Author Archives: Michelle Dobrovolny

About Michelle Dobrovolny

Born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Michelle Dobrovolny studied at Red River College and the University of Winnipeg, earning a BA in communications. She worked for a year in publishing, becoming the senior writer for the Encyclopedia of Manitoba, before returning to journalism as a reporter for The Prague Post. She was awarded a stipend for graduate studies, and earned an MA in journalism through Swansea University and the University of Amsterdam while working for the English news desk of Radio Netherlands. She enjoys cycle touring, and once rode a bicycle on a self-supported trip from Winnipeg to Galveston, Texas.

The food security paradox

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Food security has been the hallmark of Malawian President Bingu wa Mutharika's rule, yet half a million Malawians are at risk of starving

Following a famine in 2002, in which thousands died and three million people were relying on food aid, Malawi has turned itself around and recorded a surplus of maize, the country’s staple crop, for the past five years.

There is enough food for everybody. So why, according to a recent report from the Malawi Vulnerability Assessment Committee, are half a million Malawians still at risk of starving?

Malawi is a signatory to the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), the international treaty which determines access to food as a human right. Further, the right to food is included in the national constitution.

Unfortunately, neither has done much to prevent people from going hungry in the country.

Chandiwira Chisi, a food security activist working for the international NGO ActionAid, says that without having the right to food enshrined in law, such food inequities will continue to exist. That’s why right to food legislation is being pushed by a number of NGOs in the country.

“If we have a clearly developed law in place,” says Chisi, “it could guarantee that citizens of different social levels can protect their right to food.”

As economist Amartya Sen famously argued, people don’t go hungry because a country lacks food but because certain people don’t have access to food. Preventing famine isn’t simply about producing more food. In most cases, the food is there.

Malawi is a case in point. Food security has been the hallmark of Bingu wa Mutharika’s presidency since he took office in 2004. Millions of Malawians were relying on food aid in 2002. The recent surpluses arecredited to a fertilizer subsidy program that Mutharika supported in 2005. Thousands of kilograms of fertilizer are distributed each year to the 80 per cent of Malawians who rely on subsistence farming.

Carol Samdup, an advisor for the Canadian NGO, Rights & Democracy, who helped draft the right to food bill, says the new legislation will allow government to be held accountable when food shortages arise as a result of mismanagement.

“The value of the human rights framework is that it elevates food security from an aspirational goal to a legal obligation of the state,” says Samdup. “Consequently, [people] are able to hold the state accountable when policies are ineffective, discriminatory, or harmful of their enjoyment of their right to food.”

The bill also proposes to establish an arms-length investigative body to look into—and hopefully prevent—potential food violations. Similar legislation providing for the right to food has been adopted in ten countries over the past decade.

The Malawian right to food bill was first drafted in 2002 but it has been passing hands since and, nearly a decade later, it seems the political will to push it forward has evaporated.

“Initially, the government was on board when it came to recognition of a right to food framework,” says Chisi. “But then, early in 2010, we began seeing a change on their part. They began expressing fears that the Right to Food bill would exert too much pressure on government.”

Samdup has heard similar concerns from the Malawian administration.

“There seems to be a misunderstanding about the right to food within Malawi’s government,” she says. “It doesn’t mean that you have to feed people. It means you have to provide the platform from which people can feed themselves.”

Dr. Andrew Daudi, secretary for the agriculture ministry, refused to comment on the government’s position.

Whether or not the Right to Food bill would prove effective remains to be seen. What is clear is that with half a million presently at risk of starving, subsidizing fertilizers and international treaties have not been enough to prevent people from going hungry in Malawi.

A sample of Mwangwego Script

The Politics of Malawi’s Alphabet

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Nolen Mwangwego scripted an original alphabet to better suit Malawi's vernacular

The Latin alphabet is so familiar that few of us pause to question its use. But its application to a number of non-European languages is in fact quite controversial. Letters can carry meaning as much as words. For Malawian scholar Nolen Mwangwego, the Latin letters used to transcribe most African languages—including Malawi’s vernacular, Chichewa—are  politically-loaded ideograms of Western economic and cultural dominance.

