Farming in the Mirror

A Double Prelude to the Series “Farming in the Mirror”

“Do not remove the ancient landmark which your ancestors have set.” — Proverbs 22:28

“Because the creature itself also shall be delivered from the bondage of corruption into the glorious liberty of the children of God.

 For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.” –

Romans 8:21-22

Before we begin, a word about what this is—and what it is not.

This is the first post in a 10-part series drawn from years of walking fields, reading archives, crunching data and statistics, listening to farmers, and wrestling with questions that do not have easy answers. Grounded primarily but not exclusively in Malawi’s agricultural landscape, it is part memoir, part reflection, part invitation. These posts are not reports, though they are based on research. They are not manifestos, though they carry critique. They are a meditation on what it means to know the land—and to be known by it—in the midst of policies, metrics, funding cycles, and often-forgotten wisdoms.

Together, we will trace how agriculture—so often framed as a site of growth and innovation—has also been a site of extraction, erasure, and epistemic and ontological violence. But this series is not only about what has been lost. It is also about what remains. What resists. What refuses to die.

Each post will follow a thread: language, valuation, seed, silence, time. We will meet characters—some real, some remembered, some imagined. We will drift between policy meetings and kitchen fires, field notebooks and scripture, dreams and dashboards. At every step, we will ask what it means to listen well. To reclaim what has been buried. To till the ground of our own epistemologies and ontologies with care.

This opening post is offered in two distinct voices—two ways of knowing. The first is a narrative of memory and metaphor, crafted in the style of creative non-fiction. The second is an analytical reflection, grounded in political critique and conceptual clarity. You may read one or both. They speak in different registers, but share the same soil.

This is a journey into the heart of agricultural governance—but also into the soul of witness.

Welcome.

1.1    ✨ Part 1: In the Mirror of Memory

Creative non-fiction + ethnographic memoir + philosophical narrative

1.1.1   The Soil Remembers

On Seeds, Silence, and the Violence of Knowing

The story begins before the rains, with a woman listening to the land. It follows memory fragments, philosophical reflections, and imagined dialogues between farmers and systems. It ends with a quiet planting—curved, not linear—and a whispered prayer to the seed. The spreadsheet forgets. But the soil remembers.

1.1.1.1    Before the Rain

The sky is heavy with waiting.
In a village in Dedza, a woman crouches at the edge of her field. She presses her palm into the soil, then lifts it to her nose. Sniffs. Waits.

A small child stands beside her, barefoot.
“Amayi,” he asks, “why haven’t you planted yet?”
She does not answer immediately. She turns her face to the west and squints.
“The ground has not spoken,” she says at last. “It is not time.”

From a distance, a development officer might see this as delay. As inefficiency. But something deeper is happening here—something beyond scheduling, beyond metrics.

She is listening.

1.1.1.2    Field Memory

Years ago, I stood in a field with a man whose name I never wrote down. He wore a blue jacket too large for his frame and held a hoe like it was part of his body. He had just finished speaking at a farmer consultation meeting hosted by an NGO.

“They ask us what we know,” he said, half-smiling, “and then they tell us we’re wrong.”

I nodded, notebook in hand. But I had no words in response. I still don’t.

That sentence returns to me like a proverb.
It is not angry. It is not even bitter.
It is just… accurate.

1.1.1.3    The Mirror and the Mask

They call farmers the backbone of the economy. But a spine, too, can be bent.

Agricultural policy in Malawi is clothed in the language of productivity, resilience, participation, even co-creation. Reports speak of "inclusion" and "traditional knowledge integration.” Donors quote participation rates and cite partnerships. Extension officers distribute inputs while praising “indigenous wisdom.”

But somewhere in the folds of these compliments lies a quiet violence. A sweet poison.

The farmer becomes a symbol. An icon. A logo.

Meanwhile, their knowledge—‘messy’, historical, embodied—is sliced into data points. Translated into inputs and outputs. Compressed into tables that do not know rain delays, family funerals, or the scent of seed storage smoke.

This is not just technical. It is theological.
It is the substitution of relationship with representation.
It is forgetting disguised as progress.

1.1.1.4    The System That Speaks

Systems like NAMIS, the National Agriculture Management Information System, do not blink.
They process reports from the districts. They flag anomalies. They project national resilience scores.

A woman in Mchinji reports planting her groundnuts after the first rains.
The system marks her “late.”
The system does not ask why.

Her brother died that week. She buried him with her bare hands.

NAMIS records her yield.
NAMIS calculates her household food sufficiency.
NAMIS moves on.

She does not.

1.1.1.5    The Fogged Mirror

In this world, gaslighting doesn’t always feel like violence.
It feels like form-filling.
Like the soft echo of your own voice in a consultation you didn’t ask for.
Like being thanked for your participation in a project that has already been designed.

“You are free to use traditional seed,” says the NGO, handing out only hybrids.
“You can plant your own way,” says the extension officer, marking “noncompliant” on her tablet.

Over time, the mirror fogs.
Farmers begin to mimic the language of resilience.
Begin to report what is expected.
Begin to doubt the timing in their bones.

This, too, is a kind of forgetting.

1.1.1.6    Not All Resistance Is Rupture

Some plant secretly.
Some nod in meetings and ignore the advice.
Some quietly save kholiwa seed in jars tucked behind flour sacks.

But not all deviation is dissent. Not every refusal is resistance.
Some is economic constraint.

Some is exhaustion.
Some is grief.
Some is the dull ache of being misread for too long.

Some is the mistrust of years of unsuccessful yet prideful, unyielding and unrepentant social experimentation.

I do not romanticize survival. I do not mistake persistence for liberation.

But still, I have seen seeds planted with stubborn love.
And that, too, is something.

1.1.1.7    Technologies and Temptations

At a conference in Lilongwe, I watched a presentation on AI-based farm monitoring.
It was slick, efficient, impressive.
The satellite imagery was breathtaking. The dashboard showed yield prediction, drought alerts, even pest surveillance.

And yet—
No column for mourning.
No tab for ancestral calendars.
No space for a farmer’s silence.

Still, I do not reject it outright.
Not all tools are idols. Some may become instruments—if shaped with care, governed by justice, and guided by love.

It is not the presence of technology that wounds.
It is the absence of informed humility.

1.1.1.8    The Soil Speaks

Later that evening, back in the village, the woman planted her first row.
The child watched. The air smelled like memory.
She did not plant in straight lines. She planted in curves—like her mother taught her.
She murmured something under her breath. I did not understand the words.

It was not for me.

The spreadsheet forgets.
The satellite forgets.
The strategy document forgets.

But the soil remembers.
It remembers grief, and hunger, and fidelity.
It remembers the prayer whispered between thumb and seed.
It remembers the covenant.

It holds the truth.

We just have to listen.

1.2    📚 Part 2: Unearthing Knowledge — A Critical Introduction

Analytical essay introduction to the series

1.2.1   The Soil Remembers — Agriculture as Extraction

Once again, this post is the first in a 10-part blog series drawn from years of research and reflection on agricultural governance in Malawi and the postcolonial world. The series explores how agriculture—often framed as a site of development and inclusion—is also a site of extraction, erasure, and epistemic and ontological violence. Yet within the ruins of this system are seeds of something more: African agrarian knowledge, faith-rooted resistance, and a vision for just and relational futures. Each post unpacks one theme—language, valuation, resistance, or memory—to help us reimagine how we relate to land, governance, and knowledge in our time.

As we journey through these reflections, a caution is necessary: not all signs of deviation are acts of dissent. Not every local practice interrupts the logics of extraction. In fact, some forms of participation—though presented as empowerment—merely reproduce the structures they appear to challenge. This series is not an invitation to romanticize survival or reinterpret every tradition as resistance. Rather, it is a call to deepen our reading of agrarian life. To ask hard questions about where true epistemic and ontological rupture occurs—and where reclamation begins. This requires not just attention, but humility. Not just critique, but care.

The story of agriculture in Malawi—and across much of the postcolonial world—is often told in a hopeful language. A language of productivity and resilience. Of participation, co-creation, and pluralism. Development reports speak glowingly of inclusion and innovation. Farmers are invited to “have a voice.” Traditional knowledge is said to be “valued.”

But as I argue in this series—and in the research it’s based on—this language is inadequate. In fact, it often conceals more than it reveals. These terms can mask deeper forms of extraction, control, and racialized epistemic violence.

Pluralism, for instance, doesn’t just select what fits. It often refuses to name the colonial and racial foundations that still shape what counts as knowledge. It creates the illusion of openness while preserving a hierarchy of truths.c

We begin, then, not with solutions, but with a reckoning. With the soil—not as ancestor, but as witness. As record. As bearer of ancient marks.

From this reckoning, we move into deeper questions: How does data erase memory? How does language govern the governable? What happens when AI systems take on the task of classifying life? Can knowledge systems be reclaimed without being captured?

1.2.1.1    Extraction Revisited

Extraction is not just about minerals or oil. Agriculture, too, can be extractive. Not only in its physical demands on land and labour, but in its hunger for data—for knowledge that can be abstracted, standardized, and exported.

In Malawi, this happens through valuation systems—like measuring output in “international dollars”—that translate diverse local practices into foreign logics and linguistics. It also happens in development spaces where farmers are invited to participate in processes whose terms are already decided. Where knowledge is “co-created”, but only within the safe limits of pre-existing models.

But it’s not just governments and donors. Major agri-tech firms, seed multinationals, and digital platform providers shape the very language in which agriculture is understood. Their datasets and dashboards quietly determine what counts as a “yield”, what qualifies as “climate-smart”, and which farmer practices are “scalable”. They claim to mind their own business—just offering tools or technologies—but they operate as editors of agrarian reality.

Their neutrality is a myth. Their influence is linguistic colonialism in modern form.

And yet, not all technologies are born of erasure. Not all data is extractive. Some tools may yet be reclaimed and redirected—if they are governed by ethics, humility, and love. The challenge is not to reject technoscience outright, but to discern the spirit in which it is wielded.

The spreadsheet forgets. But the soil remembers.

1.2.1.2    Postcolonial Scripts, Colonial Foundations

Agricultural governance today walks in the footprints of empire. What we call modernization often replicates the rigidities of colonial rule: straight rows, uniform standards, and a suspicion of anything unmeasurable. The colonial agronomist’s blueprint is still alive in today’s policy frameworks, databases, and yield projections.

Even development buzzwords like “inclusive,” “climate-smart,” or “farmer-centered” rest on infrastructures that were built to exclude. Language becomes a tool not only of communication, but of control.

Farmers may be listened to. But they are rarely heard.

1.2.1.3    Toward Epistemic Reclamation

If agriculture has been a site of deep forgetting, it can also be a site of remembering. Of reclamation. Of recovering the ancient landmarks of agrarian wisdom—not in the name of nostalgia, but of truth.

We must ask: What does it mean to know the land on its own terms? To resist abstraction? To insist that seed saving, intercropping, and rotational fallowing are not just “local practices,” but serious philosophies of survival and progress?

This is the beginning of epistemic rupture—the breaking of inherited logics and linguistics that no longer serve. And it is also the beginning of repair. Of new covenant. Of healing.

1.2.1.4    The Africanization of the World

To speak of Africanization is not to ask the world to mimic African forms. It is to call the world to reckon with what it has erased—and with those who continue to erase. Today, it is not only governments and donors who shape what can be known about agriculture. It is also the data scientists hired by corporations, the AI tools sold as neutral solutions, and the platforms that decide which farmer voices are visible and which are not.

These companies often present themselves as mere facilitators—interested only in productivity, sustainability, or innovation. But they participate in the same infrastructures of erasure. By shaping the language, they shape the world.

And yet, this world can be unmade and remade. Even in the realm of digital systems and artificial intelligence, there is room for reimagination. We are beginning to explore how large language models (LLMs) and AI tools might serve not empire, but justice. Not abstraction, but rootedness. Not domination, but care.

Technology must not become a god. But neither must it be cast as evil. Like the seed, it must be tested by its fruit.

The agrarian imagination in Africa is not backward. It is prophetic. It offers an alternative to burnout, to extraction, to the endless search for growth at the expense of grace.

The soil holds this memory. Not because it is sacred in itself, but because it has been marked—by violence, by survival, by love.

It holds the truth.

We just have to listen.

1.3    Coming next: Post 2 – The Grammar of Control: How Language Colonizes the Land

We’ll explore how terms like “extension,” “input,” and “smallholder” shape what can be known and governed—and why translation itself can become a form of domination.

30th March 2025

Prologue: Before the Speaking

Before the policy, before the data, before the project brief—there was speaking.

Not the kind that earns a logframe or fits into a theory of change. But the kind passed down in prayer and proverb, between furrows in the field and sighs in the night. The kind that remembers the seasons not as climate variables, but as the rhythm of breath between ancestors and soil.

Then something shifted.

Words that once carried cosmology began to buckle under translation. What was once called wisdom became “constraint.” What was known through intimacy was relabeled “low capacity.” And in place of listening, came grammar. Framework. Form.

This post is about that shift. About how language became a technology of control—and how the soil still resists it.

Because even when development speaks on behalf of the farmer, there is always another voice—quiet, weary, sometimes buried, but never silenced.

The voice of the land. The voice of refusal.

The voice that says: we speak, but not as we are.

Part 1       We Speak, But Not as We Are

“Can the subaltern speak?” – Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak
“And the Word became flesh…” – John 1:14

The first time I noticed it, I didn’t have the words.

We were seated beneath a neem tree outside the agricultural office in Mchinji. It was February—maize tasseling, air thick with promise and rot. A local extension officer, clipboard in hand, was briefing a group of smallholder farmers about the benefits of “climate-smart agriculture.” He spoke with conviction, repeating terms I had seen earlier in a donor-funded project brief: “resilience,” “yield optimization,” “input packages.” The farmers nodded. But something about their nods caught my attention—they were too quick, too practiced, like an echo with no origin.

Later, I asked one of the farmers, an older man I’ll call Bambo a Chisomo, what he thought of the session.

He shrugged. “Amapanga zomwe amafuna.” They do what they want.
Then, after a pause: “Timalandira nawo… koma sindimvetsa bwino.” We participate… but I don’t fully understand it.

I’ve carried that moment for years. Not because I thought the extension officer was wrong, necessarily. But because something deeper was at work—a structure of speaking that made farmers appear heard without ever being listened to. A theater of communication. A grammar of control.

But it’s not just farmers who live inside this grammar. Extension workers, too, often find themselves translating directives they didn’t write, repeating slogans they don’t quite believe. Medium-scale farmers, caught between performance and survival, navigate it with equal ambivalence. The smallholder may be the figure upon whom this grammar is most violently inscribed—but they are not its only subject. They are its extremity.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

In the beginning, we are told, there was the Word.

And in agrarian development, the Word became project. Policy. Plan. It became frameworks and matrices, indicators and targets. It became “subsistence” and “food insecurity” and “traditional practice.” It became “farmer participation.” It became scripture—not sacred, but technocratic—recited in boardrooms and field offices alike.

But what happens when a people are made to speak in a language not their own? Not just Chichewa versus English—but a language of valuation, of deficit, of reform. A language that cannot hold the weight of their cosmologies, their soil-memory, their prayers.

What happens when language becomes law? When the ability to name—your crop, your method, your knowledge—is stripped from you and translated into something intelligible only to those with spreadsheets and funding?

Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o said it plainly: “Colonialism’s most dangerous weapon is language.” And he was right to not mean language as vocabulary. To mean language as regime. As enclosure. As a way of organizing what counts as real.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

There is a peculiar and arrogant violence in being told your knowledge is welcome, only to find it edited before it’s heard.

In development documents, I often see this sleight of hand. Indigenous intercropping becomes “resilience strategy.” Seed saving is “constraint.” Refusal to join farmer groups is “low uptake.” Each naming a translation. Each translation a reduction. Each reduction a loss.

This is not mere miscommunication—it is something more insidious. It is gaslighting. A recursive process where you are included just enough to believe your voice matters, but never enough to change the script. Where the more you speak, the less you are understood.

In the silence that follows, something breaks. You begin to doubt not only their language—but your own. You question whether what you know, what you do, what you inherit, is really knowledge at all.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________

Sometimes, in the quiet after interviews, I would ask farmers how they imagined the future.

“Mmmm… I do not really have plans… we shall see,” one said, gazing past the maize field toward the hills. It wasn’t apathy. It was fatigue. The exhaustion of being spoken about, to, through—but never with.

This grammar does not just structure reports. It lives in the mouth, in the skin, in the psyche. It produces what Fanon called the “psycho-affective complex”—a condition of internalized contradiction. To speak, but not as yourself. To know, but not as knower. To be visible, but not legible.

And so, the land remembers what the language forgets.

Part 2: The Grammar of Control

How Language Colonizes the Land

"Language is not just a tool; it is terrain."

1. Language as Infrastructure

In agrarian governance, language does not simply describe reality—it organizes it. Terms like “subsistence,” “resilience,” “input adoption,” and “traditional knowledge” are not neutral descriptors. They are infrastructures of meaning, channels through which power flows and knowledge is rendered governable. This is not metaphorical. It is infrastructural.

As my forthcoming article Agriculture as Extraction argues, language in development planning in Malawi functions as a discursive infrastructure—a structure of capture, legitimation, and exclusion. What cannot be translated into this infrastructure is often discarded. Or worse: it is recoded and reappears as “evidence” of underdevelopment.

2. Four Strategies of Epistemic Capture

Drawing on the frameworks of Fairclough, Mbembe, and my PhD research, we identify four primary strategies by which this grammar of control operates:

• Fantasy

Development discourse fabricates a fantasy of progress in which smallholders are always nearly about to transform—if only they adopt the right seeds, align with the market, or modernize. The “climate-resilient smallholder” is the latest iteration of this fantasy: always adaptable, always on the cusp of becoming, never quite whole.

• Negation

This is the erasure of knowledge through omission. Indigenous soil fertility systems, cosmological planting rituals, and gendered knowledge networks are made invisible—deemed irrelevant to planning documents, syllabi, or economic models.

• Neutralization

Where knowledge cannot be ignored, it is absorbed and rendered inert. Agroecological practices are stripped of their ontological roots and repackaged as technical curiosities. “Traditional seed use” becomes a checkbox, not a political choice.

