Embrace (41 page)

‘I’m telling you. If this choir had black voices, Jesus, no other choir in the universe could come near us. Black boys’ voices. And the music would be so much more interesting. Real. What did you think?’

‘Blacks don’t sing “Bel Canto”, Dom, they do the rhythmical tribal music stunningly, but not the sort of stuff we sing. You saw that crowd last week at the afternoon concert. Didn’t have a clue about the music. And there’s no ways the school would allow blacks in.’

‘Of course the school won’t, but that’s so thick! And blacks don’t sing “Bel Canto”! Karl, where have you been? You’re as bad as Bennie and Merv. What about the Negro spirituals, how are they meant to sound? Not like rhythmical tribal, for God’s sake. And what about Marianne Anderson? Have you never heard that voice?’

‘I suppose you’re right, it is thick not having them. But they could never afford it.’

We lay silently and I wondered what it would be like having a black boy in choir or in class with us. It seemed fine to me, as long as they didn’t take everything over. But where would they find the money? And could they speak Afrikaans or English well enough to cope in school? It was unimaginable. Maybe in fifty years, once wehad educated them, elevated them like some of the blacks in America and the other private schools around Durban.

‘What did you think of .. .’ He broke off mid-sentence, knowing I knew what he wanted to know.

‘It was like nothing you’ve ever done before.’

I could hear only my own breathing and the sound of my heart racing in my chest.

‘Can I come to—’

‘Yes.’

And he did. We lay there and held each other’s hands. He ran his hand down my belly. When his fingers came close to the elastic of my pyjama shorts, I took hold of his wrist, held it back. And even as we did nothing more, fell asleep beside each other on the bed in the missionaries’ house, I must have known we had reached a private crossroads. Must have already suspected which turn I’d allow us to take. With our private parts.

After the final Blantyre concert, before returning to South Africa for Christmas, we were to have what I had most been looking forward to: four free days on Lake Malawi.

The first sighting of the calm surface left me mum. Instinct was to look for the other side. From the dusty bus window, I strained my eyes east, then north and south. Nothing. You can’t see the other side! It’s like the ocean! If this is the eighth largest lake on earth, what could be the largest? Like a slab of veined blue-grey marble, bordered by a darker line of blue where the water met the other blue of the horizon, the surface of Lake Malawi captivated my gaze. Somewhere, up there, beyond the beyond of the fine blue north-eastern horizon, I trusted, lay the country where I had been born thirteen years and two months before. The water beyond the white beaches, bouldered cliffs and trees, was more than enough to temper my disappointment at not being able to see that place, nor even Mozambique, which I assumed from the map had to be directly east from us.

Off the bus, we stood amongst our luggage beneath a sycamore fig and waited to be divided into host families. Lukas had asked Miss — Ma’am — to see whether there was a chance of the six of us being placed together — if any host families had a big enough house; we didn’t mind sharing rooms or sleeping on the floor. A call for eight — yes, there was a piano — and the six of us, delighted, volunteered. Instead of two more boys for the one additional room, Mathison suddenly stepped into the process and insisted that Ma’am stay with us. I knew why, wondered if the others barring Dominic had guessed at his sudden intervention. This placed a slight damper on our excitement, for, though we by now knew she was not quite the ogre we’d been led to believe, the simple presence of Ma’am’s authority meant we would have to be more cautious in the way we behaved and the way we spoke.

A white house on a part of the lake called something like Monkey Bay. Close to Cape Maclear, our hosts told us, where the first Scottish missionaries lived when they came to Nyassaland. Mr and Mrs Olver were Zambian expatriates, now living in England. They came to their house in Malawi only for northern hemisphere winters. While in England, the house here, furnished and lined with bookshelves, was rented to tourists. Year round a staff of two Malawians — Tobie and Chiluma — took care of the buildings. Dominic and I shared; Lukas and Almeida, Bennie and Mervyn, and Ma’am was on her own. Over each bed — covered in white linen changed daily by Tobie and Chiluma — hung scalloped white mosquito nets. From white walls small windows opened for a view of the lake. At a jetty below the house lay a catamaran and a forty-foot yacht, sails neatly rolled, wooden decks polished and bronze fixtures burnished. Mrs Olver said there were snorkels and goggles in the boathouse by the jetty, extra towels in the bathrooms: we should help ourselves to whatever we wanted in the fridges from the kitchen. Fridges; fridges, the plural ran, almost stumbled, through my mind. Lunch, around a table that could seat sixteen, was an assortment of cold meats, fruit, salads, juice and freshly baked bread rolls, served by Tobie and Chiluma, who wore long white Arab-like uniforms. On their heads they wore red fezzes and I wondered whether they might be Mohammedans.