“Why do we use the English alphabet to write our languages?” he asks. “In our languages [in Malawi] we have a verb that means ‘to write’. In Chichewa, it is kulemba. So if this verb exists, it means that people used to write before colonization. We did have our own way of writing. It makes sense that we would have one again.”

Accordingly, Mwangwego has developed an alphabet specifically for the Tumbuka, Chichewa and Sena languages spoken in Malawi. His script, unabashedly named Mwangwego Script, serves two purposes: as political statement, and as an improved representation for the unique qualities of these languages.

In Africa, the alphabet is political. With the exception of Ethiopia, Algeria and Vai, where syllabaries have existed for centuries, African societies were traditionally oral cultures. Literacy came with Christian missionaries who initially wrote down African languages as a way to proselytize to the masses. Literacy in Africa was not a benign historical development but a political instrument of religious conversion and cultural colonization. For Mwangwego, the continued use of the Latin alphabet is an outdated relic of an oppressive history.

“We were colonized. That colonization is still in our minds,” he says echoing the sentiment of Kenyan author Ngugi wa Thiongo.

Mwangwego is not the first African to develop an alphabet as a political statement. In 1949, author Souleymane Kante introduced the N’ko alphabet to Guinea, which soon spread across West Africa. Kante described his syllabary as a response to the denigration of oral culture by the West as well as an attempt to preserve traditional forms of knowledge.

A sample of Mwangwego Script

Mwangwego Script, however, serves a pragmatic as well as political purpose. The Latin alphabet is simply not designed to represent the nuances of certain sounds in Malawian languages. In Chichewa, for example, the words for with and is become the homonym ndi when transcribed with the Latin alphabet. Though meaning can generally be gleaned from context, the lack of markings for ndi can lead to confusion. Literally, the Chichewa phrase munthu ndi galu as transcribed with the Latin alphabet can be read ambiguously as “person with dog” or “person is dog.”

 Mwangwego says his alphabet is also better suited to the grammatical structure of Malawian languages, which are part of the Bantu linguistic group that is dominant throughout sub-Saharan Africa. Bantu languages are constructed using prefixes and suffixes attached to root nouns. Using Latin consonants and vowels to write Chichewa can make for overly-long constructions. For example, the word zosiyanasiyana, meaning “different things”, takes only 7 characters using Mwanwego script, as opposed to the 14 required with the Latin alphabet.

Mwangwego began teaching his script to others in 2001, forming a community of about 200 adherents who use it to communicate amongst one another via email and at social gatherings. While there likely won’t be a mass movement to change Malawi’s alphabet any time soon, Mwangwego Script, as a political statement, claims literacy as part of Malawian culture rather than merely a Western representation of language.

“If we had our own alphabet, that would be an identity for Malawi,” says Mwangwego. “It shows that writing is not just part of Western culture.”

Guitarist Agorosso in front of The Warehouse, a music hall in Blantyre where he often performs.

Breaking Taboos Through Music

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Guitarist Agorosso in front of The Warehouse, a music hall in Blantyre where he often performs.

When Malawian musician Agorosso had no money for a guitar, he made one and taught himself how to play.

“I just used a small metallic pot with nylon strings,” he says. “I didn’t know how to play, I just tuned it to my wish.”

This kind of resourcefulness reflects the importance of music in Malawian society. In a country where literacy is stunted by lack of resources and where 85 per cent of the population lives in rural poverty, music is vital; it’s a way to reflect the thoughts and feelings of people with no other means of expression.

But music here is much more than just catharsis. As an outlet to convey the daily struggles of people facing food shortages and an HIV/AIDS epidemic, Malawian music is innately political, something Agorosso acknowledges in his own work.

“The role of the musician is to speak for the people, for those who suffer, to speak for those who cannot speak for themselves. And to speak to them. Because when you compose a song, it can be heard and felt by everyone, more than just words,” he says.

Agorosso, whose real name is Lloyd Phaundi, draws on the traditional melodies of his Sena heritage, a group with roots in Mozambique where Portuguese cultural influence is strong. His lyrics draw on daily life in his community.

