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It’s been too much to imagine, of course. The frequency is shocking, too.
Violence on women and children is reported everyday and our reaction of shock and anger was understandable. But anger will not lead Malawi to clues of this puzzle. Anger has no room for reason and common sense.
Instead we need research. Men cannot just turn into beasts in 2005 and start defiling toddlers and chopping off their wives’ arms.
There must be causes that need a systematic explanation beyond speculation. The answers provided so far are not satisfactory. There was no violence in the past. Courts do not mete stiff punishment. Culture is responsible. All these are true but not enough.
Dictatorships value society over individuals while the philosophy of liberal democracy, which Malawi aspires to attain, takes an individual as more important than society.
It’s, therefore, not true that there was no violence in the days of Dr Hastings Kamuzu Banda. Women and children, even men, suffered in silence. Now democracy has freed them from suffering in the cocoon.
Death sentence cannot stop domestic violence. No recent study has determined that imprisonment or death sentence prevents people from committing crime, especially in our cultural context.
Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish ought to remind us: do we really discipline (reform) or punish? Are we calling for revenge or reform?
Our cultures value women and children as if they were gods. Can the same cultures turn against women and children today? We got it wrong here.
Of course cultures are responsible for some vices but not rape and defilement. Our cultures have means of satisfying unreasonable lust through practices like kuchotsa fumbi, kulowa kufa and chokolo which were endorsed by women and religion until Aids disrupted our society.
It has not been proven scientifically that cases of domestic violence are rising. The frequency is, perhaps, proportional to the population.
It is, therefore, scientifically faulty to compare today’s frequency to that of early 1980s when Malawi had a dictator with almost half the current population. The rate might be the same.
The daily reporting of violence started almost immediately after Malawi Police Services decentralised its public relations. Now every station has a public relations officer.
They compete at getting more reports to newsrooms. Stories that could otherwise have gone unreported are being published.
Still the rates of violence are worrying. There should be something greater than these reasons, something powerful that can move a 55-year-old-man to defile a three-year-old-girl. That is what Malawi needs to determine and this educated guess is a starting point.
Magic
This is an important factor. People want magic for various reasons especially business, to get rich and, sometimes, requires killing and sex with minors or old women.
We live in a materialistic world. Now what was once luxury, is basic need. People want to live in utopia and nothing will stop them from that achievement.
Consider this example. One man, a banana seller and a church elder in Ndirande, followed his wife to Mdeka and killed his two children with an axe. The woman was heavily injured and spent six months at Ward 6A at Queen Elizabeth Central Hospital in Blantyre.
The reason? She refused to end her pregnancy magically for a business talisman. That got the man angry and this was in 1989. Magic is still important to most Malawians.
Mental illness
The World Health Organisation (WHO) estimates that 50 percent of mental illness sufferers go untreated. The disease is now a growing global health crisis with 150 million patients worldwide.
Yet half the patients don’t seek treatment. They may take part in everyday life while sick. The impact of untreated depression—common type of mental illness—on society can be devastating. Social scientists say between 10 and 15 percent of sufferers commit suicide. The illness is also associated with alcoholism, drug abuse and unprotected sex which can lead to other diseases such as Aids.
Zomba Mental Hospital chief nursing sister Immaculate Chamangwana agrees mental illness could explain some domestic violence. Her boss, Dr Felix Kauye, agrees, too, but with a caution, typical of academics.
“We need to study each case to determine if the crime is secondary to mental illness,” said Kauye, the country’s only psychiatrist. This is a call to research which is crucial to the fight against domestic violence.
Failed democracy
Malawi’s experience shows it is simpler to dream liberal democracy than achieve it. Building sustainable, real democracy is difficult.
We allowed ourselves freedom of dressing yet we jeer at women in miniskirts. We adopted multiparty but when opposition leaders addressed rallies, their vehicles were burnt down. We legalised marriage by repute, but our society doesn’t accept permanent cohabitation.
There is a jingle on radios which says children—and they listen to this—should not be whipped.
Yet culture and religion encourage such punishment which most of us applaud. The Bible advises whipping as a means of teaching children. And this is important in a country where 70 percent claim to be religious.
