Dark Star Safari

16. River Safari to the Coast

Possessed with another yearning to light out for the territory — another territory — I fell ill. Yet sickness of the sort I suffered is so common among travelers there is no point reporting the particularities. My ailment’s effect on me was to make me idle. My ailment’s effect on others was to make them active and pestiferous. The Africans who seemed to understand that I was weak pursued me, the way predators harry slower or uncertain prey animals, and they demanded money, as though knowing that I was too weak to refuse them. Seeing me hollow-eyed and scuffing along the crowded streets of Blantyre, they nagged me. I walked slowly. Boys tagged along, snatching and calling out, ‘Mzungu! Mzungu!’

A man accosted me outside a shop. He said, ‘Please give me money for food.’

I said in his language, ‘Why are you asking me for money for nothing? Why don’t you ask me for work?’

This perplexed him and threw him off his spiel.

‘Don’t you want to work? If you work you’ll have money every week.’

He knelt down — got on to his ragged knees — and implored me for money. This abasement must have worked well for him before, because he did it without hesitation. He even gripped my ankles as he begged.

‘Get up,’ I said. ‘You’re a man. Get off your knees. Stand up like a man and ask me for work.’

‘I’m hungry,’ he said.

‘I’m sick — can’t you tell?’ I said. ‘Why don’t you give me money for being sick?’

My unexpected aggression and weird demand seemed to frighten him, and it surprised me too, for I had not planned on saying any of that. He walked quickly away.

In my weakened state I felt irritable and contrary and persecuted. Blantyre had once been a mixed community: Greek bakers, Italian tea planters, many mixed-race families, and not just generic Indians but Ismailis, Sikhs, Gujaratis. Even the worst of them had played a part in making society in Malawi work — the friction had been necessary, the challenges had made people think harder, the pluralism had forced people to become considerate. But all these exotic-looking people had been driven out. There was no racial difference now, except for the agents of virtue, all white, all short-timers. The working of society was in the hands of charities, running orphanages, staffing hospitals, doing triage in the pathetic education system. They were saving lives — you couldn’t fault them — but in general I despaired at the very sight of aid workers, as no more than a maintenance crew on a power trip, who had turned Malawians into beggars and whiners, and development into a study in futility.

The news in the paper was that the maize harvest was a failure. A famine was expected for the coming year.

One day I woke up well. Having no desire to stay any longer in Malawi and discuss what went wrong, I decided to leave. I was now strong enough to depart by an unusual route, through the bush, to light out for the territory south, an almost unknown land.

It was the ultimate safari, one of my own devising, down the Shire River and into Mozambique to the Zambezi. Downstream at Caia I could go by road to Beira, on the coast, then travel inland on the direct road to Harare. I justified the detour by telling myself that I would compare it with a previous trip I had taken on this same route. But in fact this, the most roundabout way of getting to Zimbabwe, was a jaunt, a lark, an antidote to all the miserable buses and all the dishonest blamers.

Having sworn off risky minibuses, I dickered with a taxi driver to take me down the muddy and weirdly ferric-colored road to Nsanje, the southernmost settlement in Malawi. Nsanje, once known as Port Herald, was so buggy and remote and malarial, it had been Malawi’s Siberia for decades, a penal colony for political dissidents. Undesirables were sent to the southern region to rot.

But Nsanje was one of those distant rural places that retained the look and feel of old Africa. Not populous, inhabited by the Sena people, who were despised for being unmodern and remote in their low-lying and swampy land, Nsanje was wild enough to have its own game park, the Mwabvi Game Reserve. Nsanje was also on a wide navigable river. When David Livingstone had first come to this area he had traveled along the Zambezi and up one of its larger tributaries, the Shire River, to Nsanje and the labyrinthine Elephant Marsh and into the highlands. On the way, he made the observation that cotton would be an ideal crop here. One hundred and fifty years later, cotton was still grown around Nsanje. The crop was not in great demand.

My driver’s name was Hudson. He repeated what the papers had said, that the southern region was due for a famine, because of the heavy rains that had come before the maize crop had been harvested.

The rain had been torrential in the south. The growing cycle had been skewed. The government gave out free seeds (courtesy of donor countries), ten kilos per family, enough for an acre. This in itself was a problem, for it suggested to me that small-scale sustainable agriculture was not the norm. Anyone who grows crops with unmodified seeds can set aside one field as seed corn. But because they were using hybrid seeds (big plants, but sterile seeds), the farmers could not create seeds for the following year. Instead they waited for them to be doled out. Without free seeds every year these people would starve.

