NO MORE EXCUSES!

If there is one event which really made people out there sit up and notice that there is a country in some corner of the world known as Malawi then it must be Madonna’s first adoption. Obviously there must be people out there who already knew about Malawi but for the average Joe somewhere in the US mid-west, they really had to grab their atlases and confirm that this was not a new exotic island that had just been discovered in the south pacific.

While people were screaming Eureka! At this new discovery, those of us who were born and raised in the country we so fondly christened ‘the warm heart of Africa’ were so amazed that our country was such a non-entity in the eyes of the majority of people in the developed world.

I started asking myself what we had done wrong or did not do to have such a mediocre profile in the eyes of the world. Obviously I am sure this has got a lot to do with our historical heritage as one of the poorest and least important members of the so called ‘British Empire’ to the point that our independence struggle was one of the easiest as the old colonial master felt…well good riddance.

Again our relative stability and lack of conflict also ensured that we were not in the world press although for people who follow history and current affairs, the name Kamuzu Banda may not have sounded strange at all. Adding all this up to the fact that we are one of the poorest countries in the world then you can understand why nobody out there would know about our country because there is nothing that is news worthy.

The unfortunate stereotype that Africa is the ‘dark’ continent where nothing good happens scared off people. The only news that you would hear about Africa was conflict, AIDS, poverty and death. In some people’s minds travelling to an African country was almost equal to committing suicide.

So many things now have changed since those dark gloomy days. Globalization has made sure that more and more people travel and begin to discover the truth about Africa, the internet has also opened up the continent and all of a sudden so many good things are happening and Africans are feeling good about themselves. Countries which were at conflict including Mozambique, Angola and Rwanda are now some of the most progressive countries in the world. The white house is now occupied by a man with African roots, the FIFA world cup will be hosted by an African country for the first time and it is all looking good.

Malawi is also getting some positive buzz; we have hosted three peaceful multi-party general elections, the issue of hunger is slowly but surely receding into the vestiges of historical folk tale, our economy is officially the second fastest growing in the world (in the midst of the global recession). Things are really looking up. I also read in the newspaper the other day that Malawi will again host the Lake of Stars music festival with an expected attendance of 5,000 (a new record according to the article).

I checked up on other Music festivals in the world and boy…attendance runs in the hundreds of thousands. Of course some of them have some really weird names but the one that really knocked me out is Lollapalooza somewhere in Chicago.

I am sure that there is great potential to go beyond the 5,000 and give real meaning to the word revenue in tourism. We have no excuses any more, let’s take advantage of all this positivity and market this country so that we don’t wait for another celebrity adoption to get noticed.