‘This man is stupid,’ Karsten said, on my behalf using an unequivocal Chichewa word, wopusa.
But I beckoned the man over and when I gestured I saw a kind of fear come into his eyes. The watching people laughed as the man wobbled towards me on his twisted feet.
I said, ‘Mukufuna mankhwala?’ (Do you want medicine?) and gave him some chocolate cookies I had bought in the little shop in Marka village.
Needing to protect his cookies from the villagers, he ran away. Then we ate in peace, though we were watched the whole time. As time passed the children crept closer, nearer to our dying fire.
At last, hoarse with shyness, one of them said, ‘We want medicine, too.’
I gave them cookies and sent them away. Karsten handed the pots and plates to a woman to wash in the river, and he lay back and fired up a postprandial joint.
Since we were sleeping in the open the only question I had in my mind was whether there were hyenas in the area. Hyenas root among rubbish, and though they stay out of huts they have been known to nibble human feet protruding from hut doors, and in some instances to chew the face of the person sleeping nearest the entrance.
‘Palibe mafisi,’ Wilson said — ‘No hyenas.’ But I wanted to hear it from a villager, so when the woman came back with the washed plates I asked her. I liked her reply, which sounded poetic.
‘Palibe mafisi, alipo mfiti — No hyenas, lots of ghosts.
Curious to ask Karsten a political question I said, ‘Do you ever think about the president?’
‘No. Because he never thinks about me,’ he said.
Urging Karsten to pile wood on the fire to keep the snakes away, I sprayed my head and hands and zipped myself into my sleeping bag and went to sleep.
Hyenas and snakes were not the problem. The most dangerous aspects of the Zambezi were almost invisible — the wind, the mosquitoes which carry malaria, the biting tse-tse flies, or the innocent-looking fruit of a riverside plant called ‘buffalo beans’ which causes painful welts on the skin. There were also spiders, scorpions and in some places big wet frogs which positioned themselves near anyone sleeping in the open and then jumped with a gulp in a great smothering flop on to your face.
We left before dawn, slipping away into the still water, as we had done the day before. I asked Karsten if we would get to the Zambezi that day. Maybe, he grunted.Kapena. He seemed intent on his paddling, and so I joined them, using a board for a paddle, three of us propelling the dugout forward in silence. It was only after sunup that I remembered how he had said the day before, of the stretch we had traveled, Bad people there.
In mid-morning, I was sitting eating a mango, and Karsten said, ‘There are some hippos coming.’
We rounded a bend and there they were, snuffling, and looking fierce. Next to humans, they were the most territorial of river critters. I tried to think of the wild animals I had seen since I had left Cairo, but all I came up with were the hyenas in Harar, various antelope in Ethiopia and Kenya, the flamingos in Lake Naivasha, and the game I had spotted from the train in Tanzania. These were my first hippos in months. Hippo meat was sold in Zambezi markets in Mozambique, so Karsten said. Given the rate of deforestation and the growth in population it was predicted by environmentalists that the day was not far off when the bigger game would be poached out of existence.
Around noon we came to a ferry landing, where a barge was approaching from the east bank, bringing a pick-up truck across the river. The white man at the wheel of the vehicle that rolled on to the landing was a South African farmer, growing red peppers on an estate he had bought cheap from a Portuguese who had bolted. He said he enjoyed living in the remote Mozambican bush.
‘South Africa used to be like this,’ he said. ‘I don’t like what’s happening down there.’
He had an African foreman to translate work orders for him and to manage the workers, but he seemed completely out of his element — a plump sunburned man in a floppy hat and shorts. The variety of red pepper he grew he sold to a Dutch pharmaceutical firm — the pepper was used in some sort of medicine.
‘Aren’t you afraid of people coming out of the bush and trespassing or breaking in?’
He thrust out his chest and made a fist and said with growly authority, ‘They should be afraid of me.’
Karsten and Wilson wandered towards me obliquely to ask for some money to buy soft drinks being sold out of a burlap bag — soaked to cool them — by a woman sitting on a crate. I gave them some Malawian money and they walked away. They were very skinny, very ragged, barefoot, bushy haired.
‘Those your chaps?’
It was a significant question, the moment when one mzungu sized up another’s workers. ‘My Africans are better than your Africans,’ was a serious colonial boast. The Africans in the white farmer’s pick-up truck were dressed in sturdy overalls and floppy brimmed bush hats. Most wore shoes, one wore rubber boots. By Mozambican standards they were well dressed.
Karsten and Wilson’s clothes were purely symbolic — Karsten’s ripped T-shirt and split shorts, Wilson’s long-sleeved white shirt draped over his shoulders in ribbons. His shorts, too, were split.
‘Yup. Those are my guys,’ I said. And I thought: In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.
Farther downstream as the river became wider, showing shallows and mud banks, we saw more hippos. There were herons, too, and hawks, and cormorants, and in the clay banks the riverside nests of white-fronted and carmine bee-eaters.
Karsten said the Zambezi was not far off. Yet nothing was visible ahead except bush, some of it marshland, and where there were huts they lay in small circular compounds. We never passed a cluster of huts without hearing the thudding of a mortar in a pestle — a woman laboring to make flour, sometimes two of them, taking turns raising the heavy pestle. Men fished with throw nets or with box-like traps woven from reeds. In some trees there were logs, hoisted there to serve as bee hives. Livingstone had noticed these cultural features on the Zambezi and on this river, too.
Honey was prized by the Arabs who had come here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, looking for slaves and ivory, and there were still slavers operating in Livingstone’s time. Livingstone said he was here commanding his steamboat the Ma Robert with the intention of saving souls for Jesus and eliminating the slave trade. But the real intention of this strange depressive man was to open Africa to trade. The Zambezi he called ‘God’s Highway.’ He had a negligible impact on the slave trade, the trackless bush of Zambezia was proof that commerce had been a failure, and Livingstone’s total number of converts to Christianity was just one man, who later lapsed.
‘Zambezi,’ Karsten said.
God’s Highway was in view — a sun-dazzled sheet of water half a mile wide, carrying whole trees and big boughs and enormous logs in its muddy current — debris from the heart of Africa, beautiful flotsam.
I caught some words of a story that Karsten was telling Wilson — ‘Indian’ and ‘fish’ and ‘money’ — and as we paddled across the Zambezi, our dugout pulled sideways by the power of the stream, he told me the story.
Farther up the Zambezi, on the Zambian side, he said, there were Indian traders who made a practice of abducting very young African girls from villages. The Indians killed the girls and cut out their hearts. Using the fresh hearts of these African virgins as bait on large hooks they were able to catch certain Zambezi fish that were stuffed full of diamonds.
‘That is why the Indians have so much money,’ Karsten said.