Sunrise with Seamonsters (12 page)

What made the car journey to Uganda something of a challenge were the many roadblocks on the Great North Road in Malawi, where Young Pioneers stopped cars, searched them for smuggled arms and looked for spies and infiltrators—they were looking in fact for friends of people like Mr Rubadiri. Also a distance of 2,500 miles separated my home outside Blantyre from Mr Rubadiri's in Kampala. The drive would be difficult, but the greatest danger was my name in the logbook.

I was hesitant to drive that distance alone. I persuaded a friend to come along to share the driving. There was only one thing that remained to be done before I left. President Johnson had just escalated the war in
Vietnam by sending in 20,000 more troops: I wrote an article about this for
The Migraine
condemning Johnson's decision and also mentioning the recent fiasco in the Dominican Republic. That finished, we set off in the car for Kampala with the crate of dishes.

The drive in Malawi was harrowing. We were stopped at fourteen roadblocks and threatened by gun-toting Young Pioneers. At one roadblock a bottle of wine we were carrying blew its cork, making a loud bang and rattling the armed boys. We also took several wrong roads, trying a shortcut through the Luangwa Valley and crossing a disturbed area where the Lumpa sect, fanatical Christians led by a fat black lady named Alice Lenshina, were attacking police posts. Each Lumpa carried what they called "A Passport To Heaven" which guaranteed a
kraal
in Paradise; when the police opened fire the Lumpas rushed headlong into the blazing guns. Skirting the Lumpas, we circled back into Malawi and had more fearful moments at the northern frontier, which had been attacked on three occasions. Few people drive at night in Africa, and when we arrived at midnight at the border post the Young Pioneers thought we were raiding them. I hid the logbook. We were guarded at gunpoint while the car was searched. But it was dark and very cold, and the Young Pioneers gave up their search after a few minutes. Two thousand miles of Africa's worst roads remained, but we had no more problems. We saw lions and giraffes and Masai warriors; we had a glimpse of Mount Kilimanjaro. It was a marvelous trip, though the new car was a bit banged up by the time we reached Kampala.

On the other hand, we had broken only one small plate in the large dinner service. I transferred the car to Mr Rubadiri's name and he did me a favor. I told him about my writing for the German magazine and asked him if he would mind being interviewed by me: would he explain his attitude toward African independence, Malawi's relations with Portugal and South Africa, and Dr Banda? He agreed and we had a long, lively talk which I typed and sent to Munich. I had justified that month's payment at least.

Then he asked a favor of me. I would be flying back to Malawi and on the way stopping for an hour in Dar es Salaam; would I deliver an envelope to a Mr Yatuta Chisiza who would meet me at the airport in Dar? I said yes, of course.

"Ah," said the bearded Mr Chisiza with relief when he received the envelope. I was sure it was filled with money. "When does your plane leave?"

"In an hour or so," I said.

"Have a beer," he said. Though it was only ten in the morning, I obliged. He was leader of the guerrilla band, one of the most hated men in Malawi. He was reputed to have been trained in China.

"How was the drive?" he asked.

"So you know about Rubadiri's car."

"Everybody does!" he said. "That was a wonderful job!"

"We spent most of the time bluffing our way through roadblocks," I laughed, though I had been scared stiff at the time.

Mr Chisiza unfolded a map on the table. "Show me where they are," he said. And when I did, he said, "So many! They must have put up a few more since the last time we were there."

"So you still go to Malawi now and then?"

"Now and then." He smiled.

My plane was announced. I finished my beer and started walking toward the door.

"I wonder if you'd do me a favor or two," said Mr Chisiza.

"That depends," I said.

"It won't be any trouble." He said I was to deliver two messages in Malawi: one was to tell a Mr M that his two boys were fine, that they had gotten safely over the Tanzanian border and had started school; the other was to tell a certain Greek fellow that on October 16th he should deliver his bread to Ncheu, a town thirty miles from Blantyre.

