The tour of the guards

The tour of the guards

The knock at the door was so discrete it was almost imperceptible. I had asked Alinafe (20) to come and fetch me at 21h00 so we could do our rounds and see if the rest of the watchmen were awake and on duty. Alinafe is brother-in-law, Enos’ second son and a tall, handsome, polite, young man. He has finished his MSCE and like so many others is just waiting for something to happen, for some benefactor to appear out of the blue.

We have built a relationship of trust, so about once a week he escorts me around the various sites where we have night watchmen posted. The late night walk is a challenge for me because the nights are so dark without the moon. Alinafe has been out in the night adjusting his eyes to the obscurity, while I have been staring at the glowing screen of my faithful laptop. We walk without our torches so we can approach the guesthouse and the professors’ lodgings without the guards on duty being alerted to our coming. For the first 10 minutes I am blind and depend on him to guide me through the village footpaths which are not at all smooth and even. Tonight, as we approach the guest house, the guys are ready for us and one, two, three flashlights announce their presence in different corners and under different camouflages where they have staked out their respective view of the amazing guesthouse we have built.

There are six of them at three different sites, not because there is a major crime problem in the area, but to allow as many people as possible in the village to share a bit of the money being earned through the educational visits by Canadian students. The budget is only for 1 watchman for each of the three sites, but each household contributes a young man and they share the salaries six ways. Each one of these young men is a reflection on a school system that fails its pupils and the society it should be serving, by providing an inadequate, inappropriate education.

The Malawi School Certificate of Education is achieved after 4 years of secondary school education. The students write national exams to get out of Standard 8 of primary school. If they have had a good grounding, then they get selected to the better secondary schools in major centres, but with the fees attached to these better schools many of the students from poorer families are unable to muster the resources and drop out or are relegated to the omnipresent Community Day Secondary Schools (CDSS) which struggle to survive at the bottom end of the secondary school pecking order.

These schools can take anyone who passed the primary school leaving exam and the whole effort is sustained through the meagre fees that the students are asked to pay. Even that is enough to force some to drop out. The only government support is the teachers’ pay. The teachers until recently were almost all primary school teachers who gradually managed to upgrade their credentials to be promoted to secondary. All the teachers in the good schools are degree graduates but few of these university educated teachers want the rural life and often more difficult living conditions found at the majority of the rural CDSS schools.

The real shame is that the system is essentially a colonial relic. The first formal schools in Nyasaland were set up by the missionaries to train clerics and functionaries for the churches and the nascent civil service. Subjects were imported intact from the British syllabus and while there has been a certain Malawianisation of the curriculum, it has remained intact as an elimination system which favours elite development and disdain for manual labour. Rote learning, discipline, obedience and a slavish honouring of everything foreign discourages creative thinking and real problem solving. Students graduate from the CDSS with weak academic skills and none of the life skills and certainly no initiative to return to their homes and implement new ideas that could be useful to help develop these rural settings.

Back at the guest house we first find Leonard. He is about 20 now and another orphan from the original Makupo village down in the Rift Valley below Dedza. He would be the great-great-great-grandson of the agogo who settled our village. He and his other 2 siblings were sent to this Makupo from that much poorer Makupo when their parents died and this village was in a better position to raise them. That was in the early 2000s around 2002 or 2003. After losing their parents, and being dislocated to a largely unknown village to stay with little known relatives, Leonard and all his siblings were at a real disadvantage in their schooling. Leonard has tried to rewrite the Form 2 Junior Certificate Exam 3 times and still failed to get accepted into the Form 3 and 4 to go on to the MSCE. His English is so weak and he is so shy and modest around me that it is hard to know what he is thinking about. His sister and brother have gone to Lilongwe and Moses is being trained as a tailor by sister-in-law, Ivy, at her hotel complex. But there is not much future for Leonard and Frida, when they don’t even have those kinds of skills. Training schools for trades like bricklayers and carpenters are priced way out of the league of poor people. At least if he stays in the village, he will always have food and a place to stay but because of his orphan status he will always be something of a servant to the elders.

Then we found Chitani under a bush at the edge of the clearing at the front of the house. Frazer’s son never was good at school, does not speak any English and barely finished primary school. For a long while he considered himself a Rasta, but he has cut the dreadlocks now and looks a lot straighter. When I arrived in April, his father asked for my help with Chitani, because “he doesn’t do anything”. Frazer is a hardworking man, and I am sure he is frustrated because his son doesn’t seem to share his ambition. Chitani works hard on his guitar and would like to be an entertainer, but like the others he has not developed real life skills that can earn a living in Frazer’s eyes.

Around the other side of the guesthouse was Mwayi. He merits an article of his own. His English is excellent and he has many talents, most of which are channelled into entertainment. He is a big fan of the late Tupac and has written and sung a complete ode to the rapper. He has learned karate from movies and books and runs his own dojon. Marijuana is his substance of pleasure and he can be seen early in the morning wandering off for his fix, but it would never occur to him get up in the morning and do something for his long suffering mother, Anasimango. He is capable of hard work and his uncle the chief now has him working as the labourer for the contractor building the chief’s new house. But he shows no interest in picking up the skills of the builder. He is still waiting for his break. He ha sung some of his rap for me and in his dreams, he sees one of the lady visitors marrying him and taking him back to Canada to find his pot of gold.

And poor Paliche – even his name is a cruel joke. I have nothing. His father was Hastings, a brilliant, articulate man exiled to Makupo in the 80s and 90s after having drunk himself out of a very promising career and marriage. He kept the village poor and intimidated with his drunkenness. One day, a local woman appeared with his baby and just as quickly abandoned the child with agogo anaTembo. Paliche did not like school and did not finish his primary education. Agogo loved him especially because he was her oldest son’s child, but she never gave him any firm guidance and his father died a bad role model. With his skills he should be aspiring to be a farmer but there is no land and because he hangs with the school leavers he has not taken the initiative to acquire other skills.

We finish at the guest house and make our way to the big house where the profs are staying. I am getting to know Baolin little by little, Esnati Mbewe’s son. She was the Frida from the poor Makupo in the early 1970s. He speaks excellent English. I ask if he has completed the MSCE no – why – fees. So when will you write the exams – I plan to do my driving license instead. If I get money, that will be the first priority. He is able to see past the illusion of the credentials. One look around rural Malawi and anyone can see the number of young men with weak MSCE sitting in their villages waiting for a non-existent job to fall on them. Baolin sees the need for real skills and the futility of the MSCE system. He is smart and perceptive and acting on it. So many others are still waiting for the Godot that he school system has promised them.

These are only 6 of the “boys” as they are still called. There are others, like Kenny, Themba, Francis and Fred still hanging, still hoping and still going nowhere. In countries across Africa they share a similar fate. After the debacle of the Kenyan election, pictures of young men like these were flashed around the world carrying clubs and torching the supposed enemies that their unscrupulous leaders turned them against. In Liberia, the Congo, Ivory Coast, they are the cannon fodder for the warlords. Bored and young they are easily mobilised by someone with money to fight their nefarious wars.

And what about the girls, since there are more women than men in this country? Almost all the girls the age of these boys have fled to the city. Ulemu, Mwayi’s twin and Undeni, Themba’s older sister, Frida, Leonard’s sister, Kenny’s sister, Rhoda, and Chifundo’s wayward daughter Ruth would all rather take their chances in the hustle bustle of the urban environment and escape the drudgery of a woman’s life in the village.

To be continued.