The red earth of Malawi does not forget the footprints of its children. Even when the rain washes the surface clean, and the sun bakes the soil until it cracks like an old pot, the memory remains beneath.
I walked this path again after many years, the dust rising to greet my shoes like an old friend who recognizes you despite your changed clothes. They say a river never flows back to its source, yet here I was, walking upstream against the current of time, seeking the village of my birth.
In the days of my youth, this road was not merely a track for feet; it was a vein connecting the heart of the community. We did not walk alone. To walk alone was to invite the spirits of loneliness.
We moved in clusters, like weaverbirds returning to the acacia tree, shouting greetings that echoed across the miombo woodlands. Muli bwanji? the air seemed to ask. Tili bwino, we would answer, though often we were not fine, but in our culture, to admit suffering without cause was to burden the sun with clouds.
The village bwalo, the open meeting place, was once dominated by the great muula tree. Its branches were wide enough to shelter the secrets of a hundred families. Underneath it sat the elders, their faces mapped with the wrinkles of long rains and dry seasons. They did not speak hastily. Achebe taught us that words are like seeds; if you scatter them without care, they will not grow. Here, too, the elders believed that speech must be chewed before swallowing.
My grandfather, a man whose voice sounded like dry leaves rubbing together, would tell us stories of the lake, where the chambo fish shimmered like silver coins dropped by the ancestors.
He often said, “Mizu ya mtengo imafika kumene kuli madzi.” The roots of a tree reach where the water is. He meant that a person without knowledge of their origin is like a tree planted on stone; it may stand for a season, but it will fall when the wind blows hard. We sat on mats woven from reeds, eating nsima that steamed in the cool evening air.
The smell of woodsmoke and usipa fish was the perfume of our childhood. It was a simple life, but it was full. The drumming at night was not just sound; it was the heartbeat of the village, telling us that we were alive, that we were together.
But as I stood now in the bwalo, the muula tree was gone. In its place stood a concrete structure with a corrugated iron roof that glinted harshly under the sun. The silence was different then. It was not the peaceful silence of rest, but the hollow silence of absence.
The young people had gone to the cities, to Lilongwe or Blantyre, or further still, across the seas where the snow falls. They sent money home, yes, which built the concrete houses, but they did not send back their time.
A woman passed me carrying a basin on her head, walking with the graceful balance of our people. She nodded, a slight dip of the chin. Zikomo, I said softly. She looked at me, searching my face for a name, but found only a stranger. This is the tragedy of the memory lane; you remember everyone, but no one remembers you.
The world moves like a bicycle; if you stop pedaling, you fall. We had stopped pedaling the old ways, thinking the new wheels would carry us faster. Perhaps they did, but the journey was lonelier.
I walked to the edge of the village where the tobacco fields used to stretch green and fragrant. Now, some lay fallow, the soil tired. The colonial masters had wanted the leaf for their pipes, and we gave it, hoping for prosperity.
Prosperity came, but it wore a foreign coat. It bought radios and bicycles, but it sold the communal spirit. In the past, if a man’s roof leaked, the village repaired it before the rain fell. Now, a man waits for the water to drip inside his house before he calls a builder with money.
Yet, as the sun began to dip behind the hills, painting the sky in shades of purple and orange, I heard a sound. It was faint, carried on the wind. It was the sound of a drum. Not the loud, electric music of the towns, but the deep, wooden resonance of the ngoma. It came from the next valley. My heart quickened. The tree was gone, the concrete houses stood stiff and unyielding, but the rhythm remained.
I realized then that memory is not a place you visit; it is a fire you keep alive. The elders are dead, but their proverbs survive in the tongues of the grandchildren. The muula tree is cut, but its seeds are in the soil. To walk down memory lane is not to mourn what is lost, but to recognize what endures. I turned back toward the road, the red dust settling on my shoes once more.
I would leave again, for my life is in the city now, but I carried the village in my chest. As my grandfather would say, “Kamwa kandoko kanenele chinsinsi,” a small mouth reveals secrets. I would not speak much of what I saw, but I would keep the secret of the drum safe, knowing that as long as one person remembers the rhythm, the village never truly dies.
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Image: Nana Adwuma on Unsplash remixed