Vignettes from the Road

In the United States, hitchhiking carries some deservedly sinister connotations (often of murderous proportions), especially for a young female traveling alone. But in Malawi the story is much different – in a country where the only people with cars are a) foreigners working for development organizations or b) educated, affluent host country nationals eager to practice their English, hitchhiking is not only common, but often safer than public transportation. And although I’ll happily spend one thousand kwacha to share a seat with three other people and a goat (why else am I in Africa, after all?), I’m not one to turn down a cheap (often free!) ride full of interesting conversation, air conditioning, and plenty of leg room, even if it does force me to check my privilege and feel my inner guilt-o-meter tingling a little (or, more often, a lot).

But the biggest draw is the fact that the story file in my brain is always open for new additions, and hitchhiking has a full supply of them. Here are a few.

***

            I had my first (and most authentically Malawian) hitchhiking experience with George Chirambo, my school’s headmaster: a character of gigantic proportions, tenacious resolve, and endless quotability, and someone who really deserves to be featured in a book someday.

            We stood on the side of the road and assumed the customary hitchhiking position – not a raised thumb, in this country, but a hand held out at waist-level and flopped up and down at the wrist. A little pick-up truck stopped almost immediately, urging us to hop in for a 600-kwacha lift to Mzimba. Squeezed in with four other Malawians, perched somewhat perilously on an upturned tire in a truck-bed, I had one of the most wind-blown and breathtaking 40 minutes of my time here so far, with every twist and bend and escarpment accompanied by the mental tune of “Remember this, remember this, remember this.” (You get to choose whether you want the phrase “my time here so far” to mean “my time in Malawi” or “my time on this planet.” It works either way.)

            About halfway to our destination, Mr. Chirambo explained that drivers are required to have a special permit to carry a certain number of people and that, oh, by the way – our driver doesn’t have one. It was unclear whether or not this was going to be a problem as we neared a police checkpoint manned by several large, heavily armed men, but I quickly assumed the Zen-on-command trance that I’ve learned well by now: “Don’t worry yet; just deal with things as they come.”

            The driver stopped the truck, turned off the engine, and greeted the officers with a stiff, sticky-smiled politeness as they inspected the vehicle for contraband and asked to see the appropriate licensing. I held my breath, but Mr. Chirambo broke the quiet. “Ah, one of my corrupt friends!” he shouted, because of course this is Malawi and of course Mr. Chirambo knows everyone and of course – of course – he knew this particular officer.

The men stood together in a laughing, hand-slapping circle, and I jumped into the conversation when it became clear they were referring to me (hearing the Chitumbuka words for “teacher” and “white person” are usually the dead giveaways). And after a few minutes, as we pulled away from the checkpoint amid smiles and laughter, Mr. Chirambo turned to me to explain: “That officer stopped me once while I was driving my car without a license, but I just gave him 1000 kwacha and now we know each other and drink cold beers together!” Oh. Okay.

            But I still had some questions about what I had observed about the Malawian legal system.

            “So, the police checkpoints are here to look for illegal activity, yes?” I asked.

            “Yes,” Mr. Chirambo said.

            “But if you are doing something illegal, you can give them money and they’ll let you go?”

            “Exactly.”

            “So, if the police officers don’t actually stop people who are doing illegal things, why even have police officers? Couldn’t the government save money by just not having police, and things would still be exactly the same?”

            Everyone in the truck erupted in laughter, probably partially at my perceived naivete, probably at the sheer anarchy of my suggestion, but also, I sensed, at the insanity of a system that already borders on anarchy.

            We waved at our corrupt friend on the way back, and the jacarandas in Mzimba were incredible that day.

***

           

             On our way to a meeting in Mzuzu, my sitemate Rebecca and I got a lift from a “businessman” named Goodall. I hedge this title in quotation marks because I’m still – for many reasons – not exactly certain what his line of business was.

As we approached one of the many police checkpoints along the M1, Goodall stopped mid-sentence, turned to me in the back seat, and casually announced, “Oh, sorry, I forgot: you are on a gun.”

