Malawi

For photos, see "Malawi: The Shire Highlands" at greatmirror.com

Transcript

Near the end of 2025, I began thinking about driving the length of Malawi.  It’s a stringbean of a country, 500 miles north to south and rarely more than 100 side to side.  Google says driving north to south takes 20 hours, but I don’t believe it.   

I admit I never even tried to make that drive.  At first this was because I learned that Malawi had such an acute fuel shortage that people were lining up for days at gas stations.  I e-mailed a car-rental agency to ask how much trouble I’d have.  I was told I’d be given a car with a full tank.  After that, quote, “you’re on my own.”  You can say that car rentals always work that way, but here it sounded a little dire.

I decided to stick within a hundred miles of Blantyre.  (That’s one of the country’s two cities with international airports; the other is Lilongwe.)  When my tank got low, I’d return the car and start over with a new car and a full tank.  If the agent objected, I’d cross the street and rent from the competition.

Then, before I got to Malawi, the government solved the shortage problem by raising the price of gasoline to 4,965 kwacha per liter.  At the official exchange rate of about 1,750 kwacha to the dollar, that’s about $11 a gallon.  The lines went away like magic.

Things got better still for me when I discovered Blantyre’s curio market.  I didn’t see anyone buying curios—Malawi’s tourist numbers are about the same as Zimbabwe’s–but the curio market is the place to go for cheap kwacha.  I mean that if I bought gas with my Mastercard, I paid $11 a gallon. If, however, I went to the curio market and handed over a Benjamin, a smiling young man handed me not 175,000 kwachas but a wad of 400,000.  A gallon of gas was now only a bit over $5.  

I learned to go to gas stations and ask for “a hundred, please,” meaning 100,000 kwacha’s worth.  This would put five gallons in my tank and cost me $57 with a credit card but only $25 if I used cash from the curio market.  

The biggest banknote in circulation in Malawi is the one for 5,000 kwacha, which I learned to think of as a bit over a dollar, or a dollar and two bits, if you’re old enough to remember that expression.  Buying five gallons of gas with cash required my handing over a stack of bills, 20 of them if I had 5,000-kwacha notes.  The gas-station attendants impressed me by their skill at counting like dealers in Vegas.

The 5,000-kwacha note, by the way, has a picture of Hastings Banda.  In 1971 he became Malawi’s president for life, though, as I was told in good humor, he didn’t quite make it, losing power in 1994 and dying three years later in South Africa.  

People were a lot less resentful of the man on the next-largest note. It’s 2,000 kwachas, and he’s John Chilembwe, born in Malawi but trained in Virginia as a Baptist minister.  He returned home in 1900 and fifteen years later was shot dead by the British for beheading two British plantation managers.  (OK.  He didn’t do it himself; his followers did it. Also, he had absorbed enough Southern culture to insist that White women not be touched, and they weren’t.)  

The British had brought many good things to Chilembwe’s country–by good things, I mean things that the people of Malawi still want–but those things came, as they always did in the colonial world, at an unbearable cost.  You know what I mean. Think Aretha.  Seven letters.  Find out what it means to me.   

The British demolished Chilembwe’s home and church, though a decade later they permitted the construction of a new church on the site.  It’s a national monument today celebrating the country’s fight for independence.  I was told to pay before looking around.  There were no signs, no tickets, and I thought the fee was exorbitant and improvised on the spot for another White guy.  When I refused and got up to leave, the price collapsed from 50,000 kwacha to 5,000.  This confirmed my suspicion, but I set out with a guide who was good, and when I left I gave him another 5,000.  If you’re in a superior mood, you can mock me as a big spender.

A day or two earlier I had settled into a very comfortable in-law suite attached to a large new house on the edge of Blantyre.  The owners were a retired couple, very helpful without being intrusive.  That’s when I decided to abandon not only my end-to-end drive but also shorter trips requiring overnight stays.  This had less to do with the comfort of the apartment or with the price of gas than it did with the miserable condition of Malawi’s highways, of which I had read nothing but which turned out to be worse than highways in India or Pakistan or Sri Lanka.  Or Samoa or Micronesia.  Or Bolivia or Guyana or Mexico.  Worse even than in Zimbabwe.  I wanted to look around but instead had to keep my eyes on the wretched pavement, either broken or potholed.   

