Chewas think they made it in life

 The Chewa Heritage Foundation is looking for Chewa CVs. NonChewas need not apply! They want to see which Chewas have skills, you know, there might be some vacancies that might need a Chewa candidate in the Tonse future.

Though they are frantically trying to walk away from the release, two journalists have authenticated the release. They can deny it all they want; it is only because of the furore.

Nyau -Gold Standard of  'Malawian Culture'

We love our Chewa brothers, the history of Malawi is in part the history of the Chewas, but someone needs to call them out on their never-ending tribal myopia and mania.

Chewas came to Malawi in the 1500s, they found this land occupied by short people who they called Akafula. They brutally murdered them in what can be argued as the first ever genocide. I say this to highlight the fact that they should know that they came here from elsewhere, just like the rest of us. The only people who were here before history, we killed them all.

Chewas by and large learned how to trade and live with others and endure modern problems such as slavery and colonialism together. From Chilembwe to Yatuta Chisiza, Malawians of all tribal calling stood up until they took down white rule.

As soon as the country won the war over colonial rule, however, Chewacentrism reared its ugly head. Kamuzu was put at the centre of Malawi and his policies were to be Chewacentric. Malawians have never had a frank discussion on how tribal thought gave us that dictator.

He moved the capital from Zomba to a dusty patch close to his tribal homeland, he filled government positions with his tribesmen. The ‘new‘ country was to be named after their kingdom and while that was only fair since they were/are the dominant group, they started pushing it.

The Shameless Release

Tumbuka, among other tribal languages, was taught in schools, they stopped it, they held book-burning sessions just like the dark ages or Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

They did not want teachers from the north, so they sent them packing and forcibly transferred them away from the Chewa heartland.

Quota System was first implemented by a heavily Chewanised administration. People had to change names to make them sound Chewa to make it in life.

They made their tribal language the national language and set up a Chichewa Board at Chancellor College, funnelled money into developing their language. Even Yao children grew up learning ‘Maliro ndi Miyambo ya a Chewa’ as if they didn’t have their own rites. You see. they justify it as trying to promote national unity, but notice how they only want others to erase their identities and adopt theirs. Strange unity, this.

Just like before, Malawians of all calling banded together to fight the Chewacentric MCP tyranny. People lost their lives and some families will never be whole again because they stuck their neck out and dared a Chewa backed Kamuzu. Malawi won.

For the record, Most Chewas voted against multiparty politics in the early 90s, they also overwhelmingly voted for MCP in the following general elections - meaning to say - they wanted Kamuzu Banda to stay on.

As a matter of fact, no matter what any other candidate says, the Chewa block always largely votes MCP nonetheless. They are a tribal cabal by definition.

When the Mutharika dynasty rose up and plunged Malawi into another sunken phase, Malawians rose up again from Timothy Mtambo, who can barely speak Chichewa, to Winiko. Malawi rose up again and won.

As soon as MCP got back in power, it seems the old thinking still exists.

Many people are comparing the latest move by the Chewa body to Mhlakho wa Ahlomwe, they are wrong. What the Lhomwe were doing was just them trying to do what the Chewas started back in the Kamuzu days. The Chewa wrote the tribalism book.

So, what do we do now? Well, Chewas will not change in our lifetimes, they are always going to feel like the rest of us are deputy Malawians, after all we speak their language, when one googles ‘Malawian culture,’ their Nyau comes up. Let them be, the solution to the folly lies in two things that you might not be thinking of: A strong UTM and 50+1!

As soon as they try to make Malawi a Chewa project, UTM should get out of the Tonse Alliance and band with another party that will starve them of the votes needed to make government in the 50+1 system. Let them be MCP/Chewa and let them face the rest of the country at the ballot.

Maybe it is a mistake to pretend that they are superior. Maybe it is time someone got an injunction against teaching Chichewa to nonChewa people. Maybe it is time we made all languages in Malawi official.

Give us dictatorship - Chewa voting patterns in 93 Referendum

You see a Chewa man can live in Nkhatabay for forty years and not even learn the local language because they feel others must bow to their culture. When someone speaks Chichewa with Yao or Lhomwe accent they also get laughed at because you see, you can never be Chewa if you are not.

Time to end the hegemony. If they want a kingdom, we can split up the country, it's not like we would mind not being in the same country with our Nyau-wearing, rat-eating neighbours. What will we lose?  

If they feel this is their country, then we can let them have it. 

