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Living in Chilumba forty years ago - A Teacher’s Perspective – by Lorna Hobson

Robin Gray's articles about road building in Northern Malawi unleashed a flood of memories for me of a wonderful year I spent in Chilumba in the Northern Region back in 1969.

My appointment as a teacher to Malawi under the auspices of VSO began one of the most memorable two and a half years of my life. In the late 1960s, as a starry-eyed graduate in English from Edinburgh University, I was delighted to find that of all the parts of the world VSO might have sent me they had selected Central Africa. Africa, which always seemed so far away in those days, had an added attraction for me personally as I was brought up on my father’s tales of his safaris in the Kenyan bush in the 1930s. Initially I was appointed to Soche Hill Secondary School on the campus it shared with the College above Limbe and worked there for 15 months, but the highlight for me was an extra year when I was stationed at Chilumba Secondary School.

I was the first British volunteer to be posted to the school, which had only received secondary statu My house at Chilumba Day Secondary School s a couple of years earlier, and initially I shared one of the regulation staff houses with a Peace Corps volunteer whose heart, however, was not in the place and who left for home a few weeks later. My household then consisted of myself and my dog and the staff who seemed to ‘come with the house’, but lived nearby. There were two: Nya Nkwacha, a woman of small build but amazing energy, who washed, ironed and cooked for me on the wood-burning stove, taught me some Chitumbuka and with whom I shared many a laugh; and Wilson, a man from the village who worked as a part-time ‘hewer of wood and drawer of water’. He was also very useful in emergencies, such as the occasion we found a python coiled around the inside of the toilet bowl digesting the chicken which was subsequently found swallowed whole inside it. One of Wilson’s jobs was to carry water to the house from a nearby bore-hole and pump it up to the tank above the Skinning a Python found in the house stove which he kept going with wood gathered from the bush behind the school. The value of all this labour was really brought home to me when once I returned early from the school holiday to offer hospitality to various teacher friends, while the staff were still on leave, and had to fend for myself for a week. While food, candles and paraffin supplies were running low, my resourcefulness was put to the test to cater for my (nonetheless welcome) house-guests!

In my very first week at Chilumba, I was delighted by an unexpected visit from Chinese workers from the Hara Agricultural Scheme, offering me a wonderful selection of fruit and vegetables. Thereafter they called weekly, so I was never short of fresh food (mangoes, of course, could be gathered freely at the lakeshore in season). Nya Nkwacha also bought chambo and other fish for me at the lakeshore and I remember that eggs formed a staple in my diet. I seldom bothered with meat which seemed pricey and unnecessary. I remember, however, walking with a Health Science class the mile to the market at the main road to watch an autopsy carried out by a health inspector on a freshly slaughtered cow - my purpose being to help teach students about germs and the possibility of disease in food sources, and also understand something of the organs of the body and the alimentary canal.

The teacher I most clearly recall was the headmaster, Mr Mvula, a friendly easy-going character, happy to see his teachers happy, who gave me a fairly free rein in the classroom, since I had learnt the requirements of the curriculum and exam system at Soche Hill the previous year. Another colleague was the history teacher, a man who, I was shocked to find, had to support his large famil Impromptu Dancing at School y on the same monthly salary as I, supposedly a volunteer, received as ‘pocket money’. I would visit his wife of an evening and offered her some of the delicious fruit and vegetables the Chinese brought me. However, dietary variety seemed not to be important to her and she would only ever take cabbages. She told me that her youngest child became poorly whenever the moon was full. Like every mother, she loved to speak to me of her little children and their development, and I loved to hear her.

On the school compound, although the staff houses and the science teaching block were fairly new, the classroom where I taught was part of an old long low building with, initially, unglazed windows. Later glass was installed and we were able to start building up a class library. The corrugated iron roof made it feel like an oven in the afternoons and during the rainy season the clatter of rain was so deafening that speech was impossible! Of course there was no electricity and I clearly remember marking students’ books by tilley lamp of an evening and using candles to read in bed. Sometimes I wouldn’t bother to carry a lamp from room to room when I moved round the house, though I was cured of this when I walked barefoot one evening into the dark kitchen and discovered I had narrowly escaped treading on a scorpion. I managed to capture it in a jar and next day presented it, a live specimen, as a gift to a grateful Science teacher.

