A Miscarriage of Mother Malawi's Pregnancy

Nations are pregnant things and must be handled with care if they are to bring forth healthy offspring into the world. This is what I find from the curious case of my country of Malawi, which had three pregnancies over the last century,and which entered the new century in the middle of a fourth pregnancy. 

In her first pregnancy, Malawi conceived a child she planned to name Freedom, being impregnated by the revolutionary ideas of such freedom-fighting pioneers as John Chilembwe. But tragically, Mother Malawi had a miscarriage and the offspring of freedom died in the cold winter night of Colonialism. Malawi's second pregnancy was a success, bringing forth the child of Independence, brimming with the promise of new found freedoms and self-determination. But the child soon abandoned the values by which he was raised, denounced his parents, took all the credit for the freedom they gave him, declared himself sovereign over their estate, and changed his name from Independence to Dictatorship. Though this rogue child's rule was threatened and challenged several times, he successfully and ruthlessly cracked down on any contenders, and Mother Malawi has still not really taken stock of how many attempts that selfish child made to maim her and leave her barren for life. But before she had the time or presence of mind to count and nurse her wounds, which is critical to healthy motherhood, Malawi was pregnant again for a third time, and though her labor pains were hard, overdue, and induced, she brought forth a son named Multi-Party, who ended the one-party rule of his rogue brother, Dictatorship. 

But it is now rumored that this boy, Multi-Party, has a twin sister yet to be delivered from Mother Malawi's womb. It is said that because of and in her absence, Multi-Party has struggled to find his balance between freedom and responsibility, between development and governance, between aid and trade, between sovereignty and partnership, between security and justice, between leadership and consensus, between ideology and personality, between rural and urban. But instead of waiting for his twin sister to be born, Multi-Party has carried on without her, feeding and living off Mother Malawi without regard for the well-being of the mother or the child she still carries, and giving no thought to how much the act of welcoming and preparing for the birth of that child is the only thing that will fix the imbalances of his dysfunctional rule. 

Multi-Party's unborn twin sister is called Democracy. And there is no doubt that Mother Malawi is in the delivery room again, for her pain is now felt and groans are now heard all over the country. Malawi is fighting to bring forth her first daughter, a beauty that will be the envy of the nations and tether the excesses of Multi-Party politics, but Multi-Party is making it difficulty by clinging on to Mother Malawi and claiming to be the only child she needs to be happy.  In so doing, Multi-Party is showing all the same traits of Dictatorship, the rogue brother he ousted from power, but under a different name. And by the look of things, Democracy's birth might be accompanied by more sweat, tears, and blood than Multi-Party's.  The question is whether Mother Malawi's pushing in the delivery room will be strong, focused, and concerted enough to bring this child into the world, or be weakened by Multi-Party's depletion of her strength and health until she miscarries. If Malawi is to give birth successfully, she must push with one breath, cry with one voice, sweat from one brow, bleed as one body; and she must interpret the intensifying contractions between the government and the people as painful calls to push some more, cry some more, sweat some more, and bleed some more.         

I was recently reminded of all this during the sublime experience of holding my wife's hand as she gave birth to our third born son, a privilege I wouldn't trade for all the stars in the universe. I saw how that the beauty of the delivery room lies in its apparent contradiction, because a woman giving birth is the quintessence of mixed emotion. In one glimpse you see enough blood to evoke fears of death, and yet hear the voice of a new born announce the beginning of life; in one breath the prospective mother screams in excruciating pain, and in another she laughs with a joy that a man can only watch with envy; in one moment you are glad to hear the baby cry and yet feel you'd do anything to cry in its place; here the baby enters the world without a name, and yet does so already fully known and loved by its parents; here the medical personnel cram a room as though their patient is dying, yet their smiles expose their satisfaction that theirs are the kind of patients who are full of life; the list of such paradoxes could go on. And if you accidentally stumbled upon such a room not knowing that the patient on the table is in the middle of an experience she will regard as the most fulfilling of her life, you would easily find enough evidence in that delivery room to record it in your memory as the scene of a tragedy. But you would be wrong. Dead wrong.

So I dare say that the Multi-Party politics of the Tembo, Muluzi and Mutharika dynasties have been sucking the strength and promise of pregnant Mother Malawi; with their nepotism, election rigging, political arrests, oral law, disregard of the constitution, self-aggrandizing speeches, clinging to power past the prime of life, demonizing foreign donors, amassing personal wealth inexplicably, mismanagement of public funds, exploitation of the police force, intimidation of the media, and a general condescension towards rural people. Perhaps they will do so for a few more years, but I hear the screams of Mother Malawi for true Democracy increasing. And with each scream we must push some more and add all our voices, yours and mine, to the cries of a nation that knows that she is about to be delivered.