The Nordic Africa Institute – Publications

Personal and collective experiences of loss intersect within the broader framework of national mourning, as explored in this study based on Cyclone Freddy in Malawi. The cyclone resulted in more than 1,200 people reported as either dead or missing, and more than 2,100 people injured. It disrupted the lives of approximately 2.3 million individuals. Beyond documenting these figures, the research interrogates the structural conditions that rendered the nation particularly vulnerable to such a disaster – including chronic infrastructural neglect, political inertia, and deeply embedded social inequalities. By weaving together individual testimonies and communal narratives of grief, the study situates the cyclone within the longue durée of Malawi’s socio-political fragilities. Informed by Jacques Derrida’s theorisation of "impossible mourning", the analysis foregrounds how trauma sutures past and present, elucidating the emotional and material afterlives of catastrophe in contexts defined by enduring structural precarity.