The Vuvuzelization of world football: Ghana & the real story of SA2010

With Ghana as the only remaining African team at the ongoing 2010 World Cup, as I write, the question for many people inside and outside Africa has been about the miserable performance of the five other African representatives. The 2010 World Cup was billed as the African World Cup, and hopes were high that a good number of African teams, amongst the six, would do better than in previous World Cup tournaments. These hopes thrived notwithstanding the facts of the official FIFA rankings, in which no single African team featured in the world’s top eighteen. Running up to the start of the tournament the highest ranked African team has been Cameroon, at number 19 in the world, with Ivory Coast coming in second, at number 27^th, according to Jeré Longman in the New York Times (June 5^th, 2010). Among the more interesting explanations for the failure of all but one of Africa’s representatives has been the observation that with the exception of Algeria, the rest of the African teams have European and Latin American coaches. Now Algeria themselves, under an Algerian coach, Rabah Saadane, have also been eliminated in the very first round. As per the heading of a June 21^st New York Times article by Christopher Clarey, Africa has hosted the Cup, but has imported the coaches.

The foreign coaches argument takes on a curious tone when we note that South Africa, the host country that has had six years to prepare, have themselves exited the tournament, also in the very first round. This has happened despite being coached by none other than Carlos Parreira, a Brazilian who coached his own country to World Cup victory in 1994, according to Piers Edwards (The New African, African Football insert, May 2010). Meanwhile, Ghana have reached the quarter finals with a foreign coach, the Serbian Milovan Rajevac. The foreign coaches argument does have merit, but the fate of African teams at the 2010 World Cup has been determined by a host of other factors, including political interference, bureaucratic indifference, and perennial diffidence.

Nigeria and Ivory Coast replaced coaches with three months to go to the 2010 kick-off. According to the New York Times’ Jeré Longman, neither coach met the full team until late May. Nigeria dismissed a local coach, Shaibu Amodu, who was being paid US$13,000 a month, and hired Swedish coach Lars Lagerback who had failed to qualify his own country Sweden into the 2010 World Cup tournament. He is being paid a handsome US$300,000 per month over a five-month period ending in July 2010, according to Osasu Obayuiwana in African Football (April 2010). As I am putting finishing touches to this article, England have exited the tournament in the second round, at the hands of Germany. The Germans have a German coach, Joachim Löw, while the English have an Italian coach, Fabio Capello, according to the South Africa 2010 World Cup blog.

In the concluding part of this article I will discuss the issue of the sheer randomness and unpredictability that many times offer upsets and turn conventional expectations upside. But the main point I want to make is about Ghana and how its football triumph goes beyond the football pitch and the 2010 World Cup. I make this point regardless of the outcome of Friday’s forthcoming quarterfinal match between Ghana and Uruguay.

The more compelling story worth telling about the global tournament in South Africa this year has two sides to it. First is the story of what Ghana’s triumph symbolizes, at the center of which symbolism is Africa’s past and future. This symbolism is embodied in the vuvuzela, the cheering trumpet. Riding on the success of Ghana is also the story of how the 2010 World Cup has thus far proved wrong most of its critics, detractors, pessimists and doubting Thomases. The vuvuzela, much like Ghana’s Black Stars, has beaten odds to become more than a cheering instrument. It has now attained the status of an African metaphor for the unacknowledged ways in which Africa determines particular discourses at the global level. There are three narratives intertwined here. First, Ghana is carrying the hopes of the continent, and the larger Pan-African world. Second, this tournament has been remarkable for the bigger presence of players of African descent in many of the teams, especially those from Europe and Latin America. Third, the phenomenon that has become the vuvuzela takes on a significance that elevates the symbolization of Ghana’s performance thus far, as well as the widespread presence of African influence in the ancestry of the players on the field.

That it has been left up to Ghana at this point to carry forward the hopes of the African continent may look inconsequential in casual circumstances. But to a serious student of Pan-Africanism and of Africa’s place in the world, it is more than a coincidence. Ghana is the de facto center of 21^st century Pan-Africanist ideals, and it is unfortunate that this knowledge remains unexplored amongst the majority of ordinary Africans. This is due to the failure of Africa’s political leadership, as well as the disconnect between Africa’s intellectual elite and the African wanainchi. As I have argued elsewhere, these problems are not unsolvable. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has pointed out that there is a gap between the knowledge that African scholars produce in the academy, and the knowledge that makes up the school curriculum in many African countries (Zeleza, 1997). Even in Ghana itself, where the awareness of the country’ central place in 21^st century Pan-Africanist throught exists amongst political thought leaders and intellectuals, the political discourse still poses challenges. A recent article by Sharon Hemans in the April-June issue of the BBC’s Focus on Africa magazine laments how very few Ghanaians visit the resting place of the 20^th century father of Pan-Africanism, W.E.B. DuBois. When I visited the DuBois Memorial Center for Pan-African Culture in Accra in November 2009, I found only the staff who manage the place, on a Saturday afternoon. It was not much different when earlier in the day I visited the uniquely designed and aesthetically inspiring Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum, also in Accra.

My hosts, themselves Pan-Africanist thinkers, enlightened me about the difficulties surrounding perceptions of the relevance of Pan-Africanist ideas in Ghana today. I know these difficulties to exist in my own country of Malawi, and in the rest of Africa. As I have written elsewhere, and as is widely known in African scholarship, Sub-Saharan Africa owes its legacy of independence to the pioneering role played by Ghana’s first president, the Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah took a personal interest in supporting Malawi’s own independence, in his prescient conviction, 60 years ahead of his time, that the independence of Ghana was meaningless, unless it was tied to the independence of the rest of Africa. It is a lesson that ought to resonate with those African countries today that are undergoing an economic renaissance: the economic progress of Malawi, Botswana, South Africa, etc, is meaningless unless it is tied to the economic progress of the rest of the continent. The disconnect that divides African intellectuals, political leaders, and the wanainchi makes it very difficult for ordinary Africans to understand the significance of this exhortation. The acrimony and bitter negativity that greets the idea of a United States of Africa (notwithstanding the uninspired unoriginality of the term) amongst ordinary Africans is testimony to this difficulty.

Yet tied to the role that Ghana is playing in this tournament is the remarkable widespread presence of players of African descent in many teams, especially European and Latin American. Paul Tiyambe Zeleza has called this the “globalization of African football and the Africanization of global football” (The Zeleza Post, June 12^th, 2010). For Zeleza, “the African presence in world football has actually been astonishing.” He remarks on the number of players of African descent in teams from North America and Latin America, Europe and Western Asia. Zeleza observes that the Saudi Arabian team at the last World Cup tournament in 2006 was “predominantly black.” He points out how Latin America is “home to Africa's largest diaspora,” and that both “Western Europe and Western Asia [are] also homes to millions of people of African descent.” Many of these teams, especially the United States, England, Brazil and France have several players of African descent. In particular, Brazil has the largest population of people of African descent outside the continent of Africa. And the complexion of its national team reflects this.

Writing for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s World Cup blog on June 16^th, the South Africa-based analyst of African football Mark Gleeson listed Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Portugal, Switzerland and the United States as European and North American teams with “sons of African soil in their ranks.” Gleeson attributed this to the “global village and modern migratory patterns,” adding that “most major European sides [now] represent much more their immigrant communities than they do old national stereotypes.” Particularly fascinating was Gleeson’s comment on what was going to be a historical first for two brothers to face each other in a World Cup tournament playing for opposing sides. That happened on Wednesday June 23^rd when Kevin Prince Boateng of Ghana played against his blood brother Jerome Boateng of Germany. A comment on Gleeson’s story insisted that these players were not African at all, as their cultural mindset and upbringing were European and had nothing in common with Africa. Were it that easy to dismiss the concept of diaspora consciousness and the search for one’s roots and identity! In the England team that crashed 1-4 to Germany in the second round, no less than seven of the players featured were black, three of them coming in as substitutes. For France the presence of players of African descent has been even more visible going back to the last two World Cups.

It is this phenomenon then that gives us the metaphor of the vuvuzelization of world football. The vuvuzela’s adoption by football fans from various teams participating in the World Cup has been fascinating. Trevor Ncube, publisher of South Africa’s weekly newspaper Mail & Guardian tweeted on June 20^th about how even at matches involving non-African teams, the vuvuzela could still be heard above the din. Fans from Europe, Asia, Oceania and Latin America have also taken to the vuvuzela. And the utility of the instrument has now gone beyond the football stands. According to an article posted on the website African Aristocrat on June 25th, Taiwan’s opposition party, the Democratic Progressive Party, had ordered 200 vuvuzelas for a protest rally against a trade pact between Taiwan and mainland China. The article went on to report that a trade union in Poland, Solidarity, was also considering purchasing vuvuzelas, also for use at protest rallies.

