For two years I have lived in Malawi. It’s been a bewildering and often frightening experience in a sparse and desolate landscape. Not so much frightening because of the experience, but of confronting oneself and ones inner most demons.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve looked in a mirror in my life. Superficially inspecting my clothes or examining areas of thinning hair. But never have I seen myself, as if a mirror was a mere distraction from inspecting my insides, occupying my mind and sight with layers of flesh and follicles of hair. In Malawi, far from the cities, the demons fly, they have form and shape, and there isn’t a mirror in sight. Your fears are sharpened, your wits tested, and you walk amongst the scum of the worst of your selves.
Never do you feel so alone. A strange land that never makes sense because it can not. It’s impossible and that is what makes it such a haunting, terrifying, and perturbing place that drives so many travelers and strangers to insanity and to their wits’ end. It exists, nothing more and nothing less must be asked of it. No questions, no order, and no sense must be extracted and suddenly one finds a peculiar sort of peace. Giving oneself to a greater power, to nature, and letting existence carry on. We have such little control of our lives, a fact often forgotten in the comforts of home that it explodes with a vengeance.
And how do you face yourself? The worst of yourself? The best you have seen, but what of that inner darkness, kept buried deep under layers of years and ignorance. When people will ask me about Malawi or my two years in the warm heart of Africa, I will expect to detail my projects and the sights I’ve seen, the foods I’ve tasted, and tell anecdotal tales from my village. What I will discard is the two years spent with the darkness in myself: the frightened man, the weak, the paranoid, the angry, the violent, the merciless.
Anxiety, paranoia, all stemming from fear of the unknown. I hear shouts and shrieks in the night from youngsters roaming the fields, mysterious drums beating in the distance into the morning, and drunken men aimlessly babbling on the streets. The wind blows fiercely and branches scrape the tin roof like nails on a chalkboard. Fear manifests in its worst form in solitude. Though it was not as fierce when I arrived, it manifested. To be alone in an alien place in the pitch darkness of night, you see nothing and hear sounds in the blanket of quiet, and your inner wirings only know survival.
“It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air, high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell.”
Though it’s been almost a century since Conrad’s story, and countless foreigners have passed and lived through the heart of Africa, there is still a mystery to everything here. Perhaps not the in cities or tourist destinations, but out in the villages, far from a road or light bulb, it is still a foreign place. I have met numerous white people who come here on missions or as volunteers and proudly utter the few phrases of vernacular they know and boast their oneness with Malawians. They claim to have found their home, their love. Though in their mind it may ring true, in actuality they don’t belong at all. I can’t describe what drives them, though often it is one’s unhappiness at their own home, a feeling of inability to fit into their own culture and society. So they come here.
The truth is no white person, no matter how long they have lived here, or claim to have friends like family or that this is their home, have no idea of the realities. They often live in cities or tourist areas, and never longer than a service contract in a rural area. And after centuries of exploiting, proselytizing, and living here, they still claim it as a region that must be fixed and put in order, a problem that must be solved. They still lack understanding of how life works and continue to plaster a Western ideal of society and religion on a nation that never has and never will fit a mold.
The Indians and Chinese, however, seem to have accepted the fact that Malawi will remain a mystery to them. And they deeply fear what they don’t understand. For them it is a business relationship, they seek wealth and no more. Not religion nor friendship. They keep a vigilant watch over their workers and their enterprises, and secure their houses and shops with iron bars and bribed policemen. They are quite aware they don’t belong here and aware they are not liked or often welcome in this country, and because of that they are two groups that endure and sustain an existence in Malawi.
For all the claims of friendships you see only high-wall fences, barbed-wire compounds, guard dogs, and hired security companies protecting white people, wealthy Asians, and luxurious imports parked in grand homes. There is no friendship. The rasta-whites laying about the lakeshore be damned with their faux-rasta brethren selling curios to adventure-seekers. This is a place that cannot and will never be deciphered to foreigners and white people. If I am wrong, then let all of Malawi be prosperous.
Once we abandon plans to exploit, convert, or understand Malawi, then only can we grow closer. As I have said before, all foreigners must leave, everyone. Then only can Malawi become a nation, the strong, cohesive, beautiful nation that is waiting under piles of aid and ruin. The foreigners, and more so the white people, have perpetuated a continent of darkness, no longer in a awful colonial way, but in a legal, modern, exploitation under the guise of a guilty apology supplemented with financial assistance. The mines continue to expand. The oil continues to flow through pipelines. The lands continue to be taken.
And the nation grows darker.
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