Reading Time: 3 minutes A clip showing late Professor Chikaonda being interviewed by a TV presenter was in circulation on social media last week. The gist of the message in that clip is that as African countries were becoming independent of their former colonial rulers, Britain expressed the concern that some of them, particularly Nyasaland and Mauritius, would not […]

Reading Time: 3 minutes A clip showing a foreign university presenting the Malawi economic case circulated on social media last week. Some of what was presented probably bordered on exaggeration. It was stated, for example, that Malawi was a walking nation where people everywhere seemed to be walking to no particular destination. Everything seemed to proceed at a walking

Reading Time: 3 minutes I was listening to a program called “Apaulendo” on one of the local radios a few weeks ago. One person who was interviewed, a kabaza operator, was asked how far it was from Mponela to Ntchisi. Despite having travelled that distance numerous times, he could not come up with a figure, not even an estimate. Numeracy

Reading Time: 3 minutes A  survey conducted in or around 2012 found that Mali was the poorest country in Africa. Trailing Mali in third position was Malawi. This news was hardly inspiring. That Mali was leading the band of Africa’s poorest countries was particularly intriguing because from Mali came the world’s richest person of all time, Mansa Musa. It

Reading Time: 3 minutes The world over, people are observing a long weekend this weekend as they celebrate Easter. I was introduced to Easter when I was a toddler, having been brought up by a father who was a Pastor in the Presbyterian church (CCAP). I have watched, or participated in, numerous Easter plays as a youth and have

Reading Time: 3 minutes Back 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 minutes In 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 minutes When 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 minutes For 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 minutes In 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