Normally, fields were dug in September, the ground hoed and prepared in October, dry-planted in November, then the farmers prayed for rain. The maize stalks that matured in February were left in the field to dry, then in April the ears were picked. The cobs were stripped of their kernels and bagged for milling into flour. June, July and August were months of abundance. Malawi’s independence was in July, when people had plenty of free time and enough to eat. At the first independence celebration, Hastings Banda had stood in the National Stadium and led the thousands of Malawians present in the robust hymn, significant in that month, ‘Bringing in the Sheaves.’

The average family of four or five people required twelve bags of maize (one bag equaled fifty kilos). These were kept in a silo (nkokwe) outside the hut. Rats, rotting and importuning relatives diminished the hoard. To make flour for nsima — a blob of steamed white dough, served with stew, that I had been eating ever since Karonga — to create this Malawian staple, the kernels were pounded in mortars or ground in a communal mill. Of all the activities in Central Africa, the maize-growing cycle was the most vital, the only important work, the difference between life and death. Anything that interrupted it — war, weather, political trouble, spoiled seeds, flood, or wild fires — spelled doom.

This season the rains had been late. Some seeds had not germinated. Many had sprouted and produced a crop. But the rain was still falling in March, and the ripe ungathered maize was rotting in the fields. Much of the south had been flooded. The harvest would be small. Because of this shortfall, in Nsanje and elsewhere, famine was a certainty.

‘These people will get hungry,’ Hudson said, looking at the wet fields and blackened corn stalks, the decayed stubble, the rotted stooks, the soaked slumping thatch on the huts.

Ten months later, the situation was dire. Maize was so scarce South Africa sent a shipment of 150,000 metric tonnes, and more was ordered from Uganda, which had a surplus. But since the price per bag had tripled, the maize was unaffordable. Malawian newspapers reported people eating boiled cassava leaves, and digging for wild roots and eating earthworms.

‘A bit farther,’ I said, when we got to Nsanje. ‘I want to go to Marka.’

‘You know this place?’

I did. I had come here in the 1990s to research a story about the Zambezi River. I had had my own kayak then, but I found out that I could hire a dugout canoe for the downriver trip; that with an early start it was two nights to the Zambezi, another night at Caia, and then about twelve hours by road to the coast. I had the essential equipment — a raincoat, a down-filled sleeping bag that could be compressed to the size of a football, and bug spray. I also had cash to buy food.

Hudson dropped me at the compound of the headman of Marka village, whom I had dealt with before. A group of women with children bandaged to their backs, sat in a circle, sorting beans in tin basins, picking out stones and chatting. I greeted them with the usual formulas, the equivalents of ‘May I enter?’ and ‘May I have permission to speak?’

They welcomed me and offered me a wobbly stool.

‘I am looking for Chief Nyachicadza,’ I said.

He wasn’t there — that was bad news; and from their euphemisms and circumspect manner I feared he might be ill or possibly dead. In a village such as Marka, in the Lower River District of Malawi, no one is dead. If people appear to vanish from their corporeal existence it is just a ducking-out to return as spirits, sometimes troubling the order of daily life, sometimes acting to smooth its course.

The women directed me to the chief’s son Karsten, whom I knew from my previous visit. Karsten lived elsewhere on the river, but he happened to be in Marka, delivering some goods in his dugout canoe.

‘Delivering’ could mean anything in Marka. The place was so far off the map there was hardly any law enforcement. There were police in Nsanje, and they had a motor boat; but the river was too wide and too long for any of them to monitor the comings and goings of dugouts. So, smuggling was common: sugar and cotton were smuggled out to Mozambique, and other items — tin pots, enamel plates, knives and machetes — were smuggled into Malawi.

The Lower River was a forgotten province, inhabited by the despised and dendrophobic Sena people. The Shire valley was neglected by the Malawian government; and farther downstream, where the river entered Mozambique, it was neglected by that government too. Who could blame these people living on its banks for finding illegal ways of fending for themselves? No one was looking after them. The region like many border areas in Africa was undefined, Sena people on both sides, but the river made it even more ambiguous, not Malawi, not Mozambique, but miles and miles of moving water, something fluid, a river in Africa.

Even the riverbank had no definition, for at the muddy margins of the river were vast swathes of reeds that obscured the bank, and in places dense stretches of water hyacinths — very pretty but a nuisance to the paddlers in the dugout canoes.

The women who had mentioned Karsten ordered a young boy to take me to him. We walked through the village of mud huts, their walls eroded by the rain, and down to the landing. About twenty dugouts were lined up on the foreshore.

Some men were unloading plastic sacks from an oversize dugout — cloudy-clear plastic that allowed me to see that the cargo was plastic sandals. I presumed that they had come upriver from some drop-off spot in Mozambique. The sacks were being heaped on wooden pallets to keep them out of the mud.

