Malawi’s public education system: from planning to implementing

If Malawi truly wanted to improve the quality of public education, three questions would need to provide guidance. Which local, endogenous wisdom would we draw from? Which countries’ models would we want to learn from? And, how would we want the learning to look like? Although there are no easy answers to these questions, there are good reasons to pursue them.

Drawing from local, endogenous wisdom is important because learning from other societies is as inevitable as it is messy and complex. You can never borrow and transplant an entire system. You can only adapt what you are borrowing to an already existing, endogenous yet dynamic system. For which countries to borrow from, this is not a straightforward matter either. There are successful education systems in the global North and in the global South, with very different cultures.

As to how we would want the learning to look like, we would want to learn on our terms, not on the terms of those we are learning from. That is how successful egalitarian societies have managed to achieve their success.

A teacher continuous professional development session in Thyolo

What we know thus far about successful egalitarian education systems is that not only do they understand the significance of making their teachers the best educated and most prestigious professionals; they actually make the necessary investments. All countries say education is important. The difference between successful nations and unsuccessful ones lies in going beyond the rhetoric and implementing national plans.

On 16^th September 2015, President Professor Peter Mutharika opened Chiradzulu Teachers’ College and said what must have been the most pleasing statements any Malawian educationist would want to hear. The president said, as quoted in Nyasatimes, “We must provide teachers with necessary resources and respect them because teaching is the mother of all professions. My government wants to make sure that teachers also live a good life like Engineers, lawyers and doctors as a way of motivating them to mould our children’s future with dedication.”

The president went on to say: “Let us be people who raise the flag of our standards very high. We deserve the best and must aspire to be at our best. Education is where we begin the making of a nation.” As I have pointed out elsewhere, these were very powerful, delightful things to say and Malawians are waiting to see the fulfilment of those promises. If what the president said were to become reality, Malawi would have one of the best education systems in the world.

There are countries that have actually made good on such promises. In Africa, Zimbabwe is one example. In Asia, there is Singapore, Japan and South Korea. In Europe, there is Scotland, Germany, and Finland, among others. What these countries have done, particularly Finland, is to make teaching the most prestigious profession. Finland’s teacher preparation programmes are the most selective, admitting only the best scoring students and subjecting them to a rigorous interview process before finally accepting them into a teacher education programme.

The minimum qualification to become a teacher in Finland, starting at the preschool level, is a research masters’ degree. The result is that the Finnish education system ranks amongst the best in the world, despite having slipped in PISA rankings since 2012 (In the 2015 rankings, released on 6^th December 2016, Singapore took the number one position). Teachers, educationists and researchers from around the world go to Finland to learn how the country achieved this.

In the 1950s Finland was a largely agrarian society with very low school enrolment and transition rates. In the 1960s the country made a decision to transform its economy, and it started with the education system. In 1968 the country changed its basic education system and introduced comprehensive and compulsory education from Grades 1 to 9. They changed teacher certification requirements, introduced a new curriculum and started providing free meals to all students.

The country consolidated these changes by decentralising control to local municipalities and assemblies, and later shifted from an industry-based economy to a knowledge-based economy. Education became the basis for innovation, open-mindedness, and flexibility. Students were taught to be responsible for their own learning, and schools and teachers were given autonomy. Top-performing students were incentivised to join the teaching profession, resulting in highly educated professionals who were trusted.

Critics like to point out that Finland has a very small, homogenous population and therefore it cannot be a model for countries that differ from its makeup. That is well and true, but it does not negate the importance, nor the feasibility, of heavily investing in teacher education and professional development, and fostering responsibility for students’ own learning and self-awareness.

If Malawi were to transform its education system and improve the quality of education, we would need to start by conscientising ourselves to endogenous forms of knowledge that define who we are as a country. We would then be in a position to determine what we wanted to learn from others, on our terms rather than on the terms of those we were learning from.

We have not done a good job of learning or borrowing, and that is why we have mismanaged our education system. The results have had adverse effects on much of our society. One particular form of endogenous knowledge we have not explored is that of uMunthu; the human dignity imperative.

The most recent education statistics, from 2015, show a few gains and many losses. We have improved in net enrolment and at least 95 percent of our six-year olds are entering school. The problem is that they are not persisting to completion. We have made great strides in getting girls into school, who now outnumber boys in primary school by a small margin. Girls also outnumber boys in Form 1 selection, and our teacher training programmes are now enrolling more female student teachers than males. We are training more teachers and the qualified teacher pupil ratio is slightly improving.

