As it Grows, a Baby Crocodile Dips in Many Pools: Envisioning a new Malawi, Starting with the Children

The story of 12 year-old John Sampson was so compelling I decided I would share it with a group of young Malawians I was meeting on Saturday November 17^th. In case you haven’t heard his story, which made headlines around the world last week, let me briefly tell you who this young man is. John Samson is an orphan who is doing Standard 6 (6^th Grade) at Jacaranda School for Orphans, just outside Limbe, in Blantyre. He submitted an entry into the Royal Commonwealth Essay competition, and he won first prize.

The Commonwealth has 54 countries from around the world, and this 12 year-old Std 6 Malawian won first prize, out of 8,500 people who entered. On Wednesday November 14th, John met the Queen of England, at Buckingham Palace, and presented her with a Samsung tablet which has his essay on it. The essay is titled ‘The day I wore my best clothes.’ Judges for the competition, according to Jacaranda School’s website, were The Honourable Lady Jane Roberts, award-winning author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Telegraph Deputy Editor Benedict Brogan.

Without giving away the story, which you can read in full here, it is a heartfelt narrative from a young soul dealt a cruel hand by life. Barely out of toddler stage, he lost both his parents, was abandoned by an uncle, and lived by himself. He has since picked up the pieces, all in twelve short years. John was also interviewed on the BBC World Service radio programme ‘Outlook,’ which you can listen to here (starts at 10 minutes in).

I read John’s story to a group of young Malawians, aged between 10 and 20, at an event organized by the Malawi Human Rights Youth Network. The MHRYN had brought the youth together, with funding from Plan Malawi, for them to present issues on which they are looking for stakeholder intervention from the government and civil society. They came from primary and secondary schools, and ten of them were members of the Youth Parliament, drawn from constituencies in Lilongwe. They presented their issues to government representatives from the Ministry of Education, the National Youth Council, the Ministry of Labour, the judiciary, and from civil society.

In their presence was another young Malawian, whose own story I find as gripping as John Samson’s story. The story of 20 year-old Thandikile Jumbe appeared on the front page of The Nation on Friday November 2. When she was young, Thandikile lived in one of the wealthiest suburbs of Lilongwe City. Her parents owned property and businesses, including a filling station and a car hire firm. One day Thandikile’s father died, and her mother soon followed. Her parents had left a will which entrusted all their wealth to their only daughter. For some inexplicable reasons, the will ended up in someone else’s hands, and turned Thandikile’s life upside down. Today Thandikile lives in one of the poorest and most destitute parts of Lilongwe city. She lost everything, and in the process, became a teen mother.

But life did not end there for her. She became actively involved in a Community Based Organization (CBO) looking after little orphans. Today, she is Deputy Speaker of the National Youth Parliament, and is working to make the voice of young people heard in the national assembly. She is hoping to go to college, and to continue working with other orphans at the CBO.

The third story I shared with the young people on Saturday was that of William Kamkwamba. When he was 14 years old and in his first term in secondary school, William dropped out of school. It was in 2002, and Malawi was facing a severe food crisis. His parents used all the money they had to buy food, to keep the family alive. They were unable to pay for his tuition fees. A nearby primary school had a library, which William frequented. One of the books he checked out of the library demonstrated how to make electricity at home, using junk materials such as old bicycle dynamos, tyres, and other materials.

Soon William made a windmill out of the junk materials. He powered his parents’ house and his bedroom. An educationist whose USAID-funded project had brought the library books, Dr. Hartford Mchazime, heard of William’s windmill. He brought a Daily Times reporter, Sangwani Mwafulirwa, who wrote about William. Blogger Soyapi Mumba picked up the story and wrote about it on his blog. The story was picked up by other bloggers outside Malawi, and it became an international sensation.

Today, William is pursuing a degree at Dartmouth College, one of the best universities in the world. He has co-written a memoir of his experiences, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, which became a New York Times best seller. His media appearances talking about his book included the most watched and listened to TV and radio shows in the United States. He has attracted funding for bigger solar projects in his village, and has brought electricity to his former school and the surrounding area.

During the half day meeting on Saturday November 17th, the Lilongwe youth at the meeting presented the problems they face, and the departments they have identified to take their problems to. Issues included overcrowded classrooms, very poor sanitation in schools, inadequate textbooks, predatory teachers, too many children fending for themselves, unemployment, the politicization of youth entrepreneurship loans, among others. Several stakeholders were on hand to respond to the concerns of the youth. They described what their departments and organisations were doing to protect children and the youth, and promote their welfare.

Two police officers, Sgt Gertrude Mwachande and Sub-Inspector Malango Mwasinga described the introduction of the Child Protection Unit of the Malawi Police Service. They said every single police station in the country has this unit, where anyone, including children themselves, can go to alert the police about any abuse being inflicted on a child. Two district education managers (DEMs) were invited, from Lilongwe Urban and Lilongwe Rural West. The DEM for Lilongwe Rural West, Mr. Anderson Ntandika, came in person, while the DEM for Lilongwe Urban was represented by the Primary Education Advisor for Mkukula Zone, Mr. Nelson Kachikuni. Both Mr Ntandika and Mr Kachikuni described the numerous efforts the Ministry of Education is undertaking to improve schooling conditions. They singled out sanitation programmes in schools, continuous professional development training for teachers, and the involvement of communities in supporting schools.