• Ambiguation

Development language is riddled with contradictions: farmers are praised for their resilience and blamed for their poverty. Their knowledge is “valuable” but in need of correction. Their participation is vital—but their epistemologies are not.

3. Agricultural Gaslighting and Epistemic Contradiction

This recursive process of selective inclusion, misrecognition, and coercive affirmation produces what the article terms agricultural gaslighting. Farmers are told their knowledge is valued—then promptly overruled by input recommendations, planting calendars, and externally defined success metrics.

The smallholder becomes an epistemic contradiction: both the foundation of food security and the scapegoat for its failure. They are hailed in policy documents but undermined in practice. This contradiction is not incidental—it is structural. It sustains the development apparatus. Indeed, they are not alone in this contradiction. Extension officers must deliver trainings based on project scripts that reduce their own agronomic expertise to buzzwords. Medium-scale farmers are expected to perform entrepreneurial optimism for donor metrics while absorbing the risks of policy incoherence. The grammar of control scales—flexible enough to enroll many, precise enough to isolate the most disempowered. 

The effects are profound. Farmers begin to question themselves. Field interviews revealed what Fanon called the “psycho-affective complex”: a condition of cognitive dissonance and internalized deficiency. Participation becomes performance. Doubt becomes governance.

4. From Resilience to Rupture

Contemporary discourse frames non-compliance—seed saving, intercropping, resisting NGO enrolment—as resilience. But this framing is a sleight of hand. It aestheticizes difference without challenging the epistemic hierarchy. Resilience is the new respectability.

I think what is needed instead is rupture—a disarticulation from the developmental grammar that governs how knowledge is named, valued, and made visible. This rupture does not always take the form of confrontation. As Amber Murrey theorizes, it may appear as slow dissent—strategic silence, opacity, refusal.

Such acts, while fragmentary, are not failures. They are ontological defenses. They are counter-grammars, spoken quietly against the noise of extractive reason.

5. Toward Agrarian Sovereignty

To decolonize agricultural development is not merely to include Indigenous knowledge in plans and policies. It is to question the very forms of planning, the very categories of “evidence,” “impact,” and “progress.” It is to reclaim language as a site of struggle and sovereignty.

Yet a liberatory agrarian future cannot be built solely through smallholder empowerment. It must reckon with the entire discursive architecture—how knowledge, voice, and authority are configured across the spectrum of actors. Real sovereignty means freeing not only the farmer, but the extensionist, the planner, the mid-scale grower—from a grammar that speaks through them but not for them. 

What would agricultural policy look like if it began not with a deficit model but with cosmological abundance? What futures become possible when development listens not to metrics, but to memory?

In the words of one farmer: “Timalima chifukwa chakuti ndife anthu.”
We farm because we are human.

It is time our grammar remembered that.

Epilogue: The Word and the Soil

The man under the neem tree—Bambo aChisomo—never raised his voice. He simply said, “Timalandira nawo… koma sindimvetsa bwino.” We participate… but I don’t fully understand it.

It would take me years to understand what he meant.

In that moment of quiet, what he offered was not an admission of ignorance, but a diagnosis of something deeper—a recognition that language had ceased to be a bridge. It had become a gate.

We had all spoken. But not in the same grammar. Not with the same stakes.

Development plans had their words. So did the land. One governed through abstraction, metrics, and promise. The other spoke through memory, soil, and seed—slow languages that resist translation, that remember what the future has tried to forget.

This blog post has asked what happens when language becomes law. When it ceases to be expressive and becomes extractive. But the deeper question remains: what would it mean to speak, again, with the land?

To listen not just to policy framings, but to farmers’ silences. To dissent’s murmur. To the grammar of refusal.

In the next post, we turn our attention to that soil-speech—to how the land, too, talks back. Not in English. Not in bullet points. But in ellipses, in interruptions, in the roots that refuse to grow straight.

Because even beneath the weight of law and ledger, the soil remembers.

6th April 2025

Revised 8th April 2025

In this third post, I explore how development planning uses measurement not just to describe agrarian life, but to discipline it. From yield charts to digital dashboards, a quiet machinery is at work—funneling smallholders into a future they did not choose, through data they did not design. We move from technocratic metrics to theological discernment, confronting the neo-Malthusian scripts that narrate dispossession as progress. This is a post about numbers, yes—but more deeply, about memory, resistance, and the clarity to say: we remember otherwise.

I. Opening Image & Thematic Hook

“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.”

The sentence flashed across my screen one late evening, tagged beneath a glossy World Economic Forum promo about the “sharing economy” and future cities. I paused. Not because it sounded utopian. But because it sounded familiar.

A chill ran through me—not from the phrase “own nothing”, but from how naturally it framed loss as freedom. Dispossession as delight. The future, narrated as inevitability. And I thought: this is how it happens. Not with violence, but with a slogan. Not through land grabs, but through language. A hypnosis wrapped in infographics.

I remembered a village meeting years earlier in Mchinji district. A government extension officer had come to “sensitize” farmers about new inputs and planting calendars. His tone was polite, but the PowerPoint behind him told a different story. It showed a comparison of maize yields: Malawi vs. the Netherlands. The chart was clean, authoritative. Our bar was small. Their bar was tall. No one needed to say the quiet part out loud.

Then came the verdict: “You people need to modernize. You have land, but your yields are too low.”
A few farmers shifted in their seats. One woman—older, with a chitenje wrapped tight around her head—whispered to me later, “Do their numbers know that our soil is tired? Or that the rains have changed?”
She wasn’t asking a scientific question. She was naming something deeper: that what counts is no longer what counts. That in the world of planning and charts, our knowledges no longer qualify as knowledge.

In that moment, I realized that the real machinery of extraction isn’t always the plough or the policy per se. Sometimes, it’s the spreadsheet. The graph. The comparison table. The yield gap diagram.
And what those images do—softly, systematically—is reduce the farmer to a problem. A low-performing node in someone else’s algorithm of progress.

II. Theological Clarification: What Heritage Are We Defending?

Before I go any further, let me say something clearly—because it needs to be said.
This is not a romantic defense of “the ancestors”. I have no desire to resurrect every cultural rhythm, ritual, or worldview simply because it predates colonialism. Not all that is old is sacred. Not all that is “ours” is liberating. And not everything that wears the label “Indigenous” is aligned with life.

We speak often of reclaiming heritage. But we must ask: which heritage, and to what end?
Because I have seen with my own eyes how fear can be sanctified as tradition. How spiritual bondage can be defended as identity. And how the very rituals some now exalt once stood silently beside our enslavement. We were not only colonized by Europe—we were often prepared for it by structures that already demanded silence, hierarchy, and submission to powers we dared not name.

That’s why I do not equate ancestry with truth.
I stand with Christ.

Not as a colonial relic, but as the very center of freedom.
Not as the whitewashed figure so often weaponized in empire’s name, but as the One who overthrew tables, exposed hypocrisy, and refused to flatter the powerful.
The Christ who called fishermen, named the poor blessed, and said the kingdom belonged to children and mustard seeds—not technocrats and temple elites.

When I read Scripture, I don’t feel distant from my people—I feel closer to them.
To the ones who sang songs of lament under the trees.
To the mothers who hid seeds during famine.
To the prophets who warned of kings who claimed land that was not theirs.

This, too, is our heritage.
A decolonial Christian identity that has long been erased, sidelined, or replaced by either cultural idolatry or technocratic hegemony.

So no—I will not substitute the clarity of Scripture for the haze of ancestral consensus.
And I will not pretend that our only options are between ancient chains and digital ones.
There is another way. And He has a name.

But with that clarity, we return to the question:
If we reject both ancestor-worship and algorithmic submission—then how do we discern the systems that now shape the land?

Because make no mistake: the development charts, the planning documents, the language of yield and deficit—these are not neutral. They are not simply tools.
They are grammars. Infrastructures. And increasingly, they are designed to discipline how farmers speak, how governments plan, and how the future is imagined.

So let’s talk about that grammar—about how measurement became the new mask of control.

III. Numbers as Neutralization: The Discourse of Development Metrics

They told us that numbers don’t lie.
But what they didn’t say is that numbers don’t speak either. They are made to say what systems need them to say. And in agricultural development, those systems are rarely neutral.

Take the yield gap. Or GDP contribution. Or “climate-smart” targets tied to donor timelines.
These figures show up in every plan, every policy memo, every project proposal. They appear objective, empirical. But when you trace their grammar, you begin to see that they are not just descriptors of reality—they are producers of authority.

They tell us who is modern and who is lagging.
Who needs training and who deserves investment.
Who counts, and who needs to be counted again.

This is what I mean by mensuration bias—a term I use to describe the structural tilt of measurement systems in favor of high-input, export-oriented models of farming.
Globally, for instance, I compared three common ways of aggregating agricultural output: international dollars (I$), wheat units, and raw tonnage. What I found was startling, but not surprising: the international dollar method, commonly used in global reports, consistently overstated productivity in countries using more chemical inputs and mechanization, while under-representing the value of food systems built on diversity, resilience, and non-market labor.

In short: the more you align with industrial models, the better your numbers look.
And the more you rely on Indigenous or low-input systems, the more invisible you become.

But this is not simply a statistical artifact—it is a discursive strategy.
It is a way of saying, without saying it: You are the problem.
Your farming. Your soil. Your scale. Your seed.
The entire epistemic system through which you know how to live with land is quietly placed under suspicion.

And once suspicion is introduced, intervention becomes urgent.
Enter the platforms. The metrics. The digital dashboards. The remote sensing technologies that promise to “map” and “monitor” agrarian life with more accuracy than the farmer who walks her plot every day.

Consider NAMIS, the National Agriculture Management Information System. On paper, it’s a tool for efficiency—a way to “streamline” data and coordinate planning.
But beneath that efficiency lies an unspoken epistemic violence: what cannot be rendered into data simply ceases to exist.
The seed exchanged between neighbors.
The prayer said before planting.
The knowledge stored in memory, not manuals.

Development policy, in this sense, begins to operate like a secular liturgy: it names, ranks, values, and excludes—rituals of abstraction performed in boardrooms far from the fields they claim to serve.

And the effect of this abstraction is not benign. It is neutralization—the erasure of alternatives.
A narrowing of what can be imagined. A closing of epistemic possibility.

Because if all the indicators say you are failing, it becomes harder to say, “I know another way.”
And harder still to believe it.

IV. The Neo-Malthusian Script: Disavowing Antagonism

Once the numbers are in place, the story begins.
It’s a story that always starts with crisis: population growth, land pressure, climate change.
It rarely begins with history.

Never abundance.
It never begins with theft.

Instead, development planning performs what I’ve come to understand as a fantasmatic displacement—a narrative trick that erases the true causes of agrarian suffering and reassigns blame to the smallholder.
The land is degraded? It must be because “they” use traditional methods.
The yields are low? It must be because “they” don’t adopt new technologies.
The market is volatile? “They” must be planting the wrong crops.

This logic has roots in the ideology of Malthusian scarcity—the belief that hunger results from too many mouths and too little land. It’s a eugenicist logic as old as the plantation, dressed up now in climate graphs and investor briefings. And it performs two simultaneous erasures:

1. It forgets that Malawi’s agrarian structure was violently reconfigured to benefit settler estates, export markets, and later donor institutions.

2. It forgives the ongoing policy capture that continues to prioritize elite land access, agribusiness corridors, and large-scale farming as the “solution” to the problems these very systems created.

In this script, antagonism is not acknowledged—it is disavowed.
The long histories of resistance, coercion, and contestation are replaced by a vocabulary of deficits.
Conflict is narrated as dysfunction.
Exploitation becomes inefficiency.
Dispossession is reframed as underutilization.

And so, within this development fantasy, the smallholder emerges not as a political subject, but as a stubborn obstacle: visible but unintelligible. Invited but not sovereign. Called upon to participate, but never to decide.

The plan is already written.

That’s why we see phrases like “farm aggregation”, “land consolidation”, and “efficient transformation” appearing again and again in policy documents.
The assumption is left unstated, but firmly in place: that small-scale farmers will eventually vanish.
That they will step aside for those who can “do more with less”—who can “feed the world” while fitting the spreadsheet.

This is what I mean when I write:

“The antagonism between state and smallholder is not simply social or ideological—it is structurally inscribed in the discursive infrastructures of governance.”

The chart was never just a chart.
It was a script. A subtle rehearsal for disenfranchisement.
And the tragedy is that many who deliver it—extension officers, researchers, planners—are themselves caught in the same performance.
They know the system is failing.
They admire the farmers’ ingenuity.
But they speak the language of reform because it’s the only grammar development allows.

V. Fantasmatic Planning and the Logic of Black Reason

If development planning is a story, then it must have a hero, a problem, and a solution.
And in that fantasy, the problem is rarely colonialism and its variants.
It is not land alienation.
It is not policy capture.
It is, somehow, always… the smallholder.

Planning, in the development world, thus often presents itself as neutral: a matter of targets, baselines, and five-year visions. But beneath the surface, it works more like a theology—complete with prophets (consultants and advisors), scriptures (logframes), rituals (workshops), and tithes (conditional grants). It speaks of transformation but insists on submission. It invokes inclusion but performs hierarchy.

It is, in other words, a fantasy.

And not just any fantasy, but what Achille Mbembe calls part of Black reason—a regime of thought (better rendered “unreason”) in which Blackness (and by extension, African agrarian life) is always positioned as either excessive or insufficient, never whole, never sovereign, never enough to define its own future.

In this logic, the smallholder is indispensable and yet inadequate:

• Celebrated as the “backbone of the economy,”

• Blamed as the bottleneck of progress.

• Consulted but not believed.

• Included but only as object, not author.

What results is not policy reform but discursive containment: a carefully managed performance in which everyone plays their role.
The farmer as beneficiary.
The planner as expert.
The donor as visionary.
The document as evidence.

But this performance depends on a foundational disavowal: that there is no real conflict, only technical problems.
And when antagonism does show up—through land disputes, or slow refusals—it is translated into the grammar of “awareness gaps”, “noncompliance”, or “capacity building”.

The grammar of control is clear: policies must be “inclusive,” but inclusion is conditional. The farmer may speak, but only in technocratic terms. They may participate, but only within pre-determined goals. And they may be recognized, but only as lacking—in knowledge, in productivity, in vision.

A schizophrenic treatment of the smallholder:

• They are central to food security, yet treated as obstacles to innovation.

• Their knowledge is invited, then reclassified as folklore or anecdote.

• Their resistance is admired in theory, but pathologized in practice.

In my research, I describe this as agricultural gaslighting: a process by which smallholders are continually invited to participate in their own exclusion, made to question their knowledge while being assured that “their voices matter”.

“They say we are consulted,” one farmer told me. “But the decisions are made before we arrive. We are there to clap.”

This is where fantasy meets ambiguation—another concept from my research that deserves attention.
Ambiguation is not the same as lying. It is more dangerous than that. It is the deliberate use of ambiguous language to simulate consensus, to collapse difference into sameness, and to pacify disagreement through the illusion of shared goals.

When a policy says it supports “farmer-driven innovation” but defines innovation through exclusionary biotech patents and private-sector input packages—that is ambiguation.
When “local knowledge” is cited in preambles but never in budget lines—that is ambiguation.
When “food security” becomes the banner under which land is transferred to commercial estates—that is the triumph of fantasy over memory.

But these tactics are not accidental. They are infrastructural. They are embedded in how development thinks, talks, writes, and reports itself.
And they rely on a particular epistemic order—one that renders Black agrarian life visible but unintelligible, named but not heard, essential but never central.

This is the logic of Black reason: not merely the exclusion of African thought, but its strategic incorporation as lack.
And it is through this incorporation that agricultural planning becomes extractive—not just of resources, but of meaning, agency, and time.

“We want to hear from you,” the policy says—just before it disqualifies everything you know.
“Your traditions are valuable,” the project states—just before it replaces them with imported seed.
“We respect your practices,” the extension officer offers—just before issuing a prescription designed in Rome or Pretoria.

It is a discursive trap: the farmer is spoken to, but never heard.
They are visible, but only through the lens of underdevelopment.
They are rendered intelligible, but only as a data point in a problem statement.

This is not just bad planning. It is ontological capture.
A form of fantasmatic governance that must continually invent the smallholder as a deficit in order to justify intervention, funding, and reform.

To sustain this fantasy, planners must rely on three discursive maneuvers:

1. Negation – The historical causes of underdevelopment are erased. Land theft, structural adjustment, colonial science—they vanish along with useful local knowledges.

2. Neutralization – All alternative knowledge systems are flattened. Spiritual, ecological, intergenerational ways of knowing are rearticulated as inefficiencies.

3. Ambiguation – Contradictions are disguised through language. Participation becomes a euphemism for compliance. Sovereignty becomes “empowerment”. Freedom becomes “access”.

And so, planning becomes a performance.
One in which everyone knows the fantasy is fragile, but no one dares break the spell.
Because to do so would require naming the real antagonism—the one between elite control and agrarian life.
Between data and discernment.
Between empire and food.

VI. Funneling, Hypnosis, and the Erosion of Resistance

The danger of this machinery—of charts, plans, platforms, and promises—is not just that it displaces people.
It’s that it disarms them before displacement ever happens.

What we are witnessing is a slow funneling of smallholders—not off the land (yet), but into a narrowing of options, of imagination, of speech.
Where once there were choices—about seed, rhythm, meaning, and method—now there are forms.
Where once there were multiple interpretations of resilience, now there are dashboards.
Where once the question was, “Is this just?”, now it is, “Is this compliant?”

This is not just abstraction. It is hypnosis.
A psychic and epistemic weakening that prepares communities to accept what they might otherwise resist—if only they had the language to name it.
The data does not only describe. It disciplines. It normalizes. It teaches people to distrust their memories, their methods, their instincts.

And so, over time, the farmer stops objecting.
Not because she agrees, but because the argument has already been coded as ignorance.
She has been told, gently but relentlessly, that the future is already written—and that her only role is to catch up.

“They told us the app would help,” one farmer said. “But when I followed its advice, my groundnuts failed. When I used my method, they worked. But now they say I’m noncompliant.”

This is how resistance becomes reframed as irresponsibility.
And epistemic sovereignty is replaced by procedural participation.

