Each time the President’s motorcade passed on the M1 right next
to our village, we used to line up along the road, arms stretched, hoping
against hope, that the god who sat inside the biggest, shiniest black car with
the words “Mercedes-Benz” emblazoned at the tip of its bonnet might drop some
manna in the form of kwacha notes. At the same time, we would shout: “A Ngwazi!
Conqueror of Conquerors!” We got nothing for our troubles. Occasionally, we
would be lucky to see a mighty hand waving behind the darkest window-glasses I
had ever seen – so tinted that now I think it was our own imagination waving
back at us.
The siren would blare, clearing the way for the President. Mada
and I used to argue:
“The convoy has twenty-nine cars and sixteen motor-cycles,” I
would say.
“No, Chiko, I have counted thirty cars and fifteen motorcycles.”
“You always get the numbers wrong!”
“I am always right. Like the President.”
My father would sometimes hear us. “Shut up, Chiko!” he’d bark.
“Do not mention the Ngwazi’s name in vain.”
My father was one of the President’s fervent supporters. He had
a collarless shirt, sky-blue in colour, one hundred percent cotton, with many
faces of the President printed on it. Under each colourful portrait were the
words “Peace, Prosperity and Progress.” The shirt opened in a V below the neck.
It had no buttons. It was slightly oversized, but it was his most treasured
possession.
Whenever my mother washed his clothes, father never forgot to
give one instruction: “Don’t mix the shirt with the other clothes. The face of
the President might get stained.” He had other shirts, but “the shirt” was only
one.
My father belonged to the President’s political party, to a wing
called “Young Democrats.” To be frank, youth had nothing to do with the wing.
Though father could not remember the year of his birth, Eda, my sister, first
born, was married, had eight children, and one of the children was also already
married and had a child of her own. In spite of being the youngest in a family
of eleven, “born yesterday” as father would put it, I was able to tell that my
father could not be young.
One day the President held a rally at Bwanali. We all went
there, the whole village, young and old, even the sick, except the man we all
called Chidakwa, the Drunkard, though he no longer took alcohol due to medical
reasons. He earned his name in those days when he used to drink like a thirsty
fish, after which he would stand in the middle of the village in the quiet of
the night and shout: “The President says our lives are changing. The only life
that is changing is his. Who has forgotten that he owned only one second-hand
car, a Datsun, bought from Dubai, the time he took over the presidency?” Nobody
risked picking an argument with the drunken Kachingwe because he never stopped
talking until victory. Sometimes he would go on long after the other person had
shut up. Perhaps, I thought, Chidakwa hasn’t come to the rally to avoid picking
an argument with the President. Days before the rally, the radio had spoken of
a man who’d just been arrested. His crime was that he’d criticized the
President for appointing to high government positions only people from his
tribe. This must have scared Chidakwa.
All the villages in the surrounding areas went to Bwanali. My
father, together with Mada’s, wearing their blue shirts, left us in the crowd
to go and carry the posters of the President, to lift them above their heads
while singing praise songs as the President arrived at the venue of the Party.
The crowd was so huge. Mada and I did not see the president. We did not see the
dances of the women. We could hear the gudum-gudum-gudum-gudum of the drums and
the beautiful singing of the women. But the tall adults blocked our view, so we
were not able to see the actual dance. Nevertheless, Mada and I still had
talking points upon returning home:
“The most beautiful dance was by the women from Ntcheu Town,”
he’d say.
“But you didn’t see them! How were you able to tell the
difference?”
“The beauty of their songs, hey! A good dance comes from a good
song.”
“By your standards, the women from Kasungu were far better
then.”
“Ah, those ones! I didn’t like their songs. Salima women were
far much better.”
