Spectator's Journal/Mission to Malawi
Gregory, Joseph R.
SPECTATOR'S JOURNAL MISSION TO MALAWI Lilongwe, Malawi T t's almost noon on a Saturday at the U.S. Information Center here, where a two-week-old video of ABC News is drawing a big crowd. News of...
...Except for the privileged few who've traveled abroad, most Malawians simply don't have the frame of reference to relate to the strange happenings of the mzungu world...
...The audience titters...
...wife, six children, and a dozen neigh- side the thatched three-room hut where average height is about 5 feet 7 inches...
...Eeeek...
...Four centuries after Portuguese explorers first came here, Westerners are still regarded with amusement, awe, and incredulity...
...Given this attitude toward outsiders, it's not surprising that azungu are often treated with polite, affable mistrust...
...I certainly fit the stereotype...
...Chocolate here is much more costly than bottled beer or an entire evening with a bar girl...
...and practiced medicine in London...
...A hush fills the room as the audience, more than a hundred locals with a smattering of expatriates—mostly aid workers—take their seats...
...And so to bed...
...I roll out my sleepmortality is 151 out of every 1,000 talk...
...I move closer with the flashlight...
...It's well past eight o'clock before they say goodnight, take their flashlights, and retire...
...At first I don't see anything...
...The rainy season had begun in earnest, and it turned out to be one of the worst in years, ruining crops and flooding roads...
...then a cyclone struck, leaving 80,000 people homeless...
...It is considered ill-bred to draw attention to oneself by committing such vulgarities as, say, doing a better job than one's co-workers...
...In addition, several bones, said to be those of children, were unearthed near his house...
...Another story flashes on the screen...
...A Chewa legend tells of a woman who commits some unspecified crime and gives birth to a deformed child—born with a head and no body...
...bid me goodnight...
...In Malawian society group harmony counts far more than personal happiness and individualism is frowned upon...
...Charged with witchcraft and cannibalism, he was tried by being forced to eat a plate of hot piri-piri peppers...
...Most of the people I talked to asked me not to use their names...
...Women keep an even lower profile than men, but among the southern tribes they make the decisions about children, food, and money management...
...then asked where it was...
...Further south things were much worse...
...But despite the poverty, Malawians are speeches, a song by Freddy and the tastes like a giant lump of Cream of I hope it's a field mouse rather than a most generous to strangers in need...
...in my fingers, not because bugs spread have been further depleted by the ar- salary of forty kwacha (about $15...
...But one night, the woman by the family's three mud huts...
...But now the people see many foreigners...
...My hosts, two American teachers, aren't expecting me...
...Then I'm served a piece of chicken and disease but because I hate bugs...
...But you are so big," he to that story, the stranger disappears in the middle of the courtyard formed as it loops over the cornfield and says, "You must eat...
...My plan to bicycle 100 miles from the capital city of Lilongwe to Senga Bay and then head south along Lake Malawi reinforced both these images...
...After a while, they of the meal...
...The country's leader, His Excellency, Life President Hastings Kamuzu Banda, is also known as the Ngwazi (powerful one), or just plain "H...
...But why should they know...
...They put much more stock in witchcraft...
...casts one of the Ngway's innumerable cornflour and water that looks and hear something scurry across the floor...
...The woman laughing...
...Mzungu, mzungu, give me ten tambala...
...But they generally keep to the cities, game parks, and beaches of Lake Malawi, the continent's third largest lake...
...111 26 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990...
...The average Malawian doesn't think Europeans feel hunger or pain, or have any problems," a Catholic priest who's lived here for twenty-three years told me...
...The M&Ms are a smashing success...
...There's no running water or electricity, but they've each got their own room...
...Moyo puts the two chairs he owns throw it into the sky...
...Out in the bush, they'll probably laugh at you too, won't they, Lyman...
...Even a village chief often can't act without consulting his mother and sisters, and frequently serves only as their mouthpiece...
...On the road to the great lake you see many women carrying 50-pound bags of maize upon their heads, sorceresses hawking love potions guaranteed to bring back an errant husband, and witch doctors exhorting against evil spirits...
...Most azungu each dawn...
...His swoops down to a perfect landing be- tower over the Malawi men, whose and her brother resolve to catch him...
...The bones probably belonged to a goat...
...There is no electricity, but in my Before dinner, we share a carton of ing bag, light a slow-burning mosquito births and 33 percent of all children die honor a radio is played throughout the chebuku, the local beer brewed from repellent and read by candlelight...
...Azungu may give faulty medical advice, but they're an excellent source of names...
...But no criticism of the government is permitted, and news about the country is very difficult to get, especially when you're within its borders...
...A scream rips the night like a howl from hell...
...Now, I'm a culturally sensitive person...
...6 When I tell people I've never seen anyone shot on the street back home they simply don't believe me," my host, an American aid worker who's lived here for nearly two years, tells me after the news...