Something I greatly valued as a teacher was being invited to students’ homes. On more than o Terracing in the Misuku Hills ne occasion a fellow teacher and myself were invited to Kaporo, north of Karonga, for a two-day visit. There we were greeted by the village headman and treated as honoured guests.. No effort was spared for our comfort (for example, we were given a brick rather than a mud hut to sleep in, and mosquito nets were rigged up for our use). We were deeply touched by such kindness and by the gift of chicken we were given on parting. Among other things, we watched the malepenga and other tribal dances being performed, were shown how to play the bangwe (a seven-string harp which fits in a gourd), learnt to knot rope to make fishing nets and - a real thrill for me - we went out in a dug-out canoe. However, the trip that stands out most in my mind was a visit to the Misuku Hills in the far north, bordering Tanzania. Even getting to the student’s village took many hours; we walked till the sun set, suffusing the peaks with pink light, while the homely smells of the village fires filled the air. We had many happy carefree days high up in this beautiful landscape, always with fantastic views, and we visited different villages, wherever our student had relatives for us to meet and greet in the local dialects he taught us. Each village Brickmaking in the Misuku Hills conveyed the feel of a caring community, proud and self-reliant. The houses were well looked after and neat, the slopes terraced for cultivation; we saw bricks being made with straw and mud, a joint effort by the community, and a primary school bright with decorative daubs of colour.

Of Malawi’s other mountains I have to admit that my first and strongest love was Mlanje. I clearly remember my first sight of it from Soche Hill forty odd miles away, rising majestically from the plain, the plateau wreathed in early morning cloud except for the peak of Sapitwa itself emerging above. I never tired of that sight nor the approach to it by road with its seemingly impenetrable walls rising above the brilliant green of the tea plantations. I climbed it on several occasions with friends, thanks to one ex-Peace Corps teacher at Soche Hill College who delighted in organising weekend trips for those who shared his passion. We stayed at the Luchenya hut most often, but I remember Tuchila and of course Chambe; we enjoyed the varied vegetation, the Mlanje cedars with their heady aroma; we walked to a crater; I remember sleeping outside under the stars (we kept our camp fire alight and had a dog to warn of the approach of a leopard or hyena); and of course I remember the refreshing dip in the pools at Likabula after descending from Chambe.

As for the northern plateaux, my first reaction to the Nyika was elation at the sight of those fine rolling hills and coniferous forests, the rocky outcrops and the rich-looking dark soil supporting a wealth of flowers. We saw numerous herds: zebra, antelope of various kinds, eland, reedbuck. . . and birds of prey soaring overhead. I returned on another occasion, but it rained almost continuously, reminding me of the Scottish Highlands! I also visited the Vipya Plateau where a VSO friend, a forester-cum-mountaineer, was stationed. Some of us climbed the rocky outcrop of Zumwanda, known to us as Elephant Rock, and I remember that at dusk we saw a leopard. On a return visit, shortly before Vipya Bill (as our friend was affectionately dubbed) left Malawi, he showed us a huge scaled contour model he had made of the Plateau - a pastime to while away his lonely evenings, but assuredly also a labour of love. It was truly impressive - in size but especially in detail and geographical precision. It had been prompted by a scheme of Dr Banda’s government for a railway line to Chintheche on the lakeshore in connection with a proposed paper-processing plant. I understand the scheme did not materialise in that form, but Bill’s model of the Vipya was to have been preserved and re-housed. I wonder if anyone knows whether that happened?