A significant percentage of primary school students drop-out annually (3.8 percent) and, an even higher percentage repeat annually (21.9 percent). By the time they reach Standard 8, up to 68 percent have dropped out or are repeating. Of those who finish Standard 8, only 36 percent transition to secondary school. In terms of net enrolment, the percentage of 13-17 year-olds who are supposed to be in secondary school, only 15 percent actually are.

Our secondary school system leaves out so many young people it has become dangerously unsustainable. The majority of Malawians 15 years and above have never attained a secondary school education. The figures stand 64 percent for men and 74 percent for women, according to the 2016 Malawi Health and Demographic Survey (p.11). For those who do attend, the quality is very poor, except for very few in elite public and private secondary schools. The majority of teachers in community day secondary schools are unqualified. It is even worse in private secondary schools, where 72 percent of teachers are untrained.

We have a textbook shortage, but it is made worse by irregular distribution and uncertainties in supply. It is a common sight to see twenty students sharing one textbook while new, unwrapped books are kept inside cupboards in headteachers’ offices for fear that if they get damaged there will be no replacements. We have many students both in primary and secondary schools who go for years without touching a textbook. These students end up in universities and are unleashed onto the streets.

In the tertiary and higher education system, our approach to solutions has been more politically-driven than based on sound thinking. The quota system, officially termed equitable access, is supposed to be used to level the ground for students disadvantaged by poverty, gender and disability, but it has become a tool that punishes high performing students even from among the disadvantaged groups. We need to address resource imbalances and shortages at the primary and secondary levels so as to give everyone a quality basic and secondary education.

We also need to acknowledge that a few private universities now offer alternative options to high performing students. These institutions deserve government support. They are now taking in the many qualified students left out of the public universities. Levelling the ground from basic education and utilising the private universities to widen access would eliminate the need to apply quotas at the higher education level. It would leave academic merit as the only criteria.

The higher education system itself is now reeling from years of elitist exclusivity and arrested development. The decades-old failure to expand access has created bottled-up pressure that is now exploding due to escalating costs amidst rapid expansion. The debate around the fees hike is undifferentiated, pitting two sides that are using sweeping statements to argue that the fees are either justified or they are too high. Missing from the debate is a discussion of how to use data and verifiable records to make students from wealthy families pay, while providing loans and scholarships to those who cannot.

Within three months of its loans recovery campaign, between April and June 2016, the Higher Education Students Loans and Grants Board (NHESLGB) was able to recover K27.5 million, from 2,700 former students. This averaged K10,000 per former student, very little when compared to the actual amount spent to educate them.

The NHESLGB has the potential to become an important part of the solution to the problem of higher education fees, especially if it can recover loans at current exchange value and inflation, with interest. It needs to find bolder ways of growing its fund base. The lesson from successful education systems is that their governments use aggressive taxation, particularly from natural resources, to generate enough revenue to provide higher education to as many citizens as possible. We are on the extreme end of the continuum.

The current capacity of our higher education misleads us into thinking that the majority of our secondary school leavers do not qualify for university education. In fact they do. Every year no less than 70,000 pass the MSCE but only 6,000 or thereabouts find space in our public universities. An even smaller number go to private universities. The reality is that many more students deserve to be admitted into higher education but capacity problems deny them this opportunity.

If we truly wanted to improve the quality of education in Malawi, we have the knowledge and the expertise. We know where to learn from. Our leaders say all the right things but fail to put them into action. It has become cliché to say what we lack is political will, shorthand for inaction due to politicised rather than national visions. It is time we moved from a planning nation to an implementing one.

A version of this article appeared in the October 2015 issue of The Lamp magazine.

A new national consciousness: Agenda for the next 50 years

We are winding down a year that marked two key milestones in our nation’s autobiography. We marked fifty years of independence, and we also marked twenty years of multiparty democracy and the end of one-party dictatorship. As we embark on another fifty years of national independence and another twenty of multiparty democracy, I want to ask a question: Do we as Malawians have a sense of national consciousness? A sense of Malawi being bigger and more important than our individual selves and interests?

Having a national consciousness is about putting one’s country above one’s personal, clan, ethnic, class, political and other self-serving interests. A national consciousness gives one hope in something greater than oneself. It grounds one’s optimism and protects a society from hopelessness, pessimism and paralysing negativity. But national consciousness does not originate itself. It has to be cultivated and nourished. And it has to be taught to the younger generation so they can nurture it further and carry it into the future.

The national heroes who fought for independence fifty years ago had a national consciousness that they held above personal and other narrow interests. They sacrificed their lives because they believed in something that was greater than them. They espoused a national, indeed Pan-African, cause for which they were prepared to die. And many indeed died. Kanyama Chiume, Henry Masauko Chipembere and others wrote autobiographies and other accounts that have taught us what sacrifices they made and what it took to achieve independence and nationhood. Their lessons still resonate today, if not more so.

