Eating Malawi

Visionaries

A treacherous little road connects Livingstonia to the mountainous town of Rumphi, the next visible mark on the map. Somewhere between them, among rugged hills, is the non-descript village of Nchenachena, where I was to visit a macadamia cooperative. Most of my knowledge on macadamia came not from my journeys, but from producing public relations pieces for a Scotland-based company, a gig I got through a good friend from the Lilongwe expat circle. Like all foreign-based agricultural initiatives in Malawi, the macadamia project had gone through its stage of politicized government control, yet had now been left to the hands of the private industry, which branched into economically successful corporate operations and the less profitable community-based efforts. Macadamia, a highland crop, is grown around Rumphi in the North Region; in the Central Region it's mostly produced in Nchisi, about an hour north of Lilongwe, and in the South Region, where the crop is most abundant, it grows in several areas including in Thyolo, near Blantyre.

It would have been impossible for me to find Nchenachena, so I was glad I could make this visit under the auspice of my temporary employer. As such, a manager of the cooperative picked me up from the main road and valiantly drove a high- clearance vehicle through terrain that would have made an off-road enthusiast nervous. The manager had planned this visit well; we would first visit a typical subsistence farmer who had added macadamia to the ingredients of his garden. His plot was mostly covered in maize and the few macadamia trees he had were routinely targeted by school children who passed by, collecting a toll of nuts for their snaking pleasure. The next farmer had more land, more crops, and more trees. I was well underway into blind amazement by the promising wealth that growing macadamia seem to result in, when we came upon Mazoe Gondwe's farm. She stepped out from her beautiful large house, instructed her husband to take over whatever chore she had been doing, and then with enviable ability cut short the ceremonious introductions that the manager and his secretary were so adamant to play through. In her spotless house dress, Mrs Gondwe was clearly the one who wore the trousers in this farm, and she had no time for nonsense.

She walked us over to her designated macadamia plot, a vast field with groomed orchards, and then, to the horrified surprise of the manager, proceeded to point out the many trees that had never produced a nut. Most of the barren trees, she said in a speech that the manager was repeatedly unable to interrupt, she had already chopped off, and some had taken a whole decade to produce a single nut. Yes, it was true that the trees she was talking about were the ones that had been given out by government officials back when macadamia was first introduced as a cash crop to Malawian farmers, and it was true that the new variety of trees sold by the cooperative were producing alright, but after all that propaganda on how macadamia was going to make everyone in Nchenachena so wealthy, her and many other farmers had drained their efforts growing these barren trees, and after years, when some trees finally started to give fruit, there was no one to buy the odd little nuts! No one came, like they had promised, and not even at the local market could she sell nuts to people who had no taste for this foreign food! The secretary reminded Mrs Gondwe that she was talking about the government scheme, one that had ended some years ago, and that I was here to talk about the new initiative, the one where she and her neighbors had to join efforts and work together to produce enough tons to justify processing plants coming all the way here to buy their nuts.

Yes, well, she was being a good neighbor and growing macadamia again, investing her own money into this project, but not everyone in Nchenachena had overcome the disappointment they had all lived through with the last scheme, and how could they? No one had even bothered showing up to apologize!

There was a bitterness in her voice that neither she nor I could ignore, and yet somehow she had conveyed in her look that the outrage with which she spoke had an element of drama; my eyes responded that I would be her silent accomplice in making the manager break a sweat, and so the little production went on for a while, she played the part of the outraged farmer, I played the part of the outraged foreigner, and both the manager and the secretary watched aghast as the illusion they had so carefully planned of happy farmers in happyland growing happy nuts crumbled into the uncertainty of reality. Later, she and I took a stroll around her garden and she showed me her great plethora of fruit trees, among them, I found what I was looking for: tree tomato. She was surprised I knew the fruit, she and her husband had tree tomato juice with some frequency, and other people around ate this fruit too, but most of them were older people; vicuyu, as the fruit is locally known, was not popular among younger people, in fact, she assured me, it was bound to disappear from the diet one day.