Malawi. It’s a whole different country from Tanzania. While we’ve travelled so fast that some countries have barely had a mention (Slovenia? Bosnia? Even Rwanda?), it feels like we’ve been writing about Tanzania forever.
Every time we cross a border, the subtle changes to culture grab our attention. The most obvious one I’ve noticed in Malawi is the completely different relationship with the ex-colonial power. In most countries, it has been ambivalent – a section of history that did no great harm, and often a little good, but that was imposed on the country.
In Malawi, David Livingstone’s excursions were to an area of the world being ripped appart by a brutal and merciless Arab-run slave trade. The preferred method of capturing slaves was to surround every house in a village at nighttime. A volley of shots would be fired and, as the men emerged from the houses, they were clubbed or speared to death. Those left were then shackled by their necks and dragged on a 3 month crawl to the coast. Neck shackles were easier to re-use than leg ones – beheading an ill or dead or complaining captive less effort than cutting off a leg (and both easier than unlocking the shackle, obviously.) The death rate of the captives was possibly as high as 90%, excluding those killed in the raids.
Livingstone’s descriptions of the area, including the clearing of dead bodies from his boat’s paddles every morning before they could set sail, were instrumental in persuading the British public to back his mission to introduce the area to his “three Cs” – Christianity, Commerce and Colonisation. Within 20 years, the slave trade was eliminated; some 65 years later, Malawi was born as an independent country. The link to the UK in general and Scotland in particular is one more akin to what a park ranger we met described as parent-child; there is certainly a genuine warm feeling towards us here.
The legacy of Livingstone’s missions are still alive and well; the Church is enormously strong and instrumental in the country, with entire towns built around mission hospitals up and down the country. The strangest of these towns is Livingstonia, named after the by-then-deceased doctor and founded on a high escarpment overlooking the lake.
Since most of the people live at the lake-side, the town hasn’t grown much in the last 100 years since its founding. Houses are neat brick-built affairs with small outhouses, tidy front gardens and white washing lines. Despite being from Edinburgh, Livingstone’s compatriots no doubt studied the newly built mining and factory towns popping up in Northern England at the time, and modelled their towns on them; except for the colour of the people living there, Livingstonia feels like it could be rural Yorkshire at the turn of the 20th century.
