THE SHIVA NAIPAUL MEMORIAL PRIZE

THE QUIET AFRICANS

SADAKAT KADRI

BLANTYRE is a lethargic place. The colo- nial architecture at its core, a complex of chalky prefabs with roofs of corrugated copper, has survived only because no one has yet got round to its long-planned demolition. Fading red stars mark out the doomed buildings, but since they were painted on 20 years ago most people have forgotten what they mean. Even the odour — a cocktail of wood smoke and petrol fumes — has a soporific, narcotic quality more usually associated with unventilated garages or faulty boilers. Early in the histo- ry of Nyasaland the town lost the race to become the capital city, and — with consis- tency if nothing else — it failed again in independent Malawi, when the powers- that-be decided to erect an entirely new capital at Lilongwe instead. Tourist brochures still insist that the town is the nation's 'business and social hub'. The comment says far more about commerce and conviviality in Malawi than it does about the vibrancy of Blantyre.

I was on contract in Malawi for two months. For one whole springtime, I roamed among the gum trees and orchids of the Mount Soche Hotel's garden and slept in a trouser-press-and-television bed- sit. Like a poltergeist, I disturbed rather than occupied my room. Through its huge windows, an electronically blue sky shim- mered over the girdle of mountains which enclosed the town, heaped like stiff brown suede or cones of demerara sugar. Clouds would float above them in Cinemascope, chugging along in flat-bottomed trains, or The Shiva Naipaul Memorial Prize is award- ed annually to the entrant best able, like the late Shiva Naipaul, to describe a visit to a foreign place or people. It is not for travel writing in the conventional sense, but for the most acute and profound observation of a culture evidently alien to the writer. This year the prize was once again part-sponsored by Penguin Books and is worth f3,000.

This year's judges were the writers William Dalrymple and Caryl Phillips, the literary crit- ic Caroline Moore, the literary editor of The Spectator Mark Amory, and the editor of The Spectator Frank Johnson.

Eight entries were shortlisted out of a total of 105 entries from 13 countries. The field was unusually open. Paschal Khoo Thwe had vehement supporters for his account of childhood in Burma, some liked Richard Hutton's stay at the writer's retreat, Haw- thomden Castle, others favoured Martin Bea- gles on a bar in Madrid. Jose Manuel Tesoro, Alexander Lester, Matthew Bannerman and Mark Swallow were among the runners-up.

occasionally piling on top of each other, like supernatural mounds of ice cream. During the week I would stroll to work past the newspaper and junk vendors on the bright, hot pavements; come Friday, I would leave the decomposing concrete of my office and drive out of town for the weekend, passing rows of commuters as they trudged homewards in obscure lines along the roadsides. It sometimes seemed as though I was barely touching the coun- try, but in truth I was immersed in it. By the time my contract was ending, the idea that I was going to exchange Blantyre for London was almost unimaginable. Not unpleasant, just hard to grasp. It felt as if I were a television and the channels were about to be switched.

The phenomenon that most struck me when I arrived in Blantyre was the perva- sive calm. My stereotype of the gesticulat- ing and chaotic African had to give way to another: the gently nodding, sombre Malawian. Speech, volume and movement were set to a disconcerting minimum. Hawkers and shopkeepers were as likely to avoid your eyes as to seek your attention. At work, my telephone receptionist would take calls with a whisper, becoming offend- ed if asked to speak up. Most extraordinary were the numerous occasions when I would walk into an office to find a group of employees simply gazing. Not skiving, not working, and certainly not chatting. Just gazing. After a while, the tranquillity began to ring like tinnitus.

Sometimes this is explained as an aspect of a more general servility. In the humor- ous lexicon of black southern Africa, the Malawian stands for the downtrodden loser just as surely as the Nigerian represents the flashy scam-artist and the Somalian the gun-toting nutter. Even some of my Malawian acquaintances seemed to regard all-rouqd inadequacy as a regrettable but undeniable feature of the national charac- ter. But the myth of congenital meekness can't be taken too seriously. It fits uneasily with David Livingstone's records of his journeys through a land of blowpipe-wield- ing and beer-guzzling natives — and it falls apart when confronted with the existence and the effect of the one man you don't ignore when considering the national char- acter of Malawi: Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda, ex-Life President, Father and Founder of the Nation, Elder of the Church of Scotland, and psychopath extraordinaire.