Secondary roads, by which I mean unpaved roads, were worse. I wanted, for example, to find the graves of the beheaded British plantation managers.  Google Maps made it look easy but the line on its map turned out to be a badly gullied dirt track so overgrown that I couldn’t even see the depth of the gullies.  This was the wet season, too, and from time to time I came to puddles whose depth I had to test with a stick.  Apple Maps was more prudent.  It had no idea how I could get there.

I returned home another day from a jaunt to Magomero, roughly midway between the managers’ graves and Chilembwe’s church.  (All these places, I should say, are within 20 miles of Blantyre.)  Magomero is not in Malawi guidebooks, which is odd because this was where Bishop Charles Mackenzie in 1861 arrived with David Livingstone to set up the country’s first church.  

True, most tourists aren’t interested in stories about missionaries–in this case a very short story, because Mackenzie died of malaria within a year.  But I think Magomero more likely is left out simply because it’s so hard to get to. I did see a plaque indicating that Michael Ramsay, soon to be Archbishop of Canterbury, had visited in the last days of Britain’s colonial rule, but I bet the roads were better then.  Maybe the country back in those times even had road signs.  Not now.

Returning home that day, I noticed that the vertical edges of my two front fenders were no longer flush with the adjacent panels. It takes some road to shake the fenders off a Toyota, and I anticipated that the car-rental agency would charge me a bundle.  I’d get the money back from insurance but that would take time and be a nuisance.  Fortunately, my landlord saw the damage and called a mechanic who came over to the house on a motorbike and fixed the car perfectly. When he was done I asked him how much.  He said 10,000 kwacha.  Do the math.  I paid him an extra 5,000, which is to say an extra $1.25.  The landlord didn’t say anything, but I saw him smiling at what I’m sure he perceived as my foolishness.  On another day he asked me not to tip the woman who cleaned my apartment every few days. Tipping her would spoil her, he said.  I didn’t tell him that I had already given her a princely 5,000.

I’ve been to lots of countries like the ones that the American president today dismisses with a vulgarity, and I don’t know why the poverty in Malawi bothered me so much.  It reminds me of my first trip to India, when 40-odd years ago I stayed at a government guesthouse.  After a couple of days, as I left, the senior local government officer–his title was District Collector–said that the two boys who had been hanging around all that time were orphans, with nobody to care for them.  Maybe this was true.  Maybe it was a setup.  Actually I think it was both, because as the Collector spoke there were a dozen people gathered to bid me safe journey.  I pulled out a 100-rupee note, worth at that time about $10.  I handed it to one of the boys and then was whirled away in a jeep as tears welled up in my bourgeois eyes.  I’m not sure if that adjective is fair, but lots of people would say it was, and I wouldn’t argue.  I doubt that the money did the boys any good.

Fast forward 40-odd years.  Blantyre is a city of close to a million people.  This would astonish the British, who in 1964 left it with 50,000.  Blantyre is also about 40 miles southwest of Zomba, a town of 100,000 people at the foot of Zomba Mountain.  Back in the 1960s, Zomba had a population slightly over 5,000.  It was also the capital of the country, which the British called Nyasaland.  In hot weather, officials often retreated up the mountain, which rises about 4,000 feet above the surrounding countryside, which is about 3,000 feet above sea level. 

Today there’s a lonely hotel high up on the mountain.  I drove there not to stay or eat or drink but for the view, which stretches south over a rolling plain interrupted by isolated and jagged volcanic hills and mountains.  The view extends over Bishop Mackenzie’s Magomero, over John Chilembwe’s mission, and over the graves of the beheaded plantation managers. It extends beyond Blantyre, then drops almost 3,000 feet to the southern end of Africa’s Great Rift Valley. 

The Rift Valley here is largely filled today with  sugarcane, on plantations owned by a company based in London.  Sugarcane is much less important to Malawi’s economy than tobacco or tea, but enough is grown to satisfy Malawi’s requirements, which is good for a country with very few dollars to spend on imports.   

The Shire River flows past the sugarcane.  This is the river that drains Lake Malawi–also called Lake Nyasa–and it continues through the Rift Valley to join the Zambezi. These are the rivers followed upstream into Malawi by the first Europeans, including David Livingstone and Bishop Mackenzie, and that’s why my view from the hotel on Zomba Mountain was over what the British called the Shire Highlands. 

