Monday, December 2, 2013

malawilostyears.blogspot
Winding up the work in Karonga
From Wednesday to Saturday, November 20 and 23 we had a busy time in Karonga wrapping up this phase of the project. There were many practical things to finalise on the one hand and plan on the other. Our funding finally came through, we got our scanner working and copied some documents, organised some correspondence, introduced Flora to the computer and said our goodbyes. The next period is going to be very intense and with very short turn around before we are back on the ground together.
The good news of the last 2 weeks is that the funding agency, aware of our difficult situation, forwarded us the grant money even before all the hurdles had been cleared. This made our life so much easier. We were able to travel knowing we had money for fuel and meals as we moved about and we were able to reimburse some of our out of pocket expenses. It, nonetheless, took a considerable chunk of time to do the accounting and set up the bookkeeping. After everything was settled, there is a balance remaining to support some of our work in February to April.
More crucial was our laying out the plans for the next 3 months of writing and follow up research. We now have over 40 interviews with a wide range of people, and yet we still see some gaps and there remain some essential people we would like to interview to round out the narratives. The focus will be to write up what we have agreed is the essential text so far and be ready for the next phase in February to fill in the blanks, smooth it out, and produce a final printable copy.
Finding a publisher is also a challenge. Not everyone shares our vision, or values oral history, nor understands the urgency we feel and we have not been as effective at selling our product as we might have been. Many publishers want to see a manuscript copy, but we won't be at that stage until late April 2014, so for the publisher it is a bit of a risk buying into our work sight unseen. One option we are looking at is self-publishing should no other alternative present itself. It would cost about $3500 to print 2000 copies in Malawi and the book would then be available at a low enough cost to make them widely available inside the country. This is still a work in progress.
The real pressure now is to earn, beg or borrow the money to finance the work in February, March and April. It will be the last time I can invest such a long period away from my home in Montreal, so we want to be very organised. We have an offer from a Concordia history professor who is interested in our work and wants to piggy back his research on our work. That offer is for a trip from Karonga to Dar es Salaam to spend a week interviewing more people and introducing him to the world of the Malawian exiles who lived there in the seventies and eighties. That is an exciting possibility, but it is busy work and we often do not get much writing accomplished when we are on the road like that. Another week would have to be spent in Malawi's southern region and another in the centre to complete the picture.
The real issue comes back to cost. The ticket from Canada back to Malawi will be hard to find with such a short turn around time. Fundraising for the February trip over the next 2 months while I am trying to write is a major preoccupation.
The stories of people who suffered under the Banda regime come from the most unexpected angles and places. I was leaving Lilongwe through the renamed Kamuzu International Airport when my friend, Police Inspector Duncan Mtambo who works there, greeted me and introduced me to another 'homeboy' who had grown up in our extended village, Mlangali and had been at Chilanga Primary School with brother-in-law Frazer. Charles Mandala is now a senior manager with the Local Development Fund and was on his way to a World Bank course in Washington via Addis Ababa on the same initial flight as me. He knew of the work we have been doing around Makupo and Chilanga and was keen to meet me and learn about Nellie and our activities. As we chatted, he learned of the work we are doing on the history of those who suffered under the Banda regime. He revealed that he had spent two years detained at Maula Prison in Lilongwe for being too vocal about local issues when he was in government service. We did not have the time in our short stop over in Addis airport to record an interview but he assured me of his interest and willingness to cooperate when I return.
It is yet another instance that reinforces the frustration so many of us feel at the way Kamuzu's name is still waved about by the political opportunists who are still trying to profit from the image he foisted on the Malawian people despite the brutality of his reign.

More from Canada, once I can get settled in.