A fisherman was untangling his nets. His catch, a bucket thrashing with big fish, lay next to him. Another man was scooping water from a dugout using a plastic gallon jug, cut off to serve as a bailer. I thought I recognized Karsten Nyachicadza in a group of men who were standing near the unloaded sacks of sandals.

A heavy smoker of chamba, Karsten was in his mid-thirties — short, thin-faced, small-boned, but even with this scrawny physique unexpectedly strong and tenacious. He had a hard stroke, he could paddle all day. His habit was to rise early, before dawn, and push his boat out and keep at it, not stopping to eat though sometimes pausing to roll a joint. He ate fruit — oranges, bananas, and tangerines, whatever was in season — and at the end of the day made a proper meal of nsima and stewed greens and smoked fish.

Even glassy-eyed from the dope he seemed to remember me. He turned from the group and shook my hand, and called out something to the others, explaining who I was and laughing at the memory of that previous trip.

‘I want to go to Caia in your boat,’ I said.

He smiled, his expression said, Sure. He hung on to my hand as though to seal the agreement. His was a paddler’s hand, scaly, with a muscly palm and pads so hardened with calluses they seemed abrasive.

‘When?’

‘How about tomorrow?’

‘Tonight we go to my house. Sleep there. Start tomorrow morning for Caia.’

He was more eager to leave even than I was, which pleased me. But there were preparations to make.

‘What about food? I want to bring bottled water. We’ll need ufa’ — flour for nsima.

‘The shop in the market has tins. Give me money. I will buy flour.’

We went together, walking through the village to the shop. For me, this was one of the most pleasant aspects of a trip — stocking up on the necessaries, filling a box with solid food, and extras like cookies and canned cheese. Because bottled water was in short supply, I bought a case of Fanta and a case of beer. An African shop like this was perfect for such food and the basics for survival — matches, candles, rope. I wanted to buy pots and spoons and camping paraphernalia but Karsten said he had everything we needed. The plastic tarp he had for covering his contraband we could use as a tent if it rained.

On the way back to the landing (young boys following us, carrying the food boxes on their heads), we agreed on a price for renting the dugout — $100 in small bills. Karsten said we would need another paddler — his friend, Wilson Matenge. But by the time Wilson was found, the sun had dropped behind the trees and the daylight was slipping away. It was too late to go to Karsten’s. I did not mind traveling in the dusk but just at dark the mosquitoes came out in clouds. I wanted to find a hut to sleep in, and a smoky fire; to cover myself with bug spray and go to sleep early.

Village dogs barked all night outside the shed I had been assigned, probably because hyenas were lurking. It was still dark when I heard Karsten’s footfalls and his wide-awake voice, ‘We go now.’

Morning, too, was mosquito time on the Shire River. As we set off they whined around my head in bunches, as thick and busy as blackflies in Maine. But I was well sprayed, and as soon as the sun came up the mosquitoes dispersed. The dugout had been hollowed from an enormous log, about seventeen feet from tip to tip, and so wide it plowed through the marsh to the main stream. Karsten paddled in the stern and steered, Wilson and I took turns paddling in the bow.

The entry to the landing was a narrow lane of open water through the thickness of closely packed leaves and flowers of the hyacinths. Much of the time I sat on a stool amidships like Stanley in the Lady Alice, or else crouched in the bow. Karsten as master of this vessel was reluctant to surrender his paddle — even Wilson was happiest paddling and I supposed he wanted to humor me by giving me a chance. But it passed the time for me to paddle, and by mid-morning we had made it through the hyacinths and the twisting waterway through the marsh grass. We were now in the swift main stream of the Shire, riding the current south.

The recent rain had muddied the river and deepened it, but though it brimmed against some of the banks it hadn’t spilled over and flooded the plains and gardens. We moved steadily with the flow and at times we used the paddles to steer, the current speeding us.

People on the banks called out to us, and they must have been asking where we were going, because Karsten yelled, ‘Zambezi!’

In places the river twisted into bewildering marshland, dividing into many separate streams, softening, losing its riverine look and becoming slow water in a mass of spongy reeds. The Shire ceased to be a river at the Ndinde Marsh, which was so dense with high grass and reeds we could not see ahead of us, so choked with hyacinths that our progress was slowed to hard paddling. In this marsh we could negotiate only by occasionally going upstream, fighting the current. I thought that perhaps Karsten’s chamba intake had destroyed his judgement, but after an hour in the marsh we emerged, with a view of Mozambique.

I could see no villages, but here and there were clusters of huts set back from the river’s edge. Karsten stopped at one village and bought mangoes, and at another he bought dried fish. The people knew him, which encouraged my confidence in him, for he could know these half-hidden places only by being intensely knowledgeable about navigating the river.

