Tambu Chirwa - Girl Child in Malawi

Tambu Chirwa (then Manondo) around 1980

Birth

The beautiful jacaranda bloom season of Pretoria, South Africa had just ended. The year 1963 was about to be closed. Lessa Manondo was in the third trimester of a pregnancy as the seasons transitioned from Spring, that runs September to November, to Summer. And the Summer rains had started. Lessa’s older sister, Lizinet Thembachako, came to be with her during this joyous pregnancy. At about 40 years of age, Lessa thought she was past the childbearing age. And then this pregnancy happened.

“It’s a girl”, said the midwife on Monday December 9, 1963 as Lessa delivered [1].

“I am naming this one Tambudzai after myself”, pronounced Lessa’s older sister.

“The name of this baby is Mauawawa”, chimed in Dickson, Lessa’s husband.

Hello world! Receive your newest addition in the form of a girl given the most uncommon collection of names. For Tambudzai is a word in the Shona language that means troublemaker. While Mauawawa means “words hurt” in the Chichewa language.

Within the same time period, Lessa’s older sister Lizinet gave birth to a daughter whom she named Maria. Tambu and Maria were raised as twins from childhood. At three years old, Tambu moved to Wanyemba Village in Ntcheu, Malawi together with her mother and siblings. So did Lizinet and Maria and their family.

Early Years

Tambu was a rambunctious child. Everyone in Wanyemba Village considered Tambu a tomboy. She liked to play with boys and she got into many fights. At age 6 she was enrolled in standard one at Kapalamula Primary School in Wanyemba. Tambu’s student life was off to a rocky start. She was not doing well in school. She narrated the following experience to me:

“One day, the teacher was teaching us names of different parts of the body. To check if we were paying attention, the teacher asked me the name of the bulging lines on the arm. I proudly answered, ‘muscles’. But the teacher said, “No, it is veins!” I told the teacher that he was wrong. There is no way those lines can have such a silly name”.

Outside the classroom, Tambu’s life was that of an ordinary village girl. She helped her mother with cleaning, fetching water from the borehole, washing clothes by hand, and cooking. She was trained in the Ngoni manners. The elders taught her how to be a respectable and responsible female in the community. Other than the fighting and playing with boys, she was receiving the usual village girl training. The Manondo family had more wealth compared to most in the village. They were able to pay for some labor such as farm work. This enabled Tambu to be exempt from farm work. But she enjoyed the authentic flavors of newly harvested fresh farm products such as green maize (corn), raw groundnuts (peanuts), pumpkins, mustard greens, okra, and tomatoes. And she enjoyed going to the market to bargain for cheaper prices of produce. Tambu also learned early on that her father loved tea. She made tea for her father three times a day: morning, afternoon, and night.

The family belonged to the Presbyterian Church. As such, Tambu attended church regularly. She completed all the baptismal and confirmation requirements of the church. The Malawi Presbyterian Church has always experienced a shortage of trained clergy. Prayer houses that may have upwards of 1000 members may not have a dedicated pastor. Pastors tend to be assigned to mission stations whose catchment areas have many prayer houses. Therefore, pastors tend to carefully plan visits to the prayer houses in their “parishes”. It is not uncommon for a prayer house to have only two to three pastor visits per year. The prayer house at Wanyemba was no exception. Due to this clergy shortage, lay members fill in the preaching schedule. The quality of preaching by lay members was sometimes hilarious. Tambu shared a story with me of a lay member who was asked to preach. The member kept repeating:

“Jesus said hoho!”.

This went on for 15 minutes. The congregation kept wondering if there was more to come. But alas! While the preaching sometimes left little to be desired, the singing was usually good. The pure unaccompanied voices of church members was usually uplifting.

