An impromptu stop at a prison. A mobile children’s library. A drunk man falling onto my head. A chorus of orphans singing. This (and much, much more) was all in one weekend, the weekend of The Lake of Stars, a music festival held on the beach at Lake Malawi.
Part One, Saturday morning: Attempts to get petrol (at the exorbitant price of about $8/gallon) for the 4-hour drive are finally realized after fearing that the fuel shortage was back in force. We finally fill up and are off toward the lake. Well, that is, until we (my Malawian sisters and I) near the prison in Zomba, a town an hour east of Blantyre where we live. On impulse, we decide to visit someone we know there.
After parking the car and wrapping chitenjes around us like sarongs (women cannot enter the prison wearing pants), we walk up to the gate guard who lackadaisically moves the metal detector wand around us. Even when my belt (which is hidden by the chitenje) continues to set it off, he is satisfied by my saying, “it’s a belt” and doesn’t look to see if I’m being honest or actually packing. He does not seem to have this same attitude when he ‘wands’ one of my Malawian sisters, slowly moving the wand up and across her breasts, to the point of all of us noticing. “Hey pervert, the wand isn’t supposed to be used for feeling someone up!” I wish I could say that, but we actually do want to get inside and he probably wouldn’t have understood what I said anyway. He gives us tiny worn wooden chips with the word “visitor” penned on them. We hold onto them, and this is all we carry inside with us.
(wall surrounding the prison)
Wearing large sunglasses and with my blonde hair down around my shoulders (and wearing a chitenje, to boot!), I get quite a few stares. I am the only white woman in the entire place, and the three of us – my Malawian sisters and I – are clearly the best dressed, most recently bathed, and nicest smelling of all of the visitors (plus, we're speaking English!). We’re getting stares and more stares. Prisoners and visitors alike rearrange themselves to be in a good position to stare at me. Granted, I get stared at and shouted at and hissed at and kissed at (no, not kissed for real, just kissed at, whereby men childishly make kissing sounds as I walk past them) quite a bit here, but this is the first time I feel slightly uncomfortable. Perhaps it is the dank concrete building with peeling paint on its walls. Or maybe it’s the guards’ lascivious looks. Or maybe it’s just because I need to pee and know there will be no place here remotely clean to do so.
We walk into a narrow room, with five different visiting stations, although with no barriers or separation of any sort in between them. Each visiting area is a hole in a cement wall, with chicken wire attached. After the chicken wire is a gap of a few feet and then another hole in a cement wall with more chicken wire. Thus, we look through chicken wire, across a three-foot gap, to more chicken wire behind which the prisoner stands. Communicating with the prisoner means shouting across the gap while other visitors on either side shout at the person they are visiting. Some prisoners stand next to one another, at one chicken-wired hole in the wall, while their visitors stand next to each other on the other side, all shouting back and forth to communicate, creating a cacophonous din. I strain to listen to what our friend is saying to us and think I only get about 80%. But perhaps the lack of listening is exacerbated by my continued ducking behind my Malawian sisters when the staring from other prisoners gets a bit too creepy.
At the end of our visit, we walk back to the car (the only car there), and I get my camera. I very conspicuously de-chitenje and traipse back toward the prison gate to take some pictures. Attempt denied, as a guard quickly emerges and tells me ‘no pictures.’ I am a bit surprised, as the prison clearly does not have any sort of high security. I mean, when a guard ignores the metal detector wand going off and instead chooses to use it to rub a woman’s breast, one cannot imagine serious security. Plus, the metal door leading up to the prison is left hanging open, and the first wall surrounding the prison has no barbed wire. In addition, there are no visible guards in the visiting area inside the prison. None. So really, why the no pictures rule? Lack of logic strikes again!
The guard continues to look at me as I walk back to the car. Perhaps he too is perplexed by the illogical ‘rules’ of prison security. More likely he’s just wondering who we are – a white blonde woman and two Malawian women, all of us wearing big shades – and who we visited, as we get back into a black SUV with tinted windows and drive off.
(driving away from the prison)
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