Mua Mission

We went on a field trip to Mua Mission during IST. It’s a complex with a Catholic Parish, hospital, dam, museum, lodge located near the lake and a bit of a tourist attraction. To get there we took what must’ve been the most treacherous road I’ve encountered yet here in Malawi. It’s a paved road connecting the M1 to the lakeshore road (M5), but it’s very steep and very winding. Most of it seems like if your brakes failed you’d just go careening off the mountain-side. But on the other hand, the view is beautiful from the road. There were waterfalls and numerous scenic overlooks of the lake and mountains.
At Mua we had a tour of the museum. It was put together very well, there was one building with pictures, sculptures and carvings that dealt with the coming and spread of Christianity to Malawi—but that was the only building that tourists could take pictures in.
There was a little vestibule about the history of tribes immigrating to Malawi. The first people here were pygmy peoples that lived as hunter-gatherers. Then Bantu tribe people (which split and formed the Chewa and Tumbuka and Ngoni tribes, and others) migrated here from the Congo. They got along for a while, then there were land disputes and the pygmy peoples were chased out—so they aren’t found in Malawi any longer.
The second building was all about Chewa culture. It was filled with over a hundred gule-wamkulu masks and costumes. We also learned about the color scheme of the masks. Red stands for danger or menstruation. Black for fertility. White for spirits or sexual disinterest “coolness”. Yellow or pink for strangers/outsiders. There were also pictures about Chewa tribe traditions; I guess one of the missionaries was an anthropologist as well. It was really neat to see actual pictures of some of the ceremonies my language group researched. From naming babies at birth, through Chinamwale (the coming of age ceremony for girls), through marriage. And I learned a few new things as well. Such as if a baby dies in the first three months after birth, it isn’t yet considered a person. It will be buried in a shallow grave (if the grave is deep like a usual grave there is a belief that the mother will lose her fertility), and the father never goes to the gravesite, though the mother might. And girls have their heads shaved at Chinamwale to symbolize a new beginning.
The third building was split between culture of the Ngoni and Yao tribes. With the Ngoni, I had a very basic understanding of their culture from Language intensive, but pictures made a huge difference. Some interesting culture tidbits about the Ngoni people is they select their chiefs in part by having a series of qualifications, such as standing on one leg for half an hour. J Also traditionally, the men pay lobola (like a dowry) when they marry, and if the new wife doesn’t please her mother in law by deferring respectfully to elders or cooking a good enough meal, she is run out of the village. Also, when a chief dies, he is put into a sitting pose before rigor mortis sets in, and buried in a “sitting” tomb, that looks a bit like a pyramid. The Yao people we learned are originally from Mozambique and are mostly Muslim. They bury their dead in a white shroud, facing Mecca. The women also are known for their pottery and for painting/decorating their houses.
After the museum we looked at a bunch of the carvings, went to a small zoo where there was a crocodile, two pythons, a porcupine, and an antelope, then had lunch at the lodge. If I thought food at Dedza was good, the food at the lodge was phenomenal. We had rice, a carrot/eggplant dish, a pork in tomato sauce dish, and potatoes with a peanut sauce. Then there was pound cake (or something like it for dessert). It was probably, excluding dinner at Thanksgiving, the best meal I’d had in Malawi. Mmmm.