Of all the Christian church traditions, Tambu enjoyed Christmas [2] the most. Lessa Manondo and Lizinet Thembachako would coordinate tailoring new dresses for Tambu and Maria. These would be presented to the girls on Christmas day. The girls would proudly wear their new Christmas presents to church. Later in the day, they would indulge in eating rice with chicken and wash it down with Fanta orange soda.

Preteens

Tambu was in junior primary school in the late 1960s to early 1970s. From a nation-building point of view, this was an exciting period in Malawi. The country seemed to be developing in leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, the political environment started to deteriorate as undemocratic laws were passed so that the ruling party and its president would have a grip on political power.

By then, some of Tambu’s older siblings were employed and married. Anna, in particular, was employed by the Coca-Cola subsidiary in Malawi and was married to Felix Mwasinga. They were living in Blantyre in the south of Malawi.

The parents and older siblings were worried about Tambu’s development because she was not doing well in school. An intervention was worked out. Tambu was going to live with one of the siblings who would impose more discipline on her. The first sibling chosen to take up this responsibility was Anna.

Felix Mwasinga was very abusive. He used to abuse both his wife Anna and all the children. The abuse was both physical and verbal. He had affairs and sometimes was away from home for days, spending those days at other women’s homes. Upon returning home, he was irascible and would find fault with anything or anybody of his choice. And he would beat whoever he thought was at fault. He was particularly angrier when he was drunk. Tambu took a larger proportion of the abuse because she usually answered back. Her sister Anna advised her not to answer back but to just take the abuse silently. Tambu did not understand this type of advice. For this reason, Tambu was labeled “wamwano” which means the disrespectful one. The Mwasinga’s had four children all of whom lived in the house. The names of the children were Mike, Ronnie, Solomon, and Maureen. There were also some relatives living in the house. Tambu took up the role of protector of the children. She sought to protect the children from their father’s abuse.

The abuse that Tambu experienced in the Mwasinga home made her take a vow of never getting married in her life.

In 1975, Malawi moved its government headquarters from Zomba in the south to Lilongwe in the center [3]. The government was encouraging businesses to have a presence in Lilongwe to legitimize the move. The Coca-Cola affiliate where Anna worked built a bottling plant in Lilongwe. Anna Mwasinga was transferred to Lilongwe to work in the new factory. The Mwasinga’s moved to Lilongwe and Tambu moved with them. She was enrolled in a new model primary school that was built next to the new teacher’s training college. It was appropriately named Lilongwe Demonstration Primary School. However, living with the Mwasinga’s just did not work.

Teenager

Tambu was sent back to Blantyre to live with older brother Anthony. Anthony was working for a British company’s subsidiary in Malawi named Brown & Clapperton (B&C) also in Blantyre. He was married to Anne Chibwana who worked at Air Malawi, the country’s official airline. B&C was a heavy metal equipment manufacturing company. One of their products was maize (corn) mills. In the later part of the 1970s, Anthony bought a maize mill from B&C that was installed in Wanyemba Village for his parents. People from neighboring villages brought maize and paid a fee to have it ground into flour. This served as a source of income for the Manondo family.

Tambu (bottom) with some of her siblings. Standing to the reader's left is Doris. Standing to the reader's right is Catherine. Seated to the reader's left is Anna. Seated in the middle is Anthony. Seated to the reader's right is Anthony's wife Anne. Wiskot and Dave are not in the picture. 

For Tambu, life in the Anthony Manondo family was much better. The Anthony Manondo’s had four children as well namely Martha, Faith, Titani, and Chimango. Only Chimango is male, the others are female. Tambu helped with any house chores and childcare. Tambu became good at both cooking and housekeeping due to the expectations of doing chores. Later in her married life, she would put these experiences to effective use to the extent that there was clear consensus that Tambu’s food was scrumptious.

However, there was not much improvement in school performance. Now in her teens and approaching the senior classes of primary school, Tambu was sent back to Wanyemba. Again, she was a student at Kapalamula Primary School. In narrating stories about her final enrolment at this school, she often mentioned a teacher named Mr. Chigadula. This teacher had a positive influence on her life.

