When
the seeker Googles in the word “Malawi”, the
first titles provider the reader the short version of the
first facts about this country. Words like “HIV/AIDS,
…one of the world’s poorest countries; hunger
is inevitable;” are right at the top of the listings.
Surely there is more to find in Malawi. The lyrics of the
national anthem say, “… Join together all
our hearts as one, that we be free from fear. . . let us
all unite to build up Malawi. With our love, our zeal and
loyalty, bringing our best to her… Men and women serving
selflessly in building Malawi.”
The
Republic of Malawi is a democratic, densely populated country
located in southeastern Africa. It borders Zambia to the
northwest, Tanzania to the north, and Mozambique surrounding
it on the east, south and west. The origin of the name Malawi
remains unclear—it is either derived from the name
of southern tribes, or noting the “glitter of the
sun rising across the lake” (as seen in its flag).
Malawi
has the Great Rift Valley running through the country from
north to south. In this deep trough lies Lake Malawi (Nyasa),
the third-largest lake in Africa, about 20% of Malawi’s
area. Lake Malawi is sometimes called the Calendar Lake
as it is about 365 miles long and 52 miles wide. The Great
Rift Valley is a vast geographical and geological feature,
approximately 3,700 miles in length which is caused by the
geological process of rifting, a complex activity where
several plates of the earth's crust join. The rift valley
varies in width from 30 to 100 kilometers, and in depth
from a few hundred to several thousand meters.The great
rift system extends from Lebanon in the north to Mozambique
in the south. Some of the African rift is underlain by a
mantle plume, an upwelling of abnormally hot rock within
the Earth's mantle. As the heads of mantle plumes can partly
melt when they reach shallow depths, they are thought to
be the cause of volcanic centers known as hotspots and probably
also to have caused flood basalts. It is a secondary way
that Earth loses heat, much less important in this regard
than is heat loss at plate margins. All of the African Great
Lakes, featuring a variety of water types—salty, alkaline
and fresh-- were formed as the result of the rift, and most
lie within its rift valley. The formation of the Rift Valley
continues, probably driven by mantle plumes and ultimately
a result of the African superswell. The associated geothermal
activity and spreading at the rift has caused the lithosphere
to thin from a typical 100 km thickness for continents to
a mere 20 km. Though it is common for one arm of a triple
junction to fail, if spreading continues the lithosphere
may rupture several million years hence, splitting eastern
Africa off to form a new landmass. In short, this will lead
to the formation of a new mid-ocean ridge.
 |
The Great Rift Valley is
the world’s longest rift on the surface of the
earth. The eruptions which caused the rift formed new
landforms and mountains, such as Ethiopian Highlands,
Mount Kilimanjaro, Mount Kenya and Mount Margarita.
The valley is separated into two sections known as the
Eastern and Western Rifts. The Eastern Rift starting
in the Ethiopia region, extends southwards into Kenya,
Tanzania and Malawi, ending in Mozambique. The Western
Rift begins north of Lake Malawi and runs along the
eastern border of the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
|
Scientists
are now planning to drill into what could be the longest
and richest archive of Earth’s past climate at Malawi,
which could provide a year-by-year continuous record going
back millions of years in a part of the world where it is
thought humans first evolved. Using a newly developed drilling
system, rsearchers will, for the first time, obtain sediments
from the bottom of Lake Malawi, which they say could provide
the background needed to undestand human origins and evolution.
Scientiss know that each annual layer of Lake Malawi sediment
consists of a black zone—the sediment runoff from
land deposited during the rainy season—and a light-colored
layer of single-celled algae that grow in abundance each
dry season. The composition and variation in the layers
can be used to infer climatic conditions in the distant
past. Old trees, glaciers, even fossilized plankton shells
hold clues to what the Earth’s climate was like millions
of years ago.
*
* *
Words
like Khoisan, Bantu, Chewa, Luba, Zulu, Ndwandwe, KwaZulu-Natal,
Ngoni and King Zwangendaba were used as names by the various
tribes that originally made this area of Africa their home.
The first significant Western contact was Dr. David Livingstone
in 1859 and subsequently Scottish Presbyterian churches
establishing missions, leading to the rift called British
rule during the first half of the 20th century. The name
Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda is that of a hero who took leadership
of the NAC and later the Malawi Congress Party (MCP), was
imprisoned and then released in 1960 to participate in a
constitutional conference in London, but it took until 1964
for Malawi to become a republic, with Dr. Banda as its first
president, and also a one-party state. In 1971, Banda was
named President for Life of Malawi. By 1993, the people
of Malawi voted overwhelmingly in favor of multi-party democracy
with free and fair national elections held in 1994. Accelerated
economic liberalization and structural reform accompanied
the political transitions. Local elections, the first in
the multi-party era, took place on November 21, 2000.
