Opinion | Could the tables turn?
Many old men told me they had once worked on the mines. Many of their sons were down there, underground, at the time.
It was sometime in the 1980s.
My wanderlust for more Africa was limited on a “green mamba” apartheid-era South African passport.
Malawi, however, welcomed South African tourists.
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I was in the far north of that little country beside a long, thin deep lake that looked over to the Livingstone mountains of Tanzania. Longing to venture further north, I had hitched a lift with two other South Africans whose car had broken down.
Two Dutch motorcyclists stopped to help. They had “TX” number plates, Back then, a number plate beginning with a “T” meant the vehicle was registered in the Transvaal. Only, these bikes were from Tanzania.
In my youthful naivete, I asked what they were doing there.
“Are you with the Peace Corps or something?”
That was the only foreign aid organisation I had heard of.
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“No, we are with the ANC,” one of them replied before kick-starting his bike and disappearing up a mountain pass towards Livingstonia Mission where the view to Tanzania is even better.
Three little white South Africans had their eyes on stalks.
“I think we’re a bit far north,” said one.
It was the most exciting moment of an exciting lakeside experience.
Further inland, on the Vipya Plateau, while travelling by bus I thought I was beginning to understand the odd word of the local chatter around me. Then the bus approached a town with a very Zulu-sounding name: Ekwendeni.
It even connected in my mind to the name of my birth town: Empangeni!
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This was home to the Ngoni people, who are of partly Zulu descent and whose ancestors moved north during the Mfecane, often fighting their way up there. Today, most of them speak Tumbuka or Chichewa.
One didn’t need to travel that far up the long, thin country to hear of a connection to South Africa.
Many old men told me they had once worked on the mines. Many of their sons were down there, underground, at the time.
On a later visit, after Pretoria’s friend Hastings Kumuzu Banda had stood down, I visited his Kumuzu Academy, “Eton in Africa”, as it was often dubbed by journalists who were critical of the Latin and Ancient Greek it taught.
Banda, a fierce dictator, had wanted to create a school in Malawi that could match the best boarding schools in Britain, so that gifted Malawian children would not have to leave the country to receive a worldclass education.
While on my tour there, I heard that every Malawian child went there free, based on merit and every primary school child in Malawi was eligible. There were fee-paying pupils there too, including foreigners, among them South Africans whose parents wanted to get them out of the burning townships.
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The Malawi-South Africa link is deep and it spans decades, as do links between here and other countries to the north.
An old school friend who came to South Africa as a teenager from Kenya, called me recently to say he was interested in returning to his birth country for a visit, adding that it had enjoyed “close to six percent economic growth”.
One also hears bits and bobs of information about Zambia, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Angola “picking up”. All this while we wallow in our economic growth of not much more than one percent during an era of not controlling our borders the ordinary way.
Should South Africa continue along this economic trajectory — or tragedy — could it mean that one day economic forces will drive people north?
And if that does happen, any resentment would surely not be only because of competition for resources, but also a bitter history that is brewing right now.
• Duncan Guy is a senior journalist and sub editor at The Witness.
