TRACKING THE RIGHT

A grown man, we know, does not, after spitting out something, go back and lick it again. But when one does, we know too that his senses –two or three– are gone, lost or perhaps warped.

One lover of wisdom once said: a bad man is bad because of ignorance; a man who fails to do good fails to do so because he does not recognize it.

Our history is loaded. And history, lest we forget, has never disappointed. Many decades ago, our ancestors used to grow, gather, and hunt. In them was also knowledge of the existence of some supernatural being, nay Creator, called Leza, Mphambe, Chisumphi, Namalenga – the list we can reserve for posterity.

In times of drought, they performed religious activities, asking God to remove such holdups from their faces. Before everything they would search amongst themselves to see where they went wrong, in case Chisumphi was annoyed. Sometimes after such rites rain from heaven would pour down their habitations and fields.

Every growing season they had at hand was utilized. After rains, they would sow whatever seeds were found in their pockets. They had their own measures in ensuring good growth of their crops. By the end of it all, they reaped their anticipated yields. And life then, was good.

When our friends from the West came, they faulted the ways of living of the ancestors. In the name of Missionaries did most of them come, with Holy Bibles in their palms. The news contained in these holy books was, still is, and will ever be, good. They contain the Word which is life, eternal life.

Importantly, the power of reason separates us, humans, from other creatures. No wonder some Bantus whose philosophies are identical with Mpilo Desmond Tutu’s think some of these guys had other ideas.

As Tutu had no time but generalizing, “When the whites came to Africa they had Bibles in their hands, and they found us with land. And when they came to us, they told us ‘let us pray’. By the time they said Amen, they had our land in their hands and us their Bibles”.

It was in 1891, when Malawi, Nyasaland then, with the bosshood of Sir Harry Johnston, became a British Protectorate. As other colonized African countries did experience, oppression, discrimination, iniquitous treatment in short was normalized and imposed on the innocent proto-Chewas.

When John Chilembwe came in the early 1900s, he saw and felt the pain inflicted on the people of his beloved land by the white man, the one who once came in robes of sharers of good news, the gospel. His uprising in 1915 – though the intended goals weren’t all that realized then, – was really the beginning of a new chapter and end of another.

They were the 1950s that witnessed the coming of the one and only Ngwazi Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda. As he used to ‘roar’ at rallies, his coming was mainly, among other things, to break the stupid federation.

Their journey on a road so winding and long, characterized by arrests and beatings, started promising its destination in the early sixties. In 1964, Nyasaland became now Malawi as a symbol of her attainment of independence.

Much as we were happy to rule ourselves, our former colonial masters, really, had some other ideas, as Tutu would suggest. They were confident that having their plan A failed, their plan B would probably succeed. The first was usual colonialism and the other one neo-colonialism. It is this second one that continues haunting the sovereignty of almost all ‘developing’ or ‘underdeveloped’ countries.

Towards late seventies throughout eighties, when the country faced complex problems, among them drought and oil crisis, Ngwazi saw neither capitalism nor socialism as fully good for Malawi. Alternatively he mixed both capitalistic and socialistic approaches which he saw were applicable to our situation.

Then, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF), which were both established in 1944 at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, in the United States, and other Western countries were there to help but on conditions. Most of them were – and are – too serious a prescription for a people like us to treasure. They are the very same conditions through which some countries in the West continue colonizing us in a new way – neo-colonialism.

The highly publicized story of two gays who scheduled to wed at some location in Blantyre, has invited the West again, and provoked them to exercise their neo-colonial powers on us – as their tradition?

They know financially we’re wanting. They believe they are succeeding sharing us their deteriorating morals – if morals – forcedly. They threaten us with sanctions on condition we continue vetoing this abomination in this land of ours, the Warm Heart of Africa.

But forty plus years of independence should likely make a nation grow. And if she is grown, we know, she will not go back and lick the abomination which she spat at first. If she will do so, we will know too, that some of her senses –two or three – are gone, lost or perhaps warped.