“This
is a good place,” I said.
“Yes,” he said.
“But some people are sick.”
“This is where they are cured,” Simon said.
“That is why it is a good place.”
He had put the candle down and was throwing open the
shutters.
“In the villages”—he meant everywhere
else—“people are sick, but they stay that
way.” |
“The
scorching light exposed everything so completely it even
burned shadows away. It was not sunshine, not warm and bright,
but a fiery African light that swelled in the sky and seemed
to drum against the land. It came rattling straight through
the threadbare curtains into my room, waking me like a blade
piercing my eyes. I saw that the walls were cracked plaster
and dusty whitewash, with a wooden crucifix of a skinny,
suffering Jesus over my bed. The floor was dusty, the wood
doorjamb was pitted with termite holes, and the whole place
smelled of ants. It had seemed to substantial last night,
the whole building on its hill, but in this harsh, truthful
light the structure was frail and elderly.”
“The
Lepers of Moyo” from Paul Theroux (erstwhile Peace
Corps Volunteer), My Other Life. 1996.
Lilongwe,
Malawi’s capital since 1971, has a population which
exceeds 400,000. The climate is subtropical with a rainy
season from November through April, and little to no rainfall
from May to October. Life expectancy in Malawi is now as
low as 36.5 years, five years lower than it was 50 years
ago. This drop is due to the population’s impoverishment,
which is caused by many factors, including: insufficient
nutrition, poor access to medical treatment, low income
(the mean per capita income in Malawi is less than $1 per
day), extreme lack of foresight by the government, misuse
of international donations, insufficient school education,
spread of HIV/AIDS, government economic restrictions, corruption,
climate change. Child mortality is 103/1,000. There are
more than a million orphans, 700,000 of whom became orphans
when their parents died of AIDS.
| “There
was no point in a letter home. I seldom wrote anyway,
and my family might be alarmed by this one. They might
misunderstand and pity me. I had no way to describe
this place. The danger in writing about it was in making
it seem worse than it was. Yet leprosy was accepted,
snake bite was normal, work changed nothing. Everyone
except the foreigners was either a leper or else a relative
of a leper. … Moyo, the leper colony, the mission,
all the people and their simple buildings—was
a little world of illness . . . The reality here was
that no one was sentimental. They came here ill; they
declined; they died. No one advanced or prospered. It
was a small world in which no one had the illusion of
making choices. And no one minded that. I did not know
why this was so, though I suspected that it was because
the people here were always in the presence of death.
. . " |
* * *
For
the Tumbuka people of Malawi, traditional medical practices
are filled with music. This health care system is populated
by dancing prophets, singing patients and drummed spirits.
Tumbuka healers diagnose diseases by enacting divination
trances in which they "see" the causes of past
events and their consequences for patients. Music is the
structural nexus where healer, patient, and spirit meet
- it is the energizing heat that fuels the trance, transforming
both the bodily and social functioning of the individual.
Anthropologists find that the sound of the ng'oma drum,
the clapping of the choir, call-and-response singing and
the jangle of tin belts and iron anklets do not simply accompany
other more important ritual activities - they are the very
substance of a sacred clinical reality. This analysis of
the relation between music and mental and biological health
should interest medical anthropologists, Africanists, and
religious scholars as well as ethnomusicologists. - (The
Dancing Prophets: Musical Experience in Tumbuka Healing
(Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology, by Steven M. Friedson)
*
* *
"Death is an endless night so awful
to contemplate that it can make us love life and value it
with such passion that it may be the ultimate cause of all
joy and all art."
Art is produced in the complex country of Malawi, Great
Rift land of suffering, death, musical healings and human
expression. Carved wooden sculptures, furniture and objects,
jewelry, musical instruments, dolls, wicker containers,
fabrics and batiks, paintings, brass objects, leather art,
kitchen implements and décor are just a few of the
artistic expressions of the fleeting people of this brave
country. (www.africaguide.com/shopping) Words are being
written by people with names like Du Chisiza, Gertrude Kamkwatira,
Innocent Kommwa, Smith Likonge, Mufunanji Magalasi, Steve
Chimombo, Jack Mapanje and others describing life in Malawi
much better than this writer ever could.
*
* *
The
soil of Malawi was collected on 11/20/06 from the Lilongwe
permaculture field. “The significance is that the
permaculture plots will have a multiplier effect which (in
the long-run) help with Malawi’s food security; a
contributing factor to peace as well. Thanks,” writes
Ulemu C. Malindi, the soil collector from Mali. Mr. Malindi
was contacted by Mitchell Moss, Public Affairs Officer in
the U.S. Embassy in Lilongwe. Our sincerest thanks go out
to both men for participating in this project. Common Ground
191 currently needs 36 soils to complete the collection
part of the project, and earth from countries like Malawi
is very difficult to obtain, so especially precious.
