Mulanje

Mulanje was made by tea. The mountain and the fertile, well-watered land at its foot drew European planters into the Shire Highlands in the 1890s, first for coffee, grown commercially from about 1895, and then, after Brazilian competition broke the coffee price, for tea, first planted commercially in the Shire Highlands in 1905; the estates around Mulanje and neighbouring Thyolo have been worked ever since. The town itself grew as the boma, the administrative and trading centre for the district that served them.

The estates needed labour, and they drew it largely from Lomwe families crossing the border from Portuguese Mozambique in large numbers in the colonial period, many of them settling as tenants on estate land under the thangata system, which required labour in exchange for the right to farm a plot. The system's harshness was among the grievances behind John Chilembwe's rising in 1915, centred on the estates a little to the west, and it shaped land politics in the district long after independence in 1964.

The massif above the town has its own history of use: forestry on the lower slopes, and the cutting of Mulanje cedar, the national tree, which grows nowhere else and has been reduced by logging and fire to scattered stands under a replanting programme. In March 2023 Cyclone Freddy brought extreme rain to the south of Malawi and killed more than a thousand people in the country; Mulanje district, along with neighbouring Phalombe, Blantyre, Chikwawa and Nsanje, was among the badly affected, with landslides and flooding off the mountain destroying homes, roads and fields.

The district is predominantly Lomwe, and much of Malawi's Lomwe identity is rooted here and in Phalombe and Thyolo — a community descended largely from nineteenth-century migration from Mozambique into the estate country, with its own language, Malawian Lomwe, still spoken by some tens of thousands of people in the south-east. Chichewa is the everyday language of the market and the school.

Christianity dominates, with Catholic, Presbyterian and a wide range of Pentecostal congregations, and church choirs are a serious local pastime. Beliefs about the mountain sit alongside them: Sapitwa, the highest peak, carries local stories and taboos, and guides will usually explain the customs expected on the mountain before a climb, which costs nothing to follow.

The other constant is the estate. Tea picking is the district's wage work, done by hand, mostly by women, in long lines across the bushes, and the estate calendar, the factory hooter and the walk to the fields shape daily life for thousands of households. Guiding and portering for walkers on the massif, which has been climbed by visitors since Sapitwa was first reached in 1894, give a smaller number of men seasonal work of their own.

Mulanje town is small, but the district around it holds more than 400,000 people and is one of the most densely settled parts of Malawi, and the town works as its market and service centre rather than as a city in its own right. The boma holds banks, a hospital, schools, district offices and the transport stage; most people live in villages on the plain and the lower slopes.

Work is tea, smallholder farming and trade. The estates employ pickers and factory staff; families grow maize, cassava, beans and bananas on small plots; and cross-border trade with Mozambique, a short distance down the road, moves goods and people in both directions. Guiding and portering on the mountain provide seasonal income for a few hundred men, and the tourism trade at Likhubula supports lodges and shops.

Population pressure shows: plots are small, firewood and charcoal cutting have stripped hillsides, and the loss of tree cover made the Cyclone Freddy landslides worse than they would otherwise have been. Recovery from that storm, the high cost of fertiliser and food, fuel shortages and unreliable power are the district's pressing problems. Days begin very early, with pickers in the fields and traders at the market before the heat builds, and finish soon after dark.

Mulanje eats the Malawian staple: nsima, stiff maize porridge, taken by hand with ndiwo, a relish of beans, pigeon peas, pumpkin or cassava leaves, rape or cabbage, often cooked with groundnut flour. Meat is occasional — goat or chicken at a celebration — and the everyday protein is dried fish, usipa and other small species brought from the lakes and the Shire river and sold in the market.

The district grows more than maize. Bananas, cassava, sweet potato, mangoes, avocados and pigeon peas come off smallholdings on the mountain's lower slopes, and the cooler, wetter ground supports vegetables that struggle in the plains. Roadside sellers do roasted and boiled maize, sugar cane, groundnuts and mandazi, the small fried dough cakes eaten with tea in the morning.

Tea is the district's own product and the drink of the house, made strong with plenty of milk and sugar. Thobwa, the sweet, lightly fermented maize drink, is made in the villages; chibuku, the thick commercial maize and sorghum beer, is sold in cartons in the bottle stores; and bottled lager from the Carlsberg brewery in Blantyre comes up the road. On the mountain, food is whatever is carried up — porters cook nsima and relish at the huts.