That’s why Collier and Dercon (2014) could argue—quite casually—that the exit of small-scale farmers from agriculture is not a crisis, but a pathway to efficiency.
That’s why AGRA’s vision of transformation quietly presumes that land will shift hands, not through violence, but through “investment readiness”.
That’s why smart contracts, blockchain-based tenure systems, and agri-fintech platforms are pitched not as tools of control, but as tools of transparency.

The new enclosure doesn’t come with fences. It comes with interfaces.
And the new violence does not shout. It persuades.
It presents itself as choice. As progress. As optimization.

But what is optimized in this system is not life—it is legibility.
And what is slowly eliminated is not land—but the ability to refuse.

Because that’s what’s really at stake.
Not just ownership, but resistance.
Not just hectares, but horizons.
Not just livelihoods, but the very ability to say, “This is not the only way.”

_ _ _

Indeed, it’s easy to imagine that dispossession requires violence—bulldozers, fences, evictions.
But in the 21st century, disenfranchisement is often subtler, slower, and harder to name.
It doesn't always come wearing boots. Sometimes, it arrives in a PowerPoint slide.
Sometimes, it speaks fluent English.
Sometimes, it uses phrases like “transformational change” or “inclusive growth”.

And its most effective weapon is not coercion.
It’s hypnosis.

What I mean is this: smallholders are being drawn into a scripted future in which their knowledge, identity, and autonomy are gradually neutralized—not by confrontation, but by inclusion.
Not by being pushed out, but by being written in.
And rewritten.
And abstracted.
Until they no longer recognize themselves in the story.

This is the mechanism of funneling.

It begins with numbers. It continues through planning. It is enforced by performance. And its endpoint is resignation.

You’re told that your yields are too low.
That your methods are outdated.
That your land is underutilized.
That the climate is changing, and only “climate-smart agriculture” can save you.
That your seed is vulnerable.
That your practices are informal.
That your silence is consent.
That your consent is progress.

And eventually, you stop resisting—not because you believe, but because you begin to doubt your right to know otherwise.

You begin to ask:
Maybe they’re right.
Maybe I’m the problem.
Maybe we should lease the land.
Maybe we should join the platform.
Maybe we should sell the seed bank.
Maybe progress looks like leaving.

This is not just loss. It is ontological erosion.
A slow evacuation of the self.
A spiritual disinheritance engineered through epistemic overload.

The tragedy is that this hypnosis often works best when framed as empowerment.
When digital dashboards tell you your farm is visible.
When farmer profiling promises to “include” you in national planning.
When mobile apps encourage you to learn, adapt, transform.

But in truth, what’s being transformed is not just your practice—it’s your position.
From farmer to data point.
From knower to beneficiary.
From sovereign to stakeholder.

This is why I wrote, in my research notes:

“Disenfranchisement under extractive governance is rarely declared outright. It is performed subtly—by rearranging the terms of legibility until resistance feels irrational, even to those who once carried its fire.”

That is the funnel.
That is the hypnosis.
And that is the real machinery of measurement.

VII. Closing: Discernment as a Form of Resistance

In the face of this machinery—the yield charts, the dashboards, the scripts of inevitability—it is tempting to respond with nostalgia, or cynicism, or rage. But I am learning to choose something older than those reflexes and more enduring than metrics.

Discernment.

The ability to name what is happening.
To hear what is not being said.
To see the difference between what is given and what is true.

Scripture tells us plainly: “Do not conform to the patterns of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God’s will is—His good, pleasing and perfect will.” (Romans 12:2)

That renewal of mind—that testing and approving—is not just a private luxury. It is a necessary political and spiritual act too.
Because when measurement becomes a god, discernment is a form of necessary rebellion.
When development is built on abstraction, remembering becomes prophetic.
When plans are written in the language of fantasy, naming what is real becomes sacred.

I do not write this post to romanticize the past or demonize innovation.
I write it because I believe that truth still matters.
And because I believe Christ is not merely a comfort, but a compass—an anchor in a world that trains us to forget what was taken and numbs us against what is coming.

Development does not need to be discarded. But it must be disarmed.
Its tools must be re-evaluated. Its grammars must be unlearned.
And its numbers must be made to answer to the stories they obscure.

Because the soil still remembers.
And the Spirit still speaks.
And the poor are not a problem to be solved, but a people to be heard, to be loved, fully deserving of justice.

So let us begin again. Not with models, but with memory.
Not with efficiency, but with love and justice.
Not with silence, but with speech.

Not with fear. But with discernment.

       ✨ A Note on Faith and Clarity

If you’re curious to understand more about the theological foundation shaping my perspective—especially my conviction that Jesus Christ is not a colonial import but a liberating truth—I invite you to explore the following teachings. These broadcasts offer deep insight into the spiritual architecture of global systems, the grammar of control, and the freedom found in Christ:

▶️September 2024 Global Communion Service

▶️ Your Loveworld Specials – Season 9, Phase 7, Day 3

These messages speak into the same world this blog critiques—a world shaped by illusions. 

9th April 2025

Introduction

Global Africanism and the Smallholder Icon: The Africanization of the World
Part I – Field Memory / Poetic Invocation

“We plant because the dead told us to.”
That’s what the old man in Mchinji told me, his hand pressed to the dry furrows as though they were pages.
“And we harvest because the living need hope.”
He looked out at the field that hadn’t yielded enough for three seasons.
“But now,” he said, “they tell us even our planting is wrong.”
He meant the extension worker. The one with the clipboard and GPS. The one with the model plot and the demo seed.
“Soon,” the old man said, “even our hunger will be outsourced.”

I remember the silence that followed. It wasn’t bitter—just tired. A silence like dry ground. A silence that has watched too many promises arrive in vehicles and leave in reports. I think often of that moment now, years later, because I see it replayed in places that have never known Malawi. In warehouses in Kansas. In clinics in Delhi. In refugee camps in Lesbos. In boardrooms in Nairobi and scrolls of predictive modeling from Geneva. What was done to this man—measured, named, improved, erased—is now happening to more of us. To all of us, perhaps, in staggered degrees.

Part II – Theoretical Frame / Critical Thesis

The story of the African smallholder has long been cast as a provincial drama. A footnote in development reports. A backdrop for resilience. A prototype of poverty. But that view was always too small. Because what happened to the African peasant—his land reformatted, his labor reorganized, his knowledge reclassified, his body managed—is now unfolding across the world.

We are witnessing, as Achille Mbembe prophesied, the Africanization of the world. A process by which the condition of the native, the smallholder, the disqualified life, becomes the template for global population management. The term "Africa" has always borne more than geography. It is, as Mbembe writes, a name for negation. A word that "judges the world" by exposing its unwillingness to recognize common humanity. Through the lens of Black reason—an epistemic system built on misrepresentation, idealization, and academic subterfuge—Africa was made both origin and limit. First, it was isolated. Then it was studied. Then it was copied.

Today, the condition once reserved for the African peasant—exclusion from epistemic authority, coercive medicalization, toxic food disguised as aid or progress, forced resilience—has become planetary policy. The global 'poor' are fed chemical coatings. The sick are managed through cancer economies. The dissenting are datafied, discredited, and disciplined. The world is vaccinated. And the vaccinated are surveilled in real time. And all are asked to perform gratitude, because the 'aid' came with a logo.

The smallholder is not the only victim. He is simply the extremity. The warning. The prototype. A mirror held up to the world.

And in that mirror, the scandal of humanity confronts us. For if the name “Africa” now names the world, then the cry for restitution is not African. It is human. And it is urgent.

I. From Africanism to Global Africanism

Part I – Lyrical Reflection / Theological Register

There is a word we are afraid to speak because we don’t know what it contains anymore: Africa. It was once a place. Then it became a metaphor. Then a punishment. Then a prayer.

"The problem is not that the world forgot Africa," the pastor once said at a funeral under the Nsangu tree.
"The problem," he said, “is that the world remembered Africa—but wrongly. And now that memory has gone viral.”

He spoke over the coffin of a boy who had swallowed too many toxins in too many years of chemically engineered food aid. “Our seed remembers,” he had whispered to the mother. “But so do their chemicals.” He meant the ones in the maize. The ones that came with promises of better yields and faster harvests. The ones that killed the insects—and slowly, the children.

What was done to this boy, to his field, to his mother’s sovereignty, to their bodies, to their God, is no longer unique. It is being exported. It is being normalized. The forgetting of Africa has become the design of the world.

Part II – Theoretical Frame / Mbembe and Black Reason

In his Critique of Black Reason, Achille Mbembe describes how Africa was made not simply into a location, but into a name for the negation of humanity itself. It became a symbol, a placeholder, a reservoir for all that the modern world wanted to cast out of its rational self-image. If Europe was the standard, Africa was the surplus. The irrational. The animal. The dead thing in need of saving.

But Mbembe goes further. He insists that this process—what we might call the racial abstraction of the world—did not remain confined to Africa. Instead, Africa became a prototype. A staging ground. A lab. The early name for what would later be made global. “Other parts of the world,” he writes, “are currently undergoing a process of Africanization.”

This is not a cultural diffusion. It is a structural transposition. A reversal and exportation of colonial dispositifs:

• The abstraction of the human into data.
  
  

• The reduction of the political into policy.
  
  

• The administration of suffering as resilience.
  
  

• The disqualification of knowledge as culture.
  
  

• The management of populations as care.
  
  

What Mbembe calls Black reason is the epistemic infrastructure that supports this: a system of discourses that do not seek truth but justification—justification for domination, for control, for reformulated inequality. This regime, built on idealization and misrepresentation, invented the Black Man as a figure of failure. It invented the native as incomplete. And now, it has moved on. It is creating new subjects.

Today, Black reason governs not only in Africa, but through global development systems, international aid protocols, climate-smart agriculture, bio-political health interventions, and crisis-driven innovation. It governs through WHO field manuals, USAID food packs, United Nations seed catalogs, and multilateral “investment frameworks” including the WEF. It governs through things that look like help.

The African condition—once imposed through military might and missionary grammar—is now imposed through algorithms, vaccines, resilience indexes, and participatory workshops.
The field has gone digital. But the logic is the same.

This is the terrain of Global Africanism. Not an embrace of Africa, but a replication of its colonial condition, now applied to other parts of the world. The Africanization of the world, in this sense, is not the diffusion of culture or solidarity. It is the spreading of negation—the export of epistemic disqualification and ontological doubt.

And the smallholder remains at its center: not as leader or agent, but as symbol, warning, and mirror.

II. The Smallholder as Extremity, Not Exception

Part I – Field Scene / Poetic Invocation

I remember a woman in Dedza, standing between two ridges of freshly hoed soil. The wind was cruel that day. The kind that flattens speech. She didn’t look up when I greeted her.

“They said I’m a farmer,” she said quietly.
“Then they said I’m a beneficiary.”
She kicked the soil with her heel. “Now they say I’m resilient.”
Then she laughed, dry and beautiful: “Next, I think, I’ll be a sensor.”

I wrote her words down that night in my notebook. I didn’t have a name for what she was saying then. But I do now.

She was naming the reclassification of her life. Not by her own will, but by development’s grammar. What she felt in her body — the weight of hunger, the dignity of harvest, the quiet grief of planting seed that wouldn’t sprout — was no longer hers to name. It had been renamed for her. Repurposed. Rendered legible to an external logic. She was now data. A model. A plot on a spreadsheet. A target for inputs. A symbol of the future. And through it all, her food was being poisoned, her soil depleted, her knowledge overwritten.

What was done to her is not isolated. It is epitomized.
She is not the exception. She is the extremity. The outer edge of a logic that is now tightening around all of us.

Part II – Theory and Theology / Critical Deepening

For decades, the smallholder has been positioned as development’s problem and its solution. Too poor to compete. Too central to ignore. Too stubborn to modernize. Too essential to displace. This paradox has made the smallholder arguably the most studied and ostensibly the least sovereign subject in the world.

Their fields have been demo plots. Their lives trial runs. Their hunger rendered as productivity gaps. Their resistance reframed as culture. And in every case, they are not allowed to name themselves.

But what is happening now is far more dangerous. The technologies and logics once developed to “manage” smallholders—valuation metrics, behavioral change frameworks, synthetic food systems, soft coercion through seed policy—are no longer limited to them. They are expanding. Scaling. Increasingly moving into urban poor communities, refugee camps, informal economies, suburban food deserts, and even middle-class and upper-class lives under precarity.

The logic of the excessive life—the life too irrational to govern itself, too undisciplined to be trusted, too biological to be philosophical—is now applied everywhere.

This is the creeping architecture of neo-Malthusian eugenics:

• A system that categorizes people not only by income or race, but by their usefulness to a global order.
  
  

• A system that feeds some, pharms others, and forgets the rest.
  
  

• A system that asks: not who should be saved, but who is cost-effective to sustain?
  
  

And so the smallholder is not merely a subject of exclusion. He is the epistemic outline by which other exclusions are drafted:

• The cancer patient denied experimental alternatives.
  
  

• The unvaccinated child marked as non-compliant.
  
  

• The rural laborer whose calorie intake is algorithmically calculated.
  
  

• The informal food vendor pressured into QR-coded compliance.
  
  

• The village woman who must perform resilience for a photo op while her land is being surveyed for drone-fed digitalization.
  
  

These are the new smallholders.
The system just hasn’t named them yet.

This is why the smallholder must not be pitied or paternalized. She must be recognized as the extremity of a universalizing logic—a warning of where the world is headed unless we confront the deeper question:

Who is allowed to know, to name, to live—and who is not?

III. Global Replications: Case Studies from LN24 International

The African condition — once seemingly confined to smallholders and natives — is now the global template for managing surplus populations.

A. Apeel and the War on Food

Narrative / Sensory Invocation

“It’s not rotting,” the woman says, holding a tomato in her hand.
“But it’s also not alive.”
She puts it back on the shelf and wipes her fingers.
“I don’t trust food that doesn’t die.”

That scene unfolded in a supermarket in Johannesburg, but it could’ve been anywhere — Manila, São Paulo, Detroit, Delhi. The produce aisle now resembles a laboratory. Food no longer spoils. It is shelled in chemicals, sheathed in logic. Controlled.

Critical Reflection

LN24’s exposé on Apeel, the synthetic food coating marketed as sustainable innovation, reveals the slow violence of bio-engineered edibility. This isn’t just about extending shelf life. It’s about redefining life itself — and who gets to consume what.

Apeel joins a constellation of global food interventions — GMOs, fluoridated water, synthetic supplements, seed licensing — that echo the logic of colonial seed policy:

• We know what your body needs better than you do.
  
  

• Eat what we’ve engineered or be left out of the system.
  
  

This is food as infrastructure for discipline — a means of introducing toxins as nutrients and even calling it humanitarianism. It is not about health. It is about containment and control.

The same logics used to colonize African food systems are now globalized:

• Crop standardization under AGRA.
  
  

• School feeding programs laced with hormone-altering fortifications.
  
  

• Indigenous foods replaced with patented hybrids.
  
  

Apeel is the edible frontier of Global Africanism: where food becomes a vehicle for epistemic disqualification and biochemical submission.

B. Land Reparations and Sovereignty as Judgment

Narrative / Theological Invocation

“The land still remembers who it belongs to,” Rutendo said.
“Even if the documents don’t.”
And Yvonne added: “Reparations are not a debt — they are a return.”

They weren’t preaching. They were testifying.

Critical Reflection

In their podcast at the African Union Summit, Yvonne Katsande and Rutendo Matinyarare deliver more than a policy suggestion — they pronounce a judgment on the global order. Land reparations are not simply about compensation. They are about epistemic repair.

Their voices are rare in formal diplomatic spaces because they refuse to reduce justice to metrics. They insist that land is not an economic asset but a theological terrain — the site of memory, dignity, and cosmic order.

In Global Africanism, even land reform becomes sanitized:

• Framed as an "investment environment".
  
  

• Relegated to pilot zones.
  
  

• Filtered through donor KPIs.
  
  

Katsande and Matinyarare rupture that logic. Their call for restitution reframes Africa not as a recipient of repair, but as the source of a redemptive critique that the world ignores at its peril.

C. Exposure of Hidden Operations

Narrative / Whispered Truth

“They don’t assassinate with bullets anymore,” she said.
“They use research. They use philanthropy. They use silence.”

Critical Reflection

In her piercing interview with Yvonne Katsande, Shabnam Palesa Mohamed exposes what many suspect but few say aloud: that humanitarian infrastructure is often a cover for imperial experimentation.

She names the CIA, pharmaceutical conglomerates, and media cartels as actors not just in geopolitics, but in biopolitical warfare. Africa is not only where these strategies were tested — it is where they are perfected and exported.

Her insights make it clear:

• “Health” is often a proxy for population surveillance.
  
  

• “Innovation” hides coerced experimentation.
  
  

• “Aid” disguises systems of domination designed to reshape life at the molecular level.
  
  

If Global Africanism is the architecture, then covert operations like these are the foundation beneath it.

D. Vaccine Trials and Weaponized Health

Narrative / Post-pandemic Lament

“They told us the vaccine would save us,” the nurse says.
“But now half my village is sick in other ways. More blood clots. More miscarriages. But we can’t talk about it.”
She pauses. “Silence is the price of compliance.”

Critical Reflection

LN24’s reporting on WHO’s Ebola response in Uganda and the UN’s $11.2 million appeal offers a devastating view into the machinery of weaponized health. With fewer than ten confirmed Ebola cases, WHO deployed trial vaccines, surveillance teams, and "emergency" containment funding.

This is not public health. This is biopolitical theater — using minimal crisis to justify maximum intervention. The real epidemic is not Ebola. It is the systematic normalization of coerced medical compliance under a humanitarian banner.

And what COVID-19 proved is that this logic is no longer African-only:

• Vaccine mandates enforced globally.
  
  

• Dissenting scientists silenced.
  
  

• Populations locked into immunity passports and digital health IDs.
  
  

The condition of the smallholder during seed standardization is now the condition of the world under mRNA standardization.
Medical subjectification has gone global.

E. Cancer as Managed Biopolitical Economy

Narrative / Lamentation as Revelation

“The medicine made him worse,” the mother said.
“They said it would shrink the tumor, but it shrank his body. His joy. His life.”
“They don’t heal. They harvest.”

Critical Reflection

LN24’s searing article on the global cancer industry reveals the deep infrastructure of profit-driven, systemic illness. It is a managed economy of pain, where healing is bad for business and dependency is incentivized.