Malawi education has a very narrow bottleneck between primary school and secondary school. This bottleneck is even narrower for girls. At the end of primary school in standard 8, all students sit for a national examination. Less than 10 percent of those who pass the examination are selected to go to secondary school.  Very few secondary school places were reserved for girls at the time when Tambu sat for the examinations around 1979. Some schools such as Kapalamula went through a drought of several years without having even a single student selected to go to Secondary School. Tambu was not selected for secondary school.

One more intervention solution was conceived. Boarding school! The parents and older siblings agreed to send Tambu to Dzenza Girls Boarding School located in the northern part of the city of Lilongwe not too far from where Anna Mwasinga lived. This school belongs to the Presbyterian Church. (As an aside, my grandfather taught at this girls’ school when I was young. I lived there from the age of 2 to the age of 6.)

At Dzenza, Tambu made friends with Joyce Thole. Joyce’s older sister was the wife of a prominent Malawian named Katengeza. As such, she enjoyed some niceties and luxuries that were not common to most boarders at Dzenza. Some of the niceties included nutritious foods, personal care products, and extra clothes. And occasionally, she was spoiled with cookies and candies. Joyce shared most of these niceties with Tambu.

From the late 1970s to the 1980s, women and school children in Malawi were forced to attend political rallies and dance for politicians [4]. This was done for propaganda to give the impression that the politicians were loved by large crowds. The girls at Tambu’s boarding school were not spared of this forced attendance. Tambu hated every minute of those political attendances and dances. This was during the One-Party Rule in Malawi. The Malawi Congress Party was by law the only permitted political party. Its leader was the dictator, Hastings Banda. By extension, Tambu hated Hastings Banda and Malawi Congress Party. This hatred lasted the entirety of her life.

For the second time, Tambu was not selected for secondary school after taking the national exam at Dzenza Girls Boarding Primary School.

Malawi Correspondence Centers (MCC) were started as an alternative to secondary schools. The purpose was to give some of the students who had not been selected for secondary school a detour. The hope was that this would broaden the primary-to-secondary school pipeline. Students at MCCs were supposed to study on their own to acquire secondary school education. Students who enrolled in MCCs were given preprinted material to prepare them for the national examinations that were given to secondary school students. At MCCs, there was minimal instruction. Even in cases where there was instruction, the teachers were untrained.

Tambu enrolled at Gowa MCC in Ntcheu District in 1981. There, she befriended Sophie Kachoka. During our 33 years of marriage, this phase of Tambu’s life was not discussed. The blackout was by mutual agreement. All I know is that she became pregnant and could not continue at the MCC. In those days, pregnancy was a death nail in a girl’s educational journey. Tambu’s mother took her pregnant daughter back into her home in Wanyemba Village. Tambu always told me that a mother’s love is unconditional. She gave the example of her mother taking her back after what was considered a mess-up as an example that mother is the last refuge.

A healthy son was delivered on 26th February 1983 to Tambu. She named him Robreen. Tambu was 19 years old when she gave birth to her first son.

What became of the other siblings? Dave became a businessman who supplied stationery to organizations. He married Ida from Blantyre District who also was a businesswoman owning a tailoring shop. The two had four children named Memory, Eggley, Florence, and Dave Junior. They lived in the Machinjiri neighborhood of Blantyre. Doris finished secondary school at Lilongwe Girls Secondary School and worked for the Unilever subsidiary in Malawi that manufactures chemical products such as soaps and oils. She was married to Leonard Ganizani of Zomba. They had three children named Obed, Harry, and Jessie. They lived in the New Ndirande neighborhood of Blantyre. Catherine went to Ntcheu Secondary School and later worked for People’s Trading Centre shops in Blantyre. There she met and married Jack Chitedze who hailed from Mchinji in the Central Region of Malawi. Later, Jack Chitedze was transferred to Lilongwe and Catherine changed jobs. She joined the civil service and worked for the Ministry of Health. Jack was transferred back to Blantyre. Both Jack and Catherine retired and live in the Chilimba neighborhood of Blantyre. They have four children named Brian, Eric, Jack Junior, and Clive. Wiskot married from the Chisale family near Wanyemba village. They had 11 children that included three sets of twins. I will not name the children but Tambu and I adopted one of the children after Wiskot passed away in 1990. The girl we adopted is named Brenda.

