‘You’re asking for bulbs and they won’t give them to you?’ I said. ‘I think they’re sending you a message, that they don’t care.’
‘Aye, possibly.’
This used to be one of the best schools in the country.’
‘Aye, it’s sad, I agree.’
‘What happened to the books?’
‘Students stole them.’
‘Good God.’
‘We’re trying to work out a new system. When we get it up and running we’ll be able to prevent a lot of the theft.’
I thought: I will never send another book to this country. I also thought: If you’re an African student and you need money, it made a certain criminal sense to steal books and sell them. It was a justifiable form of poaching, like a villager snaring a warthog, disapproved of by the authorities but perhaps necessary — there was no tribal sanction against poaching when it concerned survival.
Leaving the Soche library I felt as though I was emerging from a dark hole of ignorance and plunder. We walked across to the classrooms, which were as seedy as everything else, but in some respects worse, for the verandas had not been swept and the grass had not been cut, and there was litter on the paths. What excuse was there for that?
‘There’s a serious money shortage in this country,’ Anne said.
‘That’s probably true,’ I said. ‘But how much does a broom cost? The students could sweep this place and cut the grass. I don’t think it’s a money problem. I think it’s something more serious. No one cares. You’re here to do the work, and you’re willing, so why should anyone help?’
I’m not just teaching,’ she said. ‘I’m learning a lot.’
‘Absolutely — that’s a good reason to be here,’ I said. ‘That’s why I liked being here.’
We walked through the building to the schoolyard, where some students lingered, watching us. This field was where morning assembly was held, a bigger space than I had known, but now paved with cinders and bordered by more unswept and damp-stained classroom blocks. A stout confident-looking woman in a green dress stepped out from a classroom, where she had obviously been eating, for she was licking her fingers. The headmistress.
‘This is Mr Theroux. He used to teach here.’
‘Thank you. That’s interesting.’
Still with her fingers in her mouth, the headmistress returned to the classroom, to her meal.
Anne and I walked on to the assembly ground. I looked around the dismal school and thought how I had longed to return here. I had planned to spend a week helping, perhaps teaching, reliving my days as a volunteer. This was my Africa. You’re planting a seed! some people had said. But the seed had not sprouted and now it was decayed and probably moribund.
Perhaps reading my thoughts, Anne said, ‘I have my doubts sometimes. I say to my mother, “What if we just upped and left? All of us. Every last one.” ’
‘What do you think would happen?’
‘Then the people here would have to think for themselves. They’d have to decide what’s best for them — what they want. No one would influence them. Maybe they would say they wanted education — and they’d have to do the teaching. They’d have to do what we’re doing.’
‘For your measly salary.’
‘Right,’ she said. ‘Or maybe they’d decide that they wouldn’t want a change. They might allow things to stay as they are. Lots of the people in villages are fine — they’re not miserable.’
These serious questions from someone who was willing to work — the person I had been — gave me hope. Not enough Africans were asking the same questions.
I wanted to see some African volunteers — caring for the place, sweeping the floor, cutting grass, washing windows, gluing the spines back on to the few remaining books, scrubbing the slime off the classroom walls. Or, if that was not their choice, I wanted to see them torching the place and burning it to the ground, and dancing around the flames; then plowing everything under and planting food crops. Until either of those things happened I would not be back. I felt no desire to linger, and certainly none to work here. I wished Anne Holt lots of luck and I left the place in her hands, feeling that I would never be back, that this was my last safari here.
I did not know the answer; I didn’t even know the question. A kind of clarity came to me: I saw the pointlessness, almost triviality, of my staying and attempting to do some teaching. That effort would have been something purely to please myself. I did not feel despair at having been prevented from doing it, but rather a solemn sense that since only Africans could define their problems, only Africans could fix them.
And maybe none of these flawed schools was the problem, but only foreign institutions like foreign contraptions — like the big metal containers that were sent full of machinery or computers that were distributed and used for a while, then broke and were never fixed. I saw them all over Africa, the cast-off container at the edge of town. Whatever their contents might have been, what remained as the most valuable object was the metal container itself. The empty things became sturdy dwellings, and there were always people or animals living in them, like credulous corrupted tribesmen in a cargo cult.
On my way back to Zomba I drove to Blantyre (named for David Livingstone’s birthplace in Scotland) and stopped at a shop on a side street, Supreme Furnishers, to see another of my students, Steve Kamwendo. Steve was now branch manager, aged fifty-one, father of six, a big healthy man with the powerful features and chiefly presence of Vernon Jordan, Bill Clinton’s expert in damage control. He hugged me and said he was glad to see me. I told him where I had been. His face fell.
‘You went to Soche?’ he said. ‘Did you shed tears?’
That summed it up. Anyone who felt I had been too hard on my old school I could send to Steve, who lamented that the school was in a bad way, that crime was terrible and life in general very hard. His own business was good. Malawian-made furniture, and bedsteads and lamps from South Africa and Zimbabwe were popular, because furniture imported from outside Africa was so expensive.
‘Your old students are doing well, but the country is not doing well. People are different — much poorer, not respectful.’
‘What about your kids, Steve?’
‘They are in America — four of them are in college in Indiana. One is graduating in June.’
By any standards, Steve’s was a success story. All his savings went towards educating his children elsewhere and, though he was gloomy about Malawi’s prospects, he was encouraging his children to return to the country to work.
‘It’s up to them now,’ I said.
I returned to Zomba sooner than I had expected, with an unanswered question in my mind. Why were the schools so underfunded?
‘I can tell you that,’ Gertrude Rubadiri said, her feet squarely on the ground as usual. ‘The money was taken.’
It seemed that two million American dollars, earmarked for education from a European donor country, had recently been embezzled by the finance minister and two other politicians in a scam that involved the creation of fictional schools and fictional teachers. More money was unaccounted for. The men were in jail, awaiting trial but the money was gone and would never be found.
So there was a good reason for the broken windows and dead lights and unpainted walls of the school at Soche and every other school in the country. A large and important part of the education budget had been stolen by the government official to whom it had been entrusted.
The next day the Rubadiris invited some friends for dinner. One man, very fat and self-possessed, had been a Malawian ambassador in Europe and was now a bureaucrat, living in Zomba.