On our travels, we are touring eastern Africa and recently enjoyed a week on Zanzibar, one of the spice islands of Tanzania. From there we flew to Malawi, a landlocked country in south-eastern Africa that has been occupied for over a million years. We visited a rock art site there that dates back to the early Stone Age.
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| Ancient paintings at one of the Chongoni Rock Art sites (UNESCO), Malawi |
Known as the Chongoni Rock Art (or the Mphunzi Cave Paintings), it is the richest collection of ancient rock art in in this part of Africa, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Painted by the BaTwa and Chewa peoples over thousands of years, they depict life as it was in those days, providing a rich look into the history of the people and the area.
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| Ancient paintings at one of the Chongoni Rock Art sites (UNESCO), Malawi |
To get there, we flew into Malawi’s capital Lilongwe, then took a 2-hour taxi ride south to the high-altitude town (1590m) of Dedza. The paintings are in a hilly area above Dedza, so the next morning we hired a guide and driver to take us up into the hills to see them.
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| View from a Chongoni Rock Art shelter, Dedza, Malawi |
They are in 127 separate rock shelters or caves over 126 kms, and we visited several over about 4-hours. The views from the top of the hills were great, but it required all of our stamina in the high altitude, to climb the rocky and steep terrain at each one.
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| Local witch doctor’s house, indicated by the flags, Dedza, Malawi |
We had to drive through several impoverished villages on very rough roads to get to some of them. On one occasion we saw a reed hut with flags around it. We were told that the flags mean it is a Witch Doctor’s house and after we left this area, we noticed several more.
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| Marg with village children near a rock art site, Malawi |
In one village, as we made the long slow climb up into the hills, we were beset by children who were on school holidays. Our guide asked us to take a photo of them with us, and send it to him so he could show the kids. They giggled hilariously when we showed them the photo on the camera screen. It was a lovely moment.
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| Lake Malawi (UNESCO), Malawi |
After exploring Dedza and the rock art, we hired a taxi for the 2-hour ride to our next destination, which was Lake Malawi. The lake is a UNESCO World Heritage Site in eastern Malawi, bordering Mozambique. This huge 570 km long by 75 km wide by 706 m deep lake is the fourth largest freshwater lake in the world by volume. It is huge.
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| Fishermen preparing for a day of fishing on Lake Malawi (UNESCO), Malawi |
We stayed in a resort that had access to the lake, in the village of Senga Bay. The Bay has a long golden-sand beach that is home to a few fishing communes. On our walks around the bay, we saw fishing boats, people fishing and repairing nets, huge nets of fish being hauled in by a dozen men pulling together, and fish being smoked over wooden racks on the beach.
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| Women rounding up small fish in the shallows of Lake Malawi (UNESCO), Malawi |
We also watched women rounding up the small fish in the shallows while their men sailed out into the deep water. This ancient lake is estimated to be between 40,000 to three billion years old, and it has more species of fish than any other lake in the world. We had several fish meals that are cultural foods of Malawi. One of those was Chambo, a delicious fish only found in Lake Malawi and which is considered a delicacy.
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| Some of the smaller fishing boats around Lake Malawi (UNESCO), Malawi |
We really enjoyed out time beside Lake Malawi, but the surrounding areas are in dire poverty. The local fisher-people live in a very decrepit shanty town beside the lake, and were very friendly. After enjoying Lake Malawi for a few days, we hired another taxi to take us on the 2-hour ride to Lilongwe, the capital of Malawi.
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| Marg in the street where we stayed in Malawi |
We stayed in a very nice area which was obviously where the well-off people of Lilongwe lived. It was such a contrast to the rural areas we’d been through. While there, we visited the city centre consisting of the New Town which has modern government buildings and embassies and well-made roads, and the Old Town which is full of run-down shops and bad or unpaved roads.
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| A small part of the overwhelming large Lilongwe market, Malawi |
We were fascinated by the huge market in the Old Town. The streets were overflowing with stalls selling absolutely anything, and mostly in very small quantities that the vendor had produced. We wandered around there for quite a while and obviously stood out in the thick crowd, as people waved and smiled saying ‘welcome to Malawi’.
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| Men cleaning second-hand shoes ready for sale, Lilongwe, Malawi |
Crossing a bridge over the Lilongwe River, we could see young men squatting by the river washing something. We realized that they had dozens of shoes that they were cleaning ready for sale. We had seen second-hand goods for sale and are not sure whether they had been found, traded or stolen, but there were lots of them.
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| Village in Malawi |
Malawi has a population of around 20 million with most living in rural areas as subsistence farmers. It is one of the word’s least developed countries, and the poorest country we have seen on our travels. After being colonised by the British from 1891 until 1964, it was governed by a brutal dictator who left a legacy of corruption and poverty. We heard that corruption is still rife here.
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| Bricks baking (taken from dirty windscreen), Malawi |
Poverty is reflected in the housing which is rammed earth on daub and wattle frames (woven tree branches), or mudbrick. The mudbricks are home-made and along the road, we’d seen plenty of mudbricks stacked high, with a fire beneath them to cure and harden the mud into solid bricks.
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| Rural house in Malawi |
Most rural houses have a thatched roof and when you have some money, you add an iron roof. When you get more money, you plaster the house, more money and you paint it, and so on. Most are thatched, and not plastered or painted. We’d seen mudbrick and thatched housing in other east-African countries, but the condition of the houses seemed worse in Malawi.
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| Villagers collecting water at the local well, Malawi |
There is no water into the house, and water is drawn from village wells or rivers. In rural areas the toilet is a long-drop hole in the ground, and in towns, sewerage pipes are connected to a bigger hole in the ground. There is no sewage treatment as we know it. This is similar to the other east-African countries we had visited.
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| Highly populated and busy Malawi |
Malawi is also is one of the world’s most densely populated countries and we saw this everywhere we went with markets by the side of the road every few kilometres, and hundreds of people milling around them. Unfortunately, it seems that Malawi’s soils are now overworked and not producing as they used to which limits food production, and people have cut down the trees to make houses, further wearying the soils.
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| Bicycles used to transport charcoal (top), wood and sugar cane, Malawi |
They also cut down trees to make charcoal for cooking as there is limited electricity with constant power outages, and very few can afford gas. Transport is usually a bicycle which is used to move goods as well as people. Some city people have cars but they tend to be old and in poor condition. To get around, people mostly rely on motor scooters, 12-seater mini-buses that accommodate 24, utes and tray trucks.
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| Friendly Malawians - the warm heart of Africa |
Overall, we found conditions in Malawi quite confronting and depressing. But Malawi is known as the “Warm Heart of Africa” and in the short time we were there, we found the people to be so friendly and welcoming, and living up to the knick-name. Our travels take us next to Madagascar, and we've written about that in the next blog.
This blog is part of a
series on our travels in eastern Africa. The first in this series is
called Johannesburg, South Africa.