The British–and I’m thinking mostly of a horticulturalist named John Buchanan–thought that the Highlands would be an excellent place for plantations.  I can imagine somebody today thinking to themselves, “What a terrible idea. The indigenous culture would be destroyed.”  That would be true if there had been an indigenous culture, but there wasn’t one here, not in the late 19th century.  Thank Arab slavers who had mined the country with admirable thoroughness and marched almost everybody to the coast for sale in Zanzibar, assuming they didn’t die en route.  Slave sticks were the simple tool used to keep the captives in lockstep.  Perhaps you won’t shudder if you ever look up a picture of those wicked forked poles.

The very real problem facing planters was what people here at the time called fever, by which they meant what we now call malaria.  It’s still common in Malawi, but in Buchanan’s time nobody understood what caused it.   In a book published in 1885, Buchanan advised any traveller coming up the Shire River to “always have with him a supply of books” because “keeping one’s self thoroughly occupied is a considerable help towards warding off fever.”  “People,” he continued, “have to blame themselves, and not the country, for many an attack....”  

Fever killed John Buchanan in 1896.  Not enough books, I guess.  He was 40.  Bishop Mackenzie had croaked at 36. 

Some modern biographies delight in exposing David Livingstone’s shortcomings, but Livingstone and the men who came after him succeeded by the 1890s in ending the slave trade–in many cases by ending the slave traders.  I doubt that Malawians spend a lot of time thanking the British, but at least there’s no movement to change the name Blantyre, which comes from the milltown where David Livingstone was born near Glasgow in 1813.

The hotel on the top of Zomba Mountain had almost no guests, and a dozen or more vendors waiting outside the hotel gate flew into action as I drove up.  They probably would have flown into action for anyone arriving in a car, but I bet they were especially energized when the person was White. I don’t blame them for guessing that Whites in this context are marks.  The label isn’t flattering, but I’d rather be a mark than the alternative, which is to say a person without a conscience.

Carelessly, I had parked outside the hotel gate, and when I came back to the car an hour later two men were waiting.  One offered a basket of passion fruit.  I like them a lot, and the man next to him offered something he called raspberries.  They weren’t what I call raspberries, but since I had just bought four passion fruit I took the berries, too.  I didn’t bargain.  At the equivalent of 25 cents for four passion fruit I paid what some people would call too much, by which they mean that I could have bought the fruit for half that, maybe less, but I’d be ashamed to bargain at these stakes.

Other vendors saw the action, which is how I wound up with an egg-sized piece of rose quartz.  The dollar I paid for it was probably a tenth or less of what I’d pay back home, but I didn’t want the thing, so buying it was an act of surrender, charity masked as a purchase to preserve the vendor’s dignity.  Yet with that purchase and a couple of even smaller ones, the remaining vendors grew desperate.  They knew that at some point I was going to drive away, which is what I did, leaving most of them with nothing.  I didn’t look in the rear-view mirror.

Where did these vendors live?  I asked this at the hotel.  The answer was that every day they trekked five miles up the mountain and five miles back down.  

On that same road I passed at least twenty men and women carrying firewood for sale down in Zomba.  The wood was poles about an inch thick and 14 feet long.  Women tied a dozen poles together, put a thick pad on their head, then balanced the bundle of wood on the pad.  Off they went.  Men used fewer, thicker pieces of wood, skipped the pad, and carried the wood on one shoulder.  I don’t know why they did it this way, but perhaps it seemed more manly.

One man, trying to get his load properly positioned, said he could sell it in Zomba for 5,000 kwacha.  I took a picture of him, then–we can argue about my doing this–gave him some money.  I was just getting the hang of kwacha and now am embarrassed to say that I thought I was generous in giving him a shiny new 200-kwacha note.  He was too polite to call me a cheapskate, which is how I felt once I realized that I had shelled out the equivalent of a nickel.  Will it surprise you if I mention that the house where I stayed in Blantyre was, like its neighbors, rimmed by a high brick wall topped with electric fencing?

I suppose it’s true that most poor people don’t spend all day brooding about their lot.  Sometimes that’s because the people around them are equally poor. (I’m reminded of a real-estate developer in New York City whose building included separate entrances for market-rate and subsidized-rate residents. “They’re not comfortable together,” he explained.)  People may also not spend their days brooding because brooding doesn’t make you feel good. Mostly, I think, people are too busy to brood. 