A muddy embankment was the Mozambique border. There was no indication it was a frontier, but there were wrecked vehicles and boats on the muddy banks, always signs of civilization. The riverside settlement of Megaza consisted of two wrecked riverboats, a rusted truck chassis, a slippery ramp, some sheds that sold the usual — oil, candles, matches, crackers, raw soap, cigarettes — and idle skinny Africans sitting under another wrecked truck for the shade. The place had everything except Mr Kurtz and his human skulls. Under a mango tree a man sat at a table, the Mozambican immigration officer. We pulled our dugout up the bank and Wilson made a fire, while Karsten went in search of water.

I sat under the mango tree with the immigration official while he thumbed through my passport, which he finally stamped. Then I walked up the road to see what else was here. I noticed the immigration officer was following me. I let him catch up. We walked together in silence. Ahead were three wooden buildings. One was a government office — a single room. One was an abandoned shop — I peered in and saw empty shelves and a long bench. I liked the width of the bench. The third building was a bar — just a counter, warm beer on shelves, and Portuguese music blaring from a radio.

‘You buy me kachasu?’ the immigration official said.

It was Malawian gin, made from bananas. I bought two. We drank. I said, ‘I want to sleep next door tonight, okay?’

He shrugged, not saying yes or no. I bought him another glass and when I started to walk away he said, ‘Come. You can sleep.’

Boiling the flour with water in the blackened pot, Karsten had mixed up some nsima. He mashed the dried fish with greens. I opened a can of stew, heated it on the fire and ate that with the nsima. We squatted around the smoky fire and talked.

‘How far can we get tomorrow? Maybe the Zambezi?’

He made an equivocating face and said, ‘Mphepho’ — wind.

If there was a headwind we probably would not make it as far as the Zambezi, he said. The dugout rode so high in the water that the wind affected us more than other shallower craft.

It was hardly seven thirty when we turned in. I reclined on my bench in the shed up the road and though I could hear the idiot music coming from the bar, I fell into sleep so deep I did not awaken until Karsten came for me in the darkness of early morning.

We slid into the river and paddled in the predawn silence for almost an hour. The sun came up — no warning, a flicker, the whole sky lighted and then the powerful heat and blaze of the quickly risen sun. Ahead I could see a single loaf-shaped mountain, Morrumbala. My map showed a town nearby called Morrumbala, but there was no sign of that, only this beautiful rounded thing rising 4000 feet from the flat marshy land by the river. There was not another hill or high spot anywhere.

We toiled towards it all that hot morning. When Livingstone had come through here in 1859 he urged some of his crew to climb it. The Zambezi and the Shire had allowed Livingstone to penetrate the African interior with all its marvels — lakes Shirwa and Nyasa, the country we know today as Malawi, the labyrinthine marsh on the Shire with its abundant elephants, and the mountain Morrumbala, or ‘The Lofty Watch Tower.’ But for Livingstone it was a horrible trip on a riverboat that had too deep a draft for this river, and it was slow going through the sandbanks and the marsh. He had gone at a time of widespread famine, and the river was full of crocs. The verdict of one of Livingstone’s men was that the Shire was ‘a river of death.’

As a monumental land feature, sculpted like a citadel, Morrumbala had been regarded as a prize from the earliest days of Portuguese exploration. In the 1640s, this general area was the haunt of Portuguese sertanejos — literally, backwoodsmen — each of whom chose a region to rule. All were colonists from the mother country, but while some were aristocrats, others were criminals. They were conquistadores, united in their greed and in their delusions of grandeur, for they made themselves into provincial potentates, lived like little kings, created retinues, cultivated courtiers, and owned and traded in slaves.

From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century sertanejos inhabited the Mozambican hinterland, turning featureless bush into a number of rural kingdoms, where they amassed silver and gold and ivory. Conrad’s Kurtz is a Belgian version of a sertanejo. In his doublet and hose, carrying an arquebus, the wild-eyed Portuguese backwoodsman is colorful in a contemptible way, and an illustration of Sir Richard Burton’s remark, ‘There is a time to leave the Dark Continent and that is when the idée fixe begins to develop itself. “Madness comes from Africa.” ’

The immediate area of Morrumbala was held in the mid-seventeenth century by a self-appointed Lord of the Manor, a backwoodsman named Sisnanda Dias Bayão, who settled in Sena, not far away. The Africans farther up the Shire and in Sena-land generally were not warlike or well-armed and so Bayão had an easy time suppressing them, enslaving them and putting them to work, searching for silver and gold. There was a gold rush of brief duration in this area in Bayão’s time, all those years ago. When the colonial government objected to Bayão’s methods and pursued him, he holed up on the mountain. At the same time, because of its gullies and caves, the wooded slopes of Morrumbala became a favorite route for escaped slaves. Morrumbala as a refuge persisted to the present day. The mountain was a favorite hiding place for fleeing soldiers in the vicious guerrilla war, twenty-five years of it, fought in the Mozambican bush in the twentieth century.