On several occasions I travelled the forty-five miles of ‘dirt’ road north to Karonga - a journey that on one occasion took the bus four hours! That would have been only months before the re-surfacing of that road mentioned by Robin Gray in this Newsletter. Also at that time there was no road to the south along the lakeshore beyond the foot of the escarpment: again the road that Robin had a hand in, through the South Rukuru valley, was still two years in the future. So apart from the dear old ‘Ilala’ (of happy memories for me - both for the trips on it and for its welcome arrival each weekend, mooring out in the bay) our main route south was via Livingstonia. So, many a time I enjoyed - sometimes endured! - the rough ride Robin mentions as unforgettable, between Livingstonia and Rumphi. I also of course experienced the thrill of the incredible escarpment road between the Livingstonia Mission and the lakeshore, that drops more than 3000 feet in 7 miles via 22 numbered hairpin bends (some of which required to be negotiated by a three-point turn). On one occasion our lorry, carrying the school team and supporters to a match at Livingstonia, had a puncture on the eleventh bend and to much merriment students and teachers spilled out over the road while its tyre was changed. Of course, it is just off this road that the breathtaking Manchewe Falls make their dramatic descent in a series of drops down the thickly vegetated precipice. At caves under the Falls, some of the Ngoni people are said to have once lived in concealment during a tribal conflict. It was there one afternoon, when a small group of us teachers was visiting these caves, that an unforgettable incident occurred. . .

. . . One of our number, a young British volunteer - presumably unfazed by tales we had heard of people plunging to a watery grave in the Falls - ventured recklessly out to the edge of the slippery rocks, camera in hand, for a better view of the 50-foot drop, leading to the main 200-foot fall. He lost his footing, clutched at an overhanging branch which, as if in slow motion, broke off, and vanished from our sight over the rushing sheet of water. Three of us who witnessed his disappearance stared at each other in shock and disbelief. The horror of that moment and of the subsequent afternoon, as help was sought from the village, was in a strange way mitigated for me, personally, by a sense of unreality. I had recently been reading Laurens van der Post’s ‘ Venture to the Interior’ in which he graphically describes, and reflects on, a young man being swept to his death when crossing the torrent of the Great Ruo on Mount Mlanje, and in my mind then the two incidents seemed uncannily similar. However, our story had a happier ending than van der Post’s: our man only fell over the lesser of the two main falls - and miraculously landed in a deep pool, about a yard in width, between rocks on to which he managed to pull himself, just short of the next edge and the main drop. By the time we could see him far below us, like a beached fish and waving weakly, drums had started to sound in the village and an hour later four wiry men of the Phoka tribe were making their way by a circuitous route through the undergrowth of the seemingly sheer precipice. Three hours later they emerged with our dazed and bruised friend slung in a blanket under a pole. That evening, after a rough ride to Ekwendeni in the back of a land-rover, the hospital x-ray showed, amazingly, no internal injuries or broken bones, and within days the lucky survivor was back in the classroom.

A Teaching Block at Chilumba DSS nyone who has lived near the lakeshore but sheltered from the breezes that waft across the lake will know how unbearable the heat becomes in October before the arrival of the rains. I recall a visit to the school by the MP for the area. Any assembly could only be held in the school playground near which there was a solitary tree. Naturally our illustrious visitor stood in its shade while the entire school, his audience, endured the ferocious sun. More sympathetic to the situation, on another occasion, was a school inspector who suggested a change to the times of the school day - from 6.50am until 11am. so as to spare the students the long midday walk back to their home or lodgings and then back once more to the furnace of the classrooms. In the event this was not a popular move and the change was eventually discontinued. How I welcomed the moment when the school day was over (for the Day Students at least; I had Night Classes later) and I could take my bike and, with my dog running beside me, cycle through villages, past mang Bringing in the Catch o trees and along beside the tall elephant grass, to the lake, for the refreshing coolness of its depths. Later there would be piles of workbooks to be marked by lamplight, then sleep to the background chorus from the nearby bush. . .

I count myself lucky to have lived in such a beautiful place, to have had the friendship of such welcoming people and to have been able to share with them the precious resources of this very special part of Africa.