Rantings about Malawi: Who we are

Malawi is truly a Post-Colony, and this is not merely because colonization was a real event of our history. I often like to listen attentively to what various experts and pundits have to say in their diagnostics of our Great Republic, and then I also like to listen to conversations amongst our other various groups who are never heard widely through our media outlets. In these conversations, there are numerous overlaps amongst the themes, but the eventual proposals of action are quite dissimilar. In the final instance, the difference in opinion amongst various experts, pundits and all other groups can be classified as follows: expert opinions are the result of (western) education with occasional tinges of Afrocentricism here and there, pundit opinions are broadly the views of an overburdened (professional) middle-class informed by the reader-, listener- and viewerships of newspapers, radios and television, while the other opinions are of the uneducated masses who supposedly don’t know what’s good for them. Conspicuously missing are the views of big business leaders because these tend to be disembodied through the institutional voices of say National Bank, or Press and other such large corporations without any real human face.

This is broadly how our society tends to classify opinions, and this is a typical hallmark of a post-colony: a society in which natives differentiate themselves into artificial groups through which violence (symbolic, systemic and physical) is appropriated, and suffering is legitimated. The veil beneath which violence in the post-colony hides itself is in how various groups respond practically to the real situations that confront them without a broader view of how their actions contribute towards the ongoing decay in the wider social setting. The postcolony is thus an association of seemingly disaffiliated groups conjoined in what appear to be isolated activities which nonetheless amalgamate into their collective decline.

In my humble view nonetheless – and indeed it is humble because this is a rather complicated issue – most discourse in Malawi is generated out of a general tension between two broad fronts which are the views of the experts/pundits on the one side, and the unarticulated desires of all the other groups on the other side, mediated by a middle consisting of a politicized state vis-à-vis a silent yet highly influential disembodied private sector run by the super (invisible) rich. This middle is also beholden to the colonial masters who essentially sustain through grants and loans their politico-economic and economic-political fortunes, respectively. Experts/pundits articulate the desires of a middle-class wanting to flourish in terms of vague freedoms, under a limited but developmental government while clinging on to certain sentimentalities of culture and even Malawian-ness (whatever that means). At the same time, all the other groups whose desires are unarticulated aspire at least to a basic middle-class existence of proper housing, satisfactory access to education, health and security, and of course, three proper meals a day. Their desires are thus truncated and distilled into middle-class aspirations for lack of a voice of their own since they are seen as uneducated.

However, as a prominent African scholar notes (Mamdani in Citizens and Subjects), middle-class desires in the postcolony are necessarily blockades to the realization of a more universal material emancipation. This is because rights which are at the core of middle-class aspirations, within a context of high inequality, protect those who have, and deny those who don’t have. From our own experience, we all know that the postcolony is a highly unequal place and primarily so by initial colonial design and continuous postcolonial implementation across material (politico-economic), institutional as well as symbolic (socio-cultural) overlapping spheres. This is why in the past I have commented that if we are to develop more intentionally and not wait on “trickle-down” economics (which is less likely to work in a climate of insatiable greed for nothing ever trickles off the plate of the greedy if not for purposes of patronage and politics of division) we must at least devolve rights to their basic minimums, and leave the tertiary matters for a latter period. But I digress.

More importantly, the question that begs our consideration is this: what are we to do in order to find a more wholesome articulation of the Malawian condition? That is, how can we get beyond our immediate practicalities that enable our own survival at the immediate expenses of collective well-being? Looking at this question will enable us to understand ourselves better, to look into our own soul so to speak – and perhaps even understand why secession (which is unfortunately being mistaken for federalism) has become a very hot matter.

I will end like this – very few of us, including myself, know what being a Malawian is all about even on a superficial level. Americans have their fictions such as “the land of the free” or “the free world”, a pretext so powerful that it has enabled them to turn a blind eye towards obscenely grotesque and dehumanizing violence against other peoples in the name of trying to liberate and democratize them [by force] (see Libya, see Iraqi, see Afghanistan which have all become hell-holes much worse than when the so-called liberators found them. Great Britain is perhaps the only “major” country which has decided that its creed shall be “to remain globally relevant by doing everything the Americans do” and when China begins to assert itself, their creed will become “do everything the Chinese do”, and indeed this may have already started to happen. It’s really quite pathetic, and perhaps this is why Scotland sought to leave them and narrowly lost amongst other things Westminster and Brussels related.

South Africans have rapidly developed their own fictions such as “the rainbow nation” even though certain colors of that rainbow are more visible than others: to put it mildly, the loudest color of the South African rainbow is male as their citizenship is heavily gendered, and we haven’t even talked about race yet. Oh, I forgot, ours is “the peace loving nation” – which to me sounds like telling people to condone all things in the name of peace even to their very own eminent demise. This is why we peacefully let MEC get away with murder at the last polls even though we are far less tolerant of “murder” amongst ourselves because this creed is about being beholden to the grace and excellence of our leaders by keeping others and ourselves in check (also known as Kamuzu-ism). But in the absence of some kind of national creed, countries are reduced to nothing more that territories of personal practicalities that contribute to the decay people through those same practicalities hope to escape. After all, nations are nothing more than constructs – but some fictions are closer to reality than others, and this is what I was getting at when I listed those other countries as examples. Next time, I hope to make another contribution in which I will present what I think would be the steps towards the more wholesome of such fictions. I hope to do so before the beloved north leaves us… that is, before it constructs itself into a new nation.

By the way, with regard to the Northern secession agitations, I do not know if I will be leaving or being left. This is because I belong through my extended families to both places – the north and the south, and recently I have developed new roots in the central region as well. I hope those of us with parents from the north and the south will we be allowed to have dual citizenship to both Malawi (main) and Northern Malawi. Or perhaps we can be constructed into some group of disadvantaged people towards whom large sums of compensatory money will flow… lol. But perhaps this too would in fact be a closer illustration of the creedless practicalities that continue to bedevil us: mere symptoms of the same problems.