Of the poor people in Malawi–those who will never own a car or fly on vacation to South Africa or God knows where–the most fortunate may be those who are on salaries and can look forward to a pension in retirement.  Every day, for example, I was stopped at least once at a police roadblock.  The police officer was always neatly dressed and always friendly.  I remember one looking at my driver’s license, seeing my name, and then saying, “I’m James.”  Has that ever happened to a driver in the United States?  Another, learning that I was retired, said he had 17 years to go.  None of them demanded a bribe, and nobody came to the point and asked me why I was allowed to visit their country when my government refused to let them visit mine.    

Other people had jobs but no security.  Shop clerks come to mind, but I think of the thousands of teapickers in the misty highlands near Thyolo, 20 miles south of Blantyre, or of the others near Mulanje, 30 miles farther east.  They picked not with fingers but with manual hedge trimmers, like a big pair of scissors.  One blade was attached to a plastic bucket, and every few seconds the picker lifted his arms and tossed the clipped leaves into a sack on his or her back.  I saw dozens of pickers waiting in the rain to have their sacks weighed.  The pickers were usually allowed to live rent-free in windowless brick buildings, but picking occurs only in the wet season, and when it’s over the pickers usually leave to find other work. 

Then there were the entrepreneurs.  I think of the hundreds of men I saw riding or pushing bicycles loaded with 200 pounds of charcoal packed into two plastic bags tied at the top with netting.  Charcoal is the common cooking fuel in Malawi.  Everybody recognizes that it’s bad for Malawi’s forests, but electricity is unaffordable for most people. (My apartment, of course, had two split-unit air conditioners.)  

It’s true that people have been cooking here with wood or charcoal forever, and there are still lots of trees in Malawi, but when the British arrived the country had no more than a million people.  Today it has 22 million and as an American state would be wedged in fourth place between Florida and New York.  Malawi’s crowded, too.  By square miles, it would rank 34th in the United States, between Maine and South Carolina.  I’m trying to imagine 22 million mostly poor people in either of those states.

So bicycles come down the road with 50,000 kwachas worth of charcoal.  Nobody can afford to buy that much–or, if they can, they have electricity–so the bags are delivered to what in Malawi is called a trading center.  These are rural markets, a cluster of shops made of brick but later expanded with shops of sticks and straw.  Sometimes a shop is simply a spot on the ground where a woman has piled a dozen pumpkins.  Some of these trading centers become very crowded, and many sellers put their stuff as close as possible to passing vehicles.  It doesn’t make for relaxed driving.

So the heavy bags of charcoal are repacked for sale in bags of one or two kilograms.  Meanwhile, bicycles with such loads on such roads need frequent repair, which is why every trading center has a bicycle repair shop, identifiable not by a sign but by half a dozen wheel rims hanging from the edge of the roof.

I saw one such shop that also had a bench with a dozen coke bottles filled with a dark liquid.  It turned out to be used motor oil offered for sale to people with motorbikes.  

More entrepreneurs. I mean, I met a trio of young men sitting at a minor junction east of an extremely congested trading center called Bangwe, about five miles east of Blantyre.  They each had a motorbike, and they were all waiting for customers.  Malawians aren’t shy, and one of the men came over and asked what I was up to.  I forget what I said, but he was soon explaining that he wouldn’t take passengers even through Bangwe for fear that his motorbike would break down on the atrociously broken pavement.  He and his two friends were meanwhile trying to save 20,000 kwachas to build a shelter from the rain and sun.  Just poles and sheetmetal; no walls.  It was a bit of a hustle, but he was good at it, and I made a contribution.      

These guys were living close to the edge, but so was almost everyone else. I remember three baristas in a coffee shop in Thyolo.  It was a nice place, and I didn’t feel awkward taking up their time because there was nobody else around.  How could the business survive, I asked, and the answer was that people in Blantyre came up on the weekends.  The owner, who I never met, had another shop in Blantyre.  A day later, I went there but found that it, too, had no customers. Neither did the furniture store next door.  The furniture–Blantyre actually has an Ashley store–was much too expensive for most people, and I was told that the few people with lots of money in Blantyre often shop for furniture in South Africa. 

The only stores I ever saw busy in Malawi were the few supermarkets.  There were two in Blantyre and one in Zomba, and they were all part of the Malawian chain called Chipiku.  I just missed seeing Blantyre’s best supermarket.  It had been a South African ShopRite but had given up on Malawi shortly before my arrival.  