Just as seed companies depend on the infertility of saved seed, the cancer economy depends on the recurrence of disease. Chemotherapy is monetized attrition. Radiotherapy is sanctioned assault. Pharmaceutical guidelines are often written by those who profit from the prescriptions.

This is not accidental. It is the medicalization of eugenics:

• Not to sterilize directly.
  
  

• But to weaken, subdue, profit, and dispose — slowly, legally, and with corporate branding.
  
  

In Global Africanism, even disease becomes a site of moral disqualification. Those who fall sick are recoded as burdens. The question becomes not: How do we heal them? but How do we manage them?

IV. Black Reason and the Infrastructure of Expendability

Part I – Theological Invocation / Ontological Meditation

“What is man, that you are mindful of him?”
the Psalmist asks.
But in the world of Black reason, the answer is clear:
Man is mindful only if he is measurable.
Only if he complies.
Only if his hunger is useful.
Only if his suffering can be capitalized.
Only if he dies at the right time, under the right protocol.

There is a deeper violence beneath every food pack, vaccine rollout, climate-smart intervention, and medical guideline: the gradual disqualification of human life as sacred. Not with bullets, but with bureaucracies. Not with whips, but with wellness dashboards.

What was once spiritual is now statistical. What was once communion with the land is now a logistical chain. What was once community is now a targeted population.

And so, quietly, the world becomes a field of expendables.
Harvested not for grain, but for data.
Measured not in joy, but in risk mitigation.
Saved not for salvation, but for system performance.

Part II – Critical Theory / Epistemic Infrastructure

This is the work of Black reason in its most insidious form. Not merely as ideology, but as operational code — a mode of organizing life through differential value:

• Some lives are legible. Others are illegible.
  
  

• Some suffer in reports. Others suffer in silence.
  
  

• Some are resilient. Others are residual.
  
  

• Some are medicated to be saved. Others are vaccinated to be studied, and expended.
  
  

Black reason, as Mbembe teaches, is not about race alone. It is about the conditions under which any life becomes governable through its difference. And those conditions — once ostensibly confined to colonial Africa — have become the universal design of governance under the humanitarian regime.

This is what my PhD thesis names with clarity:

“Black reason becomes a system of narratives and discourses built on idealization and misrepresentation with an academic facade — a deception, a subterfuge… more concerned with justifying forms of domination than finding truth.”

In this system, truth is not what happened.
Truth is what justifies the intervention.
Truth is what fits the funding model.
Truth is what permits experimentation.

And so infrastructure — food chains, medical systems, climate metrics, data portals — becomes an architecture of moral triage:

• Who gets to live fully?
  
  

• Who must live conditionally?
  
  

• Who is deemed too costly to sustain?
  
  

These are eugenic calculations, reframed as policy:

• Feed the productive.
  
  

• Medicate the compliant.
  
  

• Abandon the resistant.
  
  

• Praise the resilient.
  
  

• Study the dying.
  
  

This is why Global Africanism is not about Africa at all. It is about using Africa as a reference point to extend disqualification across the globe. The African condition — spiritual dispossession, epistemic silencing, biopolitical/necropolitical containment — is no longer the exception. It is the structural norm for anyone deemed irrational, excessive, or expendable.

And the perimeter widens.
Every day, it widens.

The elderly.
The disabled.
The unemployed.
The politically inconvenient.
The pregnant woman with questions.
The boy with a cough in the wrong region.
The smallholder who refuses a digital voucher.
The scientist who says: no.

They are all included. In the system. But never at the center.
Never with sovereignty.
Always as subject.
Always as statistic.
Always as symbol.
Never as soul.

V. Conclusion: From Mirror to Judgment

Part I – Poetic Reflection / Eschatological Tone

The smallholder stands at the edge of the field.
But now, the field is the world.
And the soil is burning.

She is no longer alone.

The mother in Mumbai whose child reacts to a trial vaccine.
The pensioner in England denied cancer care for being “low priority”.
The farmworker in Mexico eating plastic-wrapped fruit laced with hormonal coatings.
The nurse in New York forced to medicate or lose her job.
The refugee in Gaza monitored for biometric compliance before receiving food.

They are all smallholders now.
Except the soil is no longer only under their feet — it’s inside their bodies.
And the harvest is not grain. It’s obedience.

What was once done to the African is now offered to the world as a developmental future.
What was once called “colonial misfortune” is now called “global governance”.
What was once tested on the Black body is now applied to the general population.

But the figure of the smallholder refuses to die.
She is not just data. She is a mirror.
And the mirror, as Mbembe says, is also a judgment.

Part II – Theological and Critical Closure

The Africanization of the world is not merely the spread of suffering. It is the reproduction of the colonial condition under the cover of modernity. It is the expansion of Black reason — not to uplift the Black subject, but to extend the techniques of their domination to other bodies, other territories, other populations.

The smallholder was not the exception.
She was the extremity.
The margin where new logics were tested.
And now, those logics are standard.

She was digitized before you were.
She was surveilled before you were.
She was told her food was dangerous before you were.
She was asked to perform resilience while starving.
She was praised for her productivity as her land was stolen.
She was given vaccines not to heal, but to monitor.
She was asked to be grateful. To be patient. To be silent.

And so today, as more and more people feel the walls closing in — through inflation, technocratic control, coercive health systems, and toxic “solutions” — they would do well to remember:

The smallholder was the warning.
Africa was the mirror.
And now, the mirror has turned.

It no longer reflects your distance from her.
It reflects your likeness to her.
Not because Africa has failed,
but because the system that once targeted Africa
has now set its sights on you.

And so the question is no longer whether we stand in solidarity with the smallholder.
The question is whether we recognize ourselves in her fate —
and whether we will allow this condition to define our collective future.

Because if we do not resist,
if we do not rupture,
if we do not name the falsehood and refuse the reward,
then the field will remain poisoned.
And we will all be harvest.

🌐 Final Note to Readers:

Africa was not the problem. It was the prototype.
The smallholder was not the burden. She was the bell.
And the bell has rung for us all.

📡 We invite you to explore the critical work of LN24 International — a sanctuary for truth-telling in a world of curated deception. Their fearless reporting has been essential in helping us trace these patterns of injustice, extraction, and slow death.
Visit: ln24international.com

10th April 2025

“Tiyeni titenge ufulu wathu.”
Let us claim our justice now.

A field. A ledger. A law.
One was meant to feed.
One was meant to count.
One was meant to protect.

But in Malawi, as in many places, these have become entangled in a slow violence so quiet, so calibrated, that you might mistake it for order.

We were told that land titling would secure us. That fertilizers would lift us. That partnerships would prosper us. That debts—though inherited—were our “national duty”. We believed. Or at least, we tried. Because to survive under lawfare is to live with the weight of silence pressed into every harvest.

But the law, as it stands today, is not neutral. It is not our own. It has been bent into a tool of extraction. Not just by colonizers of the past, but by philanthropists, creditors, corporations, and policymakers—many with good intentions, but blind to our inheritance. An inheritance of dispossession.

What kind of law defines a seed but forgets the hand that saved it?
What kind of justice protects a loan shark but not the hungry?
What kind of sovereignty leases its land through legal incantations in someone else’s tongue?

We name it plainly now: structural violence in legal form. Or what some call "lawfare".

Take the Registered Land Act—recently amended, but still laced with assumptions of private property that ignore communal tenure. Or the Plant Breeders’ Rights Act, which rewards patent holders while criminalizing informal seed sharing. Or the subtle clauses in donor agreements that handcuff future governments to past obligations—wrapped in language of “reform” and “investment”.

This is not law that liberates.
This is law that binds.
And so we ask:

What would it mean to redeem the law?

It would mean cancelling debts that were signed in our name but never with our voice.
It would mean repealing laws that criminalize traditional knowledge or displace people in the name of “development”.
It would mean untying our agriculture from compacts that ask us to smile for a logo while our soil erodes beneath us.
It would mean writing law that listens—to the ground, to the grandmother, to the God who sees.

And yes, it would mean bringing a case—to court, to history, to conscience.

A team of legal scholars, theologians, geographers, and economists have now done the work. They have argued, persuasively and precisely, that Malawi has a claim. A claim to justice, to dignity, to land, to water, to memory. They have named the debts as odious. The partnerships as coercive. The laws as complicit.

But theirs is not the only voice.

The Farming in the Mirror series has carried the testimony of farmers, of elders, of those silenced by policy but faithful to the land. Their words were seeds. And now, a case has grown.

We call it: The Agrarian Redemption.
And we do not bring it alone.

We bring it with scripture in our bones, and the memory of buried wisdom in our hands.
We bring it with Pastor Chris’s words echoing from Ceflix: "This is the Year of Redemption!"
We bring it with the hope that the law can still remember what it means to serve the people.
And we bring it with a mirror—held up not just to Malawi, but to the world.

Because what was done to the Malawian farmer was not unique.
It was a blueprint.
And now, it is being exported.
Everywhere.

To the man on bus seat #5 to Mchinji:
This case is for you.
Not because you studied law, but because you have lived its consequences.
Because every bag of seed that comes with strings, every government form that forgets your name, every meeting that promises but does not listen—that is the courtroom.

And you, sir, are the plaintiff.

We fight with law, yes. But also with story, with truth, with the soil that remembers.

And we say to the systems:
Your judgment is not final.
The mirror has turned.
And Malawi is rising.

🔗 Join the Call
📜 Read the full legal case: A Mock Legal Case for Malawi’s Agrarian Redemption (coming soon!)
🎥 Watch: Your Loveworld – Year of Redemption
📣 Speak out. Share. Pray. Organize.
✊🏾 “Let us claim our justice now.”

11th April 2025

1     Introduction

So far, we have established that Malawi’s struggle for agrarian justice stands at the intersection of law, history, and epistemology. Decades of colonial and neo-colonial interventions in agriculture have left deep scars on the nation’s sovereignty—manifested through illegitimate debts, coercive “development” compacts, and the systematic erasure of indigenous knowledge​ (Moyo, 2025). The Farming in the Mirror blog series has poignantly laid bare these issues, describing how colonial linguistic infrastructures and technocratic systems continue to extract, neutralize, or rename Malawi’s rich agrarian wisdom. Building on those insights, this comprehensive report develops a legal case to reclaim Malawi’s agrarian future.

We begin by identifying the appropriate judicial forums—international and domestic—where Malawi’s claims can be heard. We then integrate all arguments from Farming in the Mirror as foundational context, especially the notions of linguistic colonialism, agricultural gaslighting, technocratic erasure, and epistemic violence. These concepts illustrate how current arrangements in Malawi’s agriculture are not merely economic or technical issues, but forms of structural violence.

Next, we advance legal arguments grounded in international law, precedent cases, and scholarship. We argue for: (a) an immediate halt to exploitative payments rooted in odious colonial-era debt, and (b) Malawi’s release from coercive public–private partnerships (PPPs), philanthrocapitalist schemes, and development compacts that undermine its sovereignty and knowledge systems. In making this case, we draw on critical theories—Achille Mbembe’s Black Reason, the concept of the Plantationocene, feminist agroecology, and critical agrarian studies—to show that these financial and developmental shackles are part of a larger continuum of extraction​ (Bezner Kerr, 2024). International legal norms like the right to self-determination (African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 1981) and permanent sovereignty over natural resources (African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 1981), as well as African regional human rights law, strongly support Malawi’s claims to liberation from these burdens.

Finally, recognizing that legal battles do not occur in a vacuum, we include two vital components for broader impact: Consultation Notes summarizing insights from interdisciplinary experts (geographers, anthropologists, theologians, philosophers, and economists), and a Public Mobilization Strategy. The mobilization section, written in plain language, references Pastor Chris Oyakhilome’s “Year of Redemption” message to rally public support for immediate global action. Further, the subsequent and final five posts of Farming in the Mirror (while maintaining the series’ poetic–yet–analytical voice) will further translate the legal and agrarian critiques into accessible narratives that inspire reflection and action on the ground. The aim of this document is to meet rigorous legal and academic standards while also serving as a clarion call for agrarian sovereignty and epistemic liberation in Malawi. By bridging courtroom arguments, scholarly critique, and grassroots voices, we chart a path toward redemption—restoring dignity to Malawi’s farmers and integrity to its fields.

2     Jurisdiction and Forum Selection for Legal Action

A multifaceted problem demands a multi-forum strategy. We identify several judicial and quasi-judicial venues—international, regional, and national—where Malawi’s case for agrarian justice can be pursued. Each forum offers distinct avenues of relief and requires specific jurisdictional considerations:

• International Court of Justice (ICJ) – Jurisdiction: The ICJ is the principal judicial organ of the United Nations, with jurisdiction over disputes between states and authority to issue advisory opinions on legal questions referred by U.N. organs. Rationale: Malawi can invoke the ICJ’s authority in two ways. First, it could pursue a contentious case against one or more states directly implicated in enforcing odious debt or coercive agreements (for example, former colonial powers or creditor nations). In such a case, consent to jurisdiction would be required (via a special agreement or an applicable treaty compromissory clause). Alternatively, and more feasibly, Malawi (or the African Union on Malawi’s behalf) could seek an Advisory Opinion from the ICJ via the U.N. General Assembly. An advisory opinion could address, for instance, whether the doctrine of odious debt has become part of international law and thus renders certain sovereign debts void and unenforceable. Precedent shows the ICJ’s willingness to confront colonial legacies: in the Chagos Advisory Opinion (2019), the ICJ held that the decolonization of Mauritius was incomplete and that the U.K.’s continued administration of the Chagos Archipelago was an unlawful act, inconsistent with the right to self-determination​ (International Court of Justice Advisory Opinion, 2019). By analogy, an ICJ opinion could affirm that economic subjugation through illegitimate debt and imposed agrarian schemes is incompatible with self-determination, thus requiring their removal. While advisory opinions are not binding, they carry significant moral and political weight; a favorable opinion could bolster Malawi’s position in negotiations and encourage multilateral debt relief initiatives.

• African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights – Jurisdiction: The African Court (established under the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights) can hear cases alleging violations of the rights guaranteed in the African Charter. Cases can be submitted by the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, by states that have accepted the Court’s jurisdiction, or by individuals/NGOs if the state has made a special declaration. Malawi is a party to the African Charter; however, it must accept individual access for its citizens or NGOs to bring a case directly. Rationale: The African Charter provides a rich framework of collective rights highly relevant to Malawi’s situation. Article 20 affirms the “unquestionable and inalienable right to self-determination” and the right of colonized or oppressed peoples to “free themselves from the bonds of domination” (African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 1981). Article 21 guarantees that “all peoples shall freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources” in their exclusive interest and obligates states to eliminate foreign economic exploitation​ (African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 1981). Article 22 enshrines the right of all peoples to economic, social and cultural development with due regard to their freedom and identity (African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, 1981). Malawi’s forcible entanglement in exploitative debt repayments, imposed PPPs, and externally dictated agricultural policies can be argued to violate these provisions. A case could be brought on behalf of the people of Malawi (a collective claim) arguing that the State of Malawi and foreign actors together have infringed on the people’s right to freely dispose of natural resources and to pursue development according to their own chosen path. The African Commission’s landmark Endorois case (2009) provides a powerful precedent: the Commission held that Kenya’s eviction of the Endorois people for a development project, without their consent or benefit, violated the rights to property, culture, natural resources, and development (African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, Endorois Case, 2009-2010). It emphasized that lack of consultation and inadequate involvement in the project breached the community’s right to development. By parallel, Malawi’s subjection to foreign-designed agricultural programs and debt schemes without meaningful citizen participation or consent could be found to violate the African Charter. The African Court, if seized of the matter, could order remedies such as cessation of debt payments, cancellation or renegotiation of exploitative contracts, and measures to ensure local communities’ participation in agricultural policy—remedies grounded in African notions of justice and the Charter’s mandate to eliminate foreign domination.

• Malawian Constitutional Court and High Court – Jurisdiction: Domestically, Malawi’s courts can adjudicate claims under the Malawian Constitution and applicable law (including administrative law and contract law). The Constitution of Malawi protects various rights (potentially including the right to development or property) and affirms the sovereignty of the people. Rationale: Malawi’s judiciary could be a direct venue to challenge certain laws, executive actions, or agreements that underpin the exploitative arrangements. For instance, if the government entered into a public–private partnership or development compact that cedes control over resources or policy in a manner contrary to the Constitution, affected communities or public-interest litigants could seek a constitutional review. They might argue that such agreements violate constitutional principles such as sovereignty, the public trust over natural resources, or socio-economic rights (for example, if agricultural policies undermine the right to food or livelihood). Additionally, Malawi’s contract law, potentially buttressed by doctrines of equity and public policy, could be invoked to declare certain contracts void or unenforceable if they were signed under conditions of duress, fraud, or ultra vires (beyond the government’s lawful authority). The High Court of Malawi could also entertain a judicial review of government decisions to continue servicing certain debts or implementing donor-driven agricultural programs, on grounds that these decisions are irrational or against the public interest. Notably, courts in the Global South have shown willingness to scrutinize state agreements with foreign entities. For example, Kenya’s National Environmental Tribunal in Save Lamu v. NEMA (2019) revoked a license for a coal plant after finding that the project’s environmental impact assessment was approved without public consultation or participation, violating community rights (Human Rights Watch, 2019). Similarly, a Malawian court could require that any development project or partnership involve genuine consultation with farmers and respect indigenous knowledge systems, or else be struck down as unconstitutional.

• Other Forums (Regional and Specialized) – Beyond the primary forums above, other avenues could amplify Malawi’s case. One is the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Tribunal (if revived or reformed) which previously allowed individuals to challenge state actions violating SADC treaty obligations; a reactivated Tribunal could hear a case on regional economic justice, though this remains a long-term prospect given the Tribunal’s current suspension. Another potential forum is international arbitration or claims commissions: for example, Malawi might invoke an arbitration clause in a debt or investment contract to argue the debt’s voidness under international public policy (though arbitral tribunals are often creditor-friendly). Alternatively, Malawi could seek relief in foreign courts where creditor entities are based (for instance, asserting the odious debt doctrine as a defense in any enforcement action brought in New York or London courts on defaulted loans). On the diplomatic front, U.N. human rights mechanisms – such as the U.N. Special Rapporteurs on the Right to Food or on Foreign Debt – can be engaged to apply pressure and issue findings aligning with Malawi’s claims, although their recommendations are not judicially binding.

