Emmanuel Jekete was at secondary school in 2019 when his mother’s Canadian boss invited him to try out a climbing wall in his garden in Malawi’s capital, Lilongwe. Jekete found it easy to pull himself up the plastic holds when the wooden board was vertical. But, once it jutted out at a 25-degree overhang, he struggled – and was hooked.
Now, Jekete is part of a growing group of young Malawians who love climbing and the community they have created, and who want to see the sport thrive in the southern African nation.
“I was one of the first Malawian climbers to do indoor and outdoor [climbing], so I thought, ‘I’m going to be one of the pioneers, you know, I’m definitely going to dominate in this sport’,” the 23-year-old says in an interview at the Climb Centre, an outdoor gym run by Climb Malawi in Lilongwe.
Jekete climbs three times a week with his friends on bouldering walls – wooden walls with plastic holds, tilted at varying angles, which are climbed without ropes. Then, once or twice a month, they head out to the rocks where they climb with ropes.
“I can have a busy day, but when I’m at the wall I’m just going to leave everything from whatever was stressing me out,” says Jekete, a personal assistant at a mining company. “Psychotherapy, you know?”
Moses Kalirani started climbing with Jekete in 2019 when they were classmates. Until a couple of months ago, when he went back to studying, Kalirani worked at Climb Malawi as a coach and gym manager.
“I like the community feeling, how it’s something big and you belong to it … You’re like one of the gears trying to move something and then, if you’re not part of it, it’s not going to move,” he says.
Kalirani and his friends say they want to see more Malawians try climbing, rather than dismiss it as something only for white people: “I would love for the community to grow, for more locals to get into it, because it’s an international-dominated sport.”
Climb Malawi, a non-profit organisatin, was founded in 2018 by Tyler Algeo, the Canadian who employed Jekete’s mother. In August 2019, the gym moved from Algeo’s back yard to its current site.
The wall operates on a pay-what-you-can basis, with a suggested monthly donation of 35,000 Malawian kwacha (£15) for gym access and £7.50 or £15 for the outdoor trips – a huge sum in one of the world’s poorest countries, paid mostly by international climbers and wealthier Malawians, with others paying less or volunteering instead.
All equipment is donated from overseas, from the metal bolts screwed into cliffs to the holds, harnesses, ropes and shoes. The community has also received support from the Global Climbing Initiative, a Colorado-based non-profit organisation.
Ed Nhlane was running a tour guiding company and hoping to get into rock climbing when he heard about Algeo’s wall through a friend in 2019. “I never looked back,” he says.
The coronavirus pandemic was a wake-up call that Malawi’s climbers had to be more self-sufficient, says Nhlane, 34. All but one of the international climbers left the country, and the group had to learn the necessary skills themselves, which they then passed on to newer climbers.
Nhlane says they still need outside resources though, including bolts for new outdoor routes, expertise in how to train and coach effectively, and funding to go abroad to bigger events, such as in South Africa.
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In May, a Climb Malawi team attended its first overseas competition, and Zambia’s first international event, at the Pa Mitengo gym in the capital, Lusaka. Malawian climber Mphatso Brooklyn Kazembe came second to a local athlete – although, he says, he thought he would win.
Kazembe floated up Climb Centre routes that others fell off, then repeated one with two five-litre bottles of water clipped to his harness and again with a female friend clinging to his back. When the others were asked who their favourite climbers were, they named Muambi M’tulatia Naituli, a Kenyan climber, and Kazembe. “He’s a superstar”, “Hulk”, “very strong”, his friends say admiringly.
Kazembe, a content creator studying journalism, has found peace through climbing, since he started in 2021. “I actually got into climbing because of some therapy issues and some things in life that I was dealing with,” he says. He adds that he would like to “maybe become pro one day, [but] usually this is just sanity for me”.
Cele Nhlane also has big ambitions. Introduced to climbing at 15 by her uncle Ed, the 19-year-old dreams of representing Malawi at the Olympics and of becoming a mountain guide. “It’s all about how you believe in yourself, trusting yourself, pushing your limits,” she says. “That’s why I love it.”
Climbing has spread to Malawi’s commercial capital, Blantyre, where two climbers from Lilongwe have moved and set up a gym. Outdoors, it is also winning new recruits.
Early on a Sunday morning, Jekete drives the Climb Malawi van around Lilongwe, picking up the group. About 45 minutes later they are outside the city in the town of Nathenje, looking up at cliffs in an old quarry in the grounds of a secondary school.
Joining them are two of the school’s pupils. “It’s so good,” says Braven Franklin, before pulling on to the rock for only his second time. “I like climbing so far, high, to be on top.”
