The politics of tribe in Malawi

The cultural festival of the Lhomwe tribe took place on 25 October in the village of Chonde in the Mulanje District of southern Malawi, its Malawian heartland. This is close to the Mozambican border over which this group migrated in the course of the last two centuries and across which chiefs Mutharika (whose name Bingu borrowed when he tired of his original name of Brightson Webster Thom), Nasiyaya, Mpeni and Khoromana came for this celebration.

It was attended by the Lhomwe’s most prominent member, President Bingu wa Mutharika, and thus attracted to this small village in the shadow of Mulanje mountain a crowd estimated at 40,000; also a large number of official limousines and military uniforms, a television crew from the state-owned Malawi Broadcasting Corporation, many yards of Mulhako wa Alhomwe cloth, and a host of soft drinks traders to serve the usual thirsts of the country’s hot season.

It was a peaceful and colourful festival which the President insisted, in his opening speech, was “non-political”. “Some critics”, he explained “suggested that I should not come to this function because I am president of this country …. But the Mulhako is non-political. It is about promoting Alhomwe cultural and traditional values including our language” [Daily Times 26/10/09]

It is Malawi’s misfortune that almost everything a president does is political. When its first president, Hastings Kamuzu Banda, shifted the country’s capital-city from Zomba to the heartland of the Chewa people, at Lilongwe in the Central Region, and made their language into the official one of Malawi, it was a political act against the Tumbuka-speakers of the North and the Yao and Ngoni peoples of the south, however justified by the brutal logic of modern state-building.

When Malawi’s second president, Bakili Muluzi, made public appointments from his own Yao people, and was seen to be favouring the Yaos’ Muslim faith over Christian ones, and to be building more roads and power lines in their Mangochi district than elsewhere, he was strongly criticised too.

The fact that post-independence Malawi has escaped large-scale ethnic violence, and is proud of its peaceful and friendly spirit, cannot altogether conceal those bitter ethnic resentments and jealousies that plague other African states and which lie close to Malawi’s surface at all times.

A president’s favour or disfavour can make or break an entire region’s economy, just as they can do for individual careers, and if those favours and disfavours are seen to be based on tribe, then resentments gain political force and coherence.

Suspicions of Bingu’s ethnic favouritism had already surfaced before the Chonde gathering. The arrival there of official limousines containing Lhomwe Cabinet ministers such as Patricia Kaliati, Anna Kachikho, George Chaponda, Richie Muheya, and the President’s own brother and minister of Justice, Peter, was not the only occasion for a counting of Lhomwe heads in Bingu’s government.

Lhomwes at the head of the Anti Corruption Bureau (Alex Nampota), the police service (Peter Mukhito), the Malawi Electoral Commission (Anastasia Msosa); of government-owned corporations such as the Agricultural Development and Marketing Corporation (Charles Matabwa) and the Malawi Social Action Fund (Edward Sawerengera); of Principal Secretaries of major government departments (Joseph Mwanamvekha is the latest on the scene: Chairman of Mulhako wa Alhomwe, and since October, Chief Secretary to the Treasury); the Chief Justice (Lovemore Munlo) and the Attorney-General (Jane Ansah) – all these Lhomwes in high places had been noted with varying degrees of alarm. Nor were the sellers of soft drinks the only businessmen at Chonde to profit by their proximity to greatness.

Leston Mulli, the rapidly rising star of the Malawian business community, with a multitude of blossoming investments in Malawi’s freight and passenger transport, tourism and timber concessions, and in Mulanje District’s large tea estates, was there too as patron of the event. He too is a Lhomwe and the brother of Felton, another of Bingu’s cabinet ministers.

The suspicion of Mutharika’s “tribalism” by members of Malawi’s twenty , or so, other ethnic groups expresses itself in many different ways.

The veteran Sena-speaking political baron of the Lower Shire valley, Gwanda Chakuamba, who was leader of the powerful Mgwirizano Coalition in the 2004 elections, and who now leads the New Republican Party, was recently convicted (but not punished because of his age and growing eccentricity) of incitement to violence against the Lhomwe people.

He told a crowd in November 2008 that the Lhomwe were becoming “cheeky” and deserved to be beaten-up. More significant, perhaps, was the more recent action of Harry Mkandawire, a powerful figure in Malawi’s Northern Region and (until his sacking last month) within the ruling Democratic Progressive Party hierarchy.

His “Open Letter” to the President of 22 October expressed the concerns of Malawi’s northern, largely Chitumbuka-speaking, peoples, who had given Bingu overwhelming support in the recent general election, but who now feel sidelined and ignored by him.

Mkandawire’s particular complaints were directed against the reintroduction of Kamuzu Banda’s old regional quotas for the selection of university students (because northerners were, and are, seen to be over-represented in the student population); and the Southern bias in Bingu’s appointments to government departments and corporations.

He expressed a particular concern about Mulhako wa Alhomwe: “As the President of Malawi, you are expected to … embrace all tribes and their cultures. It is a paradox for you to be looked upon as favouring one tribe which is synonymous with being called a tribalist”.

Malawi’s ethnic and regional politics are, for the time being, balanced by a growing sense of a common, non-violent, Malawian culture. Its tribalism is often expressed in a healthy respect for cultural ties across those political frontiers established by nineteenth-century European colonialists with little knowledge or respect for such things.

It still offers important solidarities and reassuring cultural identities and it allows the presidents of Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, Tanzania and South Africa to celebrate their common Chewa, Zulu, Lhomwe, Tumbuka, heritages as easily as their own people have always done .

Bingu may be genuinely innocent of deliberate tribalism. His Democratic Progressive Party on the approach to the 2009 elections did well in the Tumbuka-speaking North, the Chewa-speaking Centre and the Sena-speaking South. But he has to be careful to ensure that the legacy he leaves for Malawi in 2014 will be the golden one he anticipates.

He hopes that it will be that of the modern Moses, leading all of his people to the Promised Land of economic and political security. But it could be that of Humpty Dumpty on the wall in the popular nursery-rhyme of another cultural tradition, who carelessly fell off and could not be put together again.

The tribal politics of Kibaki’s Kenya are a grim warning to Malawi of what happens when a president becomes careless with tribal politics. Malawians familiar with Michela Wrong’s “It’s Our Turn to Eat”, are now openly wondering whose turn it will be “to eat” after the Lhomwes of Malawi leave the dining-table

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