...Not that azungu, the plural form, are all that rare here...
...Oh no, sir," says Lyman, his chief servant...
...He died, thus proving his guilt...
...Indeed much of what foreigners say here is taken with a grain of salt...
...They also think most azungu are ugly and all of them are rich...
...Mothers tell their children that if they misbehave, azungu will come and gobble them up...
...organs, on my tin plate...
...The children gobble the remains Malawi's future, but most everyone in the other chair, legs crossed, staring crashes at his feet...
...They will take no notice...
...Returning a year later, he met infants named Master Cylinder Kanyama and Brake Shoes Komoni...
...Dreamers, and a Muzak rendition of Wheat...
...As the screen shows the hearse containing his coffin passing through prison gates a wave of chuckling ripples through the room...
...CeMzungu...
...Joanna bursts from her room, shouting something about the wall...
...Then I notice something odd about the wall...
...the children cry, running from mud huts to point and gape as I bicycle past their villages...
...A before the age of five...
...Infant English, etiquette doesn't require small three stones...
...Back in the U.S., a mass murderer has been put to death...
...Malawians often laugh when theyare embarrassed or puzzled," my host explains...
...She says she's beginning to get used to being one of the few azungu for miles around...
...I can't stand it," Joanna sobs...
...Later that year there was an earthquake...
...Some say the word itself is related to the verbs kuzungulira, which means "to go around," and kuzungumutu, "to be crazy...
...Bugs flow down the wall like a waterfall, fanning out across Joanna's desk and spreading onto the floor...
...It seems to be undulating, as though there were a living thing inside it...
...Banda permits few journalists to enter the country...
...It paper...
...The screen shows a montage of broken buildings and weeping survivors...
...No one speaks...
...I put it back From this vantage point it's easy to I experience this generosity firsthand To liven things up I produce a balsa on his, saying he should have it...
...agrees that even harder times lie ahead...
...The pace seldom changes, even in the face of the occasional by Joseph R. Gregory careening truck...
...I step outside and close the door...
...Mzungu means "foreigner" in Chichewa, the dominant language of the tribes in southern Malawi...
...Moyo's son, seven or eight it for lunch tomorrow...
...But nothing draws a crowd like a close encounter of the mzungu kind...
...She nurtures it under the watchful eye of her brother, who notices that at night the mouth opens and a European emerges, complete with azungu accessories—car, refrigerator, and TV...
...I waited all day but it didn't let up...
...He seems marries the stranger and they live hapa polo shirt and dark blazer...
...But hospitality in Malawi tends to be informal...
...When I told my friends in the States I was going to tour the country by bicycle, most said, "Gee that's great...
...The crowd loves it...
...Termites, they're termites," Joanna says between sobs...
...He's run Malawi—the Landof Fire—since 1964 and is credited with earlier providing relative prosperity and stability...
...Many shout the only English phrase they appear to know...
...Maybe in the old days...
...In some places people line the road as if watching a parade, the older children calling for money, the toddlers cowering behind their parents...
...They're munching on the rafters and on a pile of papers on the desk...
...I remove my shoes at mosques, don't pat Asian kids on the head, and never, never butter my baguettes in Paris...
...The road, a one-lane strip of ripped up tarmac, is busy with pedestrians, all moving with the same loping, somnambulant gait...
...The chief arrives, dressed in but Mr...
...Young people add to their status by having many nicknames...
...H. E., who is believed to be about ninety years old, was educated in the U.S...
...For my next act, I juggle mat on the dirt floor of my room and for women, forty-three for men...
...For the termites, it's Apocalypse Now...
...E." for short...
...Tomorrow I'm to set out alone on a mountain bike through a land where people smile at disaster and laugh at death...
...They stand in awe very hungry...
...I hum a Joseph R. Gregory is a senior editor at the Foreign Policy Association in New York...
...Some villagers believe, for example, that a government campaign against AIDS is really just an azungu ruse to encourage birth control and to keep people from enjoying sex...
...So do older Malawians...
...Bugs...
...The next item, a special report on a California sniper who shot several children, draws big belly laughs...
...He thinks money and the good things in life come by themselves, that the European doesn't have to work for them...
...He can't be too forward in making suggestions, yet "he faces the dilemma of trying to prove himself because he is a stranger," the missionary said...
...He years old, grabs it, pushes him away, pleased as his wife wraps it in brown pily ever after...
...Many Malawians think of them as carefree, eccentric, and not quite human...
...One of the women, Joanna, is from Chicago and has only been in the country a couple of months...
...I take a can of pesticide and spray the room with thick bursts...
...After more than three decades abroad he returned to what was then the British colony of Nyasaland to lead the battle for independence...
...Dusk, dinner, and bed- trunk, still containing some internal ever crawl inside the hut...
