Malawians are one
Those who have studied management will have come across the Hawthorne experiments which took place from 1927 to 1932 in America. The aim of the experiments was to study the factors that would lead to higher productivity.
In one of the experiments, a group of females was isolated from the rest of the employees and allowed to work together as one team, virtually by their own regulations. They soon formed a social entity with its own norms. That, in a way, is how culture develops.
There is nothing biological about culture. The women referred to above may have come from different backgrounds but they belonged together once they spent time together and agreed on what was permissible or impermissible among them.
Over hundreds of years, different groups have evolved different cultures in Malawi, simply by historical and geographical accidents. One group was isolated into one corner and developed their own norms, another in a different corner and so on. There is nothing biological about being a Sena, a Chewa, a Tumbuka, a Lhomwe, a Ngoni, a Yao and so on.
All Bantu people, which we are in Malawi, share the same origin. Our languages clearly show that they come from the same root. We share so many similarities even with our colleagues beyond our borders. In Mchinji, for example, the word they use for salt is “munyu“. It is the same word the Shona speakers of Zimbabwe use for salt. In the Shona language, water is mvura, and in Chichewa mvula is the water that falls from above, namely rain.
When I first visited Zimbabwe in the 1980s, I attended a CCAP church service, conducted in Chichewa. The convener, a naturalised Zimbabwean of Malawian origin, started off by saying, “Tivule msonkhano wathu ndi nyimbo 30″. In Shona kuvura is to open but in Chichewa it is to take off clothes. The concept is the same because for you to take off your clothes you must open them. I figured out that what the gentleman was saying was, “Let us open the meeting by singing hymn number 30”.
Obviously, there are similarities among our local languages too. Even languages whose communities are separated by vast distances share startling similarities. The word atupele is used both in Yao and Nkhonde, to mean “we have received”. Yaos and Nkhondes are not in close proximity to each other yet they have these similarities.
It is unfortunate that there are some among us who accentuate the differences between ethnic groups and throw away any similarities. Some extremists even go so far as suggesting that their own tribe is smarter than the rest. In Kenya, the Luos, Obama’s father’s tribe, hold themselves as the smartest tribe. To prove it, they point to the number of university graduates they have produced.
What people sometimes do not realise is that in every community, there are few gifted people and few intellectually challenged ones, but the majority lie somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. Statisticians call this normal distribution. History and cultural dynamics may play out differently in different cultures, making some cultures value education more than others, but this does not mean that those that have not attained formal education are dull.
When such attitudes pervade political life, the results can be devastating. I urge our political leaders to ensure that we do not degenerate further into “a collection of quarrelling tribes” (to use Kamuzu’s terminology), particularly in light of the tribalistic/regionalistic voting patterns that emerged in our recent elections. Of all the regions, the North turned out to be the most open, where non-northerners overwhelmingly voted for. The Southern Region was the least open with non-southerners getting a pittance, a meagre two percent, of the southern vote. The Central Region fared marginally better than the South.
Our leaders have to make sure, among other things, that nepotistic tendencies do not mar any public appointments and that business opportunities are given to people strictly on merit with no regard to where the business person comes from.
To think of one’s own tribe as the smartest and more deserving of the national cake than the others is at best wishful thinking and at worst a recipe for ugly ethnic conflict. Our colleagues in Rwanda learnt this truth the hard way. There is absolutely no need for Malawi to go the Rwanda route. Let us not forget that at the end of the day we are one, and together we can achieve a lot economically, socially, politically.
—The author is a printer who enjoys writing.
