When Cyclone Freddy struck southern part of Malawi in March 2023, massive landslides from Mulanje Mountain left indelible scars on the life of Edna Namandwa, 38, of Nanviyo Village, Traditional Authority Njema.
The roaring mudslides from the country’s tallest mountain swept two of her three daughters to the grave and battered her house to rubble around 9pm.
“I wish I had just died,” she says. “I am still living in fear and despair.”
According to the Department of Disaster Management Affairs, the world’s longest cyclone affected over 2.2 million people, including 660 000 displaced and 676 killed. Up to 2000 people were injured and at least 538 were declared missing, many of whom are feared to have been washed away or buried in the mudslides.
Namandwa is still searching for closure as her 10-year-old daughter Felista is still missing about 20 months later.
“At least I buried my eight-year-old daughter Catherine, whose body was found at the confluence of Muloza and Nanchidwa rivers,” she says amid sobs.
The mudslides also swept goats, pigs and chickens, burying her one-acre maize field in sand and rocks.
“The cobs were almost ready for harvesting,” she says. “We were expecting to harvest more than 30 bags the following week. The expected yield was enough to feed my family of four up to the 2025 harvesting season, but all the efforts and inputs worth K200 000 were lost.”
Namandwa is among the 509 244 farming households estimated to have lost 28 164 hectares of maize to the storm in the Southern Region, according to assessments by Dodma and its partners.
Njema, along the border between Malawi and Mozambique, was among the worst-hit areas.
Survivors were trapped in the eye of the storm without any assistance as the roads were damaged.
Aid only arrived six days after they had lost almost everything except the clothes they wore that tragic night.
The mudslides also took away Namandwa’s life-prolonging drugs.
This disrupted her HIV treatment for two weeks, leaving her at risk of developing resistance to the antiretroviral drugs and dying from opportunistic diseases that thrive on falling body immunity.
“Had the health surveillance assistants not come to persuade me to resume treatment, I could not have taken them anymore. I just wanted to die just like my two daughters,” she recalls.
One of the 2 186 people injured during the disaster was Sosten Fashion, 61, a breadwinner for a family of seven.
He was trapped in mud as the landslides swept the rest of his family away.
“We were found injured in different spots along the Nanchidwa River,” he states. My two-year-old granddaughter died. I was the worst injured as I broke my right leg, with scratches all over the body.”
Fashion rates cyclone Freddy the worst disaster in his lifetime.
“The cyclone eroded decades of hard work and everything we had acquired. It left me with nothing. I lost a K2 million four-bedroom house roofed with iron sheets, a K650 000 motorcycle, a K16 000 bicycle, 10 goats worth K80 000 each, three mattresses and 20 iron sheets for another house I wanted to build,” he laments.
Njema Area Disaster Risk Management Committee chairperson Ellaton Mlenga said survivors need financial support to build back better and overcome hunger caused by the loss of maturing crops and fertile farmland buried in sand and rocks.
The decried food scarcity was worsened by drought caused by the El Nino weather pattern which scorched crops across southern Africa early this year.
Mlenga says if he met world leaders at the UN climate change summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, he would ask them to increase funding for poor countries to tackle the loss and damage caused by climate-related disasters fuelled by globe-warming emissions from rich countries.
“People still live in makeshift huts and their livelihoods have been disrupted. We need support to feed our families and start businesses to rise again sustainably,” he says.
Mlenga says the 29th Conference of Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in Baku should push the agenda for communities like his and countries like Malawi to lessen the frequency and burden of the climate crisis.
“World leaders and negotiators should remember the devastating suffering caused by persistent cyclones due to climate crisis. Disasters continue to kill people, destroy livelihoods and worsen hunger.”