Writing in the Mail & Guardian Online’s Thought Leader blog on June 24^th, Sarah Britten quoted Peter Aspden of The Financial Times as describing the vuvuzela thus: “It is a joyous, life-affirming sound, of a nation entranced in pride and celebration, and expressing it through its own culture.” The word “vuvuzela” sounds very much an African word, but there has reportedly been a dispute as to its invention. Several web sources attribute the invention of the vuvuzela to an Afrikaner businessman, Neil Van Schalkwyk, co-owner of the Masincedane Sport Company, said to own the trademark for the instrument. The BBC reported in January that a black South African religious congregation, the Shembe Church, threatened to take FIFA to court over the use of the vuvuzela. The church claimed that the vuvuzela was invented by the church’s founder, Isaiah Shembe, in the early 1900s. To this day, the church conducts an annual ceremony retracing the footsteps of Isaiah Shembe, to the sound of the vuvuzela. The South African newspaper The Sowetan reported on June 22^nd that Neil Van Schalkwyk and the Shembe Church had reached a settlement in which the Masincedane Sport Company had acknowledged that the church were indeed the original inventors of the vuvuzela.

The instrument is also known to have irked quite a few people. European coaches appealed to FIFA to ban the instrument, saying it was disrupting coach-player communication on the field. The British newspaper Daily Mail Online reported about one woman said to have torn a part of her windpipe after blowing on the instrument too hard. A US Army civilian employee in Germany is said to have been driven nuts by the trumpet, and to have threatened a vuvuzela-blowing neighbor with an axe. Such is the intrigue of the vuvuzela that it has created its own narrative alongside that of the 2010 World Cup. The vuvuzela has secured for itself an important legacy at this year’s tournament, Africa’s World Cup, creating a following of its own, according to Ndesanjo Macha of Global Voices Online. Now to return to the issue of randomness and unpredictability as to who gets to win and who gets to lose in any given FIFA World Cup tournament.

Commenting on developments at an ongoing event like the World Cup tournament is like aiming at a moving target. The failure of the majority of African teams to progress beyond the preliminary round has caused much anguish to supporters and sympathizers of African football. The various explanations that have been offered carry elements of accuracy, but there’s also the inevitability of chance that is always present in football. Much of this chance is inexplicable even by FIFA rankings, and by recent World Cup triumph history. For example, the two teams which competed as finalists at the last World Cup, in 2006, Italy and France, exited the 2010 tournament in the first round. How does one explain this, especially for Italy who were the reining world champions going into the tournament?

And watching the African teams play, one is hard placed to see distinct differences between them and their European, Latin American, Oceania and Asian counterparts. Ivory Coast held Portugal to a 0-0 draw, and lost very narrowly to Brazil. South Africa drew against Mexico 1-1 in the opening game, and beat France in their last group match (albeit arguments that the French team had been dispirited by internal squabbles). Nigeria, Cameroun and Algeria all held their own against high ranked European, Asian and Latin American teams. There’s a randomness, an unpredictability to the final result in many of these games not easily explained by FIFA rankings and recent success among the traditional favourites. It’s only when one throws into the equation the tactical and bureaucratic mistakes made by countries such as Nigeria and Ivory Coast, that the odds add up and militate against the African representatives. This is what has to be taken into consideration and added to the soul searching about what exactly happened to the African teams at South Africa 2010. Aren’t Italy, France, England and many other teams also doing the same soul searching?

Another point worth considering is what I discussed back in 2006, about the imbalance in the number of representatives per region, and how that imbalance skewers the probability of succeeding or failing in World Cup tournaments. The continent of Europe has 51 national football associations, and this year has had 13 World Cup finals slots (15 in 2002, 14 in 2006). Africa has 52 member associations, and this year has had 6 slots, with the sixth, South Africa, being included only because they are the hosts. The Latin American continents, combining North and South America and the Caribbean have a combined total of 50 associations, and this year they have had a combined total of 8 World Cup places. With these kinds of numbers and unequal representation, is it much wonder who gets eliminated early in the process, and who proceeds to the final rounds, as has always been the tradition?

For now, the action continues for another two weeks. Histories have been made. Critics, detractors and perpetual pessimists have been proven wrong. There are legacies that will shape the coming decades, on and off the football field. Long after the 2010 World Cup tournament has ended, the sound of thousands of vuvuzelas blowing across the South African veld will remain an indelible, identifiable symbol of this historic moment. Ghana’s possible success in the coming match will be pregnant with even more significance, but the greater meaning of what the Black Stars have already achieved will have resonance beyond footballing circles. This meaning will reinforce the historical legacy that Ghana has already given the Pan-African world, connecting an emancipatory past with the aspirations of a different African future both on the continent and in the diaspora. The sound of the vuvuzela will for a long time to come be the soundtrack for the 2010 World Cup anthem, performed by Shakira, and emblazoned in the words “This time for Africa.”

Powering a Development Idea: OVOP Prospects in a Malawian Village

 

Until Thandika Mkandawire commented on the launching of the One Village One Product (OVOP) concept on the Malawi Internet listserv Nyasanet in November 2003, I hadn’t heard much about the idea.  So when I heard that a team from the OVOP Secretariat in Malawi’s capital city Lilongwe would be visiting my village in Bwanje, Ntcheu district, on Monday May 31^st 2010, I decided to go and see for myself. I was told that the Member of Parliament for the area, Hon. Stevin Stafford Kamwendo (Ntcheu Bwanje North), was also going to be present. The meeting was supposed to start at 11am, but the OVOP team didn’t arrive at the Bwanje Primary School venue until after 2pm. Hon. Kamwendo was supposed to be in parliament back in Lilongwe by 2pm that same day, so when he didn’t show up with the OVOP team, we assumed the delay had made it impossible for him to make the trip.

Members of the Bwanje Agroprocessing Cooperative, who had submitted to the OVOP Secretariat a proposal for a tomato sauce processing plant, told their chairperson to make sure to let the OVOP team know about their displeasure at being kept waiting for more than three hours. When they arrived, the OVOP team explained that Lilongwe was once again experiencing diesel shortages, and it had taken them all morning to find diesel for their vehicle. Their team leader, whose name I wasn’t able to catch, apologized for keeping the people waiting for so long.

The OVOP team’s visit gave me an opportunity to experience an on-the-ground episode in the giant industry that development discourse has become for academics and social justice activists both in the global North and in the global South. In enabled me to not only watch at close quarters but also be a participant on the receiving end of the cyclical process of villagers’ aspirations for development, and a government bureaucracy making key decisions about whether a village will get development, or be denied. And quite serendipitously too, just two days earlier I had seen the United Nations Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, address the Malawi Parliament in its glitzy new building, accompanied by his special adviser on the Millennium Development Goals, Jeffrey Sachs.

I had expected the OVOP meeting to be a preliminary stage serving the purpose of informing the Bwanje group what the proposal process looked like, what was expected on their part, and the kind of support the OVOP office was going to provide to help the group navigate that process. What I saw was a government procedure that involved quizzing villagers on their market research skills and capacity (or lack thereof) to understand local economics. I also got a glimpse into the potential mass frustration that might likely arise out of the absence of infra-structural investments needed to infuse a tinge of hope into the aspirations of villagers looking up to a government that has promised a new way of doing development. (See more pictures here) But I also saw villagers determined to take charge of their development aspirations, armed with the knowledge of how much tomato their area produces, most of which is sold at very low prices in the high season, and a lot of which also goes to waste due to the perishable nature of the crop. 

The Bwanje Valley area boasts the Lake Shore Road, a Kamuzu-era asphalt route that connects the eastern parts of Ntcheu and Dedza districts, to Salima district and the northern region, along Lake Malawi. But from Bwanje Trading Centre, the nearest source of ESCOM’s electricity is 30 kilometres each away to the south and to the north. On the southern end, the electric grid stops at the magnificent Nachitheme Secondary School, built when Sam Mpasu was the Member of Parliament for Ntcheu Bwanje South. On the northern end, the grid stops at Golomoti, on the border with Dedza district.

I will soon return to the issue of electricity supply and the massive challenges it is causing the entire development agenda that Malawi’s President Dr. Bingu wa Mutharika has set for the country. For now, let me offer a description of how the OVOP meeting at Bwanje Primary School went. I want to explore, in the background, three related issues. First is the nature of the interaction between government officials responsible for important decisions about development, and local area people whose expectations may or may not always match those of the government’s bureaucratic machine. Second is the important question surrounding the promising potential of an initiative such as OVOP, and how much support government officials entrusted with the responsibility of facilitating development offer village communities interested in developing preliminary proposals. Toward the conclusion, I will look at what development initiatives such as these entail in the context of the enormous problems of electricity supply that Malawians stoically live with on a daily basis. In particular, I want to ask how much thought the Malawi presidency has given to the possibility of alternative energy, especially wind and solar power.

Back to the Bwanje Primary School OVOP meeting, the chairperson of the Bwanje Agroprocessing Cooperative, a Mr. Chajula, had prepared a programme for the day. It included speeches from chiefs and area political representatives. The lead person on the OVOP team of three, calling himself an “adviser”, had a different idea. “How about we start with what we came for, and then we can do the formalities later?” (The leader of team introduced himself and his two colleagues, but I wasn’t able to hear any of the names. When I asked at the end of the meeting if they had business cards, they had none.)