Dr Banda, the charismatic and cackling homunculus who ruled Malawi for 30 years, turned the country into a wasteland of the soul. The totalitarian regimes of the Warsaw Pact were well-meaning nanny states compared to the one-party monolith over which he presided. Over 90 per cent of the population were enrolled in his Malawi Congress Party, and thousands died at his hands. Even more brutalising, because more diffuse in its effects, was the irrationalism of his regime. Banda's coun- try was notoriously the country where mini- skirts and bell-bottom trousers were defined and banned by statute, where 'hip- pies and hobos' had their hair shorn at the borders, and where — in a fit of lunacy so laughable as to be terrifying — the whistling of Simon and Garfunkel's 'Cecil- ia' became a capital offence because the good doctor's entourage suspected that it referred to Cecilia Kadzamira, his mistress and the country's 'Official Hostess'. Until 1993, every Malawian had lived under the most extraordinary combination of authori- tarianism and anarchy: a rule of law under which laws were so simultaneously draconi- an and unpredictable as to more closely resemble thunderbolts. Now he was gone, but his chill presence still haunted the country. Freedom had left its citizens as stunned as pit canaries released into the sun. Almost everyone I met had a horror story to tell. Several others had a part in the story to conceal.

There was another reason for the silence. African catastrophes are conventionally described as Biblical, but the cliché does not do justice to the awful reality of Malawi's Aids epidemic: a hecatomb against which the death of the first-born reads like a hamfisted morality play. The scale of the epidemic is unparalleled since the conquistadores' infection of the Ameri- cas or mediaeval Europe's Black Death. Over a fifth of 20-40-year-olds are HIV- positive, and the country's fragile institu- tions — from the media to the judiciary have been left as riddled as a mad cow's brain. Exoticising African disease is a Western habit, but so too is ignoring it, and Malawi — like the rest of southern Africa — is simply incomprehensible without an appreciation of its Aids crisis. While I was in the country, at least a dozen friends of friends died. Not a week went by without a colleague having to attend a funeral. And if someone absented themselves from work, the hovering question was almost palpable — was this the Big One?

The cull has left short circuits through- out Malawi's social network, but equally notable was the hush that it left in its wake. To some extent this was because its omnipresence made it beyond comment like the sky, only its absence would have been noteworthy — but even the word Aids was almost taboo. Newspapers were filled with obituary notices — all too often inserted by parents for their son or daugh- ter — but never did I see Aids given as the cause of death. The news that someone had `passed away' would be greeted with a sor- rowful shake of the head, but the fact that people were dying of disease at a rate unheard of anywhere else in the world was never mentioned. Catastrophes which made it onto the front pages of Malawi's newssheets were risible rather than Bibli- cal: rampaging swarms of bees, supernatu- ral roosters and murderous hyenas all made media appearances during my stay, but only one major Aids story appeared. That was the saga of Billy Chisupe, who claimed to have synthesised an antidote to the disease with the help of his dead ances- tors. He was refusing to subject his snake oil to analysis, and the Daily Times cau- tiously warned that, 'in the absence of sci- entific tests on the concoction to determine whether it really cures Aids or not, some people still doubt its effectiveness'. Mr Chisupe's feisty retort was that 'if it is inef- fective, why does the government send patients from hospitals in official ambu- lances?' Unfortunately, the question was probably a fair one.

The solitude of my weekend excursions was as magical as the calm of Blantyre could be maddening. As insects whirled and crunched in my path, I sped through a countryside which often had the strangeness of another world. The inter- minable roads were punctuated by pillars of tyres, or raffia mats, or strings of melons instead of advertising billboards. Crocodiles and hippos swam in the silvery rivers, and shadowy creatures zipped suici- dally across the highways. The scenery had a grandeur fitting for a land which had been torn and folded into existence over 40 million years: palms and marshes would give way to sandy wildernesses filled with the fat torsos of baobab trees; mountains were peppered with vast boulders which had been once marooned by primaeval floods and were unlikely ever to move again. At night, fields of glowing stubble would smoulder under a sky splattered with unrecognisable stars. And snaking across the country always were the funeral corteges. Driving past one of the ululating, singing marches could lead to one's car being stoned and, as one approached, the attenuated lines of traffic on the long high- ways would be drawn together like curtains on a rail. Every vehicle would empty, and passengers would stand with heads bowed as the cardboard coffin or shrouded body was carried past. On my final trip to Lake Malawi, I waited for eight processions.