The wind picked up in the afternoon, riffling the river, pushing our boat sideways. To steel himself, Karsten paused in his paddling, fired up a doobie, and with wild staring eyes, headed downriver again.

As with the last time I had come here, for many miles downstream we could see Morrumbala. For its isolation and its solitary strangeness — no one on it or around it — I regarded Morrumbala as an inspiration. I fastened my attention on it and delighted in it. Its shape was more that of a plateau than a mountain. There were abandoned farms and fruit orchards at the top, we were told by Africans in passing dugouts. How had the Portuguese gotten up and down the mountain, I wondered.

‘They were carried by Africans,’ Wilson said.

I could just imagine a pink Portuguese planter in a palanquin, fanning himself as he was being trundled by four Africans up the steep mountainside. Abandoned houses and plantations, remnants of the Portuguese colonial presence, were visible in many places on the riverbanks. They had the melancholy look of ruins in remote places, mute but solid signs of a lost world. The river itself was swampy in some places and just marsh in others — a series of divided streams running through dense reeds. ‘A swampy plain sacred to buffaloes and water buck and mosquitoes,’ a traveler in 1863 wrote — one of Livingstone’s companions. ‘We almost despair of finding the waters of the Shire in the various currents that mingle there.’

But Karsten was never in any doubt of the stream. He had paddled the river so often that he had come to know the backwaters and the wrong turns. We came to a village. I thought Karsten was intending to buy fish or fruit, so I rested on my paddle. But Karsten had grabbed the food box and was swinging it to the bank.

‘What’s happening?’

‘We sleep here.’

There was still at least two hours of daylight and the wind was not bad. I could see a lovely bend in the river beckoning, a stillness and gilded look in the reach. I said, why not go a few more miles?

But he pointed to the bend in the river.

‘Bad people there.’ His saying this in English made them seem much more dangerous.

That simple statement was all it took to persuade me to leap ashore and claw my way up the steep bank and through a crowd of about thirty women and children. A cluster of village huts stood on higher ground a little distance away.

They watched us laboring with our boxes and bundles, but I knew they were not idle spectators. Anything we did not want — bits of plastic or paper, tin cans, anything reusable — they were ready to seize. A little while later, after we started the fire, a woman crouched next to me as I opened a can of beans. She said, ‘Wanga,’ ‘That’s mine,’ meaning the can when it was empty.

Many people were watching me, children sitting in a semi-circle, tall skinny girls standing behind them, ten or a dozen women and a few men standing at a little distance, perhaps thirty people altogether, observing Karsten, Wilson and me, steaming nsima, slopping food out of cans. They had enough to eat themselves — this was not a place deprived of food, but a village where the men fished and the women tilled the fields. Watching us was their evening entertainment.

I became aware of a ripple of laughter that ran through the watchers and I turned to see a small ugly man tottering towards me. From his hideous face, bumpy with boils and growths and seeping wounds, and his withered fingers, I took him to be a leper. But he might also have been an epileptic, because the fresh bruises and his smashed nose were injuries I associated with grand mal sufferers who repeatedly fall down in their seizures.

Anyway, for his deformities he must have been considered the village fool — blameless, an object of scorn, teased but also a teaser when he found someone weirder-looking than himself. This would be me, the mzungu, who had wandered into his village.

He took to poking his finger in my plate of nsima and pretending to snatch my food. His finger was truly disgusting. His face was stained and gleaming from the leaking wounds, his eyes were crazed-looking, his hands were scaly, leprous, and very dirty. When he opened his mouth to laugh I could see his teeth were broken.

His antics roused the watching villagers to laugh, some in mockery, others in embarrassment, for they were not sure how I was going to react to this teasing. But I could see that the little battered man, miserable in his disfigurement and probably simple minded, was like the Fool in a Shakespeare play, the court jester who is licensed to do or say anything he likes.

‘This man is stupid,’ Karsten said, on my behalf using an unequivocal Chichewa word, wopusa.

But I beckoned the man over and when I gestured I saw a kind of fear come into his eyes. The watching people laughed as the man wobbled towards me on his twisted feet.

I said, ‘Mukufuna mankhwala?’ (Do you want medicine?) and gave him some chocolate cookies I had bought in the little shop in Marka village.

Needing to protect his cookies from the villagers, he ran away. Then we ate in peace, though we were watched the whole time. As time passed the children crept closer, nearer to our dying fire.

