Under African Skies (32 page)

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Authors: Charles Larson

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“Tomorrow morning some of us will accompany you back to Habelo to help with the burial service for the deceased. You will have to carry the corpse back home on your back, just like you brought it here today. I have spoken.”
As soon as he had finished, everyone stood up to disperse to their families in silence.
Matweba and his men might have been keeping culture, customs, and the Nhlapo family intact, but they were still in for another surprise, another challenge. The decision from the kraal was not definite and final enough for Mama KaZili. She stood up to speak. Members of the family who were already going had to stop to listen.
“You may have spoken. But I also have meant every word I spoke to you and to everybody. It is up to us women to stand up for our lives and the lives of our children … I'll go back to work hard, hard for them and for myself …” She spoke aloud in a tone that changed to a familiar one I had heard several hours ago when we were struggling to climb the slippery, snowy mountain.
She did not finish all she wanted to say because she fell down heavily, just like the last time she did on the mountain with a baby on her back. But this time she did not utter the name of my father in disgust when she fell. It was just a heavy and very silent fall. Her body lay painfully crooked next to the body of Mkhathini.
My sister and I were the first to cry hysterically. We did not like the thought that our mother might have died too, leaving us alone in the brutal, uncaring world.
Very quickly we were taken to the other house, because we were making unbearable noise and disturbing the adults. They were pouring cold water on Mama KaZili's head to wake her up.
I recalled all the events of the day and all that Mama KaZili had said. In one instance, she had said: “Before I pass away in this world I want to have had a chance to improve my life and the lives of my children.” I wondered if this would ever happen.
By the end of the year she would be working as a primary teacher without my father's or his parents' permission. From her meager salary she sent us to school, again without anybody's permission. From then on, there was always something to eat before we went to sleep.
 
—1994
(BORN 1945) MALAWI
Steve Chimombo has been an active force in Malawi's literary resurgence for the past twenty years. A professor of English at Chancellor College, University of Malawi, he has edited and encouraged student work in addition to founding Writers and Artists Services International. His education has been international: a B.A. from the University of Malawi, an M.A. from Leeds, an Ed.D. from Columbia, and stints as a creative writer at the Iowa International Writers Workshop and the Macdowell Colony. He has also taught briefly in the United States, in addition to his more lengthy career as an academic in Malawi.
The scope of Chimombo's writing is equally broad. His six volumes of poetry include
Napolo and the Python
(1994). He has had one novel,
The Basket Girl
(1990), published and has had several plays presented in Malawi, including
The Rainmaker
(1975). A collection of short stories,
Tell Me a Story
(1992), several children's books, and a volume of folklore (
Malawian Oral Literature
, 1988) are part of his extensive output, in addition to several academic guides to Malawian literature.
In an interview with Lee Nichols, commentator for the Voice of America, Chimombo stated that the main goal of all his writing has been to show “the cyclical nature of things, the rhythms of life, night and day, birth, death, and so on.” As the story “Taken” implies, until recently conditions for the writer in Malawi have not been particularly supportive of creative work. Chimombo has said: “The story recaptures the processes of eliminating writers
under Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda's regime between 1964 and 1994. Writers, artists, and dissenters were systematically arrested, detained, killed, or forced into exile. Although the story was written under such conditions, it could not be published until democracy and multi-partyism were ushered in during the second republic. In fact, an editor of a U.K. journal of letters refused to publish it before this period for fear it might jeopardize the writer. The characters involved in the story are well known in Malawi's academic circles and have granted the author permission to publish the story as it is. The names and places, however, are pure fiction.”
Of his own attempts to survive as a writer during the Banda years, the author remarks: “My writings—poetry, fiction, and even faction—over the past thirty years have been forced to be expressed in mythological terms. Writing openly or plainly during Banda's reign of terror was an invitation to be ‘meat for the crocodiles'; hence my taking refuge in symbol and myth. Those who know the system of metaphors I use understand what I am talking about. The system is still accessible to those who are foreign to it. In the story, however, I am dealing with actualities. I was involved in some of the events and there was no room for mythologizing anymore. Even myth offered no route for escape.”
