Malawi on International Day of Peace: uMunthu, Education and a Global Paradox

On the surface, it would seem paradoxical that while the rest of the world is today celebrating the United Nations’ International Day of Peace, the air in Malawi is thick with fear, anxiety and a premonition for violence. Last evening in Lilongwe, the capital, hundreds of people were out shopping into the night, creating long check-out lines in shops that normally close early, and are usually never crowded. There was absolutely no parking space left at People’s in downtown Old Town. Bread had sold out in most shops, and bakeries had no fresh stocks. People were stocking up, afraid this might be the last shopping for several days. For that was the experience on July 20^th, when major cities and towns were taken over by protests and riots that resulted in massive looting and the killing of 20 unarmed citizens. When civil society leaders organized another protest for August 17^th, cities and towns were again paralyzed, even though no protests took place after a last minute decision to postpone the marches and give a chance to dialogue between civil society and government, mediated by the United Nations.

Despite the appearance of a paradox when a day set aside to celebrate peace is marked by tension and fears of deathly violence, it is in such moments of conflict that peace is better appreciated, and social justice affirmed. The feeling by many people in Malawi is that of a needless crisis being fomented by a leadership that seems more concerned with engineering electoral succession than worrying about the future of the country. There has been a debate about who has caused the crisis, and the culpability of all Malawians in prolonging it. There are aspects of the crisis that are clearly being perpetuated by the conduct of the leadership, but there are also aspects that are a result of complex, asymmetrical and exploitative global structures of governance and lopsided economic interdependence.

It has become cliché in Malawian lore to repeat the maxim about how peace is not only the absence of conflict, but the presence of social justice, or words to that effect. An idea first propagated by the world’s leading peace studies scholar, Johan Galtung, it is taken as common sense, even as the idea of “structural violence”, Galtung’s notion of how injustice resides in social structures, is not as widely understood. Global changes in information consumption and the idealization of government systems have created expectations and aspirations, while exposing structural inequalities not only between nations in the Global North and the Global Southth, but also within nations and their societies. In Malawi, the emergence of a category of a super-rich class is sharply juxtaposed with a majority class whose hopes have remained stagnant for decades, creating what in a recent New York Times op-ed, the Kenyan anti-corruption campaigner John Githongo aptly described as a resentment-induced rage that has fuelled revolt starting with North Africa, and spreading south of the Sahara. There have been riots in London, protests in Wisconsin and against Wallstreet in New York City, evidence that this resentment is not just a reaction to growing inequality in Africa alone. According to Richard G. Wilkinson and Kate Pickett in their book The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger, inequality is a corrosive factor in the social well-being of people, and the United States, the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country, is also one of the most unequal.

What is perhaps more paradoxical is what is going on around the world on this day when the world observes the International Day of Peace. In the United States, the southern state of Georgia is today scheduled to execute Troy Davis, who was convicted of murdering a police officer in 1989. There has been an international outcry and a growing movement to try and stop the execution, after the real killer confessed to the crime, and several witnesses recanted their testimony. Those protesting the execution have included former US president Jimmy Carter, and former FBI Director William Sessions, according to a New York Times editorial. 

Elsewhere in the world, it has been a week of untold carnage in Yemen where scores of citizens have been brutally murdered by their own government. Fighting is still going on in Libya, weeks after Colonel Ghadafi was ousted in a NATO-led military campaign. At the United Nations in New York, the Palestinians are seeking statehood in the face of threats by the United States to veto the Palestinians’ aspirations for sovereignty and peace. In Afghanistan’s ongoing NATO war against the Taliban, a prominent peace negotiator was assassinated yesterday Tuesday.

