We had a chance to visit Malawi in July 2019. We travelled there to learn about the environmental-justice initiatives put forward in various villages by the Lilongwe-based NGO Youth for Sustainable Development (YSD) over the past eight years—practices that have effectively enabled such villages to recover their pre-colonial agricultural practices and thereby strengthened their economic self-sufficiency and their resilience vis-à-vis climate change. We also collaborated with YSD giving lectures and seminaries on decolonial thought at the University of Lilongwe. And we lived, for a month, in a country whose beauty and people captivated us. Here are some interesting stories of our trip 🙂
1. Women
In the early 2000s, USAID visiting officials in the Rhumpi area determined that the women of a village had to walk a long distance to fetch water because the village in question lacked a well. Therefore, they had a water well built in a few years. Surprisingly, when they afterwards returned to the village they found the newly constructed well abandoned. The well was not being used by the women. Why? Because they liked to walk to fetch water far away from their homes inasmuch as this allowed them to meet and chat with fellow women from other villages who liked to do this as well. Fetching water was for them all an opportunity to strengthen their social bonds and to chat: Who’s fallen in love? Who’s married whom and how? Who’s got ill, or who’s died? Who’s given birth?… For, unlike westerners, African villagers value social life more than anything else. Happiness and togetherness go hand in hand. Instead, the USAID officials never bothered to ask the villagers what they needed. They presumed they could read their needs like an open book, for they assumed that all people have the same needs. Their humanism deceived them. It impeded them to realize that one cannot lack anything if that something makes no sense in one’s world.
2. Houses
Driving through rural Malawi one sees many “ugly” houses along the road. Not that they look destroyed, but they are not very much cared for anyway. Someone from the “developed world”—someone from the global north—may thus pity their owners’ poorness. But let’s think with the Malawian villagers themselves. Do they cook inside their houses? No. Do they work inside their houses? No. Do they spend their free time inside their houses? No. Do they bath inside their houses? No. Actually, the only things they do in their homes is sleeping and making love, and eventually keeping some valuables. Which means that their homes do not play the same role in their lives than our homes do in ours. Why, then, would you make your house “beautiful” if you do not use it? And why then would you call Malawians poor and pity them due to their “ugly” houses? Do they need your pity… and your houses?
3. Mr. J.
On the shores of Lake Malawi a foreigner has built a house. His Malawian neighbour told him that he should not cut the trees and have the house built so close to the shore. But the foreigner—the white man—did not listen. Why would he? Mr. J. borrowed money from a western bank, cut almost all native trees, built as he had initially planned his “beautiful” house, which looks like a palace compared to the neighbouring ones—an image to which his uniformed black servants also contribute—and laid a lawn in the backyard so as to better remember his homeland, Britain. (But then why, we wonder, would you go to Malawi in the first place?). A colonist, a settler—a white man—needs to built his house on the beachfront, so that his windows look right at the water and the horizon and he can feel empowered by seeing the vast world as if on the palm of his hand. Yet in about a year a disaster occurred. It rained so abundantly and intensely that the lake overflowed, flooding the ground floor of Mr. J.’s “palace,” whereas his native-neighbour’s house remained untouched because the latter had kept the trees instead. And now, of course, Mr. J. is asking help from some white (!) experts. But sooner or later and more likely than not, the lake will wash away the foundations of his house. And in the meantime what Mr. J. surely must do is to pay back his debt to the bank.
4. Cops
People in Lilongwe dislike the police for various reasons. One of them is that they are responsible for many traffic jams. There is, for example, a bridge that crosses a big “river” of plastic in one of the districts of Lilongwe. People, bicycles, cars, and animals alike cross it every day. But it is not very wide. In fact it has space only for a single car. And it lacks traffic lights. Like everyone else, we crossed this bridge every day, and every morning and every evening we would find ourselves in the midst of a traffic jam, more-or-less dense but always moving. So the day in which the line did not move at all, everyone knew the reason why. The stoppage of the line meant that the cops were “dealing” with the issue. The movement and the length of the line depended on the their presence or their absence. If the line was small and moving, it meant that the people themselves were negotiating the crossing of the bridge. If it was big and not moving at all, it meant the cops were trying to manage the situation. A similar problem arises in the roundabouts of Lilongwe. But the western-shaped government does not learn from this. How could they? They are persuaded that people cannot manage on their own. They need the police. Otherwise they fear anarchy would spread.
In different ways, these four little stories show, firstly, that the world can be very different from what we take it to be, secondly, that stretching our necks through the looking glass that boringly returns to us the image of our own cultural identity is necessary to acknowledge how rich and diverse it actually is (stories ## 1 & 2), and, thirdly, that our stubbornness to ignore it is the very measure of our own stupidity (stories ## 3 & 4).