then we watched it run. Against the white tiles of the floor it was much more visible. Legs included, it was about three inches in diameter; the biggest spider I've ever seen outside of a cage, but I know there are spiders quite a bit bigger.

My fiancee did what is traditionally, I suppose, the man's job: she followed it with a plate, trapped it, slid a magazine under the plate, picked up the magazine-and-plate prison with the spider inside, took it outside and released it. I remember the way the spider moved under the plate, its legs rustling around. The way it slid along under the sloped sides of the plate revealed the softness of its body.

It ran across the stones of the courtyard and disappeared into the grass. Sometimes we remember it and miss it a bit. But I wouldn't sleep well with it in the room. Spiders kill our enemies, insects, not us, so why do we hate and fear them? I don't know, but it's an instinct that I for one can't overcome.

2004-04-16T09:14:00.000-07:00

MARKET-DOMINANT MINORITIES
There is a phenomenon all over the world that certain ethnic groups perform very well and dominate the economy. Amy Chua's book World on Fire describes the phenomenon. In Southeast Asia, it's the Chinese. In Russia, the Jews. In Mexico and West Africa, the Lebanese. In Latin America, the whites. The Jews are the stereotypical example of a market-dominant minority. Market-dominant minorities make democratic capitalism very difficult, because if the rich are members of an ethnic minority they are easy to isolate, and the majority is always tempted to dispossess them if they can control the government by their votes. Market-dominant minorities are associated with poor development outcomes. The East Asian countries that achieved booming growth-- Japan, China, Taiwan, Korea-- all lack them, as do Europe and the US.

In Malawi, the phenomenon of market-dominant minorities is starkly visible. It seems that almost every business establishment is run by some kind of ethnic minority. Indians are a market-dominant minority. Whites are a market-dominant minority. Arabs are a market-dominant minority. Chinese are a market-dominant minority. Of the market-dominant minorities I've talked to personally (whites and Indians, no Arabs so far) they tend to have a bleak view of the country, and their attitudes to Malawians tend to be scornful and racist. By an unspoken pact, they mingle with each other as equals, and the blacks remain in a subordinate role. Pardon the generalizations, and of course this is no scientific survey. But you notice the pattern.

(By the way, it might seem more "politically correct" to say "Africans" than "blacks." But this seems unfair to me. A lot of whites, not to mention Arabs, were born in Africa. The term may make some people uncomfortable; it makes me uncomfortable too, actually. I think this discomfort is something you just have to swallow and transcend. Maybe that discomfort is a reminder of facts about the world that should make us uncomfortable: if so, that is useful, and we shouldn't try to sterilize the language through political correctness.)

I haven't noticed any resentment against the market-dominant minorities from the blacks. Which is good, I think, because it's always a temptation for the non-market-dominant majority to think the minority cheated somehow, and the problem is just maldistribution of resources, whereas in fact market dominance always (possibly "always" is too strong, but I doubt it) reflects certain aspects of the character of the market-dominant ethnicity. And yet I always find the phenomenon a bit mind-boggling. Why are the two photo shops in town run by an Arab and a Chinese? Why don't the millions of blacks decide to do that? How do the handful of whites, Indians, Arabs and Chinese here manage to float so high above the rest? People look so equal; why do some groups do so much better than others? This mystery has its exciting side-- if we could all change our behaviors a bit, do business like them, imagine how prosperous the world could be!-- and its disturbing side-- as if people are predestined to certain stations in life, not by laws, not by macroeconomic conditions, but by their own cultural programming. Why and how is cultural programming so strong?

Big question, of course. I'll stop there.

2004-04-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

STEVIE AND CHERRY TOMATOES
A snatch of everyday life that might help you to imagine Malawi:

Five minutes from my office is a parking lot/town square with a couple of restaurants. Tasty Take Aways is very quick, cheap (under $3, typically) and has friendly staff, and Ali Baba's is slower but tastier, with larger portions, and only slightly more expensive. I go there for lunch a lot, and the streets are full of kids and young men selling things. There are beggars too, some crippled, some women with babies, to whom I would immediately give change in the US, but here... how can you help everybody? Some of the boys are beggars. "Please boss, no mother no father give me your money..."

But not Stevie: he sells things. And he recognizes me as a customer. Once, early on, he sold me cherry tomatoes. They were about 10 times cheaper than what you'd pay in the US, so I gave them a try. They were pretty good, and addicting. I loved the way the juice popped in my mouth.

Lots of other people sell things too. Ties are a popular item, and I've bought a couple of them. Guys walk around offering them, with great selection and prices. I've picked up a couple of shirts too, one of which I particularly like. But so many of the merchants don't have a clue. They'll walk around with one thing to sell: say, a cell phone, or batteries, or plugs, or bicycle parts. "Very cheap, very cheap." It doesn't seem to register that price isn't the problem: we just don't need the things. They keep talking about the cheapness as if that would help. I felt sorry for them as much for their poverty as for their seeming lack of commercial savvy.

I had hopes for Stevie, though. He recognized me as a customer, and he picked up the fact that I really liked the cherry tomatoes. I was hoping he would become my supplier. I told him once that if he brought cherry tomatoes again I would buy them for sure. I said "tomorrow." But "tomorrow" I went past City Center in my car but did not stop in that part. I returned the next day hoping for my cherry tomatoes.

"I had them yesterday," he said. "But you didn't come. You just drove past..." he pointed to the road where I had driven past. "Today I don't have them." And then he wanted me to buy his wares for the day, probably big tomatoes or something, I don't remember...

I've seen Stevie a lot of times since then. He always recognizes me. But he never seems to have the cherry tomatoes, so I never buy anything. I guess it wouldn't make sense as a business model, getting the cherry tomatoes for my occasional visits. I don't know. I really want to give him some business but I don't want it to be charity, but real business: identifying a motivated buyer and catering to that demand. I'd pay him three times what I paid the first time for those delicious things. Too bad.

2004-04-16T04:29:00.000-07:00

TEA FIELDS AND THE SOUTH
One of the things that makes the views of Mount Mulanje so beautiful are the tea fields. Unlike the shaggy and often half-dead cornfields that cover so much of Malawi, tea fields are bright green and very neatly shaped, almost like a hedge. I don't know if they grow that way naturally or are pruned (which would be a lot of work for no reason that I can see), but anyway the effect is lovely. Tea fields are a cash crop, for export, unlike the cornfields, which are planted for subsistence-- you hardly ever see maize even in restaurants and cornfields. It's only one symptom of a general phenomenon: "the south is better." There's a bit more cash-crop and industrial development, Blantyre is a genuine city (even sort of modern) and Zomba a very pleasant African town among the mountains, the landscapes are nicer, more rolling... you noticed it in all sorts of ways.

2004-04-15T09:48:00.000-07:00

MULANJE
Mount Mulanje is the highest mountain in Malawi at 3001 meters (about 10,000 feet.) That won't impress Coloradans (ours go over 14,000 feet) but I've sometimes wondered whether there would be a better way to measure mountains that took account of the degree to which they loom over you when you stand at the foot of them. Looking up at the summits of Mulanje from directly below, they loom very grandly: a 70-degree angle maybe. Glorious. Mulanje is actually not a single mountain but a "massif," an area 300 km square that surges out of the surrounding countryside, with a lot of different peaks. The massif faces the world with huge cliffs, some of them thousands of feet high, and it is often shrouded in cloud. Canyons cut their way into it, and through one of these we went up to Chambe Hut, on the "plateau." It has a great view of Chambe Peak, but as a destination I prefer lakes, perhaps... The hike was beautiful, though. We passed one lovely waterfall where my fiancee went for a swim (sadly, I had forgotten my suit). One of our guides also swam a bit. I was very envious of the swimmers. Sad, sad, sad. But a beautiful falls.

One strange thing about mountains is that they're supposed to be harsh, but they can be so wonderfully, madly full of life. Certain stretches of Mulanje were like that: lush with ferns, with pine trees with hanging needles that reminded me of maidens' hair, with vines, with spiderwebs that dangled among the trees, shone in the sun, miracles of design.

I would rather have done without the porters, perhaps. Unix and Rafik, two local high school students, met us as soon as we came into town, and helped us to the lodge, then showed us up the mountain. They were very friendly and cheerful for the most part, and we couldn't have found the way without them. But on the way they started telling us their sob stories about the difficulty of paying school fees. Then they seemed disappointed at their pay, which was above the standard daily rate and far above what they had casually mentioned the night before (unless they had meant an hourly rate, which they didn't specify at the time, and even if they did we were not far short of paying them that). Then the next day they played a tacky trick on us. They said they needed a ride to Mulanje town, and we agreed. But once we got there, they said they needed to buy school uniforms but didn't have the money, and "we're just begging" for more. We broke and gave them 200 each (about $2; they asked for 500). I wish I had given them nothing and scolded them for dishonesty. Instead, I created an incentive for it.

2004-04-13T13:07:00.000-07:00

CHIROMBO THE DOMESTIC HYENA
One of the chief attractions of the lodge where we stayed is the "domestic hyena." Semi-domestic, I would say. Peter, the stout and humorous owner, and Garret, an Englishman lingering in Africa after volunteering who stays at the lodge for room and board (but no pay), keep saying "he's just like a dog." They got him from a trader someplace and he would have been killed without them, and now he's five months old. It is certainly remarkable to have a hyena walking around, to see his face, his head, his colors. You can watch the way he behaves and imagine him in the wild...

But he's not "just like a dog." Only "semi-domestic," I would say. His mouth and teeth are always active. Not that he really bites, I guess; hyenas actually live on their mothers' milk for a year, and Chirombo is not ready to eat meat yet. But you can see how he is, as Garret puts it, "programmed;" he'll put his teeth around things, people's body parts, feeling them, playing... I guess with a carnivore the way of discovering the world is by biting it. I felt sorry for him; it's as if he wanted to be like a dog, but he couldn't. Peter and Garret claim they'll just keep him. Hmm. Right now, a person can overpower him, but when he gets bigger... I wonder if a person could love a hyena. No doubt they could, but there would be something sad about it, because the hyena's strange, sneaky, tooth-gripping nature would always be a barrier to real friendship.

Hyenas are somewhat ugly. Oh, and they do laugh: Peter grabbed Chirombo by his hind legs and hung him up-side-down and the sound he made really was like a weird, screechy kind of laughter. So people have trouble taking them seriously, and are inclined to think they are scavengers off the prey of lions. But it seems that hyenas are actually better hunters than lions: the hyenas kill something, then the lions come and chase them away from their kill, and the hyenas wait and get the leftovers. It seems like that must be a metaphor for something.