From the Lilongwe District Youth Office came Mrs Alice Mazungwi, while Steven Phiri, Lilongwe District Social Welfare Officer, represented his department. Other stakeholders came from the Labour Office, the Magistrate Court, and Plan Malawi. They outlined initiatives being taken to improve the social welfare of vulnerable children, and to protect from them from abuse, poverty, and destitution.

On their part, young Malawians are taking up their place at the leadership table. In schools where MHRYN is working, they have set up Child Rights Clubs, where they educate one another about their rights and responsibilities. They are learning about the Convention on the Rights of the Child, and what Malawi is doing in fulfillment of the convention. They have formed a youth parliament, and are working towards making their concerns reach the highest levels of legislative power.

During lunch I sat on a table with three boys and one girl. The boys were in Standard 6 and 7, while the girl was in Form 3. They were all from different schools. They described to me what was working and what was not working in their schools. They said they were looking forward to visits from human rights activists to teach them more about human rights, and to encourage membership of their clubs.

As the stories of children like Thandikile, John Samson and William Kamkwamba teach us, young Malawians are no longer just sitting and waiting for the day when they will finally grow up and become leaders. They are claiming their leadership roles right now. They have their own vision for how to make Malawi a better place, something that going by the levels of degeneration and backward development over the past few decades, has eluded generations of Malawian leaders, including the current one. Combined with predatory, extractive capitalism structured to enrich the global North at the expense of the global South, the result has been regressing, rather than improving quality of life for most Malawians and Africans.  

There are many youth groups mushrooming around the country, young people looking for meaningful, active involvement in making Malawi a better place. For the past six months Edward Chileka Banda has been organizing fellow youth and bringing them under one umbrella organization, the Youth Consultative Forum. He is driven by one philosophy: it’s time for the youth to get meaningfully engaged in the development of the country, through volunteering their time. Edward’s zeal and energy has inspired many other young Malawians and civil society leaders who have stood side by side with the YCF to galvanize the synergies of young Malawians.

The question of leadership has dominated the media over the past few weeks. Malawians are beginning to wonder what kind of leadership we have produced over the decades, and are hankering for a new vision. As John Samson, Thandikile Jumbe, William Kamkwamba, Edward Chileka Banda and other young Malawian leaders inspire their fellow youth to envision a different Malawi, two questions will be important: What legacy are we going to leave them? What kind of education is going to prepare them not to repeat the mistakes of past generations, but to build upon and ameliorate what is being bequeathed to them? 

Beyond reading, writing & empowerment: Thoughts for International Literacy Day 2010

Until I started knocking on people’s office doors to ask about what was being done to celebrate this year’s International Literacy Day in Malawi, September 8^th, I hadn’t thought of how differently various people might interpret the concept “literacy”. Picking up the phone to tell a director of a ministry department about what I had come for, one secretary didn’t bat an eyelid to add “adult” to the word. It didn’t matter that I repeated the phrase “International Literacy Day” several times. And she was not the only one. Several people heard it as “International Adult Literacy Day”.

Obviously a basic meaning of “literacy” starts out as learning how to read and write, and in Malawian discourse, the type of literacy most commonly heard on the street and across the airwaves is “Adult Literacy”, Sukulu ya Kwacha. No doubt adult literacy is crucial an issue as is emerging literacy, what we teach toddlers in nurseries and Standard 1 classrooms. But literacy is an extremely broad term, and covers probably each and every area that requires specialized knowledge across the breadth of human productivity. Viewing literacy in this manner forces us to consider the importance of learning more complicated knowledge systems beyond the ability to read and write as a child or as an adult literacy learner. It is not enough to know how to read and write; one needs to develop life-long intellectual habits of reading regularly and utilizing modern technologies including computers and the Internet.

A crucial factor in developing and maintaining such intellectual habits is a thriving book industry.  There was a time in Malawi when we had what could be considered a thriving book industry, considering our development stage and years from independence at that time. When I was growing up in the then Municipality of Zomba, I had access to four excellent bookshops, and a well-stocked library, within walking distance. A Malawi Book Service bookstore easily competed with a Times Bookshop a stone-throw away from each other along the M1 road in the centre of town. At Zomba Zero the CCAP Church ran a CLAIM Bookshop not too far from the Times and MBS Bookshops, and straight down the road from Zomba Zero to Chancellor College was the MBS University Bookstore.

