We are raising Afro-Saxons

I once was on a team that visited Ntcheu on church business. One member of the team decided to call her son in Blantyre to tell him that if anybody would come home or call, he should inform them that his mother was in Ntcheu. “Where, mum?” the young man asked. She repeated the name to him and he said: “How do you spell it?”

Many of our urban young people are so Anglicised that they can neither pronounce nor spell Malawian names. At my church in Blantyre, there is an annual programme where Sunday school children lead the service on one Sunday in the year. Three or four years ago, a girl took the announcements during such a service. She had great difficulty announcing the banns of marriage, which required her not only to pronounce the people’s names but also where they came from.

The girl mumbled through names of chiefs such as Chadza-Mkwenda, Chilikumwendo and Mabulabo. When it came to the Salima chief, Bibi Kuluunda, my goodness, she almost fainted. What came from that poor girl was total gibberish, the first bit of the chief’s name sounding like something you do not want to hear, much less in church.

Not surprisingly, when the church administration next met, a resolution was quickly passed to bar minors from making announcements in church.

My good friend, Arthur Kambombe, once narrated an interesting story to me. A girl at Chancellor College was walking from the teaching area to the hostel at night. If you are familiar with Chancellor College, you probably know that it has lots of open spaces and sometimes free-roaming dogs wander around.

As the girl walked, she saw some dogs in the distance. She called out to the watchman who was in the vicinity to help her get the dogs off her way. “Ay-londer!” she called. This was a corruption of alonda which means watchman. Not picking the strange accent, the watchman did not respond. Meanwhile, the dogs were getting closer. Fortunately for her, she was not totally devoid of vernacular expression, so she went: “Ah, olonda, ogaluwatu otiluma!” (Please help, Mr Watchman, I could be bitten by these dogs).

Not many of our Anglicised young people would have such flexibility of expression. They are so detached from anything Malawian that they may well be from a different nationality. They do not share the values that Malawians cherish. They are simply disconnected.

When I was a youth, it was unheard of that an elderly person would be working or carrying a heavy load while the youth were simply watching. Today, you, the father or the mother, get home with items in the vehicle that you are bringing home and you end up removing them from the car yourself. Meanwhile, the youngsters of the home are on Facebook or are watching a Premier League match. They are not bothered one bit about elderly people running around. Very unMalawian!

The truth of the matter is that these youngsters are hardly to blame for this state of affairs. It is we, the parents, who have failed in our parental duty. We have not guided them accordingly. We have not engaged them to honestly and repeatedly tell them how life, as it is known in Malawi, ought to be lived. These young people learn more from their peers and from the TV or the Internet than from their fathers or mothers. Most fathers are strangers in their own homes, spending more time at work or at drinking resorts. Mothers spend a great deal of their time attending social functions, if they are not at work.

We are paying a great price for being absentee parents.

The tragedy is that while we are raising people who are, to all intents and purposes, unMalawian, they are not British either, although they may sound so. How I wish they were one or the other. I know they are not British because most of them cannot say anything about the Stonehenge or about Guy Fawkes. They have not heard of Neil Kinnock or Robert Maxwell. In fact, a good number of them would struggle to explain the difference between England, Britain and United Kingdom. They are neither here nor there. Nay, these “non-Malawians” are not Anglo Saxons. They are a strange breed that can be referred to as, to borrow Ali Mazrui’s terminology, Afro-Saxons. n