Blantyre

            I traveled to Blantyre this week for a TB/HIV Integration meeting called by the Ministry of Health (MOH) to discuss rolling out the program to Nsanje.  The person who called the meeting was attending a TB conference in Paris and I was doubtful that this meeting would take place but since we could not reach him I left for Blantyre only to learn that indeed he just landed in Malawi and the meeting would not take place till later in the week.  Blantyre, being in the highlands, is at least five degrees Celsius cooler than Nsanje.  I could not do any of the field work in Nsanje while in Blantyre but there is absolutely nothing I could do about it.

            Blantyre is the second largest city in Malawi after the capital, Lilongwe.  It was founded by the Church of Scotland through missionary work in 1876 and named after the town in Scotland where Dr. David Livingston was born. Dr. Livingston’s missionary work led to the building of St. Michael’s and All Angels Church in 1891 with arches, domes and flying buttresses. Rev. David Clement Scott who managed the construction had no formal architectural training and the church was built with the help of local people with no knowledge of this kind of architecture.  I attended an English church service in Malawi for the first time one Sunday when I was in Blantyre since I have not been able to find a church service in English in Nsanje. I was in awe of the different brick designs and arches in the building. 

St. Michael's and All Angels Church

At the south Side of the Church

     

           Mandala House is one of the oldest buildings in Malawi.  It was built in 1882 with mud, grass and bricks and was then the first house which had another house sitting on top of a house.  Locals came to gape at it and crawled up the stairs cautiously.  It was called Mandala because John Moir wore glasses or Mandala.  John and Frederick Moir, the two brothers who ran the African Lake Corporations, traded in coffee, clothing, ammunition and hardware. It has a shop and an archive library and also a cafe where one could have a light lunch and drinks. 

Mandala House

   

           The National Museum is not much to write home about.  There is an exhibition of the life of Dr. Livingston in the lower section to celebrate the bicentenary of his birth.

The Women Returning Home with their Babies and Bucket of Unsold Food

            In Limbe where I stay when I visit Blantyre, the guesthouse Fargo is on BCA Hill which stands for British Central Africa.  I was given this piece of information by a Malawian man one evening when I took a walk in the neighborhood.  The hill is dominated by nice homes inhabited by expats and rich Malawians including the ex-President all fenced in by brick walls topped with barbed wires and slivers of broken glass, guarded by twenty-four hour security guards and agalu olusa or dangerous dogs. Down in the valley is where the poor locals live in tinned or tiled roofed houses. The houses here are mostly of bricks and not haphazardly patched together with tarp, mismatched corrugated sheets or wood as in the houses in the slums of Kampala or Nairobe .  

           The man waved his hand towards the BCA Hill, " That's where our people go to work."  

            Even years after independence, there are still traces of colonialism in the hierarchical order of the social system here.  All over the slopes of the hills around this region the land has been furrowed and ready for the growing season. Men chip painstakingly at big boulders to form small gravels for sale as building materials to earn a living wage. The disparity between the well-to-dos and the poor is rather stark.  However in my walks I find the locals are always friendly and break into a ready smile with my Chichewa. Around four in the morning the call to prayer arising from the mosque in the valley invariably elicits a chorus of howling from the dogs.

The Valley Below BCA Hill

          

          At the outskirt of Blantyre is the Bvumbwe (Wild Cat) Market where I asked the driver to take me one Saturday morning.  It is a large local market selling produce, meat, second-hand clothes and chtenjis. This is where we get our vegetables which are grown in the cooler region of Thyolo: cauliflower, cilantro, broccoli...which we cannot get in Nsanje and they are brought to us via the weekly transport from Limbe to Nsanje.  In a corner I found a cobbler repairing shoes that had seen their good old days but to the poor they were still salvageable.

Bwumbwe Market

The Cobbler