Ngoni Kingdom: Operationalising the Nature Futures Framework in Malawi
Overview
To build a sustainable future, we need new stories about how societies can engage with nature. Visions of the future are a powerful way to tell new stories, especially when they model value systems that are under-represented in dominant discourses about how the future might unfold or be guided. We conducted a participatory visioning process in Mombera Kingdom, a traditional community located in northern Malawi. Using the Nature Futures Framework (NFF), a tool created by the IPBES task force on scenarios and models, we co-produced several desirable, value-diverse visions of the community’s future. Hopes and tensions embedded in these visions were captured by artworks and short speculative fiction stories that aim to enable communication both within the community and a wider audience beyond academia.
We also developed a novel process to recast participants’ visions into distinct future scenarios, based on an understanding of the system that we captured with a semi-quantitative causal loop diagram. These scenarios are designed to be incorporated into scenarios at higher spatial scales (e.g. at the African regional level), enabling Mombera Kingdom’s perspectives to be amplified in the ‘bottom-up’ scenario process advocated by the IPBES Task Force. This approach elicited values and beliefs held within this community that are under-represented in environmental scenario processes and was able both to suggest new insights for decision-makers in Mombera Kingdom while also offering important new data for scenario processes at larger scales.
The project was conducted in 3 stages:
Stage 1: In 2022, the project team facilitated two participatory visioning workshops with community members (including traditional leaders, women, and youth representatives). These workshops included both system mapping exercises and visioning exercises.
Stage 2: During the Stage 1 workshops, we hired Malawian visual artists and science-fiction writers to create artistic products inspired by the participatory visions. This resulted in three artworks and three short stories. The stories are presented in the Mombera Rising anthology, and the artworks were given to the community.
Stage 3: (concurrent with Stage 2). We created expert-led scenarios based on the participatory visions. The purpose of these scenarios was to highlight opportunities for community action in the present, insights about the meanings of the NFF value perspectives in this community’s contexts, and areas where the visions were internally incompatible. To achieve these goals, the scenarios rearranged elements of the visions into three alternative descriptions of the community’s structure and landscape, each prioritizing one value perspective.
Narratives
Three narratives were developed using the framework’s three value perspectives:
Nature for Nature
Elephant Crossings – This scenario imagines that a majority of Mzimba’s landscape has been reserved for miombo, with people living in dense cities at each Inkhosi’s seat. The miombo is maintained by the woodland service, a prestigious organization that monitors plant and animal health, manages and controls fire, and protects the woodland from intruders. Thriving wildlife populations (after a series of successful reintroductions) also help maintain ecosystem health, and bring in eco-tourists from across the globe as well. This tourism is a boon for Mzimba’s economy, along with new international schemes to pay for the carbon sequestration benefits of grasslands. However, with restrictions on when and how locals can visit the woodland, the connection between culture and the cultural landscape is strained.
Icon is “Elephant” by Ed Harrison from Noun Project (CCBY3.0). Photograph is “Forest Reserve” by Ollivier Girard/CIFOR.
Nature for Society
Home Networks – Drones hover over groundnut fields, children build computers in their bedrooms, and every homestead has an electric car and an online business. Despite its enduring rural setting, Mzimba has seen the rise of a dynamic economy fuelled by innovation and grassroots entrepreneurship. Although people do not live close together, it is easy to stay in touch through high-speed internet or through the fleet of delivery drones buzzing across the landscape. Since the Southern African Development Community loosened its international borders, it has also been easier to travel and trade with folks in neighbouring countries. There is very little miombo left outside of the protected areas, but much of it has been set aside to produce charcoal for outdoor heating and braai.
Icon is “Acacia Tree” by anisah mahfudhah billah from Noun Project (CCBY3.0).
Nature as Culture
Nature as Culture: Old shield, new spear – Mzimba is a semi-autonomous kingdom within Malawi, governed by the Amakhosi. It is common to see workers loading export shipments on the train: Ngoni millet beer, electric nsima-makers, fashion inspired by traditional Ngoni garments. In the villages, one can find multi-story kraals: on the ground floor-courtyards, children lead in cattle and goats after a weekend-day out in the woodland; on the upper floors, adults stroll in gardens lit by sunbeams stabbing through the glass floors of the levels above. The villages are ringed by farmland, which is surrounded by miombo, which regulates the villages’ climate. All is layered with the sounds of music, animals, and the bells around the feet of marching Impi.
