Chitimba Farewell
20Nov13


Our last week together on the project has been almost perfect and very much the conditions we were hoping to have in order to move our work forward. Almost perfect, except for 2 reasons, the week was too short a period and our miscalculation about the effect of the heat in November on the shores of Lake Malawi. We have kept up our routine of 8h00 starts and 12h00 break for lunch and then back at it till 17h00. That makes an 8 or 9 hour day and leaves us quite tired. It's all intellectual work but nonetheless it wears you down and the evening is for discussing and sharing and hoping some more ideas will pop up.
As we left Mzuzu we passed by Mzuzu University known as Mzuni this time to interview Professor Kings Phiri in the History department who managed to survive the purge the University of Malawi of 1975-76 when almost all the senior lecturers and staff (mostly northerners) were picked up and detained one by one. So many had been taken away that he was certain his turn had come and was only spared because the backroom perpetrators inflicting this misery were themselves cut short in their nefarious scheme. He described as State Terrorism the way people lived in constant fear of arbitrary detention. It was a great interview and e offered advise and contacts of others we should get to see.
That led us up to the University of Livingstonia at the top of the high plateau overlooking the lake immediately above Chitimba, where we had another full and detailed account of life in detention by Augustin Msiska who was just about to become University Librarian at Chancellor College when he was detained. Even after his release, the regime would not allow his life to return to normal and after a period of enforced unemployment, he finally was allowed to leave the country and work at the University of Zambia (UNZA) where he remained mostly without his family for many years. Only much later near the end of the Banda regime was he able to return to pick up his library career which had been cut off many years before.
We survived the Gorodi road. To get to Livingstonia we had to negotiate the the 20 hairpin switchback turns that hug the slope of the escarpment and weave their way up 1000 metres in about 10 or 12 kilometres. It had never been a priority of government planning and so is in very rough shape. It was built by one of the determined Scottish missionaries and named the Gordon Road after him. The people harmonised his name and the road to sound like Gorodi. However, what struck both of us, having travelled the road in the sixties or seventies, was the deforestation. Then huge trees forested the whole mountain. They are virtually all gone to the charcoal makers and brick kilns and the devastation of the slopes, the erosion, the dried up streams have created an environmental disaster. There is literally no government presence at all to manage the delicate environment and the population pressure and need for fuel is denuding the hillsides and even cliff-faces of anything that burns.
Lukwe Camp is a wonderful respite. It is just on the edge of the plateau below the huge mission site. The cabins and resto-bar are perched right out over the precipice. The Belgian couple run it on a permaculture basis. Their trees have been left standing, and they have small ponds for fish raising and irrigating their gardens that supply all the food they serve. The steepest slopes are left in a purely natural state. It is a wonderful little oasis with amazing vistas of the whole eastern slope of the Nyika Plateau and the lakeshore.
Even in the sleepy, hot town of Chitimba, people bear the scars of Kamuzu's regime. Once our hosts knew our mission, it didn't take long to identify someone in the community who had suffered. James Mzembe was born 1924 and at 89 is moving with great difficulty. He had been a driver in Zambia for many years and like any expatriate he welcomed his home people whenever they passed through Kitwe on Zambia's Copperbelt. One of these was an ex-minister whose movements, even in exile, were closely monitored by the Malawian Special Branch who reported to to their headquarters in Malawi that James was a 'rebel sympathiser'. On a trip home to visit his family he was arrested at the border and savagely beaten and interrogated about his connections. He was delivered to the Central Region's infamous Dzeleka Detention Centre where he was allowed to recover and then released. He feared returning to Zambia where the Malawi security operatives were known to arrange disappearances, so he fled to Mozambique and later Tanzania and then eventually Zambia but not before he had lost his family and anything he possessed. When he finally came back to Malawi to retire, he was alone and found no-one left of his family here. Now he lives off the charity of old family friends and well-wishers.
The Chitimba Camp is a very productive workspace. It is a beautiful environment and our wonderful hosts Carmen and Eddy offered us whatever we needed to have a comfortable working space. We got a lot of correspondence done with possible publishers and collaborators. We continued our review of the chapters and their content and flow, and managed a couple of interviews as well. We were housed at the southern end of the camp away from the almost daily comings and goings of the overlanders.

Overlanders: The cycle of life at an overlander camp is quite fascinating. These huge trucks are fitted for up to 30 passengers with all the camping and cooking gear they need to be essentially self-sufficient. They board in Capetown and travel over a period of a month or so up to Nairobi or vice versa. I have always been critical of the concept and called it Africa in a bubble or more correctly tourists in a bubble passing through Africa. They are totally self-contained and to a great degree self-preoccupied, so we had very little relations with any of the first few groups that came through. There was little to connect us. We are old, they are young. They sleep in tents and we are relaxing in the wicker chairs on the porch of our chalets away from the bar scene.
However, one evening our new neighbour in the room next door introduced himself. Lucas had abandoned the tent scene for a couple of nights and opted to sleep in a bed in a room with a shower. He had overheard our conversation about Malawi history and politics in the afternoon and wanted to learn more about our project. From Italy, he was an investment fund manager living the high stress life in London. Now in his early-mid 40s he had taken a long leave away from work and was rethinking his future. He had planned three months of three different overland tours, in Africa, Asia and Latin America. However, most impressive was his grasp of development economics and what was needed to turn around the situation in a country like Malawi. I have interacted with many people who wear the title of “Development Expert”, but few have ever offered the kind of perceptions and insights as this young man. In any case, we never really got to talk to him again because their trips are very structured and intense. He walked the 16 kilometres up the escarpment to Livingstonia University and back and by the time he got back he was wiped out and ready for bed. His truck and group left early the next morning on their way to the next experience.
Between the full moon over the lake and a few encounters and despite the oppressive November heat, we managed to be very productive. The chapters have taken shape, the stories are compelling and the interest of participants and supporters remains high. We are also highly motivated to get this book to press, although the work to accomplish over the next few months is daunting.

