I recently bought an item from the technician that repairs our genset when it develops mechanical problems. He is amazingly good at diagnosing the problems and remedying them. I requested a receipt for the item I purchased from him then I discovered that he could barely write. He struggled to produce the receipt.

A few weeks later I needed to get a quotation for repairs to a partly collapsed fence and approached two bricklayers to get a quotation from each. These two struggled a great deal to write their quotations. Like the technician I had approached earlier, they found it particularly challenging to spell the names of some items.

Make no mistake, these men are highly talented and know what they are doing. Their work is of very high standard. No disrespect intended, but our engineers cannot come anywhere close to them in terms of the quality of their handiwork. Malawian intellectuals do not consider careers that require extensive use of hands as “cool” enough for them. They would rather be confined in an office and do white collar work instead.

A white South African friend of mine used to frequently visit my print shop to get some work done. Being a seasoned machine minder, he would operate the machine himself. Very often onlookers were surprised to see a white man carrying loads of paper from his car. I am not talking about small quantities of photocopying A4 paper here. I am talking about masses of paper in A2 size (610mm x 430mm) weighing hundreds of kilogrammes.

We have been brought up to believe that those who use their hands to work belong to the low class. The only way to “advance” from that class to a higher one is for one to become a white collar worker. I have, on more than one occasion, narrated a story in which a secretary in the head office of a printing company referred to factory workers as “labourers”. She was talking about people a good number of whom had spent three or four years to train as printers. That time the duration of a secretary’s course was only two years.

Looking down on blue collar workers is a consistent attitude in Malawi, sadly. As a result, such workers do not command much respect nor do they attract high remuneration.  This is a cadre of workers that gets populated by individuals who can hardly read or write, consequently. Yes, such workers are usually good at their work as described above but they can hardly initiate change and find it extremely difficult to adapt to technological changes. Their inability to read is their major constraint. If they were ardent readers, they would anticipate any changes before they occurred and would prepare appropriately for them.

It is these workers that build economies though. They lay down railways and erect power pylons, for example. The list of what they can create is endless.

In 2007, my wife and I joined a team of other people from our church to travel to Aberdeen, Scotland, on a partnership arrangement. Each individual or each couple was hosted by a family in Aberdeen. We were hosted by a couple that owned what we thought was a very decent dwelling unit in the granite city. We discovered in due course that the man of the house was a plumber. This man was way above being semi-literate. Not only could he read textual matter but he could also read music, a far cry from our own artisans. This is a testament to the respectability of plumbing, and, I am sure, other artisanal trades, in the British Isles.

Orville and Wilbur Wright were handworkers. They did not have university degrees but they read extensively. They established a newspaper business using a press which they had built themselves. Later they became bicycle makers. Being blue collar workers, they might have been called labourers by Malawians. But it is these “labourers” that gave us the aeroplane in 1903. Their invention, the aeroplane, has transformed the economy of the world like very few other inventions have done.

It was not for this reason that we had handiwork, also called arts and craft, as a subject in our schools in the years gone by. It was non examinable in the primary school leaving examinations but teachers used to assess it in terminal tests. It would not be unreasonable to reintroduce that subject in our primary schools so that we can groom our young people for all manner of handiwork.

If we search within our budding young people, we will discover so many that can become like the Wright brothers, given the right grooming.

The post Blue collar workers develop economies first appeared on The Nation Online.

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