It is true that as a nation we shy away from anything scientific. Our participation in innovative scientific or technological projects is, to say the least, dismal. I know there are some among us who are deep into science but such people are few and far between.
I remember meeting somebody a few years back, who said plainly that the very sight of chemical symbols on any document was enough to put them off. In fact we have no shortage of people who will drop any piece of writing if it appears to be going in the direction of science. I like reading and writing about space, but I deliberately limit myself in terms of space articles because I know that not many of my readers will come along with me.
It has been suggested from some quarters that Malawian students do not design cell phones or similar gadgets, like their Chinese counterparts do, because in the early years of their education the former learn how to analyse and draw grasshoppers instead of learning the basics of electronics. Grasshoppers wasted our time in secondary school, so the reasoning goes. As we spent our time drawing grasshoppers, our mates in China were constructing phones, cars and other gadgets.
I do not agree. I learnt about the body parts of grasshoppers in primary not secondary school but I do not have anything against it, not one bit. First of all, I do not think that analysing grasshoppers and designing or constructing cell phones are mutually exclusive, meaning that engaging in one does not preclude you from the other. Both of them can take place concurrently.
If our young people are not constructing cell phones today it is not because once upon a time they drew grasshoppers. There is a whole gamut of reasons why the majority of Malawian young people do not engage in Physics or Electronics or Chemistry related project. Chief among the reasons, in my view, is that our young people do not have people around them who do these things and who can therefore provide mentorship to them. As a boy I once attempted to make an incandescent bulb but had to resort to mischief to extract thin wire from the window gauze, to be turned into a filament. There was nobody extruding wire at Nkhoma Mission, where I lived, or in the nearby Lilongwe City, and this deprived me of a legitimate source of thin wire. By the way I was doing this after I had drawn parts of a grasshopper at school.
People do need to develop a culture of doing things, in this case the culture of conducting scientific experiments and projects. When the culture is fully developed people will have easy access to the materials, the literature, the equipment, yes the supporting human resource needed to make their projects possible and feasible. If they want to design a cell phone for example, they will not struggle to get miniature integrated circuits or indeed the materials for the microphone or the speaker. They will have easy access to the equipment that will join the different parts together or that which will enable them to make accurate measurements of the currents and voltages in and across different parts of the phone. The list of the things they will need to have at close range is endless.
As things stand, even the best schools in Malawi will struggle to provide these things. Schools like Kabweramchombo in Dowa or Nyezelera in Phalombe will not come anywhere to close to providing their students with these things. If the students at such schools never engaged in the drawing of grasshoppers they would still not construct cell phones.
Learning basic anatomy by studying grasshoppers is not a useless pursuit, to say the least. From such basic anatomy some people have proceeded to become proficient in Medicine or Health Sciences. Some of them have treated us.
What we need to do is search within our communities for anything that would enable us carry out basic scientific experiments or projects. Let our young people get exposed to the basics of a steam engine, for example, by letting them design and build one using locally available materials. And this can be done while they are learning the grasshopper anatomy. When such a crude engine works it will be a great motivator for the young minds to venture further into science and technology. Slowly we shall be gathering the things needed for such projects and in so doing we shall be developing the technological culture that today so miserably eludes us.