So did the heroes who fought for multiparty democracy twenty years ago. They knew how dangerous it was to contradict the then Life President, Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda, and the almighty Malawi Congress Party. Some had been killed before, and others had been imprisoned indefinitely. Others had left the comfort of home and had gone into exile. Others simply disappeared and were never heard from again. Yet these heroes bravely espoused a national cause to liberate the country from one-party tyranny. Today, all that is being gradually eroded. That history is being methodically sanitised and purposefully forgotten. 

Something seems to have happened to our national consciousness. As Taweni Gondwe Xaba once observed in an online conversation, today Malawians have a very low sense of “national allegiance.” Personal, ethnic, class and political interests have taken over what was once an allegiance to the nation. When a society loses its sense of national consciousness, national amnesia, blind frustration and paralytic pessimism come in and occupy the vacuum. There are Malawians for whom the idea of a national consciousness does not exit. Bola zawo zikuyenda basi.

That is the stage Malawi is at today. There are hardly any national figures to look up to for optimism and inspiration. The few Malawians who still embrace national consciousness have the odds stacked against them in a society whose moral relativism favours personal aggrandisement or ethnic chauvinism. Instead, we have supposedly respectable people proudly boasting about knowing national secrets that are destroying the nation. But they choose to keep those secrets to themselves so as to protect individuals, at the expense of national progress.

We have people who have inside information about murders, massive theft and plunder, and other heinous crimes against the nation. But they choose to keep quiet. They hold their personal interests and narcistic considerations above the national interest. They have no sense of national consciousness. They selfishly hold themselves to be bigger than Malawi. They do not wish the country well. They are content to see mothers and fathers forever mourning their murdered children while the killers roam the streets as free people. They are content to see the country continue haemorrhaging economically, yet they have the knowledge of who stole what and how they did it. And that plunder still goes on today.

We have Malawians so beholden to the saintly image of their leader they are loath to any suspicions of impropriety by the leaders, even in the face of evidence. They comfort themselves in a false sense of righteousness and refuse to accept that their heroes are plundering the nation and need to be held to account. When you reach that stage where you defend your leader to the extent of absurdity, know that you have lost your sense of national allegiance. The same goes for ethnic, political, class and other types of unexamined allegiances.

But all is not lost. The two milestones we marked this year give us pause to reflect on how to change things and imagine a new Malawi. As Levi Kabwato is fond of reminding us, quoting Frantz Fanon, “Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfill it, or betray it.” And we have the intellectual and ideological tools to do this. Our leading thinkers and philosophers have pointed the way. We still have Malawians we can look up to.

We must start with cultivating a culture of uMunthu, upon which our ancestors built their societies. As the psychologist Chiwoza Bandawe points out in his book Practical uMunthu Psychology: An indigenous approach to harmonious living, “to lose uMunthu is to lose our history and identity as people.” Which means, in paraphrase, to regain our uMunthu is to regain our history and identity as a people. That is the beginning point for the rebirth of a new Malawian national consciousness. Let us make this uMunthu-based national consciousness our mission to fulfil for the next fifty years.

Note: A version of this post appeared in The Malawi News of Saturday 27th December, 2014.

Why I still believe in the African rebirth

Text of my talk at TEDxLilongwe, 25th May, 2013

Watch the Youtube video here

When I started blogging in 2005, I gave my blog a Chichewa name. Chichewa is my first language, spoken by more than 80 percent of Malawians. It’s also spoken in parts of Zambia, Mocambique and Zimbabwe. I gave my blog the name “Afrika Aphukira.” In Chichewa that translates as “Africa will have a rebirth.” It’s been eight years since, and every other African country seems to be undergoing a rebirth, with the exception of Malawi, if you ask the average Malawian.

Speakers at TEDxLilongwe, 25th May 2013

Two weeks ago, the Africa Progress Panel released the 2013 Africa Progress Report. The foreword, by Kofi Annan, chairperson of the Panel, starts with the following sentence: “Africa is standing on the edge of enormous opportunity.” Headlines from global media are salivating on new discoveries of mineral and oil deposits in the African soil. Sceptics have retorted with the line: Africa is rising but Africans are not. The same 2013 African Progress Report reveals that Africa is losing $34 billion annually from its mining and oil deals.

Researchers from Oxford University have given Malawi 74 years before the country can eradicate poverty. That gives us up until the year 2087. When I first saw this headline in the Daily Times of 22^nd March this year, I thought of the millions of Malawians for whom daily life is a struggle. I thought of the glaring contradictions: glamorous shopping complexes facing the most dilapidated market squares, separated by a heavily potholed Devil Street.

