When you move up and down the country, you come across many Malawians selling all manner of things. As early as 4 am, our streets teem with people mostly on a variety of business errands, trying hard to make ends meet.
There is no denying that Malawians are hard workers. That is far as the good news goes. The bad news is that hard work alone is not enough. Our people must learn to work smart, meaning they must engage in innovative ventures to gain a competitive advantage over their rivals.
There is hardly anything innovative about plucking mangoes and placing them in baskets or buckets to sell them by the roadside. For one thing mangoes are a seasonal product and appear over a narrow window in the year. At most we get mangoes for a period of three months in a year. For another, anybody who has access to mango trees and knows how to climb them can join the business at the drop of the heart.
Throughout the year Malawians harvest a plethora of products, often from the wild, to sell in produce markets or by the roadside. If it is not mangoes, it will be tangerine or guavas; if it is not masau it will be masuku or mapoza; if it is not bwan’noni, it will be ngumbi or grasshoppers. The list is endless.
We seem to lack the innovative spirit that our ancestors had. They came up with numerous ways of preserving some of these foodstuffs so that they could be used even off season. When I was a little boy I used to get fascinated by my mother’s trick of preserving beef. She used to slice it into long, slender strips, apply salt to it and hang it over a tight rope in the kitchen. The perpetual warmth in the kitchen used to speed up the drying process of the beef. The salt would keep it from getting rotten. We would eat this type of beef many months after the fresh beef was obtained.
Another piece of traditional technology that used to fascinate me as a youth was chikwatu. My mother used to be good at making zikwatu (plural for chikwatu). Chikwatu was a spherical container made from leaves, in which dried vegetables were kept. Such vegetable could be kept for months on end, to be consumed when a particular vegetable was off season. It was not uncommon, for example, to enjoy the delicacy of bean leaves of pumpkin leaves in August although these vegetables only occur during the growing season.
I have seen chikwatu technology at Jenda Mzimba. I commend the women vendors there for keeping Malawian tradition intact.
What is important is that we must come up with ways of preserving our products for future use. Our ancestors did their part. We have to be innovative and devise modern ways of achieving this. Malawi is a land full of a many natural resources. If we use these resources in their raw form, which is what we do most of the time, we will miss out on their true value.
If we cannot dry or dehydrate a product, we must think of ways in which we can salinate it (and be able to desalinate later, as appropriate) so that we can preserve the product. If we can do none of this, we must find ways of changing the product’s form so that its shelf life can be increased considerably or its value enhanced significantly. Corn flakes, for example, will fetch a greater fortune on the market than the maize from which they are made. Similarly, soy milk is infinitely more valuable than they soya beans from which it is made. Both corn flakes and soy milk have reasonably long shelf lives.
I did mention in my article of last year that insects would become a very important food item because they did not require as much land to be raised on, as do bigger animals like goats, sheep or cattle. The only problem is that most insects are seasonal, often appearing for a short period of four weeks at most in a year. If we can preserve these, we can harvest them in huge quantities and make them available to the market throughout the year.
Machines for preserving food stuffs may not be available locally but a search within the Internet will yield many on offer offshore. People can buy cornflakes making machines or soy milk extracting machines from China and other countries. Malawians buy many items from China, but machinery conspicuously and perpetually misses from such imports. Our mindsets need to change.