Gettin’ Down With Nigel, My Eight-Year-Old Zimbabwean Neighbor (Glimpse)

After three years in the dorms and one year in a house of 10 women (if you dated any of us, we knew everything about you), living on my own in Malawi has been a surprisingly welcome change.

Hold on, who am I kidding? I hardly live alone. There’s the friendly wildlife that share my abode — the tiny ants that crawl in through the kitchen window, the cockroaches that scuttle across the concrete floor, the crafty mosquitoes that make it inside my bed net, the agile lizards that sashay along the walls and hide behind the bathroom mirror. And there are the three flea-bitten “guard” dogs that root through the trash and have finally stopped barking when I enter the compound. But my steadiest companion has been Nigel, my eight-year-old neighbor.



Nigel lives in the guesthouse adjoining mine with his 11-year-old sister Panashe and their mother, a nurse. His father works in Lilongwe, four hours to the north. Nigel’s family has been in Malawi since April, when they left Zimbabwe.

Nigel doesn’t talk much, but when he does, he precedes each statement with a lengthy, well-considered pause. When I ask him why his family left Zimbabwe, he falls silent and thinks for a long time. Standard practice.

“Because people were killing people,” he replies.

“Who was killing whom?”

“People were killing people.”

Such serious conversations are unusual, though. When I first moved in, Nigel would knock on my door, bound in, and drop into one of the frayed easy chairs. He would flash a close-mouthed smile and watch me wordlessly. This made me a bit uneasy. But our relationship made halting progress. We shared candy. I introduced him to the word game Bananagrams. He promised to teach me Shona. We chatted about school — he told me he was number one in his class in Zimbabwe, and as a reward, his friend’s mother gave him a green t-shirt emblazoned with the words “WEST COAST” (I abandoned an attempt to explain where the West Coast is, and that I live on it).

Now I’m comfortable with Nigel’s quiet presence. We sometimes talk and sometimes don’t. He keeps me informed about celebrity news. Madonna, he told me, is in Malawi this week. He practices his kung fu kicks as I prepare tea in the morning, and when I shoo him out so I can shower, he knocks on my door as soon as I’ve switched off the water and laughs at the towel swaddling my wet hair. We have plans to bake cookies together, chocolate-banana, he requested.

And then last Thursday, our relationship took a quantum leap forward. I was getting ready for happy hour at Doogle’s, a bar frequented by tourists, the teenage children of expats, and grizzled South African men nursing bottles of Carlsberg and fumbling with fat wads of Kwachas. Nigel sprang through the open door and gestured at me to listen to his left pants pocket. Michael Jackson chimed out. Nigel produced a cell phone, along with a crumpled tabloid, proclaiming Jackson’s death suicide.

“Nigel, we can do better than that cell phone,” I said.



It was instantly dance party o’clock. James Brown, Kool & The Gang, Tower of Power. My laptop speakers were tinny and we lacked a disco ball or flashing lights, but Nigel and I let loose. I sidestepped around the kitchen, and Nigel whipped out punching moves that would have made Richard Simmons proud. I tried introducing him to Journey, which met little success, but “Boom Boom Pow” and “Get Busy” received resounding approval. He disliked the Macarena but vowed to teach the Electric Slide to his sister.



Yet Nigel wanted the King of Pop back.

“Out of luck,” I said, scrolling through my music library. “Wait! Jackson 5!” I hit “ABC” and cranked the volume. “That’s Michael Jackson when he was a kid,” I told Nigel. “Maybe when he was your age.”

Nigel considered this. He looked to one side and then the other. He moved his lips without producing sound. I waited, as has become my custom.

Then he spoke.

“Back when he was brown?” Nigel asked.

Yes, Nigel, back when he was brown.

Why You Do Not Tell Your Mother About Your Mode of Transportation (Glimpse)

“They say no vehicle in Malawi is ever full,” a friend told me last week. Indeed — commuting in Malawi has been a most intimate experience. Though the omnipresent minibuses are designed for 10 or 12 passengers, they typically carry upwards of 16 or 17 folks, not including infants, gargantuan potato-filled sacks, and any number of live chickens. For my first two weeks here, I rode minibuses only for short-haul jaunts across Blantyre, doing my best to ignore the baler twine holding the door together, enjoying informal Chichewa lessons, and perfecting the art of clambering over knees, groceries, and small children. But after this past weekend, these short trips now seem like small peas.