Wednesday, November 27, 2013

Chitimba Farewell
20Nov13


Our last week together on the project has been almost perfect and very much the conditions we were hoping to have in order to move our work forward. Almost perfect, except for 2 reasons, the week was too short a period and our miscalculation about the effect of the heat in November on the shores of Lake Malawi. We have kept up our routine of 8h00 starts and 12h00 break for lunch and then back at it till 17h00. That makes an 8 or 9 hour day and leaves us quite tired. It's all intellectual work but nonetheless it wears you down and the evening is for discussing and sharing and hoping some more ideas will pop up.
As we left Mzuzu we passed by Mzuzu University known as Mzuni this time to interview Professor Kings Phiri in the History department who managed to survive the purge the University of Malawi of 1975-76 when almost all the senior lecturers and staff (mostly northerners) were picked up and detained one by one. So many had been taken away that he was certain his turn had come and was only spared because the backroom perpetrators inflicting this misery were themselves cut short in their nefarious scheme. He described as State Terrorism the way people lived in constant fear of arbitrary detention. It was a great interview and e offered advise and contacts of others we should get to see.
That led us up to the University of Livingstonia at the top of the high plateau overlooking the lake immediately above Chitimba, where we had another full and detailed account of life in detention by Augustin Msiska who was just about to become University Librarian at Chancellor College when he was detained. Even after his release, the regime would not allow his life to return to normal and after a period of enforced unemployment, he finally was allowed to leave the country and work at the University of Zambia (UNZA) where he remained mostly without his family for many years. Only much later near the end of the Banda regime was he able to return to pick up his library career which had been cut off many years before.
We survived the Gorodi road. To get to Livingstonia we had to negotiate the the 20 hairpin switchback turns that hug the slope of the escarpment and weave their way up 1000 metres in about 10 or 12 kilometres. It had never been a priority of government planning and so is in very rough shape. It was built by one of the determined Scottish missionaries and named the Gordon Road after him. The people harmonised his name and the road to sound like Gorodi. However, what struck both of us, having travelled the road in the sixties or seventies, was the deforestation. Then huge trees forested the whole mountain. They are virtually all gone to the charcoal makers and brick kilns and the devastation of the slopes, the erosion, the dried up streams have created an environmental disaster. There is literally no government presence at all to manage the delicate environment and the population pressure and need for fuel is denuding the hillsides and even cliff-faces of anything that burns.
Lukwe Camp is a wonderful respite. It is just on the edge of the plateau below the huge mission site. The cabins and resto-bar are perched right out over the precipice. The Belgian couple run it on a permaculture basis. Their trees have been left standing, and they have small ponds for fish raising and irrigating their gardens that supply all the food they serve. The steepest slopes are left in a purely natural state. It is a wonderful little oasis with amazing vistas of the whole eastern slope of the Nyika Plateau and the lakeshore.
Even in the sleepy, hot town of Chitimba, people bear the scars of Kamuzu's regime. Once our hosts knew our mission, it didn't take long to identify someone in the community who had suffered. James Mzembe was born 1924 and at 89 is moving with great difficulty. He had been a driver in Zambia for many years and like any expatriate he welcomed his home people whenever they passed through Kitwe on Zambia's Copperbelt. One of these was an ex-minister whose movements, even in exile, were closely monitored by the Malawian Special Branch who reported to to their headquarters in Malawi that James was a 'rebel sympathiser'. On a trip home to visit his family he was arrested at the border and savagely beaten and interrogated about his connections. He was delivered to the Central Region's infamous Dzeleka Detention Centre where he was allowed to recover and then released. He feared returning to Zambia where the Malawi security operatives were known to arrange disappearances, so he fled to Mozambique and later Tanzania and then eventually Zambia but not before he had lost his family and anything he possessed. When he finally came back to Malawi to retire, he was alone and found no-one left of his family here. Now he lives off the charity of old family friends and well-wishers.
The Chitimba Camp is a very productive workspace. It is a beautiful environment and our wonderful hosts Carmen and Eddy offered us whatever we needed to have a comfortable working space. We got a lot of correspondence done with possible publishers and collaborators. We continued our review of the chapters and their content and flow, and managed a couple of interviews as well. We were housed at the southern end of the camp away from the almost daily comings and goings of the overlanders.
Overlanders: The cycle of life at an overlander camp is quite fascinating. These huge trucks are fitted for up to 30 passengers with all the camping and cooking gear they need to be essentially self-sufficient. They board in Capetown and travel over a period of a month or so up to Nairobi or vice versa. I have always been critical of the concept and called it Africa in a bubble or more correctly tourists in a bubble passing through Africa. They are totally self-contained and to a great degree self-preoccupied, so we had very little relations with any of the first few groups that came through. There was little to connect us. We are old, they are young. They sleep in tents and we are relaxing in the wicker chairs on the porch of our chalets away from the bar scene.
However, one evening our new neighbour in the room next door introduced himself. Lucas had abandoned the tent scene for a couple of nights and opted to sleep in a bed in a room with a shower. He had overheard our conversation about Malawi history and politics in the afternoon and wanted to learn more about our project. From Italy, he was an investment fund manager living the high stress life in London. Now in his early-mid 40s he had taken a long leave away from work and was rethinking his future. He had planned three months of three different overland tours, in Africa, Asia and Latin America. However, most impressive was his grasp of development economics and what was needed to turn around the situation in a country like Malawi. I have interacted with many people who wear the title of “Development Expert”, but few have ever offered the kind of perceptions and insights as this young man. In any case, we never really got to talk to him again because their trips are very structured and intense. He walked the 16 kilometres up the escarpment to Livingstonia University and back and by the time he got back he was wiped out and ready for bed. His truck and group left early the next morning on their way to the next experience.
Between the full moon over the lake and a few encounters and despite the oppressive November heat, we managed to be very productive. The chapters have taken shape, the stories are compelling and the interest of participants and supporters remains high. We are also highly motivated to get this book to press, although the work to accomplish over the next few months is daunting.