For the moment, he's still small, and it's fun, though still a bit scary, to play rough with him. You have to be mean to have your way with him: beat him away, wrestle his head to the ground with all your might, then do it again. He has tremendous stamina, never gets tired, and doesn't seem to mind the beatings, doesn't get mad, it's even his way of being playful.

2004-04-13T12:45:00.000-07:00

HIPPOS IN LIWONDE
In Liwonde, we saw impalas, waterbucks, baboons, mongooses, a hyena and a wide variety of birds, but the biggest attraction was the hippo. Hippos are massive creatures, the third largest land animal after elephants and rhinos. Elephants, by the way, also live in Liwonde, but this time of year it's very hard to see them. They are further north, where the ground is less boggy, and the bridges and roads there are not passable during the rainy season. Hippos stay put more. Their way of life seems a profoundly reasonable one, more so, in the African climate, than that of diurnal human beings. Hippos come out of the river at night to feed-- night, when the air is cool and fresh, and a glorious array of stars is strewn across the sky, when the landscape loses its gaudy suncooked colors and a tenderness and mystery weaves itself into the world. I would rather be nocturnal in Africa. The hot daytime hippos spend in the river, first sleeping, later playing.

The strangest thing about hippos, though, is that there was something ghostly about them. Before we went to the lodge, we walked across the floodplain that gradually turns into the wide swampy edge of the river, when through the air we heard an oink-like grunting sound. We guessed it was from hippos. Hippo noises always seem much closer than they really are.

Later we saw the hippos in the river, on a long canoe ride through the wetlands along the side of the river. We rowed around a lagoon and saw the hippos in the middle of it. But except for the rare moments when they would jump, or yawn, you could just see their eyes and noses. They're dangerous, so we couldn't move in close. They seemed to be having a good time. You didn't know how many there were. We observed a group of hippos for a while and we had counted about five, when suddenly the number of hippos' heads poking above the surface increased. The count jumped all the way to ten. Then back down to five or so, but now the question was, had there really been a group of five, or were there more, and they were rotating which ones were on top? There was no knowing.

We rowed in the marshy edge of the river for a long time. Sometimes the bought was pushing through tall grass, and I'm sure that from the sure you wouldn't have known it was a river. I kept my eyes peeled for crocodiles the whole time, but in vain. "They're shy creatures," the guide told us. "They've already heard the commotion and gone down to the bottom." By contrast, the hippos were not shy, grunting and oinking and splashing and floating around for all to see-- and yet still far away, still mostly submerged.

We saw them again at night, this time on land, in the light of a bright flashlight. The night drive seemed about to come to an abrupt halt early on when the vehicle, a huge beast of a machine that ran through roads no 4WD I've driven would dare attempt, got stuck in the mud. I joined Peter, the main man at the lodge, and a black employee, shoeless in the mud and pushing with all our might, and, as in Msinja, it seemed pretty hopeless for a while and then we finally managed to get it out. And went on with the night drive. We saw four hippos in all, and all of them briefly. They vanished into the bushes. They don't graze on the banks of the river, it turns out, but prefer to go up the mountain slopes for a ways. We only saw them passing, ten or fifteen seconds, then they were gone. By the time I woke up in the early morning, they were back in the river. And yet my fiancee said she heard them in the night, their oinky sounds. They may have walked right past the lodge, and we wouldn't have seen them, not without the bright flashlights that Peter brought with him.

Hippos-- happy, jolly stereotype strangely at odds with their brisk nocturnal activity, huge and yet somehow ghostly, mysterious.

2004-04-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

BEAUTIFUL MALAWI
We had a few days off for Easter Break, so we left Lilongwe and went down south to Liwonde National Park and Mount Mulanje. "There are so many beautiful places in Malawi, why did we have to end up in the worst of them?" was my fiancee's comment by the end of the trip. Both Liwonde and Mulanje were really wonderful. In general, I prefer the south, although there are things I like about Lilongwe too. But it's a bit flat, and hot, and it was nice to find out that Malawi has its fair share of natural splendor.

2004-04-05T09:11:00.000-07:00

UNDER AN AFRICAN MOON
The most spell-binding experience of the weekend was a walk I took along the highway just as evening was falling. It turns out that it's only about ten or fifteen minutes on foot from my guesthouse before you just about leave the city behind, and around you are the locust trees above the fields, the tall tall grass, not really wild Africa but feels close to it. And above it all, a moon. Big, fat, full moon, making everything bright, and the stillness all around. There was such satisfaction to the motion of walking, foot in front of foot, in the coolness of the air and the calmness of the evening. I felt like I could have walked all night long without getting tired, or even if I did get tired it would have felt good, just the land and the moon and the tall grass and the warm-cool air. Simple pleasures. From which the wealth bubble distracts you. That's true in the US too, I suppose, but far more so here.

Life's most wonderful moments are when you do something for no reason at all, something which you are free to do anytime but why would you bother with it, and find that you really enjoy it. It's wonderful because it makes it seem like probably most of the world is wonderful and you're just trapped in the grimy, stressful, tiresome parts of it, and if you could free yourself a bit, shake loose from things, all would be bliss. It happened to me once when I took a Russian electrichka to a random town called Saltikovskaya and had a day of pure freedom and bliss that was as easy as a breeze. That heralded an excellent summer... Last night a stroll along the highway had the same enchanting feeling. And the average Malawian may have hardly a kwacha to his name, live in rural villages with a chronically aching stomach, but evenings like that, outside of the city-- he has those to his heart's content. Maybe I should get out of the habit of pitying them so much.

2004-04-05T01:44:00.000-07:00

QUIET WEEKEND IN LILONGWE
I had a fever Friday night and on Saturday I had a bit of a fever, so we dropped the idea of an out-of-town trip and stayed in the Lilongwe for the weekend. My fever got up to 102, and I got a malaria test just in case but it was negative. The malaria test was only $4, in a very nice clinic on the fringes of Lilongwe. Clean floors, professional nurses, a school, church and clinic altogether. There was an American doctor there, too, though I didn't talk to him. My fiance took very good care of me, so that it was almost pleasant.

Walking around Lilongwe in the afternoon, we found a Chinese garden. It was very odd to see the bright red and yellow and green, the wooden pagodas with stylized shingle roofs, there in Lilongwe. Who built it? More power to them, anyway. A bit run-down, and there was supposed to be a pond but it was dry, just a flat cement basin, but still, it was a pleasant (and odd) surprise. A Malawian chorus of some kind was singing there.

Africans are very good at a capella singing. While we were driving around the city we saw a lot of choirs walking along the road singing. They were dressed in uniforms and had labels like "Lilongwe Police Choir." Was it a fundraiser? I don't know. It looked like a political rally, too, but what does the Lilongwe Police Choir have to do with politics?

On Sunday we took a walk in the Nature Sanctuary. It was wonderful by the river. I should mention that the weather is getting cooler lately, and on Saturday walking outside was quite comfortable. When we went into Old Town to buy a radio, it was very hot, but in the Nature Sanctuary it's shady and cool. Bamboo, flowers. An interesting thing about this place is how the lushness and prosperity of nature contrasts with the impoverishment and bleakness of conditions for humanity, at least if you measure them in the terms of most other parts of the world. And yet humans are still prospering in comparison with their various animal rivals. They are increasing rapidly in population, and they probably starve less than lions or elephants do. It's all relative.

The lucky thing about the walk in the Nature Sanctuary was that a monkey had escaped from its cage, and we got to watch it cross the road, climb a tree with its baby, then run around as the animal trainers tried to catch it and put it back in its cage, eventually succeeding. Once the mother monkey (baby clinging to her stomach), about two feet tall maybe, ran up to me and for a moment put her arms around my leg as if she would climb me like a tree.

The unlucky thing was that the rain had made the logs on all the bridges soggy. One of the bridges broke and my fiance fell through (only one leg) and ended up rather bruised (but no complaints, she was a great sport about it :) ).

2004-04-01T12:42:00.000-08:00

"THEY'RE NOT READY FOR DEMOCRACY"
This idea, that some peoples are just not ready for democracy, has a long history. It used to be a favorite notion of the old colonialists, who practiced liberal principles at home and, to justify not practicing them abroad, opined that non-Europeans had to be "civilized" first, before they could be trusted to govern themselves (and in the meantime, Europeans would govern them instead). More recently, the anti-war "left" has taken up the old colonialist notion: they are livid that America has aspired to bestow freedom on lowly Arabs, whom, they are certain, are "not ready for democracy" (thus implying, though they are reticent about this, that they wish the Iraqis were back under Saddam's murder-ocracy). (I should add, by the way, that this is crediting the anti-warriors with far more coherence than they are generally able to muster; generally they have no arguments whatsoever but instead take refuge behind a cloud of snobbish contempt for anyone who disagrees with them… but anyway…) America is the object of two contradictory charges on this issue: first, that we betray our democratic principles by collaborating with dictatorships (in the Cold War, for example); second, that we are far too convinced that our system is the perfect one and go around imposing democracy in all sorts of places where it is not appropriate. Hmm…

Anyway, our friends down in Blantyre were of the opinion that Malawi is not ready for democracy. One of the Indians was a great admirer of Banda, even though he acknowledged his "atrocities." He was very fervent, and declared "I will speak the truth, I don't care what they do to me."

The other Indian had a similar view, but with a more thoughtful approach. He was sure that things were getting steadily worse for Malawi, and he blamed democracy. People used to respect the chiefs more, he thought. Democracy undermines the authority of the chiefs, and accelerates social breakdown. People in the villages can't read, and don't know what they're voting for. There is tremendous corruption.

What's my view on this?… Well, I place a pretty high value on freedom of thought—yet it is an elite value, for most people just think the way they're raised and taught and would rather have a full stomach than the right to (in the words of Czech president Vaclav Havel) "live in truth." They say too, that 1) there has never been a war between two democracies ("democratic peace theory") and that 2) no democracy has ever suffered a famine (Amartya Sen). My general inclination is still to go with Churchill's idea that "democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the rest." But it seems a little coarse to look at what happened in Russia in the 1990s, or Malawi in the present, and say "that's just the price you pay…"

Yet we face an intellectual vacuum here: if not democracy, then what? Nowadays, elections are the only way a government can be accepted as really legitimate. No matter how successful a ruler who chooses not to render his tenure dependent on the vote-counted judgment of the people, he will get a heavy dose of scorn from the press. Malawian democracy is a function of the global climate of ideas: educated people can no longer articulately support anything else, so democracy becomes the default, whether the people is ready for it or not. But perhaps the alternative is tradition, a deep Burkean consciousness of gradual civilizational maturation, rooted in and drawing strength from tradition… in this case, the authority of the chiefs.

