Forgetful Republicans, Malawi’s 15 million-strong population has just completed an eventful month.
A random pick cuts across chieftaincy wrangles, growing debate on cultivation of industrial hemp, the loud cries about holiday makers in New York and a commotion of a prayer event in the country’s Northern End.
There was an awful lot of talk, but like with everything in this country, give it just a little time and these huge talking points will die and get buried in the oblivious part of our minds.
As a nation, we suffer from a short memory syndrome and some funny and crazy scatterbrain observed some years ago, “Bvuto la aMalawi sitichedwa kuiwala!”— ‘Malawians have short memories.’
We are a bunch of poor and lamentable record keepers. Consequently, we suffer from a sort of information bankruptcy.
Sometimes I wonder why we are still stuck to such a path of information insolvency whose one danger is the apparent lack of proper frames of reference for decisions a little later in life.
While we have the media doing a fair job in recording our history as it happens, one still sees a seemingly large need for more vibrant record keeping.
I quickly ask myself why we have no huge interest or commitments to author books either on our people or events we cannot afford to forget.
Imagine, Neglectful Republicans, some things just come and go, eluding our sense of record keeping. I sometimes drift to an imagined era where libraries have on offer titles too good to ignore:
The Runs and End of Nachipanti; The Cashgate Revelations; The Wrath of a Flooded Shire; The 20 July — 20 people Massacre; Searching For Chasowa’s Tracks; The Mystic Bites of the Dowa Beast; Karonga’s Earth Rupture; The Tears of an Electoral Commission Chairperson; The Flames’ East and Central Africa Senior Challenge Cup Triumph.
What about chronicles of play-writer Du Chisiza Junior, soccer hotshot Ricky ‘Mabomba’ Phuka, or acoustic wizard Allan Namoko?