Monday, November 11, 2013

Good afternoon madam. Learning from our mistakes.
We have re-listened to every testimony we have in our possession. We have done some research on the web to guide us in our writing, and we have undertaken some of the organisational work needed to move to the next phase. Our setting for this work continues to be ideal as the first rains have helped cool down the climate a bit and Rachel our hostess continues to spoil us with her hospitality. As well we have developed a comfortable routine of taking a mind-clearing walk and drinks late in the afternoon to a local lodge run by a charming couple about 1.5 kilometres from here. Regrettably, the grant funds for us to travel and work elsewhere are still in the pipeline and are frustrating our progress. However, the urgency of the work was driven dramatically home on Friday when we confronted the dearth of material available on the subject we are writing about at Malawi's prestigious Mzuzu University.
Little by little we seem to be getting closer to the grant funds arriving in our hands. Calls to the embassy have led to calls to the intermediary agency and to the Karonga Museum so that maybe we almost, possibly, may be able to access our funds by the middle of next week. On that promise, suggestion, hope we are planning to move on towards Karonga and have abandoned our plans of trips to the south and centre of the country to meet the people and complete the interviews we wanted to do. In order to keep ourselves out of the clutches of the hyperactivity which preoccupies Kapote's time and energy when we are in Karonga, we are planning to stop at an overlanders lodge where we stayed on the way to Mzuzu and where Kapote got his glasses. We are taking two rooms, one for sleeping and the other for setting up our work. In that modest, but splendid isolation we are planning to put one more week of solid work on the book. That will take us to Karonga, where we will spend a few days sorting out all the administrivia and finalise our plans for the period from December until I get back to Malawi sometime in February. That's the plan for today and it's a good plan.
That huge plateau you see in the distance is what makes our communication impossible while we are at Chilumba. It's tough but we will survive.
The evening walk to our closest lodge with a bar has become a preferred way to stretch our legs and give our minds a chance to free-range after the very intense work sessions during the day. We found that the change of place allowed us a change of focus and gave us good fodder for looking at our work in a different light. The Pine Tree lodge is run by a very nice couple, Paul of British stock and Charity of Lomwe / Angoni background. They have a new baby boy just a months old and run a tidy little B&B style lodge just at the city limit of Mzuzu. We checked it out when we first got to Mzuzu, but never thought about going back until Monday this week, when after another long day of listening and discussing we opted to go for a walk to stretch our legs. We got to the place and found the outer grill was locked, but Paul obligingly allowed us to sit for a couple of drinks on the deck. Since then we go every other day as part of our need to stretch our legs and extend our horizons.
On the walk we meet many groups of primary school age children. Most are shy and stare at us as they would at any strangers. As they see us more frequently, they gather up courage and try their Standard 2 English. The drill they have learned is, “Good morning. How are you? I am fine thank you.” One young girl walking with her friends, piped up cheerily to our Good afternoon. “I am fine madam and how are you?” In the same instant, she and her friends knew she had made a mistake and she burst into embarrassed giggles while her friend offered the correct version, “She is fine SIR!” It led to Kapote to recall his first conversation with an Englishman when he was only a little older than these young ones. When asked if he was related to the Rev. Mwakasungura, he proudly announced, “Yes sir. He is my grandson.” We remember and hopefully learn from our mistakes.
We wish the same could be said of our political history. We needed to get some documents and thought that the Mzuzu University Library would have some rather basic primary documents. Dunduzu Chisiza, one of Malawi's more charismatic and dynamic pre-independence leaders wrote two very insightful and farseeing pamphlets entitled Africa: What Lies Ahead and Realities of African Independence in which he foretold the strong possibility of dictatorship following independence. The other document we assumed should be part of any university library collection was Justice Mtegha's enquiry which rigourously documented how the 1983 assassination of 4 senior politicians was masterminded by Dr Banda and his inner circle. Such material is part of our retelling this period of history for the current crop of amnesiac politicians. To our amazement, the Library did not even have any reference to Dunduzu let alone his documents and the librarian had never heard of the Mtegha report.
We were dumfounded. The premier institute of higher learning in the Northern Region with courses and programmes in History and Education does not provide the students access to such seminal material. We suspect that Kamuzu's ban on books such as Animal Farm also covered Dunduzu's work and is effectively still in place.
We are truly doomed to repeat history since we are not learning from it. Just the other day, President Joyce Banda, officiating at some public presentation in or near Kasungu, praised Kamuzu as the saviour of the nation and liberator of the women which was the same sort of mind-numbing brainwash that Kamuzu imposed on us during his reign. Meanwhile the state of terror he ran neither saved nor liberated anyone as it killed and imprisoned its imagined enemies.
We leave for Chitimba on Wednesday after a very productive 3 week stretch in Mzuzu. We have had access to high speed internet by virtue of the Munthali house being within a stone's throw of the transmission towers. Unfortunately the house's infrastructure was blocking the signal when we sit on the other side. I discovered that by going to sit at the back door and pointing the dongle at the tower, I got a super fast reliable connection. However, in Chitimba we will not have that luxury. Towers there are few and far between, so I am not sure when the next blog will get out to you.
Our work has really progressed and the pressing need to get this history out on the public stage comes home more clearly every time a politician speaks about how wonderful things were in the Kamuzu era and a conspiracy of silence envelopes the crimes of the time. In my many Quixotic campaigns for justice, I never expected the movement to free speech and democracy would turn into praise singing for the barbarism of dictatorship. We haven't learned a damned thing.

