I’ve been thinking more about the issue of classism lately.
Especially as a visiting Westerner, it’s easy to overlook this here in Malawi.
Anytime I go outside in a rural area, people stop what they’re doing so that
they can pay close attention to what I’m doing. If I enter a room where someone
is busy (cooking food, for example), they immediately stop what they’re doing,
and in what I think is a mixture of both nervousness and ingrained customs of
being overly-respectful towards guests of certain races, they make a big
gesture of giving me a wide berth and greeting me. When constantly dealing with
this hyper-attention, one has a tendency to be ignorant towards the happenings
in their absence.
Over time, the novelty of the mzungu’s presence wears off,
and the mzungu can observe the regular ebb and flow of things. One begins to
understand certain things that aren’t discussed in the Lonely Planet guide,
things that aren’t seen along the tarmac road on the way to a weekend at the
lake, and things that aren’t discussed at big NGO meetings in the cities.
Compared to most visitors to Malawi, I think it is safe to say that I have
relatively good insight into the good, the bad, and the ugly here. Over the
years I’ve discussed many of these insights (at times foolishly you’ll notice
if you read some of the early posts) but this new topic has been on my mind
more lately. I think it’s because during this two-month trip I’ve been spending
more time around people of higher socioeconomic status (SES) and observing how
they treat those of lower SES. While here as a Peace Corps Volunteer, I spent
the majority of my time living and working alongside the most populous social
class in Malawi, the rural poor. Analyzing something familiar from a new angle
often leads to new realizations. One of my favorite authors, Paul Theroux once
wrote: “In countries where all the crooked politicians wear pin-striped suits,
the best people are bare-assed.” I now agree more with this generalization than
I did four years ago. Let me explain why.
My point is not to say that classism composes the ugly part
of this society disproportionately more than any place else. While that may
actually be true (requiring a longer discussion then I have the energy for
today), my point is to say that this problem of classism is frequently overlooked
with respect to discussions on development, aid, social justice, and even in
everyday life. This holds true for both foreigners like me and for Malawians.
Unless you’re a dirty Peace Corps Volunteer, a bankrupt diamond trader, or a
Chinese criminal, most foreigners here immediately fall into the category of bourgeoisie.
Most of them (us) are either here for enjoyment, business, or some sort of
adventure to save the world. With the cost of travel and such, it’s not really
possible for foreigners of lower SES to end up here. Consequently, the
foreigners that Malawians interact with are disproportionately well off, and
Malawians then have a very skewed view the distribution of social classes in
developed countries (also think about how this works in the other direction,
eg. Americans’ misperceptions of Africans). Putting aside the fact that
foreigners here further deepen the valleys between the social classes of
Malawi, as I described a little in the beginning, most visitors to Malawi
simply don’t have the desire or time to think about classism within the local
population. The ladder allowing folks to climb to higher SES is much more
slippery here in Malawi than the ladder many complain about in the US. There is
no question that this is intentional. In a place where the supply for all
resources continues to fall behind a rapidly growing population, those at the
top keep a tight hold on their position. Read the Wikipedia article on
“Structural Violence” for an overview of how this is done. There are some that manage
to break free from these ridged social structures (see my post “A Feel Good Story” from 2011--the story has only gotten better over the past few years), but for a
long time here, the rich have been getting richer and the poor have been
getting poorer. With this happening over generations now, and with criticisms
to the situation either absent or silenced, I’ve seen that classism here is so
ubiquitous that it’s easy to overlook and even easier to ignore.
Although this entire issue can’t be traced back to the
legacy of colonialism, I think this has certainly been a big factor. Malawi is
a former British colony. From what I’ve been able to gather, the two sides—the
British and what are now called Malawians—had a fairly peaceful relationship.
The British utilized the cheap local labor to get filthy rich farming things
such as tea. Placated by small improvements in their quality of life (eg. from
wearing loin cloths to a proper pair of trousers), the Malawians took decades
to realize how thoroughly they were exploited. Nonetheless, during the time of
British rule, it was made very clear who were the “haves” and who were the
“have nots.” When Malawi gained its independence in the 1960s, there were
suddenly many new “haves” from the local population. They were quick to adopt
the power-concentrating and resource-hoarding practices of their former
leaders. Over the years, these tendencies have become more prominent and
acceptable in the society. As an American, I would be a big fat hypocrite to
criticize any of this. I’m just spelling it out for you. Again, the presence of
classism in a poor country like this is of no surprise. It’s the blatant ignoring
of it that amazes me.