Commentary

The early part of Tambu’s life had some dark aspects. These experiences imparted resilience, passion, honesty, perceptiveness, emphasis on education, and her complex view of men (including me). She was very partial when it came to children. She respected men but her antenna went up as soon as she detected any indications of abuse. She noted that in her experience, people got ahead based on social status and political connections. To her, education is the only vehicle that gives the rest of the people a chance to compete with the privileged. And so, she valued education. She loved cooking and hosting parties. She overcame the limitations imposed on girls by society and went on to obtain a bachelor’s degree and complete master’s degree coursework. And she was always there to help those in need. The next blog will describe Tambu’s journey towards bouncing back.

Footnotes

[1] All official documents say Tambu was born on December 9, 1964 in Ntcheu, Malawi. However, Lessa Manondo took contemporaneous note of the birth of each one of her children by recording day of week, date, and place of birth. The notebook in which these births were recorded was passed to Tambu and is currently in my possession. The details recorded at Tambu’s birth have Monday December 9, 1963 in Pretoria, South Africa. Apparently, the 1964 date in Malawi might have been given to school and government officials to avoid scrutiny of Malawi citizenship and other school related eligibilities.

[2] The Christmas season in Malawi is a joyful time for families. Gifts exchange are exchanged and church services are held. Carols are sung acapella, with the iconic African gift of harmonization filling the air with beautiful sounds celebrating the birth of Christ. https://www.iexplore.com/articles/travel-guides/africa/malawi/festivals-and-events

[3] Malawi moved its capital city from Zomba in the south to Lilongwe in the center. https://journals.co.za/doi/pdf/10.10520/AJA19376812_202

[4] Malawi Congress Party forced women and children to attend political rallies and dance at the rallies. “Kamuzu Banda of Malawi: A Study in Promise, Power, and Paralysis (1961 to 1993)” by John Lwanda, 1993.

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Tambu Chirwa - Princess

 

Dickson and Lessa Manondo with Anna (standing) and Anthony (on Lessa’s lap), Pretoria South Africa 1950

Dickson Manondo Phiri was born in 1914 in the headman’s family of Manondo Village [1] in Dowa District of Malawi. The Lilongwe International Airport is less than five miles south of Manondo Village. The village is near the boundary between Lilongwe and Dowa. The boundary is Lingadzi River. Some employees who work at the airport in Lilongwe cross the district boundary every day as they live in Dowa including in Manondo Village. Dickson was born a prince and heir to the Manondo throne. He grew into a tall skinny handsome boy (he was a 6 feet 3 inches man by the time I met him as my father-in-law). If you were drawing his picture and wanted to color his skin using Microsoft Word, you would probably choose Gold-Accent4 (light brown). His upbringing included being apprenticed to become a village headman. The Manondo people are part of the larger Chewa group. The village leadership training included how to become a guardian of the Chewa traditions.

Let’s take a digression to look at the Chewa. The Chewa came to present day Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia from Congo in the 15th Century. They formed the Maravi Empire that covered from Lake Malawi on the East to near Lusaka, Zambia (Luanga River) on the West and to the Indian Ocean at Quelimane, Mozambique in the South. The empire existed from 1480 to 1891. The overall leader of the empire was called the Karonga. The provinces of the empire were governed by chiefs. Each province was divided into villages whose leaders were village headmen (yes, they were always men). Villages ranged in population from hundreds to thousands of people. The Chewas were mostly farmers with occasional stints as hunters.

