First Lesson

“Hey Alex, that’s not the way to think. In God’s eyes we’re all equal.” I said, trying to appeal in vain to his African sense of religiosity.

 “It’s true you are poor, but you’re young, healthy and strong, and you’re intelligent. You must believe in yourself and stop believing in all the things that beat you down, and if you really want, I mean really want, things will change.”

As I spoke, Alex’s attention seemed riveted, as if to a truth heard for very the first time; and it seemed his demeanor had changed, from one of despondency to hope, as though the seeds of my words, nourished by the longings of his heart were germinating before my eyes. And I knew that for both of us nothing would ever be the same again.

“Do you want to be an artist, I mean learn to draw? I can teach you.”

At this suggestion his eyes widened with a look of excitement, bordering on disbelief.

“ Can I do that? Will you teach me, really?” He said, searching my face for signs of insincerity.

“If you really want to learn, if you’re prepared to work hard and persevere, because perseverance is the main thing; to be able to keep going; to keep your goal in sight no matter what other people say or think; you just keep going on an adventure, leaving behind what you know and discovering something new.”

The first lesson began. I explained that drawing and painting were one thing, but more important was how you did that thing. This was the art of the art. We talked for two or three hours. I explained line, tone, light and colour, contrast and visual storytelling. I explained the world, not as he knew it but how he would learn to know it. It was enough for one day, and we arranged to meet the following morning; and after that we met everyday. While I drew, building up a visual diary of the village, he was at my side, watching intently, hanging on every mark I made. Curiously, he knew even before I did when a drawing was finished. “You’ve got it” he would shout. At first I would carry on but, then I soon learned to trust his judgment.

Shaggy's Long Goodbye: For Whom The Bell Tolls

Shaggy's Long Goodbye: For Whom The Bell Tolls: “I’m just a useless, skinny African.” Alex said. It was a familiar story, but this time there was a possibility I could play s...

For Whom The Bell Tolls

“I’m just a useless, skinny African.” Alex said.

It was a familiar story, but this time there was a possibility I could play some part in it, besides being an on looker. I was beginning to ache from sitting too long on the hard cement porch and, with my mind bleary from the heat, the machinery of my thoughts moved slowly, but something was beginning to take shape. As Alex unburdened himself, laying before me a picture of hopelessness, he seemed so weak, so pitiful; and there was something in the frankness of his admissions that compelled me to want to help him.

With Alex’s permission I began to draw his portrait. As I mapped the line of his neck down to his slightly hunched shoulders, I made a mental inventory of his dress and posture: soiled, stained white shirt unbuttoned to the waist; faded, threadbare jeans rolled to the knee; back propped against a pillar, with one leg crooked and the other stretched out along the porch with his hand resting on it. As I drew him, his gaze turned shyly away from the glare of my scrutiny. I turned my attention to the background, and the receding diagonals of the porch and wall punctuated by two cane-screened windows, and an open doorway leading into the dark interior of the house. To the other side of Alex, standing forlornly on the bare, baked-mud yard, a yellow plastic jerry-can, and a tall wooden vessel for pounding cassava, seemed to deride with indifference the momentousness of the situation. I began to wash in some in colour, tentatively, and was just about to add a pale umber for Alex’s skin tone, when I hesitated, and decided instead to leave his skin white. With that, pictorial harmony was achieved, and the sketch finished.


If earlier my thoughts had moved like the second hand of a clock, now they raced round and round like the tiny hands of a chronometer. Then as if a bell had suddenly been rung, the following words ran through in mind: “….any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bells tolls; it tolls for thee."


They were the words of John Donne, the 17th century English visionary. To me they seemed an expression of hope that arises from the idea that we are all connected, as one; and at that moment I knew an adventure had begun.

Shaggy's Long Goodbye: Full Life Sentence

Shaggy's Long Goodbye: Full Life Sentence: Although Alex had been bold enough to seek me out, in his company an impression was forming of someone with little self-confiden...

Full Life Sentence

Although Alex had been bold enough to seek me out, in his company an impression was forming of someone with little self-confidence. It was as if his belief in his ability to influence the world around him had diminished, practically to zero. I had met many Africans with this mindset. Lack of access to education and opportunities seemed to be the defining factors. It was an indiscriminate form of discrimination, and I wondered if it really was an accident that so many people were caught in its trap. While lack of education severely limited people’s prospects, and absence of reading material kept them intellectually starved, lack of opportunity condemned them to wither away in isolation. It was as if the rest of the world really had forgotten about them. While for them the rest of the world, with its seeming freedoms and opportunities, assumed fairy tale proportions, and a place to escape to at almost any cost. For Alex, if he could only get to the nearest towns of Nkata Bay, or Mzuzu, that were just half a day's journey from Ruarwe, but without money might as well have been a continent away.

