JOE PATERNO

The hero whose picture you see most often may also have the least emotional experience...He is probably uncertain about who he's supposed to be. Inside, he's tender and fragile.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

In Malawi, we love our culture so much. That is why when the West wants to impose alien practices on us we say “that is against our culture”. Our culture expects us to respect elders, adhere to precepts of good living and be productive citizens. Most importantly, we have to respect Chiefs because they are custodians of our culture.

Talking of Chiefs, there is this Paramount Chief from the Lower Shire. He prides in calling himself a custodian of culture. On a certain single day he does not put on shoes or a shirt. He wraps himself in a red cloth and bare-breasted girls in their adolescence dance for him. Apparently, they do not dance for him but for a spirit of a certain potent priest who died centuries ago. But my question is, if the first person to occupy his throne had owned a shoe would he have conducted these cultural ceremonies barefooted? Anyway, I wouldn’t want to speculate so I leave it at that.

There are also other aspects of our culture which we treasure so much. One of them is the way we conduct our wedding ceremonies. Wedding ceremonies have revealed one trait of people to me: everybody wants to be rich. Even for a fleeting moment. This is evident during wedding ceremonies. A person who wants to give K 500.00 to the bride and groom will split it into K 20.00 units. He or she wants to be seen dropping money into the bowl, tray or whatever container is used to collect the wedding gifts a lot of times. So he or she will drop K 40. 00 and dance for five minutes, come back, drop another K 40. 00 go dancing….until the K 500. 00 is finished. The question is why not just drop the K 500. 00 into the dish at one go? Because then one saves time and energy. You and I know that then his or her wishes will not be fulfilled. He or she wants to be seen as rich, even for a fleeting moment. Everyone wants to be rich.

Weddings have also revealed how we love to dance. Malawians love to dance, especially our women. But Malawian women need to be told the truth. Pure, unadulterated truth. They do not know how to dance. All along we have been hoodwinked into thinking that Malawian women know how to dance. Now that we have satellite television and are able to see how Shakira, Beyonce, Mbilia Bel and others can dance, we know better. Malawian women do not know how to dance! The funny thing about all this is that our women actually think they know how to dance. They are so confident of their dancing prowess to the extent that they have danced for every President that we have had; dancing towards dictatorship in the process. But now that we know better, it is high time we told them that they do not know how to dance. This will make them not to dance for the next person who fate will bestow on our country as President. They will have understood that they do not know how to dance and they will no longer have the confidence to dance towards dictatorship.

Oftentimes am tempted to think that dictatorship is born out of the names we call a leader with. There is something about a person’s name. I met a certain lady and asked what her name was. “Grace”, she replied.

 “Yes, you are Grace; you cannot be Joyce, because you are not behaving like Joyce”.

The point I am driving home is that a person behaves according to his or her name. Madalitso starts to be a blessing to others, Mabvuto always courts trouble. The same holds true for other names. This is why we must be careful when giving names to people. The Ngoni should particularly be careful. They like giving names to our political leaders. They particularly like giving out the name Ngwazi to a person they think has achieved. Linguistically, the name Ngwazi comes from ‘M’gwazi’, meaning ogwaza (somebody who is ruthless). Tchaka the Zulu was a Ngwazi, he was a ‘M’gwazi’, he was ruthless. A hitherto good person starts to be ruthless when given the name Ngwazi. He or she wants to behave according to his or her name. So next time the Ngoni should think again when they want to crown someone Ngwazi.

 I do not want some to conclude that I am discrediting the Ngoni, no, I will never do that. I am of Ngoni descent myself. My late grandmother was from the Mlangeni lineage. In fact, she was just called Namulangeni. Linguists will attest that Na- means child of. So she was a child of Mlangeni. As far as I know the Mlangenis are Ngoni, pure Ngoni. I love Ngoni culture. I particularly love how the Ngoni love drinking. The wife brews beer for her husband and fills his calabash while kneeling. In some Ngoni villages and other villages in Malawi, men and women go drinking together. They smoke together and go to the fields together. A man and his wife go out together to drink at the neighbouring village (common with the elderly folk). They come back together, sniffing their powder and singing songs. In town it is different. A man tells his wife that she cannot go to a bar because women who go to bars are ‘indecent’. But if no decent woman goes to a bar then no decent man should go to a bar. But men insist they are still decent even if they go to bars. The real reason men do not want their wives to accompany them to bars is because they are afraid of losing their freedom to ‘flirt’.

Flirting seems to be the ‘in thing’. It is sweet. In the course of flirting you ‘use and dump’. Politicians want to flirt with us. They want to use and dump us. That is why when we insist that the relationship of ‘Governor’ and ‘governed’ has attendant rights, obligations and duties they try to shut us up. They want to play with our resources in whatever way they can think without being question. But hey, I digressed too much. This was supposed to be about names. Bye for now.