Zang belonged to the type of maverick lawyer who simultaneously affirms your faith in humanity while making you fear for the fate of any client they might ever repre- sent. We first met at the Blantyre Sports Club, a redoubt of willow-thwacking subur- banism popular among Blantyre's few thousand white residents. I was having lunch. That first meeting was not auspi- cious. A skinny, mustachioed black man in a tight suit and stained tie lurched over the terrace, clutching a g and t, and — after asking why I wasn't socialising with my fel- low post-colonialists — confided that he had developed a tremor in his left hand. He watched the arm with an inchoate fear, as though it had just sprouted on him. As I tried to muster an appropriate level of con- cern he manoeuvred it into a pocket and downed his drink like an oyster. He left without another word.

I next saw him at one of central Blan- tyre's three bars, the Cactus. As I munched a slimy Kraft-and-ketchup-flavoured pizza, he staggered in and pulled up one of the unpolished wooden armchairs. Ordering a g and t, he ruefully complimented me on the healthiness of my appetite before sud- denly beckoning with a reinvigorated arm to a sombre and smartly dressed man, probably a colleague at the far end of the room. The man looked away a fraction too late. Doubt filled Zang like smoke in a room, about to explode into fiery rage. `Was that a double or a triple?' I asked, and the expression dissipated. Mercurial he may have been, but he also had the forgiv- ing forgetfulness of an alcoholic. The con- versation turned, via a route I no longer recall, to cuff links. He very much hoped that when I left, I might think of giving mine to him. Somehow, we took off from there.

It is unlikely I would have befriended Zang anywhere else in the world. But amidst the stillness of Blantyre, he was irre- sistible. With the voracious appetite of the isolated autodidact, he hoovered up infor- mation, and was a fount of indiscriminate knowledge. Everything I know about John Wayne Bobbit's penile reconstruction, I owe to Zang, just as, without his insistence, I might never have read Pablo Neruda. I certainly would have been unlikely to stum- ble upon the Prohibited Publications Order: a selection of about 1,000 books, songs and films banned by Dr Banda, which ranged from Lesbo Nurse on the Make (by King Coral) to the entire series of Upstairs, Downstairs, managing to pro- scribe en route Alan Coren's Collected Bul- letins of Idi Amin and the now deleted Engelbert Humperdinck classic, 'Girl of Mine'.

Zang had qualified late as a lawyer. After several years on the fringes of a stu- dent poetry movement during the 1970s, he decided that the time had come to change the world rather than interpret it. The Marxist dream had been thwarted. Two terms into law school, he had been impris- oned for a crime he couldn't remember, and during four years in jail he suffered torture he couldn't forget. He had gone on to complete his studies, but the vagaries of post-Banda Malawi meant that the erst- while torturer was now a fellow barrister. It must be said — although neither of us ever did — that said torturer's career seemed to be proceeding far more smoothly than Zang's ever would.

Another friend was Ivan. Although almost 30 years old, he still lived with his Indian-born parents: they had told him that he could stay until he found a girl to settle down with, and that, he said with his Mutt- ley-like chortle, meant that I would always know where to find him. With his thinning hair, beanpole body and overloaded shirt pocket, he had the down-at-heel appear- ance of an overgrown office junior, which is what he was when I met him. That job, like several others, didn't last, but it soon became apparent that he regarded ortho- dox employment as something of an irrele- vance. His real vocation was the (as yet) unpaid task of transforming the parameters of international soccer — either by widen- ing the goalposts or lightening the ball and to this end he had been in communica- tion with Fifa for several years. Examina- tion of various sheaves of correspondence suggested that the contact was largely one- way, but Ivan was cautiously confident that his work was soon to bear fruit. His only real worry was that Fifa would not give him the credit, nominal and financial, which was his due.

