Blog 8
January 26
Seven days ago we left Makupo and arrived in Nairobi. A week of distance and yet Makupo was brought fresh to my memory by an article in the Globe and Mail today. I read all of Stephanie Nolen’s material and her report “Into the Valley of Death” covered a 2 page spread with 3 large pictures. 1 picture was of a frightened mother leading her 3 small children past the debris of collapsed buildings – the women and children who are the vast majority of the victims of violence everywhere.
I was more struck by the other 2 pictures. One was of a bloodied male victim standing behind soldiers – all were young men in their 20s. The other was described as “A mob from the Kalenjin tribe armed with sticks and machetes confronts soldiers in Nakuru yesterday…” Again the group was large numbers of young men, not one woman or child was in sight.
So what is the connection between the peaceful, hard working, church going people of Makupo and the violence in Kenya and for that matter in Ivory Coast, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Congo … or any other conflict zone in Africa?
Structural Poverty – Stephanie Nolen is a wonderful writer and I appreciate her good work on AIDS and her sensitive insights into the nature and impact of poverty. This article it was much more of the war correspondent driving into the valley of death and facing down the bloodthirsty warriors. At one point she went beyond the high drama of the moment to reflect on the root causes. In one paragraph she pointed the way to a very important element of what is really wrong. She writes that,
“This crisis is about much more than the election. Anger at vote-rigging has worked to rip a thin scab off many years of frustration at poverty, corruption and inequitable land ownership that dates from the colonial era. A handful of politicians have seized on ethnicity (Kenya has 37 different ethnic groups) as the most efficient way of mustering support, and incited people to "protect their own." There is evidence that some degree of ethnic-based violence was planned before the vote, that opposition supporters wanted revenge against government supporters if they won, and anarchy if they didn't.”
That third picture of the armed mob showed a lot of men smiling. Violent yes, but having fun, having something to do. This is the most action many of them have ever seen, fighting back against an unseen enemy that frustrates them and keeps them down. An undefined enemy, more easily identified as other people than a system.
They are the unemployed and the underemployed, the lumpenproletariat[1] in villages and small towns throughout Africa. They become the cannon fodder for rich men’s ambitions. Many of them have been to high school and some even further but they have no work in a handicapped economy that produces huge rates of unemployment. They are the reserve army of the unemployed.
You see them any place in the rural areas of Malawi, gathering anywhere when something is happening because anything is more interesting than just hanging around. In ChiChewa the word for hanging around bored is kungokhala. A person starts working on a project and 5 men stop to watch him work, because they have nothing else to do.
Surely they could take the initiative and start doing something? That is always so easily spoken from the comfort of North America. There is no economy, no work, no land, no access to resources, no capital, no future and precious little hope of ever escaping the never-ending poverty. J.K. Galbraith wrote that there is no greater limit to freedom than the lack of money. He also stated that "The first and most obvious consequence of poverty is social and civil instability…."
In Makupo, a small family based village, the list is long and ever-evolving as young men come in and out. Kenny, Bwelezani, Chitani in one family. Mwayi, Francis, Fred, Palije and Peter. Every one of them is waiting for some opportunity, waiting for something to happen, waiting to leave. And should one succeed in leaving, another one is always coming back forced by circumstances to fall back on the minimal comfort, shelter and food provided by returning to the family home.
And ours is one small family of about 60 members inside a much bigger village and there are villages all over Malawi and Africa with young frustrated men just like them. They face a serious injustice and have a legitimate complaint against a system that deprives them of the right to earn a living, put bread on the table, marry a partner and raise a family, have a career and rise up the socio-economic ladder.
Malawi has thankfully been spared the violent reactions of the conflict zones of Africa. But the cannon fodder is there and who knows what will be the catalyst? Will they identify their neighbours of a different ethnicity as the problem or will they see through to the structural causes of their impoverishment? And how can frustrated people take action on the root causes of their disadvantage when structural poverty is such an abstract concept?
More to come.
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[1] Lumpenproletariat: Now do not get excited by the use of the term. Marxian and even some non-Marxist sociologists now use the term to refer to those marginalised people they see as the victims of modern society, such as welfare recipients, beggars, and homeless people, who exist outside the wage-labor system, or people who make their living through disreputable means… but depend on the formal economy for their day-to-day existence. (Wikipedia)
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
China and some Nostalgia
Blog 7
I have a note to myself to mention the China question as it is played out on a personal level here in Malawi. The papers are full of it. Bingu snubs Taiwan as the Taipei Foreign Minister is already on the plane to come to Malawi. Apparently, the president is not available to meet him and the opposition and media have a field day. On the one hand is the line, “We can’t let our friends down. They stuck by us for years and now is not the time to change affiliation from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China.” In addition Taiwan is dropping lots of money around to keep its name on the map and in the news. On the other hand, there has been no end of coverage about the PRC and its efforts to access African resources from north to south and the strong rumour going through the corridors here is that the Bingu government is about to change partners.
There are also a number of private Chinese here from both of the Chinas and also people from other parts of South East Asia. I stayed at Korean Garden Lodge in Lilongwe, which is a very comfortable medium end hotel. There are tales of a man from the PRC who came here with some money in the pocket and set up an ice cream factory. Now you see all sorts of coolers on wheels, not dissimilar to the ice cream bicycles that trundle around Montreal, except in Malawi they are pushed more like a wheelbarrow.
Private citizens from both countries have settled here but according to my Malawi friends they move in very separate circles and do not associate with each other. I saw a mixed couple with the Asian lady holding a brown baby while her Malawi husband spoke on his cell in Chichewa. He handed her the phone and she spoke in fluent Chichewa to the person at the other end and made me really jealous with her capacity. That appears to be unusual, because the comments from friends is that on the whole they do not mix and they do not speak English.
On the other hand, I have had fun running into the Japanese volunteers that are all over the country. They are the same sort of semi-serious, fun loving men and now many more women that I knew in 1971-72 when I lived in Blantyre and taught the new JOVC types English. In Nkata Bay, a young shy Japanese gal joined herself to our group of Doug, Sautso and Undeni as we drank Carlsberg, joked and laughed and danced to Malawi tunes until late in the night. She was extremely shy about dancing and claimed she couldn’t and we all laughed together as she was dragged shyly but happily onto the floor to be with us.
Nostalgia trips continued:
Last Sunday The Vanier students and staff went to church at the old CCAP mission across the highway. The night before, Prita practiced a couple of hymns with Kenny, Francis Jumbe and Palije and apparently they got a rousing ovation on Sunday. After church, a lady appeared on the verandah and introduced herself as a former student, Maria Bono, who was in the first class of students to pass through Mitundu Day Secondary School when Nellie and I taught there in 1968 and 1969. She had worked as a primary school teacher for many years in Mchinji and is now retired to a village near our own where she has been elected group village headman. The politically correct term “headperson” has not been introduced into the act governing chiefs and headman. It was a lot of fun to talk with her and to try to remember the names of some of those long ago classmates. The English I taught her in 1968 is almost gone so we had to converse in Chichewa with help from my nephews.
Monday that very same evening, at dusk, a minibus pulled up right at our driveway, which is quite unusual since the bus stop is about 300 metres up the road. A well dressed women came out and glad handed her way through the people who rushed to greet her. I am at a disadvantage, because I have not seen many of the family and older friends for many years. This was one member I had not seen since 1996. Esnati is a distant relative from grandmother anMumba or Makupo whose roots are down in Golomoti in the rift valley below Dedza or Ntcheu. In 1970 Nellie’s mother had gone to her mother’s village to help this orphan and she served as the elder mother’s caregiver until she died and then stayed with Nellie’s mom before eventually getting married and now setting herself up in Lilongwe as a small trader.
She was the Frida of her day. Frida came from the same historic home just before we arrived in 2003. She and her 2 brothers, Leonard and Moses are orphans (AIDS cannot be confirmed, but does it matter?). She now serves Nellie’s mother in her disability. Frida, like her predecessor Esnati are loved and treated like family, but since they have no parents they are placed in whichever house needs help. Leonard stays with Mr Chikapa, Sautso’s dad, as a helper since his wife died and he himself has been handicapped by stroke. The kids go to school and play with everyone else and are a full part of the village.
Their fate, as orphans, is far better than the town kids who hang out in the streets. It is reminiscent of Dickensian stories to see the number of young kids who claim they are orphans and are clearly not getting the love and support that our village orphans get. Another group that breaks my heart are the children of the bar girls. In the cheapest beer halls the women solicit the men and they live in a long row house of rooms out back. All afternoon, their children play amongst the drinkers and carousers while their mothers work. I do think there is room for another orphanage that uses the strengths of our Makupo women to help these types of children grow up in a wholesome atmosphere, go to school at the mission across the road with our Makupo children and are fed by the farmers we are trying to relocate to another piece of land. A project is taking shape.
