Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight_ An African Childhood - Alexandra Fuller [84]
In our dormitories, we may have only three posters on our walls and five items on our dressing tables. We may wash our hair only on Saturday mornings. We cannot watch television or listen to a radio except for a few hours on the weekends. If we are caught smoking or drinking, or if we are disruptive, we will be expelled.
One evening, before lights-out, a rumor spread through the boardinghouses (hopping the lawns from one hostel to the next) that two teenage boys had scaled the security fence and were at large on Arundel High School property. All the boarding hostels were immediately locked, with us inside them, roll call was taken, and we were instructed to turn out the lights and undress in the dark (lest the rumored boys see us as we changed into our pajamas). Hysteria swept from cubicle to cubicle, from dorm to dorm. Several girls threw their underwear and bras out of the windows. One girl burst into tears and it was rumored that another actually fainted with excitement.
At the end of the school term, I fly out of Zimbabwe and arrive at Kamuzu International Airport.
There is a barrage of signs to greet me.
I may not take photographs of official buildings; doing so will result in my arrest.
If I am a man, I may not wear my hair below my collar. My hair will be cut if it is too long.
If I am a woman, I may not wear shorts, trousers, or skirts that show the knee. Doing so will result in my arrest.
I may not bring pornography into the country. Doing so will result in my arrest.
(Pornography laws are so stringent that even the boxes of salty crackers imported from South Africa are censored. The bikini-clad woman on the box of crackers has her shapely legs blackened to the knee by the marker of a pornography official.)
I may not bring drugs into the country. Doing so will result in my death.
There is a small army of customs and immigrations officials to greet me as I climb off the plane. I peer over their shoulders, trying to see into the terminal building, but there appears to be no end to the arrival procedures. There are rows and rows of officials and behind them there are poster-sized photographs of the little dictator whose skin, I notice, is shiny, like redwood mahogany. His photograph has been airbrushed into an eternal, tight-smiling youth. Armed guards stand at an imposing wooden entryway, blocking the view beyond the posters.
My school trunk is laid on a table. I am ordered to open it.
Three customs officials descend on my modest pile of possessions.
“Do you have any pornography?” asks one official. He waves his gun casually at the place where my heart is.
“No.”
My textbooks are discovered, opened, examined. Pages of biology, mathematics, chemistry, Latin, and French are carefully turned over until, with an expression of disgust, the official bears down on me and asks, “Do you have drugs?”
“No.”
The officials find my box of tampons, open the box, unwrap a few tampons and peer down the tubes as if they were kaleidoscopes.
I look around, my face burning. But everyone else is having their possessions fingered in just the same way. I can tell the Old Hands from the New Hands. While the New Hands blush, sweat, and occasionally protest their treatment, the Old Hands have relaxed. They are chatting to each other, smoking cigarettes, ignoring the officials, waving to each other: “Where did you go?” “How was your trip?” “Join us for a beer later?”
“Do you have foreign currency?” My brookies and training bras, awkwardly neither childish nor yet grown-up, are brought out and shaken, as if money might fall from their folds.
“No.”
The officials frown, suspicious. “Then how will you pay your way while you stay in our country?”
“My mum and dad,” I say, my voice growing