Paul Theroux: The Lower River

From Blantyre to Chikwawa, the road south, below the escarpment, was a sliding surface of loose rocks and deep sand, slow in any season and sometimes impassable in the rains. And bypassing Malabo it narrowed to a dead end, at the pinched-off frontier of Mozambique, then known as Portuguese East. Beyond the frontier lay the Zambezi, one of its obscurest reaches, wide and shallow: no bridge, hardly any villages, only dugout canoes piled with contraband that bumped among the sandbanks. The Shire River at Port Herald was a feeder to the Zambezi, thick with goggling hippos and the snouts of crocodiles, and not navigable higher up except by canoe, because of the Elephant Marsh. The marsh had defeated David Livingstone, who famously dismantled his steamer on the riverbank and sent it north in pieces on the heads of his porters.

The floods in the wet season isolated the villages on the Lower River; the hot season brought temperatures of well over a hundred in the shade. Records were so dire they weren’t worth keeping. October the settlers at the boma called the Suicide Month, because of the heat, but November could be even hotter. The land was low-lying and malarial, the Sena people mocked for holding to their traditions of child marriage, polygamy, and witchcraft. The boma at Port Herald had a generator, the district commissioner’s house was lit; but two hundred yards away the light faltered against a wall of darkness. One school served the district, yet the fees kept most students away, and the children were needed in the fields. Cotton was one of the crops, rice another, and maize and vegetables were tended in the low-lying dimbas, which were always full of snakes. Small girls looked after infants, and small boys helped their fathers fish from the canoes.

Mud huts, thatched roofs, the hot dust holding footprints in powder on narrow paths; and the silence of the solemn sun-baked bush was broken only by the wolf whistles of certain birds and the screech of insects like the howl of one untuned violin string under a dragging bow. In the mornings he was woken by the shapely notes of birdsong.

One of the first sights he’d beheld as a young teacher was a pair of naked children, the smaller one with his head bowed, the girl child delousing his hair, picking through his scalp, an elemental image of intimacy.

The heat meant that the Sena people wore few clothes, the men tattered trousers rolled to their knees, and a ragged shirt was more symbolic than useful. The women, bare-breasted, wore a wraparound, an nsalu or a chitenje cloth. Showing your legs was considered immodest; even the men unrolled their trousers whenever they were away from the river. But they wore only scraps of clothing in the Nyau dance, sometimes a monthly event, which went on all night, the mganga wearing a grotesque mask, the drumming growing more frenzied as dawn approached. That ceremony was a way of easing bewitchments. Initiations were another thing. The Sena men initiated the young girls, and in a hyena’s pelt, a man would engage in an elaborate defloration. When a man died, his earthly goods were dispersed — plucked from his hut by neighbors — and within a day or two the widow had sex with her brother-in-law beside her husband’s corpse, and thus became his junior wife. Women were forbidden from whistling, from drinking beer, from eating eggs, from owning a dugout. The Lower River was populous, but beyond the boma no building was more than six feet high, and so the bush seemed uninhabited, or just more mud; many of the termite mounds were taller and more symmetrical. A shoe was a novelty; even the word for shoe, nsopato, came from the Portuguese, as nsalu was derived from sari.

The Sena people were small, slender, delicate, and violent only when they were bingeing. They did not seem strong, yet they could paddle all day against the current of the river, especially when they were fortified by puffs of chamba, the local form of marijuana.

Most meals were the same: porridge of nsima, steamed white corn flour, or rice; greens stewed to a sliminess; and sometimes a small river fish or a segment of roasted eel. Chicken was served on feast days, but there were few feasts.

The Sena lived in a web of beliefs. The Lower River was thick with spirits, mfiti, most of them vindictive specters of the dead, restless in their malevolence. Nothing happened without a reason. A tree fell because someone wished it down, a thatched roof caught fire because someone prayed for the flames. Disease, disfigurement, a bad harvest, a broken bone, a stillborn infant — all were caused by human agency, the witch in the next hut or the next village, or the mfiti representing an avenging soul. Now and then a Belgian priest visited, a White Father from the mission at Thyolo, and said Mass in starched magnificence. He had a little medical skill and jars of pills that he distributed as though giving communion. “ L’Afrique profonde, ” he once confided to Hock, then left on his motorcycle.

The year turned on two parallel activities: for the men, the rising of the river and their opportunities to fish; for the women, the sequence of planting the garden dimbas, rice and maize and cotton — preparing the land in October, putting the seeds in before the rains, weeding for months, and the harvest in June. Then the grinding of the maize in the hand-cranked mills, and later the slashing and burning of the fields, so dramatic inland, the low hills alight, the snakes of flame thrashing on the slopes.

In his first year, village life had seemed a struggle to Hock. But the effort had a point; and for periods, sometimes a month or more, especially after the harvest, there was nothing for the men to do but drink the yeasty village beer they called mowa, or nipa, the gin distilled from sprouted maize or banana peels. In those quieter months, the women brought their corn to be milled into flour and gathered firewood. The children looked after each other, and older girls carried the babies.

Bhagat’s General Store at the boma stocked Sunlight soap, Koo ketchup, cooking oil, bottles of Lion Lager, cigarettes sold singly, and loose tobacco and tea. But few people had more than a few tickeys, the thin gray threepence pieces that bought two cigarettes. The market stalls sold vegetables and rice, smoked fish and cassava. Not much of anything, but in all the time he’d lived there, Hock decided that you didn’t need any more than that.

At first glance, the Lower River seemed to have no population, because people stayed out of the sun. They crept in the shadows, in the sheltered courtyards of their huts, under the trees, in the elephant grass, on the riverbank.

After a year, Hock understood the inflections of the weather. It was not the stifling, squalid place of its reputation; it was dense and subtle. The heat enlivened him. The smells were of wood smoke and stagnation and the perfume of the water hyacinths in the river, sweetish with decay; the sun-heated dust was like talcum.

Hidden in the high grass was Malabo, inland from the river in Ndamera District, on the road to Lutwe. To the south, the tall trees in the distance were the mopane forests in Mozambique. By tradition, the people of Malabo were allowed to keep boats on the landing near Marka — one of them, a large hollowed-out log, could hold six paddlers. It was a day’s paddle through the Dinde Marsh to the main channel of the Shire, and three days to the Zambezi.

Teaching at the primary school he’d helped to build at Malabo, Hock had become popular in the district, and when the local member of parliament paid a visit to Nsanje, he’d asked to meet Hock, to verify what the villagers had told him — their requests for a clinic and road mending and a new roof for the market. The MP had a second family in Zomba, so he seldom visited the district.