Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [83]
There are one thousand “peasant farmers,” each of whom rents an acre of land on which to grow burley tobacco, which they will sell back to the estate. They are also required to grow a patch of maize and a patch of vegetables on a separate acre of land to feed themselves and their families.
By the standards of this tiny, tightly controlled, densely populated country, our farm is remote. It’s at least an hour’s drive to Zomba, the nearest town. Zomba is built on the edge of a startling plateau on which the Life President has built himself a small palace (one of many scattered throughout the country) and which offers a sudden change of climate. The plateau, whose summit we reach by winding up an up-only road (avoiding the lawless drivers hurtling illegally down), is planted with fresh, sweet-smelling pine and fir trees. Its ground is soft and mossy; the air is thick and cool, and fresh with an almost permanent lick of mist. The dams and streams are stocked with trout; the roads on top of the plateau are hard, red, slick clay, which become so slippery during the rains that our heavy truck slides drunkenly off their spines and into the ditch. As we come down the “down” road from the plateau, the air thickens by degrees until, by the time we reach the town, we have almost forgotten the tonic of the plateau’s summit, its cool, comforting, mossy silence.
There is little to recommend the town of Zomba, or to set it apart from many other African cities of its nature, except the mental hospital on the main street. To the casual observer, the town of Zomba is primarily populated by mentally ill Malawians, escapees from the hospital, who tear around the modest city in sawn-off pink-, blue-, and white-striped pajamas.
By now, Vanessa is sixteen and attending a private coeducational school in Blantyre where the focus is on a cheerful learning atmosphere and where the students are encouraged to express themselves artistically. I am thirteen, at Arundel High School in Harare, Zimbabwe, where the students are expected not to express themselves at all. The focus is on a rigorous academic program and we will be expected to pass difficult examinations sent out from Cambridge in England.
At our school, we cannot make or receive phone calls except at ten o’clock on Saturday morning, when our conversations are monitored by a matron and we may speak for only five minutes. Our letters out of the school are frequently censored. Our letters into the school are subject to censorship at any time. We may receive only visitors who are approved by the authorities and who appear on a master list, and those only between the hours of three and five on Sunday afternoons. We must attend chapel twice a day. Grace before meals is expressed in Latin.
We must wear our uniforms no longer than an inch below the knee, no shorter than an inch above the knee as measured from a kneeling position; we are required to wear a uniform of some description (there is a school uniform, a Sunday uniform, and an activities uniform) for all but a few hours a day when, between bath time and lights-out, we are (in any case) shut up in a classroom attending to homework. We must tie up our hair when it touches our collars. We must wear high-waisted, low-legged thick brown nylon underwear. We may not speak after lights-out, or before the wake-up bell, which rings at six. We must wait at the door for our seniors, teachers, visitors.
We are issued packing lists. We must bring (but may bring no more than) everything on the list. Three sets of school uniform, three sets of civilian clothes, five pairs of underwear, a Sunday dress, two pairs of lace-up Clarks shoes bought at vast expense from the aging lady (who seems prewar to me, by which I mean pre-Chimurenga) with flaking pink-powdered cheeks and a bright blond beehive at