Here are some experiences that I have had pertaining to all
this. I’m currently working on a sanitation project at a seminary school in
Malawi. The priests have been gracious enough to host me while I’m around for a
few days managing the purchases for the project and monitoring the progress.
They’ve provided me with good local food, a nice place to sleep, and transport
to and from the school, all free of charge. In this rural environment, compared
to most of the population in the area these priests live a very comfortable
lifestyle. Most religious leaders in the US, at least where I’m from in the
Midwest, have relatively modest lifestyles. Although the circumstances are much
different here in one of the top five poorest countries in the world, religious
leaders in Malawi hold much higher social status—both in terms of respect given
to them and relative lifestyle and comfort. All that being said, I’ve been
closely observing how the priests interact with the ground labors and helpers
at the school. There’s definitely a air of authority that the priests walk
around with. They routinely scold our cook about the food he cooks. He either picks
the wrong food to cook or he picks the right food but doesn’t cook it properly.
There’s always something wrong. The other night I tried to suggest that it was
silly for us to be so fussy about the food when our friends in the nearby
villages were barely getting one meal per day. I didn’t hear any response to
this.
At the hospital I was working for six weeks, there was an
interesting dynamic between the healthcare providers (eg. doctors, nurses, and
other mid-level providers) and the patients, who were mostly poor subsistence
farmers from the nearby area. There’s a huge gap in the SES of the providers
and patients at the hospital. This holds true at most healthcare facilities in
the country, but I think the difference is especially striking at this hospital
that is relatively well funded (and therefore able to hire better educated
staff—who, it almost goes without saying, are of higher SES) but also serves a
mostly rural population. Who am I to judge, but I did find the staff to be
regularly condescending to the patients and their caregivers. Seeing the staff
shouting at these people was not uncommon. When interviewing patients about the
history of their illness, they would often falsely shorten the timeframe. When
I enquired the reason behind this, I was told that it was because they’re
scolded by staff for delaying to seek care. The patients therefore lie about
how long they’ve been sick in order to avoid being yelled at. Someone even
informed me that women in labor were often slapped and ridiculed by staff when
they weren’t pushing hard enough. A visiting American doctor mentioned to me
briefly that he believes this issue of pervasive classism is a largely
overlooked issue in discussion about improving healthcare in developing
countries like Malawi. It was this little discussion that actually got me
thinking more and more about this topic and eventually writing all this. His
concern is that higher status providers simply don’t care enough about their
lower status patients. The unexpected death of a well to do nurse’s child is a
tragedy, but the death of a poor farmer’s child is very common and not much
cause for concern. The farmer should have done a better job raising the child
anyway.
Growing up in sort of suburban America, I never really
experienced having servants or workers. But here in Malawi, as a consequence of
some of the history here that I’ve already described and also a huge amount of
low-skilled labor, the “haves” often have multiple people working for them in
their homes: cooks, gardeners, maids, nannies, guards, etc. Often these people
are desperate and grateful for the work. The “haves” get by paying these people
very low wages (it’s the market price, after all), and as masters of their
domain, they can show their dominance over their staff by scolding, micromanaging,
and complaining about them. From what I can tell from reading books and
watching too much TV, I suppose this type of master-servant relationship is
nothing new in the context of world history. Maybe it’s just ignorant,
middle-class dudes from the Midwest like me who are surprised by it all.
I regularly listen to the BBC, and the other morning they
had a program about the death of the middle class in developed countries (not
to be confused with “developING" countries like Malawi). They mentioned that
the main reason for this is that more and more jobs are being taken over by
machines and computers. I don’t know how they measure this, but they also
stated that for the first time in the history of the United States, this year
less than half of the US population is in the “middle class.” To overgeneralize
and oversimplify (which my English teachers in college would never allow me to
do, but this is my blog and I don’t have to listen to them anymore), I think a
strong middle class is a major solution to this issue of classism. As we
continue to struggle with so many other “-ism’s” in the US, I wonder if the
issue of classism will continue to grow in the Land of the Free.
