Several years ago I was given the responsibility of recruiting engineers for the printing organisation which I worked for. As it turned out, all the engineers I picked were from the northern region. My bosses were puzzled over how I, a non-northerner, could have ‘favoured’ people from the north.
The truth of the matter was that most of the applicants were northerners and when short-listing and final selection came, there was a higher probability of landing on a northerner than on a non-northerner. Simple.
Many people have wondered why people from the north have a near universal hunger for education. When I went to study at Robert Blake Secondary School in Dowa I was surprised that half of the student population comprised people from the north. Some time last year, I read from a blog, written by a non-Malawian, that northerners were more intelligent than their fellow countrymen.
I personally do not think that any one area or location has a monopoly of intelligence. If IQ tests were conducted in several areas of this country, or any other country for that matter, and the results were plotted on graphs, each area would show what statisticians call a normal or near normal distribution, with few highly gifted individuals, few intellectually challenged ones and the majority sitting in the middle section.
I attribute the low school patronage in the central and southern regions of Malawi to absentee fathers. In huge chunks of these areas a matrilineal system of family organisation is practised. Strictly speaking a father has no real attachment to his children in such a system. They (the children, that is) belong to and, therefore, are the responsibility of their maternal uncles. Every father consciously or sub-consciously knows that his children are the mbumba (the clan) of their maternal uncles. In the event of a divorce, the mother’s clan (not the father’s) will have custody of the children under a strict matrilineal system.
And because they are so detached from the children, few fathers shoulder the responsibility to encourage their children to go to school. They do not even know what their children have been up to on a day to day basis, and thereby miss out on the opportunity to mentor them. They may not even know if their children are attending school or not, and they would hardly be bothered. After all these are somebody else’s mbumba. Of course there are exceptions to this generalisation. I know of men who have defied the odds and have exerted a great deal of control on their children with the result that such children have successfully gone through secondary school and, in some cases, university. But such men are few and far between in the matrilineal societies.
The real tragedy is that the maternal uncles, whose responsibility the children are supposed to be, are, almost without exception, not attached to their mbumba closely enough to exert any meaningful control over them either. To begin with, the children and the uncles would hardly live in the same house. They sometimes live great distances apart. Further, they do not share the same name, as would be the case with a biological father. These and other factors present numerous challenges in the expectation that uncles will care for their nephews and nieces. They simply do not have enough incentives to do so.
By contrast, in patrilineal societies of the north, a father has direct control over his offspring. They belong to him according to custom, and they share the same name as him. He will do everything possible to encourage them to go to school because he is aware of the negative consequences of failed children. If a child excels, people will ask, “Whose child is this?” and the proud father will be glad. Similarly, if a child fails, the father, not some obscure uncle, will face the shame.
Why do mothers not exert the same influence over their children in matrilineal societies as fathers do in patrilineal societies? For sure, mothers can, if properly enabled, exert that kind of influence, but somehow society recognises that in family organisation it is a male figure who is the leader. It is for this reason that uncles, not mothers, are given responsibility over children in a matrilineal system. Now, it so happens that a mother who has been a victim of an absentee father herself will not have attained any education worth discussing and, therefore, cannot be relied upon to be the driving force behind her own children’s education. The cycle goes on and on, producing generations and generations of people who are alien to education. Again this is a generalisation, and there are many exceptions across the landscape.
I hope I am not misunderstood. This is not a wholesome condemnation of the matrilineal practice. A matrilineal system exists for a very good reason. It is only a mother who knows the true biological father of a child. We fathers only believe that the children we have are indeed ours. Belief and knowledge are worlds apart. If you let the lineage of inheritance go through the father’s line, there is a very good chance that you will bequeath your property or your chieftainship to somebody who is not the rightful heir. In a matrilineal society that chance is zero.
However, the matrilineal practice poses challenges such as the ones indicated in the earlier part of this discussion. It needs to be panel beaten in order to surmount these challenges.
We need deliberate interventions from government to address this problem. I do not know exactly what shape or form these interventions would take but in the extreme case, failure to send children to school could be criminalised.