The presence of such conflict and violence, death and misery make for a world that is clearly hurting. But it also highlights the efforts of individuals and groups working to find lasting solutions to problems of war and violence, and advocate for a more just and peaceful world order. States define peace as an absence of physical violence and war, but for ordinary people, peace still lacks in other ways that are more structural than physical, more subtle than obvious. Peace scholars refer to the absence of war and physical conflict as “negative peace”, and the presence of social justice as “positive peace.” In thinking about these concepts and how they apply to Malawian and African contexts, I have found the term “uMunthu-peace” to be another concept that adds to the notion that peace is much more than an absence, it is also the presence of other efforts to make the world a better place. The term “uMunthu-peace” derived out of a study in which I followed Malawian school teachers and read Malawian philosophers in an attempt to find an endogenous theory of peace in Malawian and African education systems.

That was in 2004, when two teachers in two rural districts of Malawi told me about how most educational systems are ill-prepared to teach citizens to go beyond classroom knowledge. In the informed views of these two teachers, it was not enough to teach primary school pupils and university students how to calculate complicated mathematical problems and memorize sophisticated formulae. Students needed to also learn what it means to be a good human being concerned with the well-being of others and the upliftment of their community. To date, very few educational systems in any part of the world offer that kind of education. The emphasis, argues Joel Spring (2007) of Queens College, City University of New York, is on “economic growth and the preparation of workers for the world’s labor market.” In his book A New Paradigm for Global School Systems: Education for a Long and Happy Life, Spring proposes a new educational paradigm in which “educational policy is focused on longevity and subjective well-being rather than economic success.”

Kindness, a virtue that adds to a moral code for humanity’s collective wellbeing is considered “subversive of neo-liberal assumptions that place value on utility and cost above other human values,” according to Sue Clegg and Stephen Rowland (2010) of Leeds Metropolitan University and the University of London, respectively. Writing in the British Journal of Sociology of Education, Clegg and Rowland observe that despite being an aspect easily recognized by students in a teacher, kindness is never considered in descriptions of “teaching excellence”, “student satisfaction”, nor “professional values.” This is true of Malawian education and education in most parts of the world. The result is the violent and unjust world we live in, which makes the case for continued efforts by peace activists to raise global consciousness about the possibility of sustainable peace and social justice.

When I first heard that the date for the Malawi protests, in the form of vigils, had been shifted from 17^th September to 21^st, I initially thought it was to do with the 21^st September being International Day of Peace. But the reason was because the 17^th was not ideal for most of the civil society leaders who had other commitments; 21^st September was. The Twitter hashtag that has been used for the campaign since July 20th, #redarmy, reveals no intention of an appeal for peace. Apart from an announced press conference by the UNDP Malawi office, Malawi is not observing the International Day of Peace. Instead, we are observing what was going to be another day of street protests, in the form of vigils, turned into a mass stay-away at the last minute.

Security, and fears of a repeat of July 20^th seem to have been the overriding concern in the decision to move from street protests to what civil society called “Plan B.” While civil society leaders have been imagining the protests as peaceful demonstrations aimed at sending a message of concern to the Malawi leadership about the direction the country is taking, the reaction to the call for protests has betrayed a different understanding of what is being envisioned. A court injunction obtained by “concerned citizens” after the aborted August 17^th protests put a ban on any form of anti-government protests. Shop owners were barricading doors and windows, and people were out en masse shopping late on Tuesday. Most offices announced to employees not to show up for work on Wednesday September 21^st, and to ensure their personal safety. Clearly, where civil society were envisioning peaceful protests, everyone else has been hearing violence, looting, property damage, and deaths.

That is quite an intrigue, something that comes out of events of July 20^th. And it raises some troubling questions. Are Malawians hopelessly incapable of maintaining law and order whenever they decide to exercise a constitutionally-granted right to peaceful demonstrations? What explains the easiness with which peaceful protests turn into violent riots and mass killings? How do we explain the resentment that is clearly simmering just underneath the surface and readily finds an outlet in destroying property and taking lives? Is it impossible to envision a Malawi in which leaders, both in political parties and in civil society, think of the greater good and work to bridge the gaping inequality that is fast characterizing Malawi and the rest of the world?