I tried and failed to be articulate. “…wait what.”

He repeated the same words flatly: “You are sitting on a gun.”

I had noticed that I was sharing the seat with a long hard something-or-other, but I had been so involved in our winding conversation about economic flux and patrilineal marriage that I had failed to connect the dots. Now that I was giving it my full attention, I could see that, yes, indeed, the tweed sport-coat beneath me was in fact draped over a gun-case, and that the gun-case did seem to be holding a rather large weapon, and that, okay, well, yes, look at that, I was indeed sitting on it.

Part of my brain started running a risk assessment, flashing Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-style scenarios of varying degrees of ugliness, while the rest of my brain insisted on staying in that tried-and-true “don’t worry about it yet” stupor. Thankfully the latter half of my brain was right: we passed the police with a wave and a smile, and I worked up the courage for my next question.

“Uh, so, Goodall, why do you have a gun?”

“Yes, I have a gun.”

“No, why?” I repeated.

“Yes, I have one.”

With our destination in sight, I dropped the subject and we diverted the conversation back to international economics. As he stopped for us to get out at a gas station, I slipped out of the back seat, draped the tweed sport-coat back over the gun, and bade a friendly farewell to Goodall, a man of mystery off to conduct some “business.”

***

On a short afternoon trip to pick up my kittens, I hitched with someone who may just be the most interesting (and interested) man in Malawi. The man (who will remain unnamed here) is a member of Parliament, world traveler, Doctor of Philosophy, former secondary school teacher, and published poet (whose poems are actually featured in one of the books I’m supposed to teach). But his accomplishments pale in comparison to his interests – and oh my does he have them. After exchanging the usual pleasantries about family, education, and place of birth, he turned to me and asked, with exactly this sort of emphasis, “So what are your hobbies?”

I stuttered the sort of response that would be expected of someone who had never thought about the topic before: “Oh, um…I like reading a lot. I like reading everything, actually. I like drawing. And painting. I studied art at university. Uh…and in America I worked with horses – actually, I owned a horse, but I had to sell him before coming here.”

He praised each hobby with soft noises of encouragement: “Oh! Oh, really! What else?”

And then I asked, “What about you?” and the floodgates were opened.

Over the course of the next hour, each of his subsequent dreams, diversions, pet projects, and pastimes was presented like a revelation – each time I thought the list had come to an end, another came spouting forth with just as much energy as the one before it. He announced each interest as though he had just thought of it, as if his passion for it had just been sparked in that moment.

            “I am also fascinated by compost!”

            “I am a great fan of computers, cars, and machines!”

            “I love design. I am interested in design of all kinds!”

            “I also hope to import donkeys!”

            “I would really like to have a fox!”

            “I am a lifelong fan of Shakespeare!”

            I learned about his forays into the world of food processing, his plans to invent a soft drink that will compete directly with Coca-Cola and Fanta, his recent acquisition of a mining license, his impending purchase of land for an orange farm, and his intention to import horses from South Africa (a plan that will not be deterred by the fact that he has never ridden a horse).

He also had a wealth of experience taming monkeys as pets, and strongly disagreed with Peace Corps’ rule that volunteers may only keep dogs and cats. “The wonderful thing about monkeys,” he explained, “is that they are very clever, and they do everything a human does. They are like children! But the problem with monkeys is that they do everything too much.”

“Oh? How so?” I asked.

“You are cooking; they want to help. You go for a walk; they want to come. You go to turn the knob on the radio; they want to do the same.”

“Ah, of course, just like children.”

“Yes, but then you turn around and the radio no longer has a knob.”

            But the climax of the conversation – the point where I very nearly lost it – arrived with a sentence that was made exponentially funnier not just by the brief silence immediately preceding it, but by the weight of every other thing that had already been said: “I also know how to keep hedgehogs.”

            And I choked back giggles long enough to learn that you can feed hedgehogs many things, but that it is better to handle them with gloves.

The one, the only, George Chirambo

Malawi is quintessential Africa in that red-soiled, big-skyed, acacia-tree-dotted kind of way.