The truth is, Chewa districts harbour some of the poorest Malawians, if you go to Nsundwe it's not uncommon for Nyau to raid a market and take other people's property, they also harbour some of the biggest illiterate folk and we saw how they needed a whole 21 point to enter college under quota. 

Instead of trying to band with the rest of the country to uplift the nation and make it better, they don't want to leave their 1800 thought behind. Some are very proud to be ignorant and the entitlement of some is sickening. They behave as if everyone in Lilongwe or government should pay homage to the Chewa landowners and kings. 

Politicians love them poor, ignorant. They lionize Kamuzu Banda and make them blindly vote MCP because they are promised entitlement. They believe that they need to be fed and petted like precious dogs. 

Someone had to say it.

Disclaimer: I am not a subject of Gawa Undi, in fact, fuck Gawa Undi and he can send me his CV, I am out of tissue paper. 

 

 

 

Maneb Boss Arrest Either Historic or Dangerous

 Look, I am all for this: if public officials are to be arrested for doing a bad job, then let's goooooo! It is however strange that of all the public officers that have been doing bad jobs it seems only one person has been arrested and that is kind of weird to be honest.

Before you continue, This commentary is written with the assumption that you are aware of the arrest of the suspended MANEB chief. See here if you are unupdated

The soon to be former MANEB boss, Gerald Chiunda, was everything one hates in a public officer. If you read audit reports from MANEB when he was there you will see how he flouted procurement procedures, how MANEB promoted and recruited people without proper procedure.

Chiunda - No Angel, but...

Some people at MANEB actually allege that they were entrapped and then fired in the most DPP way possible while Chiunda was there.

The list is long, to be honest, there are so many things that make me happy to see the guy behind bars, but the charge sheet of the crime he is currently charged with is really curious to be honest.

Here is how Jarson Malowa of Times reported the story yesterday:

‘Suspended Malawi National Examinations Board (Maneb) Executive Director, Gerald Chiunda, will remain in custody after the Senior Resident Magistrate (SRM) Court in Zomba reserved its ruling on bail application until next Tuesday, February 9, 2021.

The other three accused are the board's Head of Security, Owen Khuntho, Chief Examinations Development Officer and Chief Examinations Security Officer, Ishmael Faki and Joseph Chilombe, respectively.

The four were arrested on allegations that they failed to exercise due care and attention in relation to the security of national examination materials.

The case is related to the leakage of 2020 Malawi School Certificate of Education (MSCE) examinations.

They both deny the charges leveled against them.’

So here are the important basics:

MANEB has been shit lately and under Chiunda. Chiunda is suspended. He is not accused of leaking the exams, but not being careful enough to prevent the leak. He is at the time of writing this in jail awaiting his bail application.

Cool. Firstly, is this really something that he has to be kept in jail over? What would he do if he was at home? Allow more leaks? He is suspended for Christ’s sake!

That is not even my biggest issue with the arrest of this guy, the issue is that why are the arrests of bad office holders starting only now?

Who at the Reserve Bank has been arrested for the billions that have been stolen? Which jail holds the guy who oversaw the coffers have billions get stolen during the Cash Gate years?

Why have police chiefs not been arrested for crimes that saw civilians die in their custody or during demonstrations such as those of 20 July?

Who has been arrested at Road Traffic for the fake licenses that get issued to motorists who go on to cause accidents on the roads?

When hospitals run out of medicines and people die, I don’t see any doctors or anyone from the Medical Stores or Ministry of Health being arrested for it?

What about the guys that blew the COVID money where are the arrest warrants?

Our soccer national team is also losing too many matches and wasting billions, who needs to get arrested?

The most glaring example being MEC. A whole court found them incompetent. They wasted money on foreign lawyers and kept grandstanding until the costs to the taxpayers hit billions. Why was Ansah not arrested? Why is Sangwani Mwafulirwa not in Jail?

Remember when they got a loan to buy shitty tractors from India and then all they did was made to apologize?

You get the picture, it seems this Chiunda guy, as much as he sucks is being targeted for political ends. The government seems to be looking for a way to show the nation that it is in control even though the leak happened under them.

If we are going to hold public officials criminally liable, let's do it, but let’s do it across the board and let’s put the phrases in the contracts of these men and also not forget to clarify the law to the public.

Where in the Penal Code is what crime, people need to know, and if they know, they should be able to tell why people at ESCOM can waste money and enter into shitty deals that drain public coffers and yet not get arrested.