One important tradition of the Chewa is the Gulewamkulu (“Big Dance”) tradition. The Gulewamkulu tradition spans many aspects of the Chewa society. It encompasses training of boys and girls in social living, work, role in family and society, morality, spirituality, and organization of festivals. The Gulewamkulu tradition teaches “umunthu” (popularized to the world as Ubuntu by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu) to every individual of the community. Gulewamkulu glues the Chewa people. The early European colonizers did not know what to make of Gulewamkulu. They considered this tradition a threat to their governing structures. More especially, the Christian religion they were bringing could not figure out how to incorporate the ancestral spirits part of the tradition into the Gospel message. They decided that people had to choose between European education/Christianity and continuing with their Gulewamkulu tradition. With a few exceptions [2], most Chewa chiefs and village headmen chose the Gulewamkulu tradition.

Dickson Manondo found European education attractive. He found himself at the crossroads of either continuing with his headman training or abandoning it for the new way of life. Being destined to be headman, he felt trapped and unable to take his preferred path. He fled the village and travelled to Gatooma, Southern Rhodesia (now Kadoma, Zimbabwe) in his late teens or early twenties (1930s). There, he joined the Presbyterian church through which he pursued training in the European way of life and christianity.

The parents of Lessa Jessie Khomba relocated to Salisbury, Rhodesia long before Dickson travelled there. They hailed from Wanyemba Village, Ntcheu District, Malawi. Lessa was born in 1924. She was 10 years younger than Dickson. The Khombas belonged to the village headman’s family. Lessa was the youngest of three sisters. The oldest sister was Margaret Khomba and the middle sister was Lizinet Tambudzai Khomba. The Khomba family joined christianity through the Presbyterian Church. The Khomba family belongs to the Ngoni.

The Ngoni came from South Africa. They fled the raids of Shaka Zulu in the mid-1800s and migrated north. Some settled in northern Malawi, some in Zimbabwe around Bulawayo, and others in Zambia and Mozambique. The Maseko group of the Ngoni settled in the central part of Malawi in Ntcheu. Their chief is known as Gomani who sits on his throne to this day from his headquarters at Lizulu in Ntcheu, Malawi. The Ngoni were warriors and hunters. Their food came from plundering the spoils of war after conquering the Chewas and other people who had already settled there.

Dickson and Lessa met in Gatooma, Sothern Rhodesia and got married. They moved to Pretoria, South Africa in the late 1940s where Dickson learned bricklaying. He then worked for a renown Caucasian architect named Norman Eaton [3].

The first-born child to Dickson and Lessa was a boy born in Gatooma, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) named Wiskot. Mr. Wiskot Manondo grew to look just like his father. He was light-skinned, skinny, and tall. The second-born child was a girl also born in Gatooma, Rhodesia (Zimbabwe) whom they named Anna. She was also light-skinned, skinny, and tall. The rest of the children were born after the move to Pretoria, South Africa. In chronological order, the children born after Anna were Anthony, Davie, Doris, Catherine, and Tambu. As the names suggest, Anthony and Davie were male and Doris and Catherine were female.

Dickson Manondo’s employer, Norman Eaton, died in a road accident on 19 July 1966. In his will, he left 1,000 South African Rand (about US$ 100,000 if this was today accounting for inflation) for his beloved employee Dickson Manondo Phiri. The Manondo’s used this money to start relocating back to Malawi. Malawi had just gained independence from Britain and was promising to become a country full of opportunities. The relocation was in phases. First, Mrs. Lessa Manondo took all her children and returned to Wanyemba Village in 1967. Being a brick-layer, Dickson momentarily came to Wanyemba Village and built a house for the family at the edge of the village. Lessa’s sisters also returned to Wanyemba village from Zimbabwe and built their homes next to Lessa’s. After building the house, Dickson returned to Pretoria, South Africa. The relocation was completed in 1978 when Dickson returned to Malawi and settled in his wife’s village of Wanyemba. Both of Tambu’s parents were in Wanyemba Village when I met her in 1987.