...I just can't stand it...
...The story may be apocryphal, but another foreign teacher compiled a list of names his teenage students chose for themselves: Master Pencil Chibonga, Mary Engines Soko, Kidney Chimenya, Happy Holiday Simwaba, Snow Mzoma, Texas Hardwack Fusilani, and Nature Study Nsunza...
...But that isn't surprising in a country where kids ask passing azungu if they'd like to buy field mice kebabs...
...Foreigners here THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 25 are hesitant to speak openly about chuckles as we shake hands, then sits and launches the plane tail-first...
...The two teachers, women in their early twenties, had heard through the grapevine that I might stop by...
...Five days later I put aside the bike to travel by thumb, bus, and rented car...
...I wonder if black mamba snakes "Born Free...
...The past few afternoon, even though batteries cost maize that tastes like sour milk and bug stings my neck...
...Others acknowledge that the disease exists but it can be prevented by wearing the bark of a mango tree...
...Even with the aid of a sturdy mountain bike, I'm bushed after six hours on the road...
...at his shoes...
...In the morning a servant came and swept the dead bugs away...
...All countries have their ideas about foreigners and this one, which the World Bank ranks among the world's ten poorest, is no different...
...There was a drought and he was blamed...
...Aid workers tell the story of one American volunteer who left an automobile manual in a rural village while there on a job...
...Now, with his term of office drawing to a close, the big political question is who will succeed him...
...The other girl rushes in and tries to comfort her...
...Outside it was raining pretty hard...
...I crush it to death harvests were poor and food supplies roughly half the average monthly leaves chunks of matter in your teeth...
...I spread my sleeping bag on the couch, get inside, and blow out the candles...
...One boy picks it up I get a flash of inspiration...
...I blow rival of thousands of refugees from the Among other things, the station broad- a massive portion of ensema—steamed out the candle, lay on my back, and civil war in neighboring Mozambique...
...The bedroom door is ajar...
...He see the appeal of the Chewa legend as an overnight guest in the village wood glider I keep for such emergen- puts it back on mine, insisting I take about the European who emerges from of a farmer named Daniel Moyo...
...Besides, I come bearing several half-pound bags of M&Ms, a pleasant alternative to fried termites—a crispy 24 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR SEPTEMBER 1990 regional snack...
...The cies, assemble it before the curious it...
...The Ngwazi has crushed all opposition and hasn't named a successor...
...The next morning it was still raining, but I decided to push on for the lake anyway...
...Still, azungu behavior isn't predictable...
...But as I pedal by everyone perks up...
...I take a flashlight and peer inside...
...Malawians change their names as often as you change your shirt...
...They're eating all the homework I have corrected...
...After all, they can't walk for miles with heavy loads on their heads or perform the simplest household chores without the aid of fantastic devices...
...News of the outside world is hard to come by in Malawi, a landlocked country in southern Africa that's about as remote as it's possible to be in the Jet Age...
...I return it, explaining that I haven't the mysterious head each night with all villagers can't take their eyes off me as children and astound everyone as I been working as he has and am not his marvelous possessions...
...They live in a house on a hill at the edge of the school grounds, overlooking a broad valley...
...Perhaps it's because azungu have all these marvelous possessions that they are considered weak and lazy...
...According Mr...
...Mzungu...
...But I must admit that I find the native optimism in the face of the world's catastrophes disturbingly upbeat...
...Trapped, he kisses them both, turning bors sit on the porch staring at me, the Moyos sleep...
...time are hours away...
...So is dinner—beans and rice served in tin plates in their small living room...
...Moyo places the chicken's rat...
...Not long ago, he said, a man was accused by fellow villagers of deliberately delaying the start of the rainy season in order to finish repairing the thatched roof on his home...
...Although get the hang of it but then the plane At bedtime the Moyos unroll a straw The average life expectancy is forty-five the younger adults seem to know some cracks up...
...But a Catholic priest who put me upfor a night at a mission hospital deep in the bush told me that many Malawians don't believe in bad luck...
...Fifty miles from Lilongwe, I struggle up the last long hill toward a government grammar school where I plan to spend the night...
...In all likelihood, said the missionary, the man's real crime was that he had somehow failed to fit in with the community...
...The bearer of evil tidings, in this case Peter Jennings, begins in solemn tones with a report on the rising death toll from an earthquake in the Soviet Union...
...When a man marries he goes to live in his wife's village where, as an outsider, he must be careful...
...few bars of the song and laugh too...
...Can I have them into azungu too...
...As the audience sobs with mirth I reflect, not for the first time, on how wrong Walt Disney was: It's not such a small world after all...
...Plenty of folks among the 7.5 million people here gave me the same polite, never-heard-of-the-place smile when I told them I come from New York...
...I would have said it was bad luck...
Vol. 23 • September 1990 • No. 9