At last, hoarse with shyness, one of them said, ‘We want medicine, too.’

I gave them cookies and sent them away. Karsten handed the pots and plates to a woman to wash in the river, and he lay back and fired up a postprandial joint.

Since we were sleeping in the open the only question I had in my mind was whether there were hyenas in the area. Hyenas root among rubbish, and though they stay out of huts they have been known to nibble human feet protruding from hut doors, and in some instances to chew the face of the person sleeping nearest the entrance.

‘Palibe mafisi,’ Wilson said — ‘No hyenas.’ But I wanted to hear it from a villager, so when the woman came back with the washed plates I asked her. I liked her reply, which sounded poetic.

‘Palibe mafisi, alipo mfiti — No hyenas, lots of ghosts.

Curious to ask Karsten a political question I said, ‘Do you ever think about the president?’

‘No. Because he never thinks about me,’ he said.

Urging Karsten to pile wood on the fire to keep the snakes away, I sprayed my head and hands and zipped myself into my sleeping bag and went to sleep.

Hyenas and snakes were not the problem. The most dangerous aspects of the Zambezi were almost invisible — the wind, the mosquitoes which carry malaria, the biting tse-tse flies, or the innocent-looking fruit of a riverside plant called ‘buffalo beans’ which causes painful welts on the skin. There were also spiders, scorpions and in some places big wet frogs which positioned themselves near anyone sleeping in the open and then jumped with a gulp in a great smothering flop on to your face.

We left before dawn, slipping away into the still water, as we had done the day before. I asked Karsten if we would get to the Zambezi that day. Maybe, he grunted.Kapena. He seemed intent on his paddling, and so I joined them, using a board for a paddle, three of us propelling the dugout forward in silence. It was only after sunup that I remembered how he had said the day before, of the stretch we had traveled, Bad people there.

In mid-morning, I was sitting eating a mango, and Karsten said, ‘There are some hippos coming.’

We rounded a bend and there they were, snuffling, and looking fierce. Next to humans, they were the most territorial of river critters. I tried to think of the wild animals I had seen since I had left Cairo, but all I came up with were the hyenas in Harar, various antelope in Ethiopia and Kenya, the flamingos in Lake Naivasha, and the game I had spotted from the train in Tanzania. These were my first hippos in months. Hippo meat was sold in Zambezi markets in Mozambique, so Karsten said. Given the rate of deforestation and the growth in population it was predicted by environmentalists that the day was not far off when the bigger game would be poached out of existence.

Around noon we came to a ferry landing, where a barge was approaching from the east bank, bringing a pick-up truck across the river. The white man at the wheel of the vehicle that rolled on to the landing was a South African farmer, growing red peppers on an estate he had bought cheap from a Portuguese who had bolted. He said he enjoyed living in the remote Mozambican bush.

‘South Africa used to be like this,’ he said. ‘I don’t like what’s happening down there.’

He had an African foreman to translate work orders for him and to manage the workers, but he seemed completely out of his element — a plump sunburned man in a floppy hat and shorts. The variety of red pepper he grew he sold to a Dutch pharmaceutical firm — the pepper was used in some sort of medicine.

‘Aren’t you afraid of people coming out of the bush and trespassing or breaking in?’

He thrust out his chest and made a fist and said with growly authority, ‘They should be afraid of me.’

Karsten and Wilson wandered towards me obliquely to ask for some money to buy soft drinks being sold out of a burlap bag — soaked to cool them — by a woman sitting on a crate. I gave them some Malawian money and they walked away. They were very skinny, very ragged, barefoot, bushy haired.

‘Those your chaps?’

It was a significant question, the moment when one mzungu sized up another’s workers. ‘My Africans are better than your Africans,’ was a serious colonial boast. The Africans in the white farmer’s pick-up truck were dressed in sturdy overalls and floppy brimmed bush hats. Most wore shoes, one wore rubber boots. By Mozambican standards they were well dressed.

Karsten and Wilson’s clothes were purely symbolic — Karsten’s ripped T-shirt and split shorts, Wilson’s long-sleeved white shirt draped over his shoulders in ribbons. His shorts, too, were split.

‘Yup. Those are my guys,’ I said. And I thought: In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits, the best people are bare-assed.

Farther downstream as the river became wider, showing shallows and mud banks, we saw more hippos. There were herons, too, and hawks, and cormorants, and in the clay banks the riverside nests of white-fronted and carmine bee-eaters.

Karsten said the Zambezi was not far off. Yet nothing was visible ahead except bush, some of it marshland, and where there were huts they lay in small circular compounds. We never passed a cluster of huts without hearing the thudding of a mortar in a pestle — a woman laboring to make flour, sometimes two of them, taking turns raising the heavy pestle. Men fished with throw nets or with box-like traps woven from reeds. In some trees there were logs, hoisted there to serve as bee hives. Livingstone had noticed these cultural features on the Zambezi and on this river, too.

