One of my mostly highly admired authors, Stephen Covey, said when people look at the world, what they see is not the world "as it is" but "as they are", or words to that effect.
What we see are people or objects, and in themselves, these do not really have any meaning, except the meanings that we, the individual observers, attach to them. And each individual will attach a meaning based on their own background. The same situation viewed by two observers will be get two different meanings.
A story is told of a salesman working for the shoe company Bata, who went to a remote village in Malawi with a van load of shoes. When he got to the village, he was disappointed and sent a message to his manager, which read, "No hope of selling shoes here. All the villagers do not wear shoes. I coming right back with the van, still loaded."
A short while later, another salesman, who had been deployed to a different area, strayed into that village. He sent a different message to his manager, which read, "I have just arrived in village so.. so, nobody has shoes here. There is plenty of opportunity to sell our shoes. I have already sold some and I have run out. Please send a driver with another van load of shoes!"
The same situation interpreted differently by different individuals whose attitudes are different. One was negative and saw the situation through negative lens. The other one saw it through positive lens. It all boils down to attitudes.
Saturday 19 October 2013
Friday 4 November 2011
Malawian Odd Beliefs and Business
The majority of Malawians strongly believe in the existence of a supernatural world, whose members interact with living humans from time to time. Stories abound of people indulging in evil practices through invocation of these supernatural characters.
If an individual works so hard in his/her garden that they get bumper yields, people become suspicious of them and sooner or later, there will be a rumour to the effect that the prosperous individual actually employs ndondocha (miniature characters from the spirit world) to work in his/her garden. The rumour will be so rife that everybody will believe it, casting the concerned individual in very poor light.
Maize mills are believed not to run purely on diesel or electricity. The owner, so the belief goes, would usually murder a relation and "install" them in the mill to do the work. Owners of maize mills in rural Malawi are not the best loved people in society.
There is a more modern variant of witchcraft known as satanism. Even educated Malawians strongly believe in, and fear, satanism. Several years ago, a colleague of mine came into my home, and upon seeing some snail shells that I had collected from the lake in the house, he was horrified and said, "these items are the telephone handsets which demons use to communicate with each other!" Too many Malawians watch Nigerian films and take the stories therein for real.
It is not the purpose of this article to affirm or refute the existence of satanism. It is the impact of the so called satanism on business enterprise that I am concerned about. In Malawi, ingenious individuals who prosper are usually believed to be dubbling in satanism, one way or another.
These and other odd beliefs discourage Malawians from becoming entrepreneurs. The cost of becoming one is too heavy, because you will easily be associated with any of these dark practices and immediately become a misfit in society, as people will, at best, distance themselves from you, or, at worst, actively seek ways and means of eliminating you.
If an individual works so hard in his/her garden that they get bumper yields, people become suspicious of them and sooner or later, there will be a rumour to the effect that the prosperous individual actually employs ndondocha (miniature characters from the spirit world) to work in his/her garden. The rumour will be so rife that everybody will believe it, casting the concerned individual in very poor light.
Maize mills are believed not to run purely on diesel or electricity. The owner, so the belief goes, would usually murder a relation and "install" them in the mill to do the work. Owners of maize mills in rural Malawi are not the best loved people in society.
There is a more modern variant of witchcraft known as satanism. Even educated Malawians strongly believe in, and fear, satanism. Several years ago, a colleague of mine came into my home, and upon seeing some snail shells that I had collected from the lake in the house, he was horrified and said, "these items are the telephone handsets which demons use to communicate with each other!" Too many Malawians watch Nigerian films and take the stories therein for real.
It is not the purpose of this article to affirm or refute the existence of satanism. It is the impact of the so called satanism on business enterprise that I am concerned about. In Malawi, ingenious individuals who prosper are usually believed to be dubbling in satanism, one way or another.
These and other odd beliefs discourage Malawians from becoming entrepreneurs. The cost of becoming one is too heavy, because you will easily be associated with any of these dark practices and immediately become a misfit in society, as people will, at best, distance themselves from you, or, at worst, actively seek ways and means of eliminating you.
Monday 31 October 2011
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?
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?
Tuesday 4 October 2011
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.
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.
Monday 26 September 2011
The Power of Language
Last month, my niece left for China to pursue a medical course, having performed extremely well in her Malawi School Certificate of Education.
She, and two other Malawian girls, will spend their first year studying the
Chinese language. I don't quite envy them in the position they find themselves in - having to learn new vocabulary, new grammar, new characters and everything else that goes with learning a new language. It must be a very daunting task.
Their courses will be delivered in the Chinese language, hence the necessity for them to spend a whole year studying the language.
Thanks to the generosity of the Chinese government, people from underprivileged corners of the world are able to afford university education in a foreign country. This is truly an act of unconditional love. Or, so it seems at face value.
