On my early-morning run along Victoria Avenue in Blantyre, I felt completely at home. And so I should. Malawi is our little Southern Africa Development Community sister. A two-and-a-bit hour flight away from Johannesburg — almost the same distance between Joburg and Cape Town — it’s not a stretch that there’s a feeling of familiarity, or that dawn’s chilly winter temperature is the same.
I run past familiar SA brand names: turn right at the Standard Bank building, run past Pep Stores. Everywhere are signs that read Collect Money from SA Here.
People are on their way to work, walking along streets that have missing manholes and potholes to rival those I run past in my Johannesburg neighbourhood every day.
In a few days' time, just weeks after we South Africans went to the polls, this country holds its tripartite election.
I met a man from West Africa who expressed astonishment at how little evidence there is of the huge event that is soon to take place in this country. In fact, that there is absolutely no indication that an election is imminent. People are going about their daily life in the typically calm Malawian way.
On May 21, the people of this country that is home to 18-million will elect a president (expected to come from one of three of the big parties here). They will also elect MPs and local councillors.
And so, as I run down the main road, I am surprised by the remarkable absence of election posters. I don’t mean there are just a few posters plastered to walls or lampposts — there are no posters anywhere.
I am told, by my taxi driver, that things are quite different in the rural areas, where, he assures me, there are posters galore. And vehicles with loudhailers, and people wearing party colours.
You can tell there that there’s an election happening in Malawi. It’s because, he says, political parties have shifted focus and taken their campaigns to the country.
We run into a political rally as we drive into Blantyre, Malawi’s financial and commercial hub. A peaceful group of people is singing and dancing, listening to speakers standing high up on a podium.
I think of the West African whose informed view of elections in his home country is of fist-raising anger, of violence and of loud and often furious disrespect for those with opposing views.
Not here in Malawi. My West African friend found the local people to be “very polite, very calm”. And so they are.
I find out how charming they are as I run through the city that is slowly rousing itself from slumber. I am greeted over and over again. The air is cool and fresh, the early-morning light muted, soft and blurry edged as it filters through the trees.
I run over a bridge that spans a dry riverbed on whose banks is a forest of trees in this green lung. There’s a colonial feel about this outpost that was founded in 1876 and named after Blantyre in Scotland, where explorer David Livingstone was born.
Residents proudly tell how their city is one of the oldest in East, Central and Southern Africa, predating Nairobi, Harare and Johannesburg.
Historically, Blantyre was on the road of Africa’s own version of the Asian silk route, starting out as a centre for colonial trade in ivory.
Colonial echoes remain. My hotel is on Glyn Jones Street, named for Morgan Glyndwr Jones, the Welsh novelist, poet and literary historian and a man who was an important figure on the Anglo-Welsh literary world.
Still, while there might be a Victoria Street, this is, and always has been, a distinctly African city. Beautiful too. Blantyre is rimmed with mountains — Soche, Ndirande, Chiradzulu — that create a dramatic topographical tableau.
I end up one evening at Blantyre’s finest dining establishment, 21 Grill, where the executive chef is a Capetonian called Bevan Reid. He says he arrived to spend a year working in Malawi a decade ago, and has never left.
I can understand how this city, this country, can cast a spell on one. It’s the people.
When one reads in travelogues and guidebooks how warm and gentle and friendly and kind and polite Malawians are, you cringe in fear that the writer is being patronising.
And yet there it is. The Malawians are lovely.
Countries, and cities, have personalities. New York is fast paced, takes no nonsense and is often thought of as an impatient city. Paris is known for being a rude city where waiters take great pleasure in ignoring you or treating you with contempt. The Dutch are known for being forthright, the Israelis for being rude.
So yes, Malawians can be classified, on mass, as being kind and warm and friendly and polite.
It’s a wonderful, wonderful feeling to be in a place where people welcome you with the warmth usually reserved for old, good friends.
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