The team went straight into business. The leader of the team said they had brought with them a questionnaire, which they would use to assess the suitability of the cooperative’s proposal, and their readiness for the project. The first question was about the product the cooperative was proposing to produce. A woman spoke first and listed three items: tomato sauce, bwemba (tamarind) fruit juice, and baobab fruit juice. The leader asked for just one item, and the woman said bwemba fruit juice. Several hands went up, asking to correct her. Consensus established, it turned out to be tomato sauce. The OVOP team leader said the rest of the questions would come from his colleague, who had the questionnaire. In actual practice however, he repeatedly stepped in and led the proceedings. The questions were mainly aimed at establishing the level of advance preparedness the cooperative had engaged in. There were questions on what kind of market research had been carried out to identify the market for the product, and its size.  What were the average quantities of tomato produced throughout the year, per person in the cooperative? What assets did the cooperative have? How much money did they have in their bank account? How frequently did they use their bank account? How had they raised the startup funds? What other business transactions had they engaged in? Which other companies also producing tomato sauce had they identified as potential competitors? Did the area have electricity? What sources of energy would the plant run on? And many other such questions.

By the third or fourth question from the questionnaire, the conversation took on a rather hard tone, from the OVOP team leader. More than soliciting information on the level of preparedness, the cooperative was also being overtly challenged and not so subtly told they had no idea what was involved in researching the feasibility of a tomato sauce processing business. The lead person challenged the cooperative’s claim to being a “cooperative.” “What process did you go through to establish yourself as a cooperative? Did you obtain the necessary government approval? You don’t just decide to call yourself a cooperative. You have to apply for a government licence, and the government must provide it, before you can start using the term. You are not a cooperative.”

The OVOP team was requested, at least twice, to use Chichewa equivalents for terms such as “assets”, “shares,” and other words which were presented in English. Apparently aware that he may have been sounding rather harsh, the lead person said he needed to ask tough questions in order not to flatter the applicants about the real work involved in doing this kind of business. He would rather tell them the trust, than lie to them only for them to be shocked later when their proposal didn’t go through.

When the team finished with the questionnaire, the OVOP team leader said it was now time for the Bwanje group to ask questions. The chairperson of the “cooperative” signaled to continue on with the formalities they had earlier suspended, suggesting the order and hierarchies in which the chiefs and local representatives would speak. The OVOP team leader stepped in and said it was important for the group to be given a chance to ask questions. The formalities could be done on a later day. In their questions, the group wanted to know what they should do with the issue of a “cooperative.” They were told to go to the relevant offices, and fill out the proper paper work, asking to be registered. The group also wanted to know how much money they needed in their bank account in order to make their proposal more realistic. The team leader told the group how much a tomato sauce processing plant cost, around MK2 million (approximately US$13,333), and said they could attempt to raise a good fraction of that amount. Without a reasonable amount of capital, the group would not be able to make it into the top ten. OVOP had received a total of 139 proposals, and they would be paying closer attention to the top ten finalists.

The group asked if there was an OVOP business that had started off and succeeded, that they could use as a model. The team leader mentioned Bwanje Valle Rice Processing Group, which was in the same Bwanje valley area, and was using the name “Bwanje” in their designation (I later learned that the business is actually located at Mtakataka, in the next district of Dedza, and uses the name “Bwanje” because the valley straddles both Dedza and Ntcheu districts). We learned from the team leader that the rice processing business was now selling its rice in the major trading centres of Malawi, and was already depositing no less than MK200, 000 (approx. US$1,333) per month as repayments for the MK1 million loan they were given to purchase the plant. They had also participated at the recent 22^nd Malawi International Trade Fair in Blantyre.

Asked what support the OVOP office was able to provide to aspiring OVOP businesses, the team leader excitedly explained that they were capable of supporting a business from its early stages. “We can provide experts who know the business well and can offer advice right from the start. We look around the world for experts. Government has given us that authority. We will go to Japan, India, wherever, to find an expert to come and guide you in your operations, at no cost to you.” He went on to say OVOP buys the plant requested in a proposal, constructs the building, and does all the consultation necessary to make the business viable. OVOP also funds the process of connecting the plant to the electric grid, as long as the cost does not go beyond MK1,500,000 (Approx. US$10,000).

After all the questions had been exhausted, the chairperson attempted one more time to have the chiefs speak, in their hierarchical order. The OVOP team leader announced they had to leave. They were supposed to have started out at Mtakataka, Dedza, where another OVOP proposal had been prepared, but they had been told at the last minute that the venue had been changed. The people there were still waiting for the team. In business, said the team leader, “time is money.” There was no request to put that into Chichewa.

The Bwanje group’s chairperson said the group had prepared lunch for the visitors, and asked if the team could spare a few minutes and eat before proceeding. The team leader insisted they had to leave, much as they were indeed hungry, and hadn’t had lunch. “This is how we operate. We do not like to keep people waiting, and we skip meals if we have to.”

As the team was leaving, I ran after the team leader and asked him when the Bwanje group should expect to hear the verdict on their proposal. And in the meantime, were there things they could do to improve their chances? He responded by saying all the proposals would be analyzed and evaluated sometime between June and August, and that the group could expect to hear back from OVOP by the end of August or early September. As to what they could be doing in the meantime, they might want to continue raising funds and reducing the gap between the cost of the processing plant and the group’s own capital. That would make it more probable for the group to repay the loan, should they be awarded an OVOP grant.

After the team had left, I was curious to hear the impressions of the Bwanje group. The chairperson was fearful that members of the group might feel discouraged by the tone of the OVOP team leader. By all accounts, the leader had not hidden his perception that the Bwanje group was totally unprepared, and had not done the necessary background research. “Did they really expect village people like us to know how to conduct market research?” Asked one of the members.  The chairperson said he had been reassured by the official from the Ministry of Trade and Industry that the tough questioning from the team leader should not discourage them. There were other things that went into consideration, beyond the questionnaire.

I have no idea what other considerations will go into the decision whether to award the Bwanje group an OVOP business grant or not, but whatever happens will in large part also entail what a determined Member of Parliament can achieve or fail to achieve. The issue of electricity is likely to feature prominently into the decision making process. One reason for this will be because a processing plant like the one being proposed will not be able to work without electricity. But more importantly, the issue of electricity supply, as my father said after the Bwanje meeting, hovers ominously above the entire question of development in Malawi.

That the Bwanje Valley Rice Processing project in Dedza has taken off as a huge success is due to the fact of the electric grid being nearby, a luxury that the Ntcheu part of Bwanje valley can only dream of. During the campaign period for the May 19 elections in 2009, President Bingu wa Mutharika visited an area some 20 kilometres north of Bwanje, my father told me. The president is said to have directed that the area be connected to the electric grid. It has been more than one year since the president’s visit, but there’s no electricity anywhere near the area. On hearing the president’s directive, the local Catholic parish, Sharpevale, sold all its maize reserves and realized MK800,000 (approx. US$5,333). They used the money to purchase a maize mill that requires electricity to run, hopeful that the president’s directive would be followed up on.

Sharpevale boasts a beautifully designed and magnificently imposing day secondary school, one of several constructed in the last few years by a World Bank project. As impressive as it is, there is no electricity at the school. Thirty kilometers south of Sharpevale is Bilira Day Secondary School, one of the oldest in the district. It too has no electricity. There are health clinics, post offices, private secondary schools and government primary schools, NGOs, and several other institutions operating in the Bwanje Valley area in Ntcheu, and there is no electricity in the entire area. Ironically, huge power towers and cables run across the area, carrying electricity to other parts of the country, except for the Ntcheu part of Bwanje Valley.

Meanwhile, the OVOP initiative is blossoming across the country, with support from the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). It operates under the moto  “Towards Economic Empowerment of People”, and spells out its vision as “An empowered community generating wealth.” Officially launched in 2003 in the waning years of Dr. Bakili Muluzi’s presidency, after adapting the idea from Oita, Japan, the initiative has recently moved from the Ministry of Local Government & Rural Development to Trade and Industry. According to a newsletter and a flyer, the initiative had 30 projects as of March 2009.  By the end of 2009, the OVOP Secretariat had visited 60 projects, as I learned from the Bwanje visit by the OVOP team. An Antenna shop in Area 3 of the Capital City, Lilongwe, sales OVOP items from processed foods to cane furniture, to banana wine, cooking oil and gem stones, among dozens of other items. Some products are also being exported overseas, I was told by Mr. Lazarus Macheso, a shop assistant at the Antenna Shop. As of March 2009, delegations from Senegal and Rwanda had visited OVOP projects in Malawi, to learn from Malawi’s success, according to the June 2009 OVOP News, the initiative’s newsletter. And judging from explanations and descriptions offered by the OVOP team that visited Bwanje, the staff are highly trained and suitably knowledgeable about rural economics and development.

