• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Mum and I both work on the farm. Mum walks down to the grading shed (a massive hangarlike structure, into which all the tobacco from the farm has been brought) during the reaping season, or is driven down to the nursery where tobacco seedlings strive under the heat during the planting season.

Mum had been issued a motorbike, but after her first lesson ended (with a humiliating burst of feathers from a surprised guinea fowl) in a flower bed, she turned the motorbike over to me and either relied on me to drive her down to the tobacco seedlings, or walked, with the dogs fanning out in a destructive, chicken-killing wake behind her. There were constant requests from Malawians, toting bloodied fowl, for “compensation for chicken death.” We began to suspect that even Mum’s badly behaved dogs could not possibly have the energy (in the thick, swampy heat that hung almost permanently over the farm) to kill such a number of chickens and ducks over such a wide, diverse range (and all, apparently, within an hour or two). But we always paid up.

There was a constant, unspoken tension in the air, expressing the Malawian’s superiority over all other races in the country. Even Europeans who had been in Malawi for generations, and who held Malawian passports, were on permanent notice. A complaint from a disgruntled worker could have a foreigner (regardless of citizenship) thrown out of the country immediately and forever.

At the end of the farm, where the road bordered the beginning of the fishing villages, and all through the country, there were the blank faces of elaborately fronted, abandoned Indian stores whose owners had been unceremoniously expelled from the country as unpopular, money-grubbing foreigners. The stores had been handed over to Malawians, who soon lost interest in the long hours and careful scrutiny that are required to make a living from selling small bolts of cloth, single sticks of cigarettes, and individual sweets to an impoverished population. Now the windowless stores baked in the sun, their previously brightly painted walls bleaching, their floors littered with the droppings of fowl and birds, their rafters hung with bats and caked with the crusty red tunnels of termites.

Pulling dugout canoe

I often ride the motorbike down to these abandoned stores, which are so hung about with ghosts and old dreams and a lost time. Sometimes, I see chickens scratching on the cracking concrete floors where once a tailor toiled strips of bright cloth through his fingers to the treadle of a Singer sewing machine. This is as close as I get to the swamp. From here, I sometimes see men, stripped to the waist, their backs silver-shiny with sweat, as they pull dugout canoes (made farther and farther from the lake as forests disappear into stumped scrubland in the wake of many busy axes) to the lake. The men sing as they pull the craft; their song is rhythmic and hypnotic, like a mantra.

But mostly I don’t have time to drive all the way down to the start of the swamp. I have to work. Dad says, “You can’t have a vehicle unless you use it for farm business.”

I leave the house after tea in the morning; I come home for lunch and then leave again until supper. My arms and legs grow muscled and brown as I manhandle the Honda through thick sand (which quickly turns to impassable mud in the sudden, violent rainstorms that sweep across the farm). I ride the avenues between the one thousand plots that make up Mgodi Estate. I am supposed to make sure that the tobacco has been planted with appropriate spaces, that the crop is weeded, that the plants are topped and reaped correctly.

It’s a long time past lunch and I have been stuck at the north end of the estate since mid-morning trying to persuade the Honda out of an abandoned well into which I fell while following the flight of a fish eagle. Now I am hurrying down the avenues, keeping half an eye on the tobacco crop, half an eye on the road, where chickens and children and dogs have settled in the shade cast by straw barns and mud huts.