I thought of this particular stretch in a busy part of Old Town Lilongwe: a bank, a superette, an expensive restaurant, a mobile phone company, and two upscale car dealerships. Look at the street running along these structures, and 74 years doesn’t look enough. Then I thought of those who had already had their poverty eradicated.

The African rebirth I am envisioning is not based on global media headlines. It is Africa-owned; it derives its meaning from the term ‘uMunthu.’ This word means personhood in Chichewa. uMunthu is about how our humanness is tied to that of others. We say “You are, therefore I am.” The question I always ask myself is: what would it look like if uMunthu were at the centre of social policy and governance? Let me illustrate this.

In June 2010 I met a group of teachers from several primary schools here in Lilongwe. The purpose for the meeting was to start what we hoped would be a forum where teachers would regularly meet and help one another become better teachers. A bigger goal was teacher empowerment; an attempt to address the helplessness and hopelessness many teachers feel about the conditions of their schools and their profession.

As I returned to my car at the end of the meeting, I was approached by one teacher. His name was Amos Matchakaza. Amos asked for a ride to a local college, where he was studying for his bachelors’ degree. I asked Amos how he was managing to pay for his bachelors’ degree courses from his teacher's salary. He said 90 percent of his salary went to pay for tuition. They had had their electricity disconnected because they couldn’t pay the bill. He was not eligible for any government loan, nor any form of support towards his higher education. He was only able to make it because his wife was also a primary school teacher.

That evening I tweeted about Amos. A friend of mine, and former classmate from primary school, sent me a direct message. His name was Hastings Fukula Nyekanyeka. He wanted to know more about Amos. Hastings promised to support Amos until he finished his bachelors’ degree. That was June 2011. In March this year 2013 Amos graduated with his degree.

On 10th November 2012 the weekly Malawi News published a story about Mike Demesterb Nkhoma. Nkhoma dropped out of Form One, first year of secondary school, because his father could not afford the school fees. He started working as a garden boy for a lecturer at the University of Malawi’s Kamuzu College of Nursing. Her name was Juliana Lunguzi.

Juliana sent Mike to a boarding secondary school. Mike scored distinctions in Mathematics, Agriculture and Biology, and was selected to the prestigious University of Malawi College of Medicine. Juliana kept supporting him, and in November 2012 Mike graduated as a medical doctor. Today Dr. Nkhoma is practicing medicine at Malawi’s biggest referral hospital, Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital.

Even more remarkable is the example Mike set for his sister. She had dropped out in Form Two, second year of secondary school, for the same reasons as her brother. She got married and went on to have four children. Her brother Mike’s story made her rethink her future. She went back to secondary school. She made it to the University of Malawi’s Kamuzu College of Nursing, and is in her final year of her bachelors’ degree programme. Then there is the story of William Kamkwamba, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind.

The reason why many Malawians do not achieve their ambitions is how we look at human potential. We look at human potential as a fixed quantity. If one fails at school, they must be dull. This thinking leads to policies and practices that limit the potential of many Malawians. It has led to policies which favour heavy social investments in elitist structures, and little to no investment in the lives of poor people. That is why in Malawi today the government pays millions of Malawi kwacha every year to students attending public universities, while tens of thousands of younger Malawians drop out of primary and secondary school every year because they cannot afford the fees or the expenses associated with going to school.

In its Malawi Demographic and Health Survey 2010, the National Statistics Office reported that 70 percent of Malawians aged 18 years and above have never had a secondary school education. Some of the reasons for this are lack of resources and the size of the Malawian economy. But a less discussed factor is the assumption, prevalent in our policy making, that intelligence and human potential are limited.

The stories I have shared today confront these assumptions. These stories offer a beginning for us to define the rebirth of the country, and of the continent, on our terms. These stories are the reasons why I still believe in the coming rebirth of Malawi, and of Africa. They are the reason why I still believe in uMunthu. Thank you.

Five Questions with Steve Sharra, participant on LSE’s Programme for African Leadership

This interview was done for the London School of Economics' Programme for African Leadership, whose first cohort ran from March 19th to April 4th, 2012, on the LSE campus. The interview was conducted by Syerramia Willoughby, of the LSE. Click to go to the interview.