People need to know how, for example, Peter Mutharika used government money to buy buses for private teams and lied about it and yet never even get to attend a hearing on it.

Something is not right. The arrest of Chiunda is either an historic milestone or it is symptomatic of something very sinister.

Reality Check: Europeans United a Divided, Imploding Africa

Time to sober up. Europeans united Africa. Here is how.

You have probably been in a class or been bombarded with tales of how old white men sat at the 1884 Berlin Conference to carve up Africa greedily among themselves. 

That conference is also the genesis of Africa’s ills today and then, some say. 

It’s time to revisit this and set a few records straight. Europeans actually united Africa. 

At the time of the partition, Africa had over 10,000 polities or what you would call nations if they were allowed to morph into today’s Westphalian style countries. See the Murdock Ethnic Map for reference.

How does one divide 10,000 into about 40 parts? And what would Africa be if those zillion ethnic groups were left to their devices?

If countries were to be made from Africa's ethnic groups - United? 

The partition did not also disrupt a united Africa or any wholesome kingdoms, if we can trace the last time Africa was more divided it would have to be just before Africa was carved up among Europeans. In fact, Europeans had to create chieftainships in places where there were none such as in the acephalous villages of the Igbos in Southern Nigeria.

The French imposed chef de cantons who were mere clerks. Today Africans deeply respect traditional authority and rally around their chiefs, which is a unifying factor and also a product of the partition and of course Frederik Lugard. (See: The Fate of Africa: From the Hopes of Freedom to the Heart of Despair, by. Martin Meredith. New York: PublicAffairs. 2005.) 

To understand this, we need to go back, way back to the beginning of the 1800s and start in South Africa.

Shaka Zulu was rising and militarizing the Zulu Kingdom this, though contested (see The Cobbing Controversy), sparked chaos in Southern Africa -a period known as the Mfecane. It can be argued that it was the first major widespread war as it saw up to 2 million Africans die as tribes fleeing from Shaka Zulu invaded/pillaged/ran over others as they themselves fled northwards.

The Mfecane saw Zwangendaba's men reaching as far as northern Malawi, conquering local tribes there. All this was before 1840. I should know because my own tribe’s kingdom was subjugated by these marauding Ngonis and it took the British to restore the Chikulamayembe Kingdom in the first decade of the 1900s and prevent the warlike Ngonis from finishing off my tribesmen. They had already killed off most men and taken over land and women.

My own tribe - the Tumbuka - had arrived in what is now Malawi at the end of the 1700s. There were frequent wars and a genocide was instituted by the other newly arrived tribed in Malawi that saw the elimination of the original inhabitants of the land, the Akafula people.

This answers part of the question I posed above, if Africa was left alone, tribes like mine would have simply have been eliminated and enslaved or as the Akafula/Batwas/Twa saw, simply genocided out of the equation.

After 1840, we know through David Livingstone’s journals that the whole place was either decimated by slave raiders, tribal war and general chaos. Bodies were flowing down the Zambezi as Bantu killed Bantu all along the Zambezi deep into Manyuema or what is now Congo.  (See:  2003 — INTO AFRICA: The Epic Adventures of Stanley & Livingstone. Martin Dugard)

After the partition - bad? 

There were wars in Ethiopia and there was strife everywhere, after all the movement of Africans about the continent before European contact was all about conquest and fleeing from conquest.

The partition did not split Africa up. It united a broken continent. And with resources fast disappearing with the explosion of population in the 1800s, the partition of Africa might have prevented major disaster in Africa.

It is not like the partitioned also disturbed a rich Africa either. The population of Africa only started exploding circa 1800 following the introduction of maize by the Portuguese. Maize meant that Bantu Africans did not have to rely on poor grain and starting sustaining more numbers. 

Here is where I will insert my disclaimer. Yes, the borders the Europeans imposed on Africa are arbitrary and they have resulted in grouping incompatible groups such as the Kikuyu and Luo under one nation or splitting groups such as the Chewa between three nations (Mozambique, Zambia and Malawi).

While this has been blamed on some conflicts, it is not like Africans are not independent and cannot go back to their old ‘borders’ if they want.

Oversimplified Map of Ethnic Africa

I have also deliberately left out the atrocities and pain inflicted by Europeans on Africans with their colonialism/exploitation that followed. That is for another day, today I sought to zoom in on the question of Africa as being more united following the partition and not divided.

So when fake Pan-Africanists invoke the Berlin Conference to try to deflect from the fact that they cannot lift Africa out of poverty or ignorance, show them this.