From Nkhata Bay to Usisya by boat

If adventures on a sunny Saturday morning were to be considered then a trip to Usisya from Nkhata Bay by boat should be sitting somewhere on top of everything one would think about.

For starters, Usisya is located slightly on the north-eastern side of Mzuzu. It is the largest flatland along the lake between Mlowe in Rumphi and Nkhata bay boma.

UT (Usisya Town), as fondly called by those from the area, is bordered by the lake on the east, an escarpment on the west and hilly terrains on the north and south.

One can get there by road from Mzuzu, by helicopter as the aerodrome is almost nonexistent or by lake. The journey by road is one of the most hair-raising encounters one would fathom.

But it is the journey to there from Nkhata Bay that is the most captivating and adventurous in nature. Its fun will be magnified if the lake pities you and remains peaceful.

Everything starts with you wading for a few steps before you get onto a boat which usually waits a few metres from land. Operators say the way boats are designed makes them hard to pull over to land.

Boats are heavier and go a little deeper into the water. As such, they hit the base of the shallow side of the lake even when water is knee high.

So once you are on board, you really have to hold your nerve because the engine will not roll right away. The boat is paddled a little deeper into the lake to ensure that once lowered, the propeller does not run on the base.

During paddling the boat usually sways from one end to another. That is what should leave you holding onto the leg of someone next to you or virtually lying on the floor of the boat.

But you should walk from one spot to another once the engine is on. You may only fail to do so if you are riding a boat for the first time. And that should really be a bad experience and you should be lucky if you aren’t vomiting.

We started our journey as early as 6.30am and we were to be on the lake for the next four hours.

It was one of the many times I have travelled by lake but the first to sail on this stretch. Earlier experiences were either by Ilala or Mtendere and were often between Chilumba and Usisya.

If you are roaring here for the first time you should be stunned by a village near Thoto. Being watched from the lake, this village occurs like a nucleus comprising houses roofed with iron sheets.

Those familiar with the place say most of the sons of this village are either in Tanzania or South Africa and they show the benefits of being there by building such houses for their parents.

This village is possibly better than towns. While you are likely to see some houses without satellite dishes in towns and cities, each house in this village has a minimum of two dishes.

Apparently, hoping from one house to another to watch television is viewed as a sign of lacking here.

As the journey matures, by which time you should have slept and woken up, memories of this village fade too easily. It’s not that the village is less memorable. It’s because of the grandeur of what you see next.

The hills on your west are so intertwined that it will require from you a reasonable degree of patience to see which hill is which. And in a few cases, gaps extend between hills, starting from the lake and disappearing into a range of hills.

And instead of just meeting the waters of the lake, these hills draw themselves in the water with captivating unison that you start wondering whether you are sailing on the lake or on the other side of the hills.

The picturesque is just too magnificent. You would forgive one who exposes their shock and start asking whether they are treading on territory outside the warm heart of Africa.

Unfortunately, by the time you are able to take a breath after the end of this episode, you are handed over to another. This latest is Mphande Hill. It is uncharacteristically positioned in the middle of the flatland and the lake.

It is such a marvellous sight even if viewed from any direction. And it is not an orphan. There are tiny rocky islands just nearby. Building a resort on any of these would be an idea seen as one hatched in a heavenly slumber.

By this time you should be docking. Unfortunately, this will not be before you are caught up in on-the-lake trade that is fish business.

You can just beckon and they will come in large numbers. Unfortunately, assured of ready customers ashore they don’t sell cheaply. But you can easily beat them if you let one to bargain and buy for the rest of you.

Welcome to Usisya Town!

When ending poverty outweighs sustaining environment

Lizinet Josiah, 28, knows that her village is no longer getting the rainfall it used to get not so long ago. Her measurement of changes in the rainfall pattern is the volume of water in a river that roars near that village.

In yesteryears, she says, the Diamphwi River was impassable in February. The water in the river only receded to the point of people walking across around September.

