Structures once used to oppress our grandparents may one day injure their descendants.
This safety issue comes to mind as one passes by a cluster of colonial-era buildings that house magistrates and industrial relations courts, Department of Surveys and Old Town Hall in Blantyre Central Business District.
Section 30 of the Constitution guarantees every Malawian the right to development, but the colonial buildings not only impede the commercial city’s growth but also pose a risk to their occupants.
The Occupational Safety, Health and Welfare Act requires safe workplaces just as the Public Health Act empowers authorities to take action against dangerous buildings.
The Physical Planning Act and Land Act demand efficient land use.
The Local Government Act places duties of urban safety on Blantyre City Council.
Our laws, including the often cited Monuments and Relics Act, do not require preservation at any cost.
They require balance, and it clearly favours the safety, dignity, and development of the living.
Alternative remembrance
Preserving history is not synonymous with preserving every brick.
Modern tools such as digital archives, high-resolution photography and 3D scanning can record architectural detail more faithfully and enduringly than any weathering structure.
A National Museum of Colonial History and Independence would honour our past far more meaningfully than a dispersed collection of ageing buildings left to decline.
Where certain colonial features carry genuine historical value, adaptive reuse offers a dignified path forward and allows them to be incorporated into new, forward-looking developments shaped by Malawian priorities.
It is time to envision Blantyre in colour, not black-and-white colonial installations.
“Dream in colour,” former president Bingu wa Mutharika would say.
Visualise modern mixed-use developments rising in place of tired colonial shells, all purposeful, contemporary and unmistakably Malawian.
Imagine a skyline that finally rises; a city growing upward with ambition rather than outward in resignation. Singapore undertook this journey. Kigali is undertaking it now. Blantyre deserves no less.
Let us talk about it
This article does not advocate indiscriminate demolition nor does it dismiss thoughtful heritage preservation.
What it calls for is an honest, Malawian-led conversation about what we preserve, why and whom that preservation truly serves.
We must ask whether the buildings we protect tell our story or someone else’s and whether we govern our cities for the living or for the ghosts of a bygone era.
We must interrogate ourselves whether we continue to sacrifice cities’ regeneration, modernity and progress for a heritage that no longer serves us.
History matters and must be preserved through museums, books, archives and classrooms, certainly not by allowing prime urban land to remain occupied by decaying structures that endanger those who must enter them each day.
History matters and it deserves to be preserved. However, its rightful home is in museums, books, archives and classrooms, not on the most valuable land of our commercial capital, where decaying structures stand as silent hazards to those who must enter them each day.
Enough silence. What city or nation, do we intend to become?
