Clarke Profile: White Zambian Writer Facing Deportation
follow-up on previous post on Anything Prose
In the 40-odd years since, Clarke has worked as a teacher, an administrator, and finally, in his 50s, a journalist. "My dear wife didn't want to go to Britain, which is a terribly racist place. I could see her point. It was far better for me to be a white man in Zambia than for her to be a black woman in Britain. This opinion has held quite well for 35 years; I may now have to reconsider."
In spite of recent improvements, and benefiting hugely from comparison to Zimbabwe to the south, Zambia is not a happy place.
This is why, when the president made a pre-Christmas address congratulating his government on another excellent year, Clarke felt moved to protest. Out of a population of 10 million, more than a million people have HIV; 80% live below the poverty line and life expectancy at birth hovers around 35. "It left people a bit gobsmacked," says Clarke. "I thought that if there was a lot of prosperity somewhere, perhaps we would find it in the Mfuwe gamepark." The column sent up the government as a pack of duplicitous jungle animals, taking the Zambian people for fools.
"Just as the [humans] are becoming thinner," he wrote, in the voice of the elephant president, "so we in the game park are becoming fatter. As hospitals fall down in the rest of the country, so we are building veterinary clinics all over Mfuwe ... by closing schools, we now have the funds to send our monkeys abroad to Harvard. They are studying for MBAs, degrees in Manipulating Budget Allocations."
Comments