Bunda Campus Nightlife

When the songs start to play the people dance. Malawians love to dance. It doesn’t matter with who or where. Take the bar scene for instance, where you’ll almost exclusively find males hanging out and drinking their Carlsberg greens. Now imagine a popular song comes on the jukebox. All of a sudden you’ll have a group of guys dancing in a circle, often with simultaneous dance moves, just having a great time. That’s something I really appreciate in this culture. Dancing isn’t just to impress a girl or to show off, it’s really about having fun. It’s easy to feel self-conscious about dancing when you’re trying to impress someone, but here you can really let loose and have fun with it.

"Probably the best beer in the world"

Great slogan Carlsberg.

I still get laughed at sometimes for my strange dancing, but it’s fun once you’ve had a couple beers and you’re over the self-consciousness. Having a good dance partner is also reassuring. Thankfully I’ve had friends that are eager to go out and introduce me to the nightlife.

 My great dance partners. ( Nelly, Tchiwe, Wesley, Me, Peterson)

Tchiwe and Nelly are sisters. Wes, Pete and me are brothers.  

Bunda campus has a great student community that likes to throw rallies and other engaging events. There’s been a Rasta concert, a fashion show, outdoors concert, open-air discos, student union election rallies and more. All of these events were nothing like I’ve known, or would have imagined them to be.

The student commons is a happening place. Somedays a football match will a attract

 crowd of avid fans and other days you might come across a student rally.

The Rasta concert featured the Ma Blacks, also known as the Black Missionaries. This is Malawi’s number one band. You hear their music everywhere you go.  I consider myself lucky to have seen them play live. For the first half of the show I stayed back and watched the crowd from where the merchandise stalls. Here the vendors were selling a wide variety Rastafarian related items. Marijuana is illegal in Malawi but that didn’t stop vendors from selling ridiculously large joints in plain sight. There isn’t any police on campus and as far as I could tell there wasn’t even security inside the concert hall either. 

A mysterious haze covers the reggae concert.

Food vendors are a great part of Malawian nightlife. They setup just outside of events or bars and they cook chicken, pork, beef or goat over a charcoal grill. On that particular evening the grill smoke was blowing directly into the concert hall. It was the perfect cover up to explain the smoke wafting through the concert hall. Whether the smoke was from the grills or some alternative source it gave the concert an authentic reggae atmosphere.

The concept of an open-air disco is brilliant. Let me break it down. First, you need to find a suitable dance floor. Take the cafeteria parking lot or the local basketball court as recent working examples. Two, buy a ton of beer and stock the makeshift “bar”. Three, now find a DJ to play the latest and greatest hits, keep the music going from four in the afternoon until four in the morning. With a culture that loves to dance, a great supply of beer and hit music, the evening is bound to be a huge success. The attendees are free to come and go with their liquor as they please. You don’t need to worry about any inconvenient hassle from the authorities because they virtually don’t exist on campus. Without strict liquor laws, vending licenses and food safety, anything is possible. Bunda campus is also a fair distance from any major city, police presence outside of the cities is pretty minimal, apart from the many highway checkpoints that is.

My lovely Dance partner Tchiwe. 

Thomas ordered a platter of chicken livers after a night out in Lilongwe. 

The concept of an open-air disco is brilliant. Let me break it down. First, you need to find a suitable dance floor. Take the cafeteria parking lot or the local basketball court as recent working examples. Two, buy a ton of beer and stock the makeshift “bar”. Three, now find a DJ to play the latest and greatest hits, keep the music going from four in the afternoon until four in the morning. With a culture that loves to dance, a great supply of beer and hit music, the evening is bound to be a huge success. The attendees are free to come and go with their liquor as they please. You don’t need to worry about any inconvenient hassle from the authorities because they virtually don’t exist on campus. Without strict liquor laws, vending licenses and food safety, anything is possible. Bunda campus is also a fair distance from any major city, police presence outside of the cities is pretty minimal, apart from the many highway checkpoints that is.

The fashion show takes us back to the concert hall. The stands were comprised of four levels to maximize viewing capacity. People in the very front were seated on the ground, directly behind them people were standing on the floor, then there were people standing on chairs and finally the last row were people standing on rickety desks. There were hundreds if not a thousand people packed in this medium sized gymnasium. Everyone wanted to see and cheer for his or her favourite contestant, because in this fashion show the winners were named king and queen of Bunda campus, very renowned titles in the student community.

Fashion show venue was packed.

Turns out by fashion show they more or less meant dance competition, and by dance competition I more or less mean girls twerking and guys stripping. It was great fun for everyone and at the end of the competition we received a new king and queen of Bunda, named by the contest judges themselves. The crowd celebrated with jubilance and the event transformed into a night of dancing and drinking. I was even introduced to the new shirtless king of Bunda himself that night. The honour was mine.  

The student union elections for Bunda campus were being held last week and the candidates were in campaign mode. There was a ton of enthusiasm surrounding the student elections, rallies, canvasing, car parades, debates, really the whole deal. I wasn't invested in the events but I would come across them from time to time, wondering what all the noise and music was about. Sometimes these rallies were going on right outside ongoing classes, not sure how much you can absorb in class when a party is happening right next door.

Candidates poster stapled to a tree. Go Mr. Chidzani.

I was invited to a student union meeting by my dance partner Tchiwe but I politely declined. Little did I know that those meetings resembled a rally more than some boring procedural assembly. After the meeting Tchiwe had completely lost her voice. Apparently these meetings get very loud; you’re there to cheer on your favorite contestants. It’s really something special to see a large portion of the student community actively participating in politics. That kind of enthusiasm was absent from my university experiences, both in Winnipeg and Halifax.

   

My new home in Blantyre. This is actually the gym where I'll be working out.

Overall, I’ve enjoyed the social life at Bunda campus. I made a bit of a reputation for myself to the point that students knew me before we even met. That was fun to feel like a celebrity for a while, but now understand that it can be difficult to always act enthusiastic or very caring when constantly being approached by new people. After three months of living at Bunda campus I have moved to Blantyre for a chance at working more closely with small-scale, rural tilapia farmers. Really looking forward to living in Blantyre, it’s much more expensive but it’s incredibly beautiful, has great recreation facilities and a larger variety of foods.