“I compose songs based on what I have seen in the village or what I see in our day-to-day life,” he says. “My music is a way of expressing what I feel, what I hear, or what I have been told.”

In Kulowa Kufa, the Chichewa term for the practice of widows who are forced to marry their late husband’s brother, Agorosso sings about the angst of widows and how the practice helps spread diseases such as HIV/AIDS. His open criticism of cultural customs is rare in Malawi, particularly in rural villages where tradition is valued above all else.

If he is allowed room for social critique, it is because musicians in Malawi are often granted license as a kind of alangizi or “advisor.” Much like the court jesters of medieval Europe, alangizi express through art what is otherwise taboo. In his music, Agorosso sings about what is not talked about in everyday conversation.

“In song, I can be free to speak about such things,” he says. “And when there is truth in that song, it can become political, depending on how you interpret it.”

But beyond the village, musical censorship remains an issue on national radio and in the press. Even 15 years after the end of the eccentric dictatorship of the late Kamuzu Banda—who banned the Simon and Garfunkel song “Cecilia” because it reminded him of his mistress of the same name—there remains a lingering unwillingness to probe sensitive issues publicly.

While musicians are freer to challenge the status quo than the press, which relies heavily on revenue from government advertising, there are still consequences for criticizing power. The music of national icon Lucius Banda, for example, is banned on Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, the state-owned broadcaster, because of his politically-charged lyrics. In 2001, musician Evison Matafale died in prison, likely the result of police violence, after writing a series of letters condemning government action.

While Agorosso doesn’t censor what he sings about, he does shy away from openly lambasting government. But there remains a latent critique in his songs when documenting social injustice.

“If the government is doing something to the people, then I would sing a song not to criticize but maybe to say that things shouldn’t be this way,” says Agorosso. “The intention is maybe not to clash with government, but to advise one another about what things should be like.”

The importance of music is often overlooked in Malawi. But in offering emotional release while documenting the struggles of rural Malawians, Agorosso’s music draws attention to social injustice even while public speech on such issues remains restricted. For the people here whose voices have been muted by the constraints of poverty and censorship, his small metallic pot with nylon strings brings not just music but social change.

Listen to more music from Agorosso here:

Mafafaanga

Malongero

Nalira Mwananga

Suicide Criminals

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HIV/AIDS has made death a part of daily life, contributing to increased rates of suicide across sub-Saharan Africa.

The self-immolation of the Manda family in an impoverished Blantyre slum has been grabbing headlines in Malawi for weeks. Many commentators here have been mulling over why the siblings made their fatal pact. But far more concerning to me is the way 19-year-old Maria Manda, the sole survivor of the blaze, was treated after being rescued. Attempted suicide is a misdemeanour offense in Malawi, punishable by two years imprisonment with hard labour. Once pulled from the fire, Manda was duly arrested and charged for her transgression. She pleaded guilty in court.

Coming from Canada, where we speak of suicide victims, the prosecution of Manda as a criminal seems to me an unusual punishment for a non-crime. Here in Malawi, however, suicide is uncritically accepted as against the law, a criminal offense rather than a social issue.

While I was surprised by Manda’s arrest, Davie Chingwalu, the press officer for the Malawi police in Blantyre, was equally surprised by my questioning of the criminalization of attempted suicide.

“Yes, it’s illegal,” said Chingwalu, his eyebrows arched in surprise. “How else do you deal with someone who deliberately takes a life?”

The police could not provide statistics on how many people are arrested for attempted suicide each year in Malawi. (The national police spokesperson, Willy Maluka, said that compiling such statistics is time-consuming as it is done by hand. I actually believe the police on this one—I have personally seen the hand-drawn graphs of the 2010 crime rates at Blantyre’s police headquarters.) But Chingwalu acknowledges that the police pursue such cases when they are brought to their attention.

While attempted suicide, which was decriminalized in Canada in 1972, remains illegal in many countries, most of these countries do not bother expending resources on prosecuting people who pose a danger to themselves, not others. There is a tacit acknowledgement of the failed logic in punishing someone whose despair warps life into a torture worse than death.