As I continue learning more about OVOP in Malawi, there are two aspects I will be interested in following closely. The first one will be the issue of development ideas whose implementation requires electricity. Perceptions around the problem of electricity supply in Malawi run the gamut from hopelessness to intractability, making one wonder whether it is not time to shift the paradigm into what is now being called green or alternative energy, ie, wind and solar power. After 46 years of independence and attempts at eletrification, how many more decades do we need to prove that the hydroelectric power experiment has ran its course? Given how President wa Mutharika has taken on some of Malawi’s most intractable problems, does the problem of energy, and the prospects of wind and solar power, register on his development agenda?

The second aspect I want to closely follow is that of ongoing experiments and attempts at finding the best approaches to economic development in the global South. Thus far the OVOP idea seems to stand out solely due to one factor. Save for the source of funds, and the Japanese origin of the idea, the initiative comes from the people themselves, who know best what local resources are available in their area. The term “local ownership” has lately become cliché, even where ownership is glaringly not local. How different is what I saw at Bwanje on May 31^st? Is OVOP an initiative other development projects can learn from?

What Would Gandhi Do? Zimbabwe, Neo-imperialism and the Lessons of Nonviolence

The theme for this year’s Peace and Justice Studies Association (PJSA) annual conference, held from October 8 to 10 at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, could not have been more apropos. Phrased as “The Power of Nonviolence,” it compelled me to think about the ways in which Nonviolence theory and praxis could be brought to bear in the search for solutions to one of Africa’s most intractable puzzles, the case of Zimbabwe. No sooner had the conference ended and we had all returned to our respective bases than Zimbabwe shot up onto the world headlines once again. The Tsvangirai faction of the Movement for Democratic Change’s (MDC-T)) Agriculture Deputy Minister-designate Roy Bennett was indicted and remanded to jail on Wednesday October 14, to await his trial on charges believed by many to be politically motivated. He is being tried on charges of “possessing weapons for the purposes of insurgency and banditry,” according to the Zimbabwe Times. High Court Justice Charles Hungwe restored Bennett's bail two days later, on the same day that Prime Minister and MDC-T president Morgan Tsvangirai announced that the MDC-T was disengaging from the Government of National Unity. 

The Last Straw

News reports described the Roy Bennett issue as the last straw that broke the GNU’s back, despite Tsvangirai’s clarification that the disengagement was not a direct result of the Bennett trial. The Zimbabwe Times quoted Tsvangirai as telling reporters: “Let me emphasise this . . . this decision has not been made because of Bennett as some might want think. This has purely nothing to do with Bennett but with the collapse of trust in our Zanu PF partners in government.” Rumors that the MDC-T were contemplating pulling out of the Government of National Unity predated the events of this past week. The Financial Gazette titled its Friday October 2 comment “No to MDC Pull Out”, and urged the MDC-T to explore other ways of resolving the problems dogging the GNU, other than withdrawing from the eight-month marriage of convenience.

The statement from Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai announcing the “disengagement” offered the context for the decision as the culmination of “outstanding, non-compliance and toxic issues” that continued “to impede the transitional government”, eight months after it was implemented. “Despite countless meetings among the Principals, despite countless press conferences, despite numerous correspondence and trips to SADC and SADC leaders and despite a SADC summit, the above issues remain outstanding,” said the statement issued on Friday, October 16. It laid out a litany of breaches, intransigence and recalcitrance from the ZANU-PF side: provincial governors had still not been appointed; the appointments of Governor of the Reserve Bank and the Attorney General had not yet been rescinded, despite their illegality; the deputy minister of Agriculture had not yet been sworn in; and the Global Political Agreement had not yet been reviewed, way past the 6-month point as was the agreement.

Tsvangirai went on to point out how ZANU-PF had failed to enact a paradigm shift to reflect the spirit of the Global Political Agreement (GPA), abusing and disrespecting it. More ominously, he cited “the extensive militarization of the countryside through massive deployment of the military and the setting up of bases of violence that we saw after the 29th of March 2008.” ZANU-PF had imposed more than 16,000 youth functionaries onto government payroll, who had been imposed on the government payroll, and there was continuation of “selective and unequal application of the rule of law”. ZANU-PF’s mouthpieces, The Herald newspaper and the Zimbabwe Broadcasting Corporation “continue to treat the MDC and our leaders in government as if they were a third-rate treasonous and sell-out element instead of a genuine and equal partner in the transitional government.”

In what was probably a painful acknowledgement of what many had already known about the marriage of convenience, Tsvangirai turned the scathing critique inward:

“On our part, we have papered over the cracks and have sought to persuade the whole world in the last eight months that everything is working.  We have sought to persuade our constituencies that the transitional government was on course and was the only business in town. In the process, we have put at stake the reputation, credibility and trust of our movement and to ourselves as leaders. We have done everything in order to make this government work and we have done so purely for one reason, the need to restore hope and dignity to our people; the need to give our people a new start and a new beginning.”

Tsvangirai’s tone was very assertive, emphasizing how it was the MDC that was supposed to be the dominant partner in the inclusive government: “The truth of the matter is that it is our Movement that won the election of 29 March 2008. It is our Movement that has the mandate of the people to govern this country. It is our Movement that has strategically compromised on that mandate by executing the GPA and by entering into the transitional government.  It is our Movement upon which the hope and future of millions of Zimbabweans is deposited.”

In September this year the MDC started consulting its membership and support base about the idea of whether to hang in there and try to work things out. On the MDC’s website, a poll started on September 24 asked if the party should abandon the inclusive government. As of October 17, 54.5 percent of 393 respondents advised against pulling out, over 45.5 percent who voted yes. According to the Mail and Guardian of South Africa, Tsvangirai asked for an emergency meeting with Mugabe following the indictment and jailing of Bennett on Wednesday. Mugabe is said to have refused. Tsvangirai in turn refused to convene a scheduled cabinet meeting. The Sunday Times of October 18 described rumors about a meeting between President Robert Mugabe and Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai hours after Tsvangirai’s announcement on Friday, in addition to earlier rumors that Mugabe had been frantically attempting to meet Tsvangirai. Following the decision to disengage from the inclusive government, the MDC-T ordered all its cabinet ministers to pack up and leave their government offices and operate from their party’s headquarters, according to the Zimbabwe Times.

For many, it was just a matter of time before this unraveling was to get underway. For others, it is a disturbing trend of events for an arrangement that, however inconvenient and undesirable, had began to bear tangible fruit on the ground inasfar as the living conditions of ordinary Zimbabweans. The Zimbabwe crisis has not suffered a shortage of detailed, impassioned proposals and suggestions for how to resolve it. These have ranged from military options, from both inside agitation and outside Zimbabwe, to political settlements, such as the inclusive government, insisted upon by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), which both ZANU –PF and the two MDC factions ended up agreeing upon. The monumental events of this past week are likely to unfurl that process all over again. Tsvangirai said it was now time to “assert and take our position as the dominant party in Zimbabwe,” even as the MDC-T were ceasing all collaboration with the ZANU-PF. It remains to be seen how this assumption of the MDC’s rightful place in government is going to be implemented.

Among the many proposals offered as potential ways of ending the Zimbabwe impasse, there has not been much said about nonviolent action. With the exception of a special report published in 2003 by the Washington DC-based United States Institute for Peace (USIP), none of the major think tanks and interested third parties have ever mentioned, or let alone paid attention to the issue of nonviolence as a plan of action capable of being a viable solution to the Zimbabwe crisis. This is at once curious and yet not surprising. Curious because not only has nonviolent action been successfully used in difficult contexts of political repression around the world, it has actually been adopted as a strategy by a number of groups in Zimbabwe, including the MDC itself, in its first six years. But it is also not surprising because despite the success nonviolent resistance has registered in a number of cases of repression around the world, it has not been as celebrated as military campaigns have, and continue to be. With the exception of Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent movement in the first half of the century, first in South Africa and later in India, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Civil Rights Movement in the United States of the 50s and 60s, methods of resistance to political repression that rely on means other than violence receive less attention in the mainstream media.

The 2003 special report issued by the United States Institute for Peace was titled “Zimbabwe and the Prospects for Nonviolent Political Change.” The report was commissioned by USIP’s Research and Studies Program, and was written by three scholar-analysts who were living and working in Zimbabwe at the time. Their names were not provided, for reasons of their personal safety. With the term “Nonviolent Political Change” prominently gracing the title, the report offered a detailed description of events in 2003, most notably the strategies that the MDC and its partners had undertaken to pressurize Mugabe’s ZANU-PF into democratic reforms. The report stated that when civil society groups began to emerge in the 1990s, their main tactic was to use strategies of nonviolence to bring about change in Zimbabwe. Most of these strategies took the form of mass stay-aways, which paralyzed economic activity in some of Zimbabwe’s major cities. Beyond these mass stay-aways, however, it was not clear how these civil society coalitions and the MDC approached the concept of nonviolence in both its theoretical and strategic considerations. The report offered no definitions of what it termed ‘nonviolence’, nor did it cite any particular Zimbabwean proponents of nonviolence spelling out what specific approaches they would use, other than mass stay-aways.

