Livingstonia

Livingstonia is the third home of a mission that kept moving to find a healthy site. The Free Church of Scotland, answering David Livingstone's call for missionaries after his journeys to the lake, founded its station at Cape Maclear in 1875, then moved to Bandawe on the lakeshore, where malaria killed many of the missionaries and their children. In 1894 the mission climbed the escarpment to the Khondowe plateau, high above the lake and away from the malarial lakeshore, and stayed.

Its leader for more than half a century was Robert Laws, a Scottish doctor and minister who arrived with the first party in 1875 and remained until 1927. Under him the plateau acquired brick and stone buildings, avenues, a hospital, workshops and the Overtoun Institution, a school and technical college described as the best in the region at the time. The Stone House, Laws's own home, still stands and now holds a small museum of the mission's history. Laws introduced hydroelectric power to light the settlement and drive its machinery.

What Livingstonia produced was educated Malawians. Its schools trained teachers, clerks, ministers and medical workers, and its graduates became influential in several neighbouring countries, South Africa among them. That tradition survives in the University of Livingstonia, begun in 2003 by the Livingstonia Synod of the Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, which keeps its main campus on the plateau, while the settlement itself remains small, remote and defined by the buildings the mission left.

The plateau is Tumbuka country and Chitumbuka is the everyday language, though the mission's legacy means English has been taught here longer than almost anywhere else in Malawi. The Church of Central Africa Presbyterian, descended directly from the Scottish mission, is the central institution: it runs the church, the schools, the hospital and much of the university, and its calendar shapes the year.

Singing is the settlement's art form. Choirs practise in the evenings and fill the stone church on Sundays with unaccompanied harmony in Chitumbuka, and the great festivals draw families back from Mzuzu and beyond. Manners are formal and reserved by Malawian standards: careful greetings, titles, modest dress, and a quietness on Sundays that visitors notice at once. Vimbuza, the Tumbuka healing dance recognised by UNESCO, belongs to the surrounding district and sits in an older tradition that the mission long opposed.

Northern Malawi's reputation for education is bound up with this place, and people here are conscious of it: the mission's role in producing the region's teachers and in the country's political awakening is a matter of local pride. Visitors are few enough to be greeted individually on the paths, and children walking to school in uniform are the plateau's most constant sight.

Livingstonia counted about 6,700 residents in 2008, and they are spread thinly across the plateau in mission buildings, staff houses and farming hamlets rather than gathered in a town centre. The institutions are the employers: the university, the schools, the hospital and the church between them account for most of the formal work, and the rest of the plateau farms.

Households grow maize, beans, Irish potatoes, cabbages and pumpkins in the cool highland soil, keep goats and chickens, and carry produce to small markets or down the escarpment. Dried fish comes up from the lake, and almost everything manufactured — fuel, cement, sugar, soap — is carried up the hairpin road, which makes prices higher and supply irregular. Electricity is limited and solar panels are common; water comes from streams and boreholes.

The road governs daily life. When it is dry, pickups and motorcycle taxis run to Chitimba and patients and goods move easily; after heavy rain it can become impassable, and the plateau is left to walkers. Young people leave for Mzuzu, Lilongwe or South Africa, and the money they send back builds the brick houses appearing among the older ones. A small, steady trade in visitors walking up for the mission and the view adds a little income to the lodges and guides.

Eating on the plateau is highland Malawian and plain. Nsima, the stiff maize porridge, is the staple at almost every meal, torn by hand and dipped into ndiwo, a relish of beans, pumpkin or cassava leaves, tomato and onion, or greens cooked in groundnut sauce. Meat is occasional — goat, chicken or a little beef at celebrations — and eggs are common.

The cool climate gives Livingstonia food the lowlands lack: Irish potatoes, cabbages, carrots, peas and beans grow well here, and are boiled, stewed or fried as a side dish. Sweet potatoes, pumpkins and groundnuts are grown in the same gardens, and avocados, bananas and mangoes come from the warmer slopes below. Dried usipa, the lake's small fish, and occasionally fresh chambo are carried up the escarpment and cooked with tomato, while kondowole, the stretchy cassava-flour staple of the lakeshore districts, is eaten by families with roots down at the water.

Snacks are simple: mandasi, the small fried dough buns, roasted or boiled maize in season, groundnuts sold in cups, and sugar cane. Strong sweet tea is the everyday drink, along with thobwa, the lightly fermented maize or millet drink made at home, and coffee from the northern hills appears at the lodges. Alcohol is far less prominent here than in the lakeshore towns, in keeping with the mission's long influence.