Tuesday, October 29, 2013

This is getting serious
Now that we have received a grant, we have a very real deadline to produce something. Our goal is to have a document of substance available to the public by July 6, 2014 as our way of commemorating the 50th anniversary of Malawi's independence. Regardless of what Banda did to subvert democracy immediately thereafter, all Malawians must celebrate the end of colonial domination.
It was very exciting in September 2012 and February 2013 running around the country, meeting and interviewing all sorts of people. Now it is the donkey work. We are re-listening to the many interviews, looking for the threads, themes, similarities and differences as well as transcribing the more salient pieces. It is slow going, because we have to stop and repeat the segments to clarify what we heard or to translate mumbled information. The book shape has already begun to appear and we have created the chapters, and now we are looking for the material to put flesh on the bones of the outline.
The exercise might appear to be tedious, but in fact it is very rewarding. I thought that we had heard everything from just having been present at all the interviews. But listening to them again, along with a second pair of ears is very refreshing. There is a huge difference this time. Many things are being revealed that didn't jump out at us as we recorded. We were too focussed on the next question and not necessarily the answers we were recording sometimes without hearing too attentively. In addition, the fact that we have had the time together to discuss the chapter outline means that as we listen, we can see the common themes and threads falling into place. Now we feel like we are deep into the substance of the exercise.
Our original plan involved two weeks in mid October to run up and down the country to collect more interviews from our wish list. Then we were going to ensconce ourselves in some cheap lakeshore digs to hunker down to do this re-listening and analysis, the research and writing. That was premised on our funding arriving sometime in September. We have a grant approved, but it just hasn't arrived in the bank, so we have a cash flow problem. In the past, I would tack a couple of weeks of car rental onto the periods I was in Malawi so that Kapote and I could run around doing the interviews. I simply do not have the resources to pay for this phase of the project which requires so much more time together.
As it turns out the lack of funds is a blessing in disguise. We have had to rejig our plan by settling down first and travelling later, if the funds come through. By establishing ourselves here in Mzuzu, we have been able to take stock of what we have already acquired, lay out our outline and define the gaps that need to be filled with more interviews or research. Mzuzu offers the fine option of being far enough away from Makupo and Karonga that neither of us are perturbed by the many obligations we carry in those places.
Mzuzu is also on a high plateau at the edge of the rift valley, so it is cooler and has lovely refreshing breezes while Karonga and Kasungu are arriving deep into the great heat of the dry season as the sun comes southward directly overhead. We even had an evening of rain last week.


