Under the kachere tree.

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Under a kachere tree in the village of Mtunthama, ninety miles over rough dirt roads from what is today the Malawian capital of Lilongwe, a young Kamuzu Banda sat in short pants, waiting for the day’s lessons to begin. The beating of drums called the students from miles around; like Banda - the future Life President - they came and sat in the shade of the kachere, daydreaming at the puffs of cloud drifting over the treetops, reciting their ABCs.

It is hard to imagine one of Africa’s most resilient Big Men growing up in poverty in turn-of-the-century Nyasaland. But the story of his modest roots played well to the populist image the patrician Banda cultivated during his three decades of heavy-handed rule in Malawi. Indeed, the Banda legend of a self-made man was one of his most potent political tools. How could anyone accuse the Life President of elitism, of being out of touch with the common man? He, too, came from the humblest of beginnings. Never mind the fact that, more than 15 years after the late Dr. Banda’s 30-year-long tyranny came to an end, many Malawian students are still reciting their ABCs under kachere trees. The benefits of his rule were never meant to extend to every last tree and village in Malawi. As with other African rulers, Banda’s beneficence could be highly selective. Though every now and then, I have to admit, the big guy managed to get it right.

The thought crosses my mind as Dower Niyondo, the assistant librarian, gestures to the library’s domed ceiling, where golden tear drops are ringed by concentric circles of gold and green. “This library,” he explains, “represents the kachere tree. Just like the kachere tree has fruit, and all the birds come to eat the fruit: all the students come here to get the knowledge.”

“Here” is the Kamuzu Academy, a striking spectacle of higher education incongruously plopped down in the bush of rural Malawi. Built by the former Life President as a tribute to the rigorous schooling he received while abroad, the academy is an English-style boarding school set just a few hundred meters from the fabled kachere tree of Banda’s youth. It’s been dubbed “the Eton of Africa,” and for many years it was considered to be one of the finest schools on the continent. Though political turbulence and hierarchical shake-ups have tarnished the image somewhat, it is still an oasis of learning in this impoverished country. It is a lovely place to go for a stroll, too, its sprawling campus set upon landscaped grounds with trellised walkways framed by sun-dappled bougainvillea.

The facilities are first-rate, as Dower Niyondo is quick to point out. Modeled on the U.S. Library of Congress - but on a more modest, Malawian scale - the library is certainly one-of-a-kind in a country where most schools are lucky to have a few dusty classics donated from abroad. The head librarian will later note there are more than 12,000 titles on the library’s shelves. Never mind that a student in a top-tier American high school might have access to ten times that amount: in Malawi, on the outskirts of Mtunthama, the number is astounding. European politics and African history, French poetry, Latin epics. Trolling through the fiction section, I find some of my favorites - Bellow and Coetzee and Gordimer and Marquez - imagining the sort of heated literary debates that might invigorate daily life at the academy.

We stop at the desk of a young, slouching girl, twirling her hair and punching figures into a calculator. With some prompting from Dower, she puts on a show of eagerness to talk to her guest - “a journalist from America” - straightening to assume a more formal posture. I ask what she’s studying. Calculus.

“Calculus is pretty hard,” I say. “I was never much good at it.”

She smiles politely and averts her eyes. I lean forward slightly to give a little mock inspection of her notebook - the sort of thing I’d imagine Anderson Cooper or Nic Robertson doing on TV. She says she’s in her final year at the academy, and is hoping to pursue her law studies next year in the UK. I ask, with a mild, indulgent smile, if she’s ever been to the UK. Of course! She’s visited family in London, and she’s been to York and Leeds. I say that’s great, that England’s great.

“I spent a year of uni in Manchester,” I say. “It was a lot of fun.”

A short, pained silence passes between us. “Yeah,” she says. “Hmm,” I say. Dower stands beside me, beaming broadly.

It doesn’t take long to realize that, after more than a year of mixing with the underprivileged and undereducated products of the typical African school, I have no idea how to talk to these kids. Their accents are mild, vaguely foreign; most of the “fee-paying” students - the term used to distinguish them from the government students accepted on scholarship - have spent the bulk of their young lives saturated by Western media and fashions. They want - better still, expect - to be doctors and lawyers, to work and travel abroad, to live the sort of lives the rest of us take for granted. And suddenly, it dawns on me that pinching cheeks and handing out pencils just isn’t going to cut it at the Kamuzu Academy.

