The Business Culture

The business culture in Malawi is still in its infancy. Traditionally, people work three to four months in a year - during the rainy season. After harvest, they take it easy and go into a lazying period. It is during this period that people socialise a lot - weddings abound, initiation ceremonies proliferate and, in some areas, Gulewamkulu enters the scene big time.

Whereas working in their fields affords Malawians the chance to do something for themselves, each family working on their small parcel of land - often less than an acre - the social activities, by contrast, are communal, giving them no real sense of ownership. Unfortunately, it is the social activities that occupy the majority of Malawians for longer periods of time than the individual activities. As a result, Malawians have not gotten accustomed to owning anything big for themselves.

The advent of formal administration did not help matters. The idea of government was foreign, its demands on the citizenry (such as poll tax) daunting, and therefore, Malawians felt alianated from it (the government). To this day, the average Malawian thinks the government is removed from him/her, that it has its own separate existence and is endowed with infinite resources. Those that are lucky will, from time to time, tap into these resources, by hood or crook, if necessary, bettering themselves in the process. But it is not possible, indeed unheard of, for an individual to own even a fraction of what the government owns. Private ownership is simply not a reality in traditional Malawi.

In the 1970s, Dr. Kamuzu Banda, in his capacity as Life President of the Republic, ordered that all Asians should leave the rural communities and ply their trade in towns and cities. The idea was to afford Malawians the chance to run businesses in the rural areas. The move may have been well intentioned, but it was ill timed, and badly backfired. One day I went to Golomoti, once a thriving trading centre, and I almost cried to see the ruins of buildings that in ages past had been Asian shops. There are many, many places like that across the country.

What Dr. Banda failed to realise was that Malawians had, by and large, not acquired the art of business acumen. True, the University of Life had taught them many things, through the institution of African culture, but they simply had been exposed to the art of owning and running businesses. The Universty did not have a Faculty of Business or Entrepreneurship. While the Faculties of Story Telling and Performing Arts were, doubtless, active and thriving, the Faculty of Business did not exist at all.

Banda's mistake was repeated by Robert Mugabe when he grabbed farms from whites in the hope that indigenous Zimbabweans would run them. It never dawned on Uncle Bob that Zimbabweans, like Malawians, had not yet spent enough time in the Faculty of Entrepreneurship. The rest, of course, is history.

This does not mean that the situation is irredeemable. Far from it, African people in Malawi and Zimbabwe (and indeed the rest of sub-Saharan Africa) are quickly learning the art of owning and running businesses. Very soon, the business landscape will change, with more and more indigenous people owning successful businesses. Who said new faculties cannot be added to universities?

Bariers to Knowledge

When my wife and I visited my late father's farm in Mchinji district, in the company of my mother, a relation of mine living on the farm insisted that we pick his eleven year old daughter, to go to school in Blantyre, where I live.

The girl, as it has turned out, is eager to lean, but, although she can just about read the local language, Chichewa, she can hardly speak a word of English, let alone read or write it. In an attempt to teach her the basics of English, I wrote a simple poem I had learnt 40 years previously in stadard 2, and asked her to read it. The response I got was intriguing - she simply burst into tears.

Her mind, her body, her whole sytems rejected the new knowledge. Come to think about it, we are like that to varying degrees. We rejectct new knowledge. And that is the reason why learning is usually a long, tideous process.

I see it in all training sessions that I conduct. Sometimes, I teach music reading to people that have not been exposed to musical notation all their life. The response I get from some trainees is one of near total rejection. I literally struggle to communicate even the simplest of musical concepts.

Knowledge is always packaged in a highly ordered pattern. The problem is that one needs to discover and unpack that pattern for them to relate to that knowledge. If the pattern is not discovered, the same knowledge will appear like unintelligible gibberish to the observer.

I once saw a fish seller in a market tearing off pages of paper from a Physics book and using them as wrappers for sun dried fish. There were a number of important formulae on those papages, but they did not mean a thing to the fish seller. Someone else would have taken the same book and gone ahead to build a nuclear reactor from its contents. But to the fish seller, it was all gibberish.

Learning involves lifting some barriers to the new knowledge. Now, to do that takes quite a bit of work and discipline. We all have these barriers; they are innate to our nature. The lazy or unexposed individuals will naturally fall behind, as others march ahead in the ongoing exercise of acquiring new knowledge.