Paul Theroux - My Secret History

It was a new school — a compound of four squat cement buildings with tin roofs that clattered so loudly when it rained that we had to stop teaching until the rain eased. There were verandas on the classroom blocks and in the center a trampled space where we held morning assembly. Outside my office door was a foot of railway track that I banged with an iron rod at five minutes to eight.

Morning assembly was a prayer, a song, and a pep-talk. There was as yet no national anthem. We sang Mbuye Dalitsani Africa , “God Watch Over Africa,” a sort of Pan-African hymn with the lugubrious plodding melody of a funeral dirge. Likoni used to read from the Bible — usually the Psalms. I avoided the Psalms but I liked Jonah, Ecclesiastes and Ezekiel — especially I liked declaiming about the valley of bones. I also read from Aesop’s Fables, and well-known speeches from Shakespeare, and memorable poems. I made appropriate comments. I read announcements and I called the roll. On these cold mornings the wind fluttered the blue gums and made the tin roofs moan and snatched at the children’s clothes as they stood shivering. When they heard their names they answered “Heah” or “Sah.”

A new road connected the school to the lower road which, once used for logging — it led through a forest — ended at the township of Kanjedza. I had built the school road. Building it had made my reputation. In old Likoni’s time it had been a narrow path through chest-high thorn bushes and scrub. I wanted the path widened. “Big cars will pay calls on us,” Deputy Mambo said. But it wasn’t that — I didn’t want cars. I merely imagined a long sweeping road that would dignify the school and the hill.

For the road I asked the Public Works Department to send us some workmen.

“I can send some men, but you will have to pay them,” the works manager told me over the phone. His tiny distorted voice came out of a heavy old-fashioned receiver.

“Why can’t you pay them?”

“PWD is in suspension,” he said. “The British have left.”

“Who’s in charge?”

“That is the question.”

Independence was not until July and at the moment there was no one in the department to okay an order. Men still showed up every morning, but there was nothing for them to do; and although they were on the payroll they received no money.

I had a budget. I had allotted sixty pounds for the road, which seemed plenty — over a hundred dollars.

“Send me six men.”

The men arrived on bicycles. They stared at the students until assembly ended, and then they hacked at some bushes and bullied a big tree. Afterwards they slept under it. They said they wanted more money and when I refused to give it to them they pushed their bicycles down the narrow path and pedaled away.

Fifty-four pounds remained. Mr. Nyirongo said that the headman of a nearby village would supply the men to clear the road, but that he wanted a bribe.

“It’s just bushes,” I said. “If the students weren’t so sleepy they could trample a new road.”

Everyone said that the students had worms, which was why they were so languid.

But I had an idea. I went to the bank in Zimba and changed the remaining fifty-four pounds into “tickeys”—small gray threepence coins. I returned to the school with canvas money bags hanging on my bike. I had almost four and a half thousand tickeys. At the end of the next day’s assembly I shocked the students by declaring a holiday.

But before I dismissed them I said, “Watch me.”

I went to the path with my bags of coins and walked the length of it, flinging tickeys left and right, the width of the road I wanted.

Like locusts, the students descended hungrily, tearing at the bushes, and by the middle of the afternoon the land was cleared. A little tidying made it into the road I wanted. That was my first significant accomplishment as a young headmaster.

I was popular also for my special homework policy. Because the students lived in mud huts with no electric lights, I made a rule that all homework was to be done at school, before the kids set off for home. And they had homework on weekends, but none on Friday afternoons. This meant that we teachers had no weekend papers to mark.

The school was called Chamba Secondary, after the hill just behind it. The word signified Indian hemp and it was also a frenzied and futile dance. Everyone who was told what it meant said, “Very appropriate!” But I regarded that as unkind. Give them a chance, I said; and I also thought: Give me a chance.

But the main reason I made sure we had no papers to mark on weekends was that I was busy those days with my own affairs. I wrote the school rules and I fitted them to my life. That odd boy Willy Msemba had been right when he twisted his face at me and said, “African girls!”

It was my secret life — my real life. The Peace Corps knew nothing about it. I had always lived two lives, but in Africa this second one became fuller and freer. I sometimes thought that it was the best reason for having gone there, especially then, just before independence, when no one was in charge.

It had started in the most innocent way, my first week in Nyasaland. I was in Zimba, the one-street town. I had pedaled through the rain to mail some letters. (It thrilled me to write letters from Africa. I was the hero of those letters. But it was so hard to be truthful and not take liberties.) On Saturdays the post office closed at noon, and so afterwards I killed time in the small market — squatting women selling misshapen and dusty vegetables. I ate lunch at the Zimba Coffee Shop. The place was owned by two Greek brothers and was run by a yellow-haired Greek woman. She sold me a cheese sandwich, a curry puff they called a samosa , and a cup of strong coffee. She watched me eat, and she gave me the familiar attention of the white people there, as if she were a distant relation.

That made me uncomfortable. I walked into the rain. There was not much else in the town — five Indian shops, all selling identical merchandise, canned goods and cloth; a car-repair shop and gas station, a branch of Grindlay’s Bank, a fish and chip shop, a bakery, and The Nyasaland Trading Company. None were run by Africans. Two old women were the sales clerks in The Nyasaland Trading Company. This was a general store in a low wooden building. It stocked colonial merchandise — jars of jam, stationery, clothes, last month’s London newspapers, books, ink, shoes, oil lamps, rubber boots. When I walked in, one of the women was wiping a feather duster (and they sold those too) against a contraption they called a radiogram — a large varnished cabinet with a yellow plastic window.

“It’s a wireless, and it also plays gramophone records,” the woman had told me on my first visit, and I had gone away mumbling the words.

Most of the white settlers had left the country for good. The shelves were becoming very dusty. Africans did not buy Birds Custard, Bovril, Swan Vestas, Dundee Thick-Cut Marmalade, Fenwick’s Gumboots, Hacks Honey Lemons, Gentleman’s Relish, Nairn’s Capital Oatcakes, tins of Bath Olivers or Battley’s Pickled Walnuts.

I browsed in the Nyasaland Trading Company until the rain stopped, bought a Penguin paperback — a novel set in the tropics by a writer I admired, S. Prasad — and then I started back to Chamba on my bike, bracing myself for the three-mile journey, which was mostly uphill.

Passing another shop, I saw a mass of small bottles and cartons in the window, and it was my first indication of the Nyasalanders’ liking for patent medicine — DeWitt’s Worm Syrup, Philipps’ Gripe Water, Goodmorning Lung Tonic, Iron Tonic, Liver Elixir, Red Syrup (“For Strength”), Kidney and Bladder Pills by Baxter, Fam-Lax, Day-Glo, X-Pell, Reg-U-Letts, and Letrax (“Expells Roundworms, Hookworms, Whip-Worms and Threadworms”). There were skin lighteners — TV Beautybox Day and Night Skin Lightening Pack, Dear Heart Skin Brightener and Glo-Tone. And hair straighteners — Hairstrate, and Glyco Superstrate. This shop had customers inside, but reading these labels I thought: Where am I?