Violence and Nonviolence in Zimbabwe

The most compelling evidence that there were Zimbabweans who espoused nonviolence as both principle and strategy appeared in an article written by Senator David Coltart and published on the news site NewZimbabwe.com in September 2006. The article was picked up by The New African in their May 2007 issue, which had a 17-page supplement dedicated to presenting various sides to the Zimbabwe story. The sponsored supplement of the May 2007 issue of the New African dedicated six articles to the issue of violence in Zimbabwe, two of them written by two members of the MDC affected by the violence from within their own ranks.

David Coltart is an MDC-M member of parliament from the Mutambara faction who has since become Zimbabwe’s Minister of Education, Sports and Culture. Citing both Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Coltart wrote that the best way to deal with Mugabe’s authoritarianism was through nonviolent techniques. He traced his personal commitment to nonviolence to two brutal wars he had experienced. First was the war for independence, and second was the Gukurahundi, the massacre of Ndebeles in what Mugabe called a war against rebels, in the mid-1980s. “These experiences made me vow that I would do all in my power to prevent further conflict in Zimbabwe,” he wrote. Coltart pointed out that violence was endemic to Zimbabwean society, going back to the wars of the 19th century.

"Violence was used by Lobengula to suppress the Shona. Violence was used to colonise and the threat of violence was used to maintain white minority rule. Violence was used to overthrow the white minority. And since independence, violence as been used to crush legitimate political opposition."

Coltart added that a culture of impunity had taken hold, in which violence was used to achieve political ends, and the perpetrators were thriving on those victories won through violence. “As a result, violence is now deeply embedded in our national psyche. Political violence is accepted as the norm.” The MDC was different from other Zimbabwean political parties because of its commitment to ending political violence and promoting nonviolence as a principle, wrote Coltart. MDC members had at various times debated as to whether the brutality of Mugabe’s government could be encountered through nonviolence, however the MDC always maintained a “broad consensus that this was the only course open to us if we were to act in the long national interest.”

Coltart was anguished by the violence that was being perpetrated by members of the MDC, a development he argued was undermining the entire nonviolent strategy. On September 28, 2004, MDC youths were said to have attempted to murder Peter Guhu, MDC Director of Security. While this incident shocked Coltart, he was even more disturbed to learn that senior MDC officials were part of the attempted murder plot. An inquiry was carried out, but no action was taken against the members who had plotted the attempted murder. More violence was to follow in May 2005, when the same MDC youth were sent to assault other MDC members. In July 2006 MDC youth from Tsvangirai’s faction seriously injured a member of Mutambara’s MDC faction, Trudy Stevenson, stoning her in the head and breaking her arm. They also damaged the car Stevenson and other party members were traveling in. Other cases of political violence perpetrated by the MDC involved petrol bombings of police officers, some of whom incurred severe burn injuries.

Coltart wrote that if the MDC were to transform Zimbabwe into a better place, “we simply have to break this cycle of violence. We will find that if we do not stamp out violence in our ranks now, it will come back to haunt us.” The reason why ZANU-PF’s political violence had reached the proportions it had was because of the century-old trend, repeating itself and no one seemed to have learned the lesson that violence begets more violence. Coltart said that violence played right into the hands of ZANU-PF, whose sole purpose had been not only to intimidate but also to “provoke the opposition into a physical fight. The regime desperately needs a pretext to use all the power at its disposal.” Whatever mass-action the MDC and its partners were to plan needed to be “carefully organized by people who have a deep-rooted commitment to and understanding of nonviolent techniques,” he wrote. 

The MDC are not the only group espousing nonviolent techniques in Zimbabwe. The women’s group Women of Zimbabwe Arise (WOZA) state in their mission statement that their goals are “based on the principles of strategic nonviolence.” When the group organized a protest to commemorate this year’s International Day of Peace on September 21 in Bulawayo, they were brutally attacked and dispersed by the police. Some onlookers threatened the police with physical violence in retaliation, but the group’s leaders stepped in and asserted the group’s nonviolent approach: “we are non-violent activists and any history should write that the people who disturbed the peace with violence were Zimbabwe Republic Police officers, not peaceful human rights defenders.”

Given the history of Zimbabwe and the role violence has played for more than a century, the idea of nonviolence would not be an easy one. One interesting irony is that even Robert Mugabe himself once read Mahatma Gandhi, and for a while contemplated nonviolent resistance, according to Mugabe biographer Heidi Holland (2008) in her book Dinner with Mugabe. The belief that Zimbabwe’s freedom could only be won through armed struggle was pervasive, probably given the brutality of the racist regime of Ian Smith. Speaking to Bill Sutherland and Matt Meyer in a 1992 interview for their book on Pan-Africanist peace perspectives, then Minister of Foreign Affairs Nathan Shamuyayira said the question of nonviolence as a tactic for Zimbabwe’s independence struggle was out of the question. Many felt that the victories Gandhi had achieved for India and Martin Luther King Jr. for civil rights in the United States could not be used as examples for Zimbabwe, whose context was far different. But according to Coltart, the MDC did view nonviolence as a viable response to ZANU-PF’s violence, even when members of the MDC did not always adhere to nonviolent principles.

That Senator David Coltart became the new Minister of Education, Sport and Culture in February 2009 was a particularly promising sign in light of the expectation for a new curriculum and a reformed educational system. Nonviolence education requires an intellectual framework to guide practical training and discipline, under a broader Peace Education curriculum and pedagogy. Several African countries have embarked on the incorporation of Human Rights Education into their school systems, through the efforts of educational Non-Governmental Organizations. Perhaps the most significant breakthrough came in September when seven African Ministers of Education met in Mombasa, Kenya, to discuss the incorporation of Peace Education into their school systems. While seven countries were able to attend the conference, the original invitation went to twelve countries, under the auspices of the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA). The twelve countries were Angola, Cote D’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Kenya (Host), Madagascar, Mozambique, Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, South Africa, Sudan, and Uganda. Zimbabwe was curiously not on the list, although the conference was open to any interested country on the African continent. Handled carefully and properly, the introduction of Peace Education into the school systems of African countries could be the one deciding factor that might transform the educational landscape and make the school system responsive and relevant to actual African contexts.

Incorporating Peace and Nonviolence Education into the school systems of Zimbabwe and other African countries, not to say the rest of the world, is a long-term project requiring meticulous planning, consultation and deliberation. But Zimbabweans are looking for solutions for the immediate crisis also. Long term planning need not wait for immediate solutions first, nor can immediate solutions be considered a substitute for long term planning. If the nonviolence approach adopted by the MDC, WOZA and other Zimbabwean groups is going to bear fruit, there will be an urgent need to pay serious attention to lessons from other contexts where nonviolence had been attempted, learning from both the successes and failures.

Gandhi Today

Although not a mainstream ideology, nonviolent theory and practice are not new in Africa. As Desmond Tutu writes in the preface to Guns and Gandhi in Africa: Pan African Insights on Nonviolence, Armed Struggle and Liberation in Africa (Sutherland & Meyer, 2002), it was in South that Mahatma Gandhi developed his concept of Satyagraha, variously understood as a soul force that seeks truth through nonviolent action. Nonviolent action has therefore been a part of the strategies that South Africans have used to end apartheid since the late 19th century. In his autobiography titled Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah (1958) discussed how Gandhi’s concept of nonviolence influenced the strategies that Ghanaians used to win their independence in 1957 as the first country in Sub-Saharan Africa to do so. Uniquely called Positive Action, Nkrumah trained members of his party in nonviolent techniques, and won Ghana’s independence without resorting to violence. Zambia’s first president Kenneth Kaunda was also a proponent of nonviolent action, and wrote a book about the predicament of nonviolence for independence movements faced with brutal, racist violence. Tanzania’s first president Julius Nyerere was also a proponent of nonviolence, as were other Pan-Africanist movements which adopted various nonviolent techniques even as they also flirted with violence when they deemed it necessary.

The morning of Saturday October 10th, the last day of this year’s PJSA annual conference, started with a plenary session. The session was titled ‘Gandhian Traditions’, and brought together three distinguished scholar-activists who study and teach Gandhian nonviolence. The first panelist to speak was Dr. Veena Rani Howard of the University of Oregon, who pointed out that in today’s world Gandhi’s values were considered ascetic, and were dismissed as quaint, and merely symbolic. The second speaker was Fr. Cedric Prakash, SJ, Director of the Jesuit Centre for Human Rights, Justice and Peace in Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India. Fr. Prakash spoke about the challenges of mainstreaming the concept of Ahimsa, or nonviolence, in Gandhi’s own backyard which today is wracked by various kinds of violence. The panel’s third and last speaker was Dr. Michael Nagler from the Metta Center for Nonviolence Education, in Berkeley, California. Dr. Nagler pointed out that there had been a major shift in our thinking about nonviolence today. He said approximately 3.6 billion today lived in a region of the world where a major nonviolent event had occurred. He said this shift could also be seen in the study of science, with a noticeable turn toward the study of positive psychology in neuroscience. Nonviolence was now being taught in institutions across the world, and even the PJSA had made Nonviolence the theme for this year’s conference, observed Dr. Nagler.

