The written word is supreme

When I lived at Nkhoma in the 1970s, my parents employed a man called Mizilemu, who helped with domestic chores. Mizilemu was a school dropout and hardly spoke any English. One day he came home drunk. He did more talking than working that day. One of the things he talked about was that my siblings and I should respect him because he was “she shudu be”. We were all puzzled by this expression which was double Dutch to us. Did he mean “she should be”? Even that did not make sense.

It was only a few years ago, after more than 40 years, that I figured out that what Mizilemu meant was “chief to be”. It was a way of telling us that he was the person to succeed his village chief in the event of an eventuality.

When a chief dies in Malawi, replacing him or her usually turns out to be a contentious issue, with a number of individuals claiming to be the rightful successors. Somehow everybody wants to be “she shudu be”.

In numerous cases, it becomes next to impossible to replace the deceased chief immediately. Running legal battles rage between or among various contenders for months or even years, each claiming to be the rightful “she shudu be”.

It is my considered view that these problems could be minimised, perhaps even eradicated, if we had written records. We unfortunately rely a great deal on oral rather than written transmission of information. Oral transmission is more vulnerable to manipulation than written records. Information that resides in people’s heads often gets distorted as it gets passed on from one individual to another. This may happen intentionally because the transmitter may want to portray himself more favourably than does the content of the information. It may also happen unintentionally as a result of communication challenges the transmitter or the recipient may face.

The point is that oral communication is not reliable because intentional and/or unintentional errors easily creep in along the communication chain.  By contrast, written information is as close as can be to armory of truth against whispering rumour, as words in writing or in print will surely not perish on waves of sound.

Books are an impeccable source of information because writing one is a very rigorous process. Before a book is published it is subjected to fierce literary criticism and peer reviews; it gets proof read by competent individuals and, therefore, undergoes massive editing to make sure that the content is practically error free.

To read a book is to have intercourse with a great mind. An author pours himself into his book in order to come up with a quality product. A shoddy book will simply not make it through the publishing process. I fail to grasp why the average Malawian finds it rather unsettling to immerse themselves in books. A search within Malawian literates shows that even they are deeply steeped in the oral tradition. As a result, rumour mongering is very much alive among us.

Social media is an extension of the oral tradition. To place content on social media is not a rigorous process at all. People rush to social media with a rumour they have heard and, often without bothering to verify the facts, will spread that rumour for the consumption of their gullible readers.

Listening to or watching properly gathered and arranged material is a lot better than depending on social media for information, but it is not nearly as good as reading books. When you watch or listen to something, the sounds or the images will already have been compiled for you and all you do is “idly” consume them. When you read a book, your need to form your own minds and images and, therefore, you tax the brain more. Reading books is, therefore, more intellectually engaging, and rewarding, than watching or listening to programmes.

If we adopted and embraced the reading culture in Malawi, many things would change. We would, for example, know who the next chief would be in every case because the royal lineage would be available in written, in some cases printed, form. Such a lineage would have been agreed upon and verified long before the need to install a new chief arises.

We need to migrate from our overreliance on the oral tradition, which does not seem to take us anywhere. Parents have to play a big role in this by introducing their children to book reading as a pastime activity. We should not leave it to the teachers. Books should be everybody’s companion, in and out of school.