Peace Studies and ‘Africa’: International Day of Peace Reflections

When I stumbled upon peace studies as an academic discipline in 2003, I saw the myriad questions I had developed over a life time, some of which I was unaware of, begin to gel into an intelligible, coherent pursuit. I wondered why it had taken me five years into graduate school to learn of the existence of peace studies as a discipline. And had it not been for a dissertation research fellowship, I can not tell whether I would have become acquainted with the discipline, and gone ahead to adopt it as an intellectual and activist framework. What seemed even more peculiar was that it felt so natural and intuitive; I realized I had been using it all along, only I hadn’t called it peace studies. Five years later, I have come to regard it as indispensable for the way I understand the world and our attempts towards solutions to its intractable problems. The tell-tale moment came in 2004, during field work in Malawi, when it occurred to me that it was what uMunthu/uBuntu demanded of us as human beings. I had set out on a sojourn to the global North, in search of truth, and had returned home at the height of that search, only to find that the object of my searching had been lying in plain sight all along. On this day, September 21, International Day of Peace, I would like to reflect on how the discipline of peace and justice studies brings together a host of multidisciplinary approaches to understanding Africa, Pan-Africans, and their place in the work of promoting global peace.

It was whilst I was in the field that I learned how to appropriate peace studies to make sense of the uMunthu/uBuntu imperative which lay at the center of the pursuit for local and global peace. In order to achieve this, I began thinking, it was necessary for peace studies to take Africa and Africans seriously. As yet, this is not the case, an argument made by Marvin Berlowitz (2002), professor of Educational Foundations at the University of Cincinnati. Berlowitz wrote in an issue of the journal Peace Review that the discipline of peace studies was plagued by Eurocentric bias. He said several African American peace leaders and activists were ignored in the scholarship, and his list included one African peace leader, and one Caribbean scholar activist.

Berlowitz’s conclusion was that Eurocentric bias pervaded the field of peace studies, and he attributed the problem to an “ideological split” that represented differing historical experiences between Euro-Americans and African Americans. In explaining why Eurocentrism was a problem in peace studies, Berlowitz listed two main reasons: it distorted our view of peace studies and the peace movement, and it precluded any viable understanding or alliance between African Americans and Euro-Americans. For example, historical events such as the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and anti-colonization were active topics of research and activism in the African American community, while they were paid less attention to in mainstream peace studies.

While Berlowitz’s main concern was the place of African American peace leaders and activists in the peace studies canon, the same questions are relevant regarding the place of African peace leaders and activists. In this quest, a much more comprehensive persuasion for Africans and African contexts in peace studies has been made by Matt Meyer, a founding member of the Peace and Justice Studies Association and co-convener of the World Resisters League, and Bill Sutherland, a co-founder of the Congress for Racial Equality, and a leading thinker and activist of Pan-Africanism. Not only have Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland asserted the place of African leaders such as Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and other African leaders and activists in the study of peace and justice, they have also argued for the place of Pan-Africanism and African independence and anti-colonial movements as legitimate subjects of peace studies.

Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer’s 2000 book Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation in Africa, accomplishes what no other study that I know of does: merging together Pan-Africanism, African independence and anti-colonial struggles, and Gandhian nonviolence into a coherent exploration of African contexts in the study of peace and justice. The book chronicles detailed accounts and narratives of Africa’s experiments with violence and nonviolence. The narratives are developed through interviews with African leaders and political activists, and personal reflections from Bill Sutherland. Bill Sutherland’s experiences go back to the 1950s when Ghana was fighting for its independence with Kwame Nkrumah as its leader, to the 1990s when Sutherland and Matt Meyer traveled across the continent to personally meet and interview several African leaders and activists. The book thus offers deep insights into the confluence of violence and nonviolence in Africa’s struggles for independence from Kwame Nkrumah, Julius Nyerere, Jerry Rawlings, Kenneth Kaunda, Graca Machel, Sam Nujoma, Nathan Shamuyayira, Emma Mashinini, and Walter Sisulu, among many others.

In his preface to the book, former Archbishop of Cape Town, Desmond Tutu, states that Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland’s work evokes uBuntu ideals. Tutu says Meyer and Sutherland begin to “develop a language that looks at the roots of our humanness beyond our many private contradictions” (p. xi). Tutu says Meyer and Sutherland challenge us to “better understand concepts often seen as opposed to one another—like nonviolence and armed struggle.” In so doing, they “help to focus our attention on the larger struggles we must still wage, united: for economic justice, for true freedom and equality, and for a world of lasting peace” (ibid.). Tutu goes on to inform us that Gandhi’s philosophy of soul force and nonviolence originated in a South African context, and “were based on some concepts he learned in South Africa,” during Gandhi’s stay there (xii).

