Malawi in the Time of Covid
It is possible, once again, to consider travel ‘beyond the Lake’. If God and Kamuzu Academy allow, Tuesday will find me in Nairobi and Wednesday in Oxford. It is appropriate to reflect on what has passed since last I left Oxford on Saturday, 4th January, 2020.
I recall that Lent Term well. I wondered aloud to pupils about how the Chinese, alone among peoples, could ‘lock down’ (a new word) whole cities. All available information suggested the slightest risk to pupils, only a slight risk to their teachers. In February I travelled to Rwanda. My flight to Nairobi stopped at Nampula, in Mozambique, where I saw officials in ‘hazmat’ suits and new passengers embarking with masks. It was easy to ascribe this to overreaction by a country that I have always found difficult. I was reassured on arrival in Kigali to be asked only whether I had travelled in China within the past few days. On transit through Nairobi a week later I saw a temperature gun for the first time.
On Wednesday, 11th March something wonderful happened. Circles were squared and it became possible to take a party of Kamuzu Academy pupils to Cape Town, to perform at the Shakespeare Schools Festival. (We have established our own in Malawi.) It was here that I began to follow news from England with increasing concern. What China had done had been done also in Italy, and it had become conceivable that England might follow. I was asked by an Uber driver from Bangladesh what I knew about this virus named for the Rosary. Still, there was the pleasure of young people’s company and drama, and I did not (yet) consider these the end of days. But, in a sense, they were. We performed (The Comedy of Errors) at the Fugard Theatre on Friday, 13th, and returned to watch a deaf performance (De la Bat School’s The Taming of the Shrew) on Saturday, 14th, and something by Athol Fugard himself (‘Master Harold’… and the Boys) on Sunday, 15th. That night Mr. Ramaphosa announced a state of emergency (although I watched the speech only later): he had exchanged his lawyer’s suit for military fatigues and proscribed not only liberty but also alcohol and tobacco. The following day we visited Kirstenbosch and Simonstown. I put together a group to visit the museum, which we found closed, by decree. It was the first manifestation of the pandemic to affect my plans in any way. That evening I visited a supermarket in Pinelands to re-supply for Malawi: the shelves were in disarray, but I did not recognise panic buying at the time. On Tuesday, 17th, we returned to Lilongwe thru Jo’burg. The flight was half empty. Many of those who travelled wore the uniforms of South African public schools, peremptorily closed: I had unexpected thoughts of the Fall of Singapore, perhaps mediated thru J. G. Ballard’s Empire of the Sun. I saw a European wearing a mask. I learned subsequently that it was the last SA flight to Malawi (they still have not resumed) and that we had attended the last performance at the Fugard Theatre: it never reopened and closed for good one year later (to the day). On arrival at Kamuzu International I shook hands with a pupil’s parents. For the first time it occurred to me to doubt whether this gesture were welcome.
Malawian schools closed that Friday, 20th. I was impressed by the manner of pupils’ leaving. Alte Kameraden was banged out with gusto by the Orchestra, and although Christian pop. is hardly to my taste, Stuart Townend’s In Christ alone struck a peculiarly Malawian note on which to enter into the unknown. (I was later to discover Kgaogelo Moagi’s Jerusalema, which is better known in South Africa and Namibia, but also captures the poignancy, at this time, of the desolation of the young, a certain yearning.) Thereafter, a phoney war… The first two weeks of the vacation were spent in overseeing the long-postponed repainting of my house: Kamuzu Academy’s decorators moved in according to numbers House no. 9 had never accommodated before. In retrospect it seems a token of the pragmatic attitude that Malawians would adopt: there was ndiwo to buy, thus ndalama to earn. The date for the first of three flights I had arranged came and went. From the khonde I continued to marvel at what had possessed the world. I was struck most by how very sad it all seemed, how very quickly the peoples of countries that I thought I knew, including my own, had made themselves prisoners. I followed the Triduum at the Oxon. Oratory on the newly established remote link: the rites were celebrated behind closed doors, in what looked to be an upper room.