Honey was prized by the Arabs who had come here in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, looking for slaves and ivory, and there were still slavers operating in Livingstone’s time. Livingstone said he was here commanding his steamboat the Ma Robert with the intention of saving souls for Jesus and eliminating the slave trade. But the real intention of this strange depressive man was to open Africa to trade. The Zambezi he called ‘God’s Highway.’ He had a negligible impact on the slave trade, the trackless bush of Zambezia was proof that commerce had been a failure, and Livingstone’s total number of converts to Christianity was just one man, who later lapsed.

‘Zambezi,’ Karsten said.

God’s Highway was in view — a sun-dazzled sheet of water half a mile wide, carrying whole trees and big boughs and enormous logs in its muddy current — debris from the heart of Africa, beautiful flotsam.

I caught some words of a story that Karsten was telling Wilson — ‘Indian’ and ‘fish’ and ‘money’ — and as we paddled across the Zambezi, our dugout pulled sideways by the power of the stream, he told me the story.

Farther up the Zambezi, on the Zambian side, he said, there were Indian traders who made a practice of abducting very young African girls from villages. The Indians killed the girls and cut out their hearts. Using the fresh hearts of these African virgins as bait on large hooks they were able to catch certain Zambezi fish that were stuffed full of diamonds.

‘That is why the Indians have so much money,’ Karsten said.

I was so glad to be heading down the Zambezi I told them both it was a delightful story. In the late 1990s, I had read of riots against Indians in Zambia, accusing them of trading illegally in human body parts. The rumor then was they were killing Africans and disemboweling them, and selling their hearts and lungs and kidneys to Western hospitals, to make money in the organ donor business. Even some Westerners believed this improbable story to be true.

The land beside the river was featureless and flat, a grassy floodplain with low forest in the distance. We paddled among the floating trees and logs in the middle of the river where the current was strongest, the eddies giving the water the cloudy muddy bubbles you see on the surface of a chocolate milk shake. The wide river moved slowly and we had to go on paddling, yet the current helped enough so that I was able to sit back from time to time and reflect.

I was happy. The riverside villages were sorry-looking but self-sufficient. No one in the government either helped them or meddled with them. I had sometimes been uncertain stopping at one of these places, but on the river, borne onward by the muddy water, watched by fishermen and herons and (only their bulging eyes and nostrils showing) the pods of hippos, protected by Karsten and Wilson, I was the nearest thing on earth to Huckleberry Finn. I had fulfilled one of my fondest yearnings at the outset of my trip, for this was the territory I had lit out for, and cruising down this empty river in a hollow log was pure Huck Finn pleasure.

About two hours after turning from the Shire River into the Zambezi I heard a loud chugging, the working engine of a tub-like vessel making its way from a landing on the north side of the river.

The engine noise was the barge at Caia, big enough to serve as a drive-on ferry for trailer trucks. A British aid group called the Mariners had devised this barge from twelve ‘uniflotes’ and the reassembled parts of eight junked engines. The Mariners were led by an Englishman called Chris Marrow, and many of the men, like Chris, were servicemen turned aid workers. This barge-ferry was the only way a wheeled vehicle could travel the hundreds of miles from southern to northern Mozambique.

Caia was a settlement of shacks, drink shops, and squatting Mozambicans.. I hopped ashore and held the boat for Karsten, but he stuck out his arm to shake my hand.

‘We are going back,’ he said.

Just turning around, hurrying upstream to the Shire and heading home. There was still time for him to get back to the confluence of the Shire and the Zambezi; but it was all upstream for him from now on. Karsten was looking at the ragged men and boys on shore — they were pestering him, asking him where he had come from — and I knew he was thinking: There are bad people here. Anyone could see that a ferry landing on a wide river would attract the opportunists and the predators and the homeless riffraff and the lost souls. Instead of helping him land, I palmed some money as a tip and slipped it to him so that the watchers wouldn’t see, and I shoved the dugout back into the current.

Meanwhile the ferry had docked, its lines secured, and a big top-heavy truck of fat sacks was being driven up the embankment and heading towards a line-up of other trucks. With boys tagging along offering to carry my bag, I went to where the trucks were parked — four of them now. A group of men sat on a restaurant veranda, drinking and eating.

‘Okay, meesta,’ one of them said, laughing at the approach of a mzungu.

‘Bom dia,’ I said, and asked whether any of them was going to Beira.

‘We are all going,’ a man said to me. He was sitting with a spoon in his hand over a bowl of chicken and rice.

‘Can you take me?’