For news of Makupo, I am half waiting to see what the Vanier crowd will come up with. I am hoping their study trip will paint a picture of Makupo life and all its strengths and weaknesses that can be shared on the web with others. Stay tuned.
We go to Nkata Bay on Friday and with any luck I may have another couple of hours of time to get another blog article in. I found this moment when the mini van needed the headlamps and taillights replaced so I am sitting at the trimmer’s sewing machine while the electrician fixes the car and the students are off doing interviews.
Yours in solidarity
Doug
I have a note to myself to mention the China question as it is played out on a personal level here in Malawi. The papers are full of it. Bingu snubs Taiwan as the Taipei Foreign Minister is already on the plane to come to Malawi. Apparently, the president is not available to meet him and the opposition and media have a field day. On the one hand is the line, “We can’t let our friends down. They stuck by us for years and now is not the time to change affiliation from Taiwan to the People’s Republic of China.” In addition Taiwan is dropping lots of money around to keep its name on the map and in the news. On the other hand, there has been no end of coverage about the PRC and its efforts to access African resources from north to south and the strong rumour going through the corridors here is that the Bingu government is about to change partners.
There are also a number of private Chinese here from both of the Chinas and also people from other parts of South East Asia. I stayed at Korean Garden Lodge in Lilongwe, which is a very comfortable medium end hotel. There are tales of a man from the PRC who came here with some money in the pocket and set up an ice cream factory. Now you see all sorts of coolers on wheels, not dissimilar to the ice cream bicycles that trundle around Montreal, except in Malawi they are pushed more like a wheelbarrow.
Private citizens from both countries have settled here but according to my Malawi friends they move in very separate circles and do not associate with each other. I saw a mixed couple with the Asian lady holding a brown baby while her Malawi husband spoke on his cell in Chichewa. He handed her the phone and she spoke in fluent Chichewa to the person at the other end and made me really jealous with her capacity. That appears to be unusual, because the comments from friends is that on the whole they do not mix and they do not speak English.
On the other hand, I have had fun running into the Japanese volunteers that are all over the country. They are the same sort of semi-serious, fun loving men and now many more women that I knew in 1971-72 when I lived in Blantyre and taught the new JOVC types English. In Nkata Bay, a young shy Japanese gal joined herself to our group of Doug, Sautso and Undeni as we drank Carlsberg, joked and laughed and danced to Malawi tunes until late in the night. She was extremely shy about dancing and claimed she couldn’t and we all laughed together as she was dragged shyly but happily onto the floor to be with us.
Nostalgia trips continued:
Last Sunday The Vanier students and staff went to church at the old CCAP mission across the highway. The night before, Prita practiced a couple of hymns with Kenny, Francis Jumbe and Palije and apparently they got a rousing ovation on Sunday. After church, a lady appeared on the verandah and introduced herself as a former student, Maria Bono, who was in the first class of students to pass through Mitundu Day Secondary School when Nellie and I taught there in 1968 and 1969. She had worked as a primary school teacher for many years in Mchinji and is now retired to a village near our own where she has been elected group village headman. The politically correct term “headperson” has not been introduced into the act governing chiefs and headman. It was a lot of fun to talk with her and to try to remember the names of some of those long ago classmates. The English I taught her in 1968 is almost gone so we had to converse in Chichewa with help from my nephews.
Monday that very same evening, at dusk, a minibus pulled up right at our driveway, which is quite unusual since the bus stop is about 300 metres up the road. A well dressed women came out and glad handed her way through the people who rushed to greet her. I am at a disadvantage, because I have not seen many of the family and older friends for many years. This was one member I had not seen since 1996. Esnati is a distant relative from grandmother anMumba or Makupo whose roots are down in Golomoti in the rift valley below Dedza or Ntcheu. In 1970 Nellie’s mother had gone to her mother’s village to help this orphan and she served as the elder mother’s caregiver until she died and then stayed with Nellie’s mom before eventually getting married and now setting herself up in Lilongwe as a small trader.
She was the Frida of her day. Frida came from the same historic home just before we arrived in 2003. She and her 2 brothers, Leonard and Moses are orphans (AIDS cannot be confirmed, but does it matter?). She now serves Nellie’s mother in her disability. Frida, like her predecessor Esnati are loved and treated like family, but since they have no parents they are placed in whichever house needs help. Leonard stays with Mr Chikapa, Sautso’s dad, as a helper since his wife died and he himself has been handicapped by stroke. The kids go to school and play with everyone else and are a full part of the village.
Their fate, as orphans, is far better than the town kids who hang out in the streets. It is reminiscent of Dickensian stories to see the number of young kids who claim they are orphans and are clearly not getting the love and support that our village orphans get. Another group that breaks my heart are the children of the bar girls. In the cheapest beer halls the women solicit the men and they live in a long row house of rooms out back. All afternoon, their children play amongst the drinkers and carousers while their mothers work. I do think there is room for another orphanage that uses the strengths of our Makupo women to help these types of children grow up in a wholesome atmosphere, go to school at the mission across the road with our Makupo children and are fed by the farmers we are trying to relocate to another piece of land. A project is taking shape.
For news of Makupo, I am half waiting to see what the Vanier crowd will come up with. I am hoping their study trip will paint a picture of Makupo life and all its strengths and weaknesses that can be shared on the web with others. Stay tuned.
We go to Nkata Bay on Friday and with any luck I may have another couple of hours of time to get another blog article in. I found this moment when the mini van needed the headlamps and taillights replaced so I am sitting at the trimmer’s sewing machine while the electrician fixes the car and the students are off doing interviews.
Yours in solidarity
Doug
Monday, December 31, 2007
From the porch of Rondavel 350 Nkukuti Lodge – Nkhata Bay.
Sunday 30 December
I needed a vacation, and some quiet time. While it may be warm and beautiful in Malawi at this time of the year, I do not get much quiet time especially at Makupo where someone is soliciting or greeting or hanging out from early in the morning. At 5:30 this morning, it had stopped raining over night so I took a chair to the back of the house, out of sight of the construction going on next door and which had already started at this early hour with lots of hammering and thumping and sawing. (See the last paragraph for an explanation of this kind of activity on a Sunday in the holiday period.) As I sat writing my notes, Eunice appeared greeting her agogo and like a typical 3½ year old snuggled up and began asking questions and gabbed on.
Sunday 23 December
I knew if I I could escape to Nkhata Bay, one of my favourite places on Lake Malawi. I drove with my nieces Sautso and Undeni and their daughters, Laurlyn and Victoria and drove to Nkukuti Lodge owned by Sautso’s boss, Mr. Mhone, himself from Nkhata Bay. The Lodge is on a beautiful little beach just a couple of bays away from the dock in Nkhata Bay where the lake steamer lands. Sautso booked us into this place and they gave us 2 thatch roofed rondavels with a great porch protected from the sun and rain. It looks out eastward over Lake Malawi. The cottage is on the point at the end of the bay and as I look across, I can see through the mist on the far side, the mountains of Mozambique.
It’s Sunday afternoon just before Xmas and Nkukuti surrounds on 3 sides the old Chikale Beach Inn which has fallen somewhat into disrepair and is decidedly down in the tooth. The Nkukuti, on the other hand is in full expansion and has about 15 new rondavels being built and scattered up the steep slope of the bay. At the far end of the bay is Njaya Lodge, the original backpacker’s paradise catering to a gang of mzungu and Chinese of different sorts. (Note to self: write about the new face of China in a small country like Malawi –both the Chinas are here as well as Korea). It has a lot of the charm of the 60’s and as you work your way along the beach the enterprising local guys try to sell you kayak tours and chamba (Chewa for dagga) because they know their clientele. I first wanted to book the students into Njaya, because 15 years from now this corner of the world is going to be way overdeveloped and they may never have a chance to see such charm again. They only get one night, but I bet they will all want to come back.
A young boy named Moses, has just made his way over the rocks from the water up to very close to where I am. At first I thought he was scoping out the place, but as he reached the top of the rock pile on the lake shore he reached up and picked a fresh mango from the tree at the top of the waters edge. Then he came over and said hello and asked how things were going. The rock point seems to attract young guys who find the rocks more interesting than the beautiful beach sand which stretches around this little bay. Now at about 4:00, there are about a dozen of them down in their private corner, soaping up and diving in to rinse as well as washing their clothes.