On Easter Sunday, 12th April, I drove North, to Mzuzu, where I took lunch’ with a former colleague (S.) at the Mzuzu Hotel. The road over the Viphya was deserted, the hotel likewise. It was on Tuesday, 14th, that the Malawi Government promulgated its lockdown restrictions, as oppressive as anything that I had observed elsewhere. I had intended to return that day, but my derelict vehicle failed at the first hill, so I accompanied S. to the Lake at Nkhata Bay, and postponed departure until Friday, 17th. I recall an excess of sensibility at this time: the welling up of tears over something as inconsequential as leaving the Lake, even being served the wrong pizza. Perhaps we are all toddlers when we discover unaccustomed constraints? That vacation I had intended to look up an exhibition on the Sahel at the Met. and to further work toward a Maths. degree at the Open. Instead, I thought it quite possible that I would be stuck in Mtunthama Trading Centre sine die. However, S. was irrepressible, a force of nature: he had caught one of the last flights out from London to Lilongwe and had set about establishing himself in his Mzuzu ‘briar patch’ in style, with books and wine and boys. In due course his campaign to avoid the restrictions as he travelled between Africa and Europe would assume Rabelaisian proportion. I can recall every date on which we met during the long months to come: all deeply consoling. Thus passed the first month of the pandemic.
At this point Malawi could have subscribed to the madness that had consumed just about the whole world (with the exception of Sweden – a country that is not often conjoined with Malawi). Indeed, she nearly did. But there followed something which I will always oppose to the disgust that what is less attractive in Malawi can engender. In short… Her people refused to accept this curtailment of their liberty (or, perhaps more realistically, demanded money that the Government, itself weak, did not possess). Roadblocks were set, the odd Police station torched. I drove through wafts of tear gas where Government forces had been faced down in Kasungu Boma. The restrictions were blocked by injunction of the High Court and were never imposed.
The next term (Independence, as we call it here) was lonely but productive. Teaching continued online, to a far higher standard than that extended by the authorities in England to my nephew and niece. I dispatched, to junior pupils, weekly introductions to Classical objects in the shuttered museums of Europe, and there was a fine clutch of research essays by senior pupils for our Law Essay Prize. One of my psychologists made a study of Covid dreams. It became normal to communicate with senior pupils by WhatsApp, which, rather to my surprise, was mostly respected. Civilisation survived.
Colleagues had withdrawn to their houses. From time to time it was reassuring to glimpse the avuncular figure of the headmaster (A.) upon the golf course. He is retiring to England, but I shall remember his presence at this time of crisis: a man for whom one wishes to work. […] X.’s [...] preaching of ‘advanced’ UK methods and technology was shewn up not only as false, but worse, as ridiculous, for those who have eyes to see, by what we – I am proudly ‘backward’ and Malawian in this regard – made happen at Kamuzu Academy.
As many found elsewhere, there was time for projects. Just before the closure of schools, once again by good fortune, I had collected recordings of children’s games from local schools which friends overseas had supported over the years. These were edited as gifts: from Malawi, for once. In addition, I set myself to two works of translation: Notker Balbulus’ Liber Hymnorum and Eugène Rambert’s La marmotte au collier (both authors from what is now Switzerland, of which I am fond, one thousand years apart). The editions are trilingual and make handsome websites. It is difficult to imagine what effect immurement has worked upon the world at large: I had the company of my servants’ families and, vicariously, that of a friend (B.) and his Indonesian wife, resident in my Oxon. house, whose correspondence and research in my library provided intellectual diversion in the Malawi bush that is recalled with immense gratitude. I conspired further with a colleague (A.) to celebrate May Day: with a dawn ascent of Champhumi Hill, versions of the Hymnus eucharisticus and Sumer is icumen in sung by a local choir, and the Classics dept. sublimated in Gule Wamkulu – even a Maypole forsooth. It was easy both to resist the Siren urging from England to find place on an evac. flight and to consider with more than usual bemusement the folly of those who suppose that Africa must always present the worst of all possible worlds. Indeed, the world outwith Malawi flickered in and out of focus over computer screens: images of deserted cities alternating with those of the BLM mob, both strange. There was odd consolation in receiving a packet of books thru DHL – they had made the journey across closed borders – and in searching out traces of life elsewhere, however trivial: flight logs, old restaurant reviews, virtual museum tours.
