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Catherine Chipembere 49
to be the role model, the church worker and storyteller. Secondly, these women
showed a great degree of humbleness by abandoning the lives that they could have
enjoyed had they had chosen to live abroad but felt a sense of duty to serve.
This is the life that Catherine Mary Ajizinga Chipembere chose to live.
Raf Mbwana works in human resources and is a writer.
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Letter to the Editor
22
I have just read the Colin Baker obituaries by John Lwanda and David
Stuart-Mogg and want to add a short piece about Colin as an educator.
Back in 1969, I was a ridiculously young and inexperienced senior
lecturer in education at the University of Malawi, which was barely five years old;
Colin was a college principal and a seasoned administrator.
Some of us thought that students who were to become teachers in
Malawi’s secondary schools needed to have their horizons broadened; becoming
competent in their fields and learning something about the psychology of teaching
was not enough. So, we asked various people to come and give mini-courses on
topics that interested them on Friday afternoons. No homework; no tests.
I asked Colin Baker, who, as Dr. Lwanda indicates, already had two full-
time jobs, whether he would be willing to drive at least half an hour each way and
teach for us once a week. His response: instant enthusiasm.
This incident, from half a century ago, confirmed Colin’s love of Malawi
and his commitment to our students’ success.
Jonathan M. Daube,
Northampton, Massachusetts, U.S.A.
February 2019.
22 The Society of Malawi Journal, Vol. 71 - No. 2, 2018.