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.