Steve Sharra

Twenty years ago on March 8, 1992, Malawi’s Catholic bishops authored a pastoral letter which triggered a political revolution that removed the Malawi Congress Party, and president-for-life Ngwazi Dr. H. Kamuzu Banda, from power. They had ruled Malawi as a one-party state for thirty years.

The month of October marks eight months since lecturers at Chancellor College, University of Malawi, stopped teaching, demanding guarantees of academic freedom.

On the surface, it would seem paradoxical that while the rest of the world is today celebrating the United Nations’ International Day of Peace, the air in Malawi is thick with fear, anxiety and a premonition for violence.

Wednesday 20 July found me at Katoto Teacher Development Centre (TDC), less than a kilometer away from Katoto Freedom Park, ground zero for Mzuzu demonstrations. We had a teacher professional development workshop with 20 educators from Mzuzu City and Mzimba North.

In the early hours of Tuesday 30 November 2010, a group of students at Viphya Private Secondary School in the city of Mzuzu in northern Malawi fought one another, and destroyed school property worth millions of kwacha.

You have probably heard a friend say it, or at least seen it forwarded in emails: ‘If you want to hide important information from an African, put it in a book.’ Another less insulting but blunt expression says when you see a white person riding in a bus or on a train, or waiting to catch a flight

With one of the lowest university enrollments in Africa, the debate on who gets access to higher education in Malawi is an incendiary affair. The debate has erupted once again with the announcement of the 2010 intake for the University of Malawi.

Is it a mere coincidence that the 2010 summit on the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) being held this week in New York overlaps with the UN International Day of Peace?

As I was beginning a seven-month period in 2004 studying prospects for peace education in Malawian classrooms, a friend of mine seemed very surprised at the topic of my study. Why peace education? She asked. Has Malawi been at war lately?

Until I started knocking on people’s office doors to ask about what was being done to celebrate this year’s International Literacy Day in Malawi, 8 September, I hadn’t thought of how differently various people might interpret the concept of ‘literacy’.