It’s a humbling start to my stay - is benign condescension all I have to offer? - and I already feel out of my element when I’m led to the administrative offices, where I’ll sort out my plans for the next few days. Despite the emails and phone calls, my arrival seems to have been unexpected; but after my vague intentions as “a journalist” have been announced to the headmaster - a ruddy, middle-aged Mancunian, Frank Cooke - I’m offered lunch in the dining hall and a room gratis in one of the academy’s guest houses. It’s awfully kind, not least because this is one of those trips which straddles the fine line between professional interest and personal curiosity, and I might very well, after three or four days at the Kamuzu Academy, have a story to sell with no one to buy.

For now, I’ve got other problems on my mind. It’s mid-day, and there’s a centripetal pull toward the dining hall, a rolling commotion of chatter and laughter and gossip, the high-pitched joys and woes of adolescence. The students move in pairs, in groups - the lunch hour is no time for solitude - their shirts crisp and white, their pants neat and pleated, green and gold neckties knotted at the throat. There are gangly pre-teens, high-waisted bean posts with slender arms and sharp elbows, and there are pudgy kids who can probably wolf down chocolate cupcakes with the best of their obese American counterparts. Everyone is milling by the bulletin boards, edging into the lunch line, jockeying for the best seat. It’s been years since I set foot in a school dining hall, and suddenly there’s a tumult of butterflies in my stomach, the remembered anxieties of those nervous afternoons when finding a place to sit and scarf down my baloney and cheese sandwich somehow seemed as grave and portentous a decision as Caesar standing at the Rubicon, wondering whether or not to get his feet wet.

I’m at least spared the embarrassment of eating by myself: I’m passed off to a few young teachers (geography and history) and handed a plate for the buffet, and I do my best to make awkward conversation between mouths full of chicken and rice and beans. There’s surprisingly little curiosity at my presence, and my discomfort at the table only grows as I watch more and more teachers file past in sport jackets and loafers and carefully pressed slacks. In a chapter of my life marked for its scruffiness, this is a page to be dog-eared and remembered for years to come. Slouched in my seat in my musty shorts and flea-market t-shirt and plastic bath sandals, I look every inch like something you’d pull from the bottom of the hamper. And I’m only too happy, once lunch is through, to retreat to my room at the opposite end of the campus, far from the judgmental eyes of the privileged youth of Malawi.

It’s a terrifically hot day, and I’m glad to have only packed a small overnight bag full of essentials (toothpaste, books, a change of undies). I’ve been handed off once more, to one Standwell Mbeye, the housekeeper who will be looking after me during my stay. We walk down a tarmac road and then nip behind a column of blue gum trees, turning down a few dirt paths stitched between the driveways and backyards of the staff houses. I ask Standwell how long he’s been at the Kamuzu Academy, and he says 17 years - long enough to know every path and shortcut around campus, and to also (I suspect) know all the gossip that’s been building up through the years. About said dirt he’s tight-lipped; he’ll concede that things were very bad a decade ago, when the academy had all but shut down under President Maluzi, but beyond that he’s reluctant to offer anything more substantial, only grinning and accepting my compliments about the school as if he laid the brick himself.

It is a lovely campus, colored with flame trees and bougainvillea, with birds of paradise and flowering succulents. Groundskeepers tend to the sprawling lawns, as smooth and even as putting greens. Around the staff houses - tidy suburban homes with satellite dishes and two-car garages - gardeners clip and rake and tend to the flowerbeds. It’s an incongruous scene, knowing that dusty Mtunthama and the dubious Bee Hive Club lurk just beyond the schoolhouse gate. But such was the founding principal of the Kamuzu Academy, more than any other: to give Malawi’s best and brightest a sanctuary from the impoverished country around them, and to give them a chance to shape this country’s future from a seat of learning that would know few peers in the developing world.

Standwell shows me to a row of ranch houses, fumbles with the keys, opens the door. The place is as pleasantly, tactfully charmless as anything you might find in an American suburb, circa 1978: thin-pile carpeting, mock fireplace, lampshades with tasseled fringes collecting Kamuzu Academy dust. This threadbare African vision of prosperity never fails to astound. I drop my bags in the bedroom and follow Standwell to the kitchen, where he busies himself with fixing a pot of coffee. Standwell is tall and lean and almost pathologically friendly; over the next few days, with little prompting, he’ll give me a loud, good-natured slap on the back every chance he gets, as if whatever I’ve happened to say - “Good morning,” for example - is the finest joke he’s heard in days. Already I can tell we’ll get along famously.

So long as I make the coffee myself. In 17 years of service to the Kamuzu Academy, this is apparently the first time Standwell has been asked to brew a pot. It is a swell mug of coffee-flavored water I enjoy. Afterward there’s another round of happy, back-thumping bonhomie - it was, I would have him believe, the finest cup o’ joe this side of Seattle - and then I set off for a tour of the campus, wondering if I might come across a nice café along the way.

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