Having sworn off risky minibuses, I dickered with a taxi driver to take me down the muddy and weirdly ferric-colored road to Nsanje, the southernmost settlement in Malawi. Nsanje, once known as Port Herald, was so buggy and remote and malarial, it had been Malawi’s Siberia for decades, a penal colony for political dissidents. Undesirables were sent to the southern region to rot.
But Nsanje was one of those distant rural places that retained the look and feel of old Africa. Not populous, inhabited by the Sena people, who were despised for being unmodern and remote in their low-lying and swampy land, Nsanje was wild enough to have its own game park, the Mwabvi Game Reserve. Nsanje was also on a wide navigable river. When David Livingstone had first come to this area he had traveled along the Zambezi and up one of its larger tributaries, the Shire River, to Nsanje and the labyrinthine Elephant Marsh and into the highlands. On the way, he made the observation that cotton would be an ideal crop here. One hundred and fifty years later, cotton was still grown around Nsanje. The crop was not in great demand.
My driver’s name was Hudson. He repeated what the papers had said, that the southern region was due for a famine, because of the heavy rains that had come before the maize crop had been harvested.
The rain had been torrential in the south. The growing cycle had been skewed. The government gave out free seeds (courtesy of donor countries), ten kilos per family, enough for an acre. This in itself was a problem, for it suggested to me that small-scale sustainable agriculture was not the norm. Anyone who grows crops with unmodified seeds can set aside one field as seed corn. But because they were using hybrid seeds (big plants, but sterile seeds), the farmers could not create seeds for the following year. Instead they waited for them to be doled out. Without free seeds every year these people would starve.
Normally, fields were dug in September, the ground hoed and prepared in October, dry-planted in November, then the farmers prayed for rain. The maize stalks that matured in February were left in the field to dry, then in April the ears were picked. The cobs were stripped of their kernels and bagged for milling into flour. June, July and August were months of abundance. Malawi’s independence was in July, when people had plenty of free time and enough to eat. At the first independence celebration, Hastings Banda had stood in the National Stadium and led the thousands of Malawians present in the robust hymn, significant in that month, ‘Bringing in the Sheaves.’
The average family of four or five people required twelve bags of maize (one bag equaled fifty kilos). These were kept in a silo (nkokwe) outside the hut. Rats, rotting and importuning relatives diminished the hoard. To make flour for nsima — a blob of steamed white dough, served with stew, that I had been eating ever since Karonga — to create this Malawian staple, the kernels were pounded in mortars or ground in a communal mill. Of all the activities in Central Africa, the maize-growing cycle was the most vital, the only important work, the difference between life and death. Anything that interrupted it — war, weather, political trouble, spoiled seeds, flood, or wild fires — spelled doom.
This season the rains had been late. Some seeds had not germinated. Many had sprouted and produced a crop. But the rain was still falling in March, and the ripe ungathered maize was rotting in the fields. Much of the south had been flooded. The harvest would be small. Because of this shortfall, in Nsanje and elsewhere, famine was a certainty.
‘These people will get hungry,’ Hudson said, looking at the wet fields and blackened corn stalks, the decayed stubble, the rotted stooks, the soaked slumping thatch on the huts.
Ten months later, the situation was dire. Maize was so scarce South Africa sent a shipment of 150,000 metric tonnes, and more was ordered from Uganda, which had a surplus. But since the price per bag had tripled, the maize was unaffordable. Malawian newspapers reported people eating boiled cassava leaves, and digging for wild roots and eating earthworms.
‘A bit farther,’ I said, when we got to Nsanje. ‘I want to go to Marka.’
‘You know this place?’
I did. I had come here in the 1990s to research a story about the Zambezi River. I had had my own kayak then, but I found out that I could hire a dugout canoe for the downriver trip; that with an early start it was two nights to the Zambezi, another night at Caia, and then about twelve hours by road to the coast. I had the essential equipment — a raincoat, a down-filled sleeping bag that could be compressed to the size of a football, and bug spray. I also had cash to buy food.
Hudson dropped me at the compound of the headman of Marka village, whom I had dealt with before. A group of women with children bandaged to their backs, sat in a circle, sorting beans in tin basins, picking out stones and chatting. I greeted them with the usual formulas, the equivalents of ‘May I enter?’ and ‘May I have permission to speak?’
They welcomed me and offered me a wobbly stool.
‘I am looking for Chief Nyachicadza,’ I said.
He wasn’t there — that was bad news; and from their euphemisms and circumspect manner I feared he might be ill or possibly dead. In a village such as Marka, in the Lower River District of Malawi, no one is dead. If people appear to vanish from their corporeal existence it is just a ducking-out to return as spirits, sometimes troubling the order of daily life, sometimes acting to smooth its course.
The women directed me to the chief’s son Karsten, whom I knew from my previous visit. Karsten lived elsewhere on the river, but he happened to be in Marka, delivering some goods in his dugout canoe.
‘Delivering’ could mean anything in Marka. The place was so far off the map there was hardly any law enforcement. There were police in Nsanje, and they had a motor boat; but the river was too wide and too long for any of them to monitor the comings and goings of dugouts. So, smuggling was common: sugar and cotton were smuggled out to Mozambique, and other items — tin pots, enamel plates, knives and machetes — were smuggled into Malawi.
The Lower River was a forgotten province, inhabited by the despised and dendrophobic Sena people. The Shire valley was neglected by the Malawian government; and farther downstream, where the river entered Mozambique, it was neglected by that government too. Who could blame these people living on its banks for finding illegal ways of fending for themselves? No one was looking after them. The region like many border areas in Africa was undefined, Sena people on both sides, but the river made it even more ambiguous, not Malawi, not Mozambique, but miles and miles of moving water, something fluid, a river in Africa.
Even the riverbank had no definition, for at the muddy margins of the river were vast swathes of reeds that obscured the bank, and in places dense stretches of water hyacinths — very pretty but a nuisance to the paddlers in the dugout canoes.
The women who had mentioned Karsten ordered a young boy to take me to him. We walked through the village of mud huts, their walls eroded by the rain, and down to the landing. About twenty dugouts were lined up on the foreshore.
Some men were unloading plastic sacks from an oversize dugout — cloudy-clear plastic that allowed me to see that the cargo was plastic sandals. I presumed that they had come upriver from some drop-off spot in Mozambique. The sacks were being heaped on wooden pallets to keep them out of the mud.
A fisherman was untangling his nets. His catch, a bucket thrashing with big fish, lay next to him. Another man was scooping water from a dugout using a plastic gallon jug, cut off to serve as a bailer. I thought I recognized Karsten Nyachicadza in a group of men who were standing near the unloaded sacks of sandals.