As an educationist, I always turn to how and what we teach in the schools, for answers to questions like this. Educationists who espouse belief in the singular significance of peace have developed a field of study, called “peace education” at the primary and secondary level, and “peace studies” at the university level. Peace educationists argue that all education ought to be peace education. In my study of prospects for peace education in Malawian schools, since 2004, I have learned, from watching teachers, that it is entirely possible to approach the school curriculum, and day-to-day classroom content, into peace education. I have also learned how peace education and peace studies have been in existence for some decades now, but they are yet to become the staple of educational systems. It is not much wonder to peace educationists that school systems have always produced leaders who resort to war to resolve problems, and who care more about personal power and wealth than about the greater good.

Coincidentally, today, September 21^st, is also Founder’s Day in Ghana, when they celebrate the birthday of Ghana’s founding president, the late Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Africa’s pursuits for peace and independence owe a lot to a vision first stipulated by Kwame Nkrumah, who argued that the independence of Ghana was meaningless unless it was tied to the independence of the rest of the continent. Dr Nkrumah argued more than fifty years ago that on their own, African countries were not economically viable and therefore needed to integrate their systems into a continental society. He also devoted his life to connecting continental Africa with the African Diaspora, and lived a life of testimony to that noble ideal. Subsequent generations of African leaders have been unable to appreciate Dr Nkrumah’s wisdom, and have colluded with forces of imperialism to impoverish ordinary Africans.

It is the disillusionment from that collusion between African leadership and forces of imperialism that lies at the heart of the protest movement in Malawi and elsewhere. As long as educational systems in Africa and around the world continue perpetuating educational policies that ignore larger ideals of uMunthu-peace, social well-being and the greater good, the world will continue the paradox of celebrating peace amidst war, violence and death. 

Their own Worst Enemy? The Paradoxes of African Leadership & the Undermining of the African Cause

Wednesday July 20^th found me at Katoto Teacher Development Centre (TDC), less than a kilometre away from Katoto Freedom Park, ground zero for Mzuzu demonstrations. We had a teacher professional development workshop with 20 educators from Mzuzu City and Mzimba North. Hardly had we started the day when we heard the chants and songs. It was tantalizing.

An hour into our session, one participant apologized for interrupting, saying they had received a phone call. Riots were breaking out in town, vehicles were being overturned and burned, and shops were being looted. I stole a glance at my phone, and people were posting updates on facebook and on Nyasanet directly from the centre of Mzuzu. Soon we started hearing sounds of teargas canisters. Two participants who had gone out to the bathroom came back dabbing wet handkerchiefs to their eyes. The teargas had wafted in our direction. We closed the windows. Dozens of youngsters ran past our training venue. We kept on with our training, constantly peeping through the windows to monitor what was going on outside.

The trickle of people running past our venue started growing in volume. People were now passing by carrying merchandize. A crowd gathered outside nearby, and the teargas shots grew louder. There was no doubt things had turned ugly. Our driver, who had left with the car on some errands, came back on foot. Cars were being targeted, and he nearly got caught up in the mess. He quickly drove into a nearby neighbourhood, asked if he could keep the car inside somebody’s fence, and walked back to the training venue.

The work of Bingu’s hands

We broke off for lunch at 12 noon, and three of us walked toward Katoto Filling Station, which faces Katoto Freedom Park. The filling station, popularly known as Pa Harry (owned by popular local politician Harry Mkandawire), is located on the corner of Mzuzu City’s largest intersection. The three-way traffic lights open the gateway to the lakeshore districts of Rumphi and Karonga, and Chitipa further up in the north. To the east lie Nkhata Bay and the beaches of Lake Malawi, and southward the M1 takes you to the capital city Lilongwe. There were rocks strewn all over the T-junction. A billboard boasting the height of Bingu’s achievements only two years ago had been torched, but you could still read the words: “Let the work of my hands speak for me,” an English translation of a Chichewa saying about how deeds offer better evidence than words. The stark irony was lost on no one. There was a fire, still smoldering in the middle of the intersection.