It turns out he was scoping the place. He saw the kids here and was curious about the old white guy with the young Malawi girls so shortly after he said hi, he came back and asked to look at the computer I was cradling on my lap. We looked at some family pictures and because I now knew his name, he was very pleased to see it typed into this paragraph. He is ten and the girls are 7 so they are a bit shy with him, but tomorrow he has promised to teach them to swim on the beach. The city girls have not been in the lake and do not swim.
I have trained Laurlyn and Undeni to call me grandpa instead of agogo so I won’t feel so homesick. They even sound like the kids at home albeit with a cute little Malawi accent.
Being Sunday, we have a lot of the Mzuzu day trippers down, young Malawian families. The men are into the water often with a Carlsberg in hand, while the women shyly hide in the little shade available at the other side of the beach. Only a couple of Malawian women are in the water in bathing suits and they get right to water’s edge before they drop their chirundu and slip modestly into the water.
Gliding by at two or three hundred metres out pass a slow flotilla of dugout canoes. It seems so effortless but I am sure that they are a lot more work to paddle and steer than our Canadian versions. Now and again they are carrying a few crates of beer to some community along the coast. In the evening, they fish with lights close to shore when the winds have died down and the lake is peaceful. There are quite a number of bigger dory style boats with outboards acting as shuttle. They carry larger loads and are a lot more comfortable. Both dugouts and dories carry passengers as water taxis and will take you for a spin up and down the coast.
Monday 24 December
When there is sun, it is extremely hot. Right now the sky is overcast and even though threatening rain there has not been much at all here on the coast. In fact Nkhata Bay is quite dry and crops have not yet started growing. Yesterday, we drove to Mzuzu to meet Clement Mushane, Lyness Dove’s cousin who finally pulled the well together for us. Fifteen minutes out of Nkhata Bay the escarpment climb begins and it was raining heavily. Mzuzu is soaking and the rain only really started to clear up as we came back into Nkhata Bay where almost nothing had fallen.
Clement retired five years ago from the ministry responsible for water and was able to manouevre the drilling company into a position where we could finally get the rig up to Kasungu. The Mr. Jones who run the drilling company was very elusive and was really only willing to go where he could profit from economies of scale. The company has to transport three large pieces of equipment to each site and many places are extremely hard to get into. When he finally had about 10 wells to drill in the Kasungu area, he included us in his programme. In the meantime, Clement was up and down from Karonga a couple of times to track down a commitment from Jones and he got the District Water Officer in Karonga to help put some pressure on as well since they had worked together. Clement still has a very young family even though he and I are born in the same year, so he is hoping that he can be involved in more projects to supplement his meager civil service pension to pay school fees.
December 25 on Chikale Beach was wild.
In the morning we walked around the point to a couple of little backpacker Lodges. The Butterfly is aptly named ands seems to be run by a flower child from the sixties and her Tonga boy friend, a Rasta. It is very cheap and very sparse. Then we fell in love with Mayoka Village Lodge which fits right in between Njaya and Butterfly on the price range and is absolutely charming. We tried to book in but they were overbooked because of the Xmas season and they were serving their barbecued meat buffet at 15:00 which was too early for us to get back for. I have reserved the place for the Vanier students when we get to Nkhata Bay and I am pretty sure they will want to opt for a second night once they have seen the place. It has a rocky beach and offers free snorkels and masks and great fish viewing. Lake Malawi has a variety of fish that are very popular among northern aquarium fish collectors. These cichlids are very colourful and abundant near the shore.
Sunday had brought a lot of day visitors to Chikale beach, but by the time we got back, just before noon we had the Xmas day rush. People came by water taxis from up and down the coast, because there was news that there might be entertainment. A rough guess put the crowd at 2,000 and the bars were soon sold out of beer and soft drinks sending the taxis off to Nkhata Bay to restock. I hid out on the porch and sneaked (snuck?) a few crowd shots on the mighty Fuji, then we booked supper at the Njaya where they were barbecuing a lamb. The night before we had eaten there and they had barbecued a pig and had a local band play. There was a tea chest base with one string and with a large cowhide kettle drum as resonator as well as a home made snare drum set with cymbals as well as a male and female coordinated dancers. After supper on Xmas day there was a band playing at the Nkukuti, so our day was a lot of fun. Sautso and Undeni unwinding as much as I.
Wednesday 26 December
We returned to Lilongwe, by way of Salima following the lakeshore north to south. At Nkhata Bay for about 70 kilometres the escarpment hugs the coast and the road winds in and out and up and down. Large stretches are in a rubber tree plantation established back in colonial times and there still seems to be production going on. Some enterprising little guys are holding up white rubber balls which are great at the beach. They take the raw white rubber and wind it around a balloon for shape. At Tukoma we stopped at the Aleke Development Centre and drove about a kilometer down towards the to visit the aunt of Hannah McNally and her husband Aleke who were at the cottage for the holidays. The last time I had seen Mr. Banda was at Hannah and Brian’s wedding in 1975. He has set up another group, KUDA for KuNyanja Development Association which provides revolving credit, small loans in the form of livestock and child care, schooling and training for local AIDS orphans. He made me promise to drop in on KUDA when we come through with the students in January.
In Salima, we met Undeni and Yonah’s sister, Beriya who has been looking after Victoria for the last 3½ years while Undeni was in the UK. Beriya runs a small shop where she sells the used clothes we North Americans send to the Salvation Army and Thrift Shops. They are baled and shipped to Malawi and other countries where small traders like her buy the bale without knowing what is in it and hope to make a living selling the contents in small market centres like Salima. You can see Canada T shirts and Maple Leaf hockey sweaters walking the streets all over Malawi. University shirts are very popular as if they bestowed a degree by virtue of ownership.
I had spent many a dissipated holiday on the beach at the old Grand Beach Hotel and was keen to see how it had turned out. Like the back packers I slept on the beach and at fish bought from the fishermen. Now it is part of the Sunbird chain and is known as Livingstonia Beach, but sure enough the old building has been recycled into use and there is an old picture on the wall from 1970 of the original Grand Beach as I fondly knew it. Nellie and honeymooned a few miles down the coast at the old Fish Eagle Inn, but I am told that it was literally eroded away and number of other resorts have taken its place.
Thursday 27 December
Justin Malewezi and I finally managed to find some time in his busy schedule to meet. It was good to see him so fit and active, still dynamic and organized. Justin taught at Likuni when I was at Mitundu and shared a house over the time with 3 different CUSO teachers, so we had gotten to know each other very well as young men. I had not seen him since he was the new vice-president in 1996 just after the UDF won the democracy elections. We met at the Capital Hotel and he came with Senior Chief Lukwa which is one of the most senior of the Chewa chieftainships. They have been working together with the newest Chewa king in Katete, Zambia to rebuild the usefulness and integrity of the old Chewa kingdom which straddles across the borders of Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. He is formally leaving politics when this term as an MP expires in 2009 and plans to focus on delivering the goods to the people of Ntchisi on a number of levels. There is a very ambitious AIDS programme he is planning as a model for other areas. Because of his own experience with kidney problems, he is also setting up a foundation to help improve education, testing and treatment of people with kidney disease. Chief Lukwa, whom he introduced as his brother, is in fact the donor for his own kidney transplant.
Friday 28 December
I had intended to go to Makupo to finalise all the last minute preparations for the Vanier visit, but Ivy had arranged for me to have breakfast with Zilanie Gondwe, Victor’s niece, who is a music agent and promoter and closely connected to the local scene. Chimwemwe is keen to establish some links between Malawi and the music scene that he is part of in Canada and she had some really good ideas, a ton of contacts, including Jordan Mlotha who is like Chimwemwe with Malawian roots based in Ottawa but keen to make the Africa-Canada connection come alive.
Ivy and Zilanie convinced me that the Wambali Mkandawire concert at the Capital Hotel that night was a must see since, Wambali claims to be retiring from musical concerts to become an evangelical preacher and may never perform his brand of music on stage again. They were right. It was a great show in the huge marquee tent behind the Capital hotel. I had never entered the Capital before, and now I was there 2 nights in a row. Two warm up bands started the show and then Wambali came on. He plays with a strong root from South African jazz of the Cape Town sort, but has his own unique Malawi rooted style. He is a proud Tumbuka and sings almost exclusively in his mother tongue. His back up band members are really talented and overall it is a show that would travel well internationally.