In Ghana’s struggle for independence, we learn from Sutherland that Kwame Nkrumah, a leading Pan-Africanist and anti-colonial leader and activist of his time, was also a committed nonviolence advocate, and published a pamphlet in the early phase of his leadership of Ghana’s independence movement. The pamphlet was titled What I Mean By Positive Action. Positive Action was Nkrumah’s version of nonviolence, informed by the Ghanaian context of the colonialist and imperialist nature of the oppression Africans were under. Speaking decades later to Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland, one person who had been one of Nkrumah’s close associates, Komla Agbelo Gbedema, confirmed that Gandhian nonviolence was indeed the model Ghana followed. Sutherland and Meyer quote Gbedema as saying “The Gandhian movement was a our model. Some considered Positive Action a strategy or tactic, others a principle.” But for Gbedema himself, he learned his nonviolence from a Quaker teacher who taught him that violence begot violence. The Ghanaians attributed the success of their struggle to Nkrumah’s brand of nonviolence. They even invited both WEB DuBois and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr to their independence celebrations in 1957. WEB DuBois was unable to go, but Martin Luther King Jr went, and heard Nkrumah shout the words “Free at last! Free at last!” Six years later MLK himself would use those very words to end his famed “I Have Dream” speech.

Another African anti-colonial leader and activist who also believed in nonviolence as an effective approach was the first president of Zambia, Kenneth Kaunda. Meyer and Sutherland write that Kaunda was an early advocate of nonviolent direct action, and pursued these ideals in the Africa Freedom Action and World Peace Brigade, a precursor to Peace Brigades International. Kaunda wrote a book titled The Riddle of Violence, in which he directly addressed the relevance of Gandhi to Zambia’s struggle for independence. In his life after the presidency, Kaunda told Meyer and Sutherland he had established the Kaunda Institute for Peace and Democracy, where there would be courses in peace studies and democracy.

In their discussions between Meyer and Sutherland and the now deceased first president of Tanzania, Mwalimu Julius Nyerere, the problem of achieving true independence still remains a legitimate peace and justice struggle both at the local as well as the global level. Nyerere’s role in this struggle took on a visible Pan-Africanist outlook, as had Nkrumah’s. Both African leaders invited people of African descent from outside Africa to participate in the intellectual life of Tanzanian society. Bill Sutherland was one of these figures. The late Guyanese scholar and activist Walter Rodney was another. Nyerere, like Kaunda, also hosted South African and Zimbabwean political leaders in their struggle against their respective white minority governments.

Amongst African countries, South Africa’s presence in peace studies is much better represented. There is widespread recognition that the anti-apartheid movement garnered support amongst peace activists outside Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission has been researched and written about extensively in peace research, as has the story of Nelson Mandela and the debates inside the African National Congress about the efficacy and problems associated with nonviolence. What is perhaps not widely acknowledged to the extent that it deserves is the philosophy of uBuntu, of which Archbishop Desmond Tutu is a leading advocate. Whereas Pan-Africanism and the anti-colonial independence movements enter the peace studies discourse by what can be called an activist political project, the uBuntu connection to peace studies can be said to be much more organic and internal. uBuntu, which I like to refer to as uMunthu, in it’s Chichewa version, belongs to the peace and justice studies framework through its ontological definition of the collective bond of humanness, rendering responsibility for one’s neighbors on the planet an inherent core value.

If we accept Berlowitz’s claim that African American peace leaders and activists, with the exception of MLK, are absent from peace studies, African leaders and activists are even more so. If we accept Sutherland and Meyer’s argument that the African leaders they write about in their book provide an African perspective to the global peace and justice movement, then it is fair to use Berlowitz’s questions to ask why African leaders and activists are not given the attention they deserve in the peace studies scholarship. The same goes for the philosophy of uMunthu.

Amongst the texts that constitute the peace studies canon, very few of them treat Africa in a substantive, meaningful way. Matt Meyer and Bill Sutherland’s are the only exception. Meyer has a couple of books on Pan African peace studies forthcoming in the next months, which will add to Guns and Gandhi in a way that ought to begin to change the peace studies landscape. The recent achievements of Kofi Annan in resolving the Kenyan post-election crisis, the fledgling, much-criticized efforts of Thabo Mbeki in Zimbabwe, and the work of the environmentalist and scholar Wangari Maathai, amongst others, ought to add to the canon.

The absence of African contributions to the global peace and justice movement poses two kinds of problems. The first problem is that of language and definition. On the one hand, the language I am most familiar with, Chichewa, does not have definitive terms for peace, violence, or nonviolence. Even in English, the best we can do to offer a response to violence is nonviolence, itself a negative formulation. And when we look at the definitions used in the literature, some of my students have a difficult time understanding why the problem of peace is worthy of their attention in a college classroom. They point to the difficulty of finding universal agreement on what peace entails as evidence that peace can not be achieved, and that therefore the study of peace itself is a futile, empty endeavor.