In addition, the fine house offered by Rachel and Makhumbira Munthali provides a tranquility which is very conducive to the kind of work we are now involved in. We are literally in our own wing on the second floor. It is a sun room with great views all around, excellent ventilation and most important of all, it is very quiet. We virtually stay locked up there for the majority of the day and only come down to eat and stretch our legs.

Friday, October 25, 2013

Karonga to Mzuzu
One of my favourite groups in the early 1970s was an Afrobeat progenitor from Ghana called Osibisa. One of their tunes, Woyaya, off the album of the same title seemed to be emblematic of how Nellie and I were facing life. It was entitled: We are going.


WE are going. Heaven knows where we are going.
We know we will
We will get there. Heaven knows how we will get there.
We know we will.
It may be hard, we know and the road will be muddy and rough,
But we will get there.
Heaven knows how we will get there.
We know we will.


I still enjoy the song and here I sit in my 7th decade of life still singing it with as much conviction as I did in the exciting times of the 1970s.
The beginning of this phase of our writing and research brought the song back to mind as we struggled to bring the Lion of Kasoba back to life and become our beast of burden. Unfortunately, it was a good idea in principle, but has since become a burden.
We have finally arrived in Mzuzu at the wonderful house of Makhumbira and Rachel Munthali and begun work on the research intensively. However, what should have been a four hour trip from Karonga to Mzuzu with a reliable car took 2 days in the Lion which in the end failed to make the distance and had to be abandoned at the South Rukuru bridge.
Nonetheless, we got a fair bit done and our adventure continues to unfold. The time together has proven invaluable to allow us to share and unveil new insights into why the project is so important to complete. More on that when the book comes out. Back to the trip.
By the time, Joseph and George had got the diesel switch up to speed it was mid afternoon on Monday. Rather than return to Kasoba to begin the trip next day from there, we decided to press on and get at least an hour down the road toward Mzuzu to Chitimba Camp, (www.chitimba.com) a backpacker haven on the lake. It is a beautiful setting just below the Nyika massive on the crest of which sits the other worldly Livingstonia Mission. I knew Kapote would be enchanted by its simplicity and the hospitality of the Dutch couple, Eddy and Helen who run it. The Lion got us there without a hitch and we let it have a well earned rest for the night.
That evening over supper we were talking with Eddy and he asked Kapote if he would like to have his eyes checked by an optician from Holland who had come to Malawi with her diagnostic kit of lenses and 700 eye glasses to dispense. Arrangements were made and the next morning, Chantal Huisman gave him a good examination and a pair of heavy duty glasses that allow him somewhat improved vision.

We set off to complete the trip to Mzuzu and the Lion immediately began to show its age. The first part of the trip is up about 20 kilometres up the Rift Valley escarpment rising over 1000 metres in that distance. Normally an exciting enough part of the trip, but even more eventful in the Lion. The brakes became more and more difficult to apply, but we were already on our way up and that could be sorted out in Mzuzu. Half way up is Mchenga coal mine, a blight on the geography, but just as we passed the mine entrance, we started to lose power, electricity and then finally with a clatter, the radiator began to overheat. The fan belt had jumped off the pulley. Fortunately, at the mine are the big flatbed coal trucks with their driver-mechanics and a pair who were waiting for theirs to be loaded. They came to the rescue and in no time we were back on the road. This time travelling very slowly to keep the revs down and avoid taxing the fan belt. Another 10 kilometres, we reached the brand new Japanese built bridge over the South Rukuru river, where we planned to top up the water in the radiator. But that was the Lion's last gasp.
It burst a water hose with an explosive sound and it would move no more. There we sat till the end of the day waiting for Berllings Sikanda, a friend, to pick us up on his way back to Mzuzu from Karonga in his nice new Mercedes RV. So when we did arrive, we arrived in style.
Our prolonged visit, to the tiny trading centre of South Rukuru gave us close up insight into the great difficulties facing Malawi's rural people and the complicated sociology of poverty. On one side of the road, there are a couple of tiny shops selling all the same things, and a tiny grass sheltered shebeen for Chibuku the local cheap millet beer. The other side of the highway has a long grass roofed shed providing shade for about 30 people. They are sitting with plates and basins of bananas and cassava roots for sale. The place is famous for this produce because of the proximity to the river and the cheap prices, so trucks, cars and minibuses all stop to allow the passengers to stock up with cheap produce as they travel between Karonga and Mzuzu. Each vehicle that stops raises a cloud of dust and is swarmed by women and a couple of men trying to get a few Kwacha for the next meal. Each buyer tries to beat the villagers' already low prices down even lower. In front of the shops, the young men, almost all school leavers, watch the show and fiddle with their cell phones. They are above the fray when it comes to working like the women and the older folks. That is what the perverse colonial education system has taught them.