By the way: Nadia had an interesting view on this, because she worries that Russia, too, is not ready for democracy. Putin was recently re-elected with 70% of the vote, and a personality cult seems to be developing around him, with his portrait increasingly for sale in the shops. We discussed why: she attributed it wholly to the Russian character, with its tendency to look up to a leader like a god, whereas I wanted a more complex explanation, including a bit of geography: Russia is so big that people can hardly concern themselves with the affairs of the whole country; democracy might be able to develop on a more local basis, where people are more interested, only the local governments can be manipulated too easily by the center. Anyway, it made for an interesting comparison.

THE TRANSPORTER'S STORY
We met, were bought drinks by, and then were invited to stay with (and accepted) a white Zimbabwean businessman, married to a beautiful Mozambican woman, who works in the transport industry. He still had a habit of calling Zimbabwe "Rhodesia," its old name, derived from Cecil Rhodes, the vigorous and fanatical British imperialist who conquered southern Africa and endowed the Rhodes scholarship.

“We were spoiled,” he said, describing the old colonial days. “We had servants. There would be more servants than occupants of the house.”

But then everything changed. By the 1950s, South Africa had established apartheid and independence from Britain, and was already a strong and growing economy and an impressive military power. Many other states of southern Africa became “frontline states” in the struggle against apartheid. Rhodesia was still a British colony. The British wanted to liquidate their empire, but in keeping with majoritarian principles, and Rhodesia was ruled by its white minority. In 1970, after a long and laborious confrontation with Britain’s Labour government, Ian Smith led Rhodesia in declaring independence—still ruled by its white minority. Rhodesia was seen as an outlaw state by Britain and by the UN, and subjected to blockades, its only support coming from apartheid South Africa. The new republic, an “outlaw state” in international law, struggled against UN blockades, black insurgency and hostile neighbors for nine years before the end of white rule on 1 June 1979.

“When you finished high school, you got papers from the government,” said the transporter. “You had to serve ten years, age eighteen to twenty-eight. It was what everyone dreaded.” That was the whites. Some blacks fought for Rhodesia, too, I think. “I fought for five years.”

And Americans came over to help too. “These guys were Vietnam vets who didn’t know what to do with their lives when the war was over. They came to Africa to fight communism, brought their expertise with them. You had a thirty-five year old guy, and we were eighteen. We could hardly understand their accents.”

Speaking of accents, I could not place his. The other Zimbabwean I know here speaks with a good, clean British accent. Might as well be a Londoner. The transporter’s parents were British too, but he spoke such an odd dialect of English that I half-thought English wasn’t his native language. He also spoke Portuguese, the language that his wife, Isaura, spoke, and knew some of the ‘click’ languages of the Zimbabwean tribes. I know England is full of peculiar accents, but I sensed that his accents was not any brand of English, even if it perhaps originate in some English dialect. Perhaps it is a peculiar Rhodesian dialect of English, once the language of the white nation of Rhodesia, now scattered, exiled, blown to the winds? I don’t know. But there was something ghostly about his accent, like meeting a native speaker of a dead language.

I might add, too, that he had a tendency to repeat himself. “There were too many of them.” He said this phrase a half-dozen times during the war. “The Russians supported Frelimo in Mozambique, the Cubans [or did he say the Chinese] supported Angola.” The poor little desperado state led by Ian Smith was defeated and dispelled—and Robert Mugabe came to power. There’s a street named after him in Lilongwe: “Robert Mugabe Crescent.” It is customary to blame the US for wicked regimes they helped bring to power, e.g. the Taliban, Pinochet, Saddam Hussein. If the same standard were applied to the UN, they would deserve the blame for the rise of Robert Mugabe, who is now willfully wrecking the country. It’s the same old story: he wants to dispossess the white farmers, always wanted to, even if he waited a long time, and now, to hang on to power and to push forward his desperate lunatic ideas, he is wreaking a famine in his country…

The transporter was actually pretty rich. We met in the Indian bar, then accepted an invitation to spend the night at his place, where we were fed tuna on bread, peanuts, offered an array of drinks, and eventually went to bed in a large room with a bathroom apparently provided only for guests. The house is decorated with beautiful blue tiles, there is a good sound system, they have a housekeeper, and he’s continuing to build. “I worked for seventeen years, and this is all I have,” he said. “This house… this is what I will leave to my family, my children.”

The little girl who lived with them, Cheri, who was adorable and quite spoiled (“Do you like my house?” she asked) is not his own child, just as Malawi is not his own country. She is his wife’s grandchild, by a daughter from before her marriage. But his stepson-in-law is “a total bum,” who does drugs and can’t keep a job, and his stepdaughter can’t keep her, so he took her in. Whether he loves her like a daughter, I couldn’t tell, but he is certainly providing for her like a daughter. Malawi is not his country, either, and perhaps he does not love it much, but I thought he wanted to help it, that he felt for its troubles. Guys like him are what the country needs, more than guys like me: he’s committed, he’s running trucks up and down the highways, creating jobs, delivering goods, providing leadership. Why does he keep doing it, rather than moving to Britain? I suspect he himself doesn’t wholly know. I think he wants to help the country that is not his own, as he did the daughter who is not his own. But whereas he can help the daughter, to help the country is far harder.

2004-03-30T07:53:00.000-08:00

MALAWI EDUCATION LINK
Here's a link to a fairly upbeat description of what's going on in Malawi's education sector. Donors and democracy merge into a system of government that doesn't yet have a name. I think this system of government operates better in other places... Millions live under it, but neither most of those who live under it, nor those whose tax dollars pay for the donor half of the equation understand it. The positive account offered contrasts with the angry gloom of the people I met in Blantyre about their country's system.

2004-03-29T03:51:00.000-08:00

TRIP TO BLANTYRE
Last weekend we took a trip to Blantyre, the "commercial capital" of Malawi. In contrast to Lilongwe, Blantyre feels rather like a modern city, and it is also in the midst of some nice mountains; in general, distinctly preferable to here. It's about 300 km down there, yet, without thinking it through very well, we decided to go down there spontaneously on Saturday morning and planned to come back the same day. Hardly: it took us five hours to get down there, by which time it was already too late to come back before dark (when the roads are quite dangerous) even if we forewent seeing the city altogether. So we got a room at a really cool (in my, but not Nadia's, opinion) joint called Doogles (as it turned out, we didn't sleep there, fortunately for Nadia but to my regret) and then began walking around.

About the trip down, however, an interesting occurrence: we picked up seven Peace Corps volunteers, returning to site after an environmental conference near Dedza. It was really cool to be able to give seven people a ride. I have a pretty big car at present, provided to me by work, which I've gotten less use of than anticipated, so it was nice to justify it a bit. And we got to hear some stories about their experience there…

Jumping ahead a little bit in the story, I got a better idea about the drought/famine two years ago. One of the volunteers had arrived at site in the midst of the drought, and described how "you could see people starving around you… Once a girl who had just arrived found a dead person lying on the ground…" It seemed that it was some stupid policies by the government that led to this. She thought that "the government had just sold off their maize reserves…" We also got a description of the donors' response to the drought from a transporter we met in Blantyre (more about him later) who told us that "I shipped 50,000 tons of maize from Philadelphia" during the drought. (I might have gotten that number wrong.) The Peace Corps volunteers confirmed that "in a lot of places, the maize is dead," particularly in the south; and along the roads we saw fields where all the maize stalks were brown. But it seems this year will not be as bad as the drought of two years ago, because, first, while the maize is doing badly in some parts of the country, in other places they are already harvesting maize, and second, because the donors and the government have learned their lesson to some extent and are seemingly better prepared.

It was interesting, by the way, to hear that the Americans provided all that grain during the drought. After studying development for a couple years I am used to hearing that the Americans are misers when it comes to development assistance, yet here are the Americans stepping into the gap when the drought hits, and the transporter was confident they would do so again this year. "The Americans will come in [with maize]. They've got lots of it." Hmm. Are Americans really as stingy as we're reputed to be? Or do we have better things to do than jigger the numbers to make the amount of aid we dish out look bigger. Well, I don't really know. On the other hand, I've seen the British, German and Canadian aid organizations more prominently so far than USAID.

Peace Corps, you might say, is also a form of foreign aid. These people were all involved in trying to preserve Malawian forests. Is that useful? Well, sure; prevents erosion, it's a source of wood, it's a source of beauty in a place where perhaps the pleasant things of life are too scarce… yet somehow I couldn't shake the sense that what they were doing was not that relevant to Malawi's most urgent needs. And yet there was something remarkable about listening to them. While the international development consultants lived in our bubble of European-style guesthouses and international-class hotels, these people live like Malawians, in "the same crappy houses," doing their own chores, mowing their own grass with knives like the Malawians do, riding bicycles everywhere… And they seemed happy enough.

Another event on the way down: we passed the president's convoy. All the cars were forced to the side of the road, and we stood and watched as a huge convoy of cars zoomed by, dozens and dozens of them, snazzy Land Rovers and Land Cruisers. The transporter in Blantyre commented that President George W. Bush wouldn't get such a motorcade. Bakili Muluzi is the richest person in the country. Some comments on corruption from the Peace Corps people. "It seems like in this country, if you have money in hand, you just keep it." The transporter: "when these guys take power, they think they own the whole place."

Along the road we passed several crowds dressed in yellow, the color of the UDF party, Bakili Muluzi's party. In Blantyre we saw a truck full of people showing a lot of yellow and cheering. Purple seems to be the color of one of the rival parties: in one town we passed last week I saw a crowd in purple, near a building labeled "National Democratic Alliance," one of Muluzi's rivals. It's funny that, in the presence of seemingly genuine competition, they can't do a better job of putting the leash on their politicians. At this point, though, I'll introduce, without necessarily approving, a phrase I've heard from many people, about many parts of the world: they're not ready for democracy…?

