The Pub - the new English cathedral

Do you know the best way to tell what shakes/moves or worshipped by a society? Watch their soap operas. Any play writer and producer worth the name wants his/her play to reflect real life. For a play to be believed it has to reflect what is going on in the society which it is trying to serve. Kaya kumene muli inuko what does your soaps depict? Tiuzeni.

In Malawi all soap operas have funerals and preachings included. This tells you how significant the gospel and funerals are as part of the Malawian society.

In the UK, take for example the popular BBC television soap opera EastEnders. What does it tell us about the British society? Pub culture and promiscuity rank high in this society. At the center of EastEnders is the Pub - the new English cathedral and sex. Actors meet in the pub. The pub is very central to everything in the play. A soap without a pub cannot be believed because its just not true. You just need to go out any night with the climax being Friday and Saturday nights to see men and women who dress very reluctantly in freezing temperatures (Umati awatu samafuna kumvala kaya ndindani wawakakamiza) for you to see the drank Brits crawling from one pub to another. The drinking culture has brought a huge effect on the English church. The reported weekly church attendance in the U.K. is now below 8 percent. Many people are flocking away from the church to worship the bottle and sex with the consequences of the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Europe (tingoti dziko lonse lapansi) and abortion on demand as a habit. Hospital casualty staff spend most of the nights treating drink-related injuries. It all has to do with the U.K. 'cathedrals' which are elected on every street and corner.

In Malawi the creative Story Workshop Zimachitika, a Kapalepale (Sewero La Sabata Ino) and the many other emerging plays on the Malawi Broadcasting Corporation and Television Malawi can not do without a HIV/AIDS death scenario and a church service. This tells how central the church is to our society and the unprecedented death rate due to HIV/AIDS in Malawi...being 8Th highest in global ranking in HIV and AIDS cases with approximately 84 000 new orphans every year and life expectancy of 39.7 years!

My beloved Malawi is a grieving society and the UK is a pub society. I hate both with the same measure.