Sunrise with Seamonsters (3 page)

On the plateaux the cold wet winds sting the countryside with a mixture of fog and rain. These winds whip sideways against the face, tear and flatten the elephant grass, and yank swatches of thatch from the roofs of the mud houses. Yet one rarely hears complaints about this cold season—food is a great blessing in a poor country. Few mention the discomfort and perhaps this is the reason no one has popularized the African winter.

As an English teacher I can tell the season by the changing conditions of the exercise books. In the rainy season, spring, the books are damp, the ink has run, and the point of the red grading pencil gets soggy and usually breaks. Winter arrives in Malawi and the students' exercise books are charred at the edges, the stacks of books reek of woodsmoke and dampness. Sometimes moons of candlewax appear on the pages.

This is the circumstantial evidence of the season, of the conditions under which those essays on truth or
Treasure Island
are written. One
corrects the compositions and a small room materializes. The room is either of cement or mud and has a grass roof; in the corner of the room a boy or girl squints at an exercise book under the feeble flickering light of a candle or the low flame of a wick stuck in a dish of kerosene. The kerosene lamp gives off a deep yellow light and fills the room with thick smoke. In the center of the room a pile of smoldering coals in a pit warms the student and a sleeping family.

In the townships just outside the large cities of Central Africa—Salisbury, Blantyre, Lusaka—winter can be dismal. It is not a time of harvest since the persons that live in the townships in those millions of cement sheds are civil servants, mechanics, shopgirls and students. Even if there were time to plant and care for a garden there would be no space for the garden. The townships stretch row on row, symmetrical treeless towns, long files of tiny white one-room or two-room houses. Rusting signboards appear at intervals on the dirt roads that run in a grid in the townships. And early in the morning, before dawn, a stream of people winds its way among the unnamed roads. The school children, many without shoes, run stiff-legged in the cold; the girls march in clumps, hugging themselves in their long clothes.

At the assembly, held outside the school in the morning, the national anthem is sung by three hundred shivering children. Their teeth chatter and they hop up and down between choruses to keep warm. If anyone owns shoes this is the season for them. The leather shoes are patched, sewn, and some are in shreds; some wear plastic shoes—made in Rhodesia or Japan—which are uncomfortable and very little protection against the cold.

In class the wind sounds like someone crawling slowly around the corrugated roof, a heavy man trying to break through the tin. After school there is a vigorous soccer game. No one dares to stand still, the players dash about the field—a ballet on the grass with a backdrop of trees tossing in the fog.

In the villages after supper the people can be seen crouching around fires to warm themselves. A student of mine once suggested that independence in Malawi came at a perfect time of the year. He said the day of independence comes in July, with winter at its coldest, and the people who would naturally be together around the fires would have a good opportunity to discuss the meaning of the freedom they had won for themselves.

There are places in Africa that are colder than Malawi. In Basutoland (Lesotho), where the national costume is the blanket, the people can expect snow, sometimes two or three feet of it. Freezing winds sweep across the Karoo table land of South Africa, batter the Great Rift escarpments in Kenya and Uganda.

Winter in Africa? Yes, just as sure as there is snow on the equator. Winter in Africa is much more than a word. And though we may not associate cold with this continent, it is there as conspicuous and intense as the heat, and perhaps as unpublicized as the peace that also exists in Africa.

It is my good fortune that I've never owned a camera. Once, when I was in Italy, I saw about three dozen doves spill out of the eaves of an old cathedral. It was lovely, the sort of thing that makes people say
if only I had a camera!
I didn't have a camera with me and have spent the past two-and-a-half years trying to find the words to express that sudden deluge of white doves. This is a good exercise—especially good because I still can't express it. When I'm able to express it I'll know I've made the grade as a writer.

And recently I was driving through Kenya with a friend of mine. It was dusk, an explosion of red shot with gold, and the setting sun and the red air seemed to be pressing the acacias flat. Then we saw a giraffe! Then two, three, four—about ten of the lanky things standing still, the silhouettes of their knobby heads protruding into the red air.