A PRIVATE BAR IN BLANTYRE
We found a small private bar in Blantyre that made us very happy. But to explain why will not be easy. It was run by an Indian (but lifelong resident of Malawi) and had a very Indian feel. The music was Indian, somewhat ethereal and with a certain mystery about it. The lights were low, the furniture high-quality. We had to be specially invited. The place seemed closed, but a boy ran after us to lure us back in: it seems they invited us in specially, because we were white. The place was such a contrast to Africa. There was a subtlety about it that perhaps it takes a deep culture, a civilization that has grappled with the human condition through philosophy and art and religion for dozens of generations until a certain wisdom runs in its bloodstream, to create. The Indians came during the British times: first a man from a certain village ventured, of all places, to Africa, then (I suppose he did well from the move, but our host did not include that detail) be brought over his brothers, and their friends, and their friends, until the whole village came over. Thus was constituted the Indian community in Blantyre, but since the British left many of them had left. Wandering around Blantyre, we had passed a Hindu temple. Not knowing how much was permitted to a non-Hindu, I only stepped in the doorway, but even there there was a certain peace that contrasted with the city, dirty, noisy with cars, where white skin incessantly attracts the eyes of vendors and children who want to somehow get you to part with a little money in their favor.

We stayed for an hour, bought a few drinks (mostly soft drinks), then the barkeeper started offering them free, and in the end refused to take any payment. He introduced us to a friend who spoke with an excellent British accent, and briefly to his friend the transporter, who also bought us drinks. It was a very friendly place. It was only afternoon still, so we said we'd walk around the city a bit more and come back after dark for dinner.

SIMPLE PLEASURES
The stores in Blantyre were closed, it being a weekend. But the sidewalks were crowded with merchants. One had sandals for sale, in my size! I walked in them the rest of the next couple days, and how good it felt, the fresh air rubbing against my free feet. Mmm… sandals… (to use a Homer-ism)… We also found a number of books for sale. I've been starved for good reading lately. I bought a copy of Chaucer's The Franklin's Tale for 120 kwacha (about $1.20), then, the next day, The Garden of Rama, a science-fiction novel by Arthur C. Clarke, and some history of Europe from 1789 to 1981—my favorite, being an old history buff. We read about the causes of the French Revolution last night and both mentally compared it to Malawi today. Poverty and misery both places, and the same obscene abuse of the country's wealth by the royal, or in this case presidential, court; and the same dire financial conditions; yet there tradition was a source of oppression, there was too much of it. Here liberal principles are current, prevalent, paid lip service to, largely realized, and traditions are too weak, too light, to form strong and fertile social structures. There are certain times when history teaches the wrong lessons, of which the French Revolution is perhaps the pre-eminent one. Leftists have been learning the wrong lesson from the French Revolution for 200 years. How pleasant to read and think these thoughts! But few Africans have that chance.

Another simple pleasure: Nico's Gelateria. We've had ice cream here, but it's usually low quality. But an old Italian runs a gelateria in Blantyre where the ice cream was delicious. Exquisite.

AID AND CORRUPTION
This private bar was the scene of some very interesting conversations.

One Indian man had a message for the donors: "Don't give any aid to this country!" "Muluzi is the biggest criminal in the country, the fourth-richest man in Africa…" Although he denied being racist, he said that "only when this country is run by an Indian or a white will things be all right here." Hastings or Kamuzu Banda (he seems to have had two first names, a British given one and an African version of it, I suppose) was an exception. When Banda died, he had gone to his funeral and paid his last respects, because "I knew he was a great leader." But he was black, I pointed out. "But he was an educated man. He committed atrocities, but…" I can't remember how he put it here, but the idea was that Malawians needed that discipline. "He was an educated man. And he understood the African mentality… Don't be out after 5pm here. They'll beat you and rape you…"

This man, by the way, has lived in the country his whole life. It's hard to know what to think of these kind of rantings, which are similar to what I heard in Tuva, a province of Russia where the majority of the population were of a Mongoloid ethnicity called Tuvans, while the Russian minority was besieged and departing. I don't think his degree of alarm is justified… I should say, by the way, that while a few of his opinions were disturbing (though intriguing) I liked him a lot. He was extremely warm and friendly to us, bought us drinks, seemed genuinely and rapidly affectionate.

The transporter also talked about how much aid to Malawi was wasted and how rampant corruption was. "You see those clothes for sale by the side of the road. Every one of those is some first-grade teacher [in the US], who tells her students that there are these poor blacks who need clothes. The kid goes home and tells their parents… The wife makes the husband part with his favorite shirt, the one she doesn't like but he does… And there it is, by the side of the road…" Maize was wasted too: "Much of it is rotten. It wasn't properly fumigated." I had read in the paper yesterday a scandal about the government distributing rotten maize.

ISLAM
Is Muluzi really the fourth-richest man in Africa? After all, no matter how corrupt you are, you can't squeeze blood from a stone, and Malawi just doesn't have much wealth to steal. Well, here is part of the answer, it seems: Muluzi is a Muslim, even though most Malawians are Christian, and he gets subsidized by Gaddafi of Libya and by Saudi Arabia, who are keen to Islamize the country. (Anyway, this is what some acquaintances in Blantyre told me.) This helps to explain the high visibility of Islam here, which we had noticed earlier. In Lilongwe there are two very prominent and impressive mosques. Churches are also abundant but never so commanding, and in many cases there's just a sign of them on ordinary buildings, e.g. a banner with "Jesus Christ is the Lord" in big red letters. In Old Town there's also an "Islamic Information Center." On the way to Salima we passed a large white mosque, some sort of national Islamic center for Malawi. And once, flipping through the radio stations, I came across Radio Islam, with Arabic music and sermons in English.

I can understand the appeal of Islam in a country like this. I'm a Christian myself, but Christianity, though extremely rich and profound when fully understood (or rather, it can never be fully understood, it is a mystery, but the effort to understand it fully yields an endless harvest of wisdom) but it can be skin-deep, forgiving sin too easily. Islam is much more efficient in establishing behavioral norms... yet that doesn't get to the real point. What makes me understand the lure of Islam is whiteness. Not white skin, I mean (which after all isn't really white anyway, but "pinko-grey," to steal a word from A Passage to India): shiny white mosques, white clothes, white hats, there's a sort of strength and purity about the color which Islam manages to monopolize. At the end of the day, I see Islam as a dead end, but it is nevertheless a glorious civilization, which I could imagine Malawians wanting to emulate. I would even welcome it in many ways, if it weren't for that religion's tendency towards religious intolerance and political totalitarianism.

2004-03-24T10:32:00.000-08:00
LANGUAGE
One of the factors that makes it difficult to be hopeful about Malawi's future is that the language situation is unsatisfactory. English has tremendous currency here. In Lilongwe, you see far more signs in English than Chichewa. It seems that civil servants and businessmen conduct their affairs in English, I don't know why. Of course, one reason is that there are a lot of languages in Malawi, of which Chichewa is only the biggest. Like Hindi in India. My garden-shop-keeping friend suggested that it's all because of international trade. It's true, of course, that English is an international language, useful for business and foreign affairs and so on, but that doesn't seem to explain why it is used for the government's internal business, or on street signs and in advertisements and the names of political parties. Moreover, the level of command of English by the general populace here does not seem high. Consideraly lower, I would say, than in Germany, for example. Supposedly English is taught in school, but I don't know how this could be true: I'm quite sure rural children do not know English well enough to study in it very effectively.

What it reminds me of is the role of Latin in the Middle Ages: it's the language of education, government, literature... the so-called "Latin Quarter" of Paris was once literally the quarter where the language spoken was Latin. But people haven't mastered it and are not comfortable in it, and communication in it is stunted and never fluid or pleasant. When I say a few phrases of Chichewa they laugh, as if they are half-ashamed of speaking Chichewa themselves, and to hear a white man speak it is wacky and inappropriate, some kind of joke. All quite strange.

Eventually the European nations gave up Latin, which helped them to zoom into the modern world, to become more democratic and literate, but dispelled a certain international solidarity and divided them. Will that somehow happen here? And yet English will not vanish as easily as Latin because, while it is like Latin here, elsewhere it is a living language.

A lot of elements of African life remind me of medieval times, but technological and intellectual modernity is superimposed on this in so many weird ways... it's a riddle.

2004-03-24T10:14:00.000-08:00
MSINJA
I should add that we visited Msinja again and delivered them food and a soccer ball. The boys were thrilled with the soccer ball. As soon as they heard that I had brought one-- I don't even know how they figured that out, they scarcely speak English and I made only the slightest mention as I was getting out of the car-- a crowd of them began to follow us with expectant eyes. Evelyn Chilowera, who was very glad to see us, invited us back to her house for a minute, but soon we went back to the car, and I gave them the soccer ball, and wow, the way they cried out with glee, the way they threw their arms in the air and shouted and jumped... I was amazed. I thought the soccer ball would be a big success, but that amount of glee was more than I could have envisioned. That was the best part of the second visit, but we were also introduced to a number of Msinjans and had a very labored conversation in Chichewa/English, attempting to pass on basic words like wangono (young) or buzi and vuu (goat and hippopotamus). Nevertheless, they didn't seem to get bored and I guess we didn't either.

I should say that on my second impression, Msinja didn't seem as poor as the first time I came. The huts were small, but the whole village was fairly tidy, in contrast to Lilongwe. My Russian fiancee arrived the week before (I didn't announce that properly here because I wanted to tell my parents first, and now there's too much to tell, but anyway...) and a Russian's impressions were different from mine, since Russia is much closer to its poor-peasant past, and Russia's current standard of living, though much higher than Malawi's, is low enough that African poverty will amaze them a bit less thoroughly and persistently, I suppose. I was noticing that they had some rather nice chairs really, as nice as anything I have in Washington. But they brought the chairs outside; the houses were too small for guests.

Not far from Msinja is Kamuzu Dam, behind which a large reservoir has formed. The place where the water falls over the edge of the dam is beautiful. The edge of the dam is a rectangular pattern jutting out and in, like the top of a rook in chess, and in the rectangular out-jutting parts (pardon the clumsy physical description so far) there are places where the water is strangely smooth and serene, even though it's about to plummet over the edge, so that you can see the reflections of the sky and the clouds clearly. That's a local attractions and the Msinjans asked us if we had seen it. Hippos (vuu) are another local attraction-- they only come out in the early morning. So perhaps life in Msinja is not so bleak... but still, the various mothers and mothers-in-law and other women who seemed to know and love Evelyn Chilowera appealed to me to get Evelyn a job. I can imagine how they're thinking-- our talented Evelyn, who speaks English and befriended the foreigner, she's just the person to find a good job in the city, and who better to find one than this kind foreigner whom she helped out, who has a car and so must have money... If I only I had some to give.

