Ahem
Ten minutes of light drizzle fell on the dusty ochre fields the morning after my arrival at Toleza Farm in Malawi, where I spent most of a month that is normally the hottest and driest of the year. Farm records show that virtually no rain had fallen there for nine months. However, gusts of hot wind had stormed and stomped around the farm the night before, causing some damage to a couple of trees in the compound. These were made safe and turned smartly into firewood by the farm’s security team within a few days. Windy but dry weather dominated the first few days of my stay, during which I did some tasks around the house and caught up on the latest developments and news from the farm’s managers and staff.
Nature has many tricks: one of them is to give plants in very dry or arid regions the deepest, richest, and most resplendent colours. Many of Malawi’s trees and bushes are flourishing like a hothouse carrousel during this most unforgiving part of the year. I enjoyed the quality of colours and scents on the route from Lilongwe, for example the jacarandas, many with a strong lilac purple colour that sparkled in the landscape. The jacaranda trees lined many of the avenues of Lilongwe, and some of the roads resembled the jumbled detritus of the Basler Fastnacht with purple and white flowers strewn around like autumn confetti.
Mango trees, wild and farmed across the whole sub-Saharan region, take this month to bring forth vast mountains of their fruit—sweet, juicy, and buttery. No wonder they get eaten so quickly—by monkeys, bats, birds, squirrels, and, finally, people. Hundreds of mangoes hang heavily even from small trees in every town and village like fat Christmas decorations.
Here and now do the eponymous flame trees show their flamboyance – bright orange flecks, yellow flickers, and red smudges that light up the hillsides even in daylight, often appearing next to the bustling fuchsia bougainvillea, producing gorgeous palettes of smeared colours. Then the frangipani’s white, pink, and yellow flowers exhale delicate evening perfume, best experienced while viewing a sunset panorama with a drink at hand.
In Lilongwe I visited my sister-in-law’s old friend Mama Kadzamira, her jovial nephew Datsilo, and met separately with Martin, the manager of a farm near Lilongwe. I then survived a four-hour hair-raising dash back to Toleza with a taxi driver desperate to finish the round trip before sunset. Some of his late swerves around the scattered potholes were terrifying.
Temperatures in the mid-30s became the rule after the first few days. The very high level of UV radiation stopped me from spending too much time outside each day. The farm’s whole animation was in suspension as everyone seemed to be waiting for a change of direction in the wind and, above all, for rain, whose arrival would kick off with renewed vigour the planting for this farming year after a poor harvest in the last. Sudden eruptions of ants bring the same message. In Ngoni culture it is believed that the call of Burchell’s Coucal, the “Rain Bird”, or in the local Ngoni (Zulu) – “ufukwe”, sounding like a cascade of bubbling water, foretells the arrival of rain. I heard it early one morning in mid-month and, sure enough, two separate drapes of rain followed within a day, refreshing the grass for a couple of hours but not quite enough to begin planting. A proper sousing is now predicted for early November.
The days were long but there was always plenty to do in the farm office, and while trying to stay frugal I managed to make myself some meals from the several tinned, dried, or fresh options available, as well as baking, unaided, my first loaf of edible bread. I also had lunch with the departing farm manager, Mike, and his wife Sue, at the Liwonde Safari Camp, otherwise known as “Freddie’s”, where we saw plenty of contented wildlife – ibex, waterbuck, antelope, baboon, vervet, and eland – in the Liwonde Nature Reserve from the observation platform.
I spent my last nights in Lilongwe on meetings and errands around town. I had a drink with Lilian, who runs an agricultural NGO and was a friend of Jessie and Jurrat’s from their early Bangladesh days. To recognise me, she had checked out my profile from social media, but I had grown a beard in the past four weeks. Also, when in the crowded Cantina bar in Lilongwe, I found that my phone could not connect to a viable phone network. The result was that for more than 45 minutes we sat in separate places waiting for each other. I had been looking for a single woman and she had been looking for a man without a beard.
I then stayed with Jessie’s other friends from their later Bangladesh days, Rob and Kate and their two young children Finn and Elle, before leaving for the UK. Unusually, I managed to sleep a couple of hours on the plane journeys to Addis Ababa and to London. From Heathrow I took a taxi back to Uckfield, where I enjoyed a takeaway dinner, had a game of Scrabble with Alli that ended in a dead heat, and in the evening found that my place in bed was to be taken by Jessie and Jurrat’s lodging Staffie, Jaxon, who always sleeps undercover. Being by then too tired to argue, I accepted my lot and slept in the spare bedroom for nine and a half hours. When you are tired, the bed is always comfortable.
Jessie and Jurrat arrived a day later from a unique cousins’ long weekend in Copenhagen and had dinner with us before staying the night and taking Jaxon home the next morning. These cousins’ events have certainly moved on a lot within a generation. Cousins’ meetings in my day were mostly in the car park of the Abergavenny Arms in Frant with a packet of crisps and an orange squash.
It’s all about connections, right?
Lionel