The baristas were college graduates.  One said he had a degree in environmental studies.  I asked him what he wanted to be in ten years, and with a smile he said that he wanted to be a billionaire.   I asked if he had a plan.  Maybe that was unkind. He admitted he didn’t have one, but if I had asked him to name a half-dozen billionaires, I bet he could have done it, which brings us back to the question of whether the internet has been a blessing or a curse.  Yes, you’re right.  There’s a third possibility.  

At another trading center I met a young man, divorced but raising a 10-year-old son.  He had somehow got some training as a clothing designer and had worked for a South African design shop–remotely, I think.  He wanted to open his own business, but, looking around where we stood, he said the people here had no money to spend on clothes.  He pointed to an open-air shop displaying clothes imprinted with oversized names like Balenciaga and Yves St. Laurent.  There’s the internet again.  There was nobody around, not even a shopkeeper.

I asked if he wouldn’t be better off in Blantyre, but he replied that he’d need to rent space there, and he didn’t have money for that.  The baristas, to whom I later relayed this story, nodded in agreement.   I asked if there was somebody right here who could bankroll a shop for him in Blantyre, but he said that anyone around here who got money left to avoid people begging for some of it.

Almost all the people I met did have a safety net, an acre or two on which they or someone in their family grew food crops, mostly corn.  Even from the plane landing in Blantyre I could see that the Shire Highlands are a carpet of tiny fields that have replaced the plantations that John Buchanan advocated.  The biggest of those estates, the Bruce Estate, had covered something over 150,000 acres, including John Chilembwe’s church, which the plantation owner said had been built illegally on his land.  It was the manager of that estate and his young assistant who lost their heads to Chilembwe’s men.  

I met a man in his 40s who had spent a long time as a security guard.  His wife had just died unexpectedly.  She had been working as a nurse about a hundred miles away when he got a call saying she was in the hospital.  A day later he got the second call. He had two lovely children, twins, a boy and a girl about nine.  They lived with him in a rented house: living room, bedroom, kitchen.  The three of them shared a bed and slept under a single mosquito net.

He was completing a certificate in social work and had been counting on funding from USAID to begin a degree program that would lead to a position with a pension, but  USAID had been shut down, and now he was reconciling himself to some more modest future.  He had a big sack of corn meal in his kitchen, and like most other people he had a patch of land he owned a few miles away.  Like his neighbors, he and his children subsisted on nsima, a corn-meal mush with the consistency of mashed potatoes.  It’s not bad, with some sauce or stew.  Protein came mostly from home-grown beans.

All these plans, all these hopes, attainable or not, can be attributed, I think, to missionaries faithful to David Livingstone’s insistence not only on preaching but on giving Africans a way to make money.  You can argue that Africans have lived without money forever and that the British should have stayed the hell away, perhaps after taking care of the slave trade, but that horse left the barn a long time ago.  Repeat after me, “It’s the economy, stupid.”

A key figure here is Joseph Booth, a successful businessman in Australia who arrived in Blantyre after an atheist friend chided him.  Why was Booth not putting his Christian principles to work?

Booth, whose wife had just died, arrived in 1892 with his 10-year-old daughter.  On the western outskirts of Blantyre, at a place called Mitsidi, he set up what he called the Zambezi Industrial Mission.   I don’t know why he used the name Zambezi instead of Shire or even Blantyre.  Perhaps it was simply because potential donors would be more likely to recognize the name Zambesi, but the essential word was “industrial,” hinting at the mission’s vocational purpose. 

I was surprised to find that the mission had been located less than two miles from the place I was staying. I went up there one afternoon not expecting to find anything but instead found a sign pointing to the mission.  The driveway was so bad that I hesitated until I watched another small car get past the bumps. Then I got to a monument that read “Zambezi Evangelical Church, Mitsidi, Synod Headquarters Established 1892.”  

More important, just up the hill I saw a sign reading Joseph Booth Technical College.  I assumed this was computer stuff, but it wasn’t.  Courses were offered in tailoring and designing, carpentry and joinery, welding, electrical installation, and brick laying.  I wonder if the frustrated clothing designer I had talked to had studied here.  I wonder if the many carpentry shops I had seen in various trading centers–shops displaying doors and windows and furniture made on site–began here.

Booth moved on seven years later to establish the Plainfield Industrial Mission south of Thyolo. The Zambesi Mission had been nondenominational, but Plainfield was supported by Seventh Day Adventists from Plainfield, New Jersey, and that church soon wearied of Booth, partly because he didn’t adhere strictly enough to Adventist theology but also because his advocacy of "Africa for the Africans” antagonized the colonial authorities.  

