Paul Theroux - My Secret History

“Which song?” I said.

“ ‘Everything Belongs.’ ”

I had never heard it. “How does it go?”

Deputy Mambo folded his arms across his Youth League shirt and put his head back and yelled the song in Chinyanja:

Everything belongs to Kamuzu Banda

All the trees

Belong to Kamuzu Banda

All the huts

Belong to Kamuzu Banda

All the cows

Belong to Kamuzu Banda

All the roads …

“I get the idea, brother.” It was tuneful but ridiculous. “But I don’t think there’s much point in the students singing that, do you?”

He did not reply. He moved his lips over his teeth and pressed them together, and he glared at me. I wondered whether the brown spots on the whites of his eyes meant he had a vitamin deficiency.

I had not had any strong feelings about Mambo until he showed up in his red shirt and announced that he was a member of the Chamba Youth League. I could not forgive him for those two Israelis. I could hear them, even now, shrieking orders on the football pitch.

I said, “The songs we sing are boring, but at least they’re harmless.”

“We want ‘Everything Belongs.’ ”

“And Banda — who is he?”

It was just an expression — a rhetorical question. I knew who Banda was. But Deputy Mambo answered me.

“He is our Ngwazi.”

It meant conquerer.

“And Chirombo.”

It meant “great beast.”

“Our messiah.”

“Give me a break,” I said.

He was still staring at me with his brown-flecked eyes.

“Founder and Father of the Malawi Congress Party. Life President of our Motherland, Malawi.”

“Look, brother—”

“I am not your brother. I do not drink beers. I do not osculate with town girls wearing tight dresses and ironing their hair.”

I glared at him. I hated this, and yet I had been expecting it for months.

“As long as I am headmaster of Chamba Hill Secondary School we will not sing the ‘Everything Belongs’ song. Is that clear?”

On the last day of June I was visited by a man who said he was from the Ministry of Education. He was English, and very pleasant. He said he liked the look of the school. No one ever praised the place, and I was grateful to this stranger.

“I didn’t realize Nyasaland had a Ministry of Education.”

“It doesn’t,” he said. “I’m with the Malawi Ministry of Education.”

Hearing that gave me a late-afternoon feeling of something coming to an end.

“We’re just getting sorted out,” he said. “We’re appointing headmasters to schools.”

“Chamba has one,” I said, meaning myself.

“Right you are,” he said, and consulted a file. “His name is Winston Mambo and he’s to take over immediately.”

I made a little grunt of complaint.

“Can’t make much difference to you, old boy,” he said. “You’ll be gone in a matter of months.”

“How do you know?”

He smiled and said, “You’re a bird of passage.”

All the way home I kept thinking of that expression.

* * *

Mambo moved into the office and I found a cubbyhole in the science block. He fired Miss Natwick, he gave the Israelis lockers in the Staff Room — I had denied them that — and he allowed them to join us for morning coffee. He started a Youth League branch for the Fifth Form and organized the lower forms into troops of Young Pioneers. The schoolyard was thick with red shirts.

His first morning assembly was typical of the ones that followed: a Bible reading, a passage from a speech by Doctor Banda, the song “Everything Belongs to Kamuzu Banda,” and a pep-talk.

“He’s not even the official president yet,” Rockwell said. “This is still a British colony.”

It wasn’t, but what Rockwell said was partly true.

It was a much stranger situation than that. It was nothing, it was an interval, between the British leaving and the Africans taking over. But it was a short interval — a moment briefer than an eyeblink in the history of the country. For the whole of my time in the place so far no one had been in charge. The Africans were hopeful and they felt free. There was no government. Everything worked. Everyone belonged.

But now I felt it was the end of the day and we all faced a long night.

Mambo said, “We will run the school the African way. According to our ancient traditions.”

“Reading the Bible, dressing up in red shirts, singing about Kamuzu, following Israelis around the football pitch. The African way!”

“The Israelis are our friends.”

I did not argue. I was glad to be relieved of the tedium of the headmaster’s duties — doing the register, keeping track of supplies, balancing the timetable. But with Mambo in charge the school almost immediately took on a preachy political tone, and Mambo — whom I knew to be a creep — became annoyingly pious. I saw that he had become headmaster not because he liked the school particularly but because he wanted something more. He was ambitious. This was his way of moving on.

“We will have special independence celebrations at Chamba Hill Secondary,” he said. “Parades, demonstrations, cakes, and a bonfire. The minister will come and plant a tree in front of the chimbuzi. ”

This was at the first staff meeting.

“Wait a minute,” Rockwell said.

“I have the minister’s reply. Mr. Likoni is delighted to accept this invitation from his former school. I have budgeted for a small blue-gum tree to plant.”

“I built that latrine,” Rockwell said. “That’s all my work. I know you started it and provided some bricks, but I had to tear it down and start again from scratch. So it’s all mine.”

“We want to give thanks for its completion,” Mambo said.

“Then write to the Tenth Street Tabernacle and mention the Faith Fund of the Pageant for People Overseas.”

Mambo was scowling at him with speckled eyes, and showing his full set of teeth. He had the appearance of an old-fashioned mechanical bank, the same meaningless mouth and cast-iron features.

“It is our new school latrine. It must be inaugurated.”

“I already inaugurated it,” Rockwell said.

“It must be done properly,” Mambo said.

“There’s only one way to inaugurate a latrine — and I did it, fella.”

Rockwell was not on hand the day Mr. Likoni arrived in his ministerial car. He used the road that had been trampled and cleared by students searching for tickeys. Not many months before, Mr. Likoni had begged to use my bicycle. Now he was in a new Mercedes. He had a driver. He wore a pin-striped suit and new shoes. He cut a red ribbon and planted a slender blue gum in front of the chimbuzi . He did not speak to me. He praised Chamba Hill Secondary and he praised Mr. Mambo. He led the students in the “Everything Belongs” song.

That night I found Rockwell at the Beautiful Bamboo. It was his form of rebellion, he said. He had been there since noon. Thinking, he said. But he looked as though he had been crying.

“What about?”

“Words,” he said. “I could never ask a girl her box number, could you?”

To prevent him from plunging in on that subject, I said, “You missed a memorable occasion. Imagine making a ceremony out of opening a public toilet! The minister cut the ribbon and made a speech. That guy used to borrow my bike.”

“I wish I had a woman,” Rockwell said.

I turned and stared at the African girls seated at the tables, and dancing, and leaning against the wall, all of them watching us.

“Funnily enough, I don’t think of them as women,” he said. He looked puzzled and alarmed. He said, “I’d rather get drunk.”

There were tears in his eyes.