In Malawi, adherence to the letter of the law means that people like Maria Manda will face “justice” rather than sympathy—or help. This attitude towards suicide needs to be openly discussed and criticized, particularly when studies show that suicide has become a parallel epidemic to HIV/AIDS.

Though there is not data for Malawi specifically, studies carried out in South Africa link increased suicide rates in sub-Saharan Africa to the rise of HIV/AIDS. According to South Africa’s National Center for Health Statistics, the rate of fatal poisonings—ingesting agricultural pesticides—is by far the most common method of suicide in sub-Saharan Africa, increasing fivefold during the 1990s, when the HIV/AIDS epidemic was rapidly spreading. Extend such numbers to Malawi, a country similarly afflicted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and you’ll likely find a consequent rise in suicide, which makes the decriminalization of suicide an important issue for legislators. Chasing after “criminals” driven by disease, despair and desperate circumstances to take their own lives makes little less sense, particularly in one of the world’s  six poorest countries. Money expended on prosecuting suicide criminals could instead go towards treating the underlying social ills that plague the country.

I cannot say what kind of problems Maria Manda faced that drove her and her siblings to seek absolution in death. But forcing her to stand trial for the attempt to take her life does not address these problems and, worse, can only exacerbate her despair. We should be questioning the logic of a system that punishes a young woman’s grief-driven angst.

Tour de Malawi

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Cycling is common in Malawi, not just as recreation but for transporting goods over long distances

As he cycled along the road from Blantyre from Zomba, Ryan Sanderson- Smith looked up and was faced with the sheer rock face of the Zomba plateau, rising steeply to an elevation of 1,200 metres.

His first impulse: turn back. The 26-year-old South African was riding a bicycle loaded with panniers and camping gear. The air, weighed down with the humid pressure of an incoming storm, made every revolution of the wheel feel hotly languid. But the nearest village was kilometres away. He had no choice but to keep going—even after night fell and the rain clouds broke.

“I am glad I had no idea how high or far it was,” he says. “In the end, it was a good challenge. I could only laugh.”

By the standards of your average African adventurer, Sanderson-Smith’s idea of a “good challenge” fringes on lunacy. He has shunned the relative comfort of a 4 x 4 Safari jeep, instead choosing to hit the pavement on a Mountain Trek bicycle bought from a Malawian farmer. Having embarked from Cape Maclear at the bottom tip of Lake Malawi, Sanderson-Smith plans to ride the bicycle to his hometown of Plettenburg Bay—a distance of over 3,000 kilometres.

Not much lies behind his decision to cycle through one of the world’s poorest countries. He has never done cycle touring but wanted to try a kind of travel that would immerse him in a landscape, rather than simply allowing him to view it from behind the bug-smeared glass of a car window.

“I wanted a new challenge, to push my limits, become very fit and experience travelling, inch by inch,” he says. “I pretty much just jumped on a bike spur of the moment. The idea just popped into my head and I grabbed it.”

In part, his journey is an escape from the kind of sedentary life that most people find comforting. Sanderson-Smith has just graduated with an MA from Cambridge University, specializing in the commercialization of science. But the sterile environment of the laboratory bores him and there was much more he wants to experience in the world.

“I could tell that I didn’t want to work in a laboratory forever. So I decided to break the mold and get my PhD from ‘The School of Life,’” he says.

New challenges arise every day: flat tires, intense heat, not to mention pure exhaustion. Unexpected 1,200-metre climbs are enough to make anyone want to throw in the towel.

Fully loaded bicycles on Malawian highways

But by Malawian standards, his daily trek is not that impressive–bicycles are often used in Malawi to transport not just people but firewood, charcoal and even live goats. Sanderson Smith says that seeing the nonchalant endurance of people here inspires him to keep going.

“It’s great fun chatting to other cyclists and it makes me feel less tired to see someone cycle past on a bike with no gears and huge amounts of luggage and another person on the back.”

Nonetheless, jumping on a bicycle and cycling through a foreign country takes a certain amount of daring, though he maintains that anyone can do it, with some basic gear: “cycling shorts, gloves. Just do it,” he says. “Fortune favours the brave.”