Agreed, my niece and her compatriots are the ones to benefit from this act of generosity. But in the long run, it is the Chinese that stand to reap the full benefits. In neo-imperialistic fashion, they (the Chinese) are spreading their culture, their way of life, to unsuspecting young, brilliant minds.
Sooner or later the Chinese will wield a lot of power and control over the sections of the world from where the beneficiaries of their generosity will have been drawn. These Chinese speaking young graduates will subconsciously become sympathetic to anything Chinese.
The Greek language was once extensively used in academia, in business and in religion. Dr Kamuzu Banda used to believe that noone could be truly educated unless they had some knowledge of Greek [... and Latin]. There is every likelihood that the Chinese language will take the place of Greek, in the years to come, thanks to the deliberate policy of the Chinese government to offer scholarships to brilliant, young people to pursue their university education in China and in the Chinese language.
Language is power. If you can get a whole community to speak your language, you will gain the ability to control that community. The Afrikaner regime in South Africa was aware of this and attempted to make Afrikaans a compulsory language in all schools in the Republic, which sparked off the infamous Soweto uprising. The rest is history.
The Chinese have chosen a more subtle, and more benign way of doing it. But, search me, they know precisely what they are doing. They deliberately target brilliant, young minds,knowing that come ten, fifteen years from now these young people will be in influential positions, and will almost certainly not "bite the finger that will have fed them."
She, and two other Malawian girls, will spend their first year studying the
Chinese language. I don't quite envy them in the position they find themselves in - having to learn new vocabulary, new grammar, new characters and everything else that goes with learning a new language. It must be a very daunting task.
Their courses will be delivered in the Chinese language, hence the necessity for them to spend a whole year studying the language.
Thanks to the generosity of the Chinese government, people from underprivileged corners of the world are able to afford university education in a foreign country. This is truly an act of unconditional love. Or, so it seems at face value.
Agreed, my niece and her compatriots are the ones to benefit from this act of generosity. But in the long run, it is the Chinese that stand to reap the full benefits. In neo-imperialistic fashion, they (the Chinese) are spreading their culture, their way of life, to unsuspecting young, brilliant minds.
Sooner or later the Chinese will wield a lot of power and control over the sections of the world from where the beneficiaries of their generosity will have been drawn. These Chinese speaking young graduates will subconsciously become sympathetic to anything Chinese.
The Greek language was once extensively used in academia, in business and in religion. Dr Kamuzu Banda used to believe that noone could be truly educated unless they had some knowledge of Greek [... and Latin]. There is every likelihood that the Chinese language will take the place of Greek, in the years to come, thanks to the deliberate policy of the Chinese government to offer scholarships to brilliant, young people to pursue their university education in China and in the Chinese language.
Language is power. If you can get a whole community to speak your language, you will gain the ability to control that community. The Afrikaner regime in South Africa was aware of this and attempted to make Afrikaans a compulsory language in all schools in the Republic, which sparked off the infamous Soweto uprising. The rest is history.
The Chinese have chosen a more subtle, and more benign way of doing it. But, search me, they know precisely what they are doing. They deliberately target brilliant, young minds,knowing that come ten, fifteen years from now these young people will be in influential positions, and will almost certainly not "bite the finger that will have fed them."
Wednesday 24 August 2011
Training and God's Work
Two weeks ago, I attended the funeral of a man who had hanged himself in Johannesburg. The church to which the man had belonged was reluctant to conduct the funeral because of the controversial manner in which he had died.
Therefore, a fellowship (a loose grouping of believers from various churches) was called in to do the honours. Naturally, they turned out to be very good - loud, clear, logical, and I would hasten to add, spiritual. What I noticed, though, was that they went out of their way in their attempt to discredit the church that had refused to conduct the funeral service.
These enthusiastic young people said many things which I agreed with. Until, that is, they stated that training was not important for clergy. "You only need to be filled with the Holy Spirit," they asserted.
Then they went on to give the example of the Apostle Peter as somebody who faithfully and effectively proclaimed the gospel without any training, depending only on the Holy Spirit.
My own spirit said within me, "Wait a minute, the example given all but nullifies the assertion made."
First of all, Peter and his eleven compatriots spent three years with Jesus, training. They were actually called "disciples", which means "trainees". If they had lived in modern times, they would probably have been awarded diplomas.
Agreed, Peter was a man of little education. Before joining the "Jesus College", he probably receieved no education at all. Would anybody wonder why James, the brother of Jesus, and not Peter, became the head of the church in Jerusalem after Christ had left?
Does it come as a surprise that Peter and the much more learned Paul failed to click, so much so that the latter was once forced to say, "When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcission group."?
Interestingly, Peter alludes to the importance of education by acknowledging that Paul's material is difficult to understand and can easily be distorted by the uneducated (the "ignorant"). He says in 2 Peter 3:16, "His [Paul's] letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort." I dont think he meant the spiritually ignorant, but those with little or no education, otherwise his own material too would have been difficult to understand.