Booth was gone from Plainfield after only two years, yet the mission itself, like the one at Mitsidi, still exists.

In 1908 it changed its name from Plainfield to Malamulo, meaning Commandment, and in 1936, four years after Booth’s death in England, the mission established a medical school, now a College of Health Sciences.  Booth’s daughter, by the way, survived to live a long life in the United States, where in 1950 she published a loving memoir of her African childhood adventure.

I wandered around the Malamulo campus and came upon the inevitable graveyard.  It included the illegible tombstone of Joseph Watson, a very proper young man who arrived here in 1903.  In a photograph, he stands next to his wife and young child.  He has a neatly trimmed full beard and wears a necktie inside a chokingly stiff collar.  Four months after arriving, he’s dead. You have one guess.  His wife took the child back home, remarried, and lived into her late 80’s.  

Another tombstone isn’t so grim.  It’s for David Toppenberg, M.D., born in 1912 and dying 65 years later.  He had been born in Loma Linda, California, a town long associated with Seventh Day Adventists. His stone reads, “His life given in service.”

Joseph Booth not only created these two missions but at the first of them met John Chilembwe.  Booth became his mentor, and it was Booth who helped Chilembwe enroll at the Virginia Theological Seminary.  Given Chilembwe’s later career, one might argue that Booth did him no favors, but Chilembwe would probably disagree.  A short walk from the site of the church that he built after returning home in 1900, there’s a pile of huge and jagged boulders precariously balanced.  The story is that Chilembwe came here to meditate and, I suspect, in time to set upon his fatal course of rebellion, but the path to the rocks–they’re called the Sanjika Rocks–passes through corn fields and peanut fields.  

The whole campus is surrounded by them.  I say campus because there’s now a primary and secondary school.  There’s also a seminary.  I asked who did the farm work, and the answer was the students, including seminarians who could not afford the seminary fees. The corn was milled right here on the grounds of what Chilembwe had called the Providence Industrial Mission.  People in Blantyre today call it simply the PIM.

I heard students complaining loudly about the food they were given: “beans, beans, beans, always beans,” they cried, but they said it with gales of laughter.  “We want chicken.”  They were full of expectations that I trace back to Joseph Booth.

By accident I visited one more school, the Magomero Community Development College.  Magomero, you remember, was the site of Bishop Mackenzie’s pioneering church, but the college is about five miles from that spot and only half a mile by a good dirt road from the highway running between Blantyre and Zomba.  The college, in short, is easy to get to, which is how I got to it.

Frustrated by my inability to find a path to either Mackenzie’s church or the plantation managers’ graves, I had been driving along the highway when I saw a sign pointing to the college down that decent dirt road. There was no traffic unless you count pedestrians.  (I should have mentioned long ago that Malawians are fabulous walkers, and you can’t drive anywhere without passing them, even on lonely roads where there’s no visible destination.)  I did meet one car.  It stopped, and the driver asked me where I was going.  I said I was trying to find Bishop Mackenzie’s church.  The driver didn’t bother offering directions.    He just said, “Go to the college and ask for Frank.”

Frank worked in the library and called an assistant named Lazarus.  Off we went, right turn here, left turn there, on roads that made me very nervous.  Forget signs.  There were lots of people, and I figured that if we got stuck Lazarus could get help a lot more easily than I could.  It turned out we didn’t need help, though that was the day I shook the fenders loose.

Slave raiding was still going on in Mackenzie’s day, so he chose a site inside a tight meander on the Namadzi River, no more than a creek really.  Fearing raids, he dug defensive trenches on the inside of the meander.  They survive.  Nothing else is left, but that’s because the mission buildings were never more than huts of sticks and grass.

There’s a very modest modern church.  More important, there’s an elementary school.  It was a holiday, but the principal was in his office.  Its walls were covered with handwritten posters of various administrative procedures.  It seemed very well organized, but a bookcase held a heap of hundreds of tortured notebooks that the principal said were the school’s textbooks.  It was a mess, but I tell myself that how books are used is more important than how neatly they’re stacked.   

I still hadn’t been able to find the graves of the two beheaded plantation managers, and it was becoming a bit of an obsession, especially because I had been told in Blantyre not only that the graves survived but that so did the bungalows where the two men had lived.  

