Paper short abstract:

The British law was introduced in early colonial Malawi as African order in council of 1889 to 1902 and included policies which regulated sexual violence. This paper seeks to examine the implications such policies had to the postcolonial judicial system when handling sexually related cases.

Paper long abstract:

This study seeks to understand the history of sexual violence in Malawi from 1891 to 1902 and its legacy to the judicial practices on sexual violence in the post-colonial period. It seeks to examine institutionalized sexual violence against African local peoples which occurred in 1895, 1897, 1900 and 1902. The study is qualitative and uses archival sources from the Malawi National Archives and the Historical Society of Malawi; missionary reports from missionary stations; colonial court cases and secondary literature to address these questions; What were missionary, settlers and colonial administrators’ conceptions of sexuality, sexual immorality, and sexual violence in early colonial Malawi? How was sexual violence regulated and punished and how did this shape the modern judicial practices on sexual violence? In line with Martin Chanock work on the Making of South African Legal Culture from 1902 to 1936, the study argues that policies and laws on sexual violence were refashioned in colonial Malawi in relation to the imported doctrine and legislative models with local contexts. Consequently, such policies and laws reflected histories of distant metropoles as well as the immediate opportunities and constraints of colonial conquest. African bodies were sexually exploited to achieve political and economic objectives of the colonizers. Likewise, policies on sexual violence rendered the British Law as an instrument of domination with disastrous effects on the judicial system today which directly affects the development of the country.

Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the efforts the state and its agencies have made to transform the manner in which Africans produced and consumed their foods in Malawi. Framed within the political economy context, it advocates for adaptive learning by the state to achieve food security among rural farmers.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the efforts the state and its agencies have made to transform the manner in which Africans produced and consumed their foods in Malawi. It observes that, despite possessing political and economic power, the state, in its various forms, has not always been all-powerful or monolithic in executing its food and nutrition interventions in the country. It has faced challenges from the rural farmers who constantly resist and negotiate the terms of their participation. Far from being passive victims of state machination; the rural farmers have sought to not only claim but also cultivate their space within state hegemony. This dialectical relation accounted for the failure of the state food interventions. In making this argument, the paper sheds new light to political economy which considers conflict of interests as the major bottleneck to the development outcomes of well-intended projects. Conflict of interests is not always an enemy of development, but sometimes it constitutes the propelling force for achieving development goals. However, instead of developing adaptive learning towards the competitive and conflicting relations, the Malawi state insisted on its new principles independent of the existing history and the local context. The future of food security shall, therefore, depend on the ability of the state to adapt new ideas to prevailing knowledge of the rural farmers.

Paper short abstract:

Implementing the ILO minimum age policy, children have been legally banned from work in commercial agricultural estates in Malawi since the early 2000s. This paper interrogates the mixed impacts of child labour bans through the lived experiences of communities in rural southern Malawi.

Paper long abstract:

Despite implementing the International Labour Organisation’s minimum age policy, legally banning children from work in commercial agricultural estates in Malawi since the early 2000s, the Malawi state continues to fail to protect the basic rights of the nation’s children. Many children remain engaged in harmful work (including on estates), with pitiful educational attainment and food insecure. This paper interrogates the mixed impacts of child labour bans on children’s rights to work, education and freedom from hunger. Analysis of qualitative and quantitative evidence of lived experiences gathered from children, their families and community leaders in the tea and tobacco growing communities of rural southern Malawi reveals widespread corruption in government social programmes intended to support poor households and protect children from engaging in exploitative and risky work. We interrogate links between household food insecurity and children’s need to work for their survival. Facing the future, disillusionment with the moral, economic and political failure of the Malawi state towards its youngest citizens - the future heart of the nation - mean state interventions aimed at ending child labour must be transformed to put children’s rights and resilience building at the centre.

Paper short abstract:

This study argues that bureaucrats in the Malawi Ministry of Health use standard bureaucratic tools, like policies and processes, as a means of resistance against external power. Using ethnographic methods, I show how the inherited colonial bureaucracy is used to drive self-determination in Malawi.