As I write, the Gandhi-King Conference on Peacemaking will be underway next week in Memphis, Tennessee, an annual gathering, since 2004, of peace scholars and practitioners, activists and community leaders. Georgia congressman and former student leader during the Civil Rights Movement, Representative John Lewis is pushing legislation through congress to enact a bill named H.R. 3328: the Gandhi-King Scholarly Exchange Initiative Act of 2009. If passed, the bill would fund research and collaboration amongst scholars and students in both India and the United States to promote peace and nonviolence around the world. Another bill also aimed at promoting peace and nonviolence in the United States and abroad is H.R. 808, initiated by Congressman Denis Kucinich for the establishment of a cabinet level Department of Peace and Nonviolence. Adding to the shift, the PBS television documentary series titled A Force More Powerful, produced by Steve York and Jack DuVall, and the accompanying book edited by Peter Ackerman and Jack DuVall, catalogued no less than six major nonviolent revolutions, going back to the early 1900s up to the close of the century. That project helped tell the larger, if not less often told story of how nonviolent social change has been an important factor in 20th century struggles to end political repression.

If Dr. Nagler is indeed right about this shift, and there is good reason to believe he is, would it be too idealistic to imagine the role that nonviolence can play in seeking peaceful resolutions to some of the most difficult problems of violence and war that we are faced with today? And having seen the evidence for the presence of attempts to use nonviolent techniques in addressing the problems Zimbabwe is undergoing, what lessons might we draw from these attempts?

Lessons of Nonviolence

There are several tenets of nonviolent theory and practice that can help us begin answering the above two questions. There are noticeable differences between approaches that have suggested nonviolent strategies, and those that have not. The suggestion to use violent means to end the Zimbabwe impasse has gained traction, understandably so, given the frightening levels of violence that ZANU-PF has unleashed on members and supporters of the MDC and critiques alike. As Senator Coltart has pointed out, retaliation for this violence has played right into ZANU-PF’s philosophy of violent repression, a key lesson that nonviolence theory and practice teaches. 

As Senator Coltart has also argued, cycles of violence repeat themselves endlessly, even over hundreds of years. Nonviolent theory and practice, under the broader framework of Peace Studies, emphasizes the importance of studying the root contexts of problems in order to know how to address them. The Zimbabwe case has created such a revulsion for Robert Mugabe that to suggest a role for historical factors in leading to the present crisis has become passé. As Mahmood Mamdani observed in an essay in the London Review of Books in December 2008, the discourse on Zimbabwe turned into a dichotomous contention between two options: one either adored Mugabe, or one abhorred him. In his attempt to free the debate from such a binary, Mamdani suffered the fate of many who have made the argument for historical understanding of the roots of the problem, being dismissed as someone who was defending Robert Mugabe. Thus when Heidi Holland wrote her psychobiography of Mugabe, attempting to provide both a historical context and a psychoanalytical interpretation of why Mugabe turned from a hero to a villain, the result was a book whose description of the context that created Mugabe became something of a rare breath of honesty and a break from the vilification and demonization, which was nevertheless not totally absent.

Holland published an op-ed in the New York Times at the time her biography of Mugabe, Dinner With Mugabe, came out. The op-ed was titled ‘Make Peace with Mugabe,’ in which she pointed out that Robert Mugabe’s real quarrel was with the British, arising out of promises they had made, and had then reneged on. “Indeed, he told me that he was prepared to sacrifice the welfare of his country to prove his case against Britain,” wrote Ms. Holland, a point Mr. Mugabe buttressed in his recent CNN interview with Christian Amanpour in September 2009, when Mugabe told Amanpour one does not leave power because an imperialist has demanded thus: “You dig in.” Ms. Holland went on to suggest that for someone who was prepared to destroy his country just to make a point against an opponent, estranging and vilifying him the way the West was doing was equally reprehensible. “That he has an arguably justifiable complaint against a major Western power — namely the repudiation of the land reform pledge — is doubtless an embarrassment in the West. But that Britain and others choose to shun Mr. Mugabe rather than attempt to settle these differences is quite frankly reckless.”

As evidence of that recklessness, much has been said about “Smart sanctions,” whose devastating effects on the Zimbabwean economy, as a combination with economic mismanagement by ZANU-PF, have little that can be said to be smart about them. Not much is said about the Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZIDERA), passed in the US Congress and Senate in January 2001 as S.494. Dismissed by much of the White liberal left and African critics of Mugabe as irrelevant to Zimbabwe’s economic crisis, that bill effectively prohibited the biggest international financial institutions and traditional bilateral donors from entering into any economic and financial relationships with the government of Zimbabwe. As provided in Section 3 of the Act, the terms “International Financial Institutions” and “Multilateral Development Banks” include all the global financial institutions that most African and other developing regions of the world have long depended on for loans, development aid and the day to day running of their governments. Included in these categories are the African Development Bank, the Asian Development Bank, as well as the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. The Act also recommended requesting the compliance of the European Union, Canada and “other appropriate foreign countries” in maintaining the sanctions stipulated in the Act.

Love Thy Enemies, Including Robert Mugabe

Ms. Holland’s advice to the West may have been premised on the politics of realism and pragmatism, but it also points toward an important principle in nonviolent theory and practice. Both Gandhi and King preached that at the heart of principles of nonviolence was love; nonviolent activists protested against oppression and injustice whilst still being able to love and respect the perpetrator of those vices. Nonviolence strategies did not aim to defeat and humiliate an opponent, a piece of wisdom that allowed the British to leave India without ill feelings. It was this philosophy that also enabled the wider mainstream American public to understand and appreciate the Civil Rights struggle, leading to both the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and 1965 respectively. Former Archbishop Desmond Tutu extended this philosophy, framed in the African concept of uBuntu, as it facilitated the extension of forgiveness from Black South Africans toward White South Africans, and enabled a transition from White minority rule to a democratic dispensation that opened up political participation for all South Africans.

It is not very easy for many people to consciously imagine themselves forgiving Robert Mugabe and facilitating a new process of engagement with him, but neither does Mugabe show signs of a capability to do that himself. But therein lies one of the hardest principles of nonviolent theory and action as bequeathed to us by Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr, Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu. Seeing nonviolence as both principle and strategy opens up new possibilities in thinking differently about the causes of the Zimbabwe crisis, and envisioning new solutions that represent a break from the intractable impasse that has clouded the minds of many. Zimbabwean peace activists have a lot to teach us about nonviolence, given the realities of what they go through every day. Nonviolent theory and practice teaches that local activists have a much better chance of effecting change in their own locality than activists coming in from outside, with no deeper knowledge of the issues and ties to the community. This does not mean outsiders have no role to play; rather it means outsiders need to show their solidarity based on respect of local knowledge, a consciousness and awareness of historical wrongs and their own complicity in that history, as well as a readiness to learn from the people of the area.

What Gandhi and King Would Advise

We can only imagine what Gandhi’s and Martin Luther King Jr.’s advice would have been toward dealing with the question of Zimbabwe. However several factors highlighted in this article offer key concepts in nonviolence theory and practice as a compelling alternative towards attempts to better understand and resolve problems of violent conflict anywhere in the world.  Some of the biggest struggles to end repression in the 20th century and at the beginning of the 21st century have been carried out using largely nonviolent means. One such untold story is how my own country Malawi waged a largely nonviolent struggle between 1992 and 1994 to rid itself of an entrenched thirty-year dictatorship.

In Zimbabwe, the MDC, WOZA and such other groups are keeping the traditions of nonviolent struggle alive, even as they learn new lessons about what works and what does not. Entrusting a crucial Ministry of Education, Sport and Culture to a strong, respected advocate of peace and principled nonviolence is a major step that has the potential to transform the role of education in how Zimbabweans and other African nations envision the future. The spirit of uMunthu/uBuntu is not completely dead in Southern Africa; in fact it offers a new framework for uMunthu-based peace education and nonviolence, built on endogenous epistemologies that transform themselves with changing times. Handled with the requisite care and sensitivity, the recent ADEA conference in Mombasa, Kenya, by seven African Ministers of Education to lay the foundation for a peace education curriculum in African school systems will be a major step in envisioning a different future for Africa.

Mourning an Inspirational Malawian: Henry Chabwino Malunda, an Obituary

I woke up this morning and was greeted by the shocking news, via an email listserv, of the death of Henry Malunda. Henry was my immediate boss at the Malawi Institute of Education (MIE) when I worked there between 1994 and 1998. He is the one who taught me how to use a computer, an Apple Macintosh; how to do desktop publishing, and how to be an editor. Everything I learned about educational editing and publishing I learned from him. One of the exciting things for me to learn early on was seeing how to manipulate text in PageMaker (in those days) and turn it into a column the way it appears in newsprint. Just weeks before joining the editorial team at MIE I had been a Standard 7 teacher at Gunde Primary School in Ntcheu, near the border with Balaka. As a primary school teacher, chances of learning how to use a computer were next to none, then as it is today.