It is my considered view that Peter would have been a better and more effective leader if he had attained a higher level of education than he did.
True, you cannot be an effective leader in the church if the Holy Spirit does not dwell in you. But if you filled with the Holy Spirit and lack education, you will not be particularly helpful, either.
Therefore, a fellowship (a loose grouping of believers from various churches) was called in to do the honours. Naturally, they turned out to be very good - loud, clear, logical, and I would hasten to add, spiritual. What I noticed, though, was that they went out of their way in their attempt to discredit the church that had refused to conduct the funeral service.
These enthusiastic young people said many things which I agreed with. Until, that is, they stated that training was not important for clergy. "You only need to be filled with the Holy Spirit," they asserted.
Then they went on to give the example of the Apostle Peter as somebody who faithfully and effectively proclaimed the gospel without any training, depending only on the Holy Spirit.
My own spirit said within me, "Wait a minute, the example given all but nullifies the assertion made."
First of all, Peter and his eleven compatriots spent three years with Jesus, training. They were actually called "disciples", which means "trainees". If they had lived in modern times, they would probably have been awarded diplomas.
Agreed, Peter was a man of little education. Before joining the "Jesus College", he probably receieved no education at all. Would anybody wonder why James, the brother of Jesus, and not Peter, became the head of the church in Jerusalem after Christ had left?
Does it come as a surprise that Peter and the much more learned Paul failed to click, so much so that the latter was once forced to say, "When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he was clearly in the wrong. Before certain men came from James he used to eat with the Gentiles. But when they arrived, he began to draw back and separate himself from the Gentiles because he was afraid of those who belonged to the circumcission group."?
Interestingly, Peter alludes to the importance of education by acknowledging that Paul's material is difficult to understand and can easily be distorted by the uneducated (the "ignorant"). He says in 2 Peter 3:16, "His [Paul's] letters contain some things that are hard to understand, which ignorant and unstable people distort." I dont think he meant the spiritually ignorant, but those with little or no education, otherwise his own material too would have been difficult to understand.
It is my considered view that Peter would have been a better and more effective leader if he had attained a higher level of education than he did.
True, you cannot be an effective leader in the church if the Holy Spirit does not dwell in you. But if you filled with the Holy Spirit and lack education, you will not be particularly helpful, either.
Monday 22 August 2011
Encounter With Gule Wamkulu
Last week, my brothers-in-law, my sisters and I travelled together in one vehicle to Nambuma, north west of Lilongwe city, to attend the funeral of a close relative. We took the earth road from Kamuzu International Airport, heading westwards.
After we had covered a distance of about 5 kilometres from the airport, we came across a team of men and women in the company of zirombo (beasts). There were two "beasts" called kasiyamaliro and following close behind was a huge njobvu (elephant). Dotted around were six or seven smaller, masked characters.
We knew that we had to stop as a mark of respect to the on-coming "entourage". One gentleman dashed forward from the group to where we had parked and demanded that all the women in the car should hide their faces with pieces of cloth. All my sisters obliged, and consequently we had a safe "passage".
My first encounter with Gulewamkulu (The big dance) was at Kongwe mission back in the 1960s. I was four years old then. I heard strange noises outside our home, and as I got out to find out who was making these noises, I met almost face to face with one strange character. Petrified with fright, I ran back into the house. On enquiry I was told the charater I had come face to face with was a kapoli.
Another close encounter was in the late 1970s. My late brother and I went to our mother's village in Dowa district during school holiday time. One day, as we were chatting with relations close to a nkhokwe (granary), two characters came by, asking for maize cob covers to roll tobacco into (a way of improvising cigarettes). For the first time I heard gulewamkulu characters speak in an intelligible language. My brother and I did not move an inch. The characters realised that there were strangers around.
The following day, two more characters came by, brandishing panga knives. We hid ourselves in our cousin's house, but they came right in, pointing to us with the pangas. Another cousin of ours came along and pleaded with the characters to leave, saying "Tulukani chonde okang'wing'wi" (Please get out Mr Kang'wing'wi). They relented, and vanished. We were saved. We learnt that it was Chimalizeni and a collegue from a neighbouring village that had disguised themselves as akang'wing'wi to intimidate us.
Gule Wamkulu is an old age institution of the Chewa people of Malawi, Zambia and Mozambique. Because of its association with black magic and the use of profane language by itse adherents, it is incompatible with the Christian faith. It is, therefore, impossible to be a Christian and a practioner of Gulewamkulu at the same time.
That is as far as the negative aspects of Gulewamkulu go. On a positive note, one needs to mention that Gulewamkulu has been adopted by UNESCO as world heritage for oral tradition. The stylish dancing of its characters is hard to match, even by the likes of late Michael Jackson.
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