I remember the dreams: fiercely vivid, with sharp and sensory recollection of people and events far removed. For whatever reason memory turned most to my long-dead paternal grandparents and their house in Milton, Stoke-on-Trent, which I had visited often when young, where I had known only good. Unlike many dreams these remained (and remain) into the conscious state. In another context I would say I have learned what it is to commune with my ancestors. The passing of time became abnormal, likewise sleep: it continues difficult to believe that these events took place two years ago, and not one year, nor, for that matter, one month. The dreams have lost their focus but remain fierce. The sadness of March 2020 has yet to dissipate.
One day in May there fell a great silence, as if the world had paused. I was taking a turn around the Ornamental Lake and saw the waters covered with a great flock of duck: knob-billed or white-faced whistling I do not recall. It is perhaps fanciful to suppose that they had taken advantage of empty skies and a silent school, like the horses of Edwin Muir’s poem, to attempt reconciliation with Man, more likely that they were exploring new territory. Even so, I have seen one or two since, but never again in numbers to compare. By now I had brought my desk onto the khonde. There too I became aware of a world of nature that I had overlooked. As a quondam Mertonian – a college which is esteemed not least for its mulberry tree – how could I have failed to notice my very own, if not so venerable, in the garden of House no. 9? (It was betrayed by the scrumping of mousebirds and children.) I then pursued A.’s guide to the trees of Kamuzu Academy and found much else that too-frequent travel had obscured. There is – would you believe it? – a tree (Msambamfumu, Afzelia quanzensis) whose gap-toothed pod resembles nothing so much as the smile of the Cheshire Cat.
Malawi conducted a presidential election that June: not the most obvious way to guard against a pandemic. I am always ready to be surprised by my adopted country, for good and ill, but I must confess that I found myself in agreement, for once, with NGO’dom and predicted disaster – although, unlike NGO’dom, I did not relish the prospect for the sake of the aid money it would rake in – and disaster… did not happen. (The talk of the time, when not of rallies, was of bloodsuckers and of the immolation of suspected bloodsuckers. One was burned alive just down the road.) All credit to the Hon. Chifundo Kachale, who presided over the electoral commission: he is alumnus of Kamuzu Academy and has been my guest. For a time I feared that the new man, with a stronger government, would succumb to the weird predilection for lockdowns, but no – he has been intelligent in this regard.
Mtunthama is cold in July: that and inconsiderate neighbours (the roaring of vehicles, the barking of dogs), together with the impossibility of dealing with the treachery, deceit and rapacity of the village, compelled re-engagement with Malawi outwith Kasungu District. I broke my fast and travelled to Lilongwe at month end, not least to see S. (en route to Amsterdam). I was cautious at first, but an interminable campaign of vehicle registration and repair made such visits habitual: I began to stay at (what I call) Little China, an hotel imported to its last decorative lantern in shipping containers from Tianjin and reconstructed in Central Africa, where I had heard the fireworks of Chinese New Year back in January, before the world changed. What impressed most was a city that continued to live: as the world without suffered all the pain of isolation I was able to take dinner in a lodge where, for example, people celebrated birthdays and weddings; and these people, whatever their colour, lived there – the parasites of NGO’dom had fled. It was touching to note how mzungu residents, a small community, shyly acknowledged each other’s presence as they undertook, one by one, the decision to re-engage with a city that had never (in fact) closed. I discovered the pleasures of a fine garden centre and a lodge that is the home of a troupe of vervet monkeys. That has now changed – scheduled flights resumed in September 2020 – but for a time Lilongwe was more at ease with itself than I have ever known.