I brought the car to a halt and my friend unsheathed his camera and cocked it. He snapped and snapped while I backed up. I was so busy looking at the giraffes that I zig-zagged the car all over the road and finally into a shallow ditch.

The giraffes moved slowly among the trees like tired dancers. I wanted them to gallop. Once you've seen a giraffe galloping—they gallop as if they're about to come apart any second, yet somehow all their flapping limbs stay miraculously attached—you know that survival has something to do with speed, no matter how grotesque, double-bellied and gawky the beast may be.

My friend continued to fire his camera into the sunset, and pretty soon all the giraffes had either loped away or had camouflaged themselves in the trees. Both of us, rendered speechless by beauty, nodded and we continued along the road.

After a while my friend told me that we should have stayed longer with the giraffes. Why? Because he didn't get a good look at them.

"See," he explained calmly, "if you take a picture of things—especially
moving things like giraffes—you don't really see them." He said he would have had trouble explaining what the giraffes looked like except that he had seen some in the Chicago Zoo. I could only agree and I told him about my Italian dove episode.

The next day, when we saw another herd of giraffes, he pushed his camera aside and we both sat there—it was a blazing Kenyan noon—and watched the giraffes placidly munching leaves and glancing at us, pursing their lips in our direction.

No camera is like no hands, a feat of skill. And if you know that sooner or later you will have to explain it all, without benefit of slides or album, to your large family, then as soon as you see something you start searching the view for clues and rummaging through your lexical baggage for the right phrases. Otherwise, what's the use? And when you see something like a galloping giraffe which you can't capture on film you are thrown back on the English language like a cowboy's grizzled sidekick against a cactus. You hope for the sake of posterity and spectators that you can rise unscratched with a blossom.

Some writers frustrated by prose turned to get-rich-quick schemes, action paintings or mushrooms. Goethe botanized, Melville wore black, Dostoevski gambled all his money away, and Mark Twain had many flirtations with printing machines and photography. All writers look for a way out of writing. But writing is like serving a jail sentence—you're not free until you've done your time on the rock-heap. Taking fine pictures won't give any lasting freedom to a writer.

(And neither will plagiarizing. I was once in a writing course in which there was a boy who wrote superb poems. Of course the teacher gave him a hint or two, touched the poems up here and there, but said affirmatively that the boy was well on his way to becoming a very good poet. Everyone competed with the boy and we all improved ourselves by his good example. Alas, our poems never were as good as those of the boy. On the last day the class met it was revealed that the boy had lifted his poems from somebody else's translations of Juan Ramón Jiménez, the Nobel Prize winning Spanish poet.)

A poet-friend of mine who lives in Amherst, Mass., has a rattletrap camera that is more of an oddity than anything else. It is a very old box camera, and before my friend takes a picture he must measure distances carefully and read the yellowed directions about five times. Chuckling privately to himself he snaps the picture. Cranking the film forward takes more time and having the pictures sent to be developed requires all the mystery and care of an income-tax return.

But it is really not the pictures that intrigue him. It is the fun of owning an infernal machine (when he is not actually snapping the picture he holds the camera as if it were a time bomb). After he had taken some pictures of me he announced that none of them looked like me and he suggested that we refrain from taking any more pictures. This was fine with me because, as I have said, no camera is like no hands.

Ignoring cameras is also good for the eyes. I have often sat staring at something wide-eyed, feeling a fabulous clicking in my skull, snapping everything in sight and, occasionally, things that aren't in sight. Afterwards, strenuously gesturing and leaping out of my seat, I have described these phenomena to my friends.

This is also good exercise. What I have told may not always have been the pictorial truth—a camera may easily have seen something different. But when you see a sunset or a giraffe or a child eating a melting ice-cream cone there is a chemical reaction inside you. If you really stand as innocent as you can, something of the movement, entering through your eyes, gets into your body where it continues to rearrange your senses. Also—and for a writer this bit of information is priceless—a picture is worth only a thousand or so words.