Now and again crowds surged, running away or towards the northern end of the bus depot. A police land cruiser seemed to be coming from that direction. A vehicle belonging to the National Aids Commission arrived at the Filling Station where we had stopped. Somebody behind me started shouting in a menacing way. He was trying to galvanise others to attack the vehicle. The driver quickly made a u-turn and drove away. Suddenly an army truck appeared from the direction of Moyale Barracks, east of the city. It was full of soldiers, carrying guns. Another one quickly followed, and a third. You could feel the tension go up a notch amongst the crowd. A few people waved at the soldiers.

I was itching to go nearer and take pictures, but I was strongly advised not to. We walked back to our training venue, passing residents of Katoto who had come out of their houses and were thronging the neighbourhood streets. Back at the training venue, we continued with our programme. It was a surreal experience. Here were twenty Malawian educators discussing professional development plans for Malawian schools, with gun shots sounding very close by, and people streaming past the building. Police teargas and live gunshots were still droning when we left Mzuzu and headed for Mzimba Boma as the sun set.

That evening Malawi Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) rebroadcast President Bingu wa Mutharika’s televised public lecture from earlier that day, so I had a chance to watch it. Bingu spoke for about 2 hours 15 minutes. On twitter and facebook, the reactions to the lecture were furious. The choice of Wednesday 20 July was clearly meant to not only sabotage the planned demonstrations, but to also cause mayhem and confusion. In that, they succeeded. The government machinery had done everything possible to discredit the planned demonstrations. Tactics used by the MBC bordered on comic relief. On several consecutive days the prime time evening news bulletins carried opinionated claims masquerading as news to the effect that the real aim of the demonstrations was support for homosexuality.

That the government has been scared of a Tunisia-Egypt type revolt has been evident in the way it has reacted to the slightest mention of demonstrations. The academic freedom struggle has its roots in that fear, as does the edict President wa Mutharika issued on March 6, 2011 that anybody wanting to stage a demonstration must first pay 2 million kwacha (approx. US$13,000) to the police as surety against property damage. Such has been the government’s fear of demonstrations that it has gone out of its way to placate a few civil society activists, who have since turned around and now praise government, while ridiculing former civil society colleagues. If events of 20^th and 21^st July look as if they vindicate government’s fears, it is not for its foresight; rather it is for having worked hard toward that fulfillment. The president’s decision to blame the property damage and loss of life on the organizers of the demonstrations leave that in no doubt.

Undermining African renewal

There are two tragedies, here. First are the deaths that have resulted from the demonstrations. Second is the precipice we have gone over, beyond which debate does not seem salvageable. The second tragedy has important implications for the African renewal that President wa Mutharika, and many of his then admirers in Malawi and outside, had hoped his presidency, and his one-year rotating chairpersonship of the African Union, would accomplish. I’ll get to this point in due course.

On Thursday 21^st July the organizers of the demonstrations took out a public service announcement urging a stop to further protests. They said only Wednesday 20^th July was the legitimate date for demonstrations, and a petition had been delivered to the president to that effect. Any further protests after that date were illegal. The president’s lunch hour address to the nation on Thursday 21^st July ended with an invitation to dialogue, having spent much of the address blaming the organizers for having paid demonstrators to loot and damage property. On Friday July 22^nd the president spoke to graduating police cadets at Zomba Police College, and all the pretense for dialogue was gone. He accused the protests organizers of treason, and threatened to “smoke them out.” Offering condolences to the families of those killed in the protests, he read from his prepared remarks, “They have died in vain.”

President Bingu wa Mutharika and leaders like him have always presented for me a particularly difficult dilemma. I have suggested previously that all political leaders are the same, a manifestation of what they perceive to be the imperatives of wielding political power. It is the levels and degrees of civil society activism that explain the differences in the extent of what each particular leader is capable or incapable of doing. July 20^th itself offers a telling Malawian example.

The entire idea behind the lecture was ill-thought. As George Kasakula noted in one of his columns in The Weekend Nation recently, Malawians did not need lectures; they needed solutions to chronic social, economic and political problems. The choice of the date itself was a “bizarre juxtaposition” with the demonstrations, to quote Professor Paul Tiyambe Zeleza in his 21^st July article, “Malawi on the Brink: The July 20 Movement.” That was reason enough for many not to even listen to or watch the lecture. Even after listening to it in its entirety, many people’s reaction was utter dismissal and ridicule. That was exactly my attitude as well.

