I remember in one of my first Anthropology courses we were tasked with mapping out kinship systems. Coming from a large family myself, it took two pieces of paper to draw the intricacies of my complicated tree. In Malawian culture it can be immensely difficult to sort of the interwoven branches of their familial systems as well.In fact, I fear some children would never be able to complete the task. To begin with, your mother's sisters are your 'mothers', and your father's brothers are called 'father'. Then the children along the branch of your 'mothers' and 'fathers' are also your siblings. On the other side, your mother's brothers are your uncles and his children your cousins. This is the same for your father's sisters side falling outside of the immediate structure. Have I lost you yet? Making it even more complex. Many families in the villages are still polygamous (particularly amongst the chiefs) so that layers in second wives and their children. One man I spoke to had three wives and had lost count of his grandchildren altogether. Then, you have inheritance- less common- but in some villages brothers inherit the wives of their deceased brothers. So culturally it can be very difficult, now moving into economics... 1,300,000 children in Malawi are orphans (half expected to be due to AIDS). A whole generation of would-be-parents have been lost to AIDS and other preventable illnesses (malaria, complications during child birth, pneumonia...) This leaves approximately fifty percent of Malawi's population as children. Half of those 6.8 million children will be stunted due to malnourishment and about 30 percent of them will get the chance to go to secondary school (high school). This means Malawi has millions of children being raised by extended family members (mostly grandparents) and with no birth certificate- unlikely to be able to trace their heritage much past their own village compound. On top of that, they are struggling to meet their most basic of needs - food, education - leaving little room for drawing trees or getting themselves out from underneath all the broken branches. On the other side there is some beauty in all of this. It takes a village to raise a child, but it seems that the village steps up to the task. Kids run freely around the foothills of Usisya and have very little to do on the long summer days than practice swimming in the lake or trying to catch some fish in their 'uncle's' boats. This does not mean that their lives are not hard. The young girls bear the weight of carrying water in the mornings, and when planting season comes all hands are called to the fields. But they carry a freedom which has been lost to many American children. In Portland there was a news article questioning if parents should allow their children to be ' free range', and a mother in WV was chastised by police for letting her child bike around the block. Here, however, it seems kids are allowed - if only for a brief amount of time- to be kids. In short, the kinship system here is complex because of the cultural and economic conditions in which Malawians live - and children are tangled up in the game of both having freedom in the moment, yet unstable pasts and unsure futures. I don't know what will become of any of the children in these photos, but I do know that they live on a knife's edge. If only they could have one more year of schooling, one parent back to care for them, one lesson in their ability to be more than what they were given.
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Bonnie HarveyCurrently working in northern Malawi as Programs and Evaluations Coordinator for Temwa Archives
June 2019
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