It was a few minutes before noon, and I was packing my briefcase slowly, when Zinenani, an old friend now working in the capital city, burst in.
“Alekeni!” he shouted unceremoniously.
“Hi!”
“When did you get back?”
“Get back?”
“I thought you'd gone abroad.”
“It won't be for a month or so.”
“But the whole capital is full of rumors of your having gone already, and decided to stay on.”
“Stay on?”
“Defected is the word.”
“Defected? Why?”
“Because of what happened to Ndasauka.”
“But I wasn't involved in that.”
“Rumor has it that since your fellow writer was detained you decided to skip the country.”
“But why should I do that? I haven't done anything that would make me go into exile.”
“Believe me, when I saw you walk up to your office a few minutes ago,
I thought I was seeing a ghost. The rumors were that strong. I came up just to make sure I was seeing right.”
“But I was on the radio two days ago.”
“That could have been prerecorded.”
“That's true. Anyway, you can tell my well-wishers in the capital that I'm still around.”
“But you'll still be going abroad?”
“I can't miss that opportunity.”
“The rumors aren't anticipating your exile?”
“Believe me, if I had wanted to go into exile, I would have done so years ago when I was away studying in the U.K. and U.S.A. The thought seriously occurred to me then, but after toying with it, I realized I'm, deep down, an ancestor worshiper. I also discovered that I cannot write the genuine stuff when I'm on foreign soil. I decided to brave my own country.”
“It's good the rumors were just that. We need fellows like you around.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Consultations.”
The phone rang. I let it ring.
“It's nice to see you, all the same.”
“I've got to be going.” Zinenani turned to the door.
I waved him off and lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“This is Chodziwa-dziwa.”
It was my kid brother. He had not been in touch for a long time. He, too, worked in the capital.
“How are you?”
“Fine. I'm actually speaking from your house.”
“When did you come down?”
“I just arrived. I wanted to talk to you.”
“I'll be right over. It's lunchtime, anyhow.”
As I finished packing my briefcase, I puzzled over what Zinenani had said. The rumor was getting slightly stale. Just yesterday, I had been waylaid by a colleague's wife in the supermarket.
“Alekeni, come here!”
She took me by the hand and literally dragged me between two food counters. She was so enthusiastic I worried someone might suspect we were going to embrace or something, the way she furtively looked around and then drew near me as if she wanted to touch me.
“So”—she heaved a sigh of relief—“you're not gone!”
“Gone where?”
“Taken by the police.”
“Why should the police take me?”
“Because of Ndasauka.”
“But I don't even know what he's inside for.”
“You don't need to know to be implicated. You're a friend of his, and a writer, too.”
“Even then.”
It had ended like that, leaving me thoroughly peeved at the source of the rumor. In Mtalika, rumor diffused at the speed of sound: word of mouth, telephone, letter, even telepathy. It was said that before you decided to seduce your friend's wife, people would already know about it and actively make sure it came about. Before long, I would end up believing in the rumor myself, even when right now I was still in Mtalika, getting into my own car to drive from my office home to have lunch with my family and kid brother. A free man.
“Daddy! Daddy!”
My five-year-old always ran up to the garage doors to meet me as soon as he heard the car in the driveway. Between our dog and him, I could not tell who gave me the warmer welcome. Sometimes they almost tripped over each other in the rush to meet me with cries and barks. It was overwhelming.
“Your brother is in the sitting room” were my wife's welcoming words.
I walked through the dining room to the lounge to find Chodziwa-dziwa flipping through a popular magazine. He looked up and grinned sheepishly. Something was bothering him.
“So it's not true” was his greeting.
“What?”
“That you are missing.”
“Missing?” This was getting to be too enormous to be funny.
“A man came round to my place two days ago to say that something had happened involving a friend of yours, that your friend had been taken, and that you had disappeared without a trace.”
“This is ridiculous. Who was the man?”
“I don't know, and he refused to identify himself. He said he just wanted your relatives to know that you could not be found.”
It was wearisome, if not monstrous. I reviewed my involvement with Ndasauka again.
I was going too fast but could do nothing about it. I was too agitated to be driving at that speed, yet I still maintained it, even when I kept going off the road at each minor bend. I had had one too many, but it was too late to start regretting that. I could not talk about Ndasauka rationally with his best friend by my side.
