Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“Everybody like this guy,” Msemba said. “Especially the girls!”

Rubber mouth, I thought. His lips were the texture and color of an inner tube, and they were still flapping.

“For punishment,” I said, trying to shut him up, “make ten bricks.”

“And especially—”

“Twenty bricks! Now get back to your classroom. And what about you teachers?”

No one was listening to me. Msemba took several odd sliding dance steps, and then he began to stamp, as if he were killing roaches.

“Like this one,” he was saying.

“Get him out of here,” I said to Deputy Mambo.

“He is being insolent,” Miss Natwick said. “The bloody cheek!”

Msemba nodded, seeming to agree. He said, “Dancing with African girls.”

“Take him away,” I said.

“African girls!” Msemba said.

He had the African inability to pronounce the word Africa . It came out sounding like “Uffaleekan.”

Deputy Mambo said, “What is this boy saying?”

“Even my sister!”

“That’s a euphemism,” I said.

“Every day!”

“That’s a lie,” I said. “Now off you go.”

Deputy Mambo’s face had gone blacker, but it was creased with little whitish lines — his eyes tiny, his mouth clamped shut, his nostrils huge and horselike in fury. He wrenched Msemba’s arm and hustled him out of my office, taking his anger with me out on the boy.

Mr. Nyirongo chewed his tongue a moment longer and then moved away, his chin at the level of the high windowsill.

“Monday mornings at the Academy after prayers,” Miss Natwick said, “one would read off their names. The offenders would line up in front of the entire assembly. The headmaster took out his birch, and one by one he bent them over a chair and thrashed them. ‘Thank you!’ ‘Next!’ They passed out sometimes. Some were sick where they stood.” Her teeth were dull yellow bones. “Salisbury.”

“Likoni tried that. It didn’t work.”

“Because he didn’t hit them hard enough.”

“This isn’t Rhodesia, Miss Natwick.”

“That’s pretty bloody obvious.” And she left.

Threshed, possed out, bleddy : it was an amazing accent.

After school that day, and long after the students had gone home — their smell of soap and dirt and a stillness that was like a sound lingered in the empty classrooms — I saw Willy Msemba making bricks. He was no longer smiling. The effects of the weed had worn off and left him groggy and dazed.

“Easy punishment,” Deputy Mambo said. “More like playing.”

Where had he come from? But he often popped up. He had the envious person’s habit of creeping out of nowhere, and he was critical in an envious way too.

I decided not to hear him.

We watched together. Msemba had trampled a hole full of wet clay that he had dug and soaked. He then softened it with his feet, and mixed it with straw, and crammed it into brick-sized boxes, and tipped it out on the ground to dry. He was nearly done. His legs were muddy to his knees, and there was clay from his fingertips to his elbows. That was the point, really — that and our necessity for the bricks: a new latrine.

“He should have had a hundred bricks,” Deputy Mambo said. “He should have been beaten with a stick.”

But he was staring at me like a preacher, and I knew what he was thinking: African girls.

So now I was in the doghouse, not Msemba. I had been made headmaster after Mr. Likoni was appointed minister of education in the new government that was coming in three months. The promotion was not a comment on Likoni’s ability. He was a drunkard who had once taken a course at Aberystwyth in Wales. He had hung his certificate on the wall. There were no more than a dozen university graduates in the country. It was very easy to rise. I was a good example of that.

I had been in Nyasaland seven months as a Peace Corps Volunteer. I was too far in the bush, on too bad a road, to get many visitors. There were angry stray dogs near the mud houses. Quail ducked into the grass. Owls sat on the road all night. We had greeny-black land crabs that looked like small monsters. We had hyenas — they tipped over my barrels. I used to see the hyenas loping off in their doggy seesawing way when I returned to the house after midnight. We had snakes. The hill behind the school was a huge rock that I had once thought of climbing; but now the idea tired me. We had thirty different kinds of birds but no one knew their names. Mbalame , people called them, and it was the same word for plane. My house was high enough so that I could see Mount Mlanje, the whole plateau, in the distance — blue and flat-topped, with dark green tea planted beneath it. There were no other Americans at the school. That suited me, because I regarded myself as something of a loner, and rather a romantic figure, in my squashed hat and wrinkled suit and stained suede shoes.

It was screechy and silent, old-fashioned Africa, smelling of woodsmoke and wet earth. And strangest of all to me these spring months: it was cold.

I was in charge. But a headmaster at twenty-three was unusual, even in this unusual country. Some of my boy students were twenty, and many looked older than me. The girls were younger, but some of them had given birth and had small children. That was their secret. They pretended to be schoolgirls and I pretended not to know about their kids. There were 156 students. They were all skinny and popeyed and barefoot.

Willy Msemba was one of the rare ones — virtually the only delinquent, but a cheerful one. And he was intelligent. He read Mickey Spillane. He wrote me an essay which began, “My name is Msemba. I’m a cop. I was in Chikwawa. I saw a broad — pointed breasts, fat face, ironed hair, a real doll. But she was tough. I had to kick her before she would volunteer the information I needed—”

The other students were well-behaved and in general the discipline was so good I never really believed that we would get our chimbuzi . That was the point of the brickmaking. We needed a new latrine. The fence around the ditch was broken, and the ditch itself was nearly full; and it stank. It made you think that these people were grubby and hopeless. I knew that was not true and I wanted to prove it with a new chimbuzi . I envisioned a big solid symmetrical thing with this year scratched on it, 1964 , and when people asked what I had done for these Africans in their year of independence I could say that I had gotten them a brick shithouse.

The earth around us was clayey enough for good bricks but we didn’t have enough discipline problems to guarantee a steady supply. I gave them five bricks for lateness, ten for not doing homework, fifteen for fighting, fifteen for littering (chewing and spitting sugarcane on school premises), and so forth. It was supposed to be twenty-five bricks for smoking hemp, but Willy Msemba had been on the verge of revelations, and so far my private life had remained secret. He was buzzing, and I had to get him out of there. I had not wanted to antagonize the boy. He knew too much.

I thought — as punishment — brickmaking was a good idea. It was dirty and useful. Yet I was criticized for being too soft. I was friendly towards the students. Deputy Mambo and Mr. Nyirongo spread the word that I was afraid of the students. Miss Natwick said that the trouble with Americans was that they were so bloody diffident. That was the most painful kind of criticism, because I was not quite sure what she meant and I hated looking up one of Miss Natwick’s words in the dictionary ( Lacking in confidence; timid ).

I kept on. It was better to be whispered about for being a weak headmaster than for that other thing, that I had tried to keep secret. And I knew that the students liked me. I spoke the language, Chinyanja, and I had learned all the proverbs in Nzeru Za Kale (“Wisdom of the Old Folks”)—“He who cries for rain also cries for mud”—that sort of thing. I quoted them in morning assembly. “If your face is ugly, learn to sing.” I was the first American any of them had ever seen. For some I was their first white man. Being an American — and I was friendly — gave me power over the students, and the school ran well.