Each forum has its challenges: the ICJ requires significant political will and, for contentious cases, the consent of opposing states; the African Court requires Malawi’s acceptance of direct access or a referral by the Commission; domestic courts require a courageous judiciary willing to confront the status quo; other avenues may lack enforceability. However, these forums are complementary. A strategy that leverages all levels can create a synergistic effect: an ICJ advisory opinion or African Court judgment can provide authoritative legal principles, which Malawi’s domestic courts can then implement, and all of which can bolster Malawi’s negotiating position with creditors and donors. In sum, while no single court may be able to solve this alone, together they form a lattice of legal pressure supporting Malawi’s bid for agrarian sovereignty.

3     Foundational Context: Epistemic Violence in Agrarian Governance

Any legal case must be grounded in the facts and context of the harm suffered. Here, the “harm” is not only economic exploitation but also what scholar Dumisani Moyo and the Farming in the Mirror series describe as epistemic harm: the systematic devaluing and destruction of Malawi’s own, organic ways of knowing and farming. This context provides the moral urgency and evidentiary basis for Malawi’s legal claims. We summarize key arguments from the blog series and related scholarship:

• Linguistic Colonialism as Infrastructure: Colonialism in Malawi was not only a seizure of land and labor, but a seizure of language. The agricultural sector was and remains governed by a “grammar of control”​(Farming in the Mirror, 2025)—a technocratic vocabulary that marginalizes indigenous concepts. Terms like “low productivity” or “modernization” became tools to cast traditional practices as failures. The blog recounts a vivid scene: an extension officer promotes “climate-smart agriculture” with buzzwords like “resilience” and “optimization”, while farmers nod politely but later admit they “don’t fully understand”​. This performative inclusion creates an illusion that farmers’ voices are heard, when in fact the script is pre-written. Such language is an infrastructure of epistemic domination—what Farming in the Mirror calls “a theater of communication” or “a grammar of control” that makes people “appear heard without ever being listened to”. In legal terms, this can be seen as violating the right to cultural participation and to information, since policies are formulated and communicated in a way fundamentally inaccessible and alien to the people they affect.

• Agricultural Gaslighting and Epistemic Violence: The series introduces the concept of “agricultural gaslighting”. This refers to development programs that invite smallholders to participate—ostensibly valuing their input—only to dismiss or “correct” their perspectives, leaving them to doubt their own knowledge. “They ask us what we know,” one farmer says, “and then they tell us we’re wrong.”​ This cycle is described as “a recursive process where you are included just enough to believe your voice matters, but never enough to change the script.”​ It is profoundly psychological: “the more you speak, the less you are understood”​. In the blog’s analytical voice, “farmers are continually invited to participate in their own exclusion,” forced to question their knowledge while being assured that their voices matter. This is epistemic violence – a harm to people’s ways of knowing the world – and it parallels how colonial powers historically forced colonized peoples to question the validity of their own cultures. Legally, one might liken this to a violation of the African Charter’s protection of the right to culture and the right to development, since genuine development is impossible when local knowledge is systematically belittled. Furthermore, it underscores a key point for the odious debt doctrine (discussed later): if loans and programs were predicated on knowingly false pretenses (i.e. gaslighting the country into policies that do not serve it), those obligations are void ab initio due to fraud and bad faith.

• Technocratic Erasure and Ontological Hierarchy: Modern agrarian governance in Malawi increasingly operates through data, metrics, and models – what Moyo’s research calls “the digital turn in agrarian governance.” While data can be useful, it often carries a bias for what can be easily measured (yields, hectares, GDP) at the expense of what cannot (soil stories, community cohesion, spiritual values of land). The result is an erasure of unquantifiable knowledge. As the blog puts it: “Indigenous soil fertility systems, cosmological planting rituals, and gendered knowledge networks are made invisible—deemed irrelevant to planning documents, syllabi, or economic models.”​ This is a form of ontological violence – forcing a single reality where once there was plurality. A poignant example is how development discourse reframes issues: “Intercropping becomes ‘resilience strategy.’ Seed saving is ‘constraint.’ Refusal to join farmer groups is ‘low uptake.’ Each naming a translation. Each translation a reduction. Each reduction a loss.” What we see is a neutralization of meaning: practices rooted in centuries of wisdom are reassigned as problems to be fixed by external expertise. In legal terms, one could argue this violates the people’s right to “freely pursue and transmit knowledge” of their own (a facet of the right to culture and education, e.g. Article 27 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which guarantees the right to participate in cultural life and share in scientific advancement. It also underscores the injustice of many “development” compacts: if those agreements were made on the basis of such distorted metrics (neglecting environmental and social values that elude quantification), they lack legitimacy and rationality.

• Epistemic Contradiction and the Smallholder’s Burden: The figure of the “African smallholder farmer” stands at the center of this drama as both the most studied and the most disregarded. Smallholders are the purported beneficiaries of every aid project, yet paradoxically, they are often cast as the obstacle to progress. The blog series notes that this “antagonism between state and smallholder is structurally inscribed” in governance discourse. On one hand, farmers are praised in rhetoric (“the backbone of the economy”); on the other, policies implicitly plan for their disappearance (“the assumption… that small-scale farmers will eventually vanish”). This instability of inclusion is by design: it keeps farmers in a state of dependency and precarity. The series recounts policy documents repeating terms like “farm aggregation” and “land consolidation,” silently envisioning a future without small farms. The contradiction is deliberate: as long as the smallholder is kept “nearly becoming” (perpetually in need of improvement) but never actually empowered, the status quo of extraction can continue​. In Mbembe’s terms, this dynamic is part of Black reason: a rationality that needed the Black African as “a name for negation”—to be scrutinized, managed, and ideally transformed or erased for the modern world to believe in its own progress (Mbembe, 2017). Achille Mbembe observes that in the global imaginary, “the word ‘Africa’ stands in for a fundamental negation”—a place defined by lack, to be forever reformed by outsiders. This context of contradiction and negation underpins Malawi’s situation and will support our later legal arguments: it reveals that the struggle is not just for economic relief but for recognition of Malawi’s being – its ontology and dignity – in the face of systems that have long denied it.

These foundational observations establish epistemic violence as a core harm entwined with economic harm. Malawi’s legal case will argue that the country’s indebtedness and loss of policy sovereignty are not merely financial issues, but the product of a historical pattern of epistemic domination. Having set this stage, we now turn to the legal claims and arguments that flow from this context.

4     Legal Arguments for Agrarian Sovereignty

Building on the above context, Malawi’s case advances two primary legal claims: (1) that the nation is entitled to repudiate and halt repayment of certain sovereign debts as odious and illegitimate, and (2) that Malawi has the right to suspend or terminate certain agricultural development agreements (PPPs, compacts, etc.) on the grounds that they were imposed under duress and undermine fundamental rights. These claims are supported by multiple bodies of law: international customary law and general principles (for odious debt), treaty law and human rights law (for sovereignty and peoples’ rights), as well as comparative precedents. We also invoke scholarly concepts (Black Reason, Plantationocene, etc.) not as law themselves, but to inform the interpretation of the law in a post-colonial context, consistent with the Vienna Convention’s allowance for considering relevant context and purpose in treaty interpretation (Article 31). Below, we detail each claim and its legal substantiation.

A. Halting Exploitative Debt Payments – The Odious Debt Doctrine

Claim: Malawi should be released from the obligation to repay sovereign debts that are odious in nature, meaning debts incurred by past regimes not for the benefit of the people and with creditor awareness of that fact. Any ongoing or future attempts to enforce such debts should be deemed unlawful, and Malawi should have the right to unilaterally suspend payment and seek cancellation.

Legal Basis: Odious debt is a doctrine of international law first articulated by jurist Alexander Sack in 1927 and invoked in various forms since. It holds that debts incurred by despotic or illegitimate regimes, which did not serve the interests of the nation’s populace, are not binding on successor governments. Though not yet codified in a treaty, the doctrine is grounded in principles of equity, justice, and sovereignty, and has been supported by state practice and moral consensus. For example, after the U.S. defeated Spain in 1898, it refused to pay Cuba’s colonial debts to Spain, characterizing them as imposed on the Cuban people without consent – an early state practice of odious debt cancellation. More recently, the concept was considered in the context of Iraq’s debts incurred under Saddam Hussein, many of which were forgiven by creditors on odious debt grounds in the early 2000s​.

Malawi’s case for odious debt is compelling. Under the dictatorship of Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda (1964–1994), Malawi accumulated substantial external debt while the regime suppressed political opposition and concentrated wealth among a narrow elite. Banda’s rule, especially from 1968–1993, has been identified by experts as an odious regime period​ (Mandel, 2006). Indeed, a study by the New Economics Foundation classed Malawi’s debt from that era as odious and calculated that by the early 2000s, 84% of Malawi’s then-outstanding debt was odious in origin ​ (Mandel, 2006). Crucially, that analysis found that many developing countries (including Malawi) have actually “overpaid” on their debt service and are owed money by their so-called creditors, due to the cycle of refinancing and interest. In other words, Malawi has paid back the principal of these illegitimate loans multiple times over; what remains is a colonial tribute by another name.

Several key elements bolster Malawi’s odious debt claim:

• Lack of Consent: The debts were incurred by a regime that did not have free and fair consent of the Malawian people. Banda’s autocratic government ruled under a one-party system and stifled dissent; citizens had no say in the contracting of these loans. A core criterion of odious debt is that the debt was incurred without the population’s consent or against its will.

• Knowledge of Creditors: The odious debt doctrine traditionally requires that creditors knew (or should have known) that the loans were being used against the people’s interests. In Malawi’s case, many loans were extended by international financial institutions and Western governments with full awareness of Banda’s repressive governance. For instance, evidence shows that donors and lenders continued funneling money to Malawi in the 1980s despite well-documented human rights abuses. This satisfies the “creditor awareness” element – that lenders knowingly financed a regime that was not acting in its people’s interest.

• No Benefit to the People: A corollary of odious debt is that the borrowed funds did not benefit the nation. In legal proceedings, this can be demonstrated by examining the use of funds. If, for example, a loan ostensibly for “agricultural development” was largely siphoned into elite projects or patronage, or structured in a way that farmers derived no net benefit, that loan is odious. The historical record suggests much of Malawi’s debt under Banda went to state enterprises, prestige projects, or simply servicing prior debt – providing little tangible improvement in livelihoods. Indeed, analysts have noted that by the end of the Banda era, social indicators in Malawi (literacy, nutrition, income per capita) remained rather dismal, belying the supposed purpose of development loans.

In addition to these historical facts, there are supportive developments in international discourse. Although no international court has yet definitively pronounced the odious debt doctrine as binding law, there is growing support in international forums. The U.N. General Assembly, for instance, has acknowledged the problem of sovereign debts that result from corrupt or oppressive regimes and called for mechanisms to address them (as seen in resolutions on illegitimate debt in the context of human rights). Regionally, the African Union has sometimes broached the idea that Africa should not be forced to pay debts contracted by colonial powers or dictators. These political statements build moral and legal momentum.

Moreover, principles of equity and the doctrine of necessity in international law could come into play. If servicing these debts today would undermine Malawi’s ability to ensure its people’s basic needs (health, food, education), Malawi could invoke the state of necessity as a defense for suspending payments – a concept recognized in international law’s Draft Articles on State Responsibility (Article 25 allows necessity in narrow circumstances to safeguard an essential interest threatened by grave peril). The case of Malawi’s debt burden – where servicing costs compete with funding for hospitals or climate resilience – could meet this high bar.

Finally, precedent and morality align. After apartheid, there were calls (though politically thwarted) to cancel apartheid-era South African debt as odious; in Ecuador (2008), a government audit commission unilaterally repudiated certain debts as illegitimate, leading to partial cancellation by fear of default. These examples, while not court judgments, show state practice in line with odious debt arguments​. They bolster Malawi’s stance that it is not a radical outlier, but part of a recognized, if emergent, legal and ethical approach to unjust debt.

In summary, Malawi will assert that continuing to enforce these debts perpetuates the colonial-era exploitation in new form. Under the odious debt doctrine and general principles of justice, such debts should be deemed null and void.

Remedy sought: A declaration (by an international tribunal or Malawian court) that certain identified debts are odious and unenforceable, and an injunction or order halting their repayment. Additionally, Malawi would seek formal cancellation of these debts by creditor states/institutions, and removal of any penalties or cross-default clauses that result from non-payment. Ideally, a comprehensive debt audit would be undertaken (with international observers) to classify which portions of Malawi’s debt are odious, illegal, or unsustainable.

B. Freeing Malawi from Coercive PPPs and Development Compacts – Sovereignty and Human Rights

Claim: Malawi has the right to suspend or exit from public–private partnerships (PPPs), foreign development compacts, and philanthrocapitalist initiatives that were imposed under conditions of unequal power (or misrepresentation) and that undermine Malawi’s sovereign control over its agriculture and development. This includes large-scale land leases, input subsidy programs tied to donor conditions, and other agreements that lock in a technocratic model at the expense of citizens’ rights and indigenous knowledge.

Legal Basis: At the national level, Malawi can invoke constitutional grounds (sovereignty of the people, public trust doctrine over land, right to development, etc.) to challenge agreements that relinquish control over agricultural policy or natural resources to foreign entities without proper safeguards. Internationally, several doctrines and precedents support voiding or reforming such agreements:

• Duress and Unequal Treaties: International law has long recognized that treaties or agreements imposed by coercion may be invalid. While Malawi’s modern compacts (e.g. with donors or corporations) are not “treaties” between states in the classic sense, the spirit of this rule is relevant. If Malawi entered certain agreements because it faced overwhelming economic pressure (e.g. sign a seed privatization agreement or else lose IMF funding), that can be seen as a form of duress undermining true consent. The Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties (Article 52) declares a treaty void if its conclusion was procured by the threat or use of force; economic “force” is not explicitly mentioned, but the analogy can be drawn in moral terms.

• Ultra Vires and Public Policy: Under contract law principles (applicable to PPP contracts or leases governed by Malawian law or general principles), a contract that violates public policy or the law can be voided. If, for example, a long-term land lease to a foreign agribusiness (a PPP for estate agriculture) violates statutory requirements or undermines the rights of local communities, it could be deemed void ab initio. In Malawi’s case, deals that alienate land for 50 or 99 years to foreign investors for token fees, or agreements that give foreign agencies decision-making authority over Malawi’s agricultural strategy, could be challenged as contrary to public policy (the public policy being food sovereignty and people’s welfare). Notably, Malawi’s Land Act and Land Policy emphasize land’s social function and the need for consultation with local populations – providing a hook to argue that deals made without community consultation are illegitimate.

• Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources: This principle of international law (originating from U.N. General Assembly Resolution 1803 (1962)) asserts that states (and peoples) have inalienable sovereignty over their natural wealth and resources. It has been used historically to support resource nationalization and to void exploitative colonial-era concessions. If certain PPPs or agricultural compacts effectively transfer control of Malawi’s seeds, land use, or water (e.g. irrigation projects run by foreign companies) to outside control, Malawi can invoke this principle. The African Charter’s Article 21, again, is key: “all peoples shall freely dispose of their wealth and natural resources” and in case of spoliation, they have the right to recovery and compensation. A mega-contract that, say, leases out huge swathes of Malawian farmland to a foreign agribusiness for 99 years with negligible benefit to locals would conflict with the people’s right to wealth and resources and could be seen as spoliation, which Article 21(2) says gives the people a right to recover their property.

• Right to Development and Free, Prior, Informed Consent (FPIC): The African Charter’s Article 22 (right to development) and the U.N. Declaration on the Right to Development both highlight that development must be equitable and involve the participation of the people. The Endorois case (cited above) affirmed that removing people from their land for a project without their consent violated the right to development​. By extension, Malawi can argue that deals formulated by donors and implemented top-down – such as certain Public-Private partnerships in agriculture (e.g. large donor-funded commercial farms or seed alliances) – that lacked free, prior, and informed consent of the affected communities are violations of the right to development. For example, if smallholder farmers were not meaningfully consulted before a national seed policy was signed with a Gates Foundation-backed alliance, that policy’s legitimacy is suspect. FPIC, a principle emerging strongly in international law especially regarding indigenous peoples, would bolster the argument that communities must consent to projects affecting their lands and livelihoods.

• Human Rights Impact: Some PPP schemes and philanthropist-led agricultural programs may be shown to have resulted in human rights harms – e.g. displacement (violating the right to property or housing), loss of seed diversity (impacting cultural rights), or increased food insecurity (implicating the right to food). Under Malawi’s Constitution and international law, the government has an obligation to protect citizens’ rights. If an agreement prevents the government from doing so (for instance, a contract that forbids distributing local seeds in favor of proprietary hybrid seeds could threaten the right to food for future generations), the state can claim that its human rights obligations compel it to exit or renegotiate the contract.

• International Precedents for Reclaiming Policy Space: There are examples where countries have pushed back against onerous agreements: e.g., Tanzania in 2008 renegotiated a mining contract under public pressure to get more revenue; Bolivia and Bolivia’s nullification of water privatization in Cochabamba (2000) after popular protests, citing the public’s essential needs; Ghana’s recent termination of a power concession over performance issues. While each has its specifics, they illustrate that when an arrangement is politically or socially unsustainable, it can be undone – and legal arguments are crafted ex post facto (public interest, failure of conditions, etc.). Malawi’s case would come with the weight of asserting fundamental rights and post-colonial justice, not merely a change of policy preference.

Bringing these threads together, Malawi can make a robust case that it must disentangle itself from agreements that trap it in a colonial-style plantation economy. The relief sought here would be: declarations that certain key contracts/compacts (to be identified in the case) are void or voidable; orders halting any enforcement of such agreements (for example, stopping any investor–state arbitration claims if Malawi withdraws from a contract); and ideally, renegotiation or cancellation of those agreements without penalty. In practical terms, Malawi might enumerate, say, (i) a particular large land lease, (ii) a seed supply agreement that prohibits farmer seed-saving, and (iii) a financing compact that mandates using foreign contractors, as examples to nullify, with the broader principle established that Malawi has the sovereign right to shape its agricultural policy in the public interest.