“Surely”—I detected the hoarseness in my voice—“you must know something he was involved in?”
“I'm telling you I don't.”
“You don't know, or you don't want to discuss it?”
“I don't know anything that he was doing for the police to be interested in him.”
“You're his closest friend.”
“That doesn't mean he told me his entire life history.”
“You were there when the police came to get him.”
“It's very simple. I had invited him out to lunch at the club for a change. We had just finished the meal and were having a drink before going back to work when they found us at the bar.”
“They knew you were there?”
“That's where they found us. I didn't know what was happening at first. One of them came over and called Ndasauka out. After a few minutes, another one came in, looking for nothing in particular. When Ndasauka didn't come back after fifteen minutes, I went out to investigate. I found him in handcuffs.”
“You mean they handcuffed him right outside the club?”
“It created quite a sensation. There was a small crowd when I went out. I followed the police van to the office. There was another crowd as they took him up to his office.”
“Still in handcuffs?”
“Yes. Another contingent was already in the office going through his papers. I learned this from the secretary.”
“How did she take it?”
“Scared. So gray she looked almost white. She couldn't type, read, crochet, or phone. I understand they threatened to arrest her, too, if she so much as moved from her chair.”
“What were they looking for?”
“Search me.”
“It comes back to what you know about all this. If you don't know,
and his colleagues don't either, who is there to tell us what is happeningl”
“The police.”
I nearly exploded, the car swerved, and I hastily righted it again.
I felt cheated out of something in life and frustrated by the tantalizing thought that perhaps beneath it all there was really nothing at all to discover. Perhaps the police did not even know what they were looking for. Maybe they only had Ndasauka on suspicion, pending further investigations. If that was the case, Ndasauka would be in for a long, long time. He might not ever come out.
The normal detention orders operated for twenty-eight days without formal charges. After that period, formal charges had to be filed, a statement issued, or the detainee released. The Republic of Mandania, however, operated neither with normal detention procedures nor with formal charges. A decade or so before, the country had gone through a spate of detentions of several highly placed persons in the civil service, the armed forces, and the university. All were supposedly suspected of planning a coup. Although five years later most of the detainees had been released, some members of that group were still rotting in the numerous camps dotted around the country.
“Are we going back to the seventies?” was the question everyone asked as soon as Ndasauka was taken, and it was rumored—but never verified—that other members of the citizenry had also been or were about to be detained.
“When the police behave like that, it means they have reached the final act,” someone who had lived through the terrors of the seventies said, meaning that the swoop was too dramatic and public to be followed by others of a similar nature.
In the seventies, enough terror had been generated for you to distrust even your closest relative and neighbor, for fear they might turn out to be one of the numerous informers in the pay of the police. People had disappeared into detention, demise, or exile. The whole period was shrouded in such a terrifying cloak of mystery the media never covered it, no one talked about it in public, social places were emptied because it was safer to retire to your home after work. However, even within the safety of your home, you feared your servant, even your wife and children, and dreaded a knock at the door, lest it should be your turn to be taken.
“Don't get involved in this.”
It was the parish priest. He had gone to visit Ndasauka's family and then dropped in to see me.
“How can I get involved in something I don't know anything about?”
I was exasperated. Why was everyone implicating me in the whole thing? The first hint that people thought I would be the next one to go was the surprised faces I met at work the day after Ndasauka was taken.
“When did they let you out?” the secretary had asked me.
“Who? What?”
“People said you were also taken yesterday. Someone saw the flashing lights of a police van in your drive at seven o'clock last night.”
“It's a long drive and the driver might have been reversing.”
“But what was it doing there, of all places, and at that hour?”
I could never figure out the answer to that one. Nor to the next, which I got from a colleague at coffee time the same day. “Someone told me you were taken for at least a few hours, if not the whole of last night.”
“Who's spreading all these rumors?” I exploded. “I was at home and in bed the whole of last night. Why don't people ask me or my wife or my children before jumping to conclusions based on non-evidence? I know I went to Ndasauka's office after I'd heard what had happened to him. I saw the police there. I know I went to his house when I didn't find him at the office. I found the police and Ndasauka there. I was there to see him finally bundled into the police Land Rover to be heard of no more. But that was all I did.”