Back to Sunday 30 December
I have a meeting with the Makupo women this afternoon to plan the food portion of the visit. Time is counting down fast and brother-in-law jack has his construction crew working around the clock to finish all the toilets, baths and kitchens in time. The houses will be spic and span and everyone is eager for the visit as well as the chance to make some income. I have already made several advances on earnings so people can buy their fertilizer for the maize and tobacco. I am in the process of installing the solar panel so we will have lights in the bigger house. I have to modify the kit I bought from Light up the World Foundation to make it work in our setting. If the villagers agree on solar, I will buy the more elaborate and expensive set up and hopefully get someone of the group to work on it as a project for installation. That would become the model and service the rest of the village.
I do not know if I will have much quiet time after January 3 so the blog postings may become more infrequent.
Sunday 30 December
I needed a vacation, and some quiet time. While it may be warm and beautiful in Malawi at this time of the year, I do not get much quiet time especially at Makupo where someone is soliciting or greeting or hanging out from early in the morning. At 5:30 this morning, it had stopped raining over night so I took a chair to the back of the house, out of sight of the construction going on next door and which had already started at this early hour with lots of hammering and thumping and sawing. (See the last paragraph for an explanation of this kind of activity on a Sunday in the holiday period.) As I sat writing my notes, Eunice appeared greeting her agogo and like a typical 3½ year old snuggled up and began asking questions and gabbed on.
Sunday 23 December
I knew if I I could escape to Nkhata Bay, one of my favourite places on Lake Malawi. I drove with my nieces Sautso and Undeni and their daughters, Laurlyn and Victoria and drove to Nkukuti Lodge owned by Sautso’s boss, Mr. Mhone, himself from Nkhata Bay. The Lodge is on a beautiful little beach just a couple of bays away from the dock in Nkhata Bay where the lake steamer lands. Sautso booked us into this place and they gave us 2 thatch roofed rondavels with a great porch protected from the sun and rain. It looks out eastward over Lake Malawi. The cottage is on the point at the end of the bay and as I look across, I can see through the mist on the far side, the mountains of Mozambique.
It’s Sunday afternoon just before Xmas and Nkukuti surrounds on 3 sides the old Chikale Beach Inn which has fallen somewhat into disrepair and is decidedly down in the tooth. The Nkukuti, on the other hand is in full expansion and has about 15 new rondavels being built and scattered up the steep slope of the bay. At the far end of the bay is Njaya Lodge, the original backpacker’s paradise catering to a gang of mzungu and Chinese of different sorts. (Note to self: write about the new face of China in a small country like Malawi –both the Chinas are here as well as Korea). It has a lot of the charm of the 60’s and as you work your way along the beach the enterprising local guys try to sell you kayak tours and chamba (Chewa for dagga) because they know their clientele. I first wanted to book the students into Njaya, because 15 years from now this corner of the world is going to be way overdeveloped and they may never have a chance to see such charm again. They only get one night, but I bet they will all want to come back.
A young boy named Moses, has just made his way over the rocks from the water up to very close to where I am. At first I thought he was scoping out the place, but as he reached the top of the rock pile on the lake shore he reached up and picked a fresh mango from the tree at the top of the waters edge. Then he came over and said hello and asked how things were going. The rock point seems to attract young guys who find the rocks more interesting than the beautiful beach sand which stretches around this little bay. Now at about 4:00, there are about a dozen of them down in their private corner, soaping up and diving in to rinse as well as washing their clothes.
It turns out he was scoping the place. He saw the kids here and was curious about the old white guy with the young Malawi girls so shortly after he said hi, he came back and asked to look at the computer I was cradling on my lap. We looked at some family pictures and because I now knew his name, he was very pleased to see it typed into this paragraph. He is ten and the girls are 7 so they are a bit shy with him, but tomorrow he has promised to teach them to swim on the beach. The city girls have not been in the lake and do not swim.
I have trained Laurlyn and Undeni to call me grandpa instead of agogo so I won’t feel so homesick. They even sound like the kids at home albeit with a cute little Malawi accent.
Being Sunday, we have a lot of the Mzuzu day trippers down, young Malawian families. The men are into the water often with a Carlsberg in hand, while the women shyly hide in the little shade available at the other side of the beach. Only a couple of Malawian women are in the water in bathing suits and they get right to water’s edge before they drop their chirundu and slip modestly into the water.
Gliding by at two or three hundred metres out pass a slow flotilla of dugout canoes. It seems so effortless but I am sure that they are a lot more work to paddle and steer than our Canadian versions. Now and again they are carrying a few crates of beer to some community along the coast. In the evening, they fish with lights close to shore when the winds have died down and the lake is peaceful. There are quite a number of bigger dory style boats with outboards acting as shuttle. They carry larger loads and are a lot more comfortable. Both dugouts and dories carry passengers as water taxis and will take you for a spin up and down the coast.
Monday 24 December
When there is sun, it is extremely hot. Right now the sky is overcast and even though threatening rain there has not been much at all here on the coast. In fact Nkhata Bay is quite dry and crops have not yet started growing. Yesterday, we drove to Mzuzu to meet Clement Mushane, Lyness Dove’s cousin who finally pulled the well together for us. Fifteen minutes out of Nkhata Bay the escarpment climb begins and it was raining heavily. Mzuzu is soaking and the rain only really started to clear up as we came back into Nkhata Bay where almost nothing had fallen.
Clement retired five years ago from the ministry responsible for water and was able to manouevre the drilling company into a position where we could finally get the rig up to Kasungu. The Mr. Jones who run the drilling company was very elusive and was really only willing to go where he could profit from economies of scale. The company has to transport three large pieces of equipment to each site and many places are extremely hard to get into. When he finally had about 10 wells to drill in the Kasungu area, he included us in his programme. In the meantime, Clement was up and down from Karonga a couple of times to track down a commitment from Jones and he got the District Water Officer in Karonga to help put some pressure on as well since they had worked together. Clement still has a very young family even though he and I are born in the same year, so he is hoping that he can be involved in more projects to supplement his meager civil service pension to pay school fees.
December 25 on Chikale Beach was wild.
In the morning we walked around the point to a couple of little backpacker Lodges. The Butterfly is aptly named ands seems to be run by a flower child from the sixties and her Tonga boy friend, a Rasta. It is very cheap and very sparse. Then we fell in love with Mayoka Village Lodge which fits right in between Njaya and Butterfly on the price range and is absolutely charming. We tried to book in but they were overbooked because of the Xmas season and they were serving their barbecued meat buffet at 15:00 which was too early for us to get back for. I have reserved the place for the Vanier students when we get to Nkhata Bay and I am pretty sure they will want to opt for a second night once they have seen the place. It has a rocky beach and offers free snorkels and masks and great fish viewing. Lake Malawi has a variety of fish that are very popular among northern aquarium fish collectors. These cichlids are very colourful and abundant near the shore.
Sunday had brought a lot of day visitors to Chikale beach, but by the time we got back, just before noon we had the Xmas day rush. People came by water taxis from up and down the coast, because there was news that there might be entertainment. A rough guess put the crowd at 2,000 and the bars were soon sold out of beer and soft drinks sending the taxis off to Nkhata Bay to restock. I hid out on the porch and sneaked (snuck?) a few crowd shots on the mighty Fuji, then we booked supper at the Njaya where they were barbecuing a lamb. The night before we had eaten there and they had barbecued a pig and had a local band play. There was a tea chest base with one string and with a large cowhide kettle drum as resonator as well as a home made snare drum set with cymbals as well as a male and female coordinated dancers. After supper on Xmas day there was a band playing at the Nkukuti, so our day was a lot of fun. Sautso and Undeni unwinding as much as I.
Wednesday 26 December
We returned to Lilongwe, by way of Salima following the lakeshore north to south. At Nkhata Bay for about 70 kilometres the escarpment hugs the coast and the road winds in and out and up and down. Large stretches are in a rubber tree plantation established back in colonial times and there still seems to be production going on. Some enterprising little guys are holding up white rubber balls which are great at the beach. They take the raw white rubber and wind it around a balloon for shape. At Tukoma we stopped at the Aleke Development Centre and drove about a kilometer down towards the to visit the aunt of Hannah McNally and her husband Aleke who were at the cottage for the holidays. The last time I had seen Mr. Banda was at Hannah and Brian’s wedding in 1975. He has set up another group, KUDA for KuNyanja Development Association which provides revolving credit, small loans in the form of livestock and child care, schooling and training for local AIDS orphans. He made me promise to drop in on KUDA when we come through with the students in January.
In Salima, we met Undeni and Yonah’s sister, Beriya who has been looking after Victoria for the last 3½ years while Undeni was in the UK. Beriya runs a small shop where she sells the used clothes we North Americans send to the Salvation Army and Thrift Shops. They are baled and shipped to Malawi and other countries where small traders like her buy the bale without knowing what is in it and hope to make a living selling the contents in small market centres like Salima. You can see Canada T shirts and Maple Leaf hockey sweaters walking the streets all over Malawi. University shirts are very popular as if they bestowed a degree by virtue of ownership.