Under this claim, we also highlight the principle of intergenerational equity – often applied in environmental law – which is apt here. The misuse of Malawi’s lands and the stifling of its indigenous knowledge harm not just current farmers but future generations. Courts have begun to recognize duties to the future (e.g. in climate change litigation). Malawi can argue that freeing itself from exploitative arrangements is necessary to protect the interests of future Malawians – their right to an unencumbered heritage of land and knowledge. This adds moral force to the legal claim.

Conceptual reinforcement: The concepts of the Plantationocene and feminist agroecology are employed to show that what Malawi is contesting is not just contractual terms, but a whole paradigm of agriculture-as-extraction. As Rachel Bezner Kerr observes, the dominant “sustainable intensification” narrative treats African farmers as backwards and in need of salvation by modern science – essentially a “plantation imaginary” that justifies outside control (Bezner Kerr, 2024). By contrast, agroecology and indigenous practices offer a path of self-determination and resilience. Citing such scholarship in our legal pleadings (as social fact evidence or interpretive context) will urge the court to view these agreements not as ordinary commercial deals, but as part of a legacy of extractive domination that law and justice should help dismantle.

In conclusion, Malawi’s second claim asserts a right to agrarian sovereignty: to reclaim its policy space and resources from agreements that were neither fair nor serving its people. It ties together international law on self-determination, human rights, and equitable development to demand liberation from modern bonds of domination. If successful, the outcome would restore to Malawi the freedom to enact seed laws, land use plans, and development strategies that align with its citizens’ needs and knowledge, rather than the prescriptions of foreign “partners”.

(Together, claims A and B form the core of the legal case – attacking the financial shackles and the institutional/extractive shackles, respectively. We now provide supporting insights from consultations with experts across disciplines, which have informed and buttressed these legal arguments.)

5     Consultation Notes from Interdisciplinary Experts

In preparation of this case, extensive consultations were held with leading scholars and thinkers across different fields, to enrich the legal strategy with interdisciplinary insight. Below is a synthesis of key perspectives shared by experts in geography, anthropology, theology, philosophy, and economics, whose ideas have been integrated into our arguments:

• Geographical Perspective (Decolonial Geography): Dr. Dumisani Moyo, a Malawian geographer and author of the PhD thesis underpinning the Farming in the Mirror series, emphasized that Malawi’s struggle is fundamentally about space, place, and power. He noted that modern agricultural policy often treats land as an abstract space for yield, ignoring its place in cultural identity. Moyo’s research advocates a paradigm shift away from merely “including” indigenous knowledge on the margins, toward dismantling the structures that erase such knowledge (Moyo,2025). He highlighted how colonial land alienation set patterns of inequality, and how current large-scale land deals continue that legacy in subtler form. His input reinforced our argument that true agrarian reform must involve land justice – restoring decision-making to those who live on and from the land. Moyo also pointed out that Malawi’s new GIS-based land registries and data systems, often funded by donors, can serve external interests (like identifying plots for investors) rather than empowering villagers. This insight supports our caution against technocratic solutions that aren’t people-centric.

• Anthropological Perspective (Development and High Modernism): Prof. James C. Scott, renowned anthropologist (author of Seeing Like a State), provided context on how states (and international agencies) impose schemes that simplify and standardize, often to the detriment of local complexity. He saw Malawi’s experience as a classic case of “high modernist” agriculture – where centrally planned villagization, fixed cropping calendars, and “improved inputs” were pushed without regard for local nuance. Scott’s critique of authoritarian high modernism – the idea that governments or outsiders attempt to reshape society with scientific schemes, often failing disastrously – was used to caution that many donor-driven agricultural reforms repeat these failures. He affirmed that farmers’ seemingly “inefficient” practices (mixing crops, maintaining fallows, rotating fields, etc.) often have rational ecological bases. Scott’s insight that “the more uniform the administrative grid, the more resistant local practice becomes” resonated with the blog’s notion of slow, subtle dissent. This anthropological lens buttressed the legality of resistance: if communities covertly resist harmful policies (e.g. saving and exchanging banned traditional seeds), it can be framed as a form of self-help remedy in the face of unjust rules – analogous to civil disobedience which has been recognized historically as a precursor to legal change.

• Theological Perspective: Pastor Chris Oyakhilome, a prominent theologian whose “Year of Redemption” teachings inspired parts of our mobilization strategy, offered a spiritual framing of Malawi’s quest. He likened Malawi’s debt bondage to the biblical Jubilee concept, where every 50th year debts were cancelled and slaves freed. Pastor Chris emphasized that redemption in a biblical sense involves a restoration of rightful ownership and dignity – a theme highly relevant to stolen lands and lost sovereignty. He noted that in his sermons (e.g. “Why Are The Nations Poor?”), he teaches that poverty is not a natural state but often a result of curse-like structures that can and must be broken through faith and action. Applying this, he encouraged viewing the odious debt as a “curse” leftover from colonialism that Malawi must break free from, both legally and spiritually. His counsel imbued our case with a sense of moral righteousness and the conviction that God’s justice is on the side of the oppressed. He also highlighted the power of spoken truth – that as Malawi speaks out (in courts, in international forums) against injustice, it is enacting a prophetic declaration of freedom. This theological perspective strengthens our resolve that the case is not merely technical but an act of reclaiming moral order. (Notably, Leviticus 25 calls for proclaiming liberty throughout the land in the Jubilee year, an idea we invoke in our public campaign)

• Philosophical Perspective (Postcolonial Theory): Prof. Achille Mbembe, a philosopher and political theorist, shared insights from his concept of Black Reason. He explained that Black Reason is the assemblage of justifications that have historically been used to subjugate Africa – a mix of fantasy and selective reasoning that paints Africa as both origin (of resources, labor) and negation (as a place of lack, perpetually needing external order). Mbembe pointed to how contemporary development discourse still carries this legacy: Africa is depicted as forever “developing,” never developed – which in turn legitimizes endless interventions. He concurred with our observation that the “Africanization of the world” is happening – meaning patterns of exploitation first tested in Africa (plantation economies, forced labor, debt traps) have now gone global. Mbembe’s insight for our case is that ending Malawi’s exploitation would have universal significance, symbolically breaking a wider pattern. He urged that any legal victory be articulated not just as a win for Malawi, but as setting a precedent for decolonizing economic relations everywhere. Philosophically, he supported invoking concepts of Justice (with a capital J) and human dignity that transcend the positivist letter of the law. His ideas encourage the court to be bold and conscious of history in its decision – to see Malawi’s case as an opportunity to reject the reasoning of unreason that underpins modern inequality.

• Economic Perspective (Critical Development Economics): Dr. Joseph Hanlon, an economist known for his work on debt and development (renowned for his extensive work on international debt, development, and governance, particularly in the context of Africa), provided empirical evidence on how debt and aid have affected Malawi. Citing economic data, he noted that Malawi has been caught in a debt-aid cycle – borrow, pay interest, get relief, then borrow anew – which serves lenders more than Malawi. Hanlon’s analysis showed that by the time of Malawi’s debt relief under the HIPC initiative in 2006, the country had paid billions in debt service, much of it on loans of dubious benefit. He stressed that creditor culpability is well-documented: for example, some loans were tied to purchases from the creditor country (benefiting their exporters), or given to Malawi knowing the funds were being mismanaged. Hanlon strongly supports using the odious debt concept and he pointed to historical cases: after apartheid, there were calls (ultimately stymied) to cancel apartheid-era South African debt as odious; Ecuador in 2008 actually audited its debts and repudiated those found illegitimate, with considerable success in reducing its debt burden (Mandel, 2006). His expertise guided us on structuring the demand for a debt audit and quantifying the claim that “Malawi is owed by creditors.” Indeed, he referenced analyses where some African countries ended up repaying far more than they initially borrowed, once interest and refinancing are accounted – a situation he describes as “lenders getting rich off the poorest, under the guise of aid.” These insights underscore the economic unsustainability of the status quo and back our call for structural change. Hanlon also advised on engaging with initiatives like the Jubilee Debt Campaign internationally to align our legal case with global movements for debt justice.

In sum, the consultation process reinforced that our legal battle is part of a larger tapestry – one that includes reclaiming space (geographical and policy space), validating ‘subaltern’ knowledge, invoking moral narratives of liberation, challenging racist epistemologies, and highlighting economic evidence of injustice. This multi-dimensional understanding will make our case more persuasive, and also ensure that any legal remedy is holistically informed.

(We now turn to how we will galvanize public support for this case – because legal arguments alone, no matter how sound, often require the force of people’s voices to be realized.)

6     Public Mobilization Strategy: “Year of Redemption” Campaign

Legal action alone cannot achieve full justice without the power of the people behind it. Therefore, alongside the courtroom battle, we propose a public mobilization strategy that educates and galvanizes Malawians and global allies to support Malawi’s cause. This strategy is presented in accessible, plain language, drawing inspiration from Pastor Chris Oyakhilome’s “Year of Redemption” message (as declared for 2024 onwards) to frame this moment as one of liberation and renewal for Malawi. Key elements of the strategy include:

• 1. Framing the Narrative: We will communicate that Malawi’s pursuit of debt cancellation and agrarian sovereignty is part of a broader “Year of Redemption” – a time to break free from all forms of bondage. Just as a harvest follows a season of planting, the hard years of structural adjustment and exploitation are ending; a season of redemption is at hand. By using culturally resonant references (the Biblical Jubilee, freedom from Pharaoh’s yoke, etc.), we make the cause immediately relatable. Example message: “For 40 years, Malawi wandered under a debt burden in the desert of austerity. Now it’s time to enter the Promised Land of freedom. This is our Year of Redemption – debts forgiven, dignity restored!”

• 2. Education and Awareness: Launch a nationwide campaign of information via community workshops, radio programs, and social media, explaining in simple terms what odious debt is and why Malawi has the right to stop paying these unjust bills. We will use analogies: “If your grandfather was forced to take a bad loan at gunpoint, should you the grandchild have to pay it back?” Most will instinctively answer no. We explain that’s exactly what Malawi has been doing – paying colonial-era and dictator-era bills. Similarly, we’ll unpack how certain “donations” or “investments” in farming actually tied our hands. We will reference how even the Bible condemns exploitative loans as wicked, and how international law backs us up. The aim is to turn complex legal arguments into common sense for every citizen. Slogan ideas: “Our Land, Our Right – No More Paying for Colonial Blight”, “Malawi’s Not For Sale – Take Back Our Agriculture”.

• 3. Grassroots Participation: Form local committees (piggybacking on existing villages/clans, farmer cooperatives, churches, youth clubs and so on) as “Redemption Taskforces” in each district. Their role is to localize the message: gather stories from farmers about how debt or donor policies have harmed them, hold prayer meetings for the nation’s economic deliverance, and organize peaceful demonstrations. For instance, farmers can symbolically burn copies of old onerous contracts or hold up empty baskets to show how certain policies have left them with nothing. We will encourage testimonials — e.g. a mother explaining how the price of hybrid maize seed (driven by policy) put her family into debt, or an elder recalling how community seed exchanges were discouraged. These human stories will be shared upward to media and courts as powerful evidence of harm. The Year of Redemption theme will be woven in by organizing these actions around key dates (Independence Day, etc.) and labeling them “Redemption Rallies.”

• 4. Engaging Faith Communities: Churches and mosques have huge influence in Malawi. We will partner with faith leaders (many are already attuned to issues of social justice). Drawing from Pastor Chris’s message, sermons and prayers can be dedicated to national redemption: calling for deliverance from “economic Pharaohs” and proclaiming Jubilee. The Ceflix Year of Redemption broadcasts themselves can be disseminated or summarized in Chichewa and other local languages to congregations, linking the spiritual concept of redemption to this tangible struggle. When people see their fight for fair economic conditions as part of God’s plan of deliverance, it ignites hope and commitment. We will distribute a “Faith in Action” guide suggesting relevant scriptures (e.g. Leviticus 25 on Jubilee, Isaiah 61 on “proclaim liberty to captives, the year of the Lord’s favor”) and how to pray and act on them for Malawi.

• 5. International Solidarity: We will not isolate this as only Malawi’s issue. A global petition will be launched titled “Redeem Africa’s Future – Cancel the Odious Debts!”, aiming to collect millions of signatures worldwide. We will harness networks of NGOs (like Jubilee Debt Campaign, Oxfam, and La Via Campesina for farmers’ rights) to endorse our case. International media will be courted by framing Malawi as leading the charge for a new era of fair relations. For example, opinion pieces in major media outlets might carry headlines like “Malawi Sets a Precedent: Why It Refuses to be Exploited Anymore.” We will also reference successful David-vs-Goliath legal struggles (for instance, how small Pacific Island nations won an ICJ advisory opinion on climate change recently) – drawing a parallel that Malawi is doing the same against economic injustice. The Year of Redemption narrative can be globalized: many nations need redemption from debt and domination; Malawi is spearheading it now.

• 6. Immediate Calls to Action: To maintain momentum, the campaign will have clear immediate actions for supporters:

  • Contact representatives: Urge Malawian MPs to pass resolutions renouncing odious debt and asserting food sovereignty. Urge foreign citizens (especially in creditor countries like the U.K., U.S., France, and multilateral donors) to lobby their governments and courts to support Malawi’s claims – for instance, pressuring the UK not to oppose Malawi in any ICJ proceeding, or encouraging the U.S. to instruct its IMF/World Bank directors to forgive Malawi’s debt.

  • Boycott and divestment: If certain corporations are identified as profiteering from Malawi’s plight (say a multinational seed company enforcing patents or a land lease investor violating rights), we will initiate targeted boycotts or divestment campaigns internationally. The threat of reputational damage can push these actors to back off and agree to reforms.

  • “Redemption Now” rallies: Coordinate a major rally in Lilongwe (the capital) when the court case opens, with simultaneous gatherings in other cities and villages. People will carry signs like “We won’t pay for what was never ours”, “Our soil, our soul – not for sale.” The presence of thousands will send a message to the world (and to any judges watching) that this has popular backing. Similar demonstrations can take place outside Malawian embassies in London, Washington, Brussels, etc., organized by diaspora and sympathizers.

• 7. Utilizing Media and Arts: We will produce short documentary clips (for Ceflix TV, YouTube, and local and international stations) titled “Farming in the Mirror: The People’s Story” featuring the blog series author narrating the key issues alongside farmer interviews. Artistic expressions like spoken word poetry, songs (perhaps a Chichewa “Redemption Song”), and street theatre will be encouraged to spread awareness in an emotive way. For instance, a play could depict Malawi as a character in chains being freed by collective action. By engaging artists and influencers, we turn the legal case into a cultural movement.

• 8. Timeline and Milestones: Since Pastor Chris declared 2024 the Year of Redemption, we align our campaign timeline accordingly. Q1: Launch awareness campaign and petition. Q2: Community mobilizations and faith-based events. Q3: Major national rally and delivery of petition signatures to the African Union and U.N. (coinciding with the U.N. General Assembly session, to garner international attention). Q4: (Assuming by then a legal decision or UN resolution is imminent) – hold a “Redemption Thanksgiving” event to either celebrate victories or reinforce demands if the battle continues. By framing everything within this one-year thematic, we create a sense of urgency and unity of purpose.

In all messaging, the tone will be empowering and urgent, yet peaceful and hopeful. We assert Malawi’s rights firmly but avoid demonizing any particular nation or people; rather, we target unjust systems. We remind the world that what Malawi seeks is not charity but justice – the fulfillment of promises long enshrined in U.N. charters and moral codes. And we invite everyone, from the smallest farmer to the most influential leader, to be part of writing this new chapter. “Tiyeni titenge ufulu wathu” – “Let us claim our justice now.”

By executing this mobilization strategy, we aim to create a groundswell that no court or creditor can ignore. The legal case will thus be backed by the voice of the people, making the victory not only likely, but enduring.

15th April 2025

Revised on 16th April 2025

Part I – Between Earth and Paper

On a quiet dawn in the Dedza highlands, a farmer named Tamala kneels and presses her palm into the soil. This soil has known her family for generations; it has memory. As the sky lightens, she whispers a promise to her ancestors that these fields will remain free and fertile. Yet, miles away in the capital, ink on paper has already begun to redraw Tamala’s world. A new Customary Land Act on the books says her acres are now a “customary estate,” defined by metes and bounds on a map. To keep it, she must register documents, form committees, speak a bureaucrat’s language. The earth she knows by touch and season is being translated into title deeds and file numbers. She feels a distance opening – between earth and paper, between the customs of her people and the commands of law.

Tamala’s story is Malawi’s story. The country’s fields and villages are standing in a legal mirror, where laws and regulations reflect back an image of farming that is strangely unfamiliar to those who farm. In that mirror, communal lands appear as state property to be leased; native seeds appear as “unsafe” and “uncertified”; the free rivers appear as resources needing permits. The reflection is distorted – it shows progress and order, but hides the human faces and ancestral bonds behind the land.

She recalls the proverb her grandmother taught her: “Do not remove the ancient landmark which your ancestors have set.” Yet the surveyors came with GPS devices and did just that – removed the old boundary marker, a weathered msimbiti tree, replacing it with coordinates. They said it was for her benefit, to secure her land. And yes, perhaps now no one can easily steal her plot because it’s on a registry. But in making it secure, they also made it sellable, transferable, and no longer under the guardianship of her clan. Tamala wonders: secure for whom?

When the officials left, Tamala went out at dusk and planted a small marker of her own: a line of millet seeds saved from last harvest. Millet, a crop her people grew long before maize, long before boundaries – a reminder that some things should never be lost. As she scattered the seeds, she felt the quiet resistance of that act.

Part II – Seeds of Sovereignty, Fields of Struggle

Malawi’s farmers like Tamala find themselves navigating a new legal landscape layered atop the physical one. There is a subtle poetry in the law – and also a quiet violence. The laws speak of “formalization,” “modernization,” and “investment.” They promise prosperity. But farmers have begun to read the fine print and to read between the lines:

• They see that “all land is vested in the President”, as if the villages were still colonial estates. A ghost of the Protectorate lurks in those words. The people till the land, but the law declares it is not truly theirs. Sovereignty is professed, yet somehow not fully given to the sovereign people.

• They hear that “customary land” will be “upgraded” to “customary estates.” An estate – a word that once meant the colonizer’s farm, the very emblem of exclusion. Now it is applied to their piece of earth. Yes, an estate has papers and boundaries, but it can also be sold to someone who has never set foot on it. In the language of improvement, they sense an echo of alienation.