The Chewa are matrilineal. One of the children of the sisters of the chief or village headman is chosen to become the new chief or village headman. Elder women of the village choose the new leader. Because Dickson did not have sisters, some of his daughters’ sons would have become village headmen after him had he returned to his village of Manondo. Sorry my children Robreen, Ulalo, and Kabelo – it is too late now!

Of all these members of the family, Tambu is survived only by Catherine at the time of this writing. Catherine has been married to Jack Chitedze for over 42 years. They have four sons. Dickson Manondo passed away in 2012 at the age of 98. Lessa Jessie followed a year later. Wiskot passed away in 1990. Doris passed away in 1994. Anthony passed away in 1997. Anna passed away in 1999. Davie passed away in 2011.

In the next post, I will write about the birth and early childhood of Tambudzai Chirwa. She was three or four years old when her mother brought the family to Malawi from South Africa. I will explain the discrepancy in age at the time of return. You will also read about the type of child she was.

[1] Location of Manondo Village. https://trip-suggest.com/malawi/central-region/manondo

[2] Headman Msymboza of Dowa was converted to Christianity. https://mwnation.com/msyamboza-to-be-honoured-this-sunday/

[3] Bio of Norman Eaton. https://www.artefacts.co.za/main/Buildings/archframes.php?archid=450

 

Tambudzai Manondo Chirwa - A Beautiful Woman of Substance

 

Tambudzai Chirwa (1994)

Tambudzai Mauawawa Manondo Chirwa passed away on 20th January 2021 in Lexington, Kentucky, United States of America. The epitaph says “Loving Wife, Mother, Aunt, Sister”. The obituary says she is survived by husband Robert Chirwa, sons Robreen, Ulalo, and Kabelo, sisters Catherine Chitedze and Amy Brown (husband Matt), nieces Martha Tambala (Husband Alex), Hannah Thomas, and Sadie Thomas, grandnephews Alexander and Zachary Tambala, and many other nephews as well as nieces. Five words on an epitaph and one thousand words of an obituary cannot do justice to painting a picture of this amazing woman. Many called her sister, aunt, or granny because that is how anyone she cared about felt. Omitted from the list of sisters are names such as Dana Reitman, Margaret Seiffert, Sophie Kachoka, Joyce Mponela, Karen Berry, Julia Thorne, and Joyce Mponela just to mention a few. And she treated her nieces and nephews as her own children.

This is a story of a unique woman. A woman who was perfect. She was endowed with a good proportion of every good attribute of a person. And she carried herself very well. I have toyed with the idea of telling this story since her passing away. I hesitated to undertake this project for the past two years because I felt inadequate at the task before me. My insufficient vocabulary and poor word choice limit my ability to accurately depict this wonderful human being. However, I am compelled to write because I became a grandfather recently. A gift of this magnitude requires an act of gratitude of giving a written account of his grandmother. Later, when he grows to the age of asking questions, this account will help his parents (my son and daughter-in-law) to explain the type of woman his grandmother was.

The life of one Tambudzai Chirwa, or simply Tambu as we called her, will be documented in the coming pages. I will focus on her biography, her beauty, her loving nature, her intensity, her passion, her honesty, and her sense of humor. Along the way, I will also cover the diverse nature of her careers. Careers that ranged from manual labor to white collar office jobs. And you will read about how she was comfortable helping and befriending people of all ages and all economic classes.

I hope you will smile, laugh, and cry with me as you read these pages. For this is how I grieve her: smile, laugh, and cry. This is the best way of honoring her because she frequently went through all these emotions in short order. Incidentally, her grandson also goes through multiple emotions within a few seconds. He reminds me of Tambu.