The dusty little porch of Mrs Manda's Rukuru Shopping Centre gave us refuge from the sun and became our workplace as we waited for Mr Sikanda to collect us in the evening. We sketched out the chapters for the book and made notes about several people we wanted to include posthumously.
The Lion of Kasoba part 2
The poor old Lion had lost most of its teeth, but 2 excellent mechanics and an auto-electrician gave it back its roar and made its arthritic joints mobile again. It turns out that they are, in fact, the very people we are trying to speak for in this project in order to explain the problems caused by exile and the oppression of the dictator's regime.
Joseph Mwabulunju is about 62 years old and was in exile in Tanzania because his home area, Karonga, was always viewed as politically hostile by the Banda clique. One only had to be related to an exile activist and you and all your family were under suspicion. So many of the Karonga folks suffered from the regime's paranoia that large numbers were living in exile in Dar es Salaam. Their brothers and sisters struggled to keep body and soul together inside the country all the while being watched with a microscopic attention by the Special Branch political police. But in the case of Karonga, the proximity to the border and the shared cultural heritage with the Nyakyusa of the Tanzania side just added an extra level of daily tension to the life of anyone who carried the names beginning with 'Mwa'. Mwakasungura, Mwambetania, Mwaungulu and many others had family in exile and active opponents of the regime.
Joseph is an excellent mechanic. Through his family connection he is a first cousin to the the rebel Kapote Mwakasungura and an induna (elder) of his small village. In the meantime, he can take your transmission apart and identify its ailment in no time at all. He picked up his trade in exile where he settled and began his first family. He only returned to Malawi full time in 2001 leaving his Tanzanian wife and several children behind. His fellow mechanic George Gondwe was a child of exile. His uncle Mordecai Gondwe is a participant in our study and suffered several prolonged periods of detention and torture. George was born while his parents were in exile in Dar and trained as an auto-electrician there.

It was amazing after 3 days of recruiting young men to push the beast to life, that within a couple of hours he had the alternator charging the battery, the starter turning the motor over and the electric windows rolling up and down. Despite its geriatric state it was still a powerful beast. Exile had had a profound impact on their life outcomes. The repression suffered at the time carries consequences decades later.