The arguments would go on and on, until all the towns whose
women had come to dance for the President were analyzed. In the end, we agreed
to disagree and returned home, tired and hungry, because there was no lunch
provided at the President’s rally, though the invitation that came through the
megaphone on a car moving slowly along the M1 had said we were all expected at
the venue before twelve noon, thereby giving us legitimate expectation that if
the rally were to go beyond lunch-hour, the President might give us lunch. The
President came late, the dances went on forever, and the speech, oh, the
speech! He went on and on about how he had changed our lives. He spoke about
strange things, like how ‘inflation’ had gone down and how the ‘GDP’ had gone
up, to which the gathering cheered loudly. Malawi was now a rich nation, he’d
said. We were all rich, rich, did we understand? It seemed the adults
understood what he meant, for they clapped hands and ululated, calling him “A
Ngwazi! A Ngwazi!” Some women sang as part of the applause: “The Conqueror of
Conquerors is the Government.” Only to have the President contradict them in
his next line: “You the people are the Government. You are the ones to make or
to break this Government. You are rich. To be rich, you start with the mind.
Once you tell your mind that you’re poor, you’ll remain poor forever.”
I went back home scratching the back of my head. I did not quite
get the President, though the adults seemed to have understood him very well.
If we were rich, why was it that we rarely ate meat in the home? If we were not
poor, why did we walk on bare, heavily cracked feet?
Father had come back with what substituted the shirt as his most
treasured possession: the latest portrait of the President. In this, the
President had grown fatter than in the other one, which meant he ate well. He
had grown a beard, a small beard, a goatee to be exact. His hair was much
darker in the latest portrait. It was no longer gray. He was ageing in reverse.
He still wore the black jacket, red necktie and white shirt. The spectacles
were the same, they still covered a sizeable fraction of his face. He was not
smiling.
“Don’t hang it there!” Father cautioned my mother. “Chiko might
reach for it and break it. Bring it to me.” I didn’t understand why father
suspected I might be mischievous, considering I had left the earlier portrait
alone over the years.
He put the President beyond everybody’s reach, high up there,
towering above all of us. I noticed that it was hung above the lovely portrait
of Jesus Christ on the Cross.
There were times father’s obsession with politics troubled my
mother greatly. In the evening, I could hear them arguing in their room:
“No, Ganizani, this is becoming too much!” that was mother. “How
can you go about attending each and every political rally? Yesterday, you were
at the Speaker of Parliament’s, today you’ve just returned from the Vice
President’s. Hardly before your buttocks have warmed the stool, you are up again,
off to the Minister Without Portfolio’s tomorrow. When shall you have the time
to join me in tilling the maize garden?”
“You have to understand, Esinati, that my role as a Young
Democrat is critical for the party in the on-coming general elections. All this
will end after the general elections. But for now, I have to remain visible in
the party. Maybe the big men might notice me and give me some position. We
could then move from the village to the city, to a big house with running water
and electricity. Don’t you admire such life?”
“Cut out that nonsense! You know very well you’re not of the
Ngulu tribe. You’re wasting your time. All positions go to the President’s
people. When the rainy season is over, the ruling party will not give you even
a single bag of maize flour. Only then shall you realize how much time you have
wasted.”
“Don’t talk like that, Esinati. Don’t let the Opposition’s
propaganda get the better of you. The President is a fair and impartial man who
appoints people to positions based on merit. There is no nepotism in his
appointments.”
“I don’t want us to start mentioning examples. In fact, I don’t
want us to talk politics at all. I want you to come with me to the garden after
the third cockcrow tomorrow. We shall till the field the whole day, the whole
week and the whole month. You will only resume with your rallies after I am
satisfied that we are not facing the danger of starvation.”
Father was silent.
But, come the following morning, he found a way of sneaking out
of the house, to the Member of Parliament’s rally, leaving mother sulking.
It took a whole week of mother’s refusal to talk to father
before he relented. By that time, we were well behind everybody else in
preparing our gardens before the arrival of the rains. Still, when the
dignitary was big enough, such as the Provincial Governor or a Cabinet
Minister, father had a way of persuading mother to allow him to attend the
rally. “This one is the last,” he would always say. He could travel to such
distant places as Mponela and Madisi to play cheerleader for the party. He
spent the little money he had on transport and lunch, but that never seemed to
bother him at all.
