If you don’t know the background on what I’m talking about, read this and then this . To read the very well written, detailed description of the problems protestors are responding to, and the protestors’ demands, read this.
When I started writing this, it was 5pm in Malawi. On a normal day, people would be heading home by foot or minibus or car, getting ready for dinner and the blackouts Escom (the electric company) recently scheduled for 4pm -10pm every day. But today is 20 July. It was Red Army day. It was a day of national protest. While the demonstration is over in the city centres, gunshots still reverberate through the townships and the grocery stores still burn.
The BBC only began to pay attention today, when the protests devolved into rioting with buildings being burned, and the firefighters in the capital of Lilongwe ran out of water to fight flames engulfing DPP (the political party of the President) buildings and vehicles. It’s easy, when it’s not an issue personal to you, to recognize that the BBC and other news outlets can’t cover everything. When it is a personal issue, as Malawi is to me, it can seem incomprehensible that no one seems to give a damn.
So, where are we now? The people of Malawi poured out into the streets in their red clothes and kerchiefs and hats, refusing to be silenced. Now multiple PTCs (a grocery store) and DPP storefronts have been burned, along with DPP trucks. One person is confirmed dead, but at least 6 are reported dead in Mzuzu, including police. Some of the protests have ended and people have gone home to make their nsima and eat dinner, but Mulanje is now in conflict, the police searching for protestors. In Lilongwe, the police started sweeping for looters. The townships in Blantyre are still alight, with burning tire roadblocks and for some reason youths are throwing rocks at cars passing by. When one of the Malawians interviewed on BBC’s Africa Have Your Say offered to go ask the youths why they were throwing rocks, the interviewer asked him to please not to do that and get assaulted on account of a radio show, so I guess we’ll never know why now.
But my question is what it takes for a story to be picked up in today’s world of increasingly segmented and sensationalist news? Why is it that the BBC and Al Jazeera waited so long to weigh in, and then got everything so wrong when they did? (Note to BBC’s Africa Have Your Say: Xenophobia about Asians could theoretically be exacerbated by the events of today, but Malawians have so many legitimate reasons to be angry and to be acting on it that blaming today on bigotry is honestly disgusting. Note to Al Jazeera: 400 in Lilongwe, really? You list no other numbers, or even though the big demonstration was in Blantyre, and thousands upon thousands of people came out there? Way to make it look like a discontented minority is just causing problems.)
It’s not like there’s been no media interest in Malawi. Bingu has obviously been imploding for months, and there have been periodic updates about him and Malawi. The only question has been how many Malawians he will take out with him. And yet every step of the way, it seems the media has treated it as a titillation (the headlines may not have said it, but the copy sometimes seemed to imply an attitude of “oh, isn’t he so *cute* kicking out the UK High Commissioner like that.”) or as an isolated incident, unrelated to any of the other ways Malawi was making the news. Regardless of the method, the effect is a disjointed and disrespectful misrepresentation of what is turning into a major event in the world. Sure, it may peter out and turn to nothing. But in the meantime, here are people who are fighting for their right to a democracy that isn’t in name only, some of them even invoking the beloved narrative of the Arab Spring, and they’re treated like they don’t exist.
Even when someone tweeted the BBC yesterday to ask why the demonstration wasn’t being covered in the news, the reply was that the protests weren’t newsworthy. It wasn’t until today, when the violence started, that they decided to dedicate an entire hour to Malawi and the protests.
So yes, I understand that the BBC can’t cover everything (and I think it’s sad that CNN and other US news organizations are so isolationist that no one thought they’d be interested at all). But they could have covered this. They had the information. They had incredibly smart people outlining what is happening in blogs and on twitter. Sure, not all of those excellent people to follow were talking about the protests before this morning, but most of them were.
I realize that I am angry. My friends have been trying to decide if they are going to stand in solidarity and risk themselves, or stay behind locked doors and be safe. That is an incredibly difficult decision to make, and it is one that is inherent in being a responsible member of a democracy. I honor whatever choices they came up with. That struggle should be acknowledged, especially by media that otherwise appears to, for all intents and purposes, have its head up its ass, for lack of a better way to say it. All of us who live in democracies have something to learn from Malawi today about the responsibility that comes with. I’m not trying to negate the looting and burning, which was wrong, but just like demonstrations that (used to) happen here in the US, the destructive type is not indicative of who went out chanting and cheering and participating in democracy.
The question now, for Malawi and for the media, is the same thing Blessings Ngwira asked: What will happen on 21 July?
*I realize there are photos on these two posts that are not of the cities, which is where most of the action on 20 July happened. I am not trying to contribute to the idea that all of Africa is the bush–it’s just that I take fricking awful pictures of cities, so I couldn’t find any to post. There is, however, one picture (at the thousands and thousands link) and one video (and the chanting and cheering link). I didn’t want to steal bandwidth by posting them directly.
**A friend of mine posted this about Uganda, which shows that the issue of the media gaze is not restricted to Malawi. I knew that, but it’s a good reminder.









YAKIMA – Nancy Ann Tobin Putney Faller, 83, died July 17, 2010, at Yakima Valley Memorial Hospital. Nancy was born on September 22, 1926, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, to Carrie Farmer and Tom Tobin, a Notre Dame graduate and Irish road construction contractor. Her father died when Nancy was seven. Two years later, her mother married Ellsworth Putney, whose daughter Virginia “GeeGee” Putney became the “sister of love” Nancy had longed for.
In 1961, Bill became the football and baseball coach at YVJC and the Fallers moved to the house on Barge Street which remains the family base. While Nancy had always worked to keep the promise she had made in World War II, it was in Yakima that her community activism became a way of life for her.