I had spent many a dissipated holiday on the beach at the old Grand Beach Hotel and was keen to see how it had turned out. Like the back packers I slept on the beach and at fish bought from the fishermen. Now it is part of the Sunbird chain and is known as Livingstonia Beach, but sure enough the old building has been recycled into use and there is an old picture on the wall from 1970 of the original Grand Beach as I fondly knew it. Nellie and honeymooned a few miles down the coast at the old Fish Eagle Inn, but I am told that it was literally eroded away and number of other resorts have taken its place.
Thursday 27 December
Justin Malewezi and I finally managed to find some time in his busy schedule to meet. It was good to see him so fit and active, still dynamic and organized. Justin taught at Likuni when I was at Mitundu and shared a house over the time with 3 different CUSO teachers, so we had gotten to know each other very well as young men. I had not seen him since he was the new vice-president in 1996 just after the UDF won the democracy elections. We met at the Capital Hotel and he came with Senior Chief Lukwa which is one of the most senior of the Chewa chieftainships. They have been working together with the newest Chewa king in Katete, Zambia to rebuild the usefulness and integrity of the old Chewa kingdom which straddles across the borders of Zambia, Malawi and Mozambique. He is formally leaving politics when this term as an MP expires in 2009 and plans to focus on delivering the goods to the people of Ntchisi on a number of levels. There is a very ambitious AIDS programme he is planning as a model for other areas. Because of his own experience with kidney problems, he is also setting up a foundation to help improve education, testing and treatment of people with kidney disease. Chief Lukwa, whom he introduced as his brother, is in fact the donor for his own kidney transplant.
Friday 28 December
I had intended to go to Makupo to finalise all the last minute preparations for the Vanier visit, but Ivy had arranged for me to have breakfast with Zilanie Gondwe, Victor’s niece, who is a music agent and promoter and closely connected to the local scene. Chimwemwe is keen to establish some links between Malawi and the music scene that he is part of in Canada and she had some really good ideas, a ton of contacts, including Jordan Mlotha who is like Chimwemwe with Malawian roots based in Ottawa but keen to make the Africa-Canada connection come alive.
Ivy and Zilanie convinced me that the Wambali Mkandawire concert at the Capital Hotel that night was a must see since, Wambali claims to be retiring from musical concerts to become an evangelical preacher and may never perform his brand of music on stage again. They were right. It was a great show in the huge marquee tent behind the Capital hotel. I had never entered the Capital before, and now I was there 2 nights in a row. Two warm up bands started the show and then Wambali came on. He plays with a strong root from South African jazz of the Cape Town sort, but has his own unique Malawi rooted style. He is a proud Tumbuka and sings almost exclusively in his mother tongue. His back up band members are really talented and overall it is a show that would travel well internationally.
Back to Sunday 30 December
I have a meeting with the Makupo women this afternoon to plan the food portion of the visit. Time is counting down fast and brother-in-law jack has his construction crew working around the clock to finish all the toilets, baths and kitchens in time. The houses will be spic and span and everyone is eager for the visit as well as the chance to make some income. I have already made several advances on earnings so people can buy their fertilizer for the maize and tobacco. I am in the process of installing the solar panel so we will have lights in the bigger house. I have to modify the kit I bought from Light up the World Foundation to make it work in our setting. If the villagers agree on solar, I will buy the more elaborate and expensive set up and hopefully get someone of the group to work on it as a project for installation. That would become the model and service the rest of the village.
I do not know if I will have much quiet time after January 3 so the blog postings may become more infrequent.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
Blog 5: The theme emerges
Blog 5: The theme emerges
December 26 – Nkhata Bay
It has been many years since I was involved in the development industry, or the aid business as I prefer to call it. I was a fresh faced Canadian who had applied to CUSO to see Tanzania, the newly independent country where my friends Ulli and Weidi came from. My evolution from that point took me from naïve and relatively stupid to a serious, knowledgeable person in the NGO / solidarity business. The eleven years I spent from 1968 to 1979 were exciting and deeply formative years. More recently, over the last 27 years I have been involved in the field of education in the Quebec college system and again acquired a deep knowledge and pedagogical expertise dealing with the multicultural mosaic that is young Canada and students otherwise left behind by the educational system. That has been a slower, less exciting, but nonetheless dynamic and rewarding path with patience one of the virtues acquired by dint of persistent hard work.
The formation of the liberation years in Lusaka from 1976 to 1979 was decidedly anti-imperialist. Western capitalism with its voracious appetite for African resources and cheap labour was consistently falling on the wrong side of justice and equity. The west supported apartheid and lauded the jailing of Mandela as a communist trained terrorist, while NATO supported the Portuguese army which was brutally repressing the Africans of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau. We, in the anti-apartheid solidarity movement, knew we couldn’t overthrow capitalism as a world system, but we had no choice but to combat its uglier manifestations in colonialism and apartheid. We allied ourselves with unions and churches and campaigned relentlessly until our African brothers and sisters could rule their own countries and lives. At the same time the Ujamaa socialism of Nyerere, the writings of Kwame Nkrumah inspired the hope that there was another more equitable way to share this earth.
The union work and social justice work and in many small ways the work with students in The Learning Centre have continued this effort to build a better more just world.
Now, In December 2007, a new path is opening that looks like it may lead to an amalgam of the two parallel and seemingly disconnected paths my life has led to this point. For this trip, the watchword is “solidarity not charity”. The focus is a group of families in a very small village in rural Malawi, one of the poorest countries of the world.
The struggle is different in historical terms. Globalisation is the present form of capitalism and its spread is broader and more deeply and insidiously implanted than ever before. The grip over the poor countries has changed from colonial occupation to financial and resource debt manipulation. It has also been reinforced by the creation of a generation of African leaders and business people trained in and committed to the Adam Smith school of private enterprise. The World Bank, African Development Bank and IMF have sent out from their ranks well trained and competent people who now rule countries like Malawi, Botswana and Liberia to name but three.
Yet the reality of everyday life for people in rural areas of Malawi has not changed regardless of the language we use to define the geopolitical reality that governs the ruling classes of Malawi and the dominant paradigm of the World Bank. They remain essentially poor and exploited as cheap labour. Their lives are harsh and despite all that they are survivors who work hard and adapt to circumstances that offer little opportunity.
As part of my reflection I have been looking back over 39 years of visiting Malawi and trying to see the difference.
In 1968, Malawi was newly freed from the colonial yoke. There should be no illusions about the legacy that colonialism left. Economically, the mother country had created and entrenched economic dependency on the metropolis with raw products flowing out and manufactured product coming in. The imported materials always cost more than the exported materials received and the balance of trade was weighted to ensure permanent dependency.
A consequence of this was to force otherwise self-sufficient peasants to drop food crops and focus on inedible cash crops – tobacco, tea, cotton. The prices of these on the world market stay perennially low as huge multinationals manipulate the world prices through cartels. Today, the farmers of Malawi are very bitter about how little they receive for their tobacco on the auction floor. They did everything they were advised by the experts with respect to good agricultural practices and they were rewarded with returns that almost do not cover the cost of their inputs. Gillian Bowman’s nephew with the BBC did a really good documentary on the way the prices are fixed by the big companies so the buyers on the auction floor keep the prices low to increase their profit and to the disadvantage of the poor farmer. (Do a search in BBC under “tobacco Malawi” and it should appear).
Reflection from 39 years of hindsight.
I do not see a change in the basic structure of the economy. Rural poverty has remained entrenched and hunger has now become chronic. In many regions, the land has been stretched to its limits. Large estates stand side by side with tiny plots. Cash crops compete with food crops and no-one has any room to expand. Hence the future on this path of economic development offers very little possibility.
Culturally, the imperialists brought their churches during the Victorian period and rewarded converts with education, health care and jobs. Traditional practices were labeled pagan and had to be abandoned. The gender roles in the core structure of the matrilineal societies were pushed into the classic male vision of Victorian society of the women as chattels, as infants. The economy reinforced this as men were encouraged to grow cash crops while food crops were for consumption and not revenue and thus became a women’s priority.
Reflections of 39 years of hindsight.
Today women remain economically the most disadvantaged and the largest percentage of poor households are headed by women. The older churches still remain some of the most conservative in the religious world and are especially vigourous on maintaining the classic gender roles. The newer churches proliferate at an amazing rate and have huge establishments from which they perpetuate very conservative visions of male-female relationships and the Muslims are also busy with their missionary work, putting up mosques in the most remote villages and they too are decidedly anti-feminist. Well off the road in the midst of deeply Catholic Mtendere, we saw a substantial little mosque and related buildings. While progressive church people in North America have moved far passed some of these archaic visions, the missionaries and their churches in Africa are still promoting the traditional family values of male as boss and wife as obedient infant.
