February 25, 1986

When the Peace Corps Was Young

By PAUL THEROUX

ONDON -- My record was so bad that I was first rejected by the Peace Corps as a poor risk and possible troublemaker and was accepted as a volunteer only after a great deal of explaining and arguing. The alternative was Vietnam - this was 1963, and President John F. Kennedy was still muddling dangerously along. I was sent to Nyasaland; soon it became Malawi. And then a month before my two-year stint was over, I was ''terminated'' - kicked out -fined arbitrarily for three months' ''unsatisfactory service'' and given hell by the Peace Corps officials in Washington. The truth was that I had been framed in an assassination plot against Hastings Kamuzu Banda, the President for Life (''Messiah,'' ''Conqueror'' and ''Great Lion'' were some of his lesser titles). The Peace Corps knew this, but the case against me looked bad, so out I went.

It was a mess, and, looking back as the Peace Corps is about to mark its 25th anniversary, on March 1, I recall that for a long while afterward I hated the Corps and laughed at its subway posters. I hated the bureaucracy, the patronizing attitudes, the jargon, the sanctimony. I remembered all the official freeloaders who came out from Washington on so-called inspection tours, and how they tried to ingratiate themselves. ''You're doing wonderful work here . . . It's a great little country,'' they said; but for most of them it was merely an African safari. They hadn't the slightest idea of what we were doing, and our revenge was to take them on long bumpy rides through the bush. ''Sensational,'' they said.

On the subject of Vietnam, these bureaucrats were surprisingly hawkish and belligerent. The volunteers were divided. This was an important issue to me, because I had joined the Peace Corps to avoid being drafted. As a meddlesome, contentious 22-year-old, I made a point of asking everyone his views on Vietnam. What astonishes me today is how few people remember the ridiculous things they said about Vietnam in the 60's.

But we are a nation of revisionists, and the chief characteristic of a revisionist is a bad memory. No one now remembers how confused Mr. Kennedy's Vietnam policy was or how isolated the student movement was. I had been involved in student protests from 1959 until 1963 - first against R.O.T.C., then against nuclear testing, then against our involvement in Vietnam, and when I applied to join the Peace Corps this career as an agitator was held against me. It was all a diabolical plot, I felt. And there was the President with such style -money, power, glamour. He even had culture!

I had to fight my feeling of distrust and alienation in order to join. There were many like me - antiauthoritarian, hating the dazzle and the equivocation. And when the President was shot - we learned about it halfway through a training lecture (something about land tenure in the Nyasaland protectorate) - we were all properly put in our place. More revisionism, more guilt, and I thought: Get me out of here.

Nyasaland was the perfect country for a volunteer. It was friendly and destitute; it was small and out-of-the-way. It had all of Africa's problems -poverty, ignorance, disease. It had a fascinating history that was bound up not only with early African exploration - Livingstone himself - but also one of the first African rebellions. The people were generous and willing, and as they had not been persecuted or bullied, they were not prickly and color-conscious like the Kenyans and Zambians. There was a pleasant atmosphere of hope; the prevailing feeling was that the education we were providing would lead to prosperity, honest government and good health.

An added thrill was that many British settlers were still in residence. They had little contact with Africans - the place had never been a colony in the strict sense, only a backwater - and yet they resented us. Most of us mocked them. These pompous little creeps - so we said - went to gymkhanas and cocktail parties at the local club and dated the settlers' children when they returned from their Rhodesian boarding schools. We saw them as social climbers and traitors, and feelings were very strong on the issue. It was not uncommon for a Peace Corps volunteer in town for supplies to approach a group of settlers in a bar and say something crudely provocative such as ''The Queen's a whore'' (her portrait always hung over the bottles), and nearly always a fight would start. To Africans these antagonisms were very exciting.

We had arrived in the country speaking Chinyanja fairly well, and we had plunged in - made friends, taught school, ran literacy programs, coached sports and generally made ourselves useful.

Now and then, I remembered that I was in the Peace Corps. That gave me an odd feeling. I disliked the idea that I was with an outfit, and I rejected the suggestion that I was an American official working abroad. I have never been easy with the concept of the Peace Corps as an example to spineless Marxists, and the implications of fresh-faced youngsters wooing third worlders away from Communism. I wanted the Peace Corps to be something very vague and unorganized, and to a large extent it was. It did not run smoothly. The consequence was that we were left alone.

We were not trusted by the embassy personnel or the State Department hacks - all those whispering middle-aged aunties who couldn't speak the language. The feeling was mutual. We felt embassy people were overpaid and ignorant, always being fussed over by African servants. We were, we felt, independent spirits, answerable only to our students and patients. I regarded the Peace Corps as a sort of sponsoring organization and myself as an individual who had only the most tenuous link with it.

I think I am typical in believing that the Peace Corps trained us brilliantly and then did little more except send us into the bush. It was not a bad way of running things. After all, we were supposed to use our initiative. And when I got the boot, it seemed like the act of an absent parent, someone I hardly knew asserting his authority over me.

That is why I do not associate my years in the Peace Corps with group photographs and images of Mr. Kennedy showing me the way and soft-ball games with the other volunteers. It was much more interesting. It was to me most of all the reality of being very far from home and yet feeling completely at home in this distant place. It was a slight sense of danger, the smell of wood smoke, hearing the Beatles for the first time in a bar in the town of Limbe. In America, there was a sort of revolution in progress, but it had started partly as a result of the first Peace Corps group that had gone to Nepal. Those volunteers returning from Katmandu had blazed the hippie trail.

In Malawi, we had all of that, too -good people, wilderness music, dusty roads, hard-working students and a feeling of liberation. Things were on the move, it seemed. In Malawi, I saw my first hyena, smoked my first hashish, witnessed my first murder, caught my first dose of gonorrhea. After I lived a while in a cozy bungalow with two servants, I moved into an African township, where I lived in a two-room hut - cold water, cracks in the wall, tin roof, music blasting all day from the other huts; shrieks, dogs, chickens. It was just the thing. The experience greatly shaped my life.

When I think about those years, I don't think much about the Peace Corps, though Malawi is always on my mind. That is surely a tribute to the Peace Corps. I do not believe that Africa is a very different place for having played host to the Peace Corps - in fact, Africa is in a much worse state than it was 20 years ago. But America is quite a different place for having had so many returned Peace Corps volunteers, and when they began joining the State Department and working in the embassies, these institutions were the better for it and had a better-informed and less truculent tone.

I still do not understand who was running the show, or what they did, or even what the Peace Corps actually was, apart from an enlightened excuse for sending us to poor countries. Those countries are still poor. We were the ones who were enriched, and sometimes I think that we remind those people - as if they needed such a thing - that they were being left out. We stayed a while, and then we left them. And yet I think I would do it again. At an uncertain time in my life I joined. And up to a point - they gave me a lot of rope - the Peace Corps allowed me to be myself. I realized that it was much better to be neglected than manipulated, and I had learned that you make your own life.

Paul Theroux is author of two dozen novels and travel books.