The 100-mile journey from Blantyre to the southern shore of Lake Malawi takes about three hours by car. Our voyage lasted a full six. For the sake of dwindling attention spans, I’ve compiled six highlights from the four-leg (Blantyre to Limbe to Zomba to Mangochi to Nkopola) adventure.



1. Bribing our minibus driver to chase another vehicle bore no fruit. Thoko and I tried our darndest to make up for our late departure from Blantyre, but our friends Charles and Tawonga were off. Taking curbs and potholes at such zippy speeds, however, proved quite exhilarating. I checked in Limbe to make sure my bum had arrived intact. It had.

2. No matter how potholed, even by Malawian standards, the stretch of road from Limbe to Zomba proved, I found the hour-long ride glorious. Wind whipped through the grimy window as I bounced on the sticky red vinyl seat and soaked up the landscape, which turned lusher and greener as we approached Zomba. Had this been a movie, a contemplative song about the beauty of youth would have spun in the background.

3. And who was there in Zomba, waiting for their minibus to fill? Charles and Tawonga. They badgered us for our tardiness but then welcomed us into the back row, where we shared a greasy, paprika-flecked portion of fries. Thoko finally had his wish, the crew sitting four wide and making noise and nonsense in the backseat.

4. Not that the minibus needed us for nonsense. We took a poky pace, halting every quarter hour to drop or pick up passengers and pack in fresh loads of cargo, including a massive knot of shredded tire rubber and enough two-by-fours to construct a small house. We bought fruit through the window at each stop, juicy, tough-skinned masuku and tiny, sweet bananas.

5. Right before sunset, police at a roadblock fined our driver 5,000 Kwacha, about $35, for overloading our minibus. A recently passed law limits minibuses to three people per row, which is obeyed about as often as it snows in Malawi. As soon as we were past the roadblock, the driver continued to collect additional passengers. Have to recoup your losses, right?

6. After disembarking in baobab-studded, whitewashed Mangochi, we deserted the driver who told us his bursting minibus, already holding 20, could squeeze five more. We instead rode the last 22 kilometers in the flatbed of a vegetable truck. In a reassuring show, our driver and his cronies stopped at one point to buy drinks. I pushed visions of doom aside, nestled in among the wilted lettuce and turned my gaze up to the stars, searching for constellations, flipped upside down in the vast southern hemisphere sky.

Fanning the Flame(s) (Glimpse)

The roads of Blantyre are louder than most I’ve navigated — I’m still learning to tune out the honking, which seems the all-purpose method of communication among vehicles. On Saturday, though, the beep-beeping cars and trucks contributed just one voice to the veritable magnum opus of whistles, songs, claps, yells and yodels. Horns produced cacophonous goose honks and mimicked the wails of very unhappy infants. Passengers leaned out splintered minibus windows and bellowed. It was game time in Malawi.

Commentators heralded this weekend’s World Cup qualifier match versus Ivory Coast as one of Malawi’s biggest games in years. The last time the two countries played, Ivory Coast creamed Malawi five-nil. My friends Thoko and Tawonga told me I had no choice in the matter — I would don red, flutter a flag and lose my voice while cheering for the Flames. They needn’t have worried. Though I’m no diehard soccer devotee, I experienced Euro Cup fever in Germany a year ago, climbing atop the roof of a bakery and boogieing in the street after Germany’s semifinal victory over Turkey. I would be there.

And indeed I was, along with 25,000 others, a good number swathed in Malawian flags and body paint. We arrived a full two hours before the match began, which provided time for a brief excursion into the raucous bleacher section (terrific if you love fervent embraces from strangers, sprays of water and beer, and the occasional airborne rock) and a return to our calmer bench. As the conspicuous white girl, Malawians visited my seat to teach me cheers and songs. One fan specked my face with overzealous spittle as he instructed me in the proper pronunciation of “Malawi yidoda dadada!” This apparently translates to “Malawi is skilled on the ball,” though exactly how that figures I’m still trying to grasp.

