Everlasting: Malawi
“On your right is area 50. This here is area 28, a light industrial area. Across the road there is fertilizer factory and tobacco factory. That is heavy industrial area.” Now the national police headquarters pops up on the right. “That is area 40.” Just across the street, “Area 43,” Everlasting explains, “Is low industrial. It used to be only area ten, and area ten is still there, but it is full, so they have made area 43.” “We also have names but our names are too long, so we just say, say, area 12.” When we met, our guide told us, “I am Everlasting.” We looked away. Then we realized that was his name. Malawi’s Ministries on the left. “So, is that area 1?” Logical, I thought. “No, that is area 20.” This went on all through town. “Ah, that is area 47. Up there, that’s area 49. National Bank. Bank of the Nation.” The tallest building in Malawi is the central bank. “This is the Jehovah’s Witness headquarters in Malawi.” The flame tree, its red flower. What Everlasting called a tube tree at the central outdoor market, where a smiling little boy saw my camera and excitedly grabbed his friend’s arm. The mosque. The Lilongwe River beside the market, near the old city administration building “from when Lilongwe was a small town.” The new city hall, signal of progress, has a “Ready Print” shop sign in a window on the second floor. Everlasting was a slow, deliberate speaker, easy enough to understand once you acclimated to his accent. His “S’s” kind of trailed off.
A few kilometers out of town people carried everything you can imagine. A stack of firewood, one guy with dozens of bright crimson pin wheels twirling in each hand.
“These people are coming back from the market. They have been selling.”
They’re Chewa, originally from Congo via Zambia, and among the longest settled Malawian tribes. Portugese contact with the Chechwa came as early as 1608, with evidence of the first Chechwa kingdom just before the 1492 voyage of Columbus.
Everlasting launched into a goat lecture: They should be tied so as not to eat the maize. Sometimes you cannot see where the goat is tied because the rope is so long. But sometimes the rope is gone away.
If you see a forest, Everlasting said, it is probably a cemetery. Village people cannot use cemetery land for growing, so, sensibly, they choose stands of forest for their burial grounds.
On a flagpole the national flag hung limp.
“The wind is not blowing so it is closed,” Everlasting explained helpfully. A red sun rises from the top of three bands across the flag, and Everlasting says it reflects fire.
“The national team when they have done well we call them the Flames. When they have not, well, then it is silent.”
When Everlasting got particularly involved in his stories, he’d punctuate his remarks with the car horn. Talkin’ and tappin’ and tootin’.
The lobola, or bride price, Everlasting says, is not paid here. A boy goes to a girl’s side and settles there. When they are blessed with children and they grow up to get married, the father cannot say no. That issue is referred to the boy’s uncle.
So as an uncle, Everlasting says, I must think of character – if the boy’s family lives by fighting, for example. I might say no.
If we do not know the family well we can hire a spy to go and look at that family. The spy might test the boy to see if he will tell a lie. It maybe take a month. That is in south and central region (where we were), Everlasting was at pains to point out. In the north district, we pay lobola. I have paid lobola for my wife.
Everlasting’s wife cost four cattle. She would cost considerably more today. If the cattle are too thin her family may say no, or okay, but you must pay something to help make the cattle fat. The lobola is 10 or 15 thousand kwacha now, he tells us, but in those days it was four English pounds.
For the parents, of course, a wife is all about character, not beauty.
“But for me as a boy, of course, I go for beauty.” Everlasting is smiling.
The spy thing works both ways. His wife’s family sent a spy to spy on Everlasting.africamalawianthird worldmarketshopsteelmanpeopleumbrellacrowdtropicstore
We drive past a healer, “Herbalist of the Century – Zanga Phee,” whose “Mult-Purpose Drug 1988 Centre” can handle “asthma, bp, cancer, diabetes, gout, jaundice, piles, ulcers and many more.” Everlasting is driven from his reverie to point out that at the regular hospital they have nothing. They get aspirin. But they have aspirin at their home! So they go to a traditional healer to at least get something. Lobola is a bridge between two families. Now he must care for her mother and vice versa. And now he cannot divorce, or he would lose the lobola and the children (in that order). The Malawian constitution mandates the year of marriage. It says it must take place no sooner than the 18th year. Along the road a queue of women lines up in front of the maize mill, all holding their baskets. Others, who have been through the mill, dry their production on mats. Maize makes the local staple, sima, sticky grits. Big sacks of cassava root line the road. You can make cassava sima, and Everlasting maintains it’s just as good as from maize. Everlasting’s family said no to his first love. They sent him to tell her it was because they were distantly related, which was a lie, but nicer than telling her it was because she was a lowly Zambian. The next installment: Crossing Lake Malawi on the MV Ilala. ***** You can buy photos from the EarthPhotos.com Malawi gallery. These stories are from the eventual book, Common Sense and Whiskey: Modest Adventures Far from Home, by Bill Murray. So far in the series: Chillin' in Greenland Crossing Lake Baikal Blazing through Tibet with Noodle Boy Everlasting: Malawi
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