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.