We slid into the river and paddled in the predawn silence for almost an hour. The sun came up — no warning, a flicker, the whole sky lighted and then the powerful heat and blaze of the quickly risen sun. Ahead I could see a single loaf-shaped mountain, Morrumbala. My map showed a town nearby called Morrumbala, but there was no sign of that, only this beautiful rounded thing rising 4000 feet from the flat marshy land by the river. There was not another hill or high spot anywhere.
We toiled towards it all that hot morning. When Livingstone had come through here in 1859 he urged some of his crew to climb it. The Zambezi and the Shire had allowed Livingstone to penetrate the African interior with all its marvels — lakes Shirwa and Nyasa, the country we know today as Malawi, the labyrinthine marsh on the Shire with its abundant elephants, and the mountain Morrumbala, or ‘The Lofty Watch Tower.’ But for Livingstone it was a horrible trip on a riverboat that had too deep a draft for this river, and it was slow going through the sandbanks and the marsh. He had gone at a time of widespread famine, and the river was full of crocs. The verdict of one of Livingstone’s men was that the Shire was ‘a river of death.’
As a monumental land feature, sculpted like a citadel, Morrumbala had been regarded as a prize from the earliest days of Portuguese exploration. In the 1640s, this general area was the haunt of Portuguese sertanejos — literally, backwoodsmen — each of whom chose a region to rule. All were colonists from the mother country, but while some were aristocrats, others were criminals. They were conquistadores, united in their greed and in their delusions of grandeur, for they made themselves into provincial potentates, lived like little kings, created retinues, cultivated courtiers, and owned and traded in slaves.
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century sertanejos inhabited the Mozambican hinterland, turning featureless bush into a number of rural kingdoms, where they amassed silver and gold and ivory. Conrad’s Kurtz is a Belgian version of a sertanejo. In his doublet and hose, carrying an arquebus, the wild-eyed Portuguese backwoodsman is colorful in a contemptible way, and an illustration of Sir Richard Burton’s remark, ‘There is a time to leave the Dark Continent and that is when the idée fixe begins to develop itself. “Madness comes from Africa.” ’
The immediate area of Morrumbala was held in the mid-seventeenth century by a self-appointed Lord of the Manor, a backwoodsman named Sisnanda Dias Bayão, who settled in Sena, not far away. The Africans farther up the Shire and in Sena-land generally were not warlike or well-armed and so Bayão had an easy time suppressing them, enslaving them and putting them to work, searching for silver and gold. There was a gold rush of brief duration in this area in Bayão’s time, all those years ago. When the colonial government objected to Bayão’s methods and pursued him, he holed up on the mountain. At the same time, because of its gullies and caves, the wooded slopes of Morrumbala became a favorite route for escaped slaves. Morrumbala as a refuge persisted to the present day. The mountain was a favorite hiding place for fleeing soldiers in the vicious guerrilla war, twenty-five years of it, fought in the Mozambican bush in the twentieth century.
The wind picked up in the afternoon, riffling the river, pushing our boat sideways. To steel himself, Karsten paused in his paddling, fired up a doobie, and with wild staring eyes, headed downriver again.
As with the last time I had come here, for many miles downstream we could see Morrumbala. For its isolation and its solitary strangeness — no one on it or around it — I regarded Morrumbala as an inspiration. I fastened my attention on it and delighted in it. Its shape was more that of a plateau than a mountain. There were abandoned farms and fruit orchards at the top, we were told by Africans in passing dugouts. How had the Portuguese gotten up and down the mountain, I wondered.
‘They were carried by Africans,’ Wilson said.
I could just imagine a pink Portuguese planter in a palanquin, fanning himself as he was being trundled by four Africans up the steep mountainside. Abandoned houses and plantations, remnants of the Portuguese colonial presence, were visible in many places on the riverbanks. They had the melancholy look of ruins in remote places, mute but solid signs of a lost world. The river itself was swampy in some places and just marsh in others — a series of divided streams running through dense reeds. ‘A swampy plain sacred to buffaloes and water buck and mosquitoes,’ a traveler in 1863 wrote — one of Livingstone’s companions. ‘We almost despair of finding the waters of the Shire in the various currents that mingle there.’
But Karsten was never in any doubt of the stream. He had paddled the river so often that he had come to know the backwaters and the wrong turns. We came to a village. I thought Karsten was intending to buy fish or fruit, so I rested on my paddle. But Karsten had grabbed the food box and was swinging it to the bank.
‘What’s happening?’
‘We sleep here.’
There was still at least two hours of daylight and the wind was not bad. I could see a lovely bend in the river beckoning, a stillness and gilded look in the reach. I said, why not go a few more miles?
But he pointed to the bend in the river.
‘Bad people there.’ His saying this in English made them seem much more dangerous.
That simple statement was all it took to persuade me to leap ashore and claw my way up the steep bank and through a crowd of about thirty women and children. A cluster of village huts stood on higher ground a little distance away.
They watched us laboring with our boxes and bundles, but I knew they were not idle spectators. Anything we did not want — bits of plastic or paper, tin cans, anything reusable — they were ready to seize. A little while later, after we started the fire, a woman crouched next to me as I opened a can of beans. She said, ‘Wanga,’ ‘That’s mine,’ meaning the can when it was empty.
Many people were watching me, children sitting in a semi-circle, tall skinny girls standing behind them, ten or a dozen women and a few men standing at a little distance, perhaps thirty people altogether, observing Karsten, Wilson and me, steaming nsima, slopping food out of cans. They had enough to eat themselves — this was not a place deprived of food, but a village where the men fished and the women tilled the fields. Watching us was their evening entertainment.
I became aware of a ripple of laughter that ran through the watchers and I turned to see a small ugly man tottering towards me. From his hideous face, bumpy with boils and growths and seeping wounds, and his withered fingers, I took him to be a leper. But he might also have been an epileptic, because the fresh bruises and his smashed nose were injuries I associated with grand mal sufferers who repeatedly fall down in their seizures.
Anyway, for his deformities he must have been considered the village fool — blameless, an object of scorn, teased but also a teaser when he found someone weirder-looking than himself. This would be me, the mzungu, who had wandered into his village.
He took to poking his finger in my plate of nsima and pretending to snatch my food. His finger was truly disgusting. His face was stained and gleaming from the leaking wounds, his eyes were crazed-looking, his hands were scaly, leprous, and very dirty. When he opened his mouth to laugh I could see his teeth were broken.
His antics roused the watching villagers to laugh, some in mockery, others in embarrassment, for they were not sure how I was going to react to this teasing. But I could see that the little battered man, miserable in his disfigurement and probably simple minded, was like the Fool in a Shakespeare play, the court jester who is licensed to do or say anything he likes.