• They learn that “water is a public resource” and using it requires a permit. The stream that has flowed through their village forever now carries an invisible lock, and the key is a government stamp. Who is this law protecting? – they wonder – when it is their children who will go thirsty if the river is fenced with rules.

• They are told “quality seeds” will bring bountiful harvests. The hybrid maize grows tall indeed. But when they sift through their granaries, they miss the diversity of millet, sorghum, cowpea – the resilient rainbow of crops that ensured at least something would survive the drought. Under the onslaught of shiny packages of certified seed, their own seeds – adapted to their climate, saved in gourds by the fire – are slipping away. The Act doesn’t outlaw those local seeds outright, but it renders them ghosts: officially absent, uncatalogued, uncertified. At the market, an officer destroys a sack of “fake seed” – which was just a farmer’s honest grain sold to another. The law looked at that informal exchange and saw only illegality, not the trust and tradition it embodied.

• They hear new phrases from the lips of extension officers: “productivity,” “climate-smart agriculture,” “commercialization.” These words arrive with heavy footsteps – the weight of policy and expectation. If Tamala doesn’t follow the “recommended package,” she might be tagged as “noncompliant.” In a development meeting, she once dared to ask whether intercropping with pigeon peas (the way her father did) might be good for soil. The reply came cold: “Traditional practices are a constraint; we need you to adopt innovations.” Constraint. The care with which she tends a diversity of crops, the wisdom of her grandmothers – reduced to an obstacle in a report​. In that moment she felt small, as if her agency as a farmer was slipping through her fingers like dry soil.

Tamala has a friend, Chikondi, in a nearby district who recently faced a painful loss. The government had identified land in Chikondi’s village for a new commercial farming block under a public-private partnership. Officials arrived with maps and a lease document; the village land had been reclassified as “public land for investment.” People were offered compensation that wouldn’t even buy a decent house plot elsewhere. Some refused to leave – they set up a vigil around the baobab that marked their village center. But how do you fight a piece of paper stamped with the national seal? In the end, police and trucks came. It was all done “legally.” Chikondi’s family graves, the sacred grove by the stream – none were spared by the bulldozers. She told Tamala, with a trembling voice, “We are nothing to them; the law did not see us.”

Stories like Chikondi’s spread quietly in the rural twilight. They don’t always make headlines, but they imprint on hearts. They fuel a growing realization among Malawi’s smallholders that the struggle for land and dignity has moved from the battlefield to the courtroom, from overt colonizers to subtle statutes. It is a struggle now fought with deeds, permits, licenses, and court orders – weapons that can wound just as deeply as guns and handcuffs.

Yet, amidst these challenges, hope germinates. Farmers and allies are organizing legal literacy trainings, turning the dry text of acts into village theatre sketches so that Tamala and her neighbors know their rights and the limits of these laws. When a regulation is unjust, they say, understand it first – then strategize to change it. Tamala herself has joined a new cooperative whose motto is “Seeds of Sovereignty.” They swap indigenous seeds openly (and somewhat defiantly) at community fairs, teaching each other how to improve germination and storage. To an outside observer, they are breaking the rules. To Tamala, they are keeping an ancient pact with their ancestors to protect Mbewu – the seed, source of life.

One crisp morning, Tamala attends a gathering at the district center – a “people’s tribunal” on land issues. Elders, women, and youth speak out. A grandmother holds up a jar of finger millet and declares, “This is our library, our bank, our church. If you destroy our seeds, you erase us.” A young man from Lilongwe, a newly minted lawyer, explains in Chichewa how the Constitution can be a shield, how even the President’s trust over land must be for the people's benefit, not against it. He cites the African Charter’s promise that no people shall be deprived of their means of subsistence. These words land with power. They make the crowd realize that the law is not immutable; it is made by humans and can be unmade by humans.

Tamala goes home that day feeling something she hasn’t in a long time: a sense of agency. She gathers the women in her village and they form a plan. Next time officials come, they will not be passive. They will ask questions. “Show us where it says you can take our stream.” “Explain why our committee wasn’t consulted.” If unsatisfied, they will petition, they will seek allies in the city, they will, if needed, go to court. The law will hear their voice, even if it has to be cracked open in the hearing.

In her notebook that evening, Tamala writes a new proverb for her children: “The law is a garden – weed out the weeds, water the seedlings.” She explains to them: bad laws are the weeds, choking the life out of good practices. But good laws can be the seedlings of a just harvest. Malawi is now in the season of weeding and watering. It is arduous, it requires many hands. But after the first rains, the shoots of change begin to show.

She imagines, a decade from now, a different scene: A new Land Act that truly honors customary sovereignty, with communities deciding how to use their lands and outsiders needing the village’s blessing to acquire any. A Water law that secures water for every village first, before any commercial use. A Seed law that celebrates Malawi’s rich agrobiodiversity – where a farmer can sell her local sorghum at market proudly, with a label “traditional variety – organically grown,” and no one will confiscate it, rather consumers will cherish it. A Plant Breeders law that rewards innovation but never at the cost of farmers’ age-old practices.

In that future, Tamala sees herself standing with her granddaughter at the edge of their field. The girl is learning the names of each bean and gourd from her grandmother, not from a catalog but from stories. And in the capital, perhaps, a judge or minister – maybe the young lawyer from the tribunal, now in leadership – ensures that policies always ask first: “How does this affect Tamala? Is she empowered by this, or does it rob her agency?” If the answer is the latter, back to the drawing board it goes.

This vision of agrarian redemption is not far-fetched. It is being written, slowly, by the many hands of farmers, activists, lawyers, and leaders of conscience in Malawi. Like a patchwork quilt, pieces of reform are coming together: a court ruling here defending a community’s right, an amendment there restoring a lost privilege, a new grassroots cooperative practicing the change it wants to see.

As the sun sets on Tamala’s village, she checks her line of millet at the boundary. They have sprouted – green tips pushing through brown earth. She smiles. The soil remembers and responds. In that simple growth, she finds a lesson: if nurtured, justice too will take root and grow on this land.

She whispers to the seedlings: “Rise, so that we may rise.” And under the same sky, the laws of the land, once instruments of oppression, begin to bend – slowly – toward liberation, guided by the unwavering hands of Malawi’s farmers. 

Part III - Recommended Legislative Amendments and Repeals

Key amendments recommended (details available upon request) include: Land Acts; Water Resources Act; Seed Act; Plant Breeders’ Rights Act; Plant Protection Act; Fertilizer Act and others.

In pushing for these amendments, it will be crucial to form coalitions of farmer organizations, civil society (NGOs focused on land and food security), sympathetic Members of Parliament, and academics. Draft amendment bills could be introduced as Private Members’ Bills if government is slow. The process should be evidence-based, citing how current laws are harming citizens. Public hearings and consultations in rural areas would also bolster the case, making the reform movement farmer-led. 

16th April 2025

Revised 17th April 2025

Part I – Under the Baobab, After Dusk

Night falls gently on a village in Ntcheu. Under the broad shadow of a baobab tree, a small gathering of women takes place. They speak in hushed tones, careful not to draw the attention of the roaming agricultural officer who, during the day, extols the benefits of store-bought hybrid seeds. In the soft glow of a lantern, Grandma Thokozile opens her chitenge cloth to reveal a treasure: handfuls of native groundnut seeds, rich brown and slightly uneven – each one carrying stories of seasons past.

A young mother, Dalia, gasps softly. “I thought we lost these,” she whispers, cupping the seeds as if holding a piece of her grandmother’s spirit. Thokozile smiles. “As long as I live, mpemba will live,” she says, using the local name for the heirloom groundnuts. One by one, the women exchange small jars and packets of saved seeds – cowpea, sorghum, indigenous maize with multicolored kernels. There is no fanfare, no manifesto, no slogans. Just the crickets chirping and the quiet rustle of seeds passing from palm to palm.

They call themselves jokingly “amasiye a mbeu” – the seed widows – because outsiders think these traditional seeds are dead and gone. But here they are, very much alive. They meet at night not because what they do is shameful, but because in the harsh light of day, their freedom to plant their heritage is questioned. The NGO truck that comes monthly brought high-yield hybrids and strongly “discouraged” local varieties. At a workshop, the women were told to “get with the times” for the sake of yields and resilience. So by day they nod and accept the handouts of hybrid maize. But by night, they safeguard another future.

On this night, Thokozile leads a short prayer before they part: “Lord, bless these seeds and the soil of our forefathers. May we never forget the gifts You planted in our land.” Each woman departs quietly, clutching her share of the precious seeds. The revolution here is silent – carried in apron pockets and gourd containers, in knowledge passed ear to ear. In a world that measures progress by fertilizer bags and GDP, this little circle under the baobab might seem insignificant. But in that humble, whispered exchange lies the genetic library of generations, and perhaps the key to a freer tomorrow.

Part II – The Seeds Remember

During the day, Malawi’s agricultural story is written in reports and policies – often in English, often by people in offices far from the fields. But at night, another story is being written quietly in villages. It’s written in Chichewa, Yao, Tumbuka, in the language of soil and season, of recipe and ritual. It’s a story carried by women, like Grandma Thoko and Dalia, who refuse to let ancestral seeds or knowledge die. This is the story of slow dissent.

Not all resistance looks like protest. Sometimes it looks like an old woman wrapping beans in a cloth when the extension agent isn’t looking. Sometimes it’s a farmer planting a “prohibited” local maize variety in a hidden corner of his plot, just to keep it alive. These acts are small, even invisible, individually. But add them up across a nation, across years – and you have a quiet revolution. A revolution with dirt under its fingernails and hope in its heart.

What are they resisting? It’s not change per se – farmers embrace good innovations readily. They are resisting erasure. The seed widow exchanging mpemba under the baobab is saying: “We exist. Our knowledge exists. Our seeds exist.” In a system that tells them only what comes in a labeled package is worth planting, this is a brave assertion of value.

There’s a Chewa saying: “Mbewu imakumbukira nthaka yake” – “the seed remembers its soil.” The women believe that these local seeds, developed here over centuries, know the land better than any lab-bred variety ever will. They might not yield as explosively under perfect conditions, but they survive bad rains, they don’t demand expensive fertilizer, they nourish in ways beyond calories. In saving these seeds, the women are saving options – for their families and for Malawi. Biodiversity is their bank account, one that can’t be devalued from abroad.

From a broader lens, what these “small” acts achieve is a safeguarding of sovereignty at the most grassroots level. While our leaders negotiate big policies, villagers like Thokozile practice sovereignty of the seed. Feminist agroecology scholars often note that women are the custodians of seed and soil in many cultures. In Malawi, too, mothers and grandmothers decide which grain to set aside after harvest, which variety to plant where. Their choices quietly defy the monoculture vision imposed from above.

Earlier in this series, we talked about gaslighting – how farmers are told their way is wrong until they themselves begin to doubt it. These women have felt that doubt. “Maybe our seed is truly inferior…maybe our traditions are backward,” Dalia admits she once thought. But she also witnessed the hunger in 2016 when the hybrid maize failed in the drought and no one had millet or sorghum as backup. She recalls her agogo (grandmother) saying diversity is insurance. Dalia realized the knowledge she almost discarded in shame actually held wisdom for survival.

So, this nocturnal network of seed savers grew. What started as two widows exchanging pigeon pea seeds became a dozen women pooling harvests to replant more villages. It’s still informal – they half-joke they are an underground movement. One of them said the group is like “making matukwa under Kamuzu” (home-brewed beer under the old dictatorship) – you did it quietly among trusted friends. Except here, what they brew is freedom.

Now, let’s connect this to the bigger picture. Why does this matter beyond the village? Because it challenges the entire premise of how agricultural “development” is done. The powers that be operate on an assumption that farmers have no agency or valid knowledge – that all the solutions must be imported. But here we see agency in action. The seed widows are solving a problem (loss of diversity and autonomy) that the modern programs created. They are, in essence, protecting human rights at the fundamental level: the right to food and the right to culture. Saving a seed may not seem like a human rights defense, but when policies threaten to make a farmer’s preferred crop extinct, that farmer’s cultural and nutritional rights are at stake.

Legally, there’s a growing talk (even in the UN) about the right to seed sovereignty – farmers’ rights to save, use, exchange, and sell their farm-saved seed. This is recognized in the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources, but often undermined by trade rules. Our Malawian seed heroes highlight why such a right is vital: it’s not just about seeds, it’s about freedom from dependency. Each hybrid seed packet that comes with conditions ties the farmer into a cycle of purchase and debt. Each indigenous seed exchanged is an assertion: “We can sustain ourselves.”

As Malawi takes its case to courtrooms and international forums (as we intend to, to fight debt and unfair agreements), know that it’s carrying the spirit of these quiet rebellions. When we argue for the ability to set our own agricultural policies, we’re really arguing for what Thokozile and Dalia are already doing – choosing our own path for how we farm and eat.

There’s a line of a poem that says, “They tried to bury us, but they didn’t know we were seeds.” In Malawi’s case, literal seeds. The colonial and neo-colonial systems tried to bury indigenous knowledge, but they didn’t realize that knowledge was planted, not interred. It germinates each night in the hands of humble gardeners of heritage.

The quiet revolution will not be televised – it’s too dark out in the fields at night for cameras – but it is happening. And one day, when the conditions are right, all those small seeds of resistance will bloom in the open sun. What was done in whispers will be celebrated in song. Laws may change to protect what these women do; indeed, they must. Because the future of Malawi’s food security might very well depend on the courage of a grandmother with a handful of seeds defying the empire of agribusiness.

The soil remembers. And thanks to the quiet revolutionaries, it will continue to remember.

(Up next, in Post 7, we step back and listen to what the land itself might be saying in this era of change – “The Weight of Silence: Listening to the Land’s Lament.”)

22nd April 2025

Part I – When the Fields Fell Silent

The mid-day sun hung heavily over the cracked earth of Chikwawa. Where once the fields whispered with the rustle of maize leaves, there was only a profound stillness. Where once women sang as they weeded, and children chased after flocks of startled birds, now there was an aching quiet — a silence so thick it seemed the soil itself was holding its breath.

Mr. Banda walked the perimeter of his withered plot, each step on the brittle ground sounding like a question: crunch, crunch. The echoes of past harvests lingered in his mind — the hearty laughter of neighbors threshing grain, the rhythmic songs he would sing to his oxen under a swelling sun. Now the only sound was the sighing wind, lifting dust devils that danced briefly before collapsing into stillness.

Last season’s drought had not been merely a weather failure. It was the collapse of promises. The hybrid maize, hailed as a miracle by government agents, had shriveled under the unrelenting heat. "No more hunger," they had said. "The future is maize." Banda had listened, as many had, setting aside the sorghum of his father and grandfather — grains that knew how to endure thirst. Now, with empty hands and a heavy spirit, Banda knelt down and pressed his fingers into the dry soil. The ground was hard and unyielding, yet he searched instinctively, almost prayerfully, for a sign: was there still life underneath?

In that barren moment, Banda was not just mourning lost crops. He was mourning a lost conversation — a dialogue between the land and its stewards, once vibrant, now muted by orders from brochures, bosses, and faraway agendas. He realized, with a clarity that pierced deeper than grief, that he had been trained to trust new commandments while forgetting the ancient covenant written into the seasons, the rains, and the songs of his ancestors.

That night, sleep eluded him until exhaustion carried him into a dream. In it, he stood again in his field — but now the old baobab tree at the edge of the farm was speaking. Its voice rumbled like distant thunder: "Do you hear the land crying?"

Banda, heart pounding, pressed his ear to the soil. At first, there was only silence. Then, a faint, anguished moan rose from the earth — the mourning of roots, rivers, and forgotten wisdoms. Thin, translucent figures emerged around him — the 'spirit' of the soil, the riverbed now dry, the goats that had perished in famine. They were murmuring, hands outstretched, but their words were lost in the hot wind.

"Speak louder," Banda pleaded, but the spirits only wept. He understood their lament not through hearing, but through a wrenching in his chest: sorrow, accusation, and a yearning to be remembered. Tears streamed down his cheeks. In the deafening quiet, his heart answered: "I am sorry." He could not tell if the apology was meant for God, his ancestors, the earth itself, or his sleeping children — perhaps all of them.

When Banda awoke before dawn, the air was cool and clear, and the stars scattered across the sky as if waiting for a reply. He stepped outside, the soil gritty beneath his feet, and realized that the land had been speaking all along — not in the polished words of extension agents, but in the withering of crops, the silence of absent birds, the retreat of the rivers.

He thought of the Scripture: "For the earnest expectation of the creation eagerly waits for the revealing of the sons of God." (Romans 8:19). Creation groans, yearning not for new machinery or distant blueprints, but for restoration — for stewards who would listen and respond in love and reverence.

Banda understood now: the land was not merely a resource to be optimized. It was a living testament, a sacred trust. And if he was to live rightly upon it, he would need to listen — with his heart, his memory, and his faith. In that quiet hour, he made a vow: to relearn the forgotten songs, to hear again the language of the soil, and to walk in step with the One who made both land and man.

The silence was no longer empty. It was a call — a summons to repentance, restoration, and hope.

Part II – Hearing What Wasn’t Said

Silence can carry truths too deep for words. It can hold grief long buried, wisdom long discredited, and warnings long ignored. Mr. Banda’s silence, like the silence of many farmers across Malawi, was not merely about failed rains or lost harvests. It was the hush that descends when one’s voice — and the voice of the land — is no longer welcome in the conversation.

This silence is not accidental. It is the result of generations of decisions that muted the land and its stewards. Banda’s father once sang harvest songs that made the ground seem to answer in joy. Those songs have faded. So too has the millet that thrived without fertilizer, and the old practice of resting fields — practices dismissed as outdated by development advisors who came bearing seed kits, chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and promises. The shift from community-based rhythms to (virtually) monocropped schedules, from ancestral knowledge to agronomic algorithms, from organic to inorganic, was not progress alone — it was a kind of spiritual and epistemic eviction.

We are often taught to think of “voice” as human: who gets to speak in policy meetings, whose stories appear in donor reports. That matters. But there is another voice: the voice of creation itself. The land testifies, not in sentences, but in signals — the vanishing of bees, the thinning of streams, the quiet departure of birds that once nested in diverse fields. These are not random signs. They are utterances. They are, as Scripture says, part of the creation that “groans, waiting for deliverance”.

