"Exterminate all the Brutes"

Past Wensday, the 17th of january 2007 I presented together with Nathalie Bissig the Malawi project at the dept. of new media studies. At the “day of the open doors” after my presentation there were Urs Hodel presenting his project “News Jockey” and Domagoj Smoljo together with Carmen Weisskopf their project Projekt Bitnik.

The official 23C3 recordings have been released. The Server is available at dewy.fem.tu-ilmenau.de. We mirrored the server and its available at mirror.hgkz.ch (http, ftp, rsync). The recording of my talk (#1638) can be found here: #1638 Freie Software – Eine Chance für Afrika? (in german).
I also uploaded the talk in written (german text).

Nathalie Bissig has set up her own Weblog where she releases fotos and drawings of Malawi and of the 23C3.

Ramon Cahenzli has recorded the talk, that I held this morning at the 23C3 in Berlin. The Film can be downloaded at this URL (The talk is held in German Language). Thank you, Ramon 🙂

The audio layer of the file is corrupt. A file in better quality will be put online asap.

One of the reasons that since the end of november 2006, 25 new thinclients are running in the library of the polytechnik, are these 6 students.
Wilson Mpindi, Clara Chirwa, Clarence Gama, Prisca Mvalo, Moses Dossi, Adam

They helped us from octobre to novembre. With a lot of interesse and know how, they installed the software, buildet up the servers, and seted up the thinclient network. We would like to thank them once more for this collaboration. It was a real pleasure for us.

As every year I visit the Chaos Communication Congress. My speech will take place at 11:30 AM at Saal 3. It will also be streamed to the Internet.

It’s now a Week ago when we came back from Malawi. The temperature difference is about 30°C. Our bodies have adapted the centralafrican climate within the 10 weeks we stayed in Malawi. Sometimes it was hard to sleep because of the heat and Nathalie dreamed of flying over the Kongo with a small propeller plane because of the ventilator that stood next to our bed. Today I opened my personal sauna season. The first round of saunarium at 60°C felt like a hot day at the lake Malawi. Let me give a short explanation to my Malawian friends about what a sauna is: It’s a traditional finnish wooden cabine that is heated up dry to 90°C and one goes into it for about 15 minutes. Afterwards one cools down the body jumping into icecold water and short walk in the fresh winter air (below 0°C). That’s how the body is cooled down to activate the blood circulation to protect the body against cold and illness and activate the immune system. (You can find more information about sauna on the Wikipedia website.)

Nyasa is the Yao (one of the 4 spoken languages in Malawi) word for “lake”. When the british colonialists came into Malawi they asked the native for the name of the lake. They said it was “Nyasa”. So the british called the lake “Lake Nyasa”, which effectively means “Lake Lake”! The lake Malawi is 560 km long and 75 km large. The boarders of Malawi, Moħambique and Tanzania meet at that lake. Fishing is a pretty important income for the native who catch Chambo and Kampango. One can see the importance of Chambo when you see it printed on many things like textiles:

Sengabay is about 18 km away from Salima at the south of lake Malawi. The beach is original and has not yet seen many foreign tourists. The beach is used by native people for washing, bathing, fixing fishing-nets etc. But men and women bath seperately. The foam of the withe soap looks funny on the black bodies of the Malawians. Because the holydays have started some school classes visit the lake and are very excited taking a bath.

Seeing this idyllic lake one often forgets that there are crocodiles and hippos some of the time. The locals say that one should not go for a swim after 5 pm. That is the time when hippos are crossing at about 15 meters away from the beach.

Nathalie has taken some pictures of the drapery she bought in Malawi. You can find more of them in the image gallery. 🙂

Apart of the big collection of digital images that Nathalie has taken, she also took some middleformat pictures with her anaolg Mamya camera. The films and pictures will be developed within the next weeks.

A small preview can be seen here.

It’s not just the big temperature difference (Blantyre 35°C, Zurich 3°C), but mostly the hudge culture differende that makes us feelt sad after 10 week of stay in Malawi. Back in Zurich it’s the colored and happy faces in the streets, the colors and forms of the surroundings, the green of the rainy season that are missing. The way towards the office in the morning feels like a funeral. It looks like as if remote controlled people are beeing shifted through the public space. The grey and misty winter is written into the peoples faces. After spotting the first colored person in the bus a “shap-shap” escapes out of my mouth. People then look at me irritated. Maybe it’s the genuine italian Pizza that will save me today. After eating nsima (malawian mais food) for 10 weeks I really look forward to that.