Yet for the previous few years, the people of her Beni Village in Traditional Authority (TA) Masula in Lilongwe have no longer waited for September to walk across this river. They can do it in February and did it in February of 2012.

Although she dropped out of school in Standard four, Josiah is able to connect this diminishing rainfall pattern to the depletion of the village’s giant, the Dzalanyama forest reserve.

Scientists say forests assist in the rainmaking process called evapo-transpiration, a combination of evaporation from land and transpiration from vegetative cover including trees.

And for long, this forest had attracted rains to Josiah’s village. But that is not the case now that the forest is not longer there.

Hundreds of, mainly, men from around the forest have been descending on it, camping deep inside it, felling trees for charcoal burning. Josiah reckons that there are no culprits worse than those from her village.

Blame it on poverty

She also knows that sustaining the forest would bring back the reliable rainfall. But she chooses to stun you.

“As long as the charcoal alleviates our poverty and gives us something with which to buy food, the forest can go,” she says.

“It’s all because of poverty. We want to have food but we don’t have money to buy the food or fertilisers to boost our food yields. We get something from the charcoal from the forest. We buy food and top up what we get under the farm income subsidy programme. What we get is little and this season was worse.”

Every day, bicycles loaded with charcoal zigzag their way out of Dzalanyama forest to Mitundu where it is traded to middlemen. These middlemen later take it into the centre of Lilongwe where they sell it to final consumer.

Beating the system

Those burning the charcoal are so sought by forestry officers from the Department of Forestry. As such, they have to be artful dodgers to get to the middlemen.

Pilato Elefanti is among those who make a living out of selling firewood collected from the forest. He says every day an average of 400 bags of charcoal trek from the forest to the middlemen.

“Each bag fetches between K1,300 and K1,400 at the middlemen,” he said.

Elefanti says he is not involved in the charcoal business himself. He forms a group of people that get out of the forest will towers of dry wood on their bicycle carriers to Mitundu where they also sell to middlemen.

Each of them pays K300 a day to get a pass from the forestry officers into the forest. They are rarely monitored because of shortage of staff. So they may deliberately fell trees to collect dry wood the other day.

“I don’t collect the wood every day. But there are people who get out of the forest with bags of charcoal every day,” he says.

That is how the forest is drifting towards extinction. Unfortunately, it is those that perpetrate this extinction that are feeling the pinch.

Vicious cycle

Village Head (VH) Beni says rains have been inadequate and irregular since signs of the forest’s depletion started showing vividly over six years ago. And people there have not been harvesting enough.

“People are still planting because the kind of rains with which we plant our crops started coming very late. Before that, it was only showers,” said Beni in an interview in February.

This change in the rainfall pattern because of the depletion of Dzalanyama forest is also threatening water supply to the whole of Lilongwe and the cost of that water.

The forest is a source of rivers supplying the Kamuzu Dam which supplies Lilongwe.

District Forestry Officer (DFO) for Lilongwe Jipate Munyenyembe says a depleted Dzalanyama will raise the cost of water because more would be spent on treating the water.

“The absence of trees in catchment areas leads to sedimentation of rivers. And it is very expensive to restore the quality of water from rivers that are filled with sediment,” says Munyenyembe.

“Because the cost of treatment rises, the cost of that water also rises.”

He says halting the depletion of the forest has always been a problem due to lack of manpower and inaccessible roads.

This, he says, has given the villagers an opportunity to camp in the forest, fell trees and burn the charcoal. Only joint efforts between the Forestry Department and the Malawi Defence Force (MDF) or the police have flushed out the encroachers.

Hoping against hope

Munyenyembe says his department is currently dressing the depleted Dzalanyama and other areas in the district with 11 million trees.

People of Beni Village have also been given tree seedlings for them to plant. In fact, they have planted some. However, if you ask him, the answer you get from VH Beni tells you that Dzalanyama will keep going and protection of the young trees once mature is not guaranteed.

“The people want money to buy food and fertilisers and there are no other sources of money for this,” he says. “The poverty is what is driving them into charcoal burning.”