Yet policy logic treats these cries as noise, not speech. If maize yields decline, the diagnosis is simple: more fertilizer. If rains become erratic, the call is for smarter irrigation. Rarely is the deeper question asked: Has the land had enough? Rarely is the farmer treated not as a data point or recipient of training, but as one who already holds answers — waiting to be respected, not replaced.

This silencing is not just technical — it is part of a plantation logic, what scholars call the Plantationocene. In this system, land is rendered mute and manageable. Diversity is seen as disorder. And so, forests are cleared, single crops imposed, and the once-lively polyphony of local ecologies is reduced to a monotonous drone: maize, tobacco, soy — year after year, season after season. It’s as if the land has been taught only one word, and made to repeat it until it forgets how to sing.

Rachel Bezner Kerr calls this the plantation imaginary — a fantasy where African farmers are rescued by external inputs, and the land itself is viewed as empty potential awaiting scientific conquest. But the truth is, the land remembers. And so do its people. What looks like passivity is often a quiet defiance. The farmer who still plants groundnuts alongside maize, or who resists selling their entire harvest, is engaging in what others might call slow dissent. What they are really doing is refusing to forget.

To listen to the land again is not mysticism; it is wisdom. Traditional knowledge personified the land not just out of folklore, but out of reverence — recognizing its voice, its agency, its sacredness. In Chichewa, the phrase nthaka imayankhula — the land speaks — was once common. It meant that if you were attentive, the land would tell you what it needed, and how to heal.

Even science is beginning to catch up. Agroecological studies show that soil “tiredness”, water retention, pest resistance — all improve when local wisdom is restored, not overridden. But long before the reports and citations, this was known in the songs and proverbs of the people. “Tisamadyetsa nthaka imene yachita fuko la chaka chonse” — “Don’t force-feed soil that’s been carrying a burden all year.” That’s more than an agronomic guideline; it’s a moral compass.

Banda’s dream of the baobab speaking was not mere fiction. Scripture affirms it: “The trees of the field shall clap their hands” (Isaiah 55:12). Taken literally, the land is not silent. We have simply forgotten how to hear. The rhythms of planting and resting, of diversity and rotation, of feasting and conserving — these were not inefficiencies. They were sacred timing.

But there is hope.

Malawi is not only finding its voice in international courts and policy arenas. It is also recovering its listening. This is not about nostalgia. It is about survival. It is about justice — the justice of remembering what was silenced, and restoring what was stolen.

Some villages symbolically leave an empty chair in planning meetings — “for the land,” they say, so it too can be heard. Such gestures may seem small, but they mark a turning: away from the noise of extractive agendas, toward the still, persistent voice of the Creator — speaking through soil, seasons, and Spirit.

Let us therefore not ignore the silence. Let us interpret it.

The land is lamenting — but also awaiting. Awaiting the return of those who will tend it, not as calculators but as caretakers. Awaiting those who will not just speak of justice, but who will listen until justice speaks back through the trembling of the trees, the softness of restored rain, the laughter of children well-fed.

“He who has ears, let him hear.”

(In Post 8, “Time and the Land — Beyond the Calendar of Progress,” we’ll explore another kind of voice often ignored: the voice of time and seasonality, and how breaking free might also mean rethinking the rush of development.)

29th April 2025

Prepared For: Policymakers, Public Health Agencies, Medical Guideline Committees, and the Public

1. Introduction:

Decades of public health policy have centered on universal, strict dietary salt (sodium) reduction (<2.3g/day, often targeting <1.5g/day) as a cornerstone of hypertension and cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention. This brief argues for a critical re-evaluation of this paradigm. The scientific foundation faces challenges from evidence suggesting potential harm at very low intakes (J-curve), significant individual variability in physiological response, and a frequent failure to differentiate between sodium sources – particularly highly refined salt ubiquitous in ultra-processed foods versus mineral-rich, unrefined salts within whole-food contexts. Furthermore, the policy landscape exhibits a concerning inconsistency: intense regulation of dietary salt contrasts sharply with the systemic neglect of massive sodium loads administered via standard intravenous (IV) fluids in healthcare settings, a practice influenced by market concentration and linked to adverse outcomes. Commercial interests, including but not limited to the IV fluid market and potentially the broader antihypertensive pharmaceutical sector, may also influence the landscape. Critically evaluating observed population differences requires extreme caution to avoid harmful biological determinism, emphasizing social determinants of health. While core physiological principles appear to be sound, the application and interpretation of salt science demand greater nuance, transparency regarding potential biases, and a move beyond simplistic, one-size-fits-all mandates towards holistic, context-aware, and ethically grounded public health strategies.

2. The Problem: Prevailing Salt Policy vs. Evolving Evidence, Complexity, and Ethical Considerations

Current salt restriction policies rest on early research and the population-prevention principle. However, a deeper look reveals significant issues:

• Weak Evidence for Universal, Strict Benefit: Robust evidence for mortality reduction from strict sodium limits in the general, healthy population is lacking (Cochrane Reviews, 2020). Population studies (Intersalt) show weak links except at extremes.

• The J-Curve & Potential Harm: Compelling data suggests increased cardiovascular risk and mortality at very low sodium intakes (<2.5g/day), challenging the assumption that lower is always better for everyone (Alderman, Graudal).

• Individual & Contextual Variability:

  • Physiological Differences: Salt sensitivity has been shown to vary significantly based on genetics, age, baseline health (hypertension, CKD), and potentially other factors.

  • Racial Disparities – A Need for Critical Context: While differences in average salt sensitivity have been observed (e.g., higher sensitivity often noted in populations of African descent), attributing hypertension disparities primarily to innate biology is scientifically reductionist and ethically perilous. It risks echoing eugenicist thinking by downplaying the overwhelming impact of social determinants of health – systemic racism, chronic stress, food deserts, healthcare access – which are major drivers of these disparities. Any discussion of group-level biological observations must be rigorously contextualized within this socio-environmental framework to avoid perpetuating harm.

  • Salt Type and Dietary Matrix: Current guidelines treat all sodium chloride (NaCl) equally. This ignores:

    • Refined Salt in Ultra-Processed Foods: The vast majority of sodium intake in many Western diets comes from refined salt embedded in ultra-processed foods, which carry independent health risks (unhealthy fats, sugars, additives). Isolating sodium's effect here is methodologically challenging.

    • Unrefined Salts & Mineral Buffering: Unrefined salts (sea salt, Himalayan salt) contain trace minerals (potassium, magnesium) known to influence blood pressure positively. Their physiological impact within a whole-food diet may differ significantly from pure NaCl consumed via processed sources. This distinction is largely absent from policy.

• Scientific Integrity & Interpretation: While the core physiology linking sodium and fluid balance looks sound, the interpretation and application of epidemiological data (correlation vs. causation, confounding) and even RCTs (generalizability, focus on BP vs. hard outcomes) are subject to legitimate scientific debate. The potential for funding bias (from food or pharmaceutical industries) to influence research agendas or interpretations necessitates transparency and critical appraisal.

3. The Critical Blind Spot: Iatrogenic Sodium Loading & Market Dynamics

The intense focus on dietary salt is starkly contrasted by the lack of scrutiny on medical sodium:

• Massive IV Sodium Doses: Standard 0.9% saline delivers extremely high sodium loads (>3,500mg/L), often given to patients simultaneously advised to restrict dietary sodium (<1,500mg/day).

• Evidence of Harm: High-quality RCTs (SMART Trial) demonstrate increased mortality and kidney injury with 0.9% saline compared to balanced crystalloids in many patient populations.

• Market Monopoly & Inertia: The IV fluids market is dominated by a few corporations. The lower cost and historical inertia of 0.9% saline create significant barriers to adopting safer, slightly more expensive balanced solutions, despite evidence.

• Regulatory Asymmetry & Policy Failure: This highlights a policy failure where individual dietary choices face heavy scrutiny while systemic, high-dose, potentially harmful sodium exposure within the regulated healthcare system, influenced by concentrated market power, remains largely unaddressed.

4. Influencing Factors: Beyond Pure Science

Sodium policy is shaped by complex forces:

• Commercial Interests:

  • Processed Food Industry: Resists mandatory limits on refined salt, a key ingredient.

  • IV Fluid Manufacturers: Benefit from the status quo use of cheaper, high-sodium saline.

  • Pharmaceutical Industry (Broader): Stricter blood pressure guidelines, potentially influenced by salt reduction advocacy, can expand the market for antihypertensive medications and drugs for related cardiovascular/renal conditions. This potential alignment of interests requires scrutiny.

• Biomedical Reductionism: Focusing solely on sodium as a number ignores the complexity of whole foods, dietary patterns (e.g., potassium intake), salt type, and cultural contexts (e.g., Japan's high intake/low CVD rates).

• Historical & Ideological Frames: Legacies of control (colonial salt taxes) and debates between public health paternalism and individual autonomy influence policy approaches.

5. Policy Recommendations:

A revised approach to sodium policy should include:

1. Adopt Nuanced and Risk-Stratified Guidance:

• • Move away from universal, overly strict low-sodium targets for the general population, acknowledging J-curve risks and weak evidence for mortality benefit.

  • Develop guidelines stratified by individual risk factors (hypertension, CKD, age) and potentially observed physiological response, rather than broad group labels. Crucially, stratification must avoid perpetuating racial bias and actively incorporate social determinants.

  • Incorporate consideration of dietary context and sodium source (ultra-processed foods vs. whole foods; potentially refined vs. unrefined salt effects as evidence emerges).

2. Mandate Urgent Reform of Medical Sodium Practices:

• • Require hospitals to adopt evidence-based IV fluid protocols e.g. prioritizing balanced crystalloids over 0.9% saline where supported by evidence.

  • Investigate and address market dynamics (pricing, contracts, lobbying) that impede the adoption of safer IV fluids.

  • Ensure patient awareness of IV sodium loads, especially for those on restricted diets.

3. Promote Holistic, Food-Based Dietary Strategies:

• • Shift primary public health messaging from isolated sodium targets towards promoting overall healthy dietary patterns rich in whole foods, fruits, and vegetables (providing potassium and magnesium) and reducing ultra-processed food intake (the main vector for refined salt and other harmful components).

  • Fund research directly comparing health outcomes of diets varying in salt type (refined vs. unrefined) within realistic whole-food versus processed-food dietary patterns.

4. Enhance Scientific Rigor, Transparency, and Ethical Oversight:

• • Prioritize funding for independent research using robust methodologies (e.g., long-term RCTs measuring hard outcomes, 24hr urine) to clarify optimal sodium ranges and effects of different salt types/sources.

  • Mandate full transparency regarding funding sources for salt research and guideline committees to mitigate potential conflicts of interest.

  • Establish clear ethical guidelines for research and policy discussions involving group-level biological differences to prevent misuse and ensure focus remains on equity.

Conclusion:

The prevailing narrative on dietary salt is overly simplistic and ignores critical complexities. Optimal sodium intake likely varies significantly between individuals and depends heavily on dietary context, salt type, and overall health. The stark hypocrisy of regulating dietary flakes while ignoring intravenous floods, combined with the influence of market forces and the ethical risks of misinterpreting population differences, demands a fundamental policy reassessment. Moving forward requires a commitment to nuanced, evidence-based, ethically sound guidance that addresses sodium comprehensively – considering its source, its medical administration, and its place within whole diets and diverse populations, always prioritizing health equity and rigorous, unbiased science.

5th May 2025

Prepared For: Policymakers, Public Health Authorities, Regulatory Bodies, International Organizations, and the Public

Source: White Paper: "Structural Convergence of Agri-Food and Pharmaceutical Sectors: Global Evidence and Controversies" (Available on request)

Executive Summary:

Evidence indicates a growing structural convergence between the agri-food and pharmaceutical industries, marked by overlapping investors, shared policy influence, and commercial feedback loops linking unhealthy food environments to increased demand for medical treatments. This convergence, exemplified by mergers like Bayer-Monsanto and fueled by diet-related chronic diseases becoming profit centers for pharma, poses systemic risks to public health. This White Paper synthesizes global evidence across nutritional (salt, sugar, ultra-processed foods), chemical (additives, PFAS), and agricultural biotech (antibiotics, mRNA tech) controversies, analyzing underlying mechanisms like lobbying, regulatory asymmetries, and narrative capture. It concludes that the current trajectory benefits corporate interests at the expense of public health and offers structured recommendations for integrated governance to realign food and health systems towards the public good.

1. The Problem: Convergence Driving Ill-Health Cycles

The traditional separation between sectors providing food and those providing medicine is blurring. Key aspects of this convergence include:

• Intertwined Interests: Overlapping investors and corporate diversification (e.g., Nestlé Health Science, Abbott's nutrition division) create shared financial stakes in both food production and disease treatment.

• Commercial Feedback Loops: Diets high in ultra-processed foods (UPFs), refined salt, and sugar drive epidemics of non-communicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes, hypertension, and cardiovascular disease. These NCDs, in turn, create massive, sustained markets for pharmaceuticals, generating profits at both ends of the cycle.

• Undermining Prevention: This dynamic can create tacit incentives favouring treatment over prevention, potentially hindering policies that promote healthier diets and reduce the need for medication.

2. Mechanisms Enabling Convergence:

Several factors facilitate and deepen this convergence:

• Policy Influence & Lobbying: Significant lobbying expenditure by both sectors, sometimes in alignment, resists public health measures (e.g., soda taxes, salt limits, antibiotic restrictions) and maintains favourable regulatory environments.

• Investor Overlaps: Major institutional investors (e.g., BlackRock, Vanguard) hold substantial shares across both Big Food and Big Pharma, benefiting from the entire cycle and potentially dampening incentives for disruptive change.

• Regulatory Asymmetry & Fragmentation: Food safety and nutrition regulations often lack the stringency of drug approvals (e.g., GRAS vs. clinical trials), and differing standards globally (e.g., US vs. EU on additives) allow companies to exploit weaker regulatory environments, particularly in the Global South.

• Narrative Capture & Techno-Solutionism: Industries shape public perception by emphasizing individual responsibility over corporate accountability, and promoting technological fixes (novel sweeteners, fortified foods, new drugs) that align with product lines, potentially sidelining systemic solutions like dietary pattern change or poverty alleviation. Influence extends to funding front groups, experts, and potentially shaping research agendas.

3. Manifestations Across Controversies:

The White Paper details numerous examples:

• Nutrition: Documented industry efforts to shape science (sugar vs. fat), resist effective salt reduction and sugar policies, aggressively market UPFs (linked to >30 adverse health outcomes) despite their health impacts, and leverage the "health halo" of products like 100% juice. Latin American policies (warning labels, taxes) show effective counter-strategies.

• Chemicals: Differing regulations on food additives (e.g., Red Dye No. 3 banned in some regions, allowed in US foods for a long time), safety concerns and lack of transparency around edible coatings (Apeel), controversies surrounding water fluoridation (efficacy vs. consent/safety claims), and the widespread health/environmental risks of PFAS ("forever chemicals") originating from food-related applications (cookware, packaging).

• Agricultural Biotech: The crisis of antimicrobial resistance driven by routine antibiotic use in livestock (profiting pharma suppliers and industrial agriculture), and emerging public anxieties and regulatory challenges surrounding mRNA vaccine technology applied to agriculture.

• Global Dynamics: Vaccine inequity during COVID-19 and the influence of philanthrocapitalism (e.g., Gates Foundation and Rockefeller Foundation shaping health and agriculture agendas) highlight global power imbalances relevant to both food and pharma sectors.

4. Policy Recommendations (Derived from White Paper):

The White Paper proposes an indicative suite of actions to help structure deliberation and debate:

1. Strengthen & Harmonize Regulatory Standards Globally: Elevate food safety/nutrition regulations (e.g., on additives, contaminants) toward parity with drug safety standards, using a precautionary approach. Require rigorous testing for novel food technologies.

2. Implement Comprehensive Nutrition Policies: Enact evidence-based measures like taxes on unhealthy foods/drinks, mandatory front-of-pack warning labels, and marketing restrictions (especially to children), following successful examples (e.g., Latin America). Prioritize whole foods in public procurement.

3. Curb Industry Influence & Conflicts of Interest: Establish firewalls in policy-making and research funding. Mandate strict disclosure/recusal rules for advisory committees. Fund independent research. Denormalize industry sponsorship in health/nutrition professional bodies. Increase transparency in public-private partnerships.

4. Promote "One Health" & Integrated Governance: Create formal mechanisms for joint planning between agriculture, food, environment, and health ministries (e.g., national One Health committees) to address issues like antibiotic resistance and food safety cohesively.

5. Realign Healthcare Incentives Towards Prevention: Mandate/incentivize insurance coverage for nutrition counseling, medically tailored meals, and produce prescription programs to counter the bias towards treatment.

6. Encourage Diversification & Ethical Investment: Promote genuine ESG criteria including health metrics for institutional investors. Encourage divestment from companies driving NCD burdens and investment in sustainable, healthy food systems and preventive health.

7. Empower & Protect the Global South: Support implementation of strong regulations in LMICs, resist trade pressures undermining health, fund local healthy food production, and ensure health priorities prevail in global agreements. Consider a Framework Convention on Healthy Diets.

8. Advance Transparency & Public Awareness: Launch public campaigns on commercial determinants of health. Mandate clear labeling for food production methods/inputs. Combat misinformation and disinformation with trusted science communication.

9. Foster Innovation for Public Good: Redirect innovation towards equitable solutions (e.g., open-access livestock drugs, non-patented crop diversity). Support sustainable food startups adhering to health guidelines. Fund open science in food and health.

10. Increase Accountability: Strengthen monitoring of industry compliance. Support independent watchdogs. Pursue legal action for harms caused by industry practices (e.g., healthcare cost recovery). Bolster anti-trust enforcement in both sectors.

Conclusion:

The structural convergence of the agri-food and pharmaceutical industries creates systemic challenges that necessitate a paradigm shift in governance. The status quo, characterized by reinforcing profit cycles potentially detrimental to public health, is unsustainable. Implementing integrated, evidence-based policies (with those outlined in the White Paper serving as starting points for further deliberation and debate) is crucial to untangle perverse incentives and ensure food and health systems prioritize prevention, equity, and long-term public well-being over commercial interests.

6th May 2025