The Benefits of Weaving

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The colourful yarns used to make handspun fabrics for handbags and mats.

The shelves of the weaving centre in Bangwe are filled with spools of brightly-colored yarns, making a colourful backdrop to what would otherwise be a dreary scene: rows of weavers sit silently at their looms, staring blankly ahead as they mechanically work the spools into tightly-woven fabric.

Their expressionless faces seem eerily robotic. Then I learn that, as most of the weavers here are blind, their eyes simply focus unseeingly on whatever lies ahead. The Bangwe workshop, where about 100 visually-impaired weavers are employed, is one of many centres in Malawi where people with physical impairments are trained and employed in various artisanal crafts.

First established over thirty years ago by missionaries, this centre and others like it offer opportunity where before there had only been charity. Now government-run through the Malawi Council for the Handicapped (MACOHA), the centres employ hundreds of disabled people throughout the country.

“These people were begging on the streets,” says Henderson Nyondo, the Bangwe centre’s acting manager. “So the idea was, why don’t we take them, train them and give them something to do?”

The handbags and mats spun produced by visually impaired weavers.

Without the centres, people living with disabilities in Malawi would be faced with virtually no options to support themselves. Making a living in Malawi is hard enough, even for those who don’t face the added burden of disability-based discrimination. The MACOHA production centres work to narrow the inequalities that would otherwise leave people with any kind of disability clinging to the bottom rungs of the social ladder.

Still, considering the general impoverishment of the average Malawian, even achieving a standard of living equal to the non-disabled majority means a threadbare existence. In Bangwe, the weavers earn 13,000 kwacha (about 90 CAD) monthly – a meager wage, but one that is actually higher than the Malawian average.

Thirty-three year-old weaver Andrew Chitenje lost his eyesight when he was a child as a result of measles. Before he began working at the Bangwe centre in 2005, he was eking out a living by hawking charcoal on the streets. Few people were willing to take on a blind man.

Andrew Chitenje deftly weaving homegrown Malawi cotton into fabric for a handbag.

“Before I came here, it was difficult to feed myself,” he says. “When I wanted to work, others would say, ‘He is a blind man. How can he do this kind of work?’ Even in some other organizations, they won’t allow me to work.”

The MACOHA program offered Chitenje valued training at a specific craft, which is hard to come by, even for Malawians without a disability. Now skilled as a weaver, Chitenje has been able to reclaim his sense of social worth.

“I just want to show to the country that a disabled man can bring a good thing to the world,” he says.

Chitenje is bringing revenue not just to himself but his country. The Bangwe centre is a self-sustaining enterprise, bringing in about 25 million kwacha annually, which allows the centre to break even. The economic benefit of the factory, however, extends beyond only helping people with disabilities. All the fabric used in the products is spun from locally-grown cotton. The MACOHA production centres are thus a valuable support to Malawian cotton farmers, addressing one of the fundamental problems in the development of African economies: raw commodities are exported – without added value – to foreign markets, where they are then processed and often resold to African consumers at inflated prices.

The weavers here might not see the broader benefits of the handbags and floor mats they mechanically turn out each day. For his part, Chitenje is simply happy that he has a job, a pension, and a secure food supply. But in having been given an opportunity to realize his innate ability to support himself, Chitenje is actually benefiting the national economy, showing how development can be achieved simply by giving people born into difficult circumstances a chance to work for themselves.

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Turning Over Top-Down

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The paradox of development work is that in trying to empower people, we can conversely create dependency on outside help. Having witnessed this situation in Malawi, Rafiq Hajat, director of the Institute for Policy Interaction (IPI), is seeking to reverse top-down paradigms of social development. He has created a programme that offers a means for people to improve their own lives from below by holding those in power accountable.

Umunthu – which is a rather untranslatable Chichewan word that conveys a sense of personal independence – offers rights-based education, showing people in rural Malawi how to overcome challenges in their communities by holding their government accountable.