It was the same when I travelled to Blantyre, where I was able, in one day, to visit Times Bookshop, Central Bookshop, and a few other bookstores and libraries. Even when I travelled to rural parts of Malawi such as Mulanje, Ntcheu or Kasungu, I was still able to find well-stocked bookshops ran by the MBS, CLAIM, or Times Bookshop. Today, only the CLAIM bookshop and the National Library Branch still stand in Zomba. The Malawi Book Service and the Times Bookshop no longer exist. Central Bookshop had two shops in Blantyre and one in Lilongwe. Today two of those don’t exist anymore. When I visited Maneno Bookshop in Lilongwe in June, I saw more books from other countries, and very few from Malawi. It was the same at the lone Central Bookshop at the Chichiri Mall in Blantyre. At Maneno I saw children’s books from Kenya, and almost none from Malawi. At Central Bookshop I was told that people called to ask about the next issue of People Magazine, while stacks of Malawian magazines lay unsold.

There are reasons of political economy and recent socio-economic changes that explain problems in the book industry in Malawi. This is despite the gallant efforts of the Malawi Writers Union (MAWU) and the Book Publishers Association of Malawi (BPAM) to keep book production in the country afloat. The National Library Service has also grown in strength and outreach, as have several efforts by enterprising Malawians who establish private bookshops and open libraries in schools. The last ten years have seen the introduction of Teacher Development Centres (TDCs) that serve between ten and twenty neighboring schools, and libraries are an unfailing feature of these centres.

The most inspiring Malawian success story on the international science and technology circuit, that of William Kamkwamba, owes its origins to a TDC library. It is a pity that none of the bookstores I have visited in Blantyre, Zomba and Lilongwe recently stock Kamkwamba’s co-authored book (with Bryan Mealer) The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind. Kamkwamba’s story always elicits jaw-dropping silence and attention, whether here in Malawi or in the United States. There his book has become a best seller. I look forward to the day when every young Malawian and school-teacher will read the book and feel inspired by how a quest to enhance one’s literacy and knowledge wowed the world.

Part of Kamkwamba’s story was made possible through the power of the Internet, in particular Malawian and African bloggers. Digital literacy is a must for any society that wishes to enter the 21^st century. Digital literacy involves knowledge of how to use computers, which can start with as simple a step as setting up an email account. It is disappointing that very few Malawian teachers have email accounts, let alone access to the Internet. This is understandable for teachers working in the remotest parts of Malawi where trading centres don’t even have electricity. But many centres that have electricity have seen entrepreneurial Malawians set up Internet cafes, with Internet charges as low as K5 ($0.03) per minute. I know of one teacher who taught in Kasungu in the early 2000s when there was no Internet café at Kasungu town. This teacher would take the bus every Saturday morning and go to Lilongwe, a 2-hour journey each way, so he could access the Internet. But I also know teachers today who reside within walking distance of free Internet access, and they have never used it.

Young Malawians, like their counterparts the world over, are taking to the Internet and 21^st century technology much more rapidly than grown ups. I know of primary school pupils who have email addresses, and their teachers don’t. It is the same with other educators in the system, and in the society at large. Everyone who has a business in Malawi has a cellphone, which they proudly brand on their products, shop walls and in newspaper advertisements. It is still very rare, in 2010, to see Malawian advertisements carrying email addresses and website URLs, notwithstanding the proliferation of relatively cheap Internet access in cafes across trading centres in almost every district.

This year’s theme for the International Literacy Day is “Literacy and Women’s Empowerment.” UNESCO in Paris will on Wednesday September 8 award Literacy prizes to women’s projects that are promoting women’s empowerment through literacy. A Malawian group, Coalition of Women Farmers (COWFA), is this year receiving the 2010 Honourable Mention of the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy for its Women Land Rights Project (WOLAR).

These Malawian women have charted a new way of looking at literacy. They are challenging our stereotypes of women as helpless, hapless victims who are hopelessly disempowered. They are showing us how empowerment is not a one-way, transmission-style process, but rather a self-motivated aspiration. As Julius Nyerere once wrote, people cannot be developed. They can only develop themselves. It is the same with empowerment. Women cannot be empowered by someone else; they can only empower themselves.

A profile describing the project undertaken by the Coalition of Women Farmers observes that only four percent of Malawian women own land, yet 70 percent of Malawian subsistence farmers are women. But it is also well known that Malawian women take up the responsibility of providing food for their families. Given the food crises Malawi has experienced in the first half of this decade, and the surpluses of the last four years, the empowerment of women in land ownership is one way of establishing a social structure that could ensure that food is available to more Malawians throughout the year. Using literacy to achieve that goal reinforces the understanding that reading, writing and numeracy should not be for their own sake, but rather for greater transformation and socio-economic well-being. Literacy is part of the framework within which each of the eight Millennium Development Goals ought to be understood and integrated, if they are to be seen as more than top-down, donor-driven rhetoric. 

That is how we ought to look at literacy, and address what many Malawians see as the absence of a reading culture. We should view literacy as a process of not just knowledge consumption but production as well, embracing new technologies to facilitate grassroots participation and promote human dignity, especially that of women, children, and those with special needs. More importantly, we should use modern literacies for the promotion of social justice and uMunthu-peace.  As we Malawians like to say, kuphunzira sikutha; learning never ends.