Icon is “Zulu Shield” by Eucalyp from Noun Project (CCBY3.0). The photograph is “Cattle returning home in Mozambique” by ILRI/Stevie Mann (CCBYNCSA3.0).
Participatory visions
Title: V1: Mzimba Kingdom
Group: Workshop 1, Amakhosi
Details: Mzimba is an independent state. Peace reigns. Forest cover and animal populations have recovered due to intense and robust conservation policies.
Title: V2: Republic of Mzimba
Group: Workshop 1, Women
Details: Mzimba is an independent nation in which women can become amakhosi. Cultural traditions have recovered due to dedicated education initiatives. Forest, water bodies, and food provision have recovered due to conservation initiatives.
Title: V3: Unthu Withu (Human, Ours)
Group: Workshop 1, Youth
Details: Targeted cultural initiatives have cultivated a common sense of connection to and responsibility for the landscape. This cultural shift is bolstered by increased opportunities for sustainable livelihoods and a resurgence of traditional agricultural methods. As a result, water bodies, forest cover, and soil health have recovered. Seeds and seedlings from the forest are exported from Mzimba, bringing in sustainable income from the forest.
Title: V4: Musso Wakutowa Wa Mmbelwa (The Beautiful Kingdom of Mmbelwa)
Group: Workshop 2, Group A
Details: People live in nested villages (See Figure 2), surrounded by thriving farmlands and a healthy forest. Mzimba is governed by the amakhosi’s courts, which are supported by the national government. Stronger enforcement of traditional environmental law has enabled full recovery of forests and rivers. Villages are full of traditional round dwellings, which have been fitted with modern technology powered by renewable energy. The bulk of energy production is hydropower and solar. A thriving tourism market provides additional income to local governments and communities.
Title: V5: Umotheto Mmbelwa
Group: Workshop 2, Group B
Details: People live in multi-story traditional houses within villages. E-commerce offers opportunities to participate in national and international markets. Everyday life is enhanced by locally developed personal-use technology (e.g. computers, food processing equipment, and agriculture equipment). Children participate in obligatory cultural and technical education.
Community quotes:
Quote 1:“… we cannot be talking of human beings as different from nature. So nature is the precondition for human beings, because we depend on each other […] So whatever we are doing, at every minute, at every day, we need to be thinking of sustaining the nature because the nature will also sustain us.”
Quote 2:“[Mombera Rising] reflects to who we are and where we want to be. […] someone who receives this publication can understand that that was the point, to paint the Mzimba that we want.”
Quote 3:“And when you imagine, we say imagine something that we can achieve. […] this is a vision, we can try to achieve this one. So that’s what they are talking about. If we can be like this, like this, like this, is this achievable, can we do that? If you cannot, what are the things that can make us not reach this vision?”
Quote 4:“[The project team has] come to help us create a vision that will be attainable by 2050 as the kingdom. Without action, it’s different. And the former president of the Republic of Malawi says we should be dreaming in colour, and these are very beautiful colours. What measures are we putting in place to make sure that by 2050, at least if we will not be there, but at least nothing more should be lost?”
Key findings
This project’s multi-stage, multi-output process enabled it to access the benefits of multiple approaches. The NFF can enable participatory visioning without assigning participants to particular value perspectives: this free exploration of value plurality enables participants to distinguish multiple nature values they may hold, negotiate zones of conflict and trade-off between them, and locate areas of overlap and synergy. Artistic images and narratives inspired by future visions can help audiences establish embodied, emotional attachments to the biosphere in the present and its possibilities for the future. Contrasting scenarios enable more clarity in making sense of tangled and overlapping opportunities. Our novel approach enabled our project to create value-plural participatory visions, artistic representations of those visions’ imaginaries, and contrasting scenarios, accessing the benefits of all these products.
This work was intended to demonstrate what the research community can learn from Mombera Kingdom’s values and imaginaries: that conserving the landscapes we’ve inherited will often require consistent human intervention, that economic prosperity may not require urbanization, and that the economic need not remain the organizing principle that structures our societies’ relationships with nature.
Photos from fieldwork:
Reports and publications
Mzimba Futures: Operationalising the Nature Futures Framework in Malawi.
Carpenter-Urquhart, L., Chibwe, B., Nyasulu, M. K., & Pereira, L. (2022). Mzimba Futures: Operationalising the Nature Futures Framework in Malawi. African Futures Project report 1. Stockholm Resilience Centre. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17106345
– Download the full report here
Dreaming in Colour: Desirable future scenarios for Mombera Kingdom.