Prognosis: Nevertheless, there are some strong forces lining up against the more backward elements of this gender imbalance. The reality of the AIDS pandemic has forced discussion out of the religious closet and onto the front stage. Men still have their way, but there are campaigns against spousal violence and child abuse, and condom ads are everywhere. Women have a better chance now than ever to at least assert their rights in sexual relations, but there is still a long way to go.
In search of a theme: How will things be different today?
It is embarrassing sitting with the elders and even my peers as they ask for help and money as though this little bit here and now is going to make any difference in their long term. It has been this way ever since I came to Malawi in 1968. Nothing is changing the root causes of their situation.
On a personal level, I am free of my commitment to nine-to-five work to help one small group of people in Makupo, Malawi to free themselves of dependency and become more self-sufficient and self-sustaining. They will tell me what needs doing for the long term and through the money they earn, never have to ask anyone again to pay for short-term needs. A few really competent family members here in the country share my commitment to this form of community development and as a spin off they too may benefit as intermediaries between the Canadian end of the spectrum and the Malawian.
In Canada, critical people and progressive organisations are looking for credible intermediaries as the aid industry heavies fall into disrepute for a variety of reasons.
The thousands of Africans living overseas are but one example of very directed support who are contributing through remittances to helping people at home and with focused support their efforts can become developmental and long-term. No agencies deal with or recognize this form of family support. Those few Malawians of my acquaintance in Canada give willingly and derive no personal benefit from the support they send home. Their collective efforts have in some cases surpassed much of the formal aid in quantum figures and still goes largely unrecognized.
It would be important to lobby the Canadian government to recognize this contribution and allow some benefit through income tax returns or whatever. Another would be to set up an entirely above the board non-profit with charitable status that would research the needs at home as the expatriate Africans see them and articulate project packages allowing income tax receipts for money otherwise sent home straight without any recognition.
The theme was supposed to be building one world. That is already being done by the Africans. They live in the west and send support home and the people at home welcome strangers into their midst and offer them their hospitality without any question.
Now the issue is how can Canadians young and old come for a short visit and overcome the urge to simply throw money and material goods at the poor world without understanding the more complex nature of created poverty and how the domination of the west is what must change to allow for real development to occur. Solidarity not charity involves working together for structural change in Canada and focused support for self-sufficiency in Africa.
No answer yet, but working on it. The theme emerges from my ruminations and a few quiet moments.
December 26 – Nkhata Bay
It has been many years since I was involved in the development industry, or the aid business as I prefer to call it. I was a fresh faced Canadian who had applied to CUSO to see Tanzania, the newly independent country where my friends Ulli and Weidi came from. My evolution from that point took me from naïve and relatively stupid to a serious, knowledgeable person in the NGO / solidarity business. The eleven years I spent from 1968 to 1979 were exciting and deeply formative years. More recently, over the last 27 years I have been involved in the field of education in the Quebec college system and again acquired a deep knowledge and pedagogical expertise dealing with the multicultural mosaic that is young Canada and students otherwise left behind by the educational system. That has been a slower, less exciting, but nonetheless dynamic and rewarding path with patience one of the virtues acquired by dint of persistent hard work.
The formation of the liberation years in Lusaka from 1976 to 1979 was decidedly anti-imperialist. Western capitalism with its voracious appetite for African resources and cheap labour was consistently falling on the wrong side of justice and equity. The west supported apartheid and lauded the jailing of Mandela as a communist trained terrorist, while NATO supported the Portuguese army which was brutally repressing the Africans of Mozambique, Angola and Guinea Bissau. We, in the anti-apartheid solidarity movement, knew we couldn’t overthrow capitalism as a world system, but we had no choice but to combat its uglier manifestations in colonialism and apartheid. We allied ourselves with unions and churches and campaigned relentlessly until our African brothers and sisters could rule their own countries and lives. At the same time the Ujamaa socialism of Nyerere, the writings of Kwame Nkrumah inspired the hope that there was another more equitable way to share this earth.
The union work and social justice work and in many small ways the work with students in The Learning Centre have continued this effort to build a better more just world.
Now, In December 2007, a new path is opening that looks like it may lead to an amalgam of the two parallel and seemingly disconnected paths my life has led to this point. For this trip, the watchword is “solidarity not charity”. The focus is a group of families in a very small village in rural Malawi, one of the poorest countries of the world.
The struggle is different in historical terms. Globalisation is the present form of capitalism and its spread is broader and more deeply and insidiously implanted than ever before. The grip over the poor countries has changed from colonial occupation to financial and resource debt manipulation. It has also been reinforced by the creation of a generation of African leaders and business people trained in and committed to the Adam Smith school of private enterprise. The World Bank, African Development Bank and IMF have sent out from their ranks well trained and competent people who now rule countries like Malawi, Botswana and Liberia to name but three.
Yet the reality of everyday life for people in rural areas of Malawi has not changed regardless of the language we use to define the geopolitical reality that governs the ruling classes of Malawi and the dominant paradigm of the World Bank. They remain essentially poor and exploited as cheap labour. Their lives are harsh and despite all that they are survivors who work hard and adapt to circumstances that offer little opportunity.
As part of my reflection I have been looking back over 39 years of visiting Malawi and trying to see the difference.
In 1968, Malawi was newly freed from the colonial yoke. There should be no illusions about the legacy that colonialism left. Economically, the mother country had created and entrenched economic dependency on the metropolis with raw products flowing out and manufactured product coming in. The imported materials always cost more than the exported materials received and the balance of trade was weighted to ensure permanent dependency.
A consequence of this was to force otherwise self-sufficient peasants to drop food crops and focus on inedible cash crops – tobacco, tea, cotton. The prices of these on the world market stay perennially low as huge multinationals manipulate the world prices through cartels. Today, the farmers of Malawi are very bitter about how little they receive for their tobacco on the auction floor. They did everything they were advised by the experts with respect to good agricultural practices and they were rewarded with returns that almost do not cover the cost of their inputs. Gillian Bowman’s nephew with the BBC did a really good documentary on the way the prices are fixed by the big companies so the buyers on the auction floor keep the prices low to increase their profit and to the disadvantage of the poor farmer. (Do a search in BBC under “tobacco Malawi” and it should appear).
Reflection from 39 years of hindsight.
I do not see a change in the basic structure of the economy. Rural poverty has remained entrenched and hunger has now become chronic. In many regions, the land has been stretched to its limits. Large estates stand side by side with tiny plots. Cash crops compete with food crops and no-one has any room to expand. Hence the future on this path of economic development offers very little possibility.
Culturally, the imperialists brought their churches during the Victorian period and rewarded converts with education, health care and jobs. Traditional practices were labeled pagan and had to be abandoned. The gender roles in the core structure of the matrilineal societies were pushed into the classic male vision of Victorian society of the women as chattels, as infants. The economy reinforced this as men were encouraged to grow cash crops while food crops were for consumption and not revenue and thus became a women’s priority.
Reflections of 39 years of hindsight.
Today women remain economically the most disadvantaged and the largest percentage of poor households are headed by women. The older churches still remain some of the most conservative in the religious world and are especially vigourous on maintaining the classic gender roles. The newer churches proliferate at an amazing rate and have huge establishments from which they perpetuate very conservative visions of male-female relationships and the Muslims are also busy with their missionary work, putting up mosques in the most remote villages and they too are decidedly anti-feminist. Well off the road in the midst of deeply Catholic Mtendere, we saw a substantial little mosque and related buildings. While progressive church people in North America have moved far passed some of these archaic visions, the missionaries and their churches in Africa are still promoting the traditional family values of male as boss and wife as obedient infant.
Prognosis: Nevertheless, there are some strong forces lining up against the more backward elements of this gender imbalance. The reality of the AIDS pandemic has forced discussion out of the religious closet and onto the front stage. Men still have their way, but there are campaigns against spousal violence and child abuse, and condom ads are everywhere. Women have a better chance now than ever to at least assert their rights in sexual relations, but there is still a long way to go.
In search of a theme: How will things be different today?
It is embarrassing sitting with the elders and even my peers as they ask for help and money as though this little bit here and now is going to make any difference in their long term. It has been this way ever since I came to Malawi in 1968. Nothing is changing the root causes of their situation.
