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    Meanwhile there is shooting here in the capital of the state emergency. I'm a teacher. I presume I don't belong on the street making barricades or breaking them down. But the smoke from the palace, which the office boy has told me has just burned down, has something to do with politics; and the soldiers on the street; and the persistent pop-pop of the guns—that's politics, too. But it's not political science, and I'm a teacher; my correspondence students have just sent in their exams. I have papers to mark.

Leper Colony: A Diary Entry
[1966]
    Leprosaria: it could be a tuber, a jungle vine, a thing from the bush with dark petals and fruit, ovoid, bitter to the taste.
    The lepers are idle and so they fight with knives and they knit wool caps, and they crouch and applaud when the white priests pass.
    Bats have the faces of pigs and three hang in the privy and squeak; soft mouse-fur, kite-strutted wings, bones showing in skin. And they live, heads hanging down in the warm cesspit.
    And all around the place elephantine baobabs, gray: exploded creatures plastered hastily back and patched with the rough stubbled hide; stiff ears protrude from stumps of shoulders; they stand like dead sentries, fat, useless jugs.
    Khate:
the Chinyanja word is a call for help if ever there was one; choke, clear your throat with a
khate
or two. The fishermen say it and then point toward those trees.
    There is leprosy which causes a "tiger's mouth" in the flesh between the thumb and forefinger; the toes and fingers shrink back and hang down; the skin, hard, scaled like a night thing living among the stones; and the nose absorbed into the face, tilted up and monstrous, almost bat-like. There is nerve leprosy which clouds the eye and aims it off, which makes claws of hands and stills and jaw; limbs are clubs to thump dirt pits for trash, to wish for knives.
    For three days the
Nyau,
the image-dance, drums through the bush, ticks pulse and thunder; and because the dancers are lepers they go longer and naked. The image they have chosen is a car made of sticks and cloth—the soul of the dead man fives there for three days, conjured by dwarfish lepers dancing, whirling their stumps of hands.
    Ugly, the
khate
a thousand times over; creeping back into huts and ditches and sleeping on mats; flies and dung-ugly geckoes; even children with the dead furred rash and small faces sucking bladder breasts, toying with green reeds.
    Night, and a woman in labor wails in the leprosarium; her fingers are gone and she cannot grip tight, but only hangs, leprous, pregnant with pain; one last gasp signals the tearing of the bulbed head down hard
against the membranes; fluid from one wounded body, a child, smooth seed from the ravaged husk, brought among the drums and into the night of this cursed community; out of its freakish crust the world exudes the novelty of perfect form.

Scenes Front a Curfew
[1966]
    It was not odd that the first few days of our curfew were enjoyed by most people. It was a welcome change for us, like the noisy downpour that comes suddenly in January and makes a watery crackle on the street and ends the dry season. The parties, though these were now held in the afternoon, had a new topic of conversation. There were many rumors, and repeating these rumors made a kind of tennis match, a serve and return, each hit slightly more savage than the last. And the landscape of the city outside the fence of our compound was fascinating to watch. During these first days we stood in our brightly flowered shirts on our hill; we could see the palace burning, the soldiers assembling and making people scatter, and we could hear the bursts of gunfire and some shouts just outside our fence. We were teachers, all of us young, and we were in Africa. There were well-educated ones among us. One of them told me that, during the Roman Empire under the reign of Claudius, rich people and scholars could be carried in litters by
lecticarii,
usually slaves,