Four days off; four days in which we would see the rest of the choir formally only on two occasions for a braai at some resort.

Floating on my back in the lake beneath the house, I thought to myself that the water I was in had touched Tanzanian soil, or had come from clouds that had been formed of evaporation from northern lakes and rivers. I was so close to there and, while I would not allow anything to detract from the pleasure of the time with my friends in the big house, there was a vague regret at not being able to see the Livingstone Mountains. Who cares, I thought, this is close enough and if were lucky Mr Olver may take us north up the lake from where I might see Tanzania.

The Olvers had not attended any of our concerts. After supper they asked whether the six of us would sing for them. While as a rule we were not allowed informal singing, Ma’am said the tour was in fact over and there was no reason we couldn’t; no reason to save our voices at this point. With Dominic behind the piano and Mervy stroking his violin, we sang Christmas carols while Ma’am and the Olvers sat in armchairs with drinks. Shy as I was to have my voice heard with only five others, I enjoyed the carols and soon relaxed. For the first time in two years, I was feeling music. Allowing volume on the middle range, I didn’t even try to reach any of the high notes and left the ‘Silent Night’ descant entirely to Dominic and Steven. Dom cast a few quick glances at me, frowning when I also left out parts of other songs.

From an open window behind the piano, I saw a full moon above the lake. I left the others and went to find a place outside. There was a flat boulder above the jetty where earlier in the afternoon I had seen wild gladioli and purple foxgloves. Behind me, against the moonlit night sky, candelabra trees clung to crevasses between the rocks and further inland I could make out the silhouette of a baobab. Piano,violin and voices continued, and I wondered how far sound carried over the water before me. 363 miles long, 20 to 50 miles wide, 2200 feet deep. Somewhere I’d read that sound, like matter, never quite disappears. So, our voices, our singing, like all the other voices and singing of thousands of years around this lake, were still somewhere there, nestling on rocks, in the water, on leaves. All eternity’s sounds, a dog’s bark, a child laughing, the beating of a bird’s pulse, and the echoes of these, were suspended or drifting somewhere around where I sat. I sighed. The echo of a sigh. And what incredible sound might be made if it all came back at once! If history’s every voice and echo was heard in a single instant? Like a bomb going off, that’s what it would resemble. Its volume, surely, would shatter our universe?

From lights across the bay came the rhythm of drums, possibly a band, for it was not the sound of African drums. Pop or rock.

Mr and Mrs Olver had taken us to see the clock tower at Fort Johnston that afternoon. The red-brick tower stood on the banks of the Shire River along which Livingstone had first entered the lake. In the late afternoon sun Mrs Olver took a photograph of the six of us standing in front of the tower, the clock pointing at half past five.

Ma’am and Mr Olver walked out into the night, passing close to where I was sitting. Ma’am asked whether they could join me. She asked why I was so pensive, and I said I was wondering how much farther north I’d need to go to see the Livingstone Mountains. Mr Olver asked why I was interested and I replied it was less the mountains than the country I wanted to see. I had been born there and no one in our family had been back since we left in 1964. Never before, other than in the aeroplane, had I spoken to anyone outside of our family about Tanzania.

‘So, your family left after independence?’

‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘After all white property was nationalised by the new government. We lost everything.’