The line where the sky met the Lake, interrupted twice a week by the arrival of the Ilala, defined the monotony of Alex’s life in Ruarwe, because for him to be born there meant to rot his life away there. It was a full life sentence, and Alex was still only 21. One of a generation that had had the carpet of parental support pulled out from under them by the spread of HIV AIDS in Sub Saharan Africa. With both parents dead by the time Alex had barely reached his teens, all his future prospects were done for. Fortunately, his aunt had stepped in to take on the farming and housekeeping that his mother would have done, but the loss of his father’s earnings had meant a sudden, dramatic drop in living standards for the whole family. 

With the going price of a wife at ten cows, or the equivalent in cash, marriage prospects were extremely slim for a young man of limited means, like Alex. Capital was also needed, either in money or in property, in the way of a house and farmland to grow crops on. At some point your children would need school uniforms, because without them they would not be admitted to school. For young children there was also a likelihood of disease and death, due to lack of access to affordable medical treatment or medicines, including vaccines.  If women were poor, often because of parental pressure to leave home, they invariably married young into a life full of toil and giving birth, because except for prostitution there was no other way open to them. Allot was wrong with The Warm Heart of Africa, and many questions were begging to be answered, but it seemed right then that one simple answer would do.

Shaggy's Long Goodbye: First Meeting

Shaggy's Long Goodbye: First Meeting: One day I was walking along the beach into the village, when a gruff male voice called out to me from behind the grass screens o...

Shaggy's Long Goodbye: Second Meeting

Shaggy's Long Goodbye: Second Meeting: I decided to explore the village a little further and took a path that left the beach behind Casino bar. The path was steep; with the sun ...

Second Meeting

I decided to explore the village a little further and took a path that left the beach behind Casino bar. The path was steep; with the sun blazing down mercilessly from a clear noonday sky, my clothes were soon moist and sticking to me with perspiration. Crumbling buildings projected, like rotting, stained teeth out of the ground. Scrawny chickens scratched on bare, baked-mud yards, watched over by nursing mothers and toothless, clouded-eyed gogos. Naked children, their noses clogged with thick yellow mucus gazed at me with watery eyes as I passed by.
The path dipped in front of a large house. It was the kind of house, with a long deep porch for sitting out under, that in style was more European than African; and was essentially for those who could afford an iron sheet roof and plastering of interior and exterior walls. But an air of dishevelment and neglect hung over this house, like a murky veil of decay, cultivated by exposed patches of mud-brick, where the plaster had fallen away, and mildewed white-wash, eaten pale by the sun, through which the ochre-grey cement grinned, grimly. The house was set away from others, on higher ground with its back to the hillside, which rose steeply up behind it, sown with plots of cassava and maize between jagged rocky outcrops.

A family was having their midday meal on the porch, and there again was Alex. He crouched down and offered me his hand in greeting. It was a clammy hand; a damp dew coated its palm. The fingers were long and slender that gripped mine, with a quick, wiry strength and pulled me up on to the porch. There I was offered a place to sit, along with his family on the hard cement, since there were no chairs. A handsome, fit looking woman in her forties, whom I later discovered was Alex’s aunt, passed me a plate of nsima, boiled pumpkin leaves and usipa; and a bowl of water to wash my hands in preparation for eating with my fingers, as was the custom. Alex’s younger sister could not have been much more than a couple of years his junior, and his young brother was still just a child. Alex’s elderly grandmother, who he later explained had been left lame after a stroke, sat to one side, propped up against the wall of the house.

First Meeting

One day I was walking along the beach into the village, when a gruff male voice called out to me from behind the grass screens of what was then the only building on the beach, Casino bar: a small, grass roofed construction of unfired mud bricks, that had begun to crumble under the inundations of successive rainy seasons. Casino’s claustrophobic, cave-like interior was where the young men of Ruarwe gathered, to sit perched on chairs without seats that sunk at odd angles into the sand floor. There they would listen, over and over again, to the same clunking sound of their favourite Malawian reggae songs, coming sluggish and distorted from the worn out cassettes.
“Hello, how are you? My name is Alex. Remember that. My name is Alex”, the voice said. Through a gap in the grass screens I caught sight of a flash of bright white teeth and a beaming smile. A day or two later, when I was walking in the village, with cries of “mzunga, mzunga, mzunga,” (white man), coming from a crowd of children following along behind me, I called back to them: “mfiba, mfiba, mfiba,” (black man). This had the desired effect of creating a puzzled silence, that gave me a few moments respite from their calls ringing in my ears. The silence was immediately broken by a loud cackle of laughter that rose up from a group of men sitting near by playing Bao. There amongst them was Alex, wearing the same beaming smile. Clearly it was he who had been so amused by what I had said to the children.