FOR ZOMBA

There comes a time when, as Richard Washburn Child— former United States of America Ambassador to Italy; yes, he who wrote the foreword in Benito Mussolini’s ‘My Autobiography’— puts it, one reaches fourth to touch reality in himself, and finds that he himself has gone a little forward, isolated, determined, illusive, untouchable, just out of reach— onward!

Well, it must be that time.

One day, three years ago, I made Zomba my second home under the pinch of necessity.

But, then, the movement itself was just soup; the main dish was hope that, once I would stumble in the trenches of tertiary education, I would leave ignorance— ignorance and my own uncertainty— behind.

Well, it has happened. But it has not happened.

Why? Because where I went [Zomba]— which I thought was the future; more less like a forward movement— has only brought me back to what I left behind [in Blantyre]. That is, experience. Life’s experience.

So much so that, as I go back to Blantyre, turning my back on Zomba, I realise that the forward move I made has, through its lessons, only taken me back to ‘The behind’— the world that was supposed to remain behind. That world is not Blantyre; that world is life.

Now, I will let Benito Mussolini speak for me:

"I do not believe in the supposed influence of books. I do not believe in the influence which comes from perusing the books about the lives and characters of men.

For myself, I have had only one great teacher.

The book is life— lived.

The teacher is day-by-day experience.

The reality of experience is far more eloquent than all the theories and philosophies on all the tongues and on all the shelves.

I have never, with closed eyes, accepted the thoughts of others when they were estimating events and realities either in the normal course of things or when the situation appeared exceptional."

Now, I do not know what I am saying.

And, so, let me leave Zomba behind. To Blantyre; where I will know what to think, believe and say.

I do not know what I am saying!