This, in all fairness, is a collision of democracy and culture.
Extreme poverty and disease remain our main challenges which overwhelm not only democracy but order. Freedom does not make sense when order is threatened, when disease and death are teasing people everyday.
One reason multiparty triumphed was the involvement of the youth. A bulging youth population was bad news for Banda and his MCP.
France had a youth bulge before the French Revolution. So, too, Iran before its 1979 revolution. Malawi had its version of a revolution, but after attainment of multiparty politics, the youth were disregarded. Some were turned into UDF thugs to perpetrate violence against opposition parties. Political violence has now taken the form of domestic violence.
Media
Our young men were introduced to Hollywood movies and nudity magazines. They have one leg in new world but often wake up to frustrations that, in fact, both legs are in the old world of poverty and disease.
The power of television is unknown to most viewers. But as media researchers suggest, violence on television can have a lasting, devastating effect on viewers. (There is an excellent article in Mawu Magazine by a scholar in media effects, Innocent Mbvundula. It is must reading for every parent.)
Lawlessness
Democracy goes with the rule of law. Not so much in Malawi. Human rights were not respected. The then ruling UDF had so many decent minds and started well. (Think of cash budget system, the 10 point plan and many other brilliant initiatives that were blocked by lack of political will at the top.) The UDF rule was tainted by a few selfish people who wanted to remain in power through intimidation.
The Police stood helpless as UDF thugs beat up journalists, the clergy, women, traditional leaders and everyone deemed to hold an alternative view. If that was not enough to instill a sense of lawlessness in people, then nothing else can do so.
The violence we are witnessing now is a hangover and a product of lawlessness which extended to vendors, minibus touts and everyone.
Take the roads, for example. People prefer boarding minibuses at corners to designated places. Example are Kudya in Blantyre and Area 18 in Lilongwe.
Failed gender activism
It is right to talk about failures of men. But what about failures of women? Gender activists who emphasise on women have, to a large extent, not succeeded.
They are on collision with culture. They want people to change just once and for all yet culture, as Femi Abodunrin likes to say, is not like water in a bucket that one can empty and fill at will. Activists ought to understand that change will take years, decades, even generations and that the approach need to be based on social-cultural policies.
Umunthu
Former University of Malawi board chair Ben Dzowela once made a brilliant speech that, sadly, has gone unheeded. That was at Chancellor College during graduation on October 23, 1999.
“We have neglected the very foundation on which our training for skills should be based. Skills development alone, without character, is really a waste of time, energy and resources,” said Dzowela. “I mean we have produced accountants who are embezzlers of funds; doctors who abuse their patients....”
We are all anthu [human beings] before we take up any profession. So we need umunthu which comes first before spirituality. In fact religion works better in anthu, people with umunthu not unyama.
Decades ago, at school, we read great stories whose value lied in the many social and economic problems raised and discussed.
At home parents, educated or not, complemented school literature with oral traditions—myths, legends, folk-tales, riddles and proverbs. That level of reading is now gone. Literature is optional at secondary school. Primary school reading sessions are not as lively as they were decades ago.
Unbalanced emphasis on sciences has made us see everything as an object that we can experiment on. Umunthu is slightly disappearing from our society.
We have missed something and we need to go back to umunthu and literature is one big tool to achieve the ideal of umunthu.
A boy or girl who grows up without listening to Kalulu the Hare or critically reading Tremors of the Jungle by BMC Kayira, Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe, Matigari by Ngugi wa Thiongo or Kukula ndi Mwambo by John Gwengwe is not man or woman enough.
What next?
One sure way will take Malawi forward. People who plead guilty to charges of rape and defilement hold clues to the puzzle.
We need to talk with them, spend hours listening to them and days studying them. Did they have a voice in society or rape and defilement were perhaps the means to show off they, too, are existing?
The National research Council can coordinate a study. The universities of Malawi, Livingstonia and Mzuzu can provide researchers who can work with herbalists and magicians to engage defilers and rapists into a talk, listen to them and understand them.
Locking them away is like burning a library. We are losing key information. Let’s send them to prison but let us talk with them. Then we shall, for sure, begin to understand causes of domestic violence.
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