Schools also reopened in September. They would close again (in part) for two or three weeks in January 2021, but not once has Malawi thought it a good idea to sacrifice the education of her young in the same way as countries as different otherwise as Uganda and the United Kingdom. (In Uganda schools remained closed for two years.) There was, of course, a great show of health measures: mask wearing and the like. But it was all (mostly) good natured theatre: I chose not to wear one, and that was fine, just as it was fine to wear a mask, even a face shield. As pupils were diagnosed with Covid, they were placed in isolation, but free to come and go: I stumbled once, when on ‘duty’, into the (unmarked) isolation corridor of the boys’ hostel. No one died, and for that matter, I wasn’t aware of anyone falling ill. One or two elderly people around Kamuzu Academy passed on, but Malawi has forgotten neither God nor how to deal with death: it happens, quite commonly, indeed universally, and it is no reason to suspend life.
Banks and supermarkets still require masks, perhaps also government offices (but these I avoid). When first, back in July 2020, they became mandatory, it was common to see masks worn in the fancier sort of 4x4 behind raised windows: they confer status. But their use has become normalised, with no suggestion of the sort of conflict that they might provoke in England and America. I observed that, when Covid figures rose, visitors to a shopping centre I use wore masks in greater numbers, but when they fell, a collective decision was taken (literally) to breathe more freely. It is most astonishing to note that banks have taught their customers to queue: the pell-mell that used to greet the opening of National Bank in Kasungu Boma has been replaced by an orderly line, only lightly policed. (There is also – this being Malawi – a special arrangement to jump the queue, if you have ndalama to pay.) Otherwise, by whatever unfathomable wheels that generate progress, hotels and supermarkets have learned the use of the POS device and attempt to settle a bill by plastic is usually successful.
Many months have passed from September 2020, whither our story has brought us, to June 2022. However, the outline of how Malawi conducted herself over these two and a half years has been traced and the rest is largely detail. Teaching has continued. We have hosted two Shakespeare Schools Festivals (one virtual, one hybrid – with a tour). Greek plays are performed again. I have built another classroom block. There has been much filming of Gule Wamkulu, including the Aeroplane which heralded this New Year. I have continued to translate from and into French and German over long (and sometimes cold) vacations. Blantyre and Mzuzu are retreats, especially Blantyre, where I have renewed acquaintance with the Society of Malawi. Kungoni Centre of Culture and Art has survived. Dedza Pottery has contributed a grave marker, inspired by Paul Klee (also of Switzerland), for the late mother of dear friends (A. and B.). Favour, my gardener’s second daughter, was born together with the pandemic and is now a cheerful two year old who has learned my name (Lichadi) and lifts up her arms to be tossed into the air… I would not have exchanged these two and a half years for exile in any other part of the world as it has become.
The Covid vaccine – Astra Zeneca (‘my’ vaccine, as a charming nurse at St. Andrew’s Hospital described it on learning of my home) – reached Malawi in March 2021, and I approached the Korean mission hospital in Lilongwe with justifiable uncertainty. Anything associated with Medicine in Malawi is better avoided: I had once a colleague (M.) who was almost done to death by the most obvious negligence. (He had declared an allergy to Penicillin and so was prescribed Amoxicillin. The inevitable happened.) However, once again I was impressed: there was an orderly queue and a great courtesy to proceedings. When I approached St. Andrew’s, the local hospital in Mtunthama, for the second dose I was able to make a private appointment: I was classed, for the purpose of documentation, as a social worker (heaven forfend), and two weeks on I received a call from a clinical officer enquiring as to my health. Now, as from the beginning of this month, June 2022, the Government has lifted both exit and entrance restrictions for those who can shew a certificate: I have even persuaded an office in Lilongwe to produce one, with my details only slightly misrepresented. Hence, with a measure of trepidation as to what I will discover, it is possible to consider travel ‘beyond the Lake’ without the requirement of intrusive, expensive and (I imagine) painful ‘tests’.
In 1856 a fifteen year old Xhosa girl called Nongqawuse, living in what is now Eastern Cape, persuaded her people that, if only they were to burn their crops and slaughter their cattle, an army of the dead would rise from the ground, to rout the perfidious white man and to reclaim the land. Most of her people did as they were bidden and the starvation that followed led to the death of the amaXhosa in their multitudes, the triumph of the white man. Her story offers a powerful warning against false prophecy. Malawi has, for sure, her false prophets, but for whatever reason – poverty, religion, stubbornness, respect for liberty – she was not persuaded by those prophets (such as WHO and SAGE) who visited such appalling devastation upon the world back in 2020 and her example should command the respect of those who must now deal with the consequence elsewhere.