It had not been all I did, though. I'd arrived at Ndasauka's home just as he was writing postdated checks to give to his children—his wife was away in the capital on a six-month course. I paced up and down outside, not knowing whether or not I could go in to speak to him, or, in fact, what I would say to him if I could.
The police crowded him out of the house.
“You must take me, too!” Ndasauka's seventy-year-old mother cried as she tottered on crutches, following the group outside. It was the only clear sign of emotion that was expressed by any member of the family. I do not think the children fully understood what was happening, the oldest being only thirteen.
“Don't worry, Mother, he'll come back soon,” one of the plainclothesmen
said unconvincingly as they went over to the Land Rover parked just beyond the garage. Another police wagon was next to it. So many cars and officers for just one man.
“Excuse me,” I introduced myself. “I'm a friend of Ndasauka's and I would like to know what's happening.”
“Orders from the government: We are to take him to the capital.”
“Where in the capital?” It was an automatic question.
“We can't say.”
“But I have to tell his wife where he's being taken.”
“You can't do that. You must not discuss with anyone what has happened today, until you hear from us.”
“When will that be?”
“Tomorrow morning.”
“But these kids will be alone all night with their old grandmother if his wife is not informed immediately. Who's going to look after them tonight?”
“I'm sorry, those are our instructions.”
“Can I talk to Ndasauka?”
“Of course.”
I went over to him.
“Look,” I whispered, although the police could hear me, “do you know what this is all about?”
“All I know,” he said loudly, “is that I'm being taken to the capital on government orders.”
“What would you like me to do?”
He looked at his mute children. I thought someone would burst into tears.
He cleared his throat. “Look after the kids.” He straightened up.
I watched him walk to the police car, flanked by the Special Branch men. They climbed in the back door of the Land Rover, putting him in the middle. The wagon followed. No sirens. No tears. That was the last we saw of him.
“Pirira is arriving by the trailer tonight.” The parish priest brought me back to the present.
“She knows?”
“Of course. Could you pick her up? I have a meeting with the bishop, and it threatens to be a long one.”
“That's all right. I'll meet her.”
And so began the longest night in my life. The “trailer,” as the latenight bus was called, was aptly nicknamed. It took the whole night to reach Mtalika from the capital, when other buses took no more than three hours. I had not known these details before and had gone to the bus station at nine o'clock to check on Ndasauka's wife. They told me the bus would arrive at eleven. At eleven, it still did not appear. Nor at one.
I parked by one of the shops with lighted fronts near the bus station and tried to sleep in the car. At three, another car came and parked behind mine. I raised a sleepy head.
The other man recognized me. “You're not waiting for the trailer, are you?”
“Yes.”
“You're too early. It won't be here till four-thirty or later.”
“But why didn't they tell me that before, so I could sleep at home?”
“They didn't know, either. It's quite erratic.”
“Surely they could have phoned?”
“Once it has left the capital, it stops to drop or pick up any mail or passengers at every single trading center. It's useless to try to keep track of it. Those who know about its unpredictability wait until dawn before venturing to meet it.”
I looked at my watch: three-fifteen. If I went home, I would probably sleep until midday. I decided to stay where I was.
The trailer groaned to a halt at four-thirty, dragging the mail van, from whence its nickname. I walked across the lot.
“Pirira,” I greeted Ndasauka's wife. It was painful to try to smile.
“What happened?” She sobbed. She looked as if she had been crying all the way and was on the verge of collapse.
“The car is over there.”
I got her bag and walked briskly. She had to trot after me.
“It's like this,” I said as I drove off. “We really don't know what's happening.”
It was no consolation. I let her get what was left out of her system and drove in silence all the way to her house.
“Mommy!” was the delighted cry of the youngest boy as he rushed out to my car. The joy of seeing his mother and the reason for her being there were irreconcilable.
“I'll be in touch.” I hastily drove off.
“I'm sorry to get you involved like this,” the parish priest had continued. “You're a fellow writer and a friend of his. You should check your travel documents.”

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