Carpenter-Urquhart, L. (2023). Dreaming in Colour: Desirable future scenarios for Mombera Kingdom [MSc Thesis, Stockholm University].
– Download the full report here
Dreaming in Colour: Positive visions for Mzimba’s future.
Carpenter-Urquhart, L. (2023). Dreaming in Colour: Positive visions for Mzimba’s future. African Futures Project report 2. Stockholm: Stockholm Resilience Centre.
– Download the full report here
Mombera Rising Anthology
Set in a futuristic Malawi, Mombera Rising consists of three captivating stories, each inviting readers to imagine a preferable future where an indigenous people have the agency to step away from colonial notions of progress and modernity to manage their natural environments on their own terms, recalling their own knowledge and belief systems.
Bios from partners/writers/artists
Graphic designer: Simon Banda II
Simon Banda II is a 29-year-old multi-award winning graphic designer, and digital painter. He has been working in the design space for over a decade. With a keen understanding of color harmony, his work is usually colorful, even though it mostly depicts darker themes. He spends what’s left of his free time listening to rock/metal music to feed his strange essence. No surprises there. He aims to explore more African futuristic themes in his work, as it is one of his core passions. This anthology gave him a chance to indulge this long-held passion. You can find him online as @killsimao
Writer: Ekari Mbvundula Chirombo
Ekari Mbvundula Chirombo is a speculative fiction writer of over 15 short stories, and has won numerous prizes and recognition for her stories, including 2nd Prize in an African-wide, Nigerian-based short story marathon called The Writer 2016.
Her ebook Montague’s Last (published as Ekari Mbvundula) is a short story about a 17th Century African slave in a French dungeon who spends the final moments of his life on an invention which will change the world. Montague’s Last has been adapted into an audio podcast on Strange Horizons, republished in Omenana speculative fiction magazine, and was selected as a subject of study by a masters student at the University of Stellenbosch.
Her story Undying Love, also published in Omenana, is about a young man in Joburg who becomes possessed by an evil spirit, and pushes the love of his life away to protect her, only for her to return to try and free him. Undying Love was added to the long list nominations for the 2020 Nommo Awards, and was also added to the Nebula Recommended Reading List.
She is the founder of the Story Ink Africa: Storytelling Sessions, where up-and-coming writers from around Malawi would read their stories to a live audience. She now edits books under her company Story Ink Africa: Writing Services.
Writer: Muthi Nhlema
Muthi Nhlema is a short story writer who accidentally stumbled into the world of African Speculative Fiction and hasn’t figured out where the exit door is yet.
Spotlighted as one of the 100 African Writers of Speculative Fiction and Fantasy by Geoff Ryman, Muthi’s first foray into speculative fiction was his novella, ‘Ta O’Reva’, about the return of Nelson Mandela to a post-apocalyptic South Africa. The novella won third prize at the 2015 International Freeditorial Long-Short Story Competition and was also shortlisted for Best Novella at the inaugural 2017 Nommo Award for African Speculative Fiction, alongside internationally acclaimed writers such as Nnedi Okorafor. An excerpt of the novella, ‘Legacy’ was long-listed for the 2015 Writivism Short Story Prize and was runner-up for the 2015 Dede Kamkondo Short Story Award.
Muthi’s second speculative fiction piece, ‘One Wit’ This Place’, about a broken family trying to survive a world ravaged by climate change, opened the 2016 Imagine Africa 500 anthology, and was later re-published by the Manchester Review in 2017. The story received positive reviews, including a mention by the Nigerian writer and editor Wole Talabi, who called it one of the top 10 African Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction pieces of 2016. Muthi’s other non-speculative fiction piece, ‘Free Seating’, a first-person account of an unpleasant bus-ride with a twist, won the 2015 First Merchant Bank-Malawi Writers’ Union Short Story Prize.
In late 2021, Muthi was selected to participate in the prestigious International Writers Programme at the University of Iowa in the United States, making him the fifth Malawian writer to participate in the residency since its founding in 1967. Since the residency, Muthi has been nursing a stubborn interest in using speculative fiction to reimagine alternate histories and indigenous futures liberated from colonial or western paradigms of progress and modernity (something easier said than done!). This anthology, in its own way, gave Muthi a chance to get off his backside, stop living in his head and take a stab at penning such histories and futures on the taunting wastelands of the blank page.