2004-03-24T10:01:00.000-08:00

MOUNTAINOUS LANDSCAPES
The heat and lushness of Lilongwe was a pleasant shock, dizzyingly so almost, after cold Washington DC. New places, new natural scenery, is always exciting. All over the city there are acacia trees with bright yellow flowers. But after a couple weeks it was beginning to feel like a flat, humid trap. So it was pleasant in the past few days to discover Dedza. Take the road out of Old Town to the south, go over a hill, and a beautiful scene opens out, with scattered round "island-mountains," (rising out of the flat land like islands out of the sea) a great expanse... well, I can't think of how to describe it, but it's beautiful. Drive an hour and you'll pass a lot of maizefields, sometimes large rocks and mountains rising out of it. Not huge mountains, nor very high elevation, yet somehow the country has just the tiniest hint of the alpine about it which gives it all a great freshness and makes a pleasant contrast to Lilongwe. Along the road are a lot of small fragile flowers, sometimes crowds of orange ones, sometimes of white. Along the road people sell tomatoes, sometimes: you can get a small bag of them for 5 cents, quite tasty. Sometimes avocado.

2004-03-24T09:46:00.000-08:00

ANOTHER DROUGHT?
I've passed a lot of cornfields in the past few days with a colleague who is afraid there will be another drought. He can (like all Malawians, I suspect) tell the health of a cornfield (it's "maize" here, however) at a glance. "People work hard," he says. "But they don't have money to buy inputs." He can point to a field and say "That farmer used fertilizer," and "That farmer didn't use any fertilizer." And he will also say, "You see..." looking at a field... "this year will be a disaster." There hasn't been enough rain, he thinks, and there won't be much of a harvest.

Maize is the staple food here. I usually like to discover the local staple and eat it all the time, to feel a little like a native. Here I'm not sure, because I'm afraid I'll drive the prices up higher, and everyone is complaining about them already. Of course, they don't seem high to me: I bought an ear of maize on the street, cooked, for 5 cents a week ago. But that's a lot for locals.

My colleague described the drought two years ago. He said that even if you had a bag [of maize], it doesn't last long, because Malawians have big families, and "you have to share." When people from the town went home to visit their parents, if you brought a bag of maize, you had to put it in a laundry bag and pretend you were bringing clothes. People would cook in the middle of the night so that they would not be seen. "It was terrible." The donors did help, but "it's not enough." Will it happen again? On the bright side, this colleague of mine seems like a rather pessimistic sort of person. Hopefully he's wrong. But it all gives me a sad, nervous, vulnerable feeling.

The maizefields are not separated by fences here, and stealing appears pretty easy. I heard that sometimes people are killed for stealing maize...

2004-03-24T09:29:00.000-08:00

MALAWIAN ELECTIONS
Bakili Muluzi has been president of Malawi since the fall of Banda in 1994, but on Monday I found out that he's not running again. He is forbidden to run again by the constitution. Not that he stepped down willingly: he introduced a bill to parliament trying to stay in office for another term. But parliament did not pass it. As his successor, he hand-picked a guy who was not from his party, which naturally frustrated the members of his party, who are now running as independents. My colleague who was narrating this suggested that the hand-picked successor has some connection with the World Bank, which was interesting, but I couldn't get clear facts. The "Republican Party" seems to be a main rival of Muluzi, whose candidate got almost half the votes last time; they have a candidate in the ring. The upshot is that there are four candidates running. What I could not understand was-- what will happen if no candidate gets a majority? I tried to get my colleague to explain this but I'm still not sure. It seems, though, that there will be no run-off election, and whichever candidate gets the most votes will win. So, in principle, one of the candidates could become president with 26% of the vote. Anyway, it seems like it will be an interesting election. I feel like there's more to hope for than to fear from it, but that may be just my prejudice towards optimism. At the least, it's a peaceful democratic transition of power, which is an important landmark for any country, and a welcome contrast to Mugabe, desperately destroying his country to hold onto his own power. But "you can't eat votes."

2004-03-21T02:51:00.000-08:00

PICTURES FROM MSINJA
We visited Msinja the second time last weekend and brought back some pictures. We're still in the process of figuring out how to post the pictures to my website, but we managed to get one up. Here it is.

2004-03-21T02:49:00.000-08:00

Я попобрую блоговать по-русски. Посмотрим, можно ли?...

2004-03-18T08:14:00.000-08:00

"ARE THERE PROSPEROUS BLACK PEOPLE IN MALAWI TOO?"
That was a question someone asked me after reading my post about whites in Malawi. Well, there are a lot of well-dressed Malawians. The civil servants I mingle with usually wear suits, complete with a jacket, in spite of the heat. (Which is too uncomfortable for me, I just wear a shirt and tie.) I suppose high-level civil servants are among the best-off of Malawians, but I don't know about private business, maybe there are some Malawians doing pretty well out of that. The thing is, though, I don't know whether the whites I've met actually have high incomes. The guesthouse we're staying at would earn, I suppose, around $200,000 a year if all the rooms were full every night, paying full price. But they're not (nowhere close) and anyway that's just revenues, and they have to pay several staff, buy food, maintain the place, pay utilies, and so on. They do have a very nice play to stay in, and that's the main reason they seem so prosperous. But I think the guy who runs it more or less built it himself, no doubt with local paid help but he had the skills. The upkeep of it-- the fine grooming of the plants, the tasteful design of the lighting, and so on-- takes some expense but mostly a lot of skill and work. They eat very well, too, but only because he's an excellent cook. At the garden shop it's a similar story: it's a wonderful place to live, but I don't know if they have a lot of income. I don't think any blacks are prosperous in that way, because that kind of "prosperity" (if that's the word) is intrinsically dependent on what might be called "human capital" or "European culture" and is really both of them at once. And this calls into question the whole nature of wealth. In the West, money is zooming around everywhere and making it possible to value things on the market in real-time, and people aren't all that self-reliant because it's easy to buy lots of stuff. So you can sort of put a dollar value on people and define them according to income-tax brackets and class. Even there, though, this is sort of misleading: is someone who earns a huge salary but never gets enough sleep, and doesn't have time to spend the salary, really wealthier than someone with a moderately paid, steady job, who gets eight hours of sleep a night, and still has time to look for bargains and convert the dollars of their paycheck into an abundance of entertainment and comfort in the company of friends? If some method of calculating economic welfare compels us to answer "yes," doesn't that just discredit that method of calculating economic welfare? Anyway, here the market is far less efficient and abundant, so there is much less temptation to use it as a means of measuring people's welfare.

That's all for now. Time to go home to some of the Wendels' excellent cooking and linger in their idyllic green courtyard before bed... :)

2004-03-18T07:48:00.000-08:00

WALKING, RIDING AND CLASS IN MEDIEVAL EUROPE AND MODERN AFRICA
The German word for "knight" is Ritter, i.e. rider. And knights were the "nobility," the feudal aristocracy. In Spanish, the word for "gentleman" is "caballero," which also means "horseman." Class and mode of transport in Europe have a long correlation. I get the same sense here, driving around in a car. One thing about Africa, a highly visible indicator of poverty if you want to think of it that way but I sort of like it (and even envy them), is the abundance of people walking. Even in Lilongwe, let alone in rural areas, there are a lot more people walking along the roads than cars; as you get into rural areas, bikes also outnumber cars. And like the medieval knight's horse, the car is a sign of class. People have to stand aside. The roads are a critical resource, public space, a means for everyone to get where they're going. Cars, whose drivers and passengers represent a small and privileged minority, hog about 90% of the road, while bikes and pedestrians, representing far more people, have to squeeze into the remaining 10%. And they have to move aside for us. It's an eloquent metaphor for distribution of income. But the medieval knight had an obligation to his people; he was a leader, responsible for protecting them. In theory at least, his privileges, of which his horse (and his sword) were particularly tangible and effectual examples, were linked with obligations of service to the king and to the people of the realm, and the strength of the king and his army would keep the kingdom safe. So it is with us, the Ritter in Lilongwe, foreign consultants and Malawian civil servants alike, for whom the pedestrian masses step aside. Instead of horses and swords, we have cars and cell phones, and our job is to protect them from hunger and from the buffeting of the world economy, and to lead them to a brighter future of more health, wealth, knowledge, opportunity, and so on. Of course, justly or not, the aristocracy of medieval Europe are generally perceived as having deteriorated into a class more or less purely parasitic over the years. What about us? Does our service really justify our privileges? I don't plan to answer that, it's just thought-provoking, I guess. Sometimes I envy the ordinary people here, who walk rather than having to drive because of pressing responsibilities. I'm sure they envy me too, so instinctively perhaps that they are barely conscious of it, as we're not conscious of breathing unless we think about it.

We drove out to Senga Bay last weekend, on Lake Malawi. The road there is actually excellent, much better than the roads in Lilongwe, because the central government rather than the city of Lilongwe is responsible for them. No potholes. Potholes are something I've gotten used to. On some roads driving is like a video game, where you have to dodge dangerous obstacles: you swerve left and right, you guess how wide your car is and will this pothole fit between the tires?, and when you get it wrong there's a thump of varying loudness, and the car groans. Unlike a video game, there is no life bar for your car displayed on your screen. You just have to guess about that. But I'm getting used to it. I don't mind driving anymore, though I wish I didn't have to do so much of it.

Anyway, the drive to Senga Bay was a chance to see a bigger variety of Malawian landscapes. The land gets more rolling, not mountainous but not flat either. We saw the famous baobab tree, with a huge fat trunk and branches that look a bit like a root system pulled out of the ground. The drive was longer than we thought, so by the time we got to the lake we only had time to walk up the beach for a little while before we had to head back; I'm sure we'll see more of the lake so I'll write about that later. We had to drive home in the dark, which is a much different experience in Africa, where there are lots of people along the roads, walking or biking, like ghosts in the dark, suddenly becoming real when the headlights hit them. It would be horrible to hit one of them, of course, and easy to do, so it's an alarming experience which I hope not to repeat much. The drive in the day was great.

2004-03-18T07:18:00.000-08:00

MAYBE I'VE PAINTED TOO BLEAK A PICTURE...
I think I may have given a misleading impression of Malawi, focusing on its poverty; and in the last one I may have come across as an old reactionary, regretting the fall of Banda. Well, to set the record straight, I don't. The evenings here can be really enchanting, and it would take a whole lot of economic development to compensate for missing them because of a curfew, however effective that might be at controlling crime. Malawi feels like a free country. There are a few newspapers around here, which kids sell on street corners, the chief one being The Nation. Yes, that's a link: The Nation has a website. And the headlines, the articles, the cartoons inside, can be quite critical of the government at the time. One cartoon comes to mind, for example:

(Picture of two people fighting over money. Bystanders comment:)
FIRST BYSTANDER: What are they fighting about?
SECOND BYSTANDER: They're fighting over [Malawian President Bakili] Muluzi's money.
FIRST BYSTANDER: Why does Muluzi then dish it out to them?
SECOND BYSTANDER: I guess it's to inspire their fighting spirit.

