On being un-Malawian

Mzamo, Malawi’s representative to Big Brother, is un-Malawian. She smokes like a chimney (very un-Malawian); she drinks like fish (absolutely un-Malawian); and to cap it all, she just had sex in the house and in public at that (outrageously un-Malawian).

A Malawian (and a Malawian woman at that) doesn’t smoke like a chimney (cigarettes are for men); never drinks like fish (it’s another man thing); and, well, does not get involved in embarrassing ‘sexcapades’ by any stretch (that’s the men’s terrain). Right? Wrong, very wrong!

I can understand the outrage from her family (I can’t think of any that wouldn’t be) that one of their own has just disgraced them (walaula mtundu) but that is their private grief and they are justified to it. Hence, I don’t believe, for a moment, that we, 14 million Malawians packed in a very tiny country, should be falling all over ourselves trying to prove we are more aggrieved than the next person.

Malawians love their cigarettes and you only have to look at how many people are puffing away their sorrows to appreciate this fact. Malawians worship their beer. Such is our reverence for the stuff that we have turned every corner in the townships into a drinking place. Lucius Banda sang a song about the romance between the Ngoni’s and their beer and that speaks volumes. Some brilliant scientists in Thyolo discovered you can distil a lot of kachasu if ARVs are used as an ingredient.

As for having sex in public, well, don’t skin me alive for this. Remember the priest and the nun at the airport; another priest and a woman in Mangochi (who were caught twice having sex in a car) and ask the police about how many people are caught in uncompromising positions in cars at night.

Tell me which resthouses (and some motels and lodges) are in the actual business of providing accommodation to genuine visitors. We have too many resthouses in towns (which are nothing more than ‘sexhouses’) where people walk in in pairs to do what we can only imagine. You might say, at least, they seek the decency of cover but what decency is there when it leaves little room for imagination?

Big Brother is a reality show, which requires of the contestants to behave in the manner they would at home (except that they have cameras and microphones recording their every move) — not as actors acting the roles of their life.

By the way, were Mzamo a man, would the outrage have been this strident? I’m not, in any way, trying to justify her indiscretions. In fact, she should have known the heartache she would be causing back home with any ‘misstep’.

Last year, Hazel Warren came back without lighting the sparks in the house but she received a hero’s welcome because she had behaved like a ‘Malawian’ just as Code Sangala before her. I have my doubts if Mzamo will be accorded the same accolade because she’s done something un-Malawian. So, who’s more Malawian?

Malawian are not as introverted as Hazel but neither are they as wild as Mzamo. We have the best and the worst of both.

By the way, who’s a bigger national embarrassment (and very un-Malawian) between someone who couldn’t sing the national anthem (dear me!) and another who had sex in Big Brother house? Zein Dudha, for all I know, embarrassed himself and the nation; Mzamo has embarrassed herself largely, her family to a large extent yes, but the nation? No, I don’t think so.