Paper long abstract:

In this paper, I argue that bureaucracy can act as a means of resistance to donor pressure, using Malawi’s Ministry of Health (MOH) as an illustrative case. While most studies of bureaucratic resistance are about civil servants shirking, reshaping, or mismanaging their duties, this study rethinks everyday uses of standard bureaucratic tools, such as documents, policies, and processes, as forms of resistance. In this paper, I draw on ethnographic data, including participant observation, in-depth interviews, and document review, from 16 months of research in the Malawian community health system between 2018 and 2021. I explore how seemingly benign bureaucratic tools are actually being wielded by MOH officials to assert their power. I find that bureaucrats in Malawi have learned to use the tools that donor agencies most respond to—and which were put in place by the colonial administration—to create a formal mechanism for resistance to donor power. By quietly adapting policies and processes to suit their needs, MOH officials maintain power over the development process in ways that are customary to external actors like donors and NGOs. In this way, donors are unable to oppose formal bureaucratic policies and processes, creating a safe and noncontroversial mechanism for the bureaucracy. Thus, as governments push for greater self-determination in development programs, bureaucratic channels become clear avenues for formalizing policies that curtail the ability of external actors to assert domination.

Paper short abstract:

In this paper, I draw on empirical examples from Malawian civil servants involved in disaster relief interventions in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai, to suggest that a focus on corruption, failure and indifference has obscured their sense of duty, which actually shapes their everyday practices.

Paper long abstract:

In academic literature on African civil servants, they are often portrayed as lacking capacity, deeply entangled in patronage networks, embroiled in all kinds of corruption and largely indifferent to the plight of their fellow countrymen. The general understanding of Malawian civil servants has been no exception to this stereotype, and moreover rests on numerous recent corruption scandals such as ‘Cashgate’ and the misuse of COVID-19 funds. In this paper, however, I draw on empirical examples from Malawian civil servants involved in disaster relief interventions in the aftermath of Cyclone Idai, to suggest that this overarching focus on failure has obscured their sense of duty.

Conceptualising the state as instantiated in the everyday practices of civil servants, I spent the whole of 2019 conducting ethnographic fieldwork in a disaster-prone district in southern Malawi, where I followed civil servants working with the Department of Disaster Management Affairs. More so than merely consolidating their positions as ‘patrons of crisis’, I witnessed many instances during which they went beyond their strict professional responsibilities in an effort to balance and live up to additional (moral) obligations they experienced. I refer to this as civil servants’ sense of duty, which lies at the heart of their craft and shapes how they instantiate the state and seek to care for fellow citizens. Following my interlocutors' suggestions that one needs ‘a special heart’ in this line of work, I argue that this sense of duty is always present, but becomes more visible during times of crisis and disaster.

Paper short abstract:

The interests of the state on the natural environment in rural areas has shaped the ways that the state is imagined. As the interests of the state are driven by serving capital and urban elites with the political power, people in rural communities are increasingly distrusting the state.

Paper long abstract:

Climate change, as well as increased urbanisation, have often led to water shortages in Malawian cities. This has necessitated the launch of mega water projects. These mostly abstract water from rural into urban areas where there are also intense conversation activities that the state promotes. This has reconfigured the ways through which the communities imagine and conceptualise the state. In 2021, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Southern Malawi (Mulanje and Blantyre districts) exploring the ways that communities relate with mega water projects. This paper is informed by the data collected from the fieldwork. In this, I highlight that communities – particularly in rural Malawi – imagine and conceptualise the state from a position of resentment and distrust. Communities often regard the state as existing for elites in urban areas and, in the rural areas, it is to protect capital interests. The latter point I make having analysed the ways that communities relate with tea estates. In advancing the arguments, I also seek to comment on future and other re-imaginations of the state in Malawi. Specifically, I focus on the ways that climate change is shaping relationships that people have with the state. This is mostly driven by the projects of abstraction as well as state interests on conservation. In concluding, I look at the impacts that this distrust that local communities have on meaningful engagement between the state and the communities. I look at this distrust as having broader impacts than only within the environment.

