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Getting more tourists into Malawi
The Malawi economy can grow and stabilise at a higher level if it is diversified in its already existing three sectors. Agriculture should have new cash crops. Tobacco, tea and cotton have been around for more than a century but have not made Malawi rich. Secondary and tertiary sectors need drastic transformation. Whenever we learn that a certain country has developed and is economically in the second or first world trial, we notice that manufacturing and services dominate the economy. Agriculture is in most cases the foundation but not the roof of the economy.
The magazine African Business of March 2006 has a special report on tourism in Africa and shows that Kenya and South Africa are the main tourist destinations on the continent. Other countries such as Mauritius, Seychelles, Madagascar, Tanzania and Uganda are featured. I looked in vain for the name Malawi. Had the magazine been talking about famine, Malawi would have been mentioned. We have an image problem.
From our economic history we notice the problem in Malawi is not that most products or industries have never been introduced or tried, but that they have never been tried with persistence and zeal. Coffee, which has made Uganda, Ivory Coast and Brazil prosperous, was introduced at the beginning of the 20th century. It made a good start but was abandoned when it suffered a few hiccups on the production and marketing side. Those who were engaged in the industry did not believe in the success formula: If you fail once try and try again.
I am not sure when tourism as a potential source of national income was first realised in this country. But it goes well back in the colonial days. I remember during school days in the 1940s seeing a tourism pamphlet headed ‘Nyasaland Calling’ featuring the attractions of the country. Therein you would come across description like “Nyasaland is Switzerland without snow” or “Nyasaland is Scotland in a tropical setting”. All this was written over 60 years ago and yet up to now tourism is still in its infancy in this country. If we do not bring it into maturity now, when are we going to?
According to a press release, Malawi is tomorrow set to host a charity dinner in Scotland to raise awareness of Malawi as a tourist destination. Well and good, but what does it take to attract visitors to a country?
First, the slogan ‘Malawi is the Warm Heart of Africa’ should be seen to be real by those who visit it including the Scots who are being specially targeted in the United Kingdom. Minor civilities can strengthen existing friendship while minor ingratitude can disrupt them.
If we want people of other countries to come here we must be nice to them and never forget the good that they might have done in this country in the past.
At least three times someone has asked me to say something about the hill called Kabula and whether I support the suggestion that Blantyre be renamed Kabula. I have asked one of them why the name Blantyre should be dropped and he said it is a foreign name. I have reminded him that he and his children are using European names; that even now if you go up and down the country you will come across young persons called Macpherson, MacDonald, Catherine not to mention John and Mary. If foreign names are good for individuals, why should they be necessarily bad for a town? It depends on the history behind the naming. Don’t you hear of Lagos and Port Harcourt in Nigeria, Freetown in Sierra Leone, Monrovia in Liberia and Brazzaville in Congo? He is silent.
There can be economic advantages in preserving some historical artefacts dating back to colonial days. Listen to Lee Kuan Yew, the super achiever in transforming an economy. In his book From Third World To First, he writes: “My colleagues and I had no desire to re-write the past and perpetuate ourselves by renaming streets or buildings or putting our faces on postage stamps or currency notes. Winsemius [Lee’s Dutch economic advisor] said we would need large scale technical, managerial, entrepreneur and marketing knowledge from America and Europe.
“Investors wanted to see what a new socialist government in Singapore was going to do to the statue of Raffles. Letting it remain would be a symbol of public acceptance of the British heritage and could have positive effect. I had not looked at it that way but was quite happy to leave the monument because he [Stamford Raffles] was the founder of modern Singapore.”
Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda had wisely brushed off suggestions that Blantyre be renamed just as Port Herald (Nsanje), Fort Johnstone (Mangochi) and Fort Maning (Mchinji) had been renamed.
Behind the name Blantyre is the memory of what good Scotsmen did in this country. Blantyre was the birthplace of Dr. David Livingstone who, among other things, visited our most powerful chiefs appealing to them to give up slave trade.
He appealed to church leaders in Britain to go and establish missions in the Shire Highlands. It was due to his influence that we Malawians were among the lucky Africans who received missionary rule very early in modern history.
In 1876 a mission was set up in the land of Chief Kapeni which was called Blantyre Mission. Out of it grew what is now the city of Blantyre. An out-station of the Blantyre Mission was built with the permission of Chief Mlumbe east of Mount Zomba. It was the beginning of the municipality of Zomba which was the capital of Nyasaland protectorate.
To encourage people from Britain and Portugal, let us preserve whatever relics they left here.
Tanzanian tourists tend to concentrate in the north—Kilimanjaro, Ngorongoro and Serengete—yet the south, just north of Malawi has attractions of its own. Tourist boards or ministries of the two countries should do feasibility study on jointly promoting the Nyika Plateau in Malawi and Tanzania’s southern highlands. Though for sometime Kenya and South Africa will continue to dominate the African tourist scenario, some tourists are looking for alternative destinations. Let us encourage them.
Tourism has failed to make a permanent take-off in Malawi because it has been treated as peripheral not a central in the economy.
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