Reading Time: 3 minutes We had the opportunity to reflect on some of the developments that have taken place in this country since independence, last week. Quite impressive, I must say, but certainly not as much as one would have liked to see to realistically drill a dent into the poverty and misery Malawians face. Any GDP growth rate […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes The opening line of a certain poem goes something like this: Two prisoners looked through the bars; One saw mud and other, stars. The same reality was interpreted differently, depending on each one’s attitudes. In the one case, the observer had a positive attitude and looked for something positive in the reality before him. He

Reading Time: 3 minutes In his speech of May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy of the United States of America stated that America should set the goal of landing man on the Moon and bringing him safely back home within a decade from that time. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) got the cue and started to

Reading Time: 3 minutes The recent harvesting of wheat in Dowa has both a historical significance and a future importance. Not many people gave a chance to the successful growing and harvesting of wheat at the level that the country witnessed this month. More than a hundred years ago, a Dowa enterprising man embarked on wheat farming. His name

Reading Time: 3 minutes When white people first came across the great Zimbabwe, they quickly ruled out any possibility that the dzimba dze mabwe (houses of stone) could have been constructed by Africans. The African race was not considered sophisticated enough to embark on an engineering program of that magnitude. A 16th century Portuguese explorer postulated than the great Zimbabwe was

Reading Time: 3 minutes Tucked away somewhere in the English Midlands are the remnants of an eighteenth century factory called Quarry Bank Mill. The mill stands on the bank of River Bollin on the outskirts of Styal in Cheshire. This columnist was privileged to visit Quarry Bank Mill in the late 1980s. I must admit that the visit made

Reading Time: 3 minutes “But many of the priests and Levites and chief of the fathers, who were ancient men, that had seen the first house, when the foundation of this house was laid before their eyes, wept with a loud voice; and many shouted aloud for joy.” – Ezra 3:12 Two groups of people, the young and the

Reading Time: 3 minutes In 1972 two disgruntled Lebanese young men hijacked a South African plane and forced it to land at Chileka Airport. They had grudges against a Mr. Oppenheimer, a South African diamond tycoon, whom they had worked for but apparently never got their dues. They, therefore, wanted to get even with him by hijacking a South

Reading Time: 3 minutes Some of the most astonishing medical breakthroughs have had an African connection.  On 3rd December, 1967, Christiaan Barnard, a white South African, performed the world’s first successful human to human heart transplant. His patient, Lois Wahskansky, suffered from diabetes and a heart disease that had been declared incurable. Christiaan had, at that stage, successfully carried out

Reading Time: 3 minutes Maybe because of lack of financial resources, many Malawians do not venture far beyond their places of origin. Their knowledge of the world therefore is limited by what they know of their homes. If you ask somebody from Waliranji in Mchinji about Nyezelera in Phalombe, for example, chances are they will be blank. Very few