Slave Marks
One day, you will have a beer. You will not hurry the bottle. It will be undeserving — even disrespectful — of the new-fangled alcohol. Its content and taste will also be new to you — as new as your penis after circumcision. It will not be an expensive beer, just something comfortable not to remove its print when drinking in order to conceal its brand. But, it will be something you have never had before. You will be gentle in your sips like you would be gentle to a new lover you are trying to impress as a stranger to sex. It will almost feel like a religious ceremony drinking that beer. In many ways, it will be.
You will look at the bottle as if it’s a sacred relic and sip on it as gentle as the priest does to Jesus’ blood during mass. But, you will know, in the bottle you are drinking from, there is no plasma of Joseph’s son. It is just barley, water, hops and yeast, boiled and fermented to make a beer. Nevertheless, it will taste like it is drawing you to heaven like the Son of Man himself!
You will look up — at the bar TV. The beer will at this point be at the waist of the bottle. A soccer game will be playing. You will recall the game from last night — it will be a repeat of your team from Manchester playing. It would have been whipped. Watching it will feel like re-living a dental procedure. So you will lower your gaze to the light on your phone and there too pictures and clips of zebras being mocked will remind you about your team’s brutal ordeal.
Before you know it, the beer will be at its bare minimum — at the foot of the bottle. The thing about bars is that they are best enjoyed when you have a bottle in one hand. It does not have to be a beer. It could be anything — coke, water, sex-enhancement syrup. As soon as that bottle runs out you feel out of place. So your beer will run out, at some point. You will want to call for another one. You will not. You will not have the money to.
You will cherish every drop of beer in those times. Beer will be rare and expensive. In college you would crack open Malawi Gin and spill a little on the ground in honour of your ancestors. Now, you will not be that wasteful. After all, you will soon grasp that even though Malawi Gin was discovered in 1965 by discerning drinkers, your grandfather was not one of them. So, you will not bother him with new tastes he will loathe and give him a spinning hangover in his grave. And, again, you will come to a realisation that he was not buried here, at Sunrise Bar. He was buried at the north end of the country in Mwenekawe Village. This spill of alcohol in Lilongwe will not, after all, get to him.
You will convince yourself that you run the risk of sharing alcohol with another man’s angry grandfather who will bother the sorry fellow even more in his death. You will let your granny rest in the comfort of his two wives in his village. And, ultimately, you might even get to convince yourself that should God bless your hustle, you will one day pour a gallon of the Chipumu beer he enjoyed so much at his grave. A more deserving salute!
The inability to buy a convincing amount of alcohol will not be your only trouble after college. Sex too. You will learn that there are places not appropriate for sex because in the real world words like ‘self-respect’ ‘privacy’ and ‘discipline’ do, apparently, carry meaning. So you and your girlfriends will suffer embarrassing escapes from being caught making love in your old man’s house. Should you be lucky, you will identify a friend with an extra-room in his house who will permit you and your girlfriend to drop in now and again to commit some pre-marital sins. You will cope. Most often you will book a lodge. If money or friendship does not afford you such worldly pleasures, you will learn to be human. You will, gradually, acquaint yourself with masturbation.
The battle you will utmost confront is that of the soul — the emotional toil that will smash you to the wall again and again. You will not easily wiggle away. It will keep you awake at night and absent during the day. The nature of emotional distress is that it eats you in ways that are hard to apprehend and address. It is a smouldering coal, wagged between the two chambers of your heart today. Tomorrow it is the spin in your intestines. Wait for the other day; it will become a volcano, building pressure in your throat. You will want to vomit. You will want to die.
Adulthood will be on your heels and it will chase you with the speed of a hurricane. It will knock. You will open the door. It will remind you that you are getting too old to be spending your time in your parents’ house. Another knock, you will open. You are too old to ask for basics. Another knock and open, your friends are getting married, my friend.
The weight of adulthood will be felt more if you do not live with your parents. A burden, an extra-mouth, an extra bed, an extra plate is what you will become. You will feel like an expense.
You will start from internship. Most will say its slavery, a vicious dehumanizing experience. They will be right. You are the last born at the office. You will feel yourself cut to size and that degree you pride yourself with and wear like your shining armour will not be there to shield you from all the depression, drama and bankruptcy waiting for you. For a moment, you will be overwhelmed with the feeling that your bachelor’s degree is as important as paper towels. Your graduation will bear no significance than to supply pictures for Throw Back Thursday.
The thing about internship is that you will be trumped on at a time your only hope is to make ends meet and set yourself. You will be underutilized and abused at the same time. You will witness underperformers getting paid but even if you are lucky to have some form of payment, it will breakeven if not you will need some other form of finances to top up. The conditions of life will whip you like a slave and the scars will show in your self-esteem. You might suffer from hopelessness, anxiety disorder and life.
It will be at this point you will understand the true values of this life run beyond education and ability. It will become apparent to you that discipline, hardwork, consistency and sacrifice make good employees. You will learn to show up. To work without expecting reward. To treat humans like humans. To laugh while in pain. You will exercise the values you learnt from you mother with strict practice. However, you will not be spared from the pain of stagnation. You will want growth, a job, your own car, your own house. All you will have is internship and a promise of experience.
But, you will go through it. You will become a slave — a good obedient slave before you attain the status of a living counter-example. Each day you will work while ignoring the small voice in your head urging you to give up. You will be stronger than the voice because you are the son of Nachitete of Sokola — a warrior by heart. The blood of your ancestors flows through you. You can live with less because your father was Mambwe, and your people enjoy worms for protein. You will build from the bottom up like each one of your people. You will not apologise. You will not complain. You will just ask for an opportunity to prove yourself.
You will cope. In Lee’s reasoning, you will become foamless — shapeless, like water. When put in a cup you will become the cup. When you put in a bottle you will be the bottle. You will become a kettle, a plate, a bucket. But you will still retain your origin like water — pure in your form. A Mambwe by heart. A Ndali to the base of your very being. Like the water you are, you will be gentle to smoothen up a throat but strong enough to flood Japan. You will just have to know where you are called to be a gentle flow or a tsunami. But, you will thrive. You are a sum total of your highs and lows. Your lows will be your slave marks some day — a testimony of hard times.