And it gets worse than that. The elections are next month (May 18th) so it will be interesting to see how all that goes. My sense is that Muluzi will probably win, since I don't know who his opponents are yet, but the result is perhaps less foregone than in Russia. I can't say I've talked to a whole lot of people about it, but Malawians seem happy that they live in a democracy. Democracy and freedom are valuable in themselves, independently of the economic outcomes they may generate.

Someone said they couldn't understand why it was useful for the economy to have a strongman in charge (which isn't exactly what I meant, but I guess it came across that way). Well, let me give a couple of examples. In 1994, the Government of Malawi declared "free primary education." Sounds like a nice idea, right? Wins votes, no doubt. In practice, though, there weren't enough teachers or schools to provide this effectively. School supplies were unavailable, classrooms overcrowded, and so on, and soon there was a public outcry over quality. I don't want to condemn the policy, I believe in free primary education, but perhaps it was... well, poorly thought through. Insufficiently conscious of costs, trade-offs, constraints, let's put it that way. I can't figure out whether the large majority of students who drop out in the first four standards of primary school get anything out of their "education" or not. Another example: about three or four years ago, Malawi got off track with the IMF. Donors responded by pretty much cutting off funds. The government kept spending as if it had external money available, and financed this by borrowing on the internal market, driving up interest rates, and now they have a huge interest bill, and are back in the clutches of the IMF again. Donors are reluctant to give Malawi budget support, because it will just go to paying off that interest bill. Fund starvation afflicts the whole of the government. I'm not sure exactly how this is related to the high inflation, but anyway there was 44% inflation in Malawi a few years ago. This was steadily reduced and is now in single digits, so that's good. The effect of the inflation, since civil servants' wages did not keep pace, was to undermine the value of these wages. So no doubt it would have been better to just cut spending a few years back, stayed on track with the IMF: effectively, the reduction in spending took place anyway, only in a more chaotic way. Would a dictator have done better? Not necessarily, of course. But a dictator might be less beholden to various interest groups. If you've been in a meeting, perhaps you've noticed that a lot of people are not necessarily smarter than one. It takes much longer to make decisions, and sometimes a whole group of people can miss something that's quite obvious, just because each is thinking "If that were a valid point, someone else would have said something." And stupid, adamant people are likely to get their way in a meeting, just by grinding everybody else down. Democracy is a somewhat chaotic form of government. You can think of dictatorship like the school year and democracy as summer vacation: democracy is much more pleasant, but dictatorship may sometimes be more productive. And yet, sometimes you learn more on summer vacation than in school, following the whims of your own fascination rather than obeying orders of some teacher who may be obstinate and stupid. Sometimes Lilongwe feels to me like an endless summer vacation: always warm, lots of kids, lots of idle people out on the streets, noise, brightly colored clothing, a certain carefree warmth and friendliness despite the abundance of signs advertising coffin shops... No, I don't regret the fall of Banda, even if the results seem to be a bit chaotic for the economy.

2004-03-16T09:10:00.000-08:00

REMINISCENCES OF KAMUZU BANDA
Kamuzu Banda was the president-for-life of Malawi who fell from power in 1994. The nursery-owners I met on Sunday had been in Malawi for 22 years, and remembered. A husband and wife, and she was born in Zimbabwe, but left in 1979, after Mugabe came to power threatening (though for over fifteen years he didn't carry the threat out) to disinherit the whites and wreck the country the way he's doing now. "We looked in his eyes and believed him," she said. They came to Malawi under Banda, which sounds like a strange place. Conservative in a way: Women couldn't wear pants or skirts above the knee, and men couldn't have long hair. He demanded to be addressed as "His Excellency Kamuzu Banda President for Life," or something like that. Every time someone addressed him. But there was no crime. When there were a few break-ins in Lilongwe, Banda declared a curfew. Anyone outside their houses after 6pm would be arrested. A colleague of mine expressed the view that "In human rights, Banda was very bad, but I think that in economic development he was better." Banda, by the way, was also on good terms with apartheid South Africa, and got some financial support from them, at a time when black Africa was trying to join together to present a hostile front to Pretoria. Malawi's recent history, in a way, seems to carry the same subversive lesson as that of Russia: a wicked old strong state, disregarding human rights, with a personality cult surrounding the leader, gave way to a democratic order, but the "political" improvement was accompanied by an "economic" deterioration. With the difference, of course, that Malawi was always much poorer than Russia. And another difference: in Malawi, donors are quite important, and are becoming, as it were, interwoven with the government. Democracy and development aid, it seems to me, are quietly evolving as the new global social contract, and all sorts of nice ideals feed into them, but do they really work? Or perhaps it is better to ask: is it a good thing? Is it a less bad thing than what came before? Is there a better way? Does it all make sense? Is it built on firm foundations, morally and philosophically? Is it "legitimate"? Malawian reality is making me skeptical in a variety of ways which so far mostly just leave me confused.

2004-03-16T08:34:00.000-08:00

WHITES IN AFRICA
We moved out of the hotel on Sunday and now we're staying in a place called Wendels' Guest House, much smaller, with more of a "family atmosphere." In fact, it's a wonderful place, quite insulated from the noise and clutter of Lilongwe. Tom Wendel, who runs the place along with his South African wife, is a German, and it shows in the tidiness of the place, the abundance of paintings of European scenes, of models of German-style houses, the architecture, in short every detail. Across the street are another couple who run a garden shop. They invited us to lunch after church on Sunday. I was amazed by the sense of ease and prosperity at their establishment. There's a specialty bookshop on the property, focused on Africa, a shop with masks and carvings and furniture, and their own garden shop, along with a restaurant which was intended to be a sideshow but has become the main attraction. The food there is very tasty, and behind it there's a lush fountain. The fountain impressed me most about the place. Ten acres of well-kept land, mown lawns, lots of flowers blooming in the nursery, but it was the fountain, or rather a beautifully designed artificial waterfall running over some rocks into a pool, that expressed the ease and perfection of the place best.

It's strange to see how whites live here. Despite the general poverty of the country, they seem to live at least as well as in the west. There are trade-offs. "You can't buy anything," the woman complained, so you have to make it yourself, or perhaps hire local craftsmen to do it. But land is cheap, I suppose, and labor certainly is, and a lot of other products. The best part is the weather and the way things grow. It's always warm, there's a lot of sunshine, and such an abundance of flowers when someone takes the trouble to garden them. In Malawi, modern civilization has not developed to the extent to create the web of manifold pressures which perpetually tug at, for example, Americans. So it seems like an idyllic existence, and also a beneficent one, because capital of all kinds, human and physical, is scarce in this country. It seems that way, but I keep wondering. There is something about the contrast between the well-off whites and the millions of impoverished, hungry children in the villages, with a dismal education system that offers them scarcely any future, that makes me nervous. Yet whites-not-in-Africa are certainly no better, erecting border restrictions to shut Africans and others born in poor countries out, to deprive them of economic opportunity so as to avoid having to see them and feel guilty, while subsidizing our farmers and thus depriving the planet's agrarian millions of the best way of exporting their way out of poverty. So I am inclined to feel a sense of guarded admiration for the whites in Africa and the strange, fragile bubble of serene comfort that they have somehow managed to create.

2004-03-12T09:20:00.000-08:00

SOUNDS AND SMELLS
One thing I notice here is the sounds and smells. Only indoors is it silent. Outdoors, the air is full of the sounds of insects in the trees. The fragrances are harder to describe... but they all give a sense of life.

ELEPHANTS
I thought I was going to have to go to Zambia to see elephants. But I heard from someone today that there are lots of them in Kasungu National Park, in Malawi, not far from here. There are "too many," he said. Lions are harder to find; you don't see them, he joked, unless they attack you. They're "real men."

SCHOOLS
I visited three schools this week. Eye-opening experience. A primary school where all the children sit on the floor, the chalkboards are deteriorating. A boarding school which has 15 cents a day to feed the children with. But the last one we visited somehow hit me the most. The head teacher was a very nice middle-aged woman, who welcomed us and answered our questions in the warmest fashion, but the school had so many problems it was hard to know how she went on. It was a field of grass and mud, with scattered brick buildings, with no glass in the windows and no electricity and no desks. There were not enough textbooks to go around, even though parents paid a textbook revolving fund. Locals stole from the school, removing the roofs of the toilets for example. Students sat on the floor, leaning against the walls, writing, trying to study, but "they can't concentrate, the learning process isn't very effective." I thought of a line from Barbara Ehrenreich's book Nickeled and Dimed, where she said that "when you sell your time, what you're really selling is your life." And I thought about all those secondary school students-- an "elite," note well; most students never complete primary school-- staying at school 7:30 to 4:30 under those conditions, and why, and even so with little real hope that it would pay off in a good job, considering the economy here, and thought to myself, when a miserably underfunded "school" wastes your time, what it's really wasting is your life. I was on the verge of tears by the time I left...

2004-03-07T14:11:00.000-08:00

THE VILLAGE OF MSINJA RESCUES MY CAR FROM THE MUD
On the advice of the Lonely Planet, I went out into the countryside yesterday looking for a place called Dzalanyala, which was supposed to have a forest reserve. You can see some conical mountains around here, in the distance, and I was hoping Dzalanyala would give me a vantage point, but either it doesn't, or I never got there. The road was paved at first, then turned into dirt, then narrowed, and then my car got stuck in a large mudpuddle, and when, after desperately struggling forward and backward with the wheels grinding furiously in the mud, I broke free, I immediately decided to turn back. I parked the car nearby, along the road, and then went on on foot, hoping to reach "the lodge," but after about an hour, in the sun, and the land still flat, I gave up. It was interesting to see the Malawian natural countryside, though. I seem to have walked through two different kinds of woodland, each with a dominant species of tree. I especially liked the kind that had a slender, light-colored trunk. It will sound philistine to say that after an hour walking by myself in the heat I was a bit bored of the same flat wooded landscape... but I was. I don't like the flatness. But I do like the forests.

More interesting than the wild landscapes were the towns and villages and the many people I passed. As I went further from Lilongwe, I came to places where cars were principally for pedestrians and bicycles, and cars were scarce enough to be a spectacle. From a few miles past the town of Likuni, I probably saw a total of five or six cars in five or six hours. Everyone I passed on the road looked at me: boys on bicycles, children playing, dozens of turning heads in the streets of the two or three small towns I passed, and the women carrying heavy things on their heads, walking who knows how far. Since cars were so rare, they often had to move aside for me, which was worse, because I was inconveniencing everybody. My sense of guilt gradually began to accumulate. Guilt, and absurdity; here was the real Africa all around me, but I knew that if I stopped my vehicle and got out I would be an object of wonderment, so out of shyness I stayed in my automotive bubble, and drove on, as if I was too important to acknowledge the stares of the people around me or stop to talk.

