Reading Time: 3 minutesTomorrow is this year’s Christmas Day. It is a day on which adherents to the Christian faith all over the world commemorate the birth of a very special individual: Jesus of Nazareth. Quoting Isaiah 7:14, the Gospel writer, Matthew, mentions that Mary’s son would be called Emmanuel. He says in Matthew 1: 22 – 23, […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes“….kumene bambo ake, pansi pa mgodi, anali kuswa miyala ndi msana waonso,” goes the last line of the first stanza of a Chichewa poem in a Standard 3 book of the 1960s and 1970s. The book’s title was Liwiro. The poem was about a boy called Kandulo who was born to migrant Malawians in South

Reading Time: 3 minutesWhen we talk about corruption and other vices that bedevil our nation, we just think in terms of the civil service. It is like the public officers are really dirty and everybody else is clean. The media, especially, cannot be partakers in corruption or other acts of lawlessness, it is generally believed. Nothing can be

Reading Time: 3 minutesAt a recent burial ceremony of a senior pastor, unexpected drama erupted. As the director of programs was busy calling out names of people to lay their wreaths on the grave, another funeral procession arrived and got seated next to an open grave about 50 metres away from the site of the funeral that was

Reading Time: 3 minutesWe 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 minutesThe 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 minutesIn 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 minutesThe 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 minutesWhen 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 minutesTucked 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