Instead of replying he made a motion with his head and I took this to mean yes. His name was João. I bought two beers and gave him one and sat down with him. We bargained a little about the price, for I had vowed that for the sake of my family I would not ride on top of any more trucks. After a while he wiped his face on his shirt, paid his bill and we left, four of us in the cab, about fifteen Africans clinging to the bags of beans on top. Beira was 200 miles away, on a soft road of sand and mud that led along the old Portuguese railway line. Railways and roads had connected all the provinces in Mozambique. In colonial times there had been a plan to build a railway bridge across the Zambezi at Caia. Part of the foundation had been set into the embankments, but the idea was premature and perhaps grandiose. Even in Caia and its outskirts there were tipped over railway cars and rusted broken locomotives.

This hinterland had only recently opened. For twenty-five years two guerrilla actions, one after the other, turned the interior of Mozambique into a war zone. There was first FRELIMO’s decade-long struggle against the Portuguese. After independence in 1974 an anti-FRELIMO movement called RENAMO was formed, supported mainly by white South Africans and an assortment of right-wing well-wishers in Portugal and the United States. In the RENAMO war millions of people were either killed or displaced, bridges blown up, communications shattered, roads closed, towns and villages depopulated by massacres. Because of this civil war, the Mozambican Zambezi, from Zumbo to the delta in the Indian Ocean, and the main tributary, the Shire River, were inaccessible to outsiders as well as to many Mozambicans. Throughout the war, the Mozambican bush was a heart of darkness, just as dangerous and confused and hard to penetrate.

It was only four o’clock, so we had about two hours of daylight. In those two hours I saw that every bridge along the road had been destroyed — blown up or burned; every railway track had been twisted apart; and all the older colonial buildings were roofless ruins.

In the middle of nowhere we made a pit stop. Seeing me headed off the road to relieve myself, João said, ‘No!’ And waved me to the edge of the truck. He pointed into the woods and said, ‘Landmines.’

It was the conventional wisdom in rural Mozambique that you were not to stray off any main road, nor were you to deviate from any path, for only the well-trodden ways were sure to be free of landmines that had been set and hidden by all those different soldiers, all those well-armed factions.

Darkness fell. We traveled down the wet mushy one-lane road in a tunnel of our own orange headlights. We came to Inhaminga. In Portuguese times Inhaminga had been a good-sized railway town, with a wide main street of two-story shop-houses and large villas enclosed by garden walls. But guerrilla conflict and neglect had turned Inhaminga into a ruined settlement of collapsed buildings and rusted machinery and broken rolling stock. Seeing me in the cab of the truck, youths screamed at me.

‘White people never come here,’ João explained.

‘How odd.’

We arrived at the coast, the edge of Beira, in the early hours of the morning. Since leaving Blantyre in Malawi I had not seen an electric light, or a telephone, or a paved road, or piped water. I did not lament this, I found it restful, for it was not a country in decline — this part of it, anyway, could not fall any farther. Some months before the people had experienced the worst that nature could throw their way, deep, devastating floods. They had survived, though as everyone said, the worst aspect of the floods was not the destruction of the crops and huts, but the uprooting of the landmines, for these explosive devices had floated and moved into different and unknown positions.

The town of Beira was also a ruin. João dropped me at a hotel on a side street. I slept until mid-morning and then went for a walk among abandoned buildings along streets where grass had sprouted. The most interesting building I saw in Beira was the one that had been the Grand Hotel — a huge skeletal structure facing the Indian Ocean. The whole place, a big decrepit gambling resort, had been taken over by plunderers and invaders. These homeless people were living in the guest rooms and had cooking fires going on the balconies and rigged up tents on the verandas. Some were emptying buckets of shit over the rails, their laundry was limp on strung-up lines. The building was a vast crumbling pile of broken stucco and rusted railings, filled with ragged squatters. Smoke issued from most of the rooms. I supposed that for some people this looked like the past, but to me it had the haunted look of a desperate distant future, an intimation of how the world would end, the Third World luxury resorts turned into squatter camps.

In the market, looking for a long-distance bus to Harare, I wandered into a parking lot of battered taxis. A man leaning against an old car said he would drive me the 160 miles to the Mozambique-Zimbabwe border at Machipanda for a reasonable price. He would show me the sights along the way. I said that was fine with me if we could leave soon. We left an hour later. About halfway into the trip he pulled off the road at a junction. An arrow indicated Nova Vanduzi. I said, ‘I don’t see anything.’ Putting on his surliest face he replied that if I did not pay him more money he would not take me to Machipanda. I argued for a while, then agreed, but still he whined at me for more money all the way to Machipanda, while I complained to him that I was often the victim of my own trusting nature.