* * *
(Since
1961, over 150,000 Americans have served as Peace Corps
Volunteers. Unlike those who choose the expatriate life,
Volunteers don't go to the ends of the earth to escape American
civilization or, for that matter, to make money from the
labor of others. They go to jobs that take them away from
embassies, first-class hotels, and the privilege of being
rich foreigners in poor countries. They live far from the
capital, in villages that would never be tourist sites.
And they don't just pass through foreign countries. They
unpack their belongings, they settle down, they set about
to do a job. And they write. They begin by writing letters
home, as Paul Theroux did in 1964 from Malawi where he taught
secondary school.
| "My
schoolroom is on the Great Rift, and in this schoolroom
there is a line of children, heads shaved like prisoners,
muscles showing through their rags. These children appear
in the morning out of the slowly drifting hoops of fog-wisp.
It is chilly, almost cold. There is no visibility at
six in the morning; only a fierce white-out where earth
is the patch of dirt under their bare feet, a platform,
and the sky is everything else." |
In over
thirty years of writing, Theroux has produced some of the
most wicked, funny, sad, bitter, readable, knowledgeable,
rude, acerbic, ruthless, arrogant, moving, brilliant and
quotable books ever written. And he began by writing about
the life he knew in Africa as a Peace Corps Volunteer. Theroux
is perhaps the most famous writer among former Peace Corps
Volunteers. His first Peace Corps assignment was in East
Africa, where he lectured in English in a school in Limbe,
Malawi. He was expelled in 1965, however, for his alleged
involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate the president
of the country. )
* * *
“The
boxes had been sent from London, marked ‘personal
effects’. I opened them at random, unwrapping
the bandaged and wadded contents and setting each
item down on the sunny lawn…a large glass mixing
bowl…bought in Nyasaland at the Limbe Trading
Company in 1964. Somehow, this inexpensive and ordinary
household object, perhaps the first I had ever bought,
had survived almost thirty years. But that was only
part of its fascination. This was the bowl that my
African cook, Julius Magoya, had used to hold fruit
salad.
“He
had asked me to buy it, and he had filled it that
first day with cut-up fruit: pawpaws, bananas, apples,
oranges, grapes and tangerines, for which he used
the Afrikaans word ‘naartjies’. There
was far too much fruit salad. After a week, half a
bowl of it was left. Julius did not throw it away.
He cut up more fruit and added it, filling the bowl
again, giving it a stir. A week later, though I had
not finished the fruit salad, he added more, and the
bowl brimmed again. He repeated this every week, mixing
the new with the old, the sweet with the sour, the
crisp with the sodden. He never tossed out what was
in the bowl, no matter how small the amount. It was
replenished every week; years later I was still eating
fruit salad out of the same bowl, which had never
been emptied.
“At the age of fifty, I was glad to have that
bowl back. Now I saw the point of it: Julius’s
endless fruit salad represented for me the meaning
of life, and the source of all art.”
|
Malawi’s
fruit salad story has much more to it than the Google entries
of death and doom. There is the deep story of the earth
itself—its moving plates, mantels and plumes—the
secrets scientists hope to reveal—the fruit bowl of
the Great Rift Valley; the animals growijng out of that
earth; the tribal and modern human beings who are born,
make love and art, then die upon and are buried under the
land called Malawi; people planting foods in the soil called
permaculture in Lilwonge. Paul Theroux was deeply affected
by the lives of the lepers of his time there; and we are
deeply affected by the HIV/AIDS sufferers of ours. The words
of the national anthem ring out with the spirit of the people—“Our
own Malawi, this land so fair, fertile and brave and free.
With its lakes, refreshing mountain air, how greatly blest
are we. Hills and valleys, soil so rich and rare give us
a bounty free. Wood and forest, plains so broad and fair,
all—beauteous Malawi.” The word for
peace in Malawi is mtendere.
Children at the Njoto Orphanage in Malawi
“What
impresses me about the many African countries that I traveled
through from Cairo to Cape Town was how people have survived
tyrannical governments, food shortages, disease and poor
or no infrastructure—bad roads,no phones, etc…
Malawi is a great example of that. Nothing positive has
happened to Malawi since I left there in 1965. Yet in the
villages and by the lakeshore and in the bush people go
on.”
(All
quotations from Paul Theroux, My Other Life and online quote
sources. Pictures from www.aboutafrica.com.)
