The M1 - an anthropological car journey

After an exhausting 7h drive from Lilongwe to Mzuzu, I finally made it to my final destination. It's no exaggeration to say that I have traversed almost the entire length of the country. Those 355km, comparable to driving from Sheffield to Eastbourne, have been the best anthropological introduction to the country I could have asked for.

The M1 is the only 'motorway' of Malawi. A linear stretch of crumbled tarmac that cuts in half endless green flats of land. A gift left behind by colonisation, it has undergone 'minimal upgrades' (to quote the diplomatic Wikipedia) since. I struggled not to laugh at my colleague proudly saying that the road is currently being 'rehabilitated'. One lane for each direction, no lines to mark them, and mud in each side biting into the tarmac as a warning to the drivers that there is the steep cliff on both sides. The mud doesn't serve the purpose anyway, as a big double lorry has slipped down the cliff and lies upside down waiting for humans to put it back straight. Police check points every 5km are intended to slow down cars' speed, although I can't see how anyone would be able to go any fast. We get stopped repeatedly, but no one asks us for documents. My driver seems to know them all. They laugh for a few minutes, just enough for me to contemplate the white gloves they are wearing before we accelerate again. I wonder who designed their uniforms: if it wasn't for the helmet, they would look like the jockeys of Royal Ascot.

Of crucial importance for commerce and people movements both within the country and towards neighbouring Mozambique and Tanzania, the M1 is alive. Forget about fences and guard rails keeping people away from it like in the West. The road is a market - of services and goods. People pour to its edges from the villages that lie next to it. I can see mud huts hidden in banana trees with large plots of crops meticulously arranged next to them. Mostly, maize - which is no surprise given Malawians seem to be as obsessed about their Nsima as the Kenyans are about their Ugali. Amongst the things they bring to the road to sell, there are chicken alive. Here is a thing I have not seen anywhere else: young lads olding alive chickens from their legs and waving them at the drivers hoping they will stop to buy one. Every time we pass a stream, other young lads olding trays full of tiny little smoked fish rush towards any car that may give even the slightest impression they may stop for a purchase. 

Any now and again, the market becomes more organised. The mud huts and the countryside leave space for concrete buildings lines up next to each other. Painted with the usual bright colours that paint companies gift in exchange for their brand being written on the facade, they host tiny businesses - phone shops, corner shops, pharmacies. On the strip of mud land separating them from the M1, a buzzing group of sellers display vegetables, fruits, second hand clothes for sale. Services like lifts are also arranged here, with people taking commissions just for being able to trick a car into stopping.

Very often, we have to bypass the M1 into muddy tracks, product of the rehabilitation works taking place, so that workers can carry on with their job. We pass the 'famous' bridge my colleague has told me about, which was swept away by the rain just last week. A stump of concrete and iron bars is still standing and I look at it in some form of unjustified disbelief as the temporary, alternative ford of mud and sand lies just a hundred meters away from it - and on the same exact river bed. We emerge the other side alive: thanks god is not raining.

Cars keep breaking down. My driver, proud of his Nissan imported from the UK, explains this as a result of the fact that cars circulating in Malawi are old Japanese cars revamped to look new but actually being very poor quality. We pass a car missing it's entire back window, and one with cardboard sellotaped on all the windows of the right side. I wonder how the driver manages to deal with this. The trucks transporting humans on the back don't catch my attention until one of them stops suddenly, causing everyone on the boot to fall off their composed sitted position. We undertake to discover why the truck has stopped: there are massive tree branches on the road, impossible to avoid without invading the opposite lane. My colleagues explains that the three branches are the Malawi equivalent of the 'break-down triangle': they signal someone has broken down and, allegedly, they are supposed to work better and be more intuitive than the triangle. I can't avoid thinking how much effort cutting down such big branches must have taken the poor driver but hey, when in Rome...

When I get to Mzuzu is dark. I love the comfort of Equatorial countries, where the sun sets at the same time all year around. I realise that while I had traversed the country in a single day, for many the M1 was not a way through the country but a way of making a living which organised and fixed others’ lives around waiting, selling, and staying. 

I shall never look at roads in Africa the same way :-)

Edit of 28th January 2026: just a 'casual' public notice to remind me how lucky I was to have crossed that ford yesterday!!