“It’s very different from the normal practice of helicopter or drive-and-fly consultations; of superficially addressing issues, of not doing enough investigation to find out the root causes, of working on the community and not with the community,” says Hajat. “We work with the community. It’s a very different way of looking at things.”

Operating in the southern area of Malawi, the Umunthu programme – which started last year – had rural villages elect volunteer ambassadors to work with traditional authority leaders. The ambassadors were trained by IPI on how to coordinate initiatives with their chiefs to overcome the day-to-day struggles that are faced by many Malawians.

Who do you go to when the water supply isn’t stable? When police are abusing their power? When government is failing to act on its promises? These may sound like questions with easy solutions. But in Malawi – where 60 percent of the population is illiterate – people in power too often lack someone to hold them accountable. Umunthu educates people on means to take action when their rights are being neglected.

“We impart the concept of accountability by elected duty-bearers to the rights-holders,” Hajat adds. “We also stress the fact that every human being has an inherent dignity, self-worth and self-esteem and that lowering yourself to subservience and dependency is not doing justice to your own talents as a human being.”

A traditional 'indaba' or meeting of leaders where Umunthu ambassadors discuss plans for a new hospital.

Elida Meolera, 32 years old, is a farmer from Phalombe in rural Malawi. Speaking through a translator – most Umunthu ambassadors are not fully fluent in English – she tells me that the program has allowed her to “enlighten my community about their rights.” As an Umunthu ambassador, she was key in bringing attention to the lack of adequate medical care in the Phalombe region. When a pregnant woman was ignored by a nurse and left to give birth outside the medical facility, Meolera initiated the discussions that led to the nurse’s disciplining by the medical authorities. Meolera is now part of the Phalombe team of Umunthu ambassadors who are pushing government to fulfill its 14-year-old promise to build a hospital in the district, which has 313,000 residents but only two medical doctors. Umunthu’s training, Meolera says, has “taught me how to be a leader.”

According to Hajat, this is the kind of education that is most needed for people in rural Malawi, where subservience to traditional leaders is the norm.

“We’re contending against a neo-patrimonialistic paradigm that has been prevalent here for centuries,” he says. “Chiefs don’t go for elections. You’re a chief for a life. You don’t have term limits. The concept of authority is absolute. Unquestionable. That kind of a paradigm is still very strong in rural areas.”

Wag the Flag

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As a journalist, there is no need to chase news stories in Malawi: they confront you every day on the street. Poverty, AIDS, child labour, gender equality…the list goes on. The challenge you face is not finding news but prioritizing what cause to take the pen to first.

Malawi's government failed to listen to public response on the question of changing the country's flag.

Which is why the recent “debate” over whether or not the Malawian flag should change seemed to me particularly insignificant. I was glad to see the government’s official introduction of the new flag on August 4, if only to end the six months of  discussion about what type of sun – the dominant feature of the flag – and what order of red, green and black stripes, best represent Malawi.

I use quotation marks around “debate” because I am not convinced that there was ever any honest back and forth between government and civil society. The proposed flag change was entirely a top down initiative, starting with President Bingu wa Mutharika’s invitation to the general public to “participate.”

Aside from Mutharika, no one seems to have thought that now is  a such a decisive point in Malawi’s history that a flag change is warranted. Cries from civil society groups to at least a hold a referendum on the issue went unheeded by the government, despite what public opinion polls showed.

The “debate” over the flag can be more accurately described as widespread public opposition to the government’s self-determined decision to spend billions of kwachas on an initiative that will have no meaningful impact on the lives of the 60 percent of the population living on less than a dollar a day.

In light of widespread public condemnation, one is left to wonder why the government proposed the change to begin with. The only tangible impact of the flag change has been to divert public scrutiny from causes that matter, delaying government action where it is most needed. I am left to conclude that the new flag does not mark a new era in Malawi’s history, only the government’s manipulation of the public agenda.

Debating Silence

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The posters created by local Malawians in a clandestine campaign for gay rights.

The caller on the other end of the line would only dance around the issue, never daring to explicitly state his purpose:

“Are you the Canadian reporter?”
“Um, possibly. Who are you?”
“You want to know something?”
“That depends. Are you Mwanajuma’s* friend?”
“Maybe. What is it you want to know?”

