Reclaiming Malawi: Solidarity in times of peril

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. I was a 20 year-old student-teacher in March 1992. During the school year I taught and lived in a rural part of Malawi where I experienced Malawi’s most significant political, social and economic transformation since the struggle for independence in the 1960s. An examination of Malawi’s struggle for independence in the 1950s and 1960s and my personal experience of the transition to multiparty democracy in the 1990s lead me to conclude that both revolutions were made possible by a type of class solidarity in which both the elites and the rural masses joined in the cause. It is now twenty years since the pastoral letter, and 48 years since independence. Can Malawians in 2012 rely on the kind of solidarity seen in the 1950s and 1960s, and in the 1990s?

SOLIDARITY ON THE MARCH

The events of 2011 and early 2012 do demonstrate the existence of forms of solidarity amongst various social groups. Of particular interest in this discussion are five events. The academic freedom struggle in the University of Malawi, the 20 July 2011 demonstrations, the undressing of women, the arrests of human rights activists and opposition politicians, and the three-month strike by judiciary staff all offer evidence of growing solidarity in Malawi. There have also been expressions of solidarity from outside Malawi, which have been looked upon by the government as undue interference in its domestic affairs. We will first address each of the five events, before returning to them to expose cracks that opened up in the solidarity wall. We conclude with the observation that greater solidarity in Malawi can only be achieved when Malawian elites shed their tendency to alienate those groups they see as “illiterate”, “uneducated” and “ignorant”.

The University of Malawi’s academic freedom showed high levels of Malawian solidarity. The lecturers enjoyed the sympathies of university students, secondary school students, school teachers, civil society, opposition politicians, religious leaders and even ordinary people in the villages. One secondary school hosted a forum in which they invited representatives of the lecturers to go and talk to students about the struggle. When a university student, Robert Chasowa, was murdered on campus on September 24, 2011, representatives from the lecturers’ union were asked to lay wreaths at the funeral. When civil society organisations organised mass demonstrations to protest what they termed “bad governance” and economic mismanagement on July 20, support came from various sections of Malawian society. Churches got involved, as did opposition politicians, street vendors and market traders in a number of districts.

On Tuesday 17 January 2011 several women in the city of Lilongwe were undressed by men believed to be street vendors. The men were said to be targeting women wearing trousers or short skirts. The next day the episode spread to the commercial capital Blantyre and the northern city of Mzuzu. Many Malawians felt scandalized and strongly spoke against the practice. A number of male activists joined female activists at a protest march in Blantyre, where church leaders, civil society activists, politicians, and professional men and women attended. Some street vendors turned up at the march but were reportedly sent back.

On February 13 this year the Malawi police arrested renowned lawyer and human rights activist Ralph Kasambara after he and his security men apprehended five individuals believed to have been planning an arson attack on offices belonging to Kasambara’s law firm. Kasambara and his security men took the suspects to the nearest police station, where the police turned on Kasambara and arrested him. The police claimed Kasambara had abducted and assaulted innocent people. Reaction to Kasambara’s arrest was phenomenal, hitting international airwaves within hours. Malawians kept vigil at the prison where Kasambara was taken before being granted bail after a re-arrest and a hospital stay due to a heart condition. Similar levels of support and solidarity were seen when opposition legislator and presidential aspirant, Atupele Muluzi, son to former president Dr. Bakili Muluzi, was arrested on Monday, 19 March and charged with inciting violence. That arrest came days after another high profile arrest, that of John Kapito, out-spoken chair of the Malawi Human Rights Commission, who was curiously accused of obtaining forex without proper documentation. Kapito was arrested days before he was scheduled to travel to Geneva, Switzerland, to make a presentation to the UN Human Rights Council.

Commenting on the solidarity shown to Ralph Kasambara, presidential spokesperson, Dr. Hetherwick Ntaba, observed that nobody was coming to the defense of thousands of poor, unknown Malawians languishing in jails amidst the judiciary strike. The judiciary strike itself also manifested healthy solidarity, with judges and magistrates joining in. Civil servants also considered laying down their tools in solidarity.

CLASS FISSURES

As opportunistic as Dr. Ntaba’s remarks sound, they point to a trend that paints not so rosy a picture of Malawian solidarity. Four days after the watershed events of July 20, 2011 Sunday Times columnist Deborah Nyangulu-Chipofya wrote about how the protests had been characterized by class exploitation and indifference. She pointed out how a petition that was delivered to President Bingu wa Mutharika at the end of a protest march on that day had been circulated through email and Facebook, reaching only a tiny section of Malawians. She quoted a part of the poster circulated through emails and social media, which provided details of where people would assemble. It said: “If you cannot join and you are a Chief Executive, Managing Director, or any other Officer, or working in the Police, Army, and if you are a Civil Servant please release your house servant/gardener on this day of 20th July.”

