Month: April 2018

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Malawi

Malawi

millisphere (noun): A discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the world population.

“New Zealand must seek the light after its darkest day,” wrote Stuff when the Malawi Queens beat the New Zealand Silver Ferns in netball at the Commonwealth Games recently.

“This was an unacceptable, unfathomable and deeply disconcerting descent into the abyss,” they continued, somehow forgetting the Tangiwai, Wahine and Pike River tragedies.

“Right now NZ netball has a lot to think about. No stone must be left unturned as it searches at the end of a dark tunnel,” said Silver Ferns captain Katrina Grant continuing the theme of darkness — and mixing her metaphors.

“The players were guttered (sic) and disappointed with themselves,” Silver Ferns coach Janine Southby told Newshub after the match. I presumed this was a typo, but my mind was left grappling with “guttered” netballers instead of the usual gutted ones.

On TV One news that night, the Malawi Queens, in their fluoro pink, green and black uniforms, looked far from guttered with their 57-53 win over the Silver Ferns, unless it means piling on top of one another and then dancing around the court as their supporters in the stands broke into wild victory drumming.

Malawi is a narrow landlocked nation west of Lake Malawi (the third largest lake in Africa) and, with a population of 18 million (2016), it can be divided into two millipsheres — one in the north beside the lake and a densely populated one in the south beside the Shire River.

Ninety-eight per cent of Malawi’s electricity supply is hydro-generated by the Shire River, which flows into the Zambezi, so when there are droughts there are power cuts.
Malawi is one of the poorest countries in Africa and 75 per cent of its population is dependent on tobacco production.

Burley leaf from Malawi (which is high in nicotine) is blended into most global brands. Malawi grows about 7 per cent of the world’s tobacco and tobacco accounts for 70 per cent of the country’s foreign earnings.

Despite United Nations pressure, Malawi — unlike New Zealand — has not signed up to the World Health Organisation framework convention on tobacco control.

Malawi has very little tobacco regulation — there are no rules about smoking in government buildings, schools, hospitals, buses, restaurants or bars and, counter-intuitively, it has one of lowest incidences of smoking in the world.

There are health warnings on cigarette packets but most smokers buy cigarettes singly and never see a packet.

The impact of the tobacco industry has seen the failure of crop diversification as farmers can earn twice as much growing tobacco than other export crops like tea, coffee and sugar.

Cannabis is one crop, although riskier to grow, that can earn a farmer more than tobacco.

Cannabis in Malawi is prohibited but remains a popular drug and is produced for domestic use and export. It is known locally as chamba and a strain known as Malawi Gold is internationally renowned as one of the finest sativa strains in Africa.

The popularity of this variety has led to an increase in marijuana tourism and there is an apocryphal story in Malawi about visitors who came, tried chamba, and lost their will to return to their country of origin.

Malawi is a tiny country — about one third the area of New Zealand — but has a rapidly growing population. The average woman has 5.7 children.

At independence in 1966, Malawi had a population of four million. By 1990 it had more than doubled to 8.7 million, and by 2016 had doubled again to 18 million.

Cecilia Khofi, the current Miss Malawi beauty queen, is using her position to campaign against child brides being forced into marriage.

For this small country, overpopulation and unemployment are big problems.
Overpopulation, coupled with land being devoted to export crops, is leading to the real prospect of famine in the near future.

The Silver Ferns losing a netball game is minor league compared with the challenges the Malawi Queens face at home.

 

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Bandundu

Bandundu

Millisphere (noun): a discrete region inhabited by roughly 1000th of the total world population.

When Sam Manzanza played the Musicians Club I quizzed him about the millisphere of Bandundu. Soukous music, a speeded up Congolese version of Caribbean rumba and samba rhythms, has become popular in the Congo since Sam left Kinshasa. In 2000 the government tried to ban soukous because of its sexually explicit dancing.

The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) consists of ten millispheres and including the one Congo (Brazzaville) millisphere on the north side of the river there are roughly eleven millispheres covering the watershed of the Congo.

The Congo is the second longest river in Africa and the world’s second largest river by water discharge. The coastal millisphere of Atlantic Congo contains the non navigable section of the river and the port of Matadi is connect to the DRC capital, Kinshasa, by road and rail.

Kinshasa (11 million), the third largest African city, after Cairo and Lagos, is a millisphere in itself. According to Mike Davis in Planet of Slums, Kinshasa’s infrastructure has been in decline since the Belgians left in 1963. “The Belgians took twenty percent for themselves and put eighty percent into the government and infrastructure; after independence the new leaders took seventy percent for themselves,” said Sam who moved to Kinshasa in the late sixties.

Sam had been born by Lake Mai-Ndombe (Black water) in the time of the Belgian Congo. Mai-Ndombe is part of the old Bandundu province (eight million), above the Stanley Pools, where the Congo becomes navigable and the Kasai and Kwango rivers branch off. Bandundu is Kinshasa’s hinterland – but still in the lower Congo and there are another seven millispheres further upriver.

The Congo has many languages, and, before learning French and English, Sam spoke Lingala which is spoken by about 8 million people living upriver from Kinshasa and it is also the language used by the DRC army. Sam said in the country everything grew and there was no problem with food, but having no money to buy essentials, like medicine, sent people down the river to the city to look for work.