On a personal level, I am free of my commitment to nine-to-five work to help one small group of people in Makupo, Malawi to free themselves of dependency and become more self-sufficient and self-sustaining. They will tell me what needs doing for the long term and through the money they earn, never have to ask anyone again to pay for short-term needs. A few really competent family members here in the country share my commitment to this form of community development and as a spin off they too may benefit as intermediaries between the Canadian end of the spectrum and the Malawian.
In Canada, critical people and progressive organisations are looking for credible intermediaries as the aid industry heavies fall into disrepute for a variety of reasons.
The thousands of Africans living overseas are but one example of very directed support who are contributing through remittances to helping people at home and with focused support their efforts can become developmental and long-term. No agencies deal with or recognize this form of family support. Those few Malawians of my acquaintance in Canada give willingly and derive no personal benefit from the support they send home. Their collective efforts have in some cases surpassed much of the formal aid in quantum figures and still goes largely unrecognized.
It would be important to lobby the Canadian government to recognize this contribution and allow some benefit through income tax returns or whatever. Another would be to set up an entirely above the board non-profit with charitable status that would research the needs at home as the expatriate Africans see them and articulate project packages allowing income tax receipts for money otherwise sent home straight without any recognition.
The theme was supposed to be building one world. That is already being done by the Africans. They live in the west and send support home and the people at home welcome strangers into their midst and offer them their hospitality without any question.
Now the issue is how can Canadians young and old come for a short visit and overcome the urge to simply throw money and material goods at the poor world without understanding the more complex nature of created poverty and how the domination of the west is what must change to allow for real development to occur. Solidarity not charity involves working together for structural change in Canada and focused support for self-sufficiency in Africa.
No answer yet, but working on it. The theme emerges from my ruminations and a few quiet moments.
Friday, December 21, 2007
The Dream
Blog 4
22 December
The dream: Looking back at the last 4 years and seeing the past through the eyes of people in Makupo and those of the people in Montreal.
We have a dream from 2 polar ends of the development spectrum. From Canada we would love to help the people of Makupo village set up a self-sustaining economy that will give employment and generate revenue for as many of them as possible. The buzz words of development planners from time immemorial. The answers seem so simple. We also made a promise to ourselves that we would try to send one Canadian representative each year to support the efforts this side and as evidence of good faith. From the Makupo end, the dream is to escape unemployment, poverty and dependence, but the answers for them are far from simple, despite appearances to the contrary.
In January 2004, we promised to help the young people. There were nine at the time, who wanted us to buy a piece of land that they could farm and become self-sufficient. It took until 2006 for the land to be found and the money to be sent when they finally got 40 fertile acres with the deed signed. Then they had a struggle to get to the land let alone stay on it. After one valiant season, the four remaining members gave up and stayed home, leaving the land fallow in 2007.
What happened? Many things. Three of the original group succumbed to town life and so Rhoda works as a security guard, Moses is doing some private farming down in Dedza and Temba is following a course in Community Development. Bwelezani got accepted to Teveta Technical Institute, a Canadian sponsored school to do a 4 year course in welding. That left Kenny, Chitani, Mwayi and Palije.
The land is very fertile and relatively underdeveloped, by standards. It is commercial land that we bought, because you cannot buy traditional land which is now occupied to its limit. As a result, it is not very near the home village, in fact by the odometer it is 44 kilometres by road. It may be as much as 10 or 12 kilometres less by bicycle cross country, but the path is very sandy and hard to ride especially with a heavy load. They stayed in a room near the land and since they only had one bicycle to share they took turns riding home in shifts to see the family, take a break and to bring in food, seed and fertiliser.
The South African High Commissioner was quoted recently as saying Malawians are poor because they are lazy. I would like her to meet the hard working young people of Makupo. Their reward when the crop was ready to harvest was to find the majority had been stolen by unscrupulous local folk who knew they were away for protracted periods at the end of the season when farmers are waiting for the maize to dry for harvesting. With no funding for housing, and needing more seed grain, fertiliser, and food, they had no choice but to abandon the project for this season.
Wednesday afternoon, Jack Kamanga and I drove with Bwelezani, Kenny and Fraser to the land. It took 1½ hours to travel the 44 kilometres over VERY BAD roads. We passed through the village of sub-chief Kawomba who was busy at his depot distributing subsidized fertilizer to the farmers who qualified for coupons. Those who do not qualify for coupons are very bitter, since the subsidised fertilser is MK900 versus the full price of MK4,000 per bag. The Makupo men are respectful of village protocol and we stopped to greet the headman in the midst of the busyness of distribution.
When we finally and gratefully go to the farm we understood the kind of problems that the guys had been dealing with. Given the bruising the road had handed us in a car imagine doing all the distance with a heavily laden bicycle. We in Canada thought that by simply offering one piece of the puzzle, the land, the whole solution would appear. It is clearly a far more complicated problem not easily solved with simple solutions. Something far more comprehensive must be envisaged. If all they need is land and hard work, then the solution should have been at hand.
By contrast Just near Makupo on a large estate is a rich crop of tobacco already being harvested. The estate owner has access to capital, loans, and all the inputs to make more money. Our guys cannot even open a bank account because they do not have jobs, let alone a loan from the bank or anywhere else. They are the reserve army of the unemployed, available as cheap labour, despite their education and good farming skills and their hard work, and despite what Madame the High commissioner says.
So what is the theme: Solidarity not Charity. The guys want a chance, an equal chance to prove themselves. We are only talking about 4 people out of 13 million and even with support they are not in a position to make it.
The question has been posed that solidarity was easy in the days of the anti-apartheid struggle. There were sides to be on, the enemy was easily defined and justice was a clear cut thing. How do we convert that history and apply it to the struggles of rural people whose daily life revolves around the struggle to survive the day?
More ruminatons and ranting to follow as I head off to Nkhata Bay today with nieces, Sautso and Undeni and their daughters. I will be vacationing for a few days over Xmas, sitting on the beach with a cold Carlsberg in my hand and thinking of my Montreal connections with cold hands on the shovel. Happy holidays.
Peace and love
Doug
22 December
The dream: Looking back at the last 4 years and seeing the past through the eyes of people in Makupo and those of the people in Montreal.
We have a dream from 2 polar ends of the development spectrum. From Canada we would love to help the people of Makupo village set up a self-sustaining economy that will give employment and generate revenue for as many of them as possible. The buzz words of development planners from time immemorial. The answers seem so simple. We also made a promise to ourselves that we would try to send one Canadian representative each year to support the efforts this side and as evidence of good faith. From the Makupo end, the dream is to escape unemployment, poverty and dependence, but the answers for them are far from simple, despite appearances to the contrary.
In January 2004, we promised to help the young people. There were nine at the time, who wanted us to buy a piece of land that they could farm and become self-sufficient. It took until 2006 for the land to be found and the money to be sent when they finally got 40 fertile acres with the deed signed. Then they had a struggle to get to the land let alone stay on it. After one valiant season, the four remaining members gave up and stayed home, leaving the land fallow in 2007.
What happened? Many things. Three of the original group succumbed to town life and so Rhoda works as a security guard, Moses is doing some private farming down in Dedza and Temba is following a course in Community Development. Bwelezani got accepted to Teveta Technical Institute, a Canadian sponsored school to do a 4 year course in welding. That left Kenny, Chitani, Mwayi and Palije.
The land is very fertile and relatively underdeveloped, by standards. It is commercial land that we bought, because you cannot buy traditional land which is now occupied to its limit. As a result, it is not very near the home village, in fact by the odometer it is 44 kilometres by road. It may be as much as 10 or 12 kilometres less by bicycle cross country, but the path is very sandy and hard to ride especially with a heavy load. They stayed in a room near the land and since they only had one bicycle to share they took turns riding home in shifts to see the family, take a break and to bring in food, seed and fertiliser.
The South African High Commissioner was quoted recently as saying Malawians are poor because they are lazy. I would like her to meet the hard working young people of Makupo. Their reward when the crop was ready to harvest was to find the majority had been stolen by unscrupulous local folk who knew they were away for protracted periods at the end of the season when farmers are waiting for the maize to dry for harvesting. With no funding for housing, and needing more seed grain, fertiliser, and food, they had no choice but to abandon the project for this season.
Wednesday afternoon, Jack Kamanga and I drove with Bwelezani, Kenny and Fraser to the land. It took 1½ hours to travel the 44 kilometres over VERY BAD roads. We passed through the village of sub-chief Kawomba who was busy at his depot distributing subsidized fertilizer to the farmers who qualified for coupons. Those who do not qualify for coupons are very bitter, since the subsidised fertilser is MK900 versus the full price of MK4,000 per bag. The Makupo men are respectful of village protocol and we stopped to greet the headman in the midst of the busyness of distribution.
