The death of Blantyre
Blantyre city is dying a painful death. The beauty of this place, which used to be magnificent in the 1960s or 1970s, is slowly meeting a slow death due to frivolous citizen’s behaviour. Of course, I was born in the 1990s, but I see pictures of how Blantyre used to look and my undeniable opinion is that the city was amazing. At one point I saw a picture on Facebook of a presidential convoy passing in the Masauko Chipembere Highway and the way it looked I thought it was London.
The death of Blantyre can be equated to the death by ‘Polonium poisoning’. This poisoning is famous for its victims like the former Palestine president the late Yasser Arafat who died in 2004 and the Russian former security officer Aleksandr Litvinenko who was killed in 2006. Polonium is so deadly and it kills without doubt.
I am equating the ‘Polonium poisoning’ to Blantyre’s death in progress because we are all able to see the city dying and we are still nurturing the causes of the death. There are several causes of this death and nobody is showing any effort to help this industrial city survive. The major cause of this untimely death of the then beautiful Blantyre is the building of precarious houses in Soche Hill. I remember when I first saw the hill in 1997; it was all green, so beautiful and attractive. The vegetation and the animals like monkeys in the hill made it possible for the hill to be considered as one of the precious things Blantyre city could smile at. Today all is history and perilous houses are built in the hill while countable trees are remaining in it. Very soon the countable trees will surely be used for timber by the next man who decides to build his mansion on the poor hill. I fear for the lives of the people up there because if we could have a heavy earthquake like the ones that happen in Japan, we could have a national tragedy for sure. With this rainy season it is also inevitable.
Blantyre used to have Chimwankhunda Dam. The dam used to help people around the area with its water for domestic use and also farming. Other people used to fish in the dam and make a living out of it. I can imagine life was good and abit easy then, but now it is a whole different chapter. The dam is history and the place is not the same. If the dam was still there, people wouldn’t be having problems for find water following the recent horrendous water problems in the city. The water problems surely made someone somewhere cry for the lost and obsolete water source.
Mudi River is another thing that is killing our city. The river used to have fresh and clean water but these days saying the river is in the same state would be blatant lie and God forbid it. The smell that comes from the river can make one lose appetite and probably never want to see or go near the river again. The smell is very bad at the clock tower where the river passes to Blantyre market. The water always looks green and it is obviously prone to causing diseases to citizens.
The last cause of the death of Blantyre is the act of turning the fly over near clock tower and Wenera bus depot into toilet. It is as if it is not enough that the Mudi River passing the clock tower is bringing enough discomfort with breathing but then other preposterous citizens are adding some more discomfort by relieving themselves on the fly over. The place stinks a lot and it is very pathetic, nasty and at the same time shameful since it is in the middle of town. It is a sorry site and I was shocked two days ago when I saw a man who looked decent and like an intellectual urinating at the place. People in Blantyre it’s high time we have to change this attitude and love our city.
Malawi government, through the Housing Corporation (MHC), should help Blantyre by making sure people stop building houses in Soche Hill because it is not safe and it is very dangerous. The people who already built their houses in the hill should be vacated at once because it is better to prevent some of these tragedies than to wait for them to happen and we lose friends and families. Of course it might look cruel to make them move from the hill but what I know is “Cruelty is sometimes necessary to make things right”. Government through City Council should also help restore the beauty of Blantyre by bringing strong rules against people who urinate or defecate anywhere in town. If all this is done I am sure Blantyre shall retain some of its lost glory and beauty though it is hard to bring back the Chimwankhunda Dam.