“Can’t you be like Mada’s father?” I heard mother say once. “He
does not overdo these things. He is a ruling party supporter, yes, but he is
not a fanatic.”
“If Mada’s father is your idea of the best husband one can have,
why don’t you marry him?” Father responded angrily.
“Be reasonable, Ganizani. I didn’t say I wanted him for a
husband. But he puts family welfare before party support. He prepares his maize
field before devoting himself to party work. Unfortunately, you do otherwise.
This is not good for us as a family.”
It was father’s turn to give mother the silent treatment for a
whole week.
The President’s announced trip to Kasungu unlocked father’s
lips. “Wash the shirt,” he said. “Tomorrow we will stand along the road to
cheer His Excellency.”
We lined up along the M1. The President was coming from Kasungu
town, where he’d gone to officially launch the campaign for another term in
office. There was nothing these days my father spoke about, except the
President’s talking points. Sometimes he’d get them all wrong. He’d say, for
instance, that the inflation was going up and the GDP was going down. Since it
appeared nobody really knew what these things were, nobody cared, so I stopped
correcting him after a couple of attempts.
Father was standing across the road, talking to Mada’s father
and other “Young Democrats.” They carried portraits of the President in their
hands. They wore blue shirts. Mada and I sat on the other side, with other boys
and girls of the village, none of whom was old enough to be called “Young
Democrats.” On the same side as us was Chidakwa, the Drunkard. He wore a torn,
fading yellow cotton shirt – the uniform of the opposition – with a heavily
patched, black pair of trousers. “I want my shirt to make a statement to the
President,” I heard him mumble.
“The Ngwazi will win,” father was saying. “He’ll trounce his
opponents with a big margin.”
“That will happen only because in our country, the President
always wins,” Chidakwa answered back from our side.
I could clearly see a deep frown on my father’s face. “Are you
suggesting the President will steal this election?”
“No, but I am only saying the truth.”
“Listen, Chidakwa. The work of the President’s hands will speak
for him. The voters are not stupid. They all see what a great man he is. He has
a vision for our country.”
Chidakwa, visibly annoyed, said: “Show me his one significant
achievement from the day he took power, apart from changing the colours of our
flag.”
“Can’t you see for yourself? Open your eyes, Chidakwa. Inflation
is up, GDP is down and our lives have changed . . .”
“What is GDP?”
“Don’t be deliberately blind to the President’s achievements,
Chidakwa. You people in the opposition want to oppose literally everything!”
“But what is GDP?” Chidakwa insisted.
At that precise moment, the siren wailed to signal the approach
of the President’s motorcade. The wail drowned the voices. Father lifted his
poster higher, chanting, “A Ngwazi womwewo, kuti wa, wa, wa!” Mada’s father and
the rest joined in. “Go! Go! Go! Our one and only Conqueror of Conquerors!”
Chidakwa stood silent and pensive. He only yelled once: “Traitor! Nepotist!
Corrupt fat cat!” as the President’s car – always in the middle of the
motorcade – drew closer. Very few people paid attention to what Chidakwa had
said. We were all focused on the cars.
“I am on the twentieth car!” I shouted to Mada. “Let’s get the
arithmetic right this time!”
“Yes,” he answered. “Twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five . .
.”
“There are thirty vehicles indeed,” I conceded.
“I told you so,” Mada said in triumph.
“Did the President wave?”
“I was too busy counting to notice.”
Father began to cross the road. “Chidakwa,” he said, “I am
coming to you to conclude the debate we had . . .”
He was in the middle of the road when the President’s
thirty-first car – a Hummer – appeared from nowhere at great speed. Father
screamed, tried to jump off the road but it was too late. He was hit. We saw
him fly to one side of the road, his portrait to the other. I was the first to
dash to where he lay. He bled through the mouth and the nose. “Abambo!” I
shouted, crying. “Father!”