‘Except your lives.’ Mr Olver said it was just as well we had left. He said Julius Nyerere’s Ujamaa policies had failed miserably and thehandful of whites who remained in Tanganyika were having a tough time keeping afloat what little business was left. He said Malawi was an African anomaly, though a very bloody struggle had preceded independence from Britain. ‘Long and bloody and always against one and in cohorts with the other hand of Europe,’ he said, ‘like everywhere else on this wounded continent. When Europe decided what would be this country, way back, there were the Germans to the north, the Portuguese over there.’ And he inclined his head towards the lake’s invisible other shore. ‘But that’s all gone, only the borders and mixed excuses for nations they left remain. And the history of struggles. One interesting story from close by here is about Tobie — you know, the tall houseboy who served the lamb tonight — well, his great-grandfather was Chilembwe.’ Mr Olver lit a cigarette for Ma’am. She said ta, inhaling and exhaling the smoke into the night. ‘Chilembwe, backed by the Tanganyika Germans, led what is today called the Chilembwe Rising. He was disgruntled at the treatment of Bantu labourers by white farmers and, one imagines, from seeing that black life mattered to Europe during times of war only — as cannon fodder. So he staged an uprising. He gave strict orders that no white women or children were to be harmed. Lists were drawn up of white men who had to be killed as they slept beneath their mosquito nets. William Livingstone, one of the cruellest white farmers, had his head cut off in the presence of his family. The head was put on a pole and the women and children in nightclothes were herded through the night behind it. Chilembwe, a minister, held his Sunday service with the head hoisted up on the church altar. The European community, in a panic that they were on the verge of being slaughtered, made plans to pack up. The militia mobilised against the rebels. There are conflicting stories about what became of Chilembwe. He was a village boy who had gone through a missionary education: one story holds that he fled and was killed by the militia. Buried in the bush with nothing except his gold spectacles. If you were to ask Tobie about it he’d say he turned into a pigeon and flew off to Madagascar or the Seychelles. The other story I’ve heard Chiluma tell is that Chilembwe, at seeing the soldiers approach, simply walked out of the back door of his church. The soldiers who followed his trail found that the tracks of his shoes had turned into hyena spoor.’

Quiet after the story, we watched the slow ascent of the moon over the water from the Mozambique side. Mr Olver lit another cigarette and offered one to Ma’am. She declined. The story had reminded me of the Mau Mau in Kenya; only the Mau Mau had raped and murdered women and children too. I had read about the Mau Mau in Robert Ruark’s
Uburu,
and filled in bits of additional information from family narratives and memories.

‘It sounds like the Mau Mau,’ I said, wanting to show I knew the history of East Africa, ‘who murdered hundreds of whites in their sleep.’

Mr Olver’s chuckle rang across the water. ‘Seven whites, my boy, that’s about all they killed. And we killed
thousands
of blacks in return. Had murdered a million and more on the Middle Passage.’ I had no idea what the Middle Passage was and regretted having said anything about Tanzania. After a silence Mr Olver altered his tone and became pensive: ‘What a continent,’ he said. ‘This country too . . . Things here are not nearly all the papers or Dr Banda make them out to be. There is no press freedom here. Women have to cover their legs down to the ankles.’ Dr Banda ruled with an iron fist. Then there was also a man called Chipembere, who posed a serious challenge to Banda’s leadership. Mr Olver said that Dr Banda countered support for Chipembere by invoking Chipembere s Yao ancestry. I immediately said that I had read about the Yao: were they not the ones who had sold other tribes into slavery? Mr Olver said yes, and that Banda kept harping on the fact that less than a hundred years ago the Yao were in cohorts with the Arab slave traders from North and East Africa. Mr Olver said that by playing on the history of the slave trade in Malawi, the president could justify his links with South Africa and oppose OAU attempts to impose sanctions on us. I assumed sanctions weresomething like boycotts, which I understood because of the international sports boycott of South Africa.

Things were also disintegrating in Mozambique, Mr Olver said, looking out to where the moon sat above the black waterline of the horizon. Early in 1975 the Portuguese had, after three hundred years, withdrawn from there, as they had from Angola. Abandoned Mozambique overnight and left a population of eight million people with twelve doctors. Angola, Mozambique, Tanzania, now one-party Marxist states. And he gave Ian Smith and Rhodesia two or three years, at most. Mr Olver asked Ma’am what she thought would happen in South Africa. Did she not think it would eventually have a black majority government? Ma’am said she doubted it: the state was powerful and the homeland policies on track, with Transkei due for independence in a year’s time. Her son would be going into the army in January, and that was of course a concern now that South Africa was involved in the war in Angola.