Yesterday I finally got down to marking the political science papers from the correspondence students, and yesterday an uprising started in Kampala. The students would like their papers back. I don't blame them; the papers have been sitting on my desk for two weeks.

Yesterday was a bad day for marking papers. Today is not much better. The Kabaka (or King) of Buganda was President of Uganda until a few weeks ago; under the new constitution all political power has been taken from the hereditary monarchs of Uganda. The Kabaka once controlled the richest and most powerful Kingdom in Uganda, that of Buganda. But Milton Obote, former Prime Minister, has taken over as President.

While I was grading papers yesterday there was some shooting in the streets near the Kabaka's palace, about a half a mile from my office; roadblocks were put up, streets and pavements torn apart, and railroad ties and telephone poles ripped up. Travelers were deputized by the Kabaka's people and made to dig up the roads and help make effective roadblocks against government troops.

The Special Forces and riot squads rushed around with night sticks and Sten guns. And rumors, like locusts emerging, flew about the city. I couldn't grade papers yesterday. I had to buy some food in case the shops closed. They might not reopen for a week or more. I only looked over a few papers.

This morning I was determined. I sat down at my desk. The weather is beautiful in Kampala, the rains have just stopped after about six weeks of downpours, and everything is emerald in the sun; the herons in the large tree outside on the lawn are flapping around and tending to their fledglings. But no distractions this morning! I must get those papers graded.

The first paper, the first question.
What is a Nation
? "A nation," runs the quite elegant handwriting, "is a group of people of common consciousness and like-mindedness." I check it right. He has understood the lesson.

And then I hear a small pop. Then another. I look across to the Kabaka's palace on one of the hills opposite and see nothing. I can see a few open streets from my window. There is no traffic. I hear the pop-pop-pop of an automatic rifle. Are they gunshots? I ask the secretary—she lives near the palace. She tells me that she had trouble getting through the army lines when she came to work in the morning. She saw five truckloads of government troops. Some were battling with the people of Buganda. I turn back to the paper. "The difference between Government and State is that the Government is not permanent while the State never changes..."

The people of Buganda are proud. They love their king, they are polite and wise and seldom get ruffled. It is undignified, they might say. It was one of their kings, the first Kabaka Mutesa, who welcomed the first white men, Speke and Grant, into Uganda in 1862. The wide avenue leading to the palace is still called the We-Love-The-Kabaka road in the vernacular. This is the road where most of the fighting is taking place this morning. Back to the papers.

The question was,
What are the advantages and disadvantages of decentralization of power in a state?
I check some of the answers: "When many people exercise responsibility many of them will be interested in the government..." I look up again. I have just heard more rifleshots, this time a long volley, some louder than others.

The fighting seems much heavier today. It is hard to concentrate on the marking; and now students who are enrolled in evening classes are dropping in to say that, because of the curfew, they won't be in class tonight. Will I pass their names along to the teacher?

A few weeks ago Uganda was a Federal State with each king acting as lawgiver and tax-collector for his particular kingdom. More recently the federal constitution was suspended and Uganda made a Republic. The Kabaka and the other monarchs, people said, would be angry; no longer would they have any power. But they have loyal subjects, as loyal as any medieval farmers standing in the rain on a muddy road to watch their lord pass in a gilded carriage. But I have it all before me in one of the papers: "Federal government is that in which a number of states join together, each state keeping control of some matters, but allowing the Central Government to control national defense and foreign affairs."

Uganda is no longer a Federal State. I hear some objection to it, out the window, across the valley where there is shooting.

The Kabaka has issued what amounts to an ultimatum: he will give Obote's government until May 30 to leave his kingdom and change his mind about the constitution. We can assume that the state of emergency
will last until then. I may even be grading papers until that date, perhaps these same papers.