My readiness to say yes to favors may suggest a simplicity of mind, a fatal gullibility; but I was bored, and the daily annoyance of living in a dictatorship, which is like suffering an unhappy family in a locked house, had softened my temper to the point where anything different, lunch with a stranger, the request for an article, the challenge of a difficult task, changed that day and revived my mind. The risk was usually obvious, but it always seemed worth it—better that than the tyranny of the ordinary.

I knew that Mr M's boys must have been in Mr Chisiza's army which had attacked the border post. Furthermore, when someone mentions delivering bread on a certain day in a certain place many hundreds of miles away, I know as well as the next man that the order is a euphemism for a plot. But passing on a simple message requires no personality; if there was a plot, I knew mine was a blameless involvement; neither message was much of a revelation: I was available.

That was about the middle of September. In the next four weeks my luck started to change.

I took my time delivering the messages. Mr M worked, I was told, for Radio Malawi. He was pointed out to me; I made sure he was alone in his office and then introduced myself and said, "I'm just back from Dar es Salaam. Your boys are fine—both of them are in school."

Mr M covered his face and began sobbing. He said, "Oh, thank God!" and got up and shook my hand a number of times. Calmer a few minutes later, he said that he thought his boys had been killed. His wife had just been arrested in the north.

"That's terrible," I said. "Aren't you worried about yourself? Banda's men might be after you."

"No," he said. He had just written a song called
Brother, Pay Your Taxes
which Dr Banda liked very much—Malawi was close to bankruptcy—and Mr M thought that if he kept writing songs he would be in the clear for a while.

Then Mr M asked: "Would you do something for me?"

He needed some money, he said, to go up north by plane—there wasn't much time—and see if he could get his wife released from prison. I could hardly refuse. His tears had moved me, and the indignity of having to write a song called
Brother, Pay Your Taxes
for a government which had imprisoned his wife was really intolerable. From the large bank balance of the mounting German funds I gave him seventy-five pounds and wished him luck; and I told him that it might be better if we never saw each other again.

Mr M had cried when I told him his news. The Greek baker trembled and went pale when I told him about the delivery he was to make in Ncheu. He took me into his back room and asked me to repeat it. He held his head in his hands. He did not say, "Thank God," but he might very well have said, "Oh God." He held his head tightly and did not look at me, and I noticed that he was wearing a wig, glossy stiff animal-like hair, the shape of a fancy bathing cap.

"Stay here," he said. "I'll be right back."

When he was out of the room I looked around. My eye was caught, as most people's are, by a bookshelf. But on this bookshelf there were three or four books with their spines turned to the wall. Thinking I might get some clue to my errand, Mr Chisiza's odd message, I whipped them around and read their spines. The first was titled
Defeating Baldness,
the rest were about hair restoring, head massage, and how to thicken your hair.

The Greek returned no less nervous than when he left. I remembered Mr Chisiza had said that I should tell the Greek to give me the drink he owed him. I did so, as good-humoredly as I could.

"He should buy
me
a drink," the Greek snapped. He asked me my name. I told him, and said that I was just an English teacher in the Peace Corps and that I didn't want to get involved in anything.

"How can I get in touch with Chisiza?"

Mr Chisiza had told me his alias ("Ali Abdullah") and his box number in Dar es Salaam. I remembered the alias because it was so different from his real name, and the box number was easy because it was a historical date. I told the Greek.

"Do me a favor," said the Greek.

"Sorry," I said.

"Write to him and tell him I can't deliver the goods," said the Greek. "I got a wife and three kids. I got a business to worry about. The CID are watching me—they know I helped those guys get out of the country last year."

I refused. But I wonder what I would have done if the Greek had been an African? I think I might have helped him out; I might have pitied him. Though it wasn't pity that made me help Mr Rubadiri. He was an important man, a United Nations delegate, and his request pushed me to do something which I could construe as humane. The same went for the German articles: I was clarifying the African position; I was a kind of nationalist. My little helps were consistent with the mood of that decade in Africa, of engaging oneself and being available for the purpose of national development. The image of the Azania-like joke republic committing farcical outrages upon itself was temporarily antiquated then; it was a time when the admission to the United Nations of a country like Gambia (which is a riverbank) or Rwanda (half a dozen volcanoes) would not raise a smile.

