"Mike Resnick - Between the Sunlight and Thunder (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Resnick Mike)

when
we turned east and finally saw lights on both sides of the road. Joey left us off at the Mount
Soche
Hotel. Our room was on the fourth of its five floors -- which turned out to be the only floor the
idiosyncratic elevator didn't stop at. Not the most auspicious beginning.

September 24: Soche Tours got its act together long enough to introduce us to Mike Makwakwa, a
young man who would be our driver for the rest of the safari. We decided to start with a little
tour
around Blantyre. As we drove through the city, we noted that a number of buildings were decorated
with red stars. Mike explained that each star marked the home or business of an Indian, and that
they
had been slated for destruction or renovation. We also found out that all the Indians, who form
the
merchant class in almost every sub-Saharan country, had been forcibly relocated in just three
Malawiian cities: Blantyre, Lilongwe, and Zomba. Most of the buildings with red stars were in far
better condition that those without, and I couldn't help remembering what happened the last time a
government decided to mark buildings owned by an ethnic minority with stars. The only difference
was the color: yellow then, red now. I would not want to be an Indian living in Malawi in the
coming
months and years. Malawi, by the way, is ruled by a dictator who bears the title of President For
Life
Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Banda left the country as a child, spent more than a half century in
England
and the U.S.A., and was called back in 1958 when independence seemed imminent, as he was the
only Malawiian with a college degree and they needed a figurehead president. They drafted a model
constitution, and assumed that once they got the hang of self- government, Banda would step down
in a couple of years, if he hadn't died of old age. All that was a quarter of a century ago. Banda
killed
and jailed his enemies, had himself proclaimed President For Life, made sure no foreign entity
could
start a business in Malawi unless he, Banda, owned 51% of the stock, and developed what are
considered to be the most efficient death squads south of the Sahara. He is 91 years old, speaks
no
language but English (and has an interpretor for his three-hour orations), and has become a
hideous
caricature of The Man Who Came To Dinner. In other words, he ain't leaving. That having been said,
I must also point out that tourists are treated with enormous courtesy and deference (to the very
uncomfortable point of being called "Master" by most of the waiters and porters), since we
represent
a source of hard currency, and every effort is made to shield us from what is really going on
there. (I
had been warned not to mention I was a writer. The government does not differentiate between
fiction writers and journalists, and in Banda's opinion the only good journalist is a journalist
who is
rotting in a Malawi prison.) The press is as thoroughly controlled as any I've ever seen. Each
day's
newspaper is the same: the front page has two long articles praising Banda, the next five pages
consist of 20 quarter-page ads by major businesses proclaiming "Long Live Kamuzu!", and if you're
lucky, you can find a paragraph or two about Iraq and South Africa somewhere on page 7. This is