Reading Time: 3 minutesBack in 2013 I travelled to a village near Nsalu in rural Lilongwe to attend a funeral. After the funeral ceremony, a local young man approached me to inform me about one of the villagers in the crowd, then a 72 year old man, who was a form 2 ‘pupil’ at a local school. Naturally, […]

Reading Time: 3 minutesIn Africa, an individual’s existence is not nearly as important as that of the community to which that individual belongs. As they say, it is a matter of “I am because we are”. The community is always paramount and the individual is regarded as being of secondary importance. Whereas in Europe, and elsewhere, marriage is

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhen I lived at Nkhoma in the 1970s, my parents employed a man called Mizilemu, who helped with the outside chores. Mizilemu was a school dropout and hardly spoke any English. One day he came home drunk. He did more talking than working that day. One of the things he talked about was that my

Reading Time: 3 minutesFor any country to develop it is necessary to have private individuals who come up with innovative ways of doing things. Britain had the likes of Jethro Tull, who invented a seed drilling machine, George Stephenson who gave us the railway system, Michael Farad who experimented with electronic circuits, among many others. I once was

Reading Time: 3 minutesIn my article of a few years ago, I described how the Dutch Reformed missionaries introduced a form of money that came to be known as chamkono at and around Mvera Mission in Dowa District. The few trades, such as tile making and basketry, which the missionaries had introduced at Mvera, coupled with the piece work

Reading Time: 3 minutesRussia is one of the largest producers of oil in the world. Worldometer actually places it in the third position after USA and Saudi Arabia. The war currently raging between Russia and Ukraine will no doubt have a number of economic repercussions, not just in the two countries or in the regions where they are

Reading Time: 3 minutesOur experts in wildlife talk of the African big five animals. It is a league comprising the five most vicious and massive animals in the African jungle. They are the African bush elephant, the lion, the leopard, the African buffalo and the black rhinoceros. These animals happen to be the most difficult to hunt on

Reading Time: 3 minutesI recently came across a lady venting out her frustration over the lack of durability in a pair of shoes she had recently purchased. She was quick to brand the shoes “Chinese”. This, at any rate, is a consistent attitude in Malawi, where anything perceived to be less than durable is called “Chinese”. I had

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe number of people left desolate after the visitation of cyclone is now upwards of one million, and we are still counting. True to the predictions by the weathermen, Ana paid Malawi a visit, and in its wake devastation of gigantic proportions became the order of the day. I am typing this article in darkness

Reading Time: 3 minutesThe belief that nothing good can come out of Africa is deeply entrenched in the minds of many individuals in the West. They believe that there has been no contribution from Africa to anything that can be called a product of civilisation. However, the situation on the ground is very different, as will hopefully be