The second problem, like the first one, also deals with teaching peace studies. On the few occasions that African contexts get mentioned in the texts we use, students see a confirmation of the stereotypes they inherit about Africa as a place of hopelessness, helplessness and despair. There can be no denying that Africa has peculiar problems that defy easy rationalization. Even the African leaders and peace activists that Meyer and Sutherland describe in their book acknowledge this. However the persistence of Eurocentrism in the curriculum, both in Africa and outside Africa, lead to a distortion of the underlying contexts that create the problems Africa and Africans face. Those distortions entail policy prescriptions that over the decades have done little to teach students about difference, interdependence and imperialist exploitation. Even with well-meaning and critically-minded preparation for American students going to do study abroad in African countries, it is still very difficult to orient students to abandon a missionary-savior outlook and adopt an attitude in which Western societies can also learn from Africa in an equal exchange of knowledge production.

It is a reasonable claim that peace and justice studies is well disposed to provide a comprehensive and meaningful understanding of Africa’s problems, but the discipline can not accomplish this when the knowledge of Africa’s contributions to global peace and justice remains as underdeveloped as it currently is. The current crop of university students who feel compelled to study marginalized societies will be much better served by a peace and justice studies approach that does not ignore injustices at home, and that offers an Africa that is an integral part of historical and contemporary efforts to promote global peace.

uMunthu, Peace and Education: On Malawi's 44th Independence Anniversary

One morning at a school near Lake Chirwa in Zomba in 1972, pupils entering their Standard 8 classroom received the shock of their lives. The portrait of then Life President Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda had been defaced. Someone had drawn into the portrait a pair of spectacles, and had written unsavory comments about the then president. The pupils informed the teacher, who informed the school's head. The head immediately convened a staff meeting. After lengthy deliberations, the school administration agreed on investigating to find out who did it. The Standard 8 teacher went back to the classroom and asked for the culprit to turn himself in. Nobody volunteered any information.

After further deliberations amongst the staff, a decision was reached. Mwandilakwira, a Standard 8 pupil, would be expelled from the school and reported to the then District Education Office (DEO). Mwandilakwira protested his innocence, but the school administration responded by saying since he was the one who sat directly underneath the president’s portrait, he was probably the pupil who did this. Mwandilakwira was ordered never to come back to the school, and his name was reported to the DEO’s office. Mwandilakwira was also told that he was effectively banned from attending school in the entire Malawi.

That was thirty six years ago. Malawi has changed a great deal since then, especially in the last sixteen years. As we celebrate yet another independence anniversary, it is right and proper to ask what 44 years of independence has meant for us as a nation. This particular year I would like to ask this question from the perspective of a teacher as a way of reflecting on the role Malawian teachers play in building the nation and setting the country on a more peaceful and prosperous course.

For me, two things stand out as the most important for a future Malawi, and indeed the world, to have. First, I envision a future Malawi in which the ideals of uMunthu form the basis of our identity, and shape the form that all our endeavors take. Second, I envision a future Malawi that is blessed with peace and social justice and bestows on everyone equal chances of success and opportunities for the affirmation of everyone’s potential and talents. I see uMunthu as an ideal that pervades through these aspirations, knowing that the success of one person in a community is beneficial for, rather than a threat to, the whole community. Our Malawian elders were not wrong when they observed that Mwana wa mnzako ngwako yemwe, ukachenjera manja udya naye (your neighbor's child is your own, his/her success is your success too).

It wasn’t until 2004 that I first started thinking about uMunthu as a serious theme in envisioning the future of Malawi and the world. The day was Saturday, April 17th. The Catholic Diocese of Zomba ordained a new bishop on that day, Rt. Rev. Fr. Thomas Msusa, to take the place of Bishop Allan Chamgwera who had retired. I witnessed the beautifully choreographed and spiritually touching event at the grounds of Zomba Catholic Secondary School. In his speech, Bishop Msusa, who had left Nankhunda Seminary a few months before I set foot there in 1988, spoke of the problems Malawi was facing, and how we needed to “become as one.” He said those words had always been his guiding biblical wisdom from his seminary days. “The African worldview is about living as one family, belonging to God,” he said. “We say ‘I am because we are’, or in Chichewa kali kokha nkanyama, tili awiri ntiwanthu (when you are on your own you are as good as an animal of the wild; when there are two of you, you form a community).”