Paper short abstract:

Malawian and African politicians are much-derided as a class, including by scholars. This is partly a result of how "neopatrimonialism" has been deployed as a concept. I argue Malawian politicians in fact have complex and varied motivations in public life, many related to the concept of "home."

Paper long abstract:

Few features of contemporary Malawian society are seen to be more steeped in failure – and above all moral failure – as politics and politicians. Politicians are a derided category of persons worldwide, African politicians arguably more than most. And academic work is not immune: anthropologist Richard Werbner has identified a 'bias' amongst scholars 'against elites... as if they were the curse of liberal democracy.'

This paper interrogates "antipoliticianism" in post-Kamuzu Malawi. It suggests that there is, in any system of representative democracy, an inherent tension between the principle of popular sovereignty and the reality of leadership. This tension tends to resolve in more or less disdain for politicians. There are, moreover, peculiarities in the African literature over many decades – above all related to the use and misuse of the concept of “neopatrimonialism” – that have exacerbated these tendencies up to the present day. Regardless of the shift from dictatorial regimes to electoral democracy in Malawi and other places, politicians continue to be seen as peculiarly self-seeking and amoral as a class.

Based on extensive fieldwork and over 100 interviews with Malawian politicians, I challenge the prevailing cynicism and offer a defence of Malawian politicians in terms of their motivations in politics and the meanings inscribed in their work. I find them far from saintly, but for the most part also sincerely motivated by a desire to serve their communities. Constituency service, and the concept of their “home” constituency, are central to their ideas and ideals of public/community service.

Paper short abstract:

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in rural Malawi , this paper explores the significance of popular practices of freedom, particularly surrounding the unknowability of the heart, in shaping democratic practice in a rural constituency during the 2019 Tripartite Elections.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the relevance of the notion of freedom in democratic practice and electoral politics in rural Malawi during the 2019 Tripartite Elections. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in a rural constituency in the central region, it highlights the importance of one practice of freedom commonly adopted by interlocuters when participating in electoral politics, where they were able to keep their intentions hidden from others. This drew on popular practices and discourses, particularly discourses surrounding the Chichewa word for heart (mtima) and the unknowability of others. The significance this has in shaping political relationships and constituting democratic practice in rural Malawi is highlighted. The implications of this are both that the concept of freedom is important in understanding local political practice in rural Malawi and democratic freedom can be interpreted and refigured by populations in ways that expand normative definitions of freedom or democracy.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses contestations surrounding the Covid-19 and its associated preventive measures in Malawi to demonstrate the country's unique democratic culture that recognizes statecraft as a fluid and contested process with diverse groups making claims and counterclaims over matters of governance.

Paper long abstract:

When on 15 April 2020, the Malawi Government announced a country-wide lockdown to contain the spread of the Covid-19 pandemic, human rights defenders, private school owners, university students, urban dwellers, and others contested the lockdown. Meanwhile, doctors, nurses, and other public health officials celebrated it, for it would allow hospitals to cope, thereby avoiding a looming public health disaster. What do these contestations reveal about the nature of the Malawian state? This paper addresses this question by drawing on print and online media reports, government gazettes, and public and private records. It argues that the contestations and how they were allowed to flourish display a democratic culture in which citizens enjoy a political space where they can question the state and express their voice. While in other countries, including those boasting mature democracies, certain rights were suspended to contain the pandemic, the Malawian state allowed diverse interest groups to express their frustrations through open demonstrations, sit-ins, and dialogue while accepting the untenability of lockdown measures. In this way, these contestations reveal some level of maturity in Malawi’s democratic culture, where the state recognizes that statecraft is a process that is fluid and contested, with diverse groups making claims and counterclaims over matters of governance. Other than looking at the contestations as a threat to state operations and legitimacy, they, in fact, display a form of popular democracy in which the citizenry understands its rights and is prepared to defend them.