Ivan's parents gave me my first window into the bedlam of Banda's Malawi. Their memories were a reminder that even totali- tarianism has its limits, and that flashes of loyalty and selflessness would always illumi- nate the night and fog. Then in their seven- ties, they had a witty loquacity more suited to Brooklyn than Blantyre. Fifty years of marriage had fused their conversational styles, and their anecdotes were passed like batons to each other as their memories zigzagged through the last three decades. She told of the friend who had been arrest- ed for opening his shop on a national holi- day, and had emerged from jail, incontinent and widowed, seven years later; he remem- bered the neighbour who had fled a bar when two German tourists threw a dart at a picture of Dr Banda, only to be later traced and executed. As Indians, Ivan's parents had usually benefited from Banda's bizarre love-hate relationship with non-blacks, but even they had almost become victims. His father — whose working lifetime was spent as a 'quality controller' cum human beagle for British- American Tobacco — once found himself denounced for witchcraft and told to leave the country within 24 hours. Only the extraordinary bravery of his co- workers, who all swore that he had never practised sorcery, resulted in the order being rescinded.

Ivan was my clubbing partner. On Friday evenings — payday — the calm would sud- denly break in Blantyre. For one night, it would erupt: the outlying shebeens would overflow with drunken dancing and its three discos would pulsate until dawn. If I was in town, we would spiral from bar to club until sunrise. At the time, it was a hugely enjoyable release; but in hindsight the whirligig has become fixed in memory as a kind of tropical Masque of the Red Death. The couplings and decouplings were no more explicit than those on display during an average night on the tiles in Lon- don, but they came to symbolise for me one of the features of Blantyre life that I had long found inexplicable: the fact that rather than heightening sexual caution, Aids seemed to have resulted in it being cast to the wind. The extent to which ordi- nary life in Blantyre was sexualised was startling. Most men I knew, Zang included, had at least one 'second wife': a term which owed at least as much to a Presbyterian sense of euphemism as to pre-Christian traditions of polygamy. Women were less open about sex, but the mathematics told its own story. Even if there were fewer promiscuous women than men, the pool of exceptions was deep.

The closest I came to understanding why this might be followed a conversation with Ivan. One day as we were driving around town, he pointed to a low building and told me that it was the city's coffin factory. `They say that it's Blantyre's only growth industry,' he sniggered. I leapt through the window of opportunity, and told Ivan how surprised I was that people were still screw- ing with such abandon. 'Is it?' was his Afrikaans-accented response. 'It's like as if you're under a volcano? In this country the African person has a life expectancy of 45, hey? Why should that person care about a disease which will kill them in ten years? We know that cancer will kill us if we smoke, but we still go ahead? It's just a dif- ference in mentality.' The distinction that Ivan drew between the 'African person's' mentality and his own was unwarranted, to judge from the eagerness with which he pursued any whiff of sexual possibility, but the explanation made some sense. Equally important was the simple truth that — in a country where an imported paperback cost more than the average monthly wage sex was cheap fun. And for a population which had been crushed and pulverised, it was a dialogue that broke the silence even as it killed.

Ivan had an almost phobic unwillingness to leave Blantyre which, he would obscure- ly explain, was because certain matters required that he always be near a phone. Although it is conceivable, I suppose, that Fifa would need to speak to him at some point, Blantyre was hardly a communica- tions nerve-centre and his urban loyalties doubtless owed at least as much to the sex- ual opportunities offered by the Friday sat- urnalia. As for. Zang, the risk of being stranded in the bush — or indeed, any- where outside a bar — meant that a week- end drive into the great outdoors was never really on the cards. On the single occasion that we arranged to travel together, I found him at the Mount Soche in a deeply depressed and somewhat delusional state. His law firm had recently taken on a politi- cally sensitive case and he suspected that several colleagues had been issued with revolvers as a security precaution. He, how- ever, had been left defenceless. The injus- tice of it all had led him to go on strike that morning, but now, having considered the matter over a drink, in hindsight he was no longer sure that he was right about any- thing. Except that he wanted my cuff links. I left him in the garden.

Ivan is still alive, and awaiting news from Fifa. Zang eventually demanded my cuff links. They were my only ones, but I avoid- ed an ugly scene by promising to send him a pair. By the time I got round to it he had of course died. I never found out whether it was alcohol or Aids which killed him, but as any Malawian might • have told me long ago, it isn't that important.

The author is a barrister who assisted in the prosecution of Dr Banda. His book, Cado- gan Guide to Prague, can be ordered for f12.99 from The Spectator Bookshop. Ring 0541 557288 or fax 0541 557225. Please quote ref SP062 when ordering.