Listening to the newly ordained Bishop Msusa that afternoon harked my mind back to former Anglican Archbishop of the Diocese of Cape Town in South Africa, Desmond Tutu. A Nobel peace laureate, former Archbishop Desmond Tutu led his country, at the request of then President Nelson Mandela, in the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In his memoirs narrating his reflections on how he experienced the TRC, No Future Without Forgiveness, Archbishop Tutu explains uBuntu as the philosophical essence that propelled the TRC. In the book the former Anglican archbishop offers a list of examples where uBuntu was the driving philosophy for many southern African countries who chose forgiveness over retaliation against white minority regimes upon attaining independence. Included on the list are Zimbabwe, Kenya and Namibia.

Some people point out that South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process did not solve South Africa’s problems, and instead merely created new ones. While that may be true, with regard to what has been happening in South Africa especially in recent years and in particular this year, it is important not to blame the TRC for something it had no control over. South Africa’s problems are much more complex and difficult to understand than many of us are ready to accept. The failures of recent years belong into the broader global economic order which South Africa has been forced into by institutions with far more power than African governments can ever hope to wield. This is not to exculpate South African elites from blame, as part of the path the country has taken has been a matter of unprincipled choices in times of difficult global dilemmas. Our own country Malawi is caught up in similar influences that promote neoliberal economic competition and privatization, leaving many unable to participate, and therefore bitterly resentful. It is not always that we pause to ask ourselves the roots of the violent crime we witness in our everyday lives right here in Malawi.

Before 2004, I was not even aware that uMunthu had been the subject of serious academic and intellectual inquiry by leading Malawian and African philosophers, theologians, political scientists, and many others. Several Malawians have written entire books on the subject. They include Rev. Dr. Augustine Musopole who in 1994 published a book titled Being Human in Africa: Toward an African Christian Anthropology, Rev. Dr. Harvey Sindima who in 1995 published Africa’s Agenda: The Legacy of Liberalism and Colonialism in the Crisis of African Values, and Dr. Gerald Chigona, who in 2002 published a book titled uMunthu theology: Path of Integral Human Liberation Rooted in Jesus of Nazareth. In addition to the above books, University of Malawi scholars Richard Tambulasi and Happy Kayuni have published an article on uMunthu in Malawian politics during the one-party dictatorship and the first multiparty government. There have also been several newspaper and magazine articles on the topic, as well as performing arts groups and forums using the concept of uMunthu to describe their focus.

In my interviews with several Malawian primary school teachers since 2004, I have learned that uMunthu is a subject fit to be taught in our schools, from Standard 1 all the way to the university. This is especially important for teacher training colleges and other tertiary institutions. The teachers argued that many of Malawi’s problems of structural violence, inequality, exploitation and injustice spring from the absence of uMunthu ideals in the inculcation of values. The education system has a crucial role to play in promoting uMunthu in our society because the violence and injustice we see in our communities is in fact facilitated by the education system’s failure to offer a coherent value system that affirms our humanity and identity.

The presence of rigorously researched and analyzed treatises on the topic of uMunthu, amongst Malawians and other scholars elsewhere is an exhortation for us to make it central in our education system. In my work with Malawian primary teachers over the years, we have explored ways of teaching the values of uMunthu-based peace and social justice, even in learning areas as unlikely as Mathematics.

The consideration to make uMunthu and peace education central features of Malawian education at all levels involves rethinking the ways we train our primary school teachers also. Having been a primary school teacher myself, I have come to appreciate the need to enhance our teacher education process, to align it with the needs of present day Malawi. The two-year teacher training program has been helpful up to this point, but it has become outdated. Today’s and tomorrow’s Malawi needs teachers who are much more highly trained, who are provided the best of what our intellectual heritage has to offer. This requires making our universities an integral part of the training we give our primary school teachers. None of this can be done overnight, but that is no excuse to postpone important decisions and put them off to an unforeseeable future.

Young Malawians are bustling with intellectual energies ready to meet any academic challenges thrown their way. That is what Mwandilakwira proved to those who expelled him and banished him from attaining further education in Malawi.

After staying at home for two years without going to school, Mwandilakwira changed his name and enrolled at another school several kilometers away. There he excelled, and was selected to one of the best secondary schools in Malawi. Today he is the head of an important primary school.

Equipping teachers with the best training we can afford will be part of the process to ensure the type of future we envision for our country. It will enable teachers to assume their important role in society, in ways that empower them to uplift young Malawians, rather than attempt to destroy their future, as was the case with Mwandilakwira in 1972. Let us use the occasion of our independence anniversary to ponder the kind of future, and the kind of peace, we want for Malawi, and how best to plan for them.