Britain is not our mother

Early in the lecture the president referred to an opposition critic of his government, who said the president had been wrong to antagonize Britain, because Britain was “our mother.” The president said the last line in the country’s national anthem goes “. . . and mother Malawi,” not “. . . and mother Britain.”  A lot of the reaction to the president’s decision to expel the British High Commissioner, Mr. Fergus Cochrane-Dyet, was understandably in fear of the potentially disastrous effects of any British retaliation in the area of development aid to Malawi, which is widely believed by many Malawians to support poor people.

As a matter of fact a lot of foreign aid benefits the donating country as well as the wealthy elites of the recipient country. But another corner of the reaction bordered on hysteria, fed by the existential belief that foreign aid is an act of Western altruism and not strategic political interest; that it is the natural order of things for Western countries to give aid, out of altruism, to Third World countries for whom it is the natural order of things to forever remain beggars.

The strategic purposes of foreign aid extend beyond bilateral support to national budgets. Most Non-Governmental Organizations receive aid for reasons that have little to do with altruism. An article forwarded recently to the Fahamu Debate List, written by Tafataona Mahoso, has a most telling title: “How the US controls ‘civil society’ throughout Africa.” In the article Mahoso argues that all of civil society in Africa is sponsored by US and European interests, with the aim of making Africans “feel and believe that they are only thankful receivers of freedom and human rights conceived, taught and funded by the West.” He goes on: “The Anglo-Saxon powers, led by the US, already control a continental network and superstructure of ‘civil society’ throughout Africa.” A syndrome that has been cultivated over several centuries, Mahoso argues that it “is not natural.” It has created, Mahoso argues, a “willingness to apologise against our own dignity and interests while upholding the arrogance of the enemy.” Mahoso is quick to point out that “the problem is not with the North Americans and Nato as such.” Africans themselves are to blame: “. . . we have allowed ourselves to be tutored in governance matters by people who are our declared enemies or by organizations and individuals funded and managed by our declared enemies.”

Whether or not one agrees with Mahoso’s language of “declared enemies,” and the depiction of African civil society as pliant and supine, the point about self-sabotage should not be a substitute for apportioning blame where it belongs. As I have already pointed out, the benefits from this system go to both the Western donors and to wealthy African elites. It is the poor, and marginalized Africans, that get sacrificed in the process. For all the comical relief and laughable madness about MBC’s claims of the 20^th July demonstrations being aimed at showing support for homosexuality, gay rights have become a tug of war between competing interests in the West.

Africa has become the battleground for Evangelicals wanting to use Christians in Africa to stop the spread of Western forms of homosexual lifestyles, and a battleground for gay rights activists to contain Western forms of Christian homophobia. In the process, the human stories of Africans born gay, and their genuine struggle for their humanity, their rights and equality, get lost in the pandemonium. Because matters of sexuality are considered private in most societies, the surface outlook suggests that there are no born homosexuals and other types outside heterosexuality in Africa.

President wa Mutharika has spoken of gay people in the worst terms possible, repeating language used by President Robert Mugabe. He has claimed that homosexuality is unMalawian and unAfrican, reflecting an insensitivity to the diversity of human sexuality that is as part of human nature as is heterosexuality. The entire discourse about gay rights is fraught with extreme views on either side, making debate, and opportunities for educating ourselves about the gifts of God’s diverse creation, impossible. The irony of the denial of one’s humanity for how nature created them, a phenomenon black people around the world are only too familiar with, has not even registered.

When President wa Mutharika spoke to Malawians a month earlier on Friday June 24^th about the causes of the fuel and forex shortages in Malawi, the reaction from most Malawians was predictably the same. Front pages the next morning said his speech was empty and devoid of any solutions; full of blame for the IMF, donors, everyone but himself. In his 20^th July lecture, he went on to talk about how Malawi’s forex ends up in Mumbai, London and other global financial centres. He repeated what he had said on June 24^th that it was the IMF that had ordered the government to liberalise oil importation and forex, and leave them in the hands of the private sector.