Monday, October 21, 2013

The Lion of Kasoba
The three young men pushed mightily and the engine roared to life. “The lion of Kasoba is back.” Kapote laughed and off we 3 geriatrics rolled to start this next phase of our adventure. Kapote has a lovely sense of humour. He is 71 years old and a patriarch in Karonga society. The Lion is a 1988 Toyota Land Cruiser and our transport of choice for the work on our book for this trip. The battery needs to be replaced so for the moment the truck needs at least 3 able bodies to push it enough to start. And I am a 67 year old Attention Deficit Hyper-activity Disorder senior who instead of retiring into a rocking chair is running back and forth to Malawi. We are trying to record and document the history of people who suffered under the 30 year dictatorship of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda.
This part of my life has a very different flavour. I am out of the family and business mode and into working with my old comrade and his old truck, the Lion of Kasoba. He bought the old Land Cruiser from the Norwegian ambassador in Zimbabwe when he was the Malawi High Commissioner there in the mid90s. The Lion was already 8 or 9 years old then and now it has attained a good 25 years of age. It has been used off and on over the last few years but for most of the last 3 years, it has earned a well deserved rest in the back yard of Kapote's house in Kasoba waiting for a little investment to get it back on the road.
We were getting frustrated with the pace of the writing project being limited by my meagre resources so Kapote called on his friendship with the Norwegians once again and applied to the embassy for a small grant to help with transport and accommodation for a month or more so we could really push this writing project forward. Instead of an expensive car hire we are rehabilitating the Lion.
We started talking about this history in 2009 but really got going in February of 2010 when I interviewed him for about 3 days on the history of Lesoma. We mostly sat on the empty terrasse of the Safari Hotel Annex and talked while the goats and birds provided background sound effects. I transcribed the whole discourse over the next couple of months in Canada and sent it back for his friend and confidant Winston Mwagomba to read over with him.
Who is Archibald Kapote Mwakasungura? We met in Lisbon in 1977 at an international conference organised by the World Peace Council to commemorate the first anniversary of the Soweto uprising. When Nellie and I left Malawi for the safety of Zambia in 1976, I was already aware of the existence of Lesoma. In my year of development studies at the University of Ottawa, I had read a piece about their formation in the Review of African Political Economy and had seen an essay written by Kapote Mwaksungura critical of the HKB alliance with the World Bank.
In Lusaka, I got in touch with Attati Mpakati who had just arrived to become a lecturer at the UN Institute for Namibia. He was the National Chairman of Lesoma and even though the UN gave him diplomatic status in Zambia, the Zambian authorities warned him that they could not guarantee his security, because even in Lusaka the Malawi Special Branch and Young Pioneer operatives were omnipresent. For his own safety, he moved to newly independent Mozambique to work at Eduardo Mondlane university, but the forces of Banda's darkness finally killed him in Zimbabwe. However the contact had been made and soon enough some of the Lesoma cadres came forward to introduce themselves. I never wrote down their names, but we would help type up their newsletter, Kuchanso, and run them off on our Gestetner. When the call came from the World Peace Council to attend the anniversary commemoration of the Soweto uprising, Lesoma wanted to send Kapote from Dar es Salaam and they raised funds from their members in Zambia to help pay for the ticket. In those days currency controls were very strict and so they paid our office in Zambian Kwacha and I asked Kleist Sykes in the Dar CUSO office to release the equivalent amount in Tanzanian shillings to cover the ticket.
Nellie and I had worked for 2 turbulent years with CUSO in Malawi and Zambia and were due for our home visit to Canada, so I decided to leave early and attend the Lisbon conference as part of my mandate to provide development education around the issues of apartheid and struggle in southern Africa. As a result, Kapote and I spent the better part of a week together at the Penta Hotel, in Lisbon and very quickly found a real political kinship based on many common interests. We were both decidedly left, anti-imperialist and panAfricanists.
For the next two years of work in Zambia, we kept in touch via the Lesoma comrades in Lusaka or whenever I would get up to Dar es Salaam. He was good friends and a home boy with my Tanzanian & Malawian friends there, including the journalists Reg Mhango and Ulli Mwambulukutu even though they came from different sides of the Malawi / Tanzanian border.
Kapote tells his story through the chapter on Lesoma and through his own life story as they appear in this book. I have nothing to add except that the many people we interviewed all treated him with great respect and honoured him for what he had accomplished in exile. Many people have commented about his leadership skills and the democratic way he guided Lesoma as Secretary General as well as the way his house was open to all in need. The Ombudswoman, Tujilani Chizumila remarked that she feels closer to the friends who grew up together in exile in Dar than she does to many of the family members who remained behind in Malawi. “We supported each other like family.” Kapote was a large factor in making that spirit come alive.
Doug's story is an eclectic mix of family, work and activism in many forms. In many ways it is as though I have several lives running in parallel universes. First came my commitment to making the world a better place for the downtrodden and marginalised people. I went as a CUSO teacher to Mitundu Day Secondary School in 1968 as part of that quest. Then came my family with my marriage to Nellie Saka and the arrival of our little bundle of happiness, Chimwemwe. The activism, family and work came together with my CUSO assignment in Lusaka. There we expanded our brood to four. We worked as a couple with the ANC, SWAPO, ZAPU and ZANU as well as Lesoma to support their struggles for justice and promote their message to the people of Canada from just before the Soweto uprising of 1976 until 1979 just before the peace talks that led to Zimbabwian independence. By then the family needs required a return to Canada and another new life and new work. We have been in Montreal since 1979 and our four have given us nine grandchildren. I worked at Vanier College as an educator, or learning specialist and was also a union militant representing first the support staff and later the professionals. I was also active in the Peace Movement, the anti-apartheid movement, housing and food cooperatives, multicultural forums, the New Democratic Party and so on. Upon my retirement, from paid employment one of my goals was to write down some of the history I have been witness to.
Kapote and I had crossed paths once in 1996 when I visited him in exile again, but this time as the Malawian High Commissioner to Zimbabwe. I was doing my research for my Masters degree in Sociology and when he heard I was in town he sent his driver to bring me to the High Commissioners residence for supper. 'Golden exile' as he called it.

Then we met once again in Kasoba in 2008. and slowly the idea for this project has been coming together.