It will be the work of historians to address the question of why, between January and March 2020, most of the world went mad. I was conscious of an intellectual opposition from quite early on: there was, for example, a John Lee who wrote in the Spectator. Its voice is larger now, but back in March 2020 it was still and small indeed. There was, of course, uncertainty as to what might result. (The benefit of hindsight, thus William Blake, is indeed a wonderful thing.) However, comparison with the Spanish flu’ of 1918 – the last great pandemic – reveals nothing like this wholesale, coordinated, scorched-earth abandonment of life, and even if Covid had proven as bad, I doubt that earlier generations would have considered the response commensurate: the elderly left to die alone, children uneducated, the frail of body untreated, the unsound of mind to go mad; the wealth of nations destroyed, together with the authority of government, and justice and peace, and law; whole peoples made to fear lest their liberty should be suspended at whim; churches closed. Herein, especially in contemplation of the shameful retreat of the Church of England from public life, I would venture to make a first suggestion: namely that, in origin, the prevailing irreligion of the ‘rich’ world is at fault. The guilty men who made these decisions are, by and large, those who were young in the 1960’s and 1970’s, who were formed by the prevailing nihilism of the events, say, of 1968. Their materialism has made them wealthy but severed the ties that used once to bind the generation of the living both to past generations and those yet to come, even to itself. In the absence of any fact, value or consideration that might survive their own death, the urge to cling to a few more years of life, at the expense of all else, becomes, I suppose, understandable, hence the lockdowns. (At least as far as countries like England and America – the part that opposes Mr. Trump – are concerned.) This is the beginning of an ongoing essay, which must be revisited from time to time.
And so to England. Over the sixteen years that preceded Covid I had sought to maintain a balance, between life in Oxford, on the one hand, in Malawi, on the other, with no great success. That balance has now shifted: I remain as circumspect with regard to Kamuzu Academy as I did in 2004, but after what has passed I could imagine living in a Malawian city, perhaps Blantyre, with leisure to enjoy the Society of Malawi, if means were to allow. However, in many ways, that seems the easier option. England is a mission field, my doctrine of ‘downward convergence’ amply justified. It is now, more than ever, that one must commit anew to Oxford work, now that it has been cleansed from the imputation of self interest which had tainted so many earlier attempts. I imagine, in more optimistic moments, a society of ‘Black Fathers’ (as it were), even a UMCA (reading ‘from’ not ‘to’), dedicated to reclaiming England as the Dowry of Mary, or, if those words appear rebarbative to people otherwise of good will, a body of men, perhaps women, working toward the ‘re-enchantment’ of England, modo Roger Scruton – her intellectual, moral and spiritual reconstruction. (It would not be wholly dissimilar to what Marcel Lefebvre attempted, when he surrendered his archdiocese in Senegal, only to discover the Church apostate and his native France disgraced.)
That is, I suspect, unrealistic, but it allures still; also, of course, what I hope survives yet of an England which it has been possible, on occasion, to love and admire… basic decency, keeping one’s word, scholarship and learning, friendship, old churches and byways, the snake’s-head fritillary, the Mass at dawn, seriousness conjoined to reticence in the pursuit of high ideals, bitter beer, and bread and cheese. The week will tell.
For now, we might conclude with words that a colleague (W.) heard at a sermon in Cape Town on Sunday, 15th March, 2020, when Mr. Ramaphosa declared his state of emergency. Indeed, they are quoted in my report on the tour. C. S. Lewis was referring to nuclear warfare, which, thanks to the catastrophically ill-advised rattling of NLAW’s against Mr. Putin and Holy Russia, is no longer as unlikely as it seemed even then. However, his words are just as applicable to what has passed since that day:
‘It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty. This is the first point to be made, and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddling together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies but they need not dominate our minds.’
I would (humbly) suggest that Malawi, whether consciously or no, in this Time of Covid, has conducted herself in like spirit.