The acute shortages the country was experiencing were a direct result of those policies. There has been very little discussion on email forums, newspapers and electronic media as to why exactly the country has no forex, or responses to the president’s accusation that foreign banks, which have proliferated as part of Malawi’s economic growth since he was elected, have been siphoning it out of the country. Nor has there been much discussion as to whether poor countries have the power to reject the IMF’s neoliberal policies, with the prevailing opinion being that countries choose whether to follow IMF advice, or to leave it, with no consequences.

Is democratic debate still possible?

Not everyone has received President wa Mutharika’s lecture with indifference and ambivalence, however. In The Nation of Friday July 22, the Malawi Confederation of Chambers of Commerce and Industry (MCCCI) responded to some of the issues the president raised. Speaking for the organization, the Executive Director, Chancellor Kaferapanjira, doubted that the government had the resolve to institute measures of self-sacrifice that would be required for the president’s suggestions to be implemented. “The vehicle fleet of the Malawi Government is one of the largest in Africa,” said Mr Kaferapanjira. “If they can get rid of the appetite for new vehicles and maintain the current ones, it can help in reducing recurrent expenditure.”

An interesting observation this one, but one wonders why the Malawi Police and the Ministries of Health and Education, big ministries with big numbers of employees and big operations, have never had adequate numbers of vehicles. But Mr Kaferapanjira’s observations are also echoed by the petition civil society has presented to the president. They are also echoed by several columnists and commentators, including The Weekend Nation’s Ephraim Munthali and The Sunday Times’ Deborah Nyangulu-Chipofya and Raphael Tenthani, who have pointed out how government could rein in excesses and abuses if they could embrace self-sacrifice and austerity measures themselves.

That there has been little debate stems, partly, from the manner in which the president speaks. It has become an expectation that every time the president veers off his prepared remarks, he will make the next day’s front page headlines. He has called his critics “drunks” and “tiankhwezule,” (in reference to a small bird that, by implication, should not be taken seriously), and donors “stupid.” The latter term has so scandalized Malawians, to the extent of the opposition critic who is reported to have said Britain was Malawi’s mother and should not be antagonized. It is common amongst Malawian pundits and columnists to declare that imperialism ended with colonialism, and Malawi has all but herself to blame.

This is an observation made mostly in reaction to what Professor Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has called “the president’s nationalist anxieties and preoccupations with colonialism and admonition of Britain,” which to the majority of Malawi’s population, born after independence, “are outdated and irrelevant.” Obviously, the tendency by African leaders to use colonialism as an excuse has backfired on them. However imperialism is still very much at work, as a growing body of development studies scholarship shows. This is a body of scholarship intellectuals from Africa and from other parts of the world that demonstrates how African wealth and resources migrate out of the continent every year. The blame game insists on one culprit, when it is both Western interests and wealthy African elites behind the looting and plundering.

President wa Mutharika’s second term of office has given cause to two questions about many African leaders: Are they their own worst enemy? Are they really different from other leaders elsewhere? They set the tone for how Africans are going to discourse. It will be them setting the terms, as they know best; they cannot take Africa over a cliff, they reassure. Because there will be no real dialogue and serious debate about genuine issues raised in the pronouncements by both the presidents and their critics, the only choices left on both sides will be extreme positions that portray the other party as out of touch and ignorant, intolerant and stubborn.

In their extreme moods, African leaders want the organizers of protests and demonstrations prosecuted for treason, or “smoked out”. In the extreme fringes of the protestors, they want these leaders out of power, and worse. The presidents bring the full force of the state to bear on their detractors, who find ready support from Western interests. The middle ground which was supposed to foster debate about Africa’s desires for true democracy and independence, “Africa of the new beginning”, to use Mutharika’s own words, is further adrift.