Post by Travis Ferland
Malawi’s new president, Joyce Banda, has said that she will push for the repeal of her country’s anti-homosexuality laws. Of course this depends on her ability to secure popular support in parliament. Even if these laws are repealed, will public animosity towards gays and lesbians change? Will protective laws be created in their place? Will life be any different for Malawi’s sexual minorities?
Starting on April 1, South Africa’s public TV channel SABC3 has been running a weekly series called “I am Woman.” Every week, the show tries to follow the arc of a woman’s journey, the ways in which she comes to understand herself and the world by creating herself as the world and the world as herself. Imagine doing that without over-weaning ego or impossible humility, and you get the picture. The leap of faith is ultimately each woman’s discovery and invention of her own amazing and ordinary kind of humanity. Her discovery, and ours. If you don’t live in South Africa, you can also view the series online.
‘I am Malawi’ is a short documentary by Geert Veuskens and Pieter de Vos. (Part 1 above, part 2 below.) Veuskens gave us some more details about their project:
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In October 2011, the Ugandan government sent Ingrid Turinawe to the infamous Luzira Prison–Uganda’s Guantánamo–for the treasonable act of walking to work. This week, the State, again, attacked Turinawe and other women activists for the “crime” of standing, speaking out, driving, and generally being. Big mistake.
In her first order of business since being inaugurated as Malawi’s new president on Saturday, Joyce Banda fired the country’s top policeman. No reason was given for the firing, but the BBC reports that the police chief, Peter Mukhito, was in charge last year during anti-government protests over the worsening economy. Mukhito had personally questioned a University of Malawi lecturer over comparisons the latter had made between the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt and the fuel crisis in Malawi. The university was later closed. Then last July, police shot dead 19 protesters. Banda’s decisiveness does not surprise long term observers of Malawian politics and her appointment carries wider significance beyond the Southern African country.
Malawi is fed up with Madonna and her school daze, with the singer’s refusal to consult and her autocratic ways. Given the autocratic politics of the Mutharika regime, that’s both quite a statement and none at all. Madonna’s foundation, Raising Malawi (a telling name), has reportedly spent $3.8 million on a state-of-the-art school for girls outside of the Lilongwe. What’s there to show for that? Nothing. [Read more...]
The Guardian reports: “Cash payments help cut HIV infection rate in young women, study finds: Research in Malawi finds girls who receive regular payments are able to resist attentions of older men and avoid infection.” The headline pretty much says it all … or does it?
In November came the news that the Global Fund to fight Aids, TB and Malaria was in a financial crisis, because of declining donor commitments and failure by donors to honor existing commitments. The Fund’s board cancelled Round 11 of its funding applications, which was supposed to provide money for 2011 to 2013.
Recently Malawians have been protesting against government corruption and cronyism. The focus of citizen anger is President Bingu wa Mutharika. The state’s response has been state violence and repression; in some instances fatal. Last month Robert Chasowa, a student leader, was murdered under mysterious circumstances. Malawi is of course a democracy. Malawians last coped with this kind of thing under Life President Hastings Banda who ruled from independence in 1966 till 3 years before his death in 1997.
For those looking for a speed-read on recent events, I would suggest reading Malawian Steve Sharras’s recent post at Global Voices. But for a more longer, analytical view there is celebrated poet Jack Mapanje’s new memoir, And Crocodiles are Hungry at Night. It just came out and as Elliot Ross (he is an AIAC contributor and grew up in Malawi) writes for Guernica, the book “could scarcely be more timely, offering as it does a history of local tyranny at a time when political violence has escalated to a pitch not seen since Banda’s demise.” Mapanje who was imprisoned by Banda’s regime in the late 1980s, writes “an alternative history of the nation seen through the lens of [his] prison.” Mapanje, for Ross, is Malawi’s “most vital and furious historian” and his imprisonment is “best understood as one of the paradigmatic events in Malawi’s history since independence”:
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