Крис Бекетт - Spring Tide

I was finding all this rather depressing. No doubt these projects were appreciated by the people that used them, and no doubt they provided a pretty good living to many people, including me, but the message they gave out was very clear: the people of this country cannot look after themselves. Back in the donor countries the message was the same: pathos-drenched fundraising ads depicted sweet but helpless Africans, waiting for rescue with big brown beseeching eyes. How many local initiatives had been stifled, I wondered, how much inward investment had been lost, by the steady drip-drip-drip of this message over the decades?

I pulled over at a petrol station by a crossroads, asked for my tank to be filled up and bought myself a Coke.

‘ Mazungu! Mazungu! ’ children called out excitedly, as I climbed out of my car.

I sighed. This is a generic name for white people that’s used across Malawi, Tanzania, Kenya and the whole Great Lakes area. I’m told the word originally meant something like ‘aimless wanderer’ and, at that particular moment, this actually felt about right. I was an aimless wanderer. I knew the road to Lilongwe, and the address of my hotel. I knew the time of my flight back to Heathrow. I knew where to send my expenses form when I got home. But I’d lost all sense of the purpose of my life.

There was a white plastic table outside the petrol station, with white chairs around it of the kind that people sometimes have in their gardens back in England. I took my Coke over there so I could sit down to drink it, and I also took a book I was reading, though I knew this wasn’t the kind of place that a mazungu could expect to be left in peace. The children gathered in a group, about ten yards away from me. There were five of them aged about six or seven, two of whom were carrying baby siblings on their hips, and of course they were all very smiley and sweet. Now they watched me intently, beaming with anticipation, as if they thought I might at any moment grow wings and fly, or take water and turn it into wine. I waved and smiled to them, which made them squeal and laugh, running away for a few yards in pretence of being alarmed, and then creeping back again.

Presently a beggar approached me. He had wild red eyes, wore rags like some kind of mad John the Baptist, and was tightly clutching two live swallows. They dangled from his fist by their wings in a trance of terror and pain, while he waved them angrily in front of my face. Deciding that the birds were hostages rather than objects for sale, I gave him a few pence to take them away somewhere and let them go, and pretended to myself that I didn’t know their wings would be too badly crushed for them to be able to fly.

‘ Mazungu! Mazungu! ’ the children called out again, completely untroubled either by the beggar in his rags or the suffering of his tiny captives. I waved at them again, and once more they laughed and squealed and ran. We seemed to be playing a sort of reverse version of Grandmother’s Footsteps, in which they ran when I looked at them, and stood still when I didn’t.

Two young men came up to me, both wearing beautifully pressed white shirts and immaculate black trousers, and asked if I minded them joining me. Inwardly I sighed, for over the years I had been approached by many immaculately shirted young men in places like this. After a period of polite conversation, I knew, they would ask for my email address. And then, sometime later, I’d receive courteous requests from them for money, often couched in pious terms: ‘I pray to Almighty God that you will be able to assist me in my hour of need.’ But I couldn’t very well stop them sitting on the seats, so I told them they were welcome, and then opened my book in the hope of discouraging conversation.

‘Excuse me, sir, might I ask if you are from England?’ asked one of the young men, after a few seconds.

I glanced up at him. He was the chunkier one of the two, with big awkward limbs, and cheeks piebald with vitiligo.

‘That’s right,’ I said, and returned to my book.

The little children watched in fascinated silence.

‘God willing, I hope one day to study in England,’ the young man said wistfully.

I gave way to the inevitable and abandoned my attempt at reading. These young patronage-seekers were never anything other than polite, after all, and you could hardly blame them for trying to find a way out of a country with so little in the way of opportunities. I laid down my book, offered them both my hand, and asked them their names. The chunky one was called Godfrey. His more taciturn and more handsome friend was Joyous.

‘We both of us want to study in England,’ Godfrey went on. ‘Of course it’s very difficult for us, for until we’ve studied, how can we make money? It’s very difficult indeed.’ He sighed. ‘So we just hope that Almighty God will send help, and perhaps a friend in England, who might—’

‘May I ask what your book is about?’ asked Joyous. He seemed irritated by his companion’s fawning.

I handed him the book. It was a popular introduction to the science of climate change, a subject which I’d decided I ought to know more about. Joyous studied the cover for a moment – there was a photo of a crop of wheat that had been killed off by drought – flipped it over to read the back, then opened it at random to sample the contents. He had long lean fingers and I could see that he was an entirely different proposition from his companion: sharp, focused, full of energy, and not in the least deferential.

‘Climate change,’ he said. He had the most beautiful glossy panther-like skin. ‘Yes, I’ve heard of this. The world is getting warmer.’

‘That’s it.’

‘What does the book say about what will happen in this part of Africa?’

I hesitated. Malawi is one of the poorest and most densely populated countries in the world, without the mineral wealth of many African countries, and with precious little in the way of industry. Many villages have no electricity: you drive through them in the night and there are people sitting there in total darkness. Most of the country’s population live by subsistence farming, and almost all of its meagre export income comes from agricultural products like tobacco and tea.

‘The news isn’t good, I’m afraid,’ I said. ‘Global warming would probably mean a lot less rain round here, and a lot less certainty about when the rains will come.’

‘Then we’ll starve,’ Joyous stated flatly.

‘Why does God keep punishing us so much?’ Godfrey murmured. ‘I only wish we knew.’

‘Well, let’s just hope it doesn’t happen,’ I said.

Joyous flicked through pages, pausing to study pictures and diagrams.

‘And what does your book say is the cause of this problem?’ he asked, though it sounded to me as if he already knew.

‘Mainly the burning of oil and coal in the industrialised countries, over the last two centuries.’

I found a graph for him, showing the increase of CO 2in the atmosphere since the industrial revolution in Europe, and the corresponding increase in average temperatures. Joyous laughed.

‘So you people come here from America and Europe to instruct us how to improve our lives, but at the same time you are slowly killing us. Is that correct?’

‘Well, certainly not deliberately, but—’

‘When was it discovered that burning these things would cause this problem?’

Joyous was smiling in the way that some people do when they’re very angry. Godfrey giggled nervously, trying to catch my eye so he could defuse his friend’s alarming hostility.

‘Oh a long time ago. I think it was in—’

‘So, excuse me, sir, I don’t wish to be rude, but why do you say you don’t do it on purpose, if you know quite well what it is you’re doing?’