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.