When we finally and gratefully go to the farm we understood the kind of problems that the guys had been dealing with. Given the bruising the road had handed us in a car imagine doing all the distance with a heavily laden bicycle. We in Canada thought that by simply offering one piece of the puzzle, the land, the whole solution would appear. It is clearly a far more complicated problem not easily solved with simple solutions. Something far more comprehensive must be envisaged. If all they need is land and hard work, then the solution should have been at hand.
By contrast Just near Makupo on a large estate is a rich crop of tobacco already being harvested. The estate owner has access to capital, loans, and all the inputs to make more money. Our guys cannot even open a bank account because they do not have jobs, let alone a loan from the bank or anywhere else. They are the reserve army of the unemployed, available as cheap labour, despite their education and good farming skills and their hard work, and despite what Madame the High commissioner says.
So what is the theme: Solidarity not Charity. The guys want a chance, an equal chance to prove themselves. We are only talking about 4 people out of 13 million and even with support they are not in a position to make it.
The question has been posed that solidarity was easy in the days of the anti-apartheid struggle. There were sides to be on, the enemy was easily defined and justice was a clear cut thing. How do we convert that history and apply it to the struggles of rural people whose daily life revolves around the struggle to survive the day?
More ruminatons and ranting to follow as I head off to Nkhata Bay today with nieces, Sautso and Undeni and their daughters. I will be vacationing for a few days over Xmas, sitting on the beach with a cold Carlsberg in my hand and thinking of my Montreal connections with cold hands on the shovel. Happy holidays.
Peace and love
Doug
Sunday, December 16, 2007
Blog 3
What is with all this interest? Now that a blog exists, I have to fill it? It used to be that I could disappear off into the sunset and write letters now and again that took weeks to arrive in Canada and that was enough. Now if I do not put something on the web every day, I am accused of negligence.
Lilongwe was quite a relief after the long trip. My 2 nieces, Sautso (Ruth’s daughter) and Undeni (Ethel’s) greeted me as I came out of arrivals. It was smooth sailing through immigration and customs. In the past, it used to be such a hassle. Thursday, it was as simple as “Where are you going? What are you bringing in?” and I was out in a jiffy to the waiting arms of the family who had arranged transport to town and accommodation.
My first 2 nights were at Dunstan & Edith Malithano’s Guest Lodge, named the Titanic Off-Shore Guest Lodge, where I recovered from my trip, got things organized and arranged my move to sister Ivy’s Ufulu Gardens. Both of these are upscale places catering to the international development consultant crowd. Gated plots with lush green interiors and flowers that Canadian gardeners would give their eye-teeth to grow. Courteous staff, cold beer…. ???? Does it get any closer to paradise? Hold on!! I have got to get out of here and get going on the projects I came for.
So that is what I did. On Saturday, Sautso, Undeni and I drove up to Makupo to see how things were going and found that everything is beautiful. The new well is an inauspicious apparatus and does not stand out as significant in the geography, but there were no end of thank yous for its existence. The renovations have been carried out and brother-in-law Jack has done exactly what it takes to make a comfortable lodging for our visitors. In fact, the kitchen store room area is too nice to cook in and people will henceforth sleep there. So we will build another kitchen custom designed with the cooks in mind.
Quick meetings were held with the women first and then the men to talk about tasks and roles but they were already organized before we got there. All the houses have been included in the work except for Mr Chikapa’s because of the recent loss of his wife, sister Ruth, and his disability since the stroke. He will still be a good resource person since he speaks such good English and loves to discuss things.
Sunday, the three of us drove to Mtenedere near the Mozambique border in Dedza district to visit Alice Trindade. She is the younger sister of Anna Maria Trindade-Bessette, our dear friend from Orford who died in February this year. I wanted to see Anna Maria’s mother who is now easily 90+ years old. She lives in Mozambique and Alice sent a bicycle taxi to pick her up from her lands the other side of the border and be there to meet us. I had collected pictures of the Bessette children and their families and from the funeral to show them and as is the tradition the Bessettes had sent some money and Nellie and I put in an amount. Pepani is what we say at the loss of a loved one and it was evident that Alice had lost someone she loved very dearly despite the many years of separation. She told how Anna Maria, as the oldest daughter had mothered all of them. That is how we all remember Anna – as the consummate mother.
Mtendere means peace in Chichewa and is a major mission station with two secondary schools, a novitiate, a clinic and of course a large catholic church. I had been there with my secondary school in 1969 travelling the back road from Mitundu/Bunda to play soccer against their side. The Trindade family has a sizeable piece of land dating back to colonial times when this was a largely empty space and land grants were happily given out to people willing to settle and open it to agriculture. It is clear that at some point there had been a major operation, but Alice found herself a widow and unable to keep her small estate up before her eldest son Brian came back from Blantyre to do what he could to keep it in the family. He has ambitious plans to raise pigs and orchard crops which are in big demand in the cities and despite missing city life looks like he can turn it into a productive enterprise again.
The trip was half of the experience. Travelling south from Lilongwe towards Dedza we were supposed to meet Alice’s son Andrew at Chimpiya, a small trading centre and bus stop. She had called me in the morning to tell me that he would be there and that I would recognize him because he is a “coloured boy” the term dating back to colonial times for people of mixed race. In addition, it turns out that the boy is 27 years old. He was sitting on a rise beside the road and did look different enough in appearance to make him stand out from the other Malawians.
The road deteriorated immediately that we turned of the M1, the main north south route. I was still driving city-stule and bottomed the car a couple of times on rocks before I slowed to a crawl. On such rough roads it is not a matter of left side drive or right side drive but best side drive and the approach of another vehicle requires careful positioning when there are so few good parts to pass on. Ten kilometers took almost an hour. That is why the bicycle taxi is so useful. In fact, Andrew had gone to the main road, leaving his place at 8:00 by bicycle taxi to wait for us by the main road. I kept a watchful eye out for rain clouds, because we would be staying at Mtendere if we the rains came. The night before on our return from Kasungu we found that Lilongwe had experienced torrential rains which had turned the township roads into slippery treacherous obstacle courses.
Up and down the country that has been the experience. The north south route is well maintained and heavily used, but any branch into the lesser traveled areas finds difficult roads made more problematic when the rains come. Over 70% of Malawi’s people live in the rural areas so anyone unfortunate enough to live any distance from a main road faces an extra burden of difficult transport. Even in the city, the roads from centre to centre are fine, but turn into one of the townships where the people live in their numbers and the roads turn into gullied and pitted challenges.
End of blog entry 3. This blog is still in need of a theme, but I am starting to realize that I may be standing in the middle of a theme and will only see it when hindsight gives me a chance to step back and reflect on it.
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Blog 2 Thursday, 13 December 2007 Nairobi
Touch down in Nairobi. Of course the new airport is far removed in appearance and sophistication from the place I landed in 1968, but there is no question one has touched down south of the Equator.
In those days, all the pilots and many of the crew members were still Europeans. Now Kenya Airways flies the biggest planes built and is staffed totally by Kenyans. The plane was full with no seat to spare and the crew were friendly and fun. The passengers are much more fun and boisterous than the quiet restraint of the people who flew out of Montreal the night before. Whole families on the move with a tendency to try to bring too much carryon luggage into the cabin. Ground crew catch them at the boarding gate, so it seems to have evolved into a system where the extras are impounded in the hold and returned upon arrival.
The tea is excellent. The coffee shop prides itself in serving all the popular formats of coffee and tea and all of it made with Kenya produce. It’s not just boosterism to encourage tourism, there is a great deal of pride in being Kenyan and distinct. On the other hand it is back to the suits which were decidedly absent on the flight out of Montreal and in the airport in Holland. The suit came with the colonial civil service and it is still the uniform of success.
I have started catching up on some long overdue reading. It is impossible to understand the situation of Africa today without understanding the nature of colonialism that predates the independent countries that exist today. My historian bent comes out when I want to do an analysis so I am reading Albert Memmi’s 1957 classic The Colonizer and the Colonized with the preface by Jean Paul Sartre in the 1966 edition. It is a classic and helps clarify why so many elements and symbols of the colonial system remain intact despite the conscious effort of many independence leaders to remove them.
The connecting flight to Lilongwe has been delayed from an 8:30 departure to a 10 o’clock departure. It does not matter that I stripped out of my long underwear and wool socks, I am still way overdressed for the weather and will have to stay this way until I settle in for the night in Lilongwe. I have no idea where I will stay, but that partly depends on whether someone meets me at the airport.
Still have to work on a theme for this blog concept.
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