That decade is over; what was engagement is now detachment, a prevailing spirit of passionate disregard. And no less for the Africans themselves. I find it hard to believe that a German magazine at present would look for its contributors among the European section of a community in Africa. More frankness would be found among Africans. And now a delegate to the United Nations would not know a school teacher in his country: the time has passed when diplomats are picked from a nation's headmasters. And a black guerrilla fighter asking a white American to pass messages for him? Such things don't happen today: Azania reasserted itself at the close of the 'sixties—not in the European mind, but, much more significantly, in the African one. The next
Black Mischief,
if not the next Evelyn Waugh, will be wholly African.

The Greek asked a favor. I had no trouble refusing. My refusal was racial: he didn't count. I said, "I told you I don't want to get involved. I was supposed to give you this message. It's between you and him. It's not my affair."

"But you're in touch with him," said the Greek. "I'm not. I didn't know he was in Dar. They said he was in China."

"I'm not in touch with him," I said. "I happened to see him at the airport in Dar, that's all."

"You haven't ever written to him?"

"No," I said, "and I don't intend to."

"How do you spell your name?" asked the Greek.

Which made me suspicious. So I gave him a wrong spelling. Mine is an easy name to misspell.

A week later he invited me out to eat. But I had to turn him down. I had a new problem.

The Germans, in reply to my interview with Mr Rubadiri, had written me the strangest note. It was in an opaque envelope, of the sort used by Swiss banks, with no return address. The large sheet of notepaper was not headed. The message read as follows:

"I wish to thank you most sincerely for your letter of August 21st and for Item No. 17 which can be considered as being particularly interesting. This kind of 'poetry' is of special importance both for me and for all members of the redaction staff. If you could go along this line with your poetry it could be tremendously interesting for all of us over here. Thanks a lot."

I happened to know the German Ambassador to Malawi. His daughter was to marry one of my good friends. I asked him about the magazine.

He had never heard of it. "A German magazine about African affairs, you say?" He was somewhat angry that he had never been sent a copy, because he was supposed to be up-to-date on such publications. He said he would check on it.

In the weeks that followed a further problem cropped up:
The Migraine.
The long-delayed issue with my editorial about Vietnam had come out only to be seized and confiscated by the American Ambassador, Sam P. Gilstrap. The full text of my editorial was cabled to the State Department. And in due course the Peace Corps' representative, Mr Michael McCone, was sent back to Washington for what was considered a lack of judgment.

Nothing was done to me. The editorial board of
The Migraine
was summoned to the Embassy.

"I wrote that editorial," I said. "If anyone should be sent home it should be me, don't you think?"

"You didn't know what you were doing," said Ambassador Gilstrap. "But McCone should have known better." And then he blustered: How could I have written that? What possessed me? How could I be so stupid?

"Any human being would write what I did," I said, though I saw how feeble this justification was.

"I don't agree with you," said Ambassador Gilstrap.

"May I ask why?"

"Because I don't think you're a human being, that's why!"

A moment later he apologized for this remark, but he added, "McCone is out, and as long as I'm the Ambassador here he's not coming back. This is a very serious matter. What if your article got into the hands of the Egyptians?"

The Egyptians?

"They'd use it for propaganda to prove we're not united."

"Who says we're united?" I asked. "Everyone knows there's a lot of opposition to the Vietnam war."

"Not
here
" said Ambassador Gilstrap. He sat forward and knotted his fingers and fixed me with a stare. "Boy, I'm going to tell you one thing and I want you to remember it. You're not in Nebraska now! If I read anything more like this I'm sending you home, too. I won't hesitate." He nodded and said, memorably, "I will
prevail!
"

"Today," said Dr Banda, "I am going to talk about the teaching of English..." It was October 12th, the opening of the new University of Malawi; as Chancellor of the University Dr Banda gave the opening address, which was in the form of a lecture.