At one point, on a stretch of road not seemingly near anything, I saw two women and two girls, walking in single file with large loads on their heads. By the way, Africans, especially women, have a remarkable talent for carrying things on their heads. I saw a boy in old town walking with several boxes stacked on his head; together, they were almost as tall as he was. And they didn't fall. It's very impressive. So anyway, there were young girls carrying large loads on their heads in the hot sun, and probably a long way since no destination seemed nearby, and here I was in a large car with several empty seats, the air conditioning on, and music playing, on nothing more than a joy ride really, and something struck me as wrong and absurd. Then it hit me: why didn't I offer them a ride? I could drive them to their village, they could get a bit of cool air, the women could accept for the sake of the girls, and the girls could feel safe because the women were there, and conversation would be limited, but we could all smile a lot, and it would be very interesting for me.

By the time I realized this, I had left them far behind, but I thought, "Maybe next time." So a little while later, when I saw two burdened women and a girl walking along the road, I made eye contact, and I thought I saw her make a gesture, so I stopped to offer them a ride: the first pathetic attempt at altruism that day. She came over to the door, and I started speaking English at her, and she stared back, bewildered. I had come to assume that most Malawians know a little English, but I guess this is only in the capital. I apologized in English and drove on, feeling a bit foolish, though less guilty.

This was before Dzalanyala. On the way back, I was thirsty and wanted to buy a Coke, so I used that as a pretext to get out of the car in a village. I pulled over, stepped out, looked around. The village had about one street, quite muddy, lined with thatched houses. The inhabitants were there, in doorways. A group of children pretended to be afraid of me, running away with frightened shouts, but throwing me one or two ironic grins. Then they changed their minds and began to approach. I walked most of the way along the street, looking around in wonder. There were lots of goats in the village, more active than the people. Eventually a young man who spoke English asked me, in the friendliest way, if I was looking for something. To say, "I want to understand how you live," would have had unpredictable results, so I made use of my pretext and said I was thirsty and asked if there was a shop. No, he said. So I went back to my car as slowly as possible, trying to take it all in. But I stared at the goats to avoid people's eyes. Why was I afraid of people's eyes? It was my tremendous sense of guilt, guilt that I made in a day what they made in a year, that I took for granted so many things that these people would never dream of having. I was afraid of being impolite, afraid that they would think I was looking down on them. I had no idea what expression I could put on my face that would cancel out the obvious signs of wealth that were all over me-- my white face and my foreignness, my arrival in a car, the clothes I was wearing, the fact that I wore shoes while they were barefoot-- and would allow me to look in their eyes in the role of an equal; yet nor did I feel I was doing anything to show that I deserved to look in their eyes as a legitimate and esteemed superior. I have never seen a Malawian look at me with hatred, and generally they have been very warm and friendly; yet if someone had looked at me with resentment, I would have felt like I deserved it. So I kept looking at the goats (which were, by the way, adorable creatures, with their floppy ears; I dearly would have liked to pet their fuzzy fur.)

By the time I got back to my car, a crowd of fifteen to twenty children had gathered around it. They looked at me with curiosity and expectancy. A couple of them asked me for money; I have a sense that most of them were thinking it, but most of them doubted if it was permissible, then when they saw the guilty expression on my face a couple of them timidly decided to try it. I didn't acknowledge the requests for money, afraid I would corrupt them by giving the squeaky wheel the grease. But I had an apple in my backpack, which I offered to them. This was my second act of misguided altruism. For there were fifteen of them, and one apple. How to decide who to give it to? I didn't want to give it to the noisier ones who had demanded the money. So I tried a numbers game with a couple who knew English: how many fingers am I holding up? This concept was too hard to communicate. Finally I just closed my eyes, pointed randomly, and gave it to the kid I pointed to; this was "fair" in my mind, since the process was random, but no doubt this subtlety was lost on them. The kid who got the apple began running, and the others to chase him, and I wondered if I had just sowed dissension, though there were some sounds of laughter. I don't know. I drove on, but it turned out there was a store in the village, where I stopped and bought a Fanta, and when I came out all the children were there again. There were vague murmurs that they wanted money, or more apples. I told them I had no more to give, and felt even guiltier.

I took a wrong turn on the way back, because of a misleading road sign, and found myself traveling through miles of cornfields with no idea whether I was on the right track. I asked a boy, who was walking down the road with a couple of older women, was this the road to Lilongwe? He said to turn left, but then his mother said something and the boy translated that there was mud. I decided I would go and see for myself. I went ahead a ways, then turned left, and the mudpuddles began to appear, but I kept going. They didn't look as bad as the mudpuddles I'd seen before, but looks can be deceiving. I reached a place where the surface of the road got slippery so that, although I was still moving forward all right, the steering wheel didn't have the intended effect. I was going downhill. I pulled into a side road and decided to go on foot for a ways and reconnoiter.

I was in a bad place. To the right and left were cornfields; and, between the cornfields and the road, ditches. Backwards the distance to good roads was shorter, but that was uphill, and I had discovered earlier that turning around is very difficult. It may have been too late then, already. Anyway, the choice was forward, downhill over a long stretch of mud, then better roads, or backwards, a treacherous turnaround, and then uphill. I tried forwards, and got about thirty feet before I was in the ditch.

I struggled forwards and backwards myself for a little while. Already the people had begun to gather around, I'm not sure from where, since it was just cornfields all around. They were offering to push. I felt ashamed asking for their help but I hardly had a choice. I was afraid of getting stuck out there, in the middle of the countryside, who knows how far from Lilongwe, or from any hotel, with a car that had to somehow be rescued and returned to the rental place. I was really in a panic. They started to push, and to make suggestions. A woman in a blue dress with white polka dots took the lead; she knew English and had some suggestions. For half an hour or an hour we struggled, twenty or thirty men and women and boys pushing, now in front, now in back, as I switched between first gear and reversed, gunned the engine until it smoked and smelled. The truth was, I didn't have any hope. I was really grateful for the help of all those people (every last one of them barefoot), and I didn't even feel guilty anymore, just sad. I thought we would fail, and I would have quit much sooner but how could I ask them to leave? Now they were still hopeful, and so full of good will. So I kept taking their suggestions, wasting more of their time and muscle power, terrified that I would accidentally injure one of them under the wheels, desperate and panicky and sad.

Then, to my amazement, we succeeded! We gave up using the engine. I took off my shoes and joined them in pushing. We all put our hands under the frame of the car and heaved, and little by little, with great effort, managed to hoist it upwards and slide it out of the ditch and back onto the road. I was still afraid this triumph would go to waste, because there were still a hundred yards of mud before good roads, and the mud totally changed the rules of operation of the steering wheel, and I could run into the ditch again at any minute. But they ran alongside the truck, pushing it towards the road when it was headed towards the ditch, and we got it all the way back to good roads.

When I was in the clear, they shouted to me to stop, which of course I immediately did. I got out and looked at them, and all their faces looked back at me expectantly. The strange thing was that I had pitied the people earlier and wanted to help, and my attempts had been awkward failures; yet in the end, it was I who needed help from them. Now they wanted a bit of a reward, and eminently deserved it. One of them was the chief, so I gave him most of the money I had, and Evelyn said he would divide it evenly among them. But it was less than $5, which was pretty inadequate gratitude. So I asked for their address, and promised to come back. The village was called Msinja. I planned to bring money, but I wanted to give them goods too, both because it was more personal and... I don't know, money is identified with corruption somehow. So I asked Evelyn (I knew her name now, she wrote it for me) what they needed. She didn't understand this (her English, though seemingly the best of the lot, was still not much) so I gave examples: did they need food, clothes, sweets?

Hearing "food," she immediately said, "If you bring food, bring maize, there is much hunger here."

Wow. You hear about hunger but somehow you always think it is somewhere else. Even when the children in the other village were so grateful for my apple, I thought it was just because an apple is a sort of a treat; but we were surrounded by cornfields (maizefields), so I figured they probably had enough of that to eat. I guess not. That struck me very deeply.

Evelyn asked me for a ride back to Msinja (also so that I would know the way for when I returned with maize, as I had promised to do). There, she introduced me to a whole bunch of family members-- her grandmother, her mother-in-law (but she's not married; I didn't figure that one out), her brother. When we got to her house, she brought out a chair, and brought a bucket of water for me to wash my arms in. (They were covered with mud.) She told me to sit on the chair; she sit on the ground. The houses were so small that I don't understand how people had room to sleep in them. And yet, now that I knew the people, Msinja had a slightly romantic air about it, and it occurred to me that Sting's song "Fields of Gold" describes a place like this:

So she took her love for to gaze a while among the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down among the fields of gold

See the west wind move like a lover so upon the fields of barley
Feel her body rise as you kiss her mouth among the fields of gold.

I never take promises lightly
And there have been some that I've broken
But I swear in the days still left
We'll walk in fields of gold.

Many years have passed since those summer days
Among the fields of barley.
See the children run as the sun goes down
Among the fields of gold.

Yes, Sting mentions barley, not corn. But that song, the simple life, the agrarian setting, the peacefulness with which the act of love and its effects (see the children run) are sewn into the tapestry of a life and a way of life... somehow the village of Msinja evoked all that for me. Pity about the hunger though. That is just wrong. And the US and the EU keep heaping up their mountains of corn. These things are complicated of course: if we just shipped the mountains of corn to Malawi there would be a lot of unintended side-effects and it might make matters worse. But there is something really wrong with this world when people as warm, as good, as generous, as spontaneously giving as the villagers of Msinja go hungry for lack of maize to eat.

I was a bit amazed when I got back to the hotel alive a few hours later, and today I made up for it by complete idleness in the lap of luxury at the hotel. But I've got a job to do now, a debt to be paid to the village of Msinja, who rescued my car from the mud. Although the roads have me a bit scared, it will be a real joy to deliver some maize to them, much better than my awkward attempts at altruism earlier, because this time they did me a service, so my offering will not be patronizing or condescending. They earned it, and I'm even grateful for the mud in a way because it gave them that chance. Although, on the other hand, I hope the car dealership doesn't charge me big fees for getting their car filthy and maybe toasting the engine a bit.