When I joined MIE in April 1994, Henry had just returned from Canada where he had pursued post-graduate studies in editing and publishing. Henry was a wonderful human being, and very well liked by everyone who knew him. He taught me compassion by showing me how concerned he was with my personal welfare. He once told me "Steve, we can't expect you to perform well at work when we haven't helped you sort out your personal welfare problems." In my very first lessons on how to use a computer, he had me sit down on the chair and face the screen, as he stood over my shoulder. He would then demonstrate things by having me do those things myself. His method of teaching somebody was not to just tell them by mere words, or to just do it for them, but rather to have the learner do things for themselves while he gave guidance. It is by far the most effective teaching method I have learned, one I have gone on to use myself.

It wasn’t until ten years later that the lesson Henry had taught me about how to teach would bear testimony for itself. I had returned to Malawi in February 2004 after a six-year absence to do field work for my dissertation research. I hadn’t had a chance to check my email for about a month, so when I finally found a dial-up connection in the MIE library, a line formed waiting for a turn on the terminal. It was the only Internet terminal intended for everyone, a staff of over 100. In practice, only the professionals, as the high-ranking curriculum specialists and administrators were referred to as, got an opportunity to use the Internet. It was mostly everyone with a university degree and above. The rest, known as Clerical, Technical and Support Staff (CTSs), composed mostly of everyone else who did not possess university degree, did not even attempt, except for the library staff (MIE now has high speed broadband Internet in most offices and buildings, since some two or so years ago.)

One morning in 2004, one of the CTS workers, whose ranks I had been one of during my four years there earlier in the 1990s, approached me and asked if I could help him send an email. I took him to the computer terminal, asked him to sit on the chair, and took him through a quick lesson on how to use the Internet. I explained the functions, and had him make the keystrokes and move the mouse. I overheard him later that day exclaiming how the Internet wasn’t such a mysterious thing after all; if only the bwanas would give people a chance to learn how to use it. I remembered exactly who had taught me how to teach like that, and what effect it had had on me when I was myself learning.

Henry also taught me another lesson I have found very useful to this day: start your work day by reading the newspaper and listening to the news first thing in the morning. "I don't like starting my day without knowing what is going on in the world," he once told me. And so it was that on the morning that news broke out that my children’s novel, Fleeing the War, had won first prize in the British Council’s Write a Story contest, in October 1995, it was Henry who broke the news to the MIE community.

I had bought my copy of The Nation that morning, where the news was first published, with no prior knowledge that the results of the long forgotten competition, which I had entered back in January that year, were out. I saw the story on the front page, but was too shy to go about celebrating it to everyone. I arrived at work, got into my office and sat down to begin the day’s work. I had hardly settled down on my desk when Henry bustled into the room and shouted “Congratulations, Steve! How come you just came in quietly without saying anything, as if nothing of this magnitude had happened at all?” We laughed heartily, and he went about announcing the happy news to everyone at work.

Fleeing the War would later be published into a children’s book, and three copies sent to each and every primary school and a few secondary schools in Malawi. On visiting a number of Teacher Development Centres (TDCs) in 2004, I was pleasantly surprised on a few occasions to introduce myself to staff, and be told, “Oh, we have your children’s book here!” Whereupon they would lead me inside and take me to the library corner, where a copy of the book was on display.

Henry had learned before I joined MIE that I had a passion for writing, and that I was freelancing for a few Malawian newspapers. He offered his encouragement by not merely congratulating me, but also reading my stories and engaging me in discussions about them. He was an avid reader and writer himself, frequently writing lengthy analytical features for Malawian newspapers. He was convinced that as editors of educational materials, we had a lot in common with, and to learn from, journalism. He was an intellectual in his own right, very well informed about Malawi's movers and shakers, and about world affairs.

It was through Henry Malunda that I learned of the 1994 release of the much-awaited book by Dr. John Lwanda, Kamuzu Banda of Malawi: A Study in Promise, Power and Paralysis (1993). Henry read the book in one sitting and came to work the next morning profusely recommending it to everyone. He was particularly fascinated by how deeply insightful and knowledgeable Dr. Lwanda was about the inner workings of Kamuzu's dictatorship. Henry was even more impressed by how current the book was, describing how it captured the very recent Malawi Army rapid and thorough routing of Kamuzu Banda's paramilitary wing, the Malawi Young Pioneers, in Operation Bwezani. I knew I had to buy my own copy and read the book, one of the earliest intellectual manifestations that Malawi was undergoing profound political change.

When the Malawi Institute of Journalism (MIJ) became fully operational in the late 1990s, Dr. James Ng'ombe hired Henry away from MIE, where Henry excelled at training Malawi's new crop of journalists in the post-dictatorship era. I corresponded with him for a while, during which time he forwarded me news bulletins from MIJ Radio, which I happily forwarded onto to other listservs.

Some two years ago the MIE administration convinced Henry to return to MIE to his old post as Editor, which he happily did. I last spoke with him less than a year ago when a schools project I was working on needed professional advice on educational publishing copyright. And there was no better-qualified person to answer that question than Henry.

I am deeply saddened to hear about his death, but I am content to know that he is in a better place now. Several years ago as we communicated back and forth when he was at MIJ, I wrote him an email in which I thanked him for everything he had done for me from the moment I joined MIE to the time I left. He is one of the people who have played a very important role in my life, giving me a leg up on my professional and intellectual itinerary, allowing me to embark on the few modest accomplishments I can lay claim to.

During my time at MIE, he led the editorial unit and developed it into an operation with state of the art equipment and cutting edge desktop publishing capacity. He led the team in developing and designing a style manual for educational editing and publishing in Malawi. Under the managerial aegis of Wise Chauluka, then publishing manager and assistant director at MIE, Henry oversaw the editing, designing, typesetting and publishing of the entire stock of textbooks that Malawian schools, teachers and pupils used up until PCAR three years ago. He probably continued from where he had left off when he returned to MIE two years ago, as ably as he probably did when he trained a whole generation of Malawian journalists during the years he spent at MIJ. He touched those who knew him, and left Malawi a much better place than he had found it.

On the 50-50 Campaign: Letter to Malawian Voters

Dear Malawian Voters,

On the surface, Malawian women appear poised to transform the political landscape on Tuesday, May 19th, when Malawians go to the polls to vote in presidential and parliamentary elections. For the first time in our country’s 45-year history, a woman is running for president, and two women are running mates on presidential tickets, one of them on the incumbent’s ticket. The Ministry of Women and Child Development and the NGO-Gender Network have launched what is being termed the 50-50 campaign, aiming to achieve a 50 percent women’s representation in the legislative house. But on closer examination of the numbers of women standing in the constituencies and the districts, the transformation may not have that much of an impact. In fact, there are far too few women running to even achieve a 25 percent representation.

In this post I want to explore what the numbers look like and what that tells us about the place of women in the Malawian body politic. I also want to discuss how careful, uncaricatured, endogenous forms of feminist scholarship and gender activism have been central to the effort to rethink dead-end paradigms to problems of war, conflict, structural and physical violence in the world. I will conclude by repeating what most scholars know already about why including more women in positions of influence and governance is good for our endogenous forms of home-grown democracy. Even more important, it is a potential catalyst for new ways of thinking about the societal problems that have beset Malawi and other societies in other parts of the world.

Though not always interchangeable or synonymous with one another, the concepts of gender studies and feminist scholarship are not without heated controversies, and I am using them here with that caveat in mind. I have chosen to use these terms in the broad sense that African feminists and gender researchers use them, recognizing the endogenous contexts of knowledge production that have enriched the best practices in those fields. Feminist scholarship and gender research have produced vast amounts of indigenous and pragmatic knowledge through decades, if not centuries, of women’s expertise, experiences, perspectives and contributions. Rejecting these disciplines out of an idiosyncratic distaste over caricatured and politicized distortions is akin to throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As emancipatory projects that promote inclusive and endogenous democratic practices, feminism and gender research transcend rigid paradigms that have excluded entire groups of people and their knowledge systems. They offer dynamic perspectives into uMunthu as a peace epistemology and as an indispensable vehicle of the African Renaissance project. This is the premise from which I am examining the 50-50 campaign in Malawi and what the numbers look like on the African landscape and beyond.

A brief overview of the numbers of the candidates standing in selected parts of the country paints not so rosy a picture for the chances of women contesting in this year’s elections. A total of 1180 candidates are standing in the May 19 elections across the country, and out of these only 237 are women, based on calculations using the figures provided by the Malawi Electoral Commission. This represents 20 percent of the candidate pool. Out of the country’s 193 constituencies, 144 of them have women candidates. This means 49 constituencies have no women candidates standing, while there is no single constituency that does not have a male candidate.