I heard this from a retired accountant who was volunteering his service at the Malawi Society Library.  It’s housed in a building built for a pioneer trading company whose owners–they lived upstairs–were referred to by the British administrator in charge of the country as “vampires.”  Perhaps they deserved it, but they did build a really fine building, the oldest structure in the country. The rooms where they lived are now filled with books about the country.  For all this, the accountant still couldn’t tell me how to get to the graves or the bungalows.  

The older of the two victims had been William Jervis Livingstone, no apparent relation to David.  This Livingstone was 50 years old at his death and had come 22 years earlier from the Isle of Lismore, which, if it helps, is near the Isle of Mull.  The younger man was Duncan McCormick, also from Lismore.  He had been here seven years and at his death was 28.  I bet he had come out here thinking that he was embarking on a great adventure.

The literature suggests that they treated the plantation workers brutally–this was a cotton plantation, and we know something about the character of work on cotton plantations.  In their defense, it has been said that the owner of the plantation, Alexander Low Bruce, was pushing them to make more money. Bruce, by the way, was married to David Livingstone’s eldest daughter and had none of his father-in-law’s missionary zeal. 

I have no idea how to apportion blame, but there’s a photo of William Jervis Livingstone sitting on the motorcycle he used, and he looks stressed to me.  There’s also an undated photograph of Duncan McCormick, possibly taken before he set out on his adventure.  Health and fit, he stands in a tweed suit, carries a pocket watch, and looks as if he could be the president of a law-school class.  

I took a chance and wrote to Lazarus to ask if he had heard of these men and if he possibly knew where the graves and bungalows were.  I got a reply right away, and the answer was yes, of course, and he’d take me there.  It wasn’t exactly an expedition: the graves and the bungalows turned out to be a few hundred rough and bumpy yards from the college.  In fact they were on the college grounds, and the bungalows were now used as staff housing.

I asked if we should walk.  He said no, we’ll drive.  This made me nervous, but after a couple of minutes of bashing along tracks through corn fields Lazarus told me, 
“Stop.”  We began to walk and eventually stopped at a patch of tall grass.  “Here,” Lazarus said, to my amazement.  

A photo on Google Maps shows two concrete gravestones with heavy metal nameplates clearly visible in the midst of freshly plowed fields.  Not when I came by.  The stones were so buried in grass that Lazarus stepped here and stepped there until he finally found–almost tripped upon– the concrete blocks. The nameplates were missing.  I’m guessing they had been swiped by a souvenir hunter or by someone who simply wanted the metal.    

We had already passed one of perhaps half-a-dozen surviving plantation buildings, and now Lazarus took me to the biggest, the one where William Jervis Livingstone had been attacked and killed in 1915.

It was a really handsome building, plastered brick under a metal roof, cross-gabled and with plenty of porches.  It was Sunday, and there was somebody sitting on the porch.  Lazarus asked if I remembered Frank.  Sure.  I did.

I couldn’t ask Frank if I could look inside, but I did ask if there was any original furniture.  Frank said no.  He did say that the building now had electricity, though it had been out for some time.  No surprise there: power failures in the wet season are very, very frequent, even for people in houses with brick walls and electric fences. 

The house was perched on the top of a very gentle hill.  I tried to walk over to a spot where I could get a view over what had once been the cotton fields of the Bruce Estate, but walking was tricky.  Frank said there were snakes.  Then I realized that I was trampling his garden.  I have no excuse, but he and Lazarus had to point out the beans and the onions and the tomatoes and the cabbages and the cassava and the sweet potatoes and the avocados and the peanuts, and several fruit trees.  Plus, of course, corn at the periphery.  Frank asked if I noticed the bees flying into the end of the main gable. I think he said that he collected the honey.  I think now that he was a perfect demonstration of how people in Malawi survive. 

I did get to the brow of the hill for a view over the north edge of the old plantation.  Now it was mostly a patchwork of corn fields, intensely green with a hundred tiny variations.  I’d call it Edenic if that word didn’t scare me.  I sent a picture to a few people.  One of them, as romantic as I am, replied, “So, so beautiful.”  I agreed, but she hadn’t spent almost two weeks looking around.  She hadn’t seen the streams of people walking up and down every road, or the people negotiating the purchase of three pumpkins for the equivalent of an American dime, or the college graduates waiting for a future that was vanishingly distant.  I think that these things made the view from the hilltop even more beautiful.