It felt like I was arranging a drug deal. Actually, I was trying to find a gay Malawian who could speak, even anonymously, about his or her experiences in a country in which two gay men were recently sentenced – and subsequently released following international outcry – to 14 years of hard labour for their relationship. This cryptic phone call was about as far as I got.

Homosexuality, treated in Malawi as a criminal matter, has been pushed into dark corners where people hardly dare to utter the word gay. There is no debate, as such, on gay rights. Simply the unrelenting silence of the majority.

Mwanajuma, my link to Malawi’s underground gay community, has been trying to raise awareness about the rights of gay people since the media explosion  surrounding the engagement of Steven Monjeza and Tiwonge Chimbalanga. With four of his friends, Mwanajuma blanketed Blantyre in posters boasting the slogan Gay Rights are Human Rights (see right).

Speaking in the back office of his local business, Mwanajuma describes why he felt the need to get involved. ”We began a small campaign to be a voice of opposition to what, at the time, was just an overwhelming negative attitude: kill them, throw them in jail, that kind of thing. It was horrible,” he says. “We started raising awareness, trying to muster up the courage of human rights organizations locally who really weren’t doing anything.”

Anything that is seen to “encourage” homosexuality is a criminal offense in Malawi, under an interpretation of the penal code by which “any male person who…attempts to procure the commission of any [indecent] act by any male person with himself or another male person…shall be guilty of a felony.” One of the participants in Mwanajuma’s campaign was caught and arrested under this section, though he was later released. It’s not just gay relationships that are illegal. Even promoting gay rights can land you in jail.

But the penal code is not the main instrument in restricting free debate on gay rights. Social taboo has far more weight. Take, for example, the fact that one of the gay men involved in the international imbroglio eventually bowed to social pressure and recanted his relationship, despite winning his legal battle.

In Malawi, such social pressure is often cloaked in religious rhetoric, according to Mwanajuma. “The lens through which people saw the issue was very religious,” he says. “Ultimately, the Bible is used as a cover for a deeper prejudice. No one ever wants to say that they are bigots. The Bible is used as a buffer.”

But adhering to religious principles, he says, is not solely about faith. It’s also about social standing. ”You can discuss [homosexuality] with people but you have to understand that religiosity is not just a social and cultural thing, it’s also very political,” Mwanajuma notes. “Having close ties to a church or deep knowledge of the Bible earns you status points within the community. Any veering from that loses status points. When having a discussion with someone, you always have to be mindful of that.”

The situation has thus become that few people are willing to discuss a matter which is weighted – both legally and socially – with so much personal cost.

*a false name was used to protect the identity of my source.

Land is Life

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The Chitakale tea estate under the towering peak of Mount Mulanje

What I see is deceptively peaceful: the green rolling fields of the Chitakale tea estate, set to the majestic backdrop of Malawi’s highest peak, Mount Mulanje. The scene  hardly looks like a site of conflict. It is hard for me to fathom that it is here that a bitter land dispute between Chitakale Plantations Company Ltd. and local orphan care centre, Friends of Mulanje Orphans (FOMO), has played out. Both sides are alleging wrongdoing, though the case reeks of a land grab on the part of Chitakale more than anything else, as shown in court records. Caught in the middle are the 5,500 children without parents who rely on FOMO for basic needs like food, clothing and schooling. In Malawi, even this small grassy knoll can prove vital to survival.

“Land is life,” says FOMO founder Mary Woodworth. “There is no social security here. The only security is land. If someone gets that land, it’s as good as killing you.”

In an interview at the FOMO office in the Mulanje district, Woodworth gave me an account of the acrimonious land dispute that has resulted in criminal charges against her and five of her supporters. Woodworth denies the charges, alleging the case against her has been fabricated by a corrupt police force. Her charges should be taken seriously, considering the events that led to the stand-off between tea estate workers and FOMO supporters on July 4.

FOMO was established by Woodworth, a Malawi native with British citizenship, in 2000. Returning to Malawi upon her father’s death, she was shocked to see children–hungry and unkempt–running through her home village.