2004-03-05T08:57:00.000-08:00

TRANSPORT
They got me a car today. I HATE cars. If I was going to name the single worst feature of modern life, it would be the car. It's not because of their environmental impact either. Cars just demand too much responsibility, involve too much risk. Move a muscle wrong and you wreak, at best, thousands of dollars of damage, at worst, injury and death. Moreover, they create problems of public goods which are never satisfactorily solved. Parking, for example; there's never enough. But the roads are a more serious problem. Lots of extremely valuable real estate in big cities, on which massive rents could be paid, is used by cars for free. And, as the communists found out, anything provided for free is soon in shortage, and instead of paying with money you pay in the form of long lines. I love the idea of London's "congestion charge," where everyone has to pay 5 pounds for driving around in the city. But it's politically difficult, and London's streets are quite busy anyway. I also like high gas taxes. But while I would like to say that smart public policy would create lots of these taxes and eliminate cars, I don't think it's actually true; the horrible, horrible fact is, that even a top-notch transportation network doesn't get you where you want to go as fast as a car does, so I'm afraid that, as the value of people's time inexorably rises, a process of survival of the fittest is more likely to squeeze public transit out of existence than cars.

So I'm a bit sad that I had to resort to getting a car in Lilongwe, but what scanty "public transit" is available here just won't serve my needs. There are "minibuses" that run up and down a few of the main streets. I suppose they are a private enterprise, and there are not only no schedules but, as far as I can tell, no systematic stops. They run between "City Centre" (the new, upscale part of town, with offices of international organizations) and "Old Town" (crowded, frenetic, lively, reportedly dangerous at night). One of the interesting things about getting into a minibus is that I suddenly realize my gigantic size. Malawian men are typically about a foot shorter than me (I'm 6'4", in case any readers who have not met me happen to stumble upon this site) and the women even less, and people are mostly thin here, too, but on the streets I don't notice so much. In a minibus, with everyone tightly packed together on the jagged bent seats, I suddenly risk bumping people that I don't see because, sitting down, their heads are below my shoulders. In general, the minibuses are not reliable, and they won't stop on demand because they're too crowded to let individual passengers out, and they don't go to a lot of the places I need to get to. So the car is necessary, it seems.

They drive on the left side of the road here, which is confusing: I made a left turn improperly at a busy intersection today and ended up stopping miserably in the middle of an intersection for an hour this afternoon while my engine stopped and had to be restarted about fifteen times, and when I finally escaped I passed the long line of about thirty cars that were backed up because of me, honest people trying to get somewhere trapped in the heat by a bone-headed tourist with a white face and a shirt and tie, and I felt like Hitler. I tried to make eye contact with everyone as I passed with an I'm-really-really-sorry face. I hate, hate, hate, hate cars.

2004-03-05T08:33:00.000-08:00

CHILDREN
That the British were like parents, and their colonial subjects were like children, and it was the job of the British to raise their subjects to become adult nations, was a favorite metaphor of the age of Kipling. Nowadays that is considered a wicked and patronizing notion. But what occurred to me today (and perhaps this makes the idea less offensive) is that it need not be thought of figuratively; it is literally true! 57% of Malawi's population is under 20. Malawi is, for the most part, a nation of children.

This came home to me today in the supermarket. It was one of the classiest, most sophisticated places to shop in town, and looked a lot like an American supermarket, with brightly lit aisles and high ceilings and shopping carts and lines for people with ten items or less. There were lots of cheesy toys for sale: Barbies and other dolls, plastic sports equipment. And candy with bright wrappers. The decoration also looked like an elementary schools. You can tell that Malawian parents love their children, but there are a lot more children here.

In a way, it's not surprising that an economy of children should be poor. I didn't make a whole lot more than $200 a year when I was seventeen. (Probably less.) No wonder a country with an average age of seventeen has a low income. And perhaps, given this, it's not presumptuous to think that the rich West ought to treat a country like Malawi as a loving parent would treat a child: providing aid but discipline too, providing "loans" and then forgiving them, intrusively finding out how they spend their money...

2004-03-04T07:56:00.000-08:00

LILONGWE
I anticipate having a lot of impressions to report from Africa, and not enough time to report them to the numerous friends and relatives, and a lot of stories are the same for everyone, so this blog is to keep everyone posted about my adventures. So far, I like it here. The climate is extremely pleasant. It's a bit hot and humid during the days, but I don't mind that. I met a Malawian statistician today who had been to DC and New York and got his Masters at the University of Manchester; his comment about Manchester was that he didn't like it because of the "very hostile climate." People are very friendly here, and everyone seems to know a little bit of English, though most of the time not enough to allow for much conversation.

Lilongwe, as a city, however, is not easy to distinguish from the cornfields. There are a few nice, modern buildings in the "City Centre," and then, about 3km away, is "Old Town," with a lot of shops lining the streets (I like Old Town best) but these two small towns would hardly amount to a city of 450,000 in the West (more like 15,000). Instead, there are places like the ones I passed yesterday on my way home: shantytowns amidst the cornfields. From the road, the first thing you see is cornstalks, but behind and between them little dirt streets cut between wooden huts. You know it's a sizeable neighborhood from the crowds of people lining the road, many of them selling things.

Here are a couple of "journal entries" from the past couple of days here:

Tuesday, March 2
I’m in the hotel in Lilongwe. You can tell it’s the rainy season here. It was cloudy when I arrived, and as the evening fell the clouds grew more and more blue-grey and stirred a bit, threatening rain. There was lightning in the distance, and then around eight o’clock the rain began falling hard and fast. Now it has softened to a drizzle.

The people at customs here were seemed casual, so that I didn’t quite feel like I was entering a real country.
A crowd of taxi drivers met me at the airport, although I couldn’t bid them below $18—they seemed to be colluding. On the drive into Lilongwe there were a lot of people walking along the roads. In the hotel, perhaps one of the most luxurious in all of Malawi, there were about three young men who helped me with my bags and showed me to my room. The abundance of people is the main sign of poverty I’ve seen here. I haven’t encountered any low prices yet—not for the taxi, not for the hotel, not at the restaurant. I’ve spent $40 worth of kwacha already, not counting the hotel room. Probably there are low prices, but I just haven’t got below the touristy surface foam of the society, where international prices prevail, to encounter the real society underneath, where there is presumably a Malawian way of life that corresponds to the dismal GDP per capita statistics.

At one point on the road, the people were especially thick—men and children crossing the road in both directions amidst the cornfields. The taxi driver explained that the “tobacc’ factory” was nearby, and it was the end of a shift, and the beginning of another, so people were coming from and going to work. I asked if Malawians smoke a lot, and he said no. I asked if the production was for export, and he said yes.

This is my first time in the tropics, and so far I’ve seen two samples—the flat plains of Kenya, from the windows of the airport, and now Malawi. Neither one is “the jungle,” however. In Kenya, the land seemed high and dry. Here there are cornfields much of the time, and where they are not, the natural landscape seems to be a grassland with quite a few trees but not enough to be a forest. But it is hot, even in March, and despite the rain, and you can feel the tropical directness of the sun. And some of the vegetation in the hotel courtyard is excitingly large and lush. There’s one huge tree, for example.

The power just went out, for the second time in two hours. It seems to be unreliable here.

I’ve been reading about East and Southern Africa in the Lonely Planet. One thing that’s outstanding about this region is the number of famous large mammals—elephants, rhinos, zebras, cheetahs, leopards, lions, and many kinds of antelope. Kenya Airlines features them with a picture on every seat in the airlines. Other large mammals are more numerous and stronger here than elsewhere in the world; people are fewer, poorer and weaker than in most places; and people evolved here first. These three facts are not coincidental, according to Jared Diamond and Jeffery Sachs. Because humans evolved here first, the animals evolved along with them, learning, in particular, to beware of human hunters. And parasites evolved too, in particular malaria, which Sachs sees as a major cause of the under-development of places like Africa. I’ll see whether I believe Sachs’ theory more or less after spending some time here. I’m scared stiff of malaria right now, malaria being Africa’s most intimidating characteristic. I take daily anti-malarials, smear myself all over with mosquito repellent, and spray my clothes with it. Thus armored, I ventured out into the open air of Africa for the first time this afternoon. But just for a few minutes. Though it was barely past six, nothing seemed to be open. Nor does Lilongwe seem an especially pedestrian-friendly city.

Malawi seems to be a pocket of high population density in a region of the world where people are quite scarce. This is not how we think of Africa: on the contrary, it has a reputation for runaway population growth. Yet Zambia, with 10 million people, is the size of France and England together; Botswana and Namibia are both huge territories with less than 2 million people each; South Africa has 45 million but is one-fifth the size of the United States. Really the region has vast expanses of empty land. It is much less densely populated than western Europe, let alone the Pacific Rim.

Wednesday, March 3
Today turned out to be a public holiday, so I couldn't work and explored the city instead. I bought a colorful new shirt for $3 (I love buying new shirts) and a swim suit for $4, various liquids, a BBC “Focus on Africa” magazine which I read this evening, an ear of charred corn for 10 kwacha. I spent an hour or so in the “nature sanctuary,” but saw no animals except monkeys in cages. I avoided the riverside trail, where there was a warning to beware of crocodiles, for fear of malarial mosquitoes—I’ll go back there sometime when I’ve remembered to put mosquito repellent on.

I have no car yet, so today I relied on one taxi and a whole lot of minibuses, but the trouble with the minibuses is I don’t know how to get them to stop when I want them to, so I often end up doing a lot of superfluous walking on each end. Through the windows I saw a lot. As far as modern buildings go, Lilongwe has some but seems like a very small town. But the streets are teeming. That’s one thing I like so much about the developing world: the abundance of people on the streets. In developed countries, people acquire more private space of their own. The streets are both less full of people and less sociable, with far less of a tendency to be a place of business.

Anyway, while working my way back to City Centre from Old Town, I came to a part of the city which, on the maps, probably looks like an undeveloped street, and indeed from the roads it looks rather like cornfields, and yet there’s a shanty town of sorts among the corn. It’s places like that that make Lilongwe a city of 450,000, according to the Lonely Planet’s estimate. That estimate is three years old: perhaps the city has even grown?

I met a student at a theological college, who invited me to the Nazarene Church in Area 25. The taxi driver who brought me back to City Centre (part of the way, that is: he ran out of gas on the way and we walked the rest of the way, but I paid him the full fare anyway) told me he is part of Sabbath Day Church. I saw “Assemblies of God” through the minibus windows, and “Jesus Christ is the Lord” conspicuously on a building in Old Town. There was also an “Islamic Information Center” in Old Town. Religion seems to be quite vibrant here.