Kondwani Kamiyala

One thing that General Arthur McDouglas left us is the adage that goes old soldiers never die: they just fade away. The other Sunday, I was walking downtown the Limbe Central Business District in Blantyre, when I met an old soldier who was fading away. He fought in World War II, and now he is a guard at a filling station. He had just knocked off, and was walking to his home, some three kilometers away. When I got home, I recovered one of my 2001 notebooks, and recovered an interview I had with this old soldier then. The scene is a room in revered musician Wyndham Chechamba’s music school behind Blantyre Post Office. Chechamba himself, blew the reveille a number of time for soldiers like Jossam Maloya! On November 11, 2007, President Bingu wa Mutharika opened a tower in Lilongwe erected for soldiers who died during the two World Wars.... ++++ E ven after the greetings are over, the smile does not vanish from Jossam Maloya’s face. His eyes are bloodshot, almost filled with tears, yet war...

A decade or two ago, Malawians who had relatives and friends abroad had few modes of communication at their disposal. If you wanted to communicate with loved ones abroad, you had to rush to the nearest post office and get an air form and jot your letter. Or else, you would buy some foolscap, put your pen to paper and when you were done, you would put it into an envelope with red and blue stripes, labelled: by air mail. Once sent, the letter would take a fortnight or so to reach its destination in Europe, America or the Indian subcontinent. To get a response, then, meant another fortnight of impatient expectation. For the Malawian in the diaspora, news from home was scarce. Apart from letters from relatives, it meant they were way behind events. The only available option was the fax machine or else, they had to wait until another friend or relative brought news from home. Today, with the coming of the Internet, communication by e-mail has proved to be a worthwhile means of communication...