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DASAdventureHunter t1_isdnaiy wrote

Reply to comment by Majorian18 in First female chief in Malawi, South Africa ends child marriage by messyredemptions

Malawi has the overarching government but most people only have interaction with people in their tribe. More specifically in their Traditional Authority (TA), kind of like a collection of villages.

There's a chief in charge of a village (maybe 30 households).

A Traditional Authority in charge of several cheifs (several hundreds to thousands of housholds).

A paramount chief who is charge of a whole tribe (several thousands to millions depending on the tribe).

That's the tribal structure which almost kinda acts parallel to the republic of Malawi. For the republic government there are Districts (kind of like states/provinces), and then the national government (parliament, president, and supreme court)

In the less populated parts of the country people tend to interact more with tribal chiefs than the main government. This might have change since the Chewa tribe lost the presidency but idk.

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papadjeef t1_isdp6mw wrote

First: nice! Malawi is awesome. They, like lots of places, have post colonial, modernism, and urbanization problems but they are generally preserving things they do right that western countries get wrong.

>most people only have interaction with people in their tribe.

A large percentage of the population live in Lilongwe and Blantyre-Limbe. Tribes are not well delineated in those urban areas. I was just talking with some friends there about the cultural changes coming from so many children born in cross tribal marriages.

Also, I don't understand how she could be the "first" woman chief. Yao and Sena are matrilineal and tend to prefer women as chiefs. I was just in Zomba where the "Village" (or neighborhood) chiefs are women.

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DASAdventureHunter t1_isexvu5 wrote

True on all points. Lilongwe, Blantyre, Zomba are very different from the rest of the country.

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