“I asked why there were so many children here and was told they are orphans. They are trying to fend for themselves…I asked, ‘Where are their extended families?’ As was my experience in this area, your aunt and uncle are also your guardians. Why are they not helping them? They said that they cannot help themselves.”

Orphans in Mulanje are often taken in by extended family. But in a country where 70 per cent of the population live on less than 1$ a day, caring for the children of deceased family can prove an impossible burden. Many Malawi orphans might have a roof over their head but they are in essence left to fend for themselves.

“When I saw these people suffering and orphans with nowhere to go, I came back to try to put something back in the country that I came from,” says Woodworth. “I cannot turn my back on them.”

Initially a bank account where Woodworth deposited personal funds, FOMO has grown into a registered NGO with thirteen care centres that are now run by Mulanje volunteers. The small patch of disputed land, which Woodworth says has been in her family for generations, was used to grow crops for the centres – until 2008, when Chitakale tea estate came under the ownership of Leston Mulli as a subsidiary of Mulli Brothers Limited. Mulli is one of Malawi’s wealthiest businessmen with close ties to government.

According to court records, tea workers invaded the land following Mulli Bros. purchase of the Chitakale estate, destroying the crops that had been supplying FOMO with food and constructing a bamboo fence to keep out FOMO workers. The ensuing battle over the land resulted in three civil proceedings, up to Malawi’s Supreme Court. Every level of the judiciary decided in favour of FOMO. The final Supreme Court ruling is unwavering in its condemnation of Mulli Bros., stating that its actions constituted “the taking of the Law into the Plaintiff’s own hands…the Plaintiff occasioned to the Defendants untold loss and misery.” The ruling even recommends that Woodworth turn around and countersue Mulli Bros. Ltd. for trespassing on the land.

I spoke to Chitakale’s manager, Frank Chisesa. He claims he cannot speak about the land dispute (which has now been

Mary Woodworth speaks to reporters

settled by the Supreme Court) because of the upcoming criminal trial (yet to be heard). Leston Mulli refused all interview requests.

Regardless, nothing can undermine the fact that the Supreme Court ruling is decidedly in favour of Woodworth. Which is why I was so puzzled to hear that trespassing is among the criminal charges Woodworth is now facing. Why did police arrest Woodworth for trespassing, but neglect to assist in removing tea workers illegally occupying the land, as stated in the Supreme Court ruling, throughout the two years of civil proceedings?

Woodworth has concluded that Mulli money was behind her arrest.

“If we go to Mulanje police to ask them for their assistance, they ignore us. Even through all this, although we won at the Supreme Court, they ignore us. But when Mulli said “jump” to the police force, they just jumped.”

These are heavy charges that are still being investigated. My visit to the Mulanje police headquarters was brief: no comment, as the trial is pending. Nothing as yet can be proven.

Nonetheless, you don’t have to be a lawyer to see the failed logic in the criminal proceedings. How could Woodworth trespass on what had been legally decided as her property? How come police never assisted Woodworth and FOMO when tea workers first invaded the land, to which Mulli Bros. never had any legitimate claim? But few people here seem to be asking these questions–at least, not openly.

In Mulanje, my inquiries into the role of Mulli Bros. generally result in silent nods and averted eyes. There is a common acknowledgement and common acquiescence to the truth of the land dispute and the power of Mulli Bros. Ltd.

Children singing at a FOMO care centre

As a British citizen, Woodworth enjoys rights not afforded to most of her Malawian compatriots, and stands a chance of prevailing in her battle with Mulli Bros., though she will still have to face the arduous process of a criminal trial. Those who stand to suffer most as a result of the unlawful actions of Mulli Bros. are the 5,500 children registered with FOMO, who cannot escape destitution without help. The peacefulness of the Mulanje scenery masks a hard reality where anyone’s property rights can be trampled for the right price.

“If I turn my back on them, what then? Before, they were treated as nothing. Now, they are human beings,” says Woodworth. “In Malawi, this is what poor people are going through, and I am crying for them.”