For the first half of the game and the beginning of the second, I found the crowd more compelling than the players. Spectators wore screwy masks and costumes (one man had donned a bridal gown and another sported a graduation robe), waved imposing signs (most maligning Drogba, the star Ivory Coast striker), and inflated balloons (we’d wondered why the vendors hawked condoms in addition to lollipops and straw hats). As for the athletes, their footwork was sloppy and slow.

But then, but then! “WAKA! Malawi chinya! Malawi moto!” That’s right — “GOAL! Malawi scores! Malawi is on fire!” Flags thrashed overhead and men threw off their shirts. A friend of mine, a few kilometers away during the match, told me he heard the roars erupt from the stadium after the goal.

The celebration proved short-lived. Ivory Coast scored mere minutes later. The match ended in a draw. Yet the post-game street scene didn’t disappoint. The procession of lorries, their flatbeds heaving with fans, recalled the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade — albeit much lower-tech, much drunker, and much, much louder.

Green Tea and Moon Cakes: This is Africa? (Glimpse)

In the film “Blood Diamond,” Leonardo DiCaprio’s character often grumbles a brusque “T.I.A.” — “This is Africa.” Machete-wielding vandals, a nightclub party turned bloodbath, corrupt money dealings — “T.I.A., T.I.A., T.I.A.” I, fortunately, have yet to utter the three letters in any comparable scenarios, but in ten days here, I’ve murmured the phrase more than a few times: while switching on my headlamp during one of the frequent power cuts, while crushing cockroaches under my shoe, while passing boys on the roadside hawking skewers of mice, while riding a jostling minibus as vendors reach their hands through the windows to sell tiny plastic bags filled with sugarcane juice. Last Friday, though, I muttered it more quizzically. “This is Africa?”

I had been invited to a blowout festival, celebrating not one, but two major holidays. I was promised performances, a multi-course meal, bottomless wine and beer, hundreds of guests. The party was being held at a restaurant just outside the city center.

Let me clarify: at a Chinese restaurant just outside the city center. These weren’t Malawian holidays being celebrated — the owners were feting the 60th anniversary of the establishment of the People’s Republic of China and the Mid-Autumn Moon Festival, the second biggest holiday after New Year’s. And that’s how, on my second day in Blantyre, I wound up feasting on moon cakes and pig ears (full disclosure: I avoided the latter, though I did take a nibble of the pork tongue) with what appeared to be Malawi’s entire Chinese population.

The party began with subdued karaoke, the lyrics spooling across video images of mountains and oceans. Guests performed songs about communism (including one called “Soldiers, Stand Up”) and popular pop tunes. My American friend Dave repped our homeland with a few Johnny Cash and John Denver ditties. I met Richard, a Taiwanese man who considers himself a second-generation Malawian — his parents came as missionaries decades ago and eventually turned to business investment. This has proven a common pattern among Chinese immigrants, and China is now the world’s number-one investor in Malawi.

As the evening wore on and the wine pitchers emptied, the karaoke performances grew sloppier. I earned a number of fans at my table, thanks to my adept chopstick skills and my willingness to sample the white wine made from maize, sticky rice, and sorghum (harsh and foul-tasting, with an odd pineapple aftertaste and an alcohol content of 42 percent). Our table was visited by countless revelers, all wanting to toast us. “Ganbei!” they hollered (literally “empty your cup” in Chinese).
Toward the end of the celebration, marveling at the gaudy red and gold décor and fanning away cigarette smoke, I got up to chat with the only Malawians in the room, two waiters dressed in crimson tunics.

“Hey, bambo, what do you think of all this?” I asked.

The first one, another Richard, cringed. “I don’t like the singing so much,” he said.

Davidson, the second waiter, was more direct. “This is boring,” he said. He went on to question the order of the courses (“why do they serve the soup last?”) and the peculiar food items (“the only things from Malawi are the fish and the soft drinks”). Then he had words for me. “I want you to be my friend. Can I have your phone number?”

Dave overhead this as he slipped out the door. “Just the first step to a marriage proposal,” he quipped.

Yep, this is Africa.