Africa sends us miscreants, but also quiet, hard-working people

If you catch a sea cucumber and put it in a bucket it emits a reddish, disgusting-looking sort of ink.

The ink is actually the contents of their stomachs.

Sea cucumbers, when threatened, puke their last meal in the hope that whatever is attacking them will snack on their vomit and leave them alone.

I know this because my son and his cousins developed an interest in sea cucumbers over the holidays while fishing in the river at Kenton-on-Sea.

I was delegated to find out more about these ugly things.

I was also appointed to sell fresh sea cucumbers to upcountry holiday-makers — a task which I only half-heartedly attempted .

That was my holiday; day after blissful day of watching little boys fish things out of the sea and rivers, interspersed with rounds of golf.

Not everyone was so lucky.

I remember Zomba as an almost archetypically chaotic African town; rutted roads, clapped-out trucks, colonial- era buildings needing a lick of paint, and a colourful market.

It’s the colours of the Zomba market that I remember most vividly from my visit four or five years ago — gaudy textiles and piles of red onions.

The other thing I remember about Zomba is how remarkably happy all the people seemed to be.

Remarkably happy for one of the poorest — if most beautiful — countries in the world.

Long ago Zomba used to be the capital of Nyasaland.

Nowadays it’s just another town in another country somewhere in Africa. I was in Zomba on that great perk of journalism: the freebie.

At the end of our splendid tour, our group was entertained in the new capital, Lilongwe, at a cocktail party attended by a cabinet minister.

In the 1970s and ’80s white South Africans used to flock to Malawi (remember the “Warm heart of Africa”).

Since democracy (ours and theirs) we seem to have given up on poor old Malawi; which is a shame because it is a truly sublime holiday destination.

These days, instead of us sending them tourists, they send us workers and entrepreneurs. Not all of them are legal.

One of the legal ones is Cornelius Naphulu. I was introduced to Naphulu, the upholsterer, by my wife after getting home from the golf course.

I had spent the morning just after New Year at the course, bunking work and waiting for the rest of South Africa to get back to work.

The golf course is a 90-second drive from my home. My house, on the other hand, is a two-hour multi-taxi odyssey from Naphulu’s home in Krugersdorp.

That day the odyssey had taken him two-and-a-half hours because of a roadblock in Florida.

My wife had hired Naphulu to stitch bits of torn old blue shirts into a duvet cover for our son. The bits of blue fabric included the shirt I wore at our wedding; a linen shirt bought in Barcelona, the shirt of a great friend now living in Libya.

Naphulu told me that he was from Zomba. He told me how he had come to South Africa three years ago to seek greener pastures.

He hadn’t seen his family (wife and three kids aged 16 to 22) for two years. Like so many of the self-employed, Naphulu, 48, is loath to turn down work.

While I was inspecting sea- cucumber catches on the beaches of the Eastern Cape, Naphulu and his computer- technician-turned-barman brother were working away at their jobs in Krugersdorp .

Africa has sent this country thousands of miscreants; drug traffickers, thieves and brutes.

It has also sent us thousands of quiet, hard-working entrepreneurs such as Naphulu, whose spirit of enterprise and determination to make a better life for themselves can only enrich our country — and theirs. You can contact Naphulu on 073-245-4760.