Good afternoon madam. Learning from our mistakes.
We have re-listened to every testimony we have in our possession. We have done some research on the web to guide us in our writing, and we have undertaken some of the organisational work needed to move to the next phase. Our setting for this work continues to be ideal as the first rains have helped cool down the climate a bit and Rachel our hostess continues to spoil us with her hospitality. As well we have developed a comfortable routine of taking a mind-clearing walk and drinks late in the afternoon to a local lodge run by a charming couple about 1.5 kilometres from here. Regrettably, the grant funds for us to travel and work elsewhere are still in the pipeline and are frustrating our progress. However, the urgency of the work was driven dramatically home on Friday when we confronted the dearth of material available on the subject we are writing about at Malawi's prestigious Mzuzu University.
Little by little we seem to be getting closer to the grant funds arriving in our hands. Calls to the embassy have led to calls to the intermediary agency and to the Karonga Museum so that maybe we almost, possibly, may be able to access our funds by the middle of next week. On that promise, suggestion, hope we are planning to move on towards Karonga and have abandoned our plans of trips to the south and centre of the country to meet the people and complete the interviews we wanted to do. In order to keep ourselves out of the clutches of the hyperactivity which preoccupies Kapote's time and energy when we are in Karonga, we are planning to stop at an overlanders lodge where we stayed on the way to Mzuzu and where Kapote got his glasses. We are taking two rooms, one for sleeping and the other for setting up our work. In that modest, but splendid isolation we are planning to put one more week of solid work on the book. That will take us to Karonga, where we will spend a few days sorting out all the administrivia and finalise our plans for the period from December until I get back to Malawi sometime in February. That's the plan for today and it's a good plan.

That huge plateau you see in the distance is what makes our communication impossible while we are at Chilumba. It's tough but we will survive.

The evening walk to our closest lodge with a bar has become a preferred way to stretch our legs and give our minds a chance to free-range after the very intense work sessions during the day. We found that the change of place allowed us a change of focus and gave us good fodder for looking at our work in a different light. The Pine Tree lodge is run by a very nice couple, Paul of British stock and Charity of Lomwe / Angoni background. They have a new baby boy just a months old and run a tidy little B&B style lodge just at the city limit of Mzuzu. We checked it out when we first got to Mzuzu, but never thought about going back until Monday this week, when after another long day of listening and discussing we opted to go for a walk to stretch our legs. We got to the place and found the outer grill was locked, but Paul obligingly allowed us to sit for a couple of drinks on the deck. Since then we go every other day as part of our need to stretch our legs and extend our horizons.
On the walk we meet many groups of primary school age children. Most are shy and stare at us as they would at any strangers. As they see us more frequently, they gather up courage and try their Standard 2 English. The drill they have learned is, “Good morning. How are you? I am fine thank you.” One young girl walking with her friends, piped up cheerily to our Good afternoon. “I am fine madam and how are you?” In the same instant, she and her friends knew she had made a mistake and she burst into embarrassed giggles while her friend offered the correct version, “She is fine SIR!” It led to Kapote to recall his first conversation with an Englishman when he was only a little older than these young ones. When asked if he was related to the Rev. Mwakasungura, he proudly announced, “Yes sir. He is my grandson.” We remember and hopefully learn from our mistakes.
We wish the same could be said of our political history. We needed to get some documents and thought that the Mzuzu University Library would have some rather basic primary documents. Dunduzu Chisiza, one of Malawi's more charismatic and dynamic pre-independence leaders wrote two very insightful and farseeing pamphlets entitled Africa: What Lies Ahead and Realities of African Independence in which he foretold the strong possibility of dictatorship following independence. The other document we assumed should be part of any university library collection was Justice Mtegha's enquiry which rigourously documented how the 1983 assassination of 4 senior politicians was masterminded by Dr Banda and his inner circle. Such material is part of our retelling this period of history for the current crop of amnesiac politicians. To our amazement, the Library did not even have any reference to Dunduzu let alone his documents and the librarian had never heard of the Mtegha report.
We were dumfounded. The premier institute of higher learning in the Northern Region with courses and programmes in History and Education does not provide the students access to such seminal material. We suspect that Kamuzu's ban on books such as Animal Farm also covered Dunduzu's work and is effectively still in place.
We are truly doomed to repeat history since we are not learning from it. Just the other day, President Joyce Banda, officiating at some public presentation in or near Kasungu, praised Kamuzu as the saviour of the nation and liberator of the women which was the same sort of mind-numbing brainwash that Kamuzu imposed on us during his reign. Meanwhile the state of terror he ran neither saved nor liberated anyone as it killed and imprisoned its imagined enemies.
We leave for Chitimba on Wednesday after a very productive 3 week stretch in Mzuzu. We have had access to high speed internet by virtue of the Munthali house being within a stone's throw of the transmission towers. Unfortunately the house's infrastructure was blocking the signal when we sit on the other side. I discovered that by going to sit at the back door and pointing the dongle at the tower, I got a super fast reliable connection. However, in Chitimba we will not have that luxury. Towers there are few and far between, so I am not sure when the next blog will get out to you.
Our work has really progressed and the pressing need to get this history out on the public stage comes home more clearly every time a politician speaks about how wonderful things were in the Kamuzu era and a conspiracy of silence envelopes the crimes of the time. In my many Quixotic campaigns for justice, I never expected the movement to free speech and democracy would turn into praise singing for the barbarism of dictatorship. We haven't learned a damned thing.