Legend has it that God intended Malawians to live on the plateau of Malawi, but to work and harvest from the rich soils of the Lower Shire (pronounced Shir-ee). Of course, fast forward a few thousand years and things haven’t quite worked out as God intended: a large number of unfortunate souls live in a basin well below the rest of Malawi in intense humidity and horrendous average daily temperatures of 42 degrees. Oh yes, God was certainly right about one thing – the soil is incredibly fertile, as the sugar plantation owners know, but there’s always a catch – in this case the humidity, floods and drought. Welcome to Nsanje and Chikwawa Districts which make up the Lower Shire. It’s a little cruel, in my opinion, that from the bottom of the basin the soaring ridge of the plateau is visible so that every time you look up you are reminded that not everywhere is already 36 degrees at 7am.
Having heard the legend, last week I was fortunate enough to travel to Nsanje and Chikwawa for a week to conduct a flood impact assessment as part of the joint WFP-FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation – another UN body) mission team. Actually, the ‘team’ was made up of me and Chester, a FAO guy and previous Chikwawa District Crops Officer, and the ever important driver who managed to only get us stuck once. In November some flash floods hit the Lower Shire – quite normal for that time of year, and quite expected. BUT, come January, no one was expecting more floods. At WFP these floods have been disastrous, as transporters carrying food for the Jan-Feb distributions have become stuck in an area called the East Bank, along the River Shire.
According to Ministry of Agriculture assessments huge numbers of hectares had been totally destroyed by the January floods. Unfortunately the very lovely Ministry of Agriculture have a few ulterior motives when reporting crop damage, so we were there to do our own assessment. Unlike in the health sector, where Malawi’s 28 districts are divided into Traditional Authorities (TAs), in agriculture the districts are divided on geographical, not political lines, which results in about 5 or 6 EPA (Extention Planning Areas) per district. We spent a lot of time wandering around fields of half flooded maize, and looking at sand covered rice crops. Why oh why, we pleaded, had these people been advised to plant maize after the first rains?? Why not cassava, rice or sweet potato, which are much more resistant to flooding? At one spot we cowered under a tiny tree for shade and looked out on a field of maize which now looks like a beach. Gradually the whole village came over to us and explained that floods had never happened before in the area since 1997, and that they were 100% reliant on the maize they had planted for food. Luckily most other areas weren’t so dependent on their summer crop (it’s summer here!) and could get by on winter harvests, so there’s no need for food aid. Food aid, in my opinion, can be a hugely dangerous thing.
One night I found myself in a snazzy motel in a place called Nchalo, half way between Chikwawa and Nsanje, with ‘you want regret’ under its sign. Nchalo is your typical Malawian town, strung along a main road with a PTC shop, petrol pump and a whole host of little run-down shops selling very randoms things from bicycle tires to goats (Chester actually bought a goat on the way back). There I sat in a bar drinking a ginger ale next to a guy slowly getting drunk on green Calsberg who asked the same question ever 10 minutes or so. Behind the barman’s head was a novelty item: a television with DSTv disk, flashing scenes of As Time Goes By. It had taken some persuasion and the agreement of the entire bar to change the channel to BBC Prime, but the explanation that it would remind me of home made everyone very agreeable. Of course, there followed 100 questions: where was home, what was I doing in the Lower Shire, how long had I been here, which football team do I support??? They were, for the most part, half drunk, and so ecstatic to oblige a white girl who for some bizarre reason was spending a night down in the Lower Shire. So, we sat in the bar till 10pm, by which time the temperature had dropped to a sleep-able 30 degrees.
I wouldn’t want to live in the Lower Shire, although an awful lot of people do. Illovo, the sugar company, has a huge plantation there, and about 30kms of the M1 road travels alongside the sugar cane. Of course, those 30km takes nearly an hour to drive as the road is so bad as to make you feel that your spine is being compacted on every single bump. Nsanje, the last town on the M1, or the first – depending on your viewpoint – promises the exciting Nsanje Port on the Shire River when you enter the town. Unfortunately this hasn’t been built yet, and comments go that why not build a proper road before building a port. At least the promise of the port has brought a baker to the town.
According to my colleagues, I can now say I have seen Malawi. I have traveled the whole of the M1, from the most Southern tip in Nsanje to the most northerly point in Chitipa, covering 24 of the 28 districts. What can I say? Half the time I want to stay for ever in this beautiful, friendly, well meaning country, and the rest of the time I desperately want to come home.
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