What's in a Name?
on Me Talk Pretty One Day (Malawi), 03/Nov/2008 15:14, 34 days ago
To the people who need help, I am‘brother’; to the people who have goods to sell, I am ‘friend’; to the strangers who pass me in the street, I am ‘sir’ and ‘mister’ and ‘boss’ and ‘donor’, though I do not think any of these names fit too well. To the children, I am simply ‘Mazungo’, a white-skinned stranger from a foreign land. Names are not important here. Not anymore. I learned that lesson on my first visit to one of Malawi’s overcrowded classrooms. The story follows…The child was nervous, everybody could see that. It was understandable given the circumstances. She had been the one chosen to answer the question. There were ninety-seven other children in the classroom that morning, but the teacher had asked her and her alone to stand.“You, stand up and tell us the answer!” And so she stood—isolated in a swelling sea of dirty blue school-shirts, adrift amongst the flowing waves of creased sapphire dresses. Ninety-seven other children—an entire ocean of learners—sat on the hard concrete floor in the quiet, disciplined way of Malawian schoolchildren everywhere, stared with eager eyes, listened with expectant ears. Ninety-seven other children sat and stared and listened. Ninety-seven other children and me. Worst of all, there was me. The Mazungo!She spoke. An answer. Too quiet. Few heard. The teacher admonished her with dark, gloomy eyes, encouraged the nameless child in a non-too-encouraging tone to try again. She tried again. Once more her voice failed her. The girl’s words were absorbed by a sinister silence that seemed to whirl within the dark confines of the small classroom’s stained, windowless walls. The ocean grew pensive in the teacher’s menacing stillness, swayed this way and that with nervous, fearful energy, a quiet omen of the storm yet to come. This was the calm and we all knew it. The girl had the answer but not the volume and we all knew that too. Why didn’t the teacher?Frustration growing, dark clouds forming, the teacher repeated the question, ordered the lonely figure to speak up, but her words again could not be heard; it was all she could do to remain standing there in the face of such gale-force hostility—forlorn and friendless, a treasure lost at sea. “Again!” barked the teacher with a violent snap of the fingers. No response. The daughter of the nameless generation stood amongst her unnamed peers and looked at the floor.It wasn’t always like this. In years gone by there were fewer children, far fewer children, more teachers. In years gone by, or so I’m told, you could pass a classroom and hear the many wonderful names of the Malawian people: Goodwin, Happy, Grace, Kayakangu, Gift, Webster, Chancy, Blessings, Chimwemwe. Not any more. There are too many children now, and too few who care.The pressures of teaching such a large class have proved too much for this one educator. All desire, all enthusiasm, all hope that perhaps once existed, now exhausted. And in a final gesture, fraught with the anger and exasperation of years of frustration, the teacher pointed across the classroom in my direction. The teacher pointed straight at me—never for a moment taking her scornful eyes off the young girl—and in a loud, booming, thunderous voice shouted, “That one! Tell that one!”The Mazungo, nameless too.The girl turned, looked at me with sad, doleful eyes that pulled at the strings of my heart. Slowly, painfully, she mouthed a few precious words. The silence remained unbroken and I could hear not a thing. So I smiled, and nodded.“Good answer,” I replied, and I wished that I knew the girl’s name.But it was enough.‘That one’ had spoken. The nameless girl sank and vanished once more into the vast, anonymous ocean of her peers. It was over.