Nyangulu-Chipofya listed the residential areas which the poster mentioned by name calling on Malawians to take to the streets. They were mostly areas where the urban poor live. None of Malawi’s high class suburbs were listed. More revealing was the mode used to disseminate the announcement for the protests. According to the website Internet World Stats, as of June 2010 there were 716,400 Internet users in Malawi, out of an estimated 15,879,252 people, representing only 4.5 percent of the population. By December 2011 there were about 112,100 Facebook users in the country, representing a 0.7 percent penetration rate. Other observations she made were that the petition was written in English, and had not sought the views of ordinary Malawians, most of whom have no Internet access.

The January 17 episodes where women were undressed in the streets also laid bare more class fissures in the solidarity edifice. Malawian street vendors, wrote Dr. Linje Manyozo of the London School of Economics, “live in abject marginalization, in which their life is a form of death in itself.” Rather than view them as single-minded perpetrators, Dr. Manyozo’s article, published in the online newspaper Nyasatimes, sought to provide a class analysis of the image of Malawian vendors, using postcolonialist theorist Gayatri Spivak’s trope of the “sub-altern.” Dr. Manyozo argued against representing the assaults from a human rights perspective, suggesting they were “a political act in which marginalized groups used violence as a form of communication.” Responses to Dr. Manyozo agreed with his analysis, but others pointed out how he had overlooked the suffering that Malawian women were already subjected to, made even more apparent by the attacks.

MISSED OPPORTUNITIES

That both Malawian women and street vendors could be equally seen as victims of different forms of class warfare and exploitation was lost. A female pastor recently told President wa Mutharika that she knew he did not mean it when he spoke out against the attacks on women and said Malawian women were free to dress as they pleased. Churches continue to impose dress codes forbidding women from wearing trousers and short skirts to church. Ironically, it is women themselves who strictly enforce these dress codes against fellow women.

In recent weeks the current debate raging inside Malawi has been about whether or not the currency, the Malawi Kwacha, should be devalued. President wa Mutharika has launched a massive campaign against calls for the devaluation of the Kwacha, insisted upon by the International Monetary Fund, Malawian economists and other commentators. In February President wa Mutharika invited traditional leaders to Sanjika Palace in the commercial capital Blantyre. There he spoke to them about his views on why the Kwacha should not be devalued. Following the Sanjika meeting chiefs took to the state-owned airwaves and spoke in support of the president’s agenda. The reaction in the media has revealed the strong attitudes many elite Malawians hold about the chiefs. The chiefs have been called ignorant and uneducated, illiterate and incompetent to comment on matters of economic theory. These views have been expressed by opposition legislators, civil society activists, newspaper columnists and radio commentators.

As February drew to a close, the ruling Democratic Progressive Party withdrew two members of parliament from international bodies where they were representing the country. Grace Zinenani Maseko, MP for Zomba Changalume, was withdrawn from the SADC Parliamentary Forum; whereas Jennifer Chilunga, MP for Zomba Nsondole, was withdrawn from the Pan African Parliament. Both Maseko and Chilunga left the DPP in 2011 and joined newly formed People’s Party, belonging to Vice President Joyce Banda, who herself was expelled from the ruling party in 2010. During deliberations, it was women MPs who rose and supported the expulsion of their fellow women from the parliamentary bodies, while male MPs remained quiet.

CONCLUSION: SOLIDARITY RECLAIMED

Which brings us back to the question we started this discussion with: Can Malawians in 2012 depend on the type of solidarity seen in the 1950s and 1960s and in the 1990s? Although Malawi’s elites like to think of themselves as speaking for the masses, the picture on the ground points to class fissures in which some in the educated class look after their own interests while thriving on Western charity justified in the name of poor Malawians. Even more troubling is the seeming absence of a class consciousness which would otherwise acknowledge the presence of the problem as a first step toward addressing it. But solidarity has a rich history in Malawi. It will be instructive for Malawian elites to ask themselves questions that would help them draw historical lessons from the triumphs of Malawian solidarity in the past.

How did the generations of the 1950s and 1960s manage to build unity and achieve such a momentous goal as national independence? How did that unity dissipate within such a short period, leading to the one-party dictatorship? How can Malawians reclaim the arrested development of traditional forms of governance and leadership, which represent the majority of the population? What does it mean that a very high percentage of Malawi’s population is prevented from active civic participation because of the choices elite Malawians have made for the country in a misguided quest for modernisation?

Answers to these questions will help Malawi reclaim solidarity for the 21st century. Malawians will need to rethink the place of uMunthu values in the modernization process, and to seek new ways of restoring dignity and promoting a sense of communion with those sections of society considered to be “illiterate,” “ignorant” and “uneducated.” Malawi needs a new unity of purpose that will deal with hypocrisy and exploitation by both politicians and the educated classes.

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* Steve Sharra PhD is a teacher and blogs at Afrika Aphukira and for Global Voices Online. He moderates Bwalo la Aphunzitsi, an online forum for Malawian educators, and BloggingMalawi, an online forum for Malawian bloggers.
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