In the North, there are 228 candidates running, and of these 47 are women, representing 20.6 percent of the candidate pool. For the north, 26 out of 33 constituencies have women candidates. In the Central region 80 women are running out of 399 candidates, making the female representation there 20 percent. The Central region has 73 constituencies, of which only 48 have women candidates. In the south, there are 557 candidates total, and 110 of them are women. Women are represented in 70 constituencies, out of 87 in the southern region. Women in the south make up 19.7 percent of the total number of candidates standing in the elections.

Lilongwe district, where the capital city of Malawi is located, has 22 constituencies, but women are standing in only in 13 constituencies. The district has 115 candidates, the largest in the country, and only 20 of them are women. Blantyre has 13 constituencies, and women are standing in all but one of them. Yet out of the 108 candidates standing in Blantyre, women number up to 19 only.

Only 6 districts out of 28 have managed to field women in each of their constituencies. These are Karonga, Likoma Island (which has only one constituency), Chiradzulu, Mwanza, Nsanje and Neno. Likoma Islands, with its one constituency, has the best parliamentary candidate gender equity in the country. Out of its 6 candidates, half of them are women, making it 50-50. Dedza has the worst gender disparity, with only half of its constituencies managing to field women candidates. Lilongwe comes next, with no women standing in 9 of its 22 constituencies. Mzimba has 92 candidates standing, and only 14 of them are women. These percentages are based on calculations using figures available on the website of the Malawi Electoral Commission (MEC).

As of the last elections of May 2004, there were 25 women parliamentarians in Malawi, out of 193. This figure represented 12.95 percent, according to the Inter Parliamentary Union website

The global leader in female representation in parliament is Rwanda, where out of 80 members, 45 are women, representing 56.25 percent. Sweden follows Rwanda at 47 percent, followed by South Africa, which achieved 45 percent from 34 percent as of the April 22, 2009 elections, becoming third in the world.

In the run up to Tuesday’s elections, the Malawi Ministry of Women and Child Development has teamed up with the NGO-Gender Network to provide financial and material support to women candidates. Women candidates can be heard on the non-partisan, privately-owned Zodiak Broadcasting Station (ZBS), in an hour-long program in which the candidates introduce themselves, the constituencies they are representing, their party or independent affiliation, their symbol, and their campaign platform. There are several male activists who are in support of the effort, and their exhortations can also be heard in the campaign commercials. The central point being made is how decades of male-dominated governance and legislation making have not moved the country forward, and how it is time for voters to turn to women. Voters are being told that women stay in their constituencies as opposed to male parliamentarians who once elected move out to the cities, and in some cases divorce their first wives to marry new wives, or cohabit with mistresses. While male politicians are easily corruptible and care more about their economic welfare, women politicians care more about everyone else, roles they play as mothers in everyday life, so go the campaign messages. What is supposed to be a constituent development fund (CDF) meant to be utilized by the people ends up being diverted for personal projects, with no one being involved in deciding how the money should be used for the benefit of the constituency.

But one also hears indistinguishable patterns of paternalism, with some both male and female candidates promising to provide development to their constituencies by bringing hospitals, schools, electricity, pipe water, among other promises. A few candidates are careful not to promise too much, pointing out that no one person can bring development as if it is a commodity one picks from one place (government) and delivers it to the rural areas. Rather, they are promising to collaborate with the people, consult widely, and work with the government and civil society to tap into available resources.

In a recent radio program on Zodiak, representatives from the 50-50 campaign, the Malawi Electoral Commission, civil society and the media sought to provide a rationale for why it is necessary to consider women candidates over their male counterparts. The one journalist on the panel explained that the campaign was decided upon after observations of how other countries were making progress in their development efforts after voting for more women candidates into parliament. He said Malawi was trying to learn from these other countries, and was also a signatory to regional, continental and global treaties dealing with various protocols, including gender equality. Contrast this rationale with a Common Market for East and Southern Africa (COMESA) panel also broadcast on Zodiak, in which a member of this regional observer group flown into the country to monitor the elections praised Malawi for setting an example for other countries in Africa and elsewhere to follow. Whether out of modesty or an apparent inferiority complex, Malawians are not shy about their self-identifying poise to learn from other countries in Africa and elsewhere. It is rare to see a Malawian perspective being championed in the Malawian media or in the general social milieu as one others can learn from. It is always about what Malawi should be learning from everyone else on the planet. While corruption, sex scandals, inequality, classicism and other forms of social malfunction happen routinely in Europe, America and other parts of the global North, Africa is still treated as aberrant and unusual both inside the continent an outside.

On its own, the presence of more women in positions of leadership would not necessarily lead to any transformative changes in society. However that point is usually made to argue against efforts to increase women’s representation in positions of influence. A recent debate in the online Malawian newspaper Nyasatimes, between two University of Malawi lecturers, Pascal Mwale and Jessie Kabwila-Kapasula revealed how fractious and acrimonious these debates get when feminist ideology and women taking up leadership positions come up. And this is the case not only in Malawi but everywhere in the world. Mwale, head of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College, argued that it was “not only opportunistic and manipulative to garner support for oneself and one’s political party from a gender grouping, either male or female, but it is also abusive and exploitative of such a grouping.” In response to Mwale, Kabwila-Kapasula, a feminist theorist and comparative literature scholar-activist in the Department of English also at Chancellor College pointed out that resistance to gender organizing was a measure whose effect was to maintain the patriarchical status quo. She was also quick to add that the women candidates on the presidential and vice presidential tickets in Malawi’s forthcoming elections were not advancing any feminist transformative agenda; rather they were there as agents of patriarchy, co-opted to create a façade of change without promoting any actual change.

On his part, Mwale was careful to offer a sensitive analysis of patriarchy in Malawian society and how it shortchanges women and impedes their progress. What he was rejecting was, in his words, a “counter-progressive” adoption of foreign ideologies with the “assumption of opposition and division between women and men in the equality thesis . . .” Kabwila-Kapasula pointed out that she was not concerned about political parties, which were already patriarchal. “Purporting to be gender blind or neutral is effectively supporting the status quo, which is patriarchy,” she argued.

The caution against African activists adopting foreign ideologies of feminism has been a subject of much scholarly debate in journals and dissertations, but very little has been offered in terms of how authentic feminist scholarship opens up new vistas for rethinking approaches to problems of conflict and violence. It is especially in peace research and peace studies where feminist thought has laid bare the relationship between sexist masculinity and neoliberal militarization (Betty Reardon, (2008). The world average is 18.4 percent, and for Sub-Saharan Africa it is 18.5. Nordic countries have the highest female parliamentary representation, at 41.4 percent, and the Arab region comes last, at 9.1 percent. The United States has 435 members of congress, and of these women make up 73, representing 16.78 percent. The US senate has 100 members, and only 15 are women, at 15 percent (the outcome of the current Minnesota senatorial legal wrangle won’t change this). Sexism and the War System,1985). This understanding and its emancipatory message of resistance and solidarity should not be lost in the turf battles for the control of the trajectory of feminist ideology. As important as is the critique against the parroting of foreign ideologies to impose them on African contexts, the second-class treatment that women receive is neither an exclusively African nor Euro-American problem; it is a problem in every society. The problems of militarism and war are the preserve of neither African nor Euro-American nations; they are problems in every society.

As Kabwila-Kapasula has argued, the resistance to feminist analyses of gender has the effect of perpetuating the male-dominated status quo, and rarely do critics of feminist theory and gender activism demonstrate a requisite sensitivity to the ethical implications of their reactionary positions. Not only is it sensible to construct structures that dismantle masculinity and its tendency for violence, it is also sensible to promote inclusion for under-represented groups in governance systems. In that regard, it is crucial for more men to champion that effort. It is true that many women leaders are as militant and warmongering as their male counterparts, but it is also true that a significant number of women offer a different way of approaching development, preventing war and resolving conflict (Sanam Naraghi Anderlini, Women Building Peace, 2007; Aili Mari Trip et. al, African Women’s Movements, 2009). These women’s perspectives matter even more today when violence, both structural as well as physical, has seen a resurgence in the conduct of world affairs. In her recent research on customary land rights in Malawi, the Malawian gender activist Olivia Mchaju Liwewe has pointed out how it is not enough to know that much of Malawian society is matrilineal, when modern legal and judiciary systems treat African traditions as outdated systems impacting women negatively (Liwewe, A History of Diminishing Returns, 2008).

Thus while electing more women into office justifies its own significance as an endogenous democratic principle, it will be useful to use that democratic principle to allow more diverse views and perspectives in how to solve societal problems and advance new knowledges for innovation and transformation. In Malawi this coming Tuesday, the figures do not offer much hope for a 50-50 representation in parliament, but they certainly offer hope for an improvement from the last election five years ago. As more men make the decision to take seriously the importance of feminist approaches to problems of gender violence and a conflict-ridden society, we should also be putting in place curriculum reforms in the teacher education and school systems to make the transformation praxical, generative and self-sustaining.