Part 5 of my diaries from 1996 about my trip to Malawi and Zambia. And, by the way, the title of these posts is explained below.
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Next day, after a breakfast of pancakes and honey, we set out for Nkata Bay. It was to be a day of travelling, albeit broken up with a number of stops. The first of these was half a mile down the road from the Reserve at a tiny village where, after asking the owners permission, we had a look around one of the small farms.
"Good Morning, how are you today ?" Sheila asked a man who appeared to be in charge. He thought about it for a minute and then smiled.
"Thank you." he said "I am very much delicious. How are you."
Sheila replied, as solemnly as she could manage.
"I am also very much delicious."
It became a catch-phrase for the trip. Everyone would always answer questions about how they liked things or how they felt with 'Very much delicious."
The farm was small but the family living on it was enormous. There were about half a dozen adults and twice as many children - a number rapidly supplemented by hordes from neighbouring farms. Soon we were surrounded by barefoot children in grubby T-shirts. It consisted of three buildings, one for living in, one for storage and for the animals and a ramshackle frame-like structure for drying the cassava crop. The house was small but quite sturdy with brick walls covered in baked mud, wooden framed and shuttered windows and a thatched roof. The family were friendly and mostly happy to let us look around and take photographs. One of the neighbours asked Barry to photograph his two children but as soon as the camera was pointed they ran away screaming.
Our second stop was in Mzuzu, where we had stopped for supplies a couple of days ago. I bought some tapes of Malawian Music from a market stall. The fact that they were all likely to be religious music was readily determined from the names of the bands and the sleeve illustrations.For example the Alleluya Band perform Exultet Konwerani on a tape with a cover showing five people with their arms raised to a haloed face in the sky. I questioned Peter about it as we sat in the back of the Land Rover. It seems that there is almost no tradition of secular music in Malawi with virtually all the popular music being of a religious nature. He translated the song titles for me and these more or less confirmed the observation. Perhaps more surprising was the difficulty of some of the translations. Either Peter was being over meticulous or Chichewa is the most concise language in the history of linguistics. For example I pointed to a single word title. This turned out to be one of the few that were not overtly religious. Peter thought about it for a long time before answering.
"Sometimes," he said "When the men of the village should be planting their crops they go instead into the town where they sit with their friends and drink Chibuka. They may stay away from home for a very long time. When they go home their wives are not pleased with them and this " - he pointed at the word - "Is what they would say."
Another title, two words this time, resulted in a lengthy description of the Crucifixion and finished with "this means the emotion felt by the onlookers at Calvary."
In between these language lessons I quizzed him about local politics. Things in Malawi are, he told me, pretty good nowadays. There is free (and theoretically universal) primary school education, although books and uniforms must be paid for. There is free state health care at the hospitals although there are still many private clinics - often run by religious orders - which charge fees. The country is predominantly Christian but with a substantial Moslem minority that is more prevalent in the south. He seemed surprised at my question as to whether this side by side existence caused any friction in the community, as if such a concept had never occurred to him.
Our next stop was Nkata Bay. This is a town with a bad reputation which is much frequented by back packers. As such the inhabitants have developed a different attitude. There is a lot of begging and a lot of people trying to rip-off the foreigners with over priced inferior souvenirs. I found the place to be unattractive although interesting for the brief time that we were actually there. We spent a few minutes in one of the many drinking houses that lined the main road. These are large unfurnished rooms with a bar selling cardboard cartons of Chibuka. They are filled to overflowing, even in the afternoon, with drunken Malawian men drinking, singing and dancing. We tasted the Chibuka which was like a thin brown sour alcoholic porridge. I cannot imagine that if I lived in Africa for a thousand years I could ever come to like it although the locals seemed to love the stuff.
A little further up the road we stopped again to look at a rubber plantation and stretch our legs. The rubber trees were tall and straight with almost no low level branches. They were planted in geometrically neat rows and each one had a small cup affixed below a V shaped cut in the bark into which the thick white sap was draining.
We finally reached our overnight stop in the late afternoon. This was the Katoto Beach Hotel at Chintheche. The hotel, right on the shore of the lake is in a prime position. The lake and lake shore are very beautiful and the water supposedly free of the Bilharzia which makes the southern section so dangerous to swim in. Unfortunately the place is being allowed to fall into disrepair with lights that do not work, bare wires hanging from ceilings, piles of rubble from abandoned building projects and a general air that no one cares any more about what must once have been a very good hotel. It would require so little work to return it to a good hotel that it seemed sad that no one could be bothered.