There was no response.
I looked up. The car did not stop. I stared sadly as it
disappeared round the corner.
“He is still breathing,” Mada’s father said. “Let’s rush him to
Kamuzu Central Hospital.” The crowd was now surrounding us. Mada’s father’s
hand pressed on my father’s chest several times. He stood up and stepped aside.
He said: “A car, quick. We’re running out of time!” He emphasized ‘time’ by
tapping his right forefinger on the left wrist where a watch, if he had one,
would have been.
“There is no car,” someone said in the crowd.
“Is my husband alright? Is he fine? O God!” Mother said, pushing
her way into the crowd. She was crying. She leaned beside my father, opposite
me, shaking him by the shoulder while calling his name: “Ganizani! Ganizani!”
“Let’s rush him to the hospital, I said!” Mada’s father barked
the orders. “His heart is still beating. He will be fine.”
“But there is no car,” Chidakwa spoke.
“Get the ox-cart! The ox-cart please!”
There were four of us: father, mother, Mada’s father and I.
Mother and I cried all the way to the Kamuzu Central Hospital. Mada’s father
kept reassuring us: “Don’t worry. He’ll be fine.” The oxen were so slow. Mother
kept praying: “Oh, God, Ganizani must not die. Ganizani must not die! Please,
Jesus Christ!”
It took forever to reach the hospital. By the time we arrived,
the blanket on which father lay was heavily soaked in blood. The ox-cart was
slowly driven to the entrance written “Emergency Cases Only.” Men in white
rushed to us.
“Accident?” one of them asked.
Mada’s father nodded and explained quickly.
We clambered out as they jumped in to lift my father. They put
him on a stretcher. They began to run down a corridor. We all ran behind them.
“Intensive Care Unit” flashed ahead. The men disappeared in
there. Mother followed. A burly man, “Pasimalo Security” labeled on his shirt,
blocked Mada’s father and I. “Only one guardian per time in the ICU,” he said.
“Besides, minors are not allowed.” He shut the door in our faces.
I stood in the corridor with Mada’s father, waiting.
It was the amplified, inconsolable wail from my mother as the
door to the ICU opened that revealed all was not well. A nurse holding her by
the hand led her out of the ICU. A man hovered behind them.
“Are you guardians of Ganizani Desmond?” the man spoke.
“Yes.”
“I am Dr Sam Dolo. I just wanted to brief you that you brought
the deceased a little too late to the hospital. He died on arrival due to
excessive bleeding. If only you had rushed . . .”
I did not hear the rest because my ears were blocked by my own
sobbing.
We buried my father on the day the President threw a lavish
party to celebrate his seventy-seventh birthday, according to what we heard on
the radio. The whole village contributed to buy two bamboo mats that served as
a coffin for my father’s body. Mada’s father, representing the ruling party,
spoke warmly about how the President and the Party were deeply, deeply saddened
by the loss of such a great supporter. They sincerely hoped that Ganizani
Desmond’s soul would rest in eternal peace.
In the evening, Mada’s father led a team of the ruling party
supporters to our house to offer their condolences. They also brought something
wrapped in a blue cloth. “It’s the same old one,” Mada’s father said. “It
survived the accident.” Mother unwrapped it. True, the President’s portrait had
come out unscathed. Mother thanked them as they said their goodbyes and left.
She hung the portrait in the place father used to hang it.
The following day, when mother was away to the village well, I
grabbed the stool, reached for the portrait and brought it down, to the place
where the painting of Jesus Christ on the Cross was. I put Jesus above the
President.
Still I was not contented. On the third day, I took the
President and buried him in the garbage dump behind our house. I passed urine
right on top of the mound under which the President lay. From that day onwards,
I never lined up along the M1 again, no matter how hard Mada tried to persuade
me.
Stanley Kenani is a
Malawian writer currently based in Geneva