In the late nineteenth century, during the first thirty years of Belgian rule by King Leopold II, the population had dropped by a third. In 1961, when the DRC achieved independence, there were 13.5 million Africans and 100,000 whites; today the DRC has a population approaching 80 million and has one of the ten fastest growing populations in the world.

The Congolese independence movement came from the intellectuals in Kinshasa and Belgian mining interests were quick to help the breakaway province of Katanga, at the top of Congo watershed, in its bid for its own independence. During the Katanga conflict Patrice Lumumba, the country’s first president, was shot by Belgian mercenaries (backed by the CIA) protecting western mining interests.

In the late 1990s the ethnic conflict in Rwanda spilled over into the DRC claiming as many as five million casualties (mostly civilians) as the army, warlords and ethnic militia fought for control of DRC’s mineral-rich eastern regions. As well as being rich in diamonds, gold, copper, cobalt, manganese, tin and uranium the DRC has eighty percent of the world’s clotan, a semiconductor used in computer electronics. “Paul Kagame (president of Rwanda and now head of the African Union) is a criminal, stealing the Congo’s minerals,” said Sam.

In the First World War copper from the Congo was used to made the brass shell casings for both sides. The uranium in the nuclear bombs dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the Second World War came from a mine in southeast Congo. Nothing much has changed since the days of the Belgian Congo; with global mining interests, working with a small corrupt local elite, backed by the military and ethnic militia controlling production.

“The first will last and the last will be first,” said Sam as we discussed why a country blessed with so much abundance should be so poor and had the bloodiest conflict since the second world war. “Africa’s World War,” was a conflict for the control of minerals sought after by global corporates and arms manufacturers.

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North wind

North Wind

“That’s a millisphere!” I thought when I heard Le Vent du Nord, on stage at Womad, say the Canadian province of Quebec has eight million inhabitants. I include Quebec with the “Atlantic Canada” provinces (total population 2.3 million) in a millisphere I call North Wind (Eastern Canada).

It gets seriously cold there; last Christmas Eve, during near record low temperatures, a US Navy warship, commissioned in Buffalo New York only a week earlier, got stuck in ice in the Saint Lawrence, on its way to Florida – and stayed there for a month.

Le Vent du Nord are a progressive folk ensemble playing (and singing) French Canadian folk songs with fiddles, guitar, hurdy-gurdy, accordion and bouzouki – they sounded Cajun.

From the stage they acknowledged the welcome the performers had received from the Taranaki iwi and said there were some things that should be done for their indigenous peoples. Quebec is an Algonquian word for “where the river narrows”, the river being the Saint Lawrence. Other tribes are the Iroquois and Mohawk in the south and Inuit in the north but there is inter-reservation migration and the traditional “Indians” are a small minority, living in caravans and sheds on small reservations.

The majority tribe are the French Canadians, the French speaking residents of Quebec, who all relate back to 10,000 Catholic French settlers who came in the early 1600s. At first there was a serious imbalance of men to women so squaws were taken for wives and their bloodlines can be seen on the faces of the modern Quebecois.

The minority tribe in Quebec are the British, who took the French colony by conquest in 1763, and independence for the French speaking province has been an ongoing issue ever since. When the Parti Quebecois gained control of the provincial government the French language was granted more status although independence referenda held in 1980 and 1995 where both voted down, the last by a narrow margin.

The House of Commons of Canada passed a symbolic motion recognising Quebecois as a nation within a United Canada but Quebec closely watches Brexit, Scotland and Catalonia. These days they call it the “neverendum,” a debate that continues indefinitely and remains unresolved.

As part of doing a millisphere column I like to talk with people who have been there and I interviewed a St Johns Hill couple who grew up in Montreal, the world’s second largest french speaking city, in the 1950s and 60s.

Most of the people of Quebec live in the south, by the St Laurence, and most of them live in Montreal (metro population 4 million) which is an ancient city, in North American terms, and, like New Orleans, had a unique French/cultured European/cosmopolitan flavour. Montreal is a university town, has a thriving arts and design scene and has Canada’s biggest Jewish population.
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Montreal was also a city divided by the Saint Lawrence boulevard, the east side was French and for an English schoolgirl in an enclave in west there was no reason to go there. To the north there were the Laurentian Mountains cultivated as a playground for Montreal and then there was a vast wilderness. Including all its rivers, lakes and dams Quebec is 12 percent freshwater and has 3 percent of the world’s renewable fresh water.

In the 1950s and 60s Indians were relegated to history but in 2010 a party of Quebec Iroquois, which means “they who smoke”, travelled to the World Lacrosse Championships in the United Kingdom on their own passports; Hillary Clinton interceded to allow their passage through the United States but the British government refused to recognise the Iroquois passports.

The independence issue had created uncertainty and consequently the wealthy moved their money to Ontario (Ottawa and Toronto) leaving Montreal a bit of a backwater, escaping urban renewal

In Quebec City, which is even more of a backwater, a young French Canadian man is standing trial for murder (shooting up a mosque). Immigration and emigration are both issues in the current provincial election campaign namely; Syrian and other Islamic immigrants coming in and young, rural and Anglo (English speaking) emigrants leaving.