Mar 31 - Tragedy

March 31

For those who doubted the seriousness of witchcraft here in Malawi, this is an article taken from The Daily Times this morning. What a morning to choose to buy the paper to give our visitors, Nick, Lou & Matt, an idea of Malawian journalism (and this is word for word, mistakes and all)…

Residents of Bangwe Township in Blantyre on Saturday woke up to a shocker when a 30-year-old Agnes Gadama and her sister Catherine Kamanga, 23, allegedly burnt two children to ashes as ritual sacrifice to end their problems.
The women claimed they carried out the rituals to cast away demons they suspected to be the work of witchcraft.
The two, who are currently remanded at Bangwe Police Unit, are reported to have been on fasting with intense prayers for one week.
They claimed that two children – who belonged to Gadama – had demons.
Limbe Police spokesperson Chifundo Chibwezo said in an interview yesterday that they found the two children, Yankho Gadama, 9, and Martin Gadama, 6, already dead when they arrived at the scene of the tragedy following a public tip.
Chibwezo said the two women and five children locked themselves inside a house and lit a fire that left the whole house engulfed in thick smoke.
As the fire burnt and smoke made breathing difficult, the two women prayer and spoke in tongues to challenge th powers of witchcraft that were allegedly cast on the two sacrificed children.
“Gadama and Kamanga claim that their neighbours were teaching the deceased children witchcraft, so they were fasting and praying ceaselessly for one week to deal with the problem.
“But eyewitnesses told us that the two were burning the children one by one for the sacrifice ritual until neighbours decided to intervene after becoming suspicious,” said Chibwezo.
Eyewitnesses in Bangwe before burning the children, the women would grab one and bang their head on a rock to kill them.
Gadama now remains with one child, James, who is one year old and is now admitted at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital together with Kamanga’s child, Pemphero Phiri, 8.
The two children suffered suffocation resulting from the dangerous smoke, which engulfed the building in the day of the tragedy.
In an interview yesterday, Gadama expressed disbelief that her two children died from burning as a result of the sacrifice ritual that she allegedly offered to God after a weeklong fasting.
Gadama said it all started on Monday last week when she decided to cast away the demons in her children.
“Yankho and Martin were showing signs that they had demons resulting from witchcraft. They were very rude and misbehaved a lot.
“When I quizzed them, they disclosed that one of our neighbour was teaching them witchcraft and taking them on witchcraft escapades at night. Then I decided them to Assemblies of God where a pastor told me that it was difficult for my children to be bailed out of witchcraft,” Gadama, an Assemblies of God faithful, claimed.
She claimed to have witnessed strange incidents in the house, which she shared with her sister and children. Gadama suspected witchcraft in all this.
“The night before the tragedy, I nearly died due to choking as something just got stuck in my throat. It was terrible because I there was blood coming from my private parts and foam from my mouth. I prayed hard to fight the demons. At that time my deceased children were fast asleep. And in the morning of Saturday, I just saw a crowd of people outside my house.
“The people started beating me hard, claiming that I had killed my children but I know nothing about all of this. Later I just found myself here at the police but I do not know what wrong I have done,” said Gadama, looking confused.
However, Chibwezo said the deceased children were reportedly left without food for one week when their parents were fasting and praying.
The women were staying in the house with the four children as their husbands were currently at Chichiri prison “for work-related crimes.”
Gadama and Kamanga, who hail from Mwazanduwa Village, Traditional Authority Kanyenda in Nkotakota would be charged with murder for allegedly killing the two children contrary to section 209 of the Penal Code.
Postmortem of the children’s bodies would be carried out this morning at College of Medicine in Blantyre.

The other two children were indeed admitted at our hospital, both in a definite state of starvation. Make up your own mind.

Mar 21 - Tea Totalling

March 21


Two kwacha, forty-eight tambala. Just under 2 Australian cents.

That’s how much you’ll be paid by the estates for your work picking an entire kilogram of tea leaves – and let’s face it, they’re not the heaviest of things. Okay, so a good tea picker can pluck somewhere in the vicinity of 200 kilograms per day, but that’s some seriously back breaking work for only AUS$4. A tough living by anyone’s standards. These guys, numbering in their hundreds, walk the verdant greens of the plentiful tea estates day in day out, the backdrop of the stunning cliffs of Mount Mulanje becoming a bland normality, as they ply their trade.

Bizarrely, it is against this poverty that we on our Easter break head up the slopes of the mountain for a long weekend of hiking, photographing waterfalls and rocky peaks, drinking wine and luxuriating in the efforts of others labouring under the weight of our bags. That said, Mulanje was once again an unforgettable few days. Our seventh time up since living here and the mountain still never ceases to amaze with its natural beauty and unending diversity. Easter being a particularly picturesque time of year, with the wet season having eased, leaving crisp air and brilliant greens, flowers in abundance and water filling the pools and falls at every turn. We even discovered a few more huts we had not yet visited, situated in the almost surreal beauty of sweeping valleys, precipitous rock clad peaks and seemingly endless streams of untainted fresh mountain water. A truly relaxing four day long weekend; why would anyone trade this backyard in for anything else?

At least the porters, for whom this is their only form of income, get a decent wage for their efforts. 900 kwacha per day for four days, plus an extra day tip. That’s 4500 kwacha, or the equivalent of a reasonable monthly salary for many of the country’s non-city dwellers, in one weekend of work. One can hardly blame them for seeming overly keen for your business the moment you turn up in your nice cars with your fancy trekking boots and waterproof jackets, all unimaginably unaffordable luxuries to them. Yet they wear their packs with uncomplaining joviality, practically running up and down the sheer slopes of the massif in their flip-flops or bare feet (many of them run the annual Porter’s Race, a 26km course up the mountain, across and then down again – and they do it in a touch over 2 hours!), happy for the income they can then take back to their families.



And what do the efforts of a tea pickers get them, because we all know that AUS$4 per day wouldn’t go too far in Australia. One tomato costs 15 kwacha even in cheaper areas of Mulanje… that’s six kilograms of tea to be picked just to buy one single tomato. And if they want a beer at the end of a hard day’s work? That will be 30 kilos more tea my friend. TIA.

Mar 4 - Cosmopolitan Tanzania?

March 4

If you had have told me nine months ago that we would visit a country such as Tanzania after living in Malawi and consider it nothing short of cosmopolitan, I would have laughed in your face. Yet such is the stark poverty and lack of western resources or communication means, that this is exactly the feeling one gets coming from Malawi. Nice roads, food cooked with spices, a choice of semi-decent restaurants, locals with enough money to actually eat at a sit down affair for lunch, the majority of village houses with tin roofs, a cinema, taxis, buildings more than a couple of stories high, people out after dark, an airport that actually looks (and works) like an airport, a choice of palatable beers, road signs, drivers with a vague idea (and only vague) of how to drive. The list is unending. Tanzania is in so many indescribable ways an absolute quantum leap ahead of Malawi – yet Tanzania still sits down at 159 0f 177 countries on the WHO Human Development Index, only 5 positions above Malawi.



Since living in a country with the overwhelming poverty of Malawi, we have somewhat changed our views of the throngs of beggars who constantly harangue you as an mzungu, and it is not until you visit a country that would normally look so poor to unaccustomed Western eyes that you quite realise where you live.

And just in case we were a little homesick when in Tanzania, missing the disheveled, chaotic life of good old Malawi, the national airline kept up some gentle reminders for us. Air Malawi, or Air Where-Are-We as it has become colloquially known as after its string of countless monumental stuff ups, certainly kept us guessing. We did manage to get to Dar es Salaam on our original direct flight, but not before four different time delays (and subsequently a rather worrying number of Greens at the airport lounge dampening our increasing incredulousness) totaling almost nine hours.


The journey home wasn’t quite so smooth. Two days before departing we were called with the news that our wonderful national carrier had cancelled almost all flights, with ours being included in the axings (apparently if you refuse to pay your landing fees and route charges after the seventieth warning they ground your planes and call you bankrupt… go figure?). After many phone calls, a few travel agent visits, a couple of ticket re-issuings and innumerable options explored, we finally found our way home. Dar-Jo’burg, Jo’burg-Lilongwe, Lilongwe-Blantyre. Sixteen hours late in the middle of the night.

The ability to laugh is a valuable asset around here.

Mar 2 - Kili Time

March 2

A 400-metre vertical ascent at over 1000-metres above sea level, including a 10km constant uphill grind, against some of the fastest runners this planet has to offer – these guys run a marathon faster than most of us could hope to sprint. Add to this a generous lashing of equatorial heat and the colourful disorganization of myriad cars and villagers competing for the road you run on. Not an easy undertaking at the best of times, let alone for your first marathon. Heth the full, myself the half… that was the plan. Not only was this our goal, but we had convinced four others from Blantyre to join us, none of whom had run anything like a marathon before.

Thus the contingent from the ‘Blantyre Hash’ set out to conquer the Kili Marathon, as well as using it as a very nice excuse for some time out of the day to day routine of life in Malawi. After a night in Dar, the comparatively immense capital of Tanzania, then some lapping it up in the luxury of the San Salinero Hotel in Moshi, the nearest town to Kili, we made out way down to the very African dominated Moshi Stadium for the start. Amongst the blaring music permeating the many haphazard sponsor & food tents, and the hordes of intrigued onlookers in the stadium, stood some rather alarmingly fit looking, rake thin black guys who would have looked more at home on your television set watching the Olympics than at the same event we had turned up for. Not exactly confidence inspiring, but fun all the same.

At the stroke of 6am, minutes after first light ripped its way out of the darkness and across the dusty ground in a blaze of orange, bringing with it a distinct air of expectancy, the gun went as the three hundred or so full marathon runners, Heth & Kat included, bounded out of the stadium… a few a little more briskly than others. Twenty minutes later the twelve hundred-strong runners of the half marathon followed suit in a flurry of legs and dust. And no more than a few minutes into the run, with locals lining the streets and cheering in celebration, the behemoth of Africa’s highest peak sprang from beneath the clouds to sit majestically over the entire event, a full view of her snow capped beauty greeting you the majority of the time… hard to beat this for a marathon setting.

As I came to kilometre 18 of the half marathon, having just passed Heth starting the 10km uphill slog in the opposite direction, I was met with new levels of enthusiastic cheering from the sidelines. Buoyed by this I lengthened my stride in this downhill section, then five seconds later was overtaken by a flurry of fanfare and cars… and the leader of the full marathon positively bounding along at somewhere in the vicinity of 20km/h, making me feel like I was doing my best to run backwards. He managed to set a new Kilimanjaro Marathon record, at a lazy 4h 13m 06s. Not bad considering the world record sits less than 10 minutes less than this, on flat ground.

Without shattering any land speed records ourselves we all came in with respectable times, and were even treated to the hospitality of food and drinks in the Kilimanjaro Hash tent afterwards given we were there representing Blantyre. And what better way to celebrate such an achievement (particularly from Heth & Kat) than a few days of cold beers, indulgent seafood, diving, sunbaking and soaking up the relaxing vibe of Zanzibar. Perfect.