Wambali Mkandawire’s voice is strong and smooth; like pebbles worn by wind and water, the effects of time and trial have burnished rather than diminished it. Though the legendary singer/songwriter from Mzuzu, Malawi, sings in Chichewa—a sub-Saharan African language largely unfamiliar to the Western ear—Wambali’s words cut through the air with a plaintive beauty that speaks of urgency, of things in critical balance. “Africa wake up!” the song intones. “Remember your history, remember the stories and wake up!”

Mkandawire’s haunting song is an appropriate accompaniment to Beating the Odds, a documentary film by a German/American husband-and-wife team that helps commemorate a rare occurrence in Africa: the smooth transition of power from dictator to democracy. For unlike many of its neighbors, Malawi, a small sliver of a country in southeastern Africa, boasts a compelling story of faith and hope—of speaking truth to power despite the dangers involved.

Beating the Odds is intended to be a tool to help current and future generations of Malawians remember their remarkable history. Malawi’s move from dictatorship to democracy in 1992 has been dubbed a miracle by many in political-science circles. Yet the country’s rapid cycle of life and death—the average person lives just 43 years—threatens to wipe out the Malawians who best remember the events of less than two decades ago.

“There’s a famous saying that a friend is someone who knows the story of your heart and can sing it back to you when you forget how it goes,” says the director and screenwriter of Beating the Odds, Seanne Winslow Wehrenfennig. “This is our effort to sing Malawi’s incredible story back to its people.”

Wehrenfennig conceived the documentary with her husband, Daniel Wehrenfennig. The two met 10 years ago at an evangelical student community in Germany’s Oden Forest called the Reichenberg Fellowship, where Seanne’s father then served as spiritual director. Today they live in southern California, where Daniel is completing his doctorate in political science, specializing in conflict resolution, and Seanne is a producer working for New Line Cinema and other mainstream film companies. But Daniel, a German native, and Seanne, an American whose family lived in England and Israel before her father settled in Germany, share a faith and a global awareness that prompted them to work on social justice issues wherever they find them, and where they see God’s hand working in history.

In the early 1990s, after nearly three decades of thuggish rule by “president for life” Hastings Kamuzu Banda, a group of Catholic bishops, Presbyterian ministers and Muslim imams raised their voices in protest. Their vocal leadership prompted Banda’s eventual resignation, which ushered in the multi-party democracy that continues to this day.



After learning about Malawi’s remarkable story from John Boy, an American sociologist friend who had worked with one of Malawi’s largest civic educators, the Public Affairs Committee (PAC), the Wehrenfennigs became concerned that there was no written or oral record of this young democracy’s birth. With the country’s crushing poverty, widespread famine and the inexorable spread of AIDS and malaria, the largely rural, often illiterate population knew nothing about the transition out of dictatorship. When children did have schoolbooks, they dated to English colonial days and thus had no record of Banda’s iron-fisted reign.

Daniel reached out to a number of Malawian political scientists in exile in American universities to find the appropriate interview subjects, while Seanne organized a small film team for a fact-finding trip. They left their home in Long Beach in August 2006 to meet with African collaborators at the PAC and begin initial filming.

On their return, Seanne worked to find investors and Daniel wrote grant proposals, but they collected mostly expressions of good will. Nonprofit aid agencies rarely fund films, and while Hollywood studios got excited about the prospect of an action movie based on the story, they saw no profit in a documentary. Instead, the couple told their story at churches and schools throughout California, raising enough to pay for a second trip in summer 2007. For five weeks their crew of American and Malawian volunteers conducted interviews in both English and Chichewa and gathered archival footage.

Photo: Ira Lippke

It was important to the Wehrenfennigs that their African partners take full ownership of the project. “The last thing we wanted to do was produce another ‘white-man project’ for Africans,” says Seanne. The team created English and Chichewa versions of the film so it can both be entered in film festivals in the West and be shown in village community centers, schools, and houses of worship throughout Malawi.

The team expects to reach half of Malawi’s population within six months of the film’s release, and millions in the next year. It is crucial that Malawi’s story be told—especially to young Malawians, who increasingly blame democratic leaders for the country’s poverty, and talk about returning to a one-party system.

The trend chills those who still remember the Banda regime’s brutality. The Western-educated Banda came to power in 1964 promising that one-man rule could more efficiently improve Malawi’s economic fortunes and provide health care. He soon resorted to force and intimidation—throwing opponents into crocodile filled rivers and patrolling the country with a militia known as the Young Pioneers. Banda is thought to have dispatched half a million citizens. Most families can offer terrifying stories of late-night visits and brutal beatings. “A lot of people were silenced,” remembers Bishop Felix Mkhori, a major player in Malawi’s miraculous revolution and one of the documentary’s most compelling characters. “So we said among ourselves, ‘Now we shall speak for the people who cannot speak. Now we will tell the truth.”

Risking their lives, Mkhori and six other Catholic bishops drafted an impassioned document now known as the “Lenten Letter” outlining—in Chichewa, Tumbuku and English—the basic human rights Malawians lacked. Printed in secret by an Italian missionary named Father Piergiorgio Gamba and distributed by nuns, who drove ambulances with the contraband concealed beneath medical supplies, the letter was read in Catholic churches throughout the country on Ash Wednesday in 1992.

The next day the bishops were put under house arrest; Banda and his cabinet called a secret meeting in which they unanimously agreed to put the bishops to death. But Father Gamba had already faxed a copy of the Lenten Letter to the BBC; it was read over the airwaves on BBC Africa the same day and drew international attention to the bishops’ plight.

The next day, the Rev. Dr. Silas Ncozana, then head of the Malawian Presbyterian, received a tape recording of the meeting in which the bishops’ fate had been sealed. Who sent the tape, or who made it, has never been revealed. Ncozana went directly to Banda himself to add his voice to the protest. “It was a question of life and death,” he says. “We knew we might not come out of the meeting alive.” Two days later, Mohammed Kulesi, head of the Muslim Association in Malawi, sent his own letter to Banda saying that his organization would stand by their Christian brothers no matter the cost. “God is not a divisive God,” says Kulesi of the interfaith collaboration. “He has created all of us in his image.”

Soon every sector of the country had lined up to support the clergy. Students demonstrated, workers went on strike, civic groups organized. Never thinking that his people would actually vote for a multi-party system, Banda held a national referendum—the results of which led to an open election and democratic constitution that was ratified in May 1994. Although Malawi’s accomplishments were largely overshadowed in the international news by the demise of apartheid in South Africa, some took notice—including renowned economist Jeffrey Sachs, who commended the country in his 2005 book The End of Poverty.

While discontent with Malawi’s multi-party system has risen in recent years, thanks to Beating the Odds, the voices of this rare African democracy’s founding fathers can now call out to heed the lessons of history. “It’s a lesson we need to repeat again and again,” says Ncozana. “The social, political, and economic problems have not melted away in our nation so we need to choose one after the other and work on them together.” For as a well-known African proverb goes, “People who don’t know their past can’t have a future.”

Andrea Codrington is a Brooklyn-based writer who has been an editor at Phaidon Press, a senior editor at I.D. magazine, a biweekly columnist for the New York Times and the author of Kyle Cooper: Monographics (Yale, 2003).