Dirge for Chiume & Africa with her mad business!

The dirge for Kanyama Chiume-Doyen.

It has taken me a long time to morn Kanyama Chiume. Much has already been written about this doyen. He is no more yeah. He’s gone and he will never return.

Is he totally gone? Nay! His legacy will live on beyond imagination. His selfless life can never varnish. How can it if at all those he lived and died for are still living on?

The then Malawian dissidents running away from the manacles of their tin pot dictator, Hastings Kamuzu Banda (May God curse and punish him) still remember how Chiume- at the then Pugu road- used to be their second father in a foreign country. They still vividly remember how he used to provide shelter and logistic for them ready to take on challenge in a new beginning in a new land.

Indeed, the guy was connected and blessed. He was bigger than life itself. A small body by stature but a lion of man that he was! Chiume you are no more. Death is our sine quo non on this earth. We shall miss you. We shall always salute you as we honour your noble and exemplary life.

Father I am a good orator. But when it comes to tell the world what you meant and weighed, I feel small and a dwarf altogether. The grief thereof has overcome me. Though I am trying to forgather myself, the loss has heavily tormented me. Allow me to summarily aver that you were no normal person. What a fig tree even magnolia fir one! This is true not flibbertigibbet. You were a huge tree under which many hid.

May the almighty God grant you a peaceful rest in your new life? May God reward you for your noble and unique love of human rights?
May God reciprocate on our behalf?
Go dear.
Go father.
Go doyen.
Go hero.
Go true son of Africa.
Accord my homily greetings to my father your best friend FN-(Mhango) as you used to call him.


Your son N. N Mhango.












In my neighborhood there is this Tim Horton's coffee bar. Time and again I go there to buy a cup of coffee to kill the cold. This place is cold: no doubt about that.Something close to a quarter of a litre costs me two dollars plus.

One block ahead there is Sobeys. A quarter kilo of greens, shabby ones of course compared to ones at home, drains me of four dollars. One avocado begs a dollar-seventy. An onion relieves my pocket a dollar-plus. Embe dodo begs a dollar-fifty. This is my life and the list is too long. Let me stop here as far as western business is driving me mad.



Looking at the picture above as you embark on the price comparing games, you will find that I pay almost ninety-odd per cents of what the actual producer in Africa receives if the said items are imported from Africa .

These producers receive between one percent and one and a half percent of his produces. Why? Because some con men and women in Brussels , Paris , New York and London- in supermarkets and the governments- decide how much the producer is to get. Here is where WTO comes in. Hither is where you can trace the core of poverty and desperation of Africa and other so-called third world.

While these fat cats are driving posh cars and enjoying all leisures the world has to offer, the farmers in Karagwe, Korogwe, Kieni, Githakwa and Ngimu are dying of malnutrition and poverty!


Look at the minerals. All so called international-cum-world markets are in either America or European capitals! The con men in Brussels who pretend to know more about tanzanite, gold or diamond get away with ninety percent while our people are sinking in destitution. Don't forget their nephews in high echelons of power in Africa.


Come to stuffs like automobiles, chemicals, machines et cetera from west to Africa , the situation is the same. It is not a big deal to buy and maintain a car here. But doing the same in Africa , woooi it is but headache.


These guys benefit in two way-traffic-like business. Africa loses to the contrary. It is time that our rulers encourage our farmers to produce what they can eat instead of wasting their time and energy serving western con men who use us under the sweet language of cash crops.
Which cash crops are these if at all what we get after selling them can not buy the food we need most?

These colonial things known as cash crops are but traps that Africa has had since independence. These guys know Africans can not eat or use these stuffs. That's why they give us a raw deal. They surely know we have nothing to do with them.

It is a shame for a farmer in Kilimanjaro to produce coffee expecting to sell it so as to buy expired rice imported from Thailand! Why not concentrate on growing maize?

These purgatorial crops are wasting our future just because of the motivation of getting cash that has never done anything to us. How can one feed a goat before feeding himself? Shall any calamity strike a man can fight for a beast but the beast will never fight for him in the first place.



If anything, Africa has failed her farmers. Unfortunately albeit, this exploitation does not even fall under the cocktail of western self proclaimed Human Rights Prophets! To me, political rights are as good and as useless and meaningless without economic ones and clout.


While Africa is not allowed to export processed goods to west which dumps whatever rotten stuffs it has, west does so as pleased!

Tanzania is a good producer of fruits. Try to process and pack them then export the juice to west, you will face a million and one obstacles. But again the same victim ( Tanzania ) allows in many rotten artificial juices from the same so called developed countries even from Middle East!

Again we import unwanted toys from various places so as to hamper creativity in our kids. Yet we don’t export the same volume of sculptures to the same country we import from!

Another living example is this: many Chinese herbalists and traditional healers have flocked our country opening hundreds of the so-called Chinese clinics which prescribe every thing in Chinese we don’t know! But if you want to know how Africa has never deserved to live, send some African herbalists to china. They will never be given visas save to be licensed to operate. Why should we trust them whilst they don’t trust us? Whose fault is this?


Britain, Spain, Portugal and France have no mines. But yet they are richer than we are just because they stole our minerals during colonial times and they still maintain to host dubious so-called world markets! Why don’t we press charges against them?

Do we need PhDs or expatriates to aggressively voice our anger to seek redress? Bear with me. Africa needs to press for change of paradigm instead of painstakingly wasting time and resources serving western isms such as globalization, privatization and other braggadocio-cum madness shall we aim at forging ahead.

By changing paradigm from within Africa itself, the so called rich country will resist and shall we press on. At last they will comply. For they need us more than we do them. This is what is going on in Zimbabwe . Those guys issued all threats to Mugabe who ignored them now they are talking about peace and reconciliation!

It is simple western countries especially those of Europe can not survive without exploiting third world countries. They use whatever internationalism to humiliate and exploit third world countries which are made to believe that they can't live without the west; A big lie. How can Africa act like chickens which produce what they don